Transfigured Night playlist for 12/08/2012

We don't say "eggplant," "giraffe," or "mistletoe" every day, but they are present in our consciousness of the world around us. This is a program dedicated to specific plants, animals, herbs, mushrooms that we encounter but occasionally, perhaps once in a few weeks or months. They occupy places in our mental space, in our mental conception of the universe, and remind us of how life cannot be reduced to a few propositions about the physical world, about human consciousness, or about the industrial economy etc. I was in Chinatown the day before, where I encountered various herbs, not laid out on the shelves of a store and classified as part of a totality of foodstuffs, but simply placed haphazardly by the sidewalk; I could walk down a shopfront and turn a street corner, and immediately a plethora of herbs and mushrooms would immediately present themselves before me, without my anticipating them. And every alley I turned into presented more plants, mushrooms, herbs and so on, and opened up a new space in my mental universe. It was crazy. And to think I had just come out of a philosophy class! From a tiny, reductionist world with a few propositions my mental universe was slowly expanded and built up with each street that opened up before my eyes as I turned into it, and with each herb I encountered that I knew as a child (yes I grew up in Asia), but which I consumed perhaps once in a few months, (which means that they can't form part of a reductionist picture of my "daily life"). I wanted to share this experience on air, and thus the theme of tonight's show.