Avy asked for recommendations for a good translation of the New Testament to read. He’d already read and studied the Old Testament. I answered but I’m not Christian. I’m “post-Christian” as a good nun diagnosed me. Then I was “post-Unitarian-Universalist” when I stepped away from the Transcendentalist heresy within that movement and no longer read Emerson and Thoreau or even Margaret Fuller. So what am I now?
I say I’m not a feminist because I love men. I’m not a humanist because I love all species. I’m not putting living things at the center, because I love mountains and the past and planets and stars. So I say I’m an Everythingist. A radical inclusioner. But that’s not very helpful.
At this moment the planet is in the grip of criminal international capitalism we picture as managed by two old white men (one is orange) with China operating ambiguously as a third, which is how they like it. All want to go back to the past when they were children and the old had all the power and control, which they want. Always wanted. But this is a wrong interpretation and their renewed Roman Empire is crashing because of a microbe with no army and no money. Just death.
So what am I? In practical terms? And what should I recommend to read if someone like Avy asks about it?
I’m an ecocentrist. The category understood that the viral plague was coming and they are still working out its strategies. They still put humans at the center and their preservation as high priority, but they are reading the molecules themselves because humans are simply a specific configuration of molecules that persist because they fit the world around them. We ripped open the caves with their bats, the jungles with their other bats, and we knew that we were ripping open the Persephone bats and releasing probable plagues, but we didn’t see this as changing the world order. Hubris. Possibly our blunder saved the caves and jungles for a while longer by bringing down much civilization. And overarching the lockdowns are clear skies, delaying climate change.
Humans stopped fitting their ecosystems.
A genome is like a long molecular sentence written in atoms. Living flesh and viruses are the passages we are learning to read. Our bodies are made of cells governed by that “writing”. But the constantly renewed “words” that come to us through our senses are electrochemical symbols, both in-skin and out-skin, that become what we perceive as sounds, smells, tastes, and the whole realm of where and who we are. We are a translation from what we once thought was a concrete literal world. We are a fantasy. We are shapeshifters but the shapes are real as chairs even if they are a matter of neurons plugging into each other.
Now that some of us are aware of how many primal versions of hominins have vanished, leaving only genome scribbles, we know that our own version may be gone soon. The foxes are napping on the airport runways in Chernobyl, a place where we thought we could pull the wings off atoms.
“The genome of the new coronavirus is less than 30,000 “letters” long. (The human genome is over 3 billion.) Scientists have identified genes for as many as 29 proteins, which carry out a range of jobs from making copies of the coronavirus to suppressing the body’s immune responses.” Our alphabet is 26 letters long; the virus has only 4 “letters.”
We have a whole other system in emotions. They can be seen, measured, controlled by facts, but they are spontaneous, sometimes unaccountable, overwhelming. Attaching. Morality is driven by desire and can overrule what we are supposed to love. Combustible. We don’t know why some people are fireproof. Why some immolate the ones they love.
At a workshop about “reading the landscape” where many spoke of loving nature, a woman feminist minister declared that she loved city pavement, bare construction, impersonality. Yet she slept with her parishioner. I asked her why. She said she needed an automobile and he bought her one. So “religion” is malleable. So negligible. So negotiable. It is just raw need that runs the world.
“In his early psychoanalytic theory, Freud proposed that Eros was opposed by forces of the ego (the organized, realistic part of a person's psyche which mediates between desires). In his later views, he maintained that life instincts were opposed by the self-destructive death instincts, known as Thanatos.”
Some folks call it composting: that the dead things are the source of live things. All living things eat other living things, except some eat the living sun. Plants eat soil and can deplete it. Animals eat both plants and other animals. Plants eat dead animals. Existence is a process with complex molecules composing and disintegrating, rearranging into new patterns. Even the mineral rocks are weathering, then recomposing by chemical action or being made molten. There used to be a column in the Portland Scribe called “Entropy Increases Everywhere.” But it has to be thought about alongside the other side — composing and creation increase everywhere. Both civilization and infections have been bed partners from the beginning. Birth and death in the same bed. But right now there are not enough beds so one must give birth at home.
I am a process. I am an ecology of cohabiting cells. I live in an ecology of mountains and grasslands. I have emotions and opinions about all this, which mostly come down to hanging onto the old while trying to get to the new. But it’s scary. Avy is right to think of books. Keep it in words on pages.
But now books are blogs, processes, platforms, images with words, symphonies and plunked out stuff played by cats on YouTube. Where is yesterday’s dignity, the respect of carrying a scroll in a case, words to memorize for guidance in a world gone mad, light a candle while we chant together.
Thanatos — of course he was a god — was depicted as gentle, a wise old man with a beard. The violent kind of death was allotted to a group of women who still abide in our prisons, fucking the incarcerated mercilessly. Margaret Mead said never to let women be soldiers because they have no mercy. She wrote a lot of books.
Similar thoughts about the "pluriverse."
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