Reflection: Cris

Wiggle Room 

Our contemporary wicked problems can feel hard to swallow, to say the least. The grandiosity of the atrocious happenings and the TV static noise that accompanies them can oftentimes confuzzle us and even feel bigger than life itself. 

If we dare to feel inspired by the stillness of Buddhist principles adopted by Schniederman’s geologists or maybe reconceptualize God to account for the consistency of change (our ethereal shaper), we may hear this static noise echoe the shimmer of life. Of course this does not happen without an introspective reckoning, a dive into the conditions of the Anthropocene, if that’s what we wish to call it at all. 

The Anthropocene, a name once useful, began to reveal itself as insufficient and obsolete in our endeavour to stay with the trouble of the climate crisis. Within our sessions we, quite quickly and enthusiastically, abandoned an attachment to the term. We pursued tearing it apart, making space for other terms to help redirect our navigation. Just when we’d thought we found the language the rug was pulled from right underneath us. This encouraged us to metabolize the momentum, to challenge implications, to ask again: What lies within our relationship to our environment? To what do we owe the displeasure? 

Introducing ourselves to the Racial Capitalocene and the Plantationocene gave us more wiggle-room to reflect on the spiritual and religious, morals, values and ideologies that have immortalized and manifest as our dominant socio-economic, political, and ecological reality. These ideas do not vanish into thin air, they evolve, reshape, reform, repackage and remain omnipresent. 

What persists is a conditioned bias according to which humanity considers itself both external and superior to an objectified perception of nature, and this is the thread that stitches the fabric of our lives, of being and dying. 

It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories. (Donna Haraway) 

Capitalist, neocolonial culture has fomented an unwavering necrophilic attachment to land, where human engagement is motivated by material possession, resulting in the denigration and disturbance of the ecosystem and its complexities as a body. This permeates with an intensity that surrounds us and, like breath, eludes us. 

It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas. I compost my soul in this hot pile. (Marilyn Strathern)

This connection to our ecosystem is nurtured in an environment that is preoccupied with enforcing mastery; that knows only to materially alter, extract, objectify in order to serve a purpose deemed practical, functional, profitable. It is here where, as Strathern put it, we compost our souls. This space, of muddling ontologies, is where we build relations that deny the ecosystem, the non-human, personhood. We deny them the consciousness of a uniquely embodied experience, one that could very well inspire and add dimension to our own. 

I am sure that what we collectively experience is a confinement to the loneliness and solitude of being dull alchemists. It would serve us then to reimagine a relationship to entities that come into being with us, recontextualizing vulnerabilities, making ourselves present for a transcorporeal divine reflection between us and non-humans. Well, what if we were to liberate ourselves from the illusion of mastery? Other beings await us there, welcoming our affinity. 

The intricacy in which the ecosystem is operating could challenge our spatio-temporal understanding of vulnerability, emotionality and affect. Once this empathy is extended to non-humans we renounce the conception of earth as a durable, resilient, and stable presence. We begin to address and see ourselves within its ephemerality. 

Facing and engaging with emotionality, the nature of affect, the reproduction of impressions and energies that become multifaceted and entangled, we can cultivate what Haraway refers to as response-ability, “that is also collective knowing and doing, an ecology of practices.” Yet still, this new ecology of practices does not abandon chaos, paradoxes, and mystification, rather it is characterized by them. 

 

These two are the same

But diverge in name as they issue forth.

Being the same they are called mysteries,

Mystery upon mystery - 

The gateway of the manifold secrets.

The Tao Te Ching reckons with dualities that can initially read as linear points of departure and arrival on an unnamed spectrum. But what I found were joyful mysteries, comfort in its defiant tone, in ambiguous flows that still embody a sort of stillness. Within its secretive nature and elusiveness, I found more multiplicities! The liminal space on this spectrum reminded me of what Alan Watts referred to as a place of “wiggles” that always evoked within me a desire to graze my face against the ether and dissipate, and this brought me right back to Haraway. 

 

Tentacularity is symchthonic, wound with abyssal and dreadful graspings, frayings, and weavings, passing relays again and again, in the generative recursions that make up living and dying. (Donna Haraway)

There are small reminders that we can not exist “autopoietically” scattered everywhere like easter eggs. The ecosystem is involuntarily reciprocal, a complex system of interdependent beings; a conglomerate of entities bewilderingly interacting in a space. There is infinite room for us to deliberately transgress the biological, spatiotemporal, ontological boundaries that sharply sever intimacy between beings. 

 

An Ode to Donna Haraway, Deborah Bird Rose, Jill S. Schneiderman, Bronisław Szerszyński, Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tao Te Ching. 

Images: Laura Aguilar, "Grounded 114"; Nicole Eisenman, "Progress: Real and Imagined" 2006 (right side); Alexander Higgins, "Neptune's Eye."