ESSAY: PASSING THROUGH TWO DOORS AT ONCE

INTRODUCTION

It might be wise to begin this journey, this walk we will take together, in absentia with a caveat. What follows here is an assemblage, a bricolage of thoughts cobbled together, less concerned with a linear narrative than with the act of walking, less concerned with a story than with the act of thinking, meandering, coming inevitably, to no conclusions at all.

This is a text that arose from a simple question; What more could I add to the conversation? I am at the cutting edge of nothing; I am not a theoretical physicist, I am not a philosopher, I did not take the first photograph of an atom, I did not discover that trees can speak, I did not discover that a slime mold is capable of mapping the Tokyo subway system more efficiently than humans. But I do have a body. I do walk through the world that these texts, these ideas depict, I do exist in a world governed by laws that truthfully, we do not yet understand. Over time I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the best that I can do here is offer a recontextualisation; a poetics of assemblage, A hybrid work- of other’s words and my own words, Layered up, diffused, boundaries complicated in text as they are in life.

Worlds nestled inside words, lives nestled inside lives, microbiomes of words thriving together in symbiosis. There are entanglements between authors that I will attempt to follow, links of connection like spider silk that transverse the space between us; tenuous links. Between lives, between authors, between ideas, across time and space, let the boundaries between things relax, pass through the gaps.

I have designed this soundwalk/essay with the site of Nunhead Cemetery in mind; the winding paths, the contemplative mood, the strange chance meetings that happen in this place, but equally this text could be listened to anywhere. Feel free - Take us out into the woods to think and walk together.

Language possesses an almost unique capacity to reach out of ourselves beyond time and through empty space, connecting us, you and I are time travellers, the I I am as I write these words is not the I i will be when I record them, and who’s to say what me I will be at the point in time/space when they reach you. The present is after all, an illusion, the present moment does not exist in the body before we have managed to perceive it - there is a lag time in the wiring of the brain as it intercepts and translates reality. As I speak these words, I speak them into my own past and your future, into a projected space that exists somewhere-nowhere between the time/place where I write/speak them and the moment you read/hear/encounter them. Language is not what it seems. Do not mistake the words for the reality that they depict.

It is worth noting also, that (as of yet), walking and thinking are entirely free art forms, yet they are not freely accessible to all people, living in all bodies in all places, for those to whom this applies, I hope this assemblage can transport you somewhere else. Wherever you hear or read this collective of words/sounds/people/places/ideas, layer it onto your own reality, step inside of it, touch it, touch what surrounds you, be it skin or the thrill of grass, woody bark, cool stone.

Finally, before we begin, take care with yourselves whilst reading or listening. The text that follows will discuss many things; simple things, beautiful things, things which for me touch upon the sublime. But also difficult things, the uncomfortable truths that sit alongside the sublime, specifically I will discuss Death, decomposition, and alternative burial practices, I hope beautifully, as I attempt to knit together my own meandering threads of thought, through connections made, contexts shifted, words and their authors entangled, some speaking from beyond the grave. From the maelstrom; flickers of joyful understanding, inching closer towards… what? A unified whole? A field-verified theory of human experience? Theoretical musings on lived time, passages repeated through space, up and down the same paths, temporarily, forever, through the shadowy, sunlit tree lined paths.

PART 1: WORD LABYRINTH

Take the word butterfly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in love, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly. There is the word and there is the butterfly. If you confuse these two items people have the right to laugh at you. Do not make so much of the word. Are you trying to suggest that you love butterflies more perfectly than anyone else, or really understand their nature? The word butterfly is merely data. It is not an opportunity for you to hover, soar, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty and frailty, or in any way impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. If you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself.

Leonard Cohen, "How to Speak Poetry" From Death of a Lady's Man:

I'M SEARCHING, I'M SEARCHING. I'M trying to understand. Trying to give what I've lived to somebody else and I don't know to whom, but I don't want to keep what I lived. I don't know what to do with what I lived, I'm afraid of that profound disorder. I don't trust what happened to me.

Clarice Lispector, “The Passion according to GH”

As human beings, we live by emotions and thought. We exchange them when we are in the same place at the same time, talking to each other, looking into each other’s eyes, brushing against each other’s skin. [ ] but in reality, we do not need to be in the same place and time to have such exchanges. Thoughts and emotions that create bonds of attachment between us have no difficulty in crossing deas and decades, sometimes even centuries, tied to thin sheets of paper or dancing between the microchips of a computer. We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square metres that we tread…

Carlo Rovelli, “The Order of Time”

The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.”

St. Hildegard of Bingen, 11th Century

As long as we stick to things and words we can believe that we are speaking of what we see, that we see what we are speaking of, and that the two are

linked.

Gilles Deleuze, “Foucault”

"Words and things" is the entirely serious title of a problem.

Michel Foucault, “The Archaeology of knowledge”

Theodor Adorno claimed that it was not possible to "unseal" or parse a concept into its constituent parts: one could only "circle" around a concept, perhaps until one gets dizzy or arrives at the point at which nonidentity with the real can no longer be ignored. What also happens as one circles around a concept is that a set of related terms comes into view, as a swarm of affiliates.

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”

“We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.”

St. Hildegard of Bingen, 11th Century

I would be reluctant to conclude that only human beings speak while the rest is pure noise or deafening silence. We have not yet learned how to listen to others--and not only to our human others at that. Learning to listen does not mean that we would be able to obtain "more information," previously withheld from us. Nor does it imply that whatever or whoever we would be capable of listening to would become fully transparent and decipherable. The proliferation of multiple mean-ings, deriving from different worlds, is dependent on achieving a balance between listening and noninterference, learning from the other or from others and respecting her, his, its, or their incommunicable otherness.

Michael Marder “Through Vegetal Being”

“Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech.

St. Hildegard of Bingen, 11th Century

The secret of time lies in this slippage that we feel on our pulse, viscerally, in the enigma of memory, in anxiety about the future. This is what it means to think about time.

Carlo Rovelli, “The Order of Time”

PART 2: HETEROTOPIA

The quiet here leaves gaps for things to pass through. A dizzy palimpsest of a place, My imperfect, living body moves slowly along these paths, circling, seeking, never finding, thank god, never finding…

As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery. The cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces. It is a space that is however connected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery.

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”

Such gatherings organize time (and noise) at a different pulse rate from the outside world; time is being told there - marked or counted down - at a different pace that is powerfully seductive

Maria Warner “Writings on Art and Enchantment”

It is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an ‘illness.’ The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place.

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”

The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”

It was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body’s remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay,

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”

One day, I walk the perimeter of the cemetery. Round and round the iron railings looking for a door, a gate, a way through. One that I was sure existed but seems somehow not to appear. I find myself longing to get in and isn't that strange, to want so badly to be on the inside of a place, to circle it endlessly and never find a door…and still I’m walking. The bank of trees across the way is so tall and the graves are so small laid out in front of it, the cow parsley so tall a body could walk right into it and just disappear. Still I walk and the view from the outside shows me places I did not know were inside, roads less travelled routes I have not yet seen. Aphids are flying to my eyes and my nose and my mouth.

The words tempus and temple share the same root as temenos, a sanctu-ary, and ultimately derive from the Greek verb temno, for hewing, slicing and wounding (it survives, for example, in tomography and mastectomy); the word was also used figuratively for a ship cutting a furrow through the waves. The connection with sanctuaries depends on their character as places apart, demarcated and hallowed precincts where the crucial measurement of time and the seasons took place (obelisks acting as gnomons, charting the passage of the sun).' The connection recalls that the function of a sacred space, in eras before clocks, was to take account of time, or render its flow palpable to the worshipper/visitor and ultimately manageable by society, by observing the movement of the heavenly bodies and translating it into spatial terms? This idea of sectioning and marking off became a metaphor we live by, and produced the Latin tempus and templum and myriad derivatives - maybe even "temperature', another kind of measurement.

Maria Warner “Writings on Art and Enchantment”

The most common practice for disposal of dead bodies is inhumation in soil, which favours interactions with the surrounding environment and returns nutrients to the life cycle. However, when the burial ground is located where hydrogeological, geological and climatic conditions are not favourable to the process, contamination of soils and groundwater may occur,

Bruna Oliveira, Paula Quinteiro, Carla Caetano, Helena Nadais, Luís Arroja, Eduardo Ferreira da Silva, Manuel Burial grounds’ impact on groundwater and public health: an overview

Funny, how the thoroughfare of the dead runs so smoothly along the thoroughfare of the living.

they leach iron, zinc, sulphur, calcium and phosphorus into ground that may later be used as farms, forests or parks. They are essential nutrients, but human funerary practices mean they are being concentrated in cemeteries instead of being dispersed evenly throughout nature, according to new research.

This means that in some places the nutrients may be over-concentrated for optimal absorption by plants and creatures, while lacking in others. Furthermore, human bodies also contain more sinister elements, such as mercury from dental fillings.

Mariëtte Le Roux “Humans alter Earth's chemistry from beyond the grave”

"These traces persist for a very long time, for centuries to millennia."

Ladislav Smejda of the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague

Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”

The plants' rootedness in a place, their fidelity to the soil, is something we can only admire, especially because our condition is that of an increasing and merciless uprooting.

Michael Marder “Through Vegetal Being”

The plants in the cemetery are the only beings that truly live with the dead- we simple pass through- they stay behind. Once the gates are shut and the lights are off, and there is no way back but stillness.

To reduce the rate of decay, embalming is used to preserve the body for a “viewing” service where friends and family can say their last goodbyes. While the thought is nice, the chemicals used in this process are very strong and toxic. Formaldehyde, menthol, phenol, and glycerin are just a few of the toxins that make up the embalming solution. It’s estimated that 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde are placed in the ground each year due to conventional burials. The casket alone in typical burial services is made of wood, steel, copper, bronze and other useful resources. Some spend between $5,000 and $10,000 on a casket just for it to be placed in the ground and never used again. In just one year, the amount of casket wood buried is equivalent to about 4 million acres of forest.

https://miltonfieldsgeorgia.com/conventional-burial-harms-environment/

Each single burial plot is like a mini pollution nightmare, awash with chemicals, pharmaceuticals, hazardous materials from medical devices, and bacteria. Not to mention, according to the Green Burial Council, the 20 million feet of varnished wood and 1.6 million tons of concrete that are placed into the ground annually as caskets and vaults.

https://slate.com/technology/2022/10/cemeteries-drinking-tap-water-pollution-aquifers-dead-bodies.html

Sun, bramble, grasses. Blood on my legs as other beings knot themselves around me. I try to catch grasshoppers in the long grasses like I used to as a child, but they are all too fast, spiraling away from my hands. I wonder if they have sped up, or I have slowed down.

But the worst gravesite pollutant is embalming fluid, a chemical cocktail of formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol. Last year alone, American burials deposited roughly 4.5 million gallons of this toxic, cancer-causing preservative—about three gallons per body—into the soil. Not exactly the healthiest food for worms. And all of it has to go somewhere.

https://slate.com/technology/2022/10/cemeteries-drinking-tap-water-pollution-aquifers-dead-bodies.html

We are running out of room.

This 'Living' Mushroom Coffin Will Help Your Body Decompose Faster

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a34054806/living-coffin-helps-bodies-decompose-faster/

But what is a landscape without a body? What was the use of all of this humanness, all this wreckage, just to be standing here alone? Did any of this bring us one millimetre closer to another living being?

An Eternal Reef is part of a designed reef system created from individual reef balls made of environmentally safe, marine grade concrete that quickly assimilate into the natural ocean environment. These permanent memorials placed on the ocean floor create new marine habitats for fish and other forms of sea life. Eternal Reefs takes the cremated remains or “cremains” of an individual and incorporates them into a proprietary, environmentally safe cement mixture designed to create artificial reef formations. The Eternal Reefs are then placed in one of our permitted ocean locations selected by the individual, friend or family member.

https://www.eternalreefs.com/

These structures are fading into deep time.... Their purpose has not yet fully vanished, but it is obfuscated enough for them to become places of projection - can you sense the blankness of possibility opening up around them? There is something profound here, but I can't reach it…Their meanings shift, they become vague, take on new meanings, man-made objects are slippery like that, we think they stay still, but perhaps they never truly do. Perhaps they have their own agendas all along. They are matter, after all, just like you or I.

What is human composting? The deceased body is gently placed into a steel cylinder 8-foot by 4-foot, and wood chips, straw, and alfalfa are added. Oxygen is added to the cylinder to speed the decomposition process by increasing the growth of microbes that perform their role of breaking down the organic matter. The cylinder interior heat is kept at around 130 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit, as this is the optimal temperature range for safe and efficient composting and maximum operation of the microbe organisms feeding on the organic matter of the body. The contents of the cylinder are “blended” regularly throughout the process to help break up remaining bone fragments. When the body is fully composted, the cylinder produces one cubic yard of soil. Any inorganic medical implants are removed from the soil.

The “blending” conducted by staff throughout the 30-day composting process is aimed at helping to break down softened bones into smaller bone fragments. However, it has not been revealed what may happen with the total decomposition of the human skeleton. The resulting ‘soil’ can be returned to the family or to a conservation entity. (The resulting soil will be very nutrient-rich and make excellent fertilizer.)

https://www.us-funerals.com/human-composting-as-a-new-death-care-alternative-a-guide-to-nor/

In the UK 79% of people are now cremated, which is around 470,000 people each year spread across the UK’s 300 crematoriums (Pharos Statistic Issue 2019). Out of these 300 crematoriums, there are approximately 606 cremator machines; 99% of which are gas powered.For every gas cremation, approximately 245 kg of carbon is released into the atmosphere which, when added together, is around 115,150 tonnes of carbon released each year; solely from cremation in the UK.

(A plane's CO2 emissions per km are estimated to be 115 g of CO2 per km.)

https://www.thecdsgroup.co.uk/news/the-uk-cremation-industry-emissions

To find out just what role they play, evolutionary biologist Jessica Metcalf of the University of Colorado, Boulder, set out to survey the microbes in, on, and around corpses. She started with mice, putting 126 bodies into individual containers with soil from three places: a short grass prairie and a subalpine lodgepole pine forest in Colorado, and a desert in Texas. Over the next year and a half, she sampled microbes on the decaying mouse skin, in the guts, and in the soil. With the help of colleagues from the Sam Houston State University Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Science Facility in Huntsville, she also tracked the decay of four human corpses donated to science, two placed outside in winter and two placed outside in spring.

https://www.science.org/content/article/thousands-unexpected-microbes-break-down-our-bodies-after-death

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, these organisms are ‘animals with characteristics or attributes’, that is, they ‘serve the purposes of science’ (cited in Baker 2000, 125). As such, they are not considered worthy for becoming-with; they are too banal to offer the transcendence of the wild.

Necessary expendability: an exploration of nonhuman death in public Tarsh Bates and Megan Schlipalius

The cultural critic Ivan Illich [ ] describing what he calls “vernacular Dwelling,” which is a style off inhabiting the world deepy and materially so that we leave behind traves or tracks of our presence - odors, stains, residue - the muck- of our own imperfect, aging and soiled bodies. Vernacular libing allows us to maintain a history of ourselves in our habitation.

Elaine Scarry, “The Body in Pain”

AH [Alkaline Hyrolysis) is a reductive chemical process by which tissues are dissolved in a heated (and sometimes pressurized) solution of water and strong alkali (e.g., potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide), yielding an inert, sterile effluent and brittle bone material (calcium phosphate). The body is placed in a stainless steel cage, or on a perforated, stainless steel tray, which is then sealed in a cylindrical, stainless steel vessel to which a solution of 95 percent water and 5 percent alkali is added. [] At higher temperatures, the process is quicker (taking as little as three to four hours), System developers claim that the process destroys all RNA, DNA, and pathogens (including infectious prions), and breaks down embalming fluids, cytotoxic agents, and biological and chemical warfare agents into harmless materials. The resulting effluent, which contains amino acids, peptides, sugars, and soap, may be disposed of through municipal sewer systems, provided that it is cooled and the pH adjusted to meet local standards. The brittle bone material retained in he cage is dried and crushed, and may be returned to the decedent's family. Any metallic implants and pacemaker materials captured in the cage can be separated from the bone matter and recycled or otherwise properly disposed.

“Flush and Bone: Funeralizing Alkaline Hydrolysis in the United States” Philip R. Olson

A sensing. Sensorial part of the landscapes we travel. We leave fragments of ourselves behind wherever we go… a vernacular dwelling of skin cells and hair follicles and shed matter… Pieces of the both of us swill through the eddies of the empty air, catch on the detritus at the edges of buildings, the smallest pieces of you and I. How far do we travel, truly, on the breeze… Who is it I am breathing in? Death is on your air, on your skin. Pieces of you slough off every time you move. Each time I stretch my hands to you, I grasp a different version, the layers of you peeling back with intimate regularity. I too, am dead in your mouth and in the air and on your fingertips.

Merleau-Ponty explains about the lack of separation between lived experience and the world around: ‘it would be better to say that the body sensed and the body sentient are as the obverse and the reverse, or again, as two segments of one sole circular course . . . since the world is flesh’

Elaine Scarry, “The Body in Pain”

AH was first adopted in the early 1990s by researchers at Albany Medical College who sought an effective and inexpensive way to dispose of experimental animal remains that contained low-level radioisotopes. AH allowed researchers to discharge animal waste into sanitary sewerage in compliance with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's standards for protection against radiation.

“Flush and Bone: Funeralizing Alkaline Hydrolysis in the United States” Philip R. Olson

The ever present, ever evolving industry of death is thus entangled with the lonely fates of nonhuman bodies, whose lives and ultimate deaths were also entangled with human life. We are mostly water already- the idea of dissolving and mingling in the sewers somehow appeals to me as much as it horrifies; a leave no trace existence is a double edged blade

The Catholic Conference of Ohio, which declared: Dissolving bodies in a vat of chemicals and pouring the resultant liquid down the drain is not a respectful way to dispose of human remains."

“Flush and Bone: Funeralizing Alkaline Hydrolysis in the United States” Philip R. Olson

In contrast to the public health conception of the dead body as dangerous and in need of public surveillance and expert handling, proponents of the green burial movement view the dead body as an untainted, wholesome, even nutritive entity. In some important ways, AH technologies fit well with this conception of the dead body.

“Flush and Bone: Funeralizing Alkaline Hydrolysis in the United States” Philip R. Olson

Val Plumwood (2008, 324), who challenges the "Human Exceptionalism" concept of human identity, which places humans "outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reci-procity." In Western cultures, positioning the corpse within the food chain has traditionally been viewed as disrespectful of the exceptional human body. However, Parsi Zoroastrians and some Buddhists implement disposition practices that encourage the consumption of the unclean, dead body by scavenging birds- a form of excarnation often referred to as "sky burial." Plumwood invokes "indigenous animist concepts of self and death," which, she argues, allow us to "see death as recycling, a flowing on into an ecological and ancestral community of origins"

“Flush and Bone: Funeralizing Alkaline Hydrolysis in the United States” Philip R. Olson

between the public health conception of the dead body as dangerous, on one hand, and the environmental conception of the dead body as natural and nutritive on the other. But just as the doctor's work aims to transform the ill and diseased body into a healthy and orderly body through medical inter-vention, so too disposition technologies work to reconcile these body concepts through technological transformation. Whether by deceleration or by acceleration of the "natural" processes of decomposition, disposition technologies intervene to control the transformation of the dangerous chaos of death and decay into harmless even beneficial--products.

“Flush and Bone: Funeralizing Alkaline Hydrolysis in the United States” Philip R. Olson

As one reader of the nbenews.com article wrote in response to a post connecting AH to Soylent Green, "I cannot accept this [AH]. It's disgusting. 1 don't want to be 'green' if this is what it takes. "

“Flush and Bone: Funeralizing Alkaline Hydrolysis in the United States” Philip R. Olson

Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures.

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”

Nothing natural here will last… nature does not build a body to last eternity, just the span of a life, and a little past that, if you’re lucky… Nature does not build a thing to last eternity. Only we do that.

PART 3: ABJECTION

risky as dying. Just as one dies without knowing where to, and that is the greatest courage of a body.

Clarice Lispector, “The Passion according to GH”

Decomposition begins several minutes after death, with a process called autolysis, or self-digestion. Soon after the heart stops beating, cells become deprived of oxygen, and their acidity increases as the toxic by-products of chemical reactions begin to accumulate inside them. Enzymes start to digest cell membranes and then leak out as the cells break down. This usually begins in the liver, which is enriched in enzymes, and in the brain, which has high water content; eventually, though, all other tissues and organs begin to break down in this way. Damaged blood cells spill out of broken vessels and, aided by gravity, settle in the capillaries and small veins,

https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/may/05/life-after-death

Against the reality of temporary, humans stage heroic battles for perma-nence: Archives, museums, endowments, societies for the preservation of. mummies, relics, plaques, even park benches with plaques.

Jeanette Winterson. “Land”

cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance.

Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection”

Life is not the opposite of death, but a strange quivering of the needle between two different types of being dead. At one end of the spectrum we have total nonexistence, at the other end, we have total mechanical repetition, perpetual motion, the machination that freud called the Death Drive. If the needle stops quivering between these poles and slips towards the pole of total nonexistence, the living beings begins to dissolve, to drift into powder, to become the chemicals that composed it. If the needle stops quivering and is attracted towards the pole of mechanical repetition, te living being becomes a relentless force, like a drill or tornado.

Paul Thomas, “Quantum Art and Uncertainty”

After cessation of homeostasis, the natural flora of the body migrates from the gut to the blood vessels and spreads all over the body. External micro-organisms enter the body through the alimentary canal, respiratory tract, and open wounds. In the absence of body defenses/immune mechanisms, the microbes keep growing, as they feed upon the proteins and carbohydrates of the blood and body parts. The principal bacterial agent causing putrefaction is the gram-positive, anaerobic, and rod-shaped Clostridium welchii.[33] It releases lecithinase, which causes hydrolysis of lecithin present in the blood cells, causing their lysis.

The bacteria generate hydrogen sulfide as a result of reductive catalysis. Hydrogen sulfide reacts with the hemoglobin and forms sulphahemoglobin that stains the surrounding region green.[33] Microbes traverse throughout the body using the blood vessels. Putrefaction of erythrocytes within the superficial blood vessels leads to the formation of greenish-blue discoloration, which is observable through the skin. This outlining of the superficial blood vessels is known as ‘marbling’ of the skin.

“Postmortem Changes” Rutwik Shedge; Kewal Krishan; Varsha Warrier; Tanuj Kanchan.

show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ―I‖ is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.

Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection”

Temporary. That's how it is for human beings whose time in place is limited. As we walk down the street our footprints disappear; we are already somewhere else.

Temporary is human. We don't live long. Our ancestors lived less long.

Graveyards and ruins remind us of the atom and jot of our span.

Jeanette Winterson “Land”

The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder.

Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection”

When we embrace a woman or a man, we stroke the truss of the shoulders, feel soft gusts of breath on our throat, tingle the ghost fur of the arms, trawl the pleasure shivering across his or her skin. We recoil from thinking of the contents of the body we are holding up against our own - the spongy gray lungs, the stomach pouch, the intestines, spleen, liver, the biles.

Alfonso Lingis “Irrevocable”

In a short essay by Gilles Deleuze called "Immanence: A Life." we are introduced to the concept of "a" life. As the indefinite article suggests, this is an indeterminate vitality, a "pure a-subjective current."4 A life is visible only fleetingly, for it is "a pure event freed . .. from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens."s A life inhabits that uncanny nontime existing between the various moments of biographical or morphological time.

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things”

My death is the last moment in my time, but it is not a not-yet-present moment in the line of future moments, moments coming towards presence. It is a moment without duration, an instant, an anstantaneous cut in the line of time extending before me. And the last moment does not really lie at the end of a line of moments to come; it is imminent in any moment. The next moment may be the last moment.

Alfonso Lingis “Irrevocable”

My body is an open casket

I am made up of dead things

Young, old and ageless.

The Rubble of Heartbreak

What it is

To become

And unbecome

A body

Billy Ray Belcourt, “This World is a Wound”, ‘Time Contra Time’

PART 4: REMEMBERING

Remembrance is a process, not a task to be completed; it is carried out through constant repetition and renewal.

Maggie Nelson “The Argonauts”

Memory does not reside in the folds of individual brains; rather, memory is the enfoldings of space-time-matter written into the universe, or better, the enfolded articulations of the universe in its mat-tering. Memory is not a record of a fixed past that can ever be fully or simply erased, written over, or recovered (that is, taken away or taken back into one's possession, as if it were a thing that can be owned). And remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. Remembering and re-cognizing do not take care of, or satisfy, or in any other way reduce one's responsibilities; rather, like all intra-actions, they extend the entanglements and responsibilities of which one is a part. The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.

Karen Barard, “Meeting the Universe Halfway”

Our bodies also generate doubles of themselves that they leave in the past and project into the future.

Alfonso Lingis “Irrevocable”

Perhaps, therefore, the flow of tme is not a characteristic of the universe like the rotation of the heavens, it is due to the particular perspective we have from our corner of it…

Carlo Rovelli, “The Order of Time”

The existence of quantum discontinuity means that the past is never left behind, never finished once and for all, and that the future is not what will come to be in an unfolding of the present moment; rather the past and future are enfolded participants in matter’s iterative becoming. Becoming is not an unfolding in time, but the inexhaustible dynamism of the unfolding mattering.

Karen Barard, “Meeting the Universe Halfway”

Nature left to itself is constantly moving and changing. E. O. Wilson, in a chapter in his short book Biophilia entitled "The Time Machine," describes time in nature in four ways: first is the time in which we expe- rience reality, organismic time, the speed of ordinary organisms. Much faster than this is biochemical time, the time in which electro-chemical events, like neural events, take place. Much slower than organismic time is ecological time, the scope in which individual organisms and species function together in mutual support. Finally and slowest of all is evolu- tionary time, where species themselves change their characteristics and branch into new species. Wilson's description is a wonderful means of realizing that change and movement is happening at all sorts of levels and at all sorts of speeds, with the only constant being change itself.

Carlo Rovelli, “The Order of Time”

there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things that I see, hear, or think. The ―sublime‖ object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be. As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers—it has always already triggered—a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly. I then forget the point of departure and find myself removed to a secondary universe, set off from the one where ―I‖ am— delight and loss. Not at all short of but always with and through perception and words, the sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination.

Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection”

Many of these emanations [doubles] are ephemeral while the things are enduring, but others endure after the things have passed on or passed away. The grass retains the imprint of the deer’s bopdy after it has left; the shale holds the shape of the dinosaur whose body has long decomposed.

Alfonso Lingis “Irrevocable”

the plot twist is that we too are like stars:

even after death, the human body emits photons,

Invisible to the naked eye.

Billy Ray Belcourt, “This World is a Wound”, ‘Time Contra Time’

PART 5: CYBORG

I had broken the spell of the living thing

Only that whatever happened in the dark of night itself, would

also happen at the same time in my own entrails, and my dark wasn't differentiated from the dark outside,

the world was still a surface:

Clarice Lispector, “The Passion according to GH”

I wouldn’t be stable enough to write this sentence if it werent for millions of tiny quantum events taking place in my body. I would dissolve into a cloud of powder. My very solidity depends on how particles can suddenly change, become entangled, blur into one another. These properties bestow upon me what Schrodinger calls Negentropy, a temporary suspension of the normal rules whereby the arrow of time moves only in one direction and things tend towards collapsing. Life is a little pocket of stability in the universe.

Paul Thomas, “Quantum Art and Uncertainty”

My body? What do you mean by my body?

Just that. The physical body.

But where is it? He asked? Where does it end or begin? For me it’s not that simple. Once you’ve passed through a cell, once you pass through those ordinary boundaries, its hard to say where the body leaves off/ (notes - do we count the traces our body leaves behind as ‘our body’? Excrement, skin, experiences, art?) At the tip of my finger or the edge of a cell? Or somewhere in the DNA? Then the whole world looks like one body. Even the solar system and the galaxy and the view through the animan siddhi. All of it is still developing, parts dying and being reborn… no, i don’t know where this body ends.

Michael Murphy, “Jacob Atabet”

Matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder.

Karen Barard, “Meeting the Universe Halfway”

Even atoms, whose very name, arouoo (atomos), means "indivisible" or

"uncuttable," can be broken apart. But matter and meaning cannot be dis- § sociated, not by chemical processing, or centrifuge, or nuclear blast. Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evidently perhaps when it is the nature of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. Perhaps this is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing, and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, so tangible, so poignant.

Karen Barard, “Meeting the Universe Halfway”

Exactly where one come to consciousness is totally arbitrary; the thing that remains constant is the awareness that “i” am “here” and that “that”, whatever one is looking at, or is outside of one), is “there”. To use a bit of technical jargon, the ego crystallizes out of an amorphous and undifferentiated matrix. Up to this point, all of us feel ourselves morre or less continuous with the external environement. Coming to consciousness means a rupture in that continuity, the emergence of a divide between self and other. With the thought, “I am I,” a new level of existence opens up for us. There is a tear in the fabric, so to speak, and self vs other remains the issue that we shall have to negotiate for the rest of our lives.

Morris Berman, ‘Coming to our Senses”

Posthuman bodies being zoe/geo/techno-mediated are caught within a range of de-materialization techniques that turn them into providers and retrievers of data and information, integrated into the electronic circuit. But they also contribute to re-materialization of bodies within extensive multi-species webs of environmental and social relations. This engenders the simultaneous exposure and disappearance of what used to be 'the' body into multiple practices, networks of techno-mediated, bio-genetic and computational The famous feminist slogan 'our bodies, ourselves' acquires an ironic twist

Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Feminism”

These generative assemblages bring into full force new research themes, diversifying the study of non-human entities, from upper primates and genes, to the earth, water, dust and plastic. Conceptually, posthuman feminism promotes a cross-species way of thinking that includes the zoe-geo-techno-mediated relations to the multiple ecologies composing the

posthuman convergence.

Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Feminism”

Nonhuman agency deflects attention from human accountability to other entities, whether human, nonhuman, cyborg, or what/whomever.

-MONICA CASPER, "Reframing and Grounding Nonhuman Agency"

Posthumanism avoids strict categorizations based on standards of acceptability, and thus brings to our attention the non-acceptable, non-human, non-normal, the monster. In fact, both posthumanist thinking and monster theory reveal the fragmented nature of humans, and at the same time their connection with the outer world and with other beings. Just like a monster is born out of the opposite of what defines a “normal human”, the category “Human” derived from the Enlightenment is also a conceptualized idea that is defined by what deviates from it: “In this sense the posthuman emphasizes that we are all, and must be, monsters because none are template humans” patricia (MacCormack, 2013, p.414).

Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject."

On the contrary, creating cracks in the rigid mold that shapes our definition of “Human” and the human body will let in a multiplicity of diverging perspectives,

Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject."

Our cultural history is encoded in our bodies, and as you begin to sort one out, you will sort the other out as well

Morris Berman, ‘Coming to our Senses”

Body, language, self and divinity or the sacred realm of being all constitute an eco community; denying any one part collapses the order of the entire structure.

Elaine Scarry, “The Body in Pain”

There is here, a stretching out to a Gaia politik, the conviction that the flesh of my body is also the flesh of the earth, the flesh of experience. To know your own flesh, to know both the pain and joy it contains, is to come to know something much larger than this.

Something obvious keeps eluding our civilization, something that involves a reciprocal relatonshiop between natrue and psyche, and that we are going to have to grasp if we are to survive as a species. But it hasn’t come together yet, and as a result, to use the traditional labels, it is still unclear whether we are entering a new dark age or a new renaissance.

Morris Berman, ‘Coming to our Senses”

Trans-corporeality means that all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them.

Stacy Alaimo Interview 2018

Trans-corporeality contests the master subject of Western humanist individualism, who imagines himself as transcendent, disembodied, and removed from the world he surveys. The trans-corporeal subject is generated through and entangled with biological, technological, economic, social, political and other systems, processes, and events, at vastly different scales. Trans-corporeality finds itself within capitalism, but resists the allure of shiny objects, considering instead, the effects they have, from manufacture to disposal, while reckoning with the strange agencies that interconnect substance, flesh and place. It does not contemplate discrete objects from a safe distance, but instead, thinks as the very stuff of the ever-emergent world (Alaimo 2016).

Stacy Alaimo Interview 2018

I think I realized something like transcorporeality when I was invited to participate in Greenpeace mercury testing. I had to cut off a piece of my hair and send to Greenpeace in an envelope, which was very odd in itself—sending a piece of my body through the mail to this environmental organization... It came back with a number showing me how much mercury was in my body. I had no idea what that number meant or what I was supposed to do with it. Thinking through that, and then how that mercury got there—was it through air pollution, or eating tuna fish when I was a child, what did that mean—was an unsettling experience that made me think of my own body/self as unraveled across space and time. Greenpeace sent back a report with information about the health effects of mercury and ways to minimize exposure through everyday practices, as well as various political actions, and it was that sense of how science and your body and the political organization are all interconnected across vast distances that led to my conception of transcorporeality. It’s important to realize that there’s no nature that we just act upon. Instead, it’s also acting back upon us, as we are always already the very substance and the stuff of the word that we are changing.

Stacy Alaimo Interview 2018

The expanded definition of matter as a non-human elemental force (zoe) allows for the inclusion of the earth (geo), and for technological artefacts and mediation (techno) as elements in the transversal networks that compose posthuman subjectivity. This is a situation whereby 20e embraces geo and techno as interrelated dimensions. We are such stuff as zoe/geo/techno-bound matter is made of.

Rosi Bardotti, Posthuman Feminism

PART 6: NONHUMAN BODIES

Imagine that you could pass throuh two doors at once. Its inconceivable, yet fungi do this all the time. When faced with a forked path, fungal hyoahe don’t have to choose one or the other, they can branch and take both routes.

Merlin Sheldrake, “Entangled Life”

Viriditas is another of Hildegard’s most appealing and compelling concepts. While the Latin word means literally “greenness,” the lushness evident in Nature, it signifies in Hildegard’s visions the cosmic life force infusing the entire natural world.3 Creation is “greened” through the mystery of growth and healing. Viriditas “connects the fresh, green life of nature to the active Life of the divine and its triple role as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.” 4

VK McCarty, “Hildegard of Bingen: Cosmic Visions of Caritas & Viriditas”

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair.

Karan Barard, “Meeting the Universe Halfway”

Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure of space and of time, but rather that time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future.

Karan Barard, “Meeting the Universe Halfway”

The sense of nature as creativity also seems a part of what the ancient Greeks meant by phusis, of which the Latin natura is an equivalent. Phusis comes from the verb phuo, which probably meant to puff, blow, or swell up, conveying the sense of germination or sprouting up, bringing forth, opening out, or hatching. Phusis thus speaks of a process of morphing, of formation and deformation, that is to say, of the becoming otherwise of things in motion as they enter into strange conjunctions with one another.

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”

human subjects are themselves nonhuman, alien, outside, vital materiality.

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”

You carry around more microbes than your ‘own’ cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy. For humans, identifying where one individual stops and another starts is not generally something we think about.

Merlin Sheldrake “Entangled Life”

Panpsychism holds that all matter, including the matter in objects like tables, has a mental aspect to it. This is not the idea that the entire universe is made of experience--that is idealism. Instead, a panpsychist accepts the physical layout of the world as it appears, but adds that the material that makes up that world always has a side to it that is faintly mind-like. This mind-like side of matter gives rise to experience and consciousness, once some of that matter is organized into brains.

PROTOZOA

Of course, the real tricksters are the firm believers in the received wisdom of metaphysics. Their signature hoax, responsible for today's predominant worldview, is the act of transubstantiating all forms of life into lifeless property. The ideally disembodied, presumably gender-neutral (though actually masculine) protagonist of metaphysics has not ceased to pronounce his fraudulent hoc est corpus meum upon encountering anything and anyone in his environs.

Michael Marder “Through Vegetal Being”

One can note that the human immune system depends on parasitic helminth worms for its proper functioning or cite other instances of our cyborgization to show how human agency is always an ass semblage of microbes, animals, plants, metals, chemicals, word-sounds. vitality and self-interest 121

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”

The notion of a single individual is a very animal concept, utterly ignored by other kingdoms of life. The sporophyte does not need to reproduce sexually at all, but, like other plants, can at times clone itself, producing its own cuttings. The presence of mycorrhizal meshes, networks of fungus associated with separate plant entities, further blurs the concept of an individual, as it allows signals and even nutrients to be passed between plants, using the fungal hyphae as a conduit. In a world where your near neighbours are likely to be your own genetically identical clones, having a fungal partner could allow sharing of resources in difficult times. Collaboration can pay dividends. No species evolves in isolation, but the synergy of plants and fungi has altered the future of life on Earth perhaps more than any other evolutionary innovation.22

Otherlands: A World in the Making Thomas Halliday

That scale is almost inconceivable. To pick just one example, ribosomes are important parts of cells--the stations where protein molecules are assembled- -with a rather complex structure of their own. But over 100 million ribosomes could fit on the period printed at the end of this sentence.

Protozoa.

Even bacteria have viruses within them (an nanobiome?). Even viruses can contain smaller viruses (a picobiome?). Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life.

Merlin Sheldrake, “Entangled Life”

There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in each meeting.

Karan Barard, “Meeting the Universe Halfway”

The point is this: an active becoming, a creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new, buzzes within the history of the term na-ture. This vital materiality congeals into bodies, bodies that seek to persevere or prolong their run. Here the onto-tale again draws from Spi-noza, who claims that conatus-driven bodies, to enhance their power or vitality, form alliances with other bodies.

The vortical logic holds across different scales of size, time, and complexity, and the sequence of stages repeats, but each time with slight differences: "This is the stroke of genius in [Lucretian] . .. physics: there is no circle, there are only vortices . .., spirals that shift, that erode."28 Serres offers an account of the strange structuralism of vital materiality, a structuralism that includes the aleatory. Vital materiality better captures an "alien" quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman. My "own" body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human. My flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners.

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”

The mycelium of some fungal species is electrically excitable and conducts waves of electrical activity along hyphae, analogous to the electrical impulses in human cells

Merlin Sheldrake, “Entangled Life”

The crook of my elbow, for example, is "a special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria. . . They are helping to moisturize the skin by processing the raw fats it produces. . . The bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome."S The its outnumber the mes. In a world of vibrant matter, it is thus not enough to say that we are "embodied." We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them nested in a set of micro biomes

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”

In the end, there is little difference between the largest and smallest of imaginable things, except for our own perception of them. Where we are locked in the immutable spectrum of scales informs our vision; the structure of the human eye, of the human brain, makes an impossible task of comprehension - there is a vanishing point on either side of our own lived-scale, (that of the body), an event horizon that we cannot see past. At a certain point both the minute and the enormous become vague, skewered by the ridiculousness of the comparison between the gargantuan nature, the minute insignificance of, flesh.

This point, which has so often been misunderstood, bears repeating. The fact that h (Planck's constant) is small relative to the mass of large objects does not mean that Bohr's insights apply only to microscopic objects. It does mean that the effects of the essential discontinuity may be less evident for relatively large objects, but they are not zero. To put it another way, no evidence exists to support the belief that the physical world is divided into two separate domains, each with its own set of physical laws: a microscopic domain governed by the laws of quantum physics, and a macroscopic domain governed by the laws of Newtonian physics. Indeed, quantum mechanics is the most successful and accurate theory in the history of physics, accounting for phenomena over a range of twenty-five orders of magnitude, from the smallest particles of matter to large-seale objects.? Quantum physics does not merely supplement Newtonian physics--it supersedes it. 2

Karen barard “meeting the universe halfway”

Our minds, the minds of the nonhuman, the intricate ever shifting patterns of thought, millions of endless webs, endless changes in the pressure, the expanse. A tree doesn’t think like a snake, or a stone, or an amoeba, or like us. The word ‘think’ begins to crumble and fracture under the weight of itself, under all of these different beings. One mind is never going to be enough for me. Never should be enough.

Rebecca Tamas, “ Essays on the Strange and Nonhuman”

neuroscientists often say that consciousness depends on the cerebral cortex, the folded part at the top of our brains, something found only in mammals and some other ver-tebrates.

Most animals, especially most of the animals in this book, do not have a cerebral cortex. Do they have experience of a different kind from us, or no experience at all?

Some people do think that without a cortex there can be no experience at all.

Protozoa

Some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin human thought start to soften. As they soften, our runious attitudes towards the more-than-human world may start to change.

Merlin Sheldrake, “Entangled Life”

Slime moulds can replicate the Tokyo underground or Britain’s motorway systems

Merlin Sheldrake, “Entangled Life”

dwell on this very “enmeshment of self with place” (1), whereby “bodies extend into places and places affect bodies” and we’re constantly penetrated by often unaccountable for substances and forces” (5). Latour, is the slight surprise of action confined to human action: "That which acts through me is also surprised by what I do, by the chance to mutate, to change, . .. to bifurcate."26

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”

Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within.

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”

the so-called normal and natural body is “always an achievement”, “a model of the proper where everything is in its place and the chaotic aspects of the natural are banished” (Shildrick, 1999, p. 54).

Sara Manente, “Female Bodies and Posthumanism 101: Monsters on the Threshold of Becoming”

PART 6: VEGETAL BEING

For René Descartes, []there is a sharp divide between the physical and the men-tal, and we humans are a combination of both; we are physical and mental beings. We succeed in being both because the two realms make contact in a small organ in our brains. This is Descartes's "dualism." Other animals, for Descartes, lack souls and are purely mechanical--a dog is without feeling, no matter what is done to it. The souls that make humans special are no longer present, even in faint forms, in animals and plants.

PROTOZOA

Wouldn’t you like to be absorbed into all that swaying gold? To fuse with it, ecstatically? To feel the midas-gold swill through you, feel the woody bark creeping through tendons, fingertips stiffening, leaves force themselves out of your throat…more yellow bursting in your eyes than you had ever imagined possible. Don’t you want to be a part of it?

The one plant, [ ] is not one-a multiplicity (of growths) that does not merely negate the one, or the One, but reassembles it in a community of growing beings. Far from a negation of universality, plants, as growing beings par excellence, are, in my view, the figures of singular uni-versality, to which differently sexuated human beings also belong.

Michael Marder “Through Vegetal Being”

Humanity and nonhumanity have always performed an intricate dance with each other. There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhu-manity; today this mingling has become harder to ignore.

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”

Plants cannot pick themselves up and move themselves from place to place. For Aristotle this was reason enough to condemn vegetal life to a life without a soul. He could not conceive of the slow-time of the vegetal, the sedate drawing up of sap, the rhizomatic exchanges happening beneath his feet.

Consider the spontaneous coming-into-being of vegetal life as it colonises any surface exposed to light and water. A primary impetus to life, a primordial energy that clings to the Earth's surface like a verdant skin. In The Metamorphosis of Plants (1789) the great polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) meditated on the plant kingdom to intuit its primeval being, to understand how plants had come to inhabit their manifold forms - their (morpho)genesis.

The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree

Vegetal sentience is often dismissed since its characteristics cannot easily be overlaid on the signs of consciousness expressed in human or animal subjects. A philosophical consideration of vegetal life requires an expanded appreciation for modes of being peculiar to plants, attending to them on their own terms as centres of intelligence that exert behaviour within scales of time and movement that differ vastly from our own. If the animal subject is bounded by a body that moves, the plant is defined as being 'sessile', a distinction that is easily misrecognised as an absence of subjectivity. To be sessile, embedded in a milieu, is to express life-force on a molecular-. cellular level: plants do not possess a neurological centre but, like art perhaps, they are defined by a state of ceaseless unfolding and an insatiable, immanent becoming;

The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree

In handling a flower,

The tail of the snake manifested itself.

Kashyapa breaks into a smile,

Nobody on Earth or in heaven knows what to do.

The Gateless Gate, Thirteenth-century collection of Zen koans -

“In the beginning all creatures were green and vital. They flourished amidst flowers.”

Hildegard of Bingen, 11th Century

In the framework of Aristotle, developed over two millennia earlier, soul unifies the living and the mental. Soul, for Aristotle, is a kind of inner form that directs bodily activities, and it exists in different levels or grades in dif ferent living things. Plants take in nutrients to keep themselves alive-_-that shows a kind of soul. Animals do this and can also sense their surroundings and respond-that is another kind of soul. Humans can reason, in addition to the other two capacities, and so have a third kind. For Aristotle, even inanimate objects that lack souls also often behave in accordance with purposes or goals, tending toward their natural place.

PROTOZOA

In a culture built on property relations, withholding the possibility of appropriating one's own body and whatever surrounds it is the most basic form of economic and social oppression. The woman, the worker, the animal, and, certainly, the plant are construed as either incapable or undeserving of self-possession and, therefore, as fit for appropria-ton by others. Since Aristotle, this list also includes all those who do not. The same applies to our contemporary nihilism, which perpetuates this hoax on a global, if not on a cosmic, scale. To maintain its power, it must be in a position to convince us that the living are actually dead unless endowed with a sufficient dose of negation and self-negation.

Michael Marder “Through Vegetal Being”

On this view, plants are the least alive of creatures because they do not contain as much as a trace of self-negation, will, or subjectivity; in a word, they do not belong to themselves. Completely delivered to external appropriation, their vegetal bodies only become animated when they are chopped down, plucked, or culled.

Michael Marder “Through Vegetal Being”

The more I worked on these writings, the more lucidly I saw the connection between the philosophical dogma that plants were the least advanced of living beings, a cultural rejection of any sort of ethical responsibility toward plants, and their economic transformation into raw materials for production or combustible biofuels.

Michael Marder “Through Vegetal Being”

PART 7: ECOHORROR

I might have already known that, beyond the gates, there would be no difference between me and the roach. Not in my own eyes or in the eyes of what is God. Closed-mouth canticle, sound vibrating deaf like something imprisoned and contained, amen, amen. Canticle of thanksgiving for the murder of one being by another being.

Jason Colavito writes, "Horror cannot survive without the anxieties created by the changing role of human knowledge and science in our society."

Ecohorror in the Anthropocene, Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles

Ecohorror in the Anthropocene-and ecohorror of the Anthropocene--is not solely concerned with scientific knowledge or overreach on a small scale, however. More and more, the problems and anxieties of ecohorror texts are the result of broader forces, represented not only as mad scientists, creatures, or animal attacks but also as far-reaching events or processes such as pollution, species extinction, or extreme weather.

Ecohorror in the Anthropocene, Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles

the human mapping of the world gesture to a third category of ecohorror-a tentacular ecohorror, which describes the terrifying encounter with a nonhuman nature that reaches out to grab and entangle the human." Tentacular ecohorror is structured first by an encounter with a recalcitrantly alien form of life and second by a character's becoming enmeshed with that life. Nature comes truly to the fore here, as it starts to do in films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or 1999's The Blair Witch Project. But, unlike in those films, nature doesn't stop, doesn't give way to a concealed human, animal, or supernatural entity. Nature itself keeps coming. Its more ineffable threat doesn't fade away to be replaced by the human or the monster. In its relentless coming, moreover, nature's motives (if it has any) are inscrutable: it is not clearly propelled by revenge or by any recognizably human impulsion. Nature simply comes to the fore in all its irreducible alterity.

Ecohorror in the Anthropocene, Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles

one of ecohorror's impulses is to obscure the difference between human and nonhuman. '2 There is horror in this blurring but also the prospect of a new kind of being

Ecohorror in the Anthropocene, Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles

The first movement of tentacular ecohorror is the encounter with nature as an absolute form of alterity, a form of life that escapes our grasp." Numerous theorists have argued that horror involves the confrontation with that which is unmapped. Noël Carroll writes that the monsters of horror are "un-natural relative to a culture's conceptual scheme of nature" and that horror itself is a "literalization of the notion that what horrifies is that which lies outside cultural categories and is, perforce, unknown." Maria Beville similarly claims that horror is defined by the encounter with the "unnameable monster," which "defies all attempts to constrain it in naming" and which "exists enigmatically" and

Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Blackwood's "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" and Lorcan Finnegan's Without Name Dawn Keetley

"autonomously."IS Paul Santilli has usefully demarcated horror from evil by arguing that while evil is "defined within a cultural matrix," horror "evokes elements of the real that have not been assimilated into a culture."16 The horrifying encounter, in other words, is an encounter with what Santilli calls "the undefined other of a culture."

Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Blackwood's "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" and Lorcan Finnegan's Without Name Dawn Keetley

The nature of this encounter with an element of the nonhuman that is revealed to be also indwelling is brilliantly articulated in Emmanuel Levinas's Existence and Existents. Levinas describes an "anonymous current of being" that "invades, submerges every subject, person or thing." dissolving the subject-object distinction.38 Levinas identifies this anonymous life as the "there is," since it "resists a personal form" and is "being in general."39 "There is" is impersonal and, Levinas argues, aligned especially with darkness. Darkness does not terrify because it shrouds daylight objects, he claims, but because it "reduces them to undetermined, anonymous being, which they exude."40 And darkness not only reduces objects to "undetermined, anonymous being" but also reduces us-we who think we inhabit the darkness as subjects. Indeed, in an essay that unexpectedly turns into a primer for horror, Levinas defines the encounter with impersonal life as horror: "In horror, a subject is stripped of his subjectivity, of his power to have private existence. The subject is depersonalized." Horror, Levinas claims, is "a participation in the there is."1 This Levinasian definition of horror as a "participation in the there is"-as a recognition of the anonymity of all life--is different from the horror of the human's confrontation with an ineffable menace (as Carroll, Beville, and Santilli describe). It suggests an encounter in which the subject dissolves too, becoming as ineffable as the menace it confronts. Both subject and object disappear, then, in an encounter that lays bare the impersonal life that pervades both; impersonal life razes subjects, persons, and identities.

Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Blackwood's "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" and Lorcan Finnegan's Without Name Dawn Keetley

I, neutral cockroach body, I with a life that at last doesn't escape me because I finally see it outside of myself-I am the roach, I am my leg, I am my hair, I am the section of whitest light on the plaster of the wall-I am every hellish piece of me- liftein me is so demanding that if they hacked m he lie alizard, the pieces would keep trembling and squirming. fam the silence engraved on a wall, and the oldest butterfly flutters and finds me: the same as always. From birth to death is when I call myself human, and shall never actually die. But that isn't eternity, it's damnation.

Clarice Lispector, “The Passion according to GH”

The hydrosphere sees water getting redistributed through multiple networks and vectors intersecting with infrastructure and medical biotechnology. Roberts (2008,, infrare, folloves the course of hormones circulation through a ourside the human bodies into the general environment in water systems and leakages. This spread caused a problematic increase Of endocrine-disrupting chemicals that affect the food chain of fish, animals and humans. The effects of the fluid ecologies of geo-techno-spreading hormones are global as well as local. Human bodies are also made of carbon, air and minerals, but water is the dominant element and one that configures the inter. connectedness of living matter with admirable simplicity.

Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Feminism”

In a crossover into computational technologies, Jennifer Gabrys (2011) presents a 'natural history' of electronics in her study of digital waste disposal techniques and practices. Adopting a new-materialist approach, she stresses the geological and mineral formations that compose the infrastructure and basic components of the deceptively abstract notion of information technologies. Gabrys contests the idea that technologies are somehow 'immaterial' by exposing the grounded practices of electronic waste disposal. By studying how electronic rubbish is broken down, disassembled and stored, from containers to landfills, museums and archives, Gabrys discusses the labour relations involved in electronic rubbish disposal and exposes the racialized, digital proletariat taking care of this dangerous work.

Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Feminism”

American materialism, which requires buying ever-increasing numbers of products purchased in ever-shorter cycles, is antimateriality1 The sheer volume of commodities, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter.

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”

Monsters are born in the sites of ambiguity and represent simultaneously people’s fear and their curiosity towards the unknown and the uncertain. They are also essential in the formation of identities of any kind, from cultural to personal, national, or sexual. Any dominant group defines itself by creating distance from a minority, the Other, the racialized, the sexually deviant, the woman, the poor — categories of abnormality that are often depicted as monsters. The etymology of the word monster, the Latin monstrum or monstrare, which means “to show forth”, seems to indicate the revealing potential of monsters: if monsters exist to conceal and exorcise otherness as a way to protect the integrity of the Self and the majority, then understanding them allows to uncover what is hiding underneath them. Monsters “ask us why we have created them” (Cohen, 1997, p.20), as they don’t only represent a physical threat, but also a cognitive one because they “question our epistemological worldview” and present us with “the failures of our systems of categorization” (Mittman, 2013, p.51).

Female Bodies and Posthumanism 101: Monsters on the Threshold of Becoming

Some people respond to the proliferation of entanglements between human and nonhuman materialities with a desire to reenforce the boundary between culture and nature,

Give up the fútile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman

Jane Bennett “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”