“Finding an adequate language
for post-anthropocentrism means that the resources of the
imagination,
as well as the tools of critical intelligence, need to be
enlisted for this task.” R. Brandotti, The Posthuman.
Cambridge UK, 2013. p.82.
Bear paws pressed into the earth, a small plane roars behind
a ridge.
The bear is no longer there. The plane remains unseen. Existence
is
a "doom loop." Moment after moment disappears
like an open
circle
of stones.
When we learned to coax dreams into images, we thought we
would know
how shamans flew into their levels of being. Not seers
as much as healers,
they
would not answer questions, such as,“How many
levels of reality are
you
on at this moment?”
Clay
was heated and shaped into domesticated earth. Then,
she painted
the horizon
on her skin with red ochre
and walked toward the rising sun
chanting
words that had
never been spoken before.
The
oldest of trees stand in mythology. The biblical trees
of Life and Knowledge;
Yggdrasill, from which
Odin hung
nine days and nights; and the Cosmic Tree at
the
center of it all. Its roots spread through the
underworld, its branches
embrace
the sky. At its base curls a serpent, and a bird with
folded wings sits on its crown.
The
snake is the convolutions of Anthropo’s reptilian
brain. The bird is perched
atop the staff of a therianthropic man painted at
Lascaux more than 12,000 years
ago. "He, dancer
in the
abyss, spirit, ever to be born. / Bird and perverse
fruit of
magic
cruelly saved."(1)
What
will your reality be when your nervous system
is no longer sympathetic?
After millions of years of evolving various forms, organs,
pigments, shapes,
will human flesh be happy with a digital pulse in place of
a beating
heart?
Will the impulses of electronic prostheses entrain “the
sustainable ethics of
transformation,”(2) emulating
the phantom pain of an amputated limb? Or will
cybernetic implants have no causal memory, no positional
history, no sense
of an eternity beyond itself?
2:6
Perhaps
it was because weeds had risen wild as Gaia
conducting heat from
the planet’s fiery
viscera to its lively Critical
Zone that a man who looked like
Po Chu-I walked past
me shouted over his shoulder, “Read the original!”(3)
2:7
We
skirted foamy tide sliding in with clumps of salty
weeds, sandpipers running
pecking
for worms, as a “fishapod” emerged
from the sea into oxygenated air.
Disoriented
as to where and what it was,
it turned and wiggled
back
into familiar
currents.
We
too turned and walked back, to the parking lot. In the
distance, someone was
fishing from
what
looked like a long stand of petrified
hair.
2:8
The
early morning sun paints an empty sky with fresh
blood. Where yesterday
I had to
wade across, today I’m
walking on rocks thirsty
for what doesn't flow
anymore.
The wild is what slips from under a microscope,
and disappears.
2:9
At
the quantum level there is nothing that is not related
to everything else.
Meaning, then, is humanity’s
most elegant contribution
to the universe. A
voice
balanced in the morning
mist, it carries the mystery of
a uroboros
whose circular being hums
itself into existance.
Like
the humpbacked fluteplayer, Kokopelli, Anthropos plays
in the bulge
of its brain “a language of substance
which cannot be taken substantively.”(4)
It
is not only thick strokes of vibrant paint that make
Van Gogh’s
paintings
crucial in our time, but also the artist’s
stubborn toil under a glowering
sun.
Would an intelligent computer suffer
rejection by its peers when
madness
burns
through
the qbits of its brain?
In 2015, tools were found that were dated
to before Homo sapiens became
a distinct species. With these tools they
walked into a world that
has since
been conquered by humans, yet remains unknown.
No GPS to guide me through this jumble
of stones that looks like a corpus
callosum connecting a binary feral
mind, last year a bridge
was built over
this chasm. Heavy lengths of squared
wood were carried up steep
hills on
the backs of young men, opening
a new path that loops back
to the old.
2:13
Paleolithic cave art may have told
stories that, when the environment
changed,
and some of the animals painted
disappeared, inside they continued
to stretch,
twist, and prance across the
walls. Were these paintings
literal, symbolic,
both?
Like contemporary
religions whose stories
originated in environments that no
longer exist, we don't know what
they mean beyond the meaning we give them.
2:14
Before
the sun warms the horizon, I put on a sweater, and
consider:
Existence
is easy. But “Becoming-imperceptible,”(5) while
the media
clones
instant celebrities, takes
courage.
To
the smell of water that's sunk beneath earth’s
gritty skin, plants
reach down. Their
roots are drying;
the mountains, too,
feel sluggish.
As we cannot speak for
nature, can we learn
to speak with nature?
Does Wittgenstein’s
statement: “If
a lion could
talk we would
not
understand him,”(6) fall
within the probability
of
an AI system
that could
falsify
it? Understanding
simultaneously
expands
and slips
away.
An
art could be made by cyborgs programmed to compute
unknown
causes, in which the present is the future appearing
to be in the past.
Then what can’t be known will be for sentient
beings to dispute.
As
I climb the river’s embankment, from a jumble
of rocks the arm of a dead plant
reaches out and catches
my foot. I fall backward while leaning forward,
recalling:
“Just think how amazing! Someone getting up and walking /on
the water.”(7)
Later, I
muse: You can’t walk on water, when the water
is gone. Theology
is becoming ecology.
Split-brained
and Janus-facing Earth’s
limited resources, in an
apparently unlimited
universe
we only have a limited
reach because
we refuse to recognize the duplicity
of ourselves.
One
morning I wondered how I can live in a world whose
changes are exponentially
speeding up.
Not in, I realized,
but as
someone who may at any moment be grabbed
and digested by a flesh-eating plant. As the
sun grows crops and cancer, this forest
is living and decaying.
2:20
How could they have
painted with such acuity unless they embodiedthe animals
they were drawing in dark oxygen-deprived underground
depths, where bestial
fat danced in stone lamps, “animating andaccentuating surface details that would
soon return to darkness.”(8)
Now we tap algorithmic
codes onto smooth backlighted screens, glowing flights
of artificial intelligence with the “incapacity to
discern the secret humanity of non-
human beings.”(9)
Will
artists, subsuming their imagination to sampling machines, ask
the same
questions of the wild
nature
racing across the walls of Paleolithic caves today?
2:21
Sleeping
beneath its parched skin, this river can
no longer write
an original word. Knowing this I can finally
address my teachers.
1.
R. Char, From, “Dead Bird-Man and Dying Bison.”
2. R. Braidotti, The Posthuman. Cambridge UK, 2013. p.90.
3. Po Chu-i (772-846) was probably referring to, “Five
Spring Poems by Po Chi-i.” J. Weishaus, trans.
4. J. Hillman “The Therapeutic Value of Alchemical
Language: A Heated Introduction.” In, Alchemical Psychology.
The Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman. Vol.
5. Putham CT, 2010. p.16.
5. R. Brandotti, Ibid.p.137.
6. L. Wittgenstein. The Wittgenstein Reader.
A. Kenny, ed. Oxford, 1994. p. 213.
7. A. Ginsberg. From, Galilee Shore.”
8. J. Clottes, What Is Paleolithic Art? Chicago.
2016. p.103
9. D. Danowski & E.V de Castro, The Ends of the
World.
Cambridge UK. p.73. “To say that everything is human
(as many indigenous peoples do) is to say that humans are
not a special species, an exceptional event that came to
tragically or magnificently interrupt the monotonous trajectory
of matter in the universe.” p.72.