Object-Oriented Ontology 7. Morton 1.

 Ecology without Nature. 2007. Timothy Morton. Harvard University Press.

• I am trying to show the substance of a coat, I tear it apart, then I explain each set of its threads, then I explain the nature of the texture, then I explain the mechanism of its sewing, and then I find that the more I try to capture the substance of this coat, the more I jump to other things, and the substance becomes more obscured. If I analyze the coat, I find myself enforced to explain millions of things, and I do not get to the coat's substance, and if I keep the coat on the table, just looking at it,  the substance also is still obscured, mysterious, and hidden. 
• I am writing now and trying to explain to the reader the real "I" of me. As much as I try to discover and unveil this "I," the more I must link other "Is," other issues, other things to it, the more the substance of this "I," I sought to reach, escapes and eludes. 
• When you contact a person, think of this contact, try to arrest the real contact. You will find that contact is always in the past (p.76). When you contact, you never have it or inhabit it as it is happening; you always reflect on it only when it has gone. Hence, we always cannot fully or essentially or substantially contact! 
• I listen to music. Sounds and silences are woven together. When I try to really capture the essence or substance of this music, I find myself either capturing the moment of a sound or the moment of a silence. I know that I cannot fully capture the Music as it is. I have to kill half of it to be able to perceive it; either its silence or its sounds. 
• I see a wolf, roaming near a stream. Blood is marking its teeth, and its fur is glistering under the sun. The wolf I see is only the foreground of the entity wolf. I know that the wolf to appear as such, there must be a background of and for it: caves, sheep, bones broken in its mouth, a herd, nice dark in which it can sleep and hide, and so on. The wolf I see is only the tip of this huge or deep background. When I try to discover, unveil, reveal this background, it becomes a foreground, and I lose it again. Each foreground alludes to a background infinitely. This there above is a sign of this background, which is never captured; it is there and never can be here; it is there as much as there is mysterious, far, absent, and as much as it gives breath to the here. I know that here will never be here if there is no there. I know that I am not me if there is no others who are not me. However, these others are not substantially captured and fixed; such that, I cannot stop and point to selves, saying that "Look! they are my others." The others are there, in the background of me, and I can never fix them. Otherness should always be intrinsic to the Self, Morton asserts. 

Ecology without Nature aspires to inform us that Nature is not fixed in front of our eyes or brains, and nothing at all is fixed in front of our eyes and brains. What we think is fixed is no more nor less than the foreground of the ecology. It is only the world, the ecology, or the ambience what exists. Not me nor you, not the nature nor trees. Only ambience. Ambience is not fixed, is not captured, so it is painful. Ambience appears to us with one status: I know that music is both silence and sound, but at any moment I can only capture one, not both; "I" is not separate from others, but I can capture only one at a moment; I contact you, but I know that I either contact you and lose the substance of this contacting (as I only can understand that contact when it ends) or I do not contact you. For some reason,  appearance allows only for one thing, status, probability to occur: I flip a coin in the air, but only one side appears (when it falls down); however, we know that this side is not the whole real coin, we need to see the other side to "capture" the coin, but we cannot. This "fact" glues us to death. We cannot know fully, we cannot be a well-delineated object (or subject) separate from others: We are always invaded by the ambience, and this invasion does not appear to us fully. That is, only ambience exists, and reveals its heads (tips) while hiding its huge bodies in the background. 

Below, you can see how ambience can be studied.