![Those who wish to sit, shut their eyes,
and meditate to know if the world’s true or lies,
may do so. It’s their choice. But in the meanwhile
with hungry eyes that can’t be satisfied
shall take a look at the world in broad daylight.
Tagore 1997[1896], p. 29](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-10-320.jpg)
![Introduction 5
The aim
Adorning the entrance to the studio of landscape architect students at
Wageningen University & Research is the slogan, ‘design simplicity is the key
to lively diversity.’ The aim of this book is to contribute to the Anthropocene
debate and re-envision alternatives to our ways of being and doing, co
extensive with our Earth. Rethinking space, time and scale, the book will
contribute hopeful amendments to ‘reinvent what it means to be human and
dwell on Earth’13
and challenge you to ‘imagining and engendering just and
sustainable alternatives to existing political, economic, and ecological prac
tices.’14
At the same time I will make sense of human earthly entanglements
in the face of naive technological optimism, through life affirming practices.15
Prime amongst these naïve feelings of optimism are proposals for geo-engineering.
Following the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, I concur that ‘[t]inkering with
atmospheric chemistry is a dangerous business; ungovernable forces can
come out of thin air.’16
What I would therefore like to bring to the fore is a
degree of humbleness and care that we need to exercise in our dealings with
the Earth, put simply; being kind. I propose that we develop earthly attach
ments in recognition of our ever ongoing earthly entanglements. In a nut
shell; I will be adopting an affirmative pragmatic stance to the on-goingness
of life and inherent open-endedness in and of the Earth; a rather simple
design if I say so myself.
What makes us (un)happy and fuels our aspirations is how we compare
ourselves to others.17
The current growth-paradigmatic race to the bottom is
fuelled by us comparing ourselves with the Joneses in terms of material
wealth. Therefore, we need to establish other standards and find other ele
ments to take pride in. As such the book will develop a type of Earth-centred
narrative focused on telling stories about how we can take to heart any
thing from stones, mud, molecules, trees, fish, sheep, bicycles, peat, windmills
to the Earth itself, and let this guide our moral compass and everyday
decision-making. A re-storying of our relations with planet Earth,18
calling
for attentiveness to things we take for granted or even ignore.
Transforming noticing into attentiveness—into the cultivation of skills
for both paying attention to others and meaningfully responding.…
Beyond viewing other creatures as mere symbols, resources, or background
for the lives of humans.19
Realising how we are part of an intricate web of life, alive with what has been
hitherto deemed dead or inanimate calls for a degree of respect, reverence and
responsibility (a triple R). These are key words to guide our moral compass in
times of climate emergency and crisis. From there we can start to see how our
being is porous and relational in nature, requiring that we work with rather
than on or for Earth and all that it is composed of. The life of the triple R is
thus one of intelligent conviviality with a sentient, multiple Earth(s).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-20-320.jpg)
![6 Introduction
It is only when caring is more than the obligation of particular indivi
duals, and becomes a systemic project [through networks of care], that
the radical potential of attentiveness can be fulfilled.20
Establishing and maintaining networks of care comes down to the stories
we choose to tell and how we choose to make meaning matter.
Iceland/the Netherlands
The insights provided in this book are from the global North, more pre
cisely Europe. Thereby the book, despite its aspirations, does not deal
directly with marginalised voices or exploited communities of the global
South. Whilst my aspirations, manifest in some of the PhD projects I
promote, is to make more of these voices, my own personal research tra
jectory has not allowed me to explore these. Thereby the book draws
largely on my own mixed background of being born and raised in Ice
land, but with relations and ties to the Netherlands, culminating in my
post as professor at Wageningen University & Research. Chapters 2 and 5
will provide vignettes to ground the theoretical excursions that character
ise the book and will lead to a progressive agenda for our common future
in the concluding chapter. The two countries and their cultural contexts
are vastly different yet in many ways the same. Both were settled and are
currently dominated by peoples of similar cultural origins. Predominantly
white, Teutonic, with spoken Germanic languages and both countries rank
amongst the wealthiest and healthiest in the world. But one has a much
longer history of settlement and of carving out a habitable niche for its
population on an ancient glacial outwash plain. As opposed to the
Netherlands, Iceland was only recently settled and the whole history of
settlement has largely been dictated by the terms of nature on a relatively
hostile, sub-Arctic volcanic island in the middle of the North Atlantic
Ocean. As late-comers to modernisation, Icelanders have surely picked up
pace in exploiting and manipulating nature in the post-war years, but with
a large territory (103,000 km2
) and a tiny population (345,000), these
impacts can and are being ignored as there is plenty more of ‘pristine’
nature to exploit. At the same time in the Netherlands, there is not a
square metre of the country that is not visibly altered through human
habitation. Currently all 17.5 million, living on roughly 42,000 km2
busily
carve out their spaces for living and working in addition to the fact that
this small parcel of land is amongst the most productive in terms of
agriculture in all of Europe and beyond. Intensively farmed and inhabited,
with a long history of exploiting nature, which extends globally through
colonial involvement, the Dutch context stands in rather sharp contrast
with the Icelandic one, yet these two nations share many commonalities.
One of the interesting features for comparison is the fact that the two
nations have adopted two vastly different ways of propelling themselves. The](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-21-320.jpg)
![8 Introduction
A planetary ‘genre de vie’
I am finalising this book as the Covid-19 pandemic is gearing up to engulf the
world. It would be completely disingenuous of me to pretend to address that
in the pages to come. Therefore, you will only see the virus mentioned here
and in the Foreword and not thereafter. What the pandemic simply proves to
me is that we are all in it together on this one planet of ours. As a result, we
need more community building and cultivation of our global village, not less.
The nightmare scenario of ‘social distancing’ becoming the norm in our
already atomised and individualised society is one that will play nicely into the
hands of fearmongering politicians. I will argue that rather than looking
inwards and outwards through the social media mediated screen, we need to
nurture a sense of ourselves as one with this planet, embracing the entangle
ments we have with the places we hold dear. This ‘mode of life’ is thereby one
that is global, yet local. The ‘mode of life’ or genre de vie is an explicit refer
ence to fin de siècle 19th
-century Vidalian human geography. In its original
guise, the genre de vie was about in-depth place-specific and regional descrip
tions of the relations between life and land. A certain fixity of ‘the local’
seemed to emerge which early 20th
-century geographers would meticulously
document as a ‘botanist working on plants or an entomologist on insects.’24
It was this fixity [through force of habit and rootedness] which allowed
geographers to study the geographical distribution of genres de vie, to
cluster, classify and distinguish between them in the manner of the
natural sciences.25
The descriptions often fetishised the local and even more sinisterly fed
notions of environmental determinisms and ideas about ‘Blut und Boden’
(blood and soil) underpinning violent nationalism and racism which persist
to date. Avoiding to ‘leave ourselves open to the seduction of proximity,
nostalgia, or protectionism, engaging in a reductive strategy of triage.’26
I
will claim it is only through the local that we can make sense of the global
and in particular the Earth. I follow Latour in wanting to ‘rediscover the
inhabitable ground’ where collective human organisation unfolds through
an unravelling of our earthly entanglements to show how in the Anthro
pocene our mode of life is fundamentally an earthly one. The recognition of
the earthly entanglements constitutive of our planetary mode of life is at the
same time a plea for timefulness: extending our temporary registers beyond
that of the immediate present, even to that of geological time.27
We are thus both intemperate and intemporate — time illiterate. Like
inexperienced but overconfident drivers, we accelerate into landscapes
and ecosystems with no sense of their long-established traffic patterns, and
then react with surprise and indignation when we face the penalties for
ignoring natural laws.28](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-23-320.jpg)
![Introduction 11
was strongly advised against devoting time to a book, as it takes a long time
to write and does not really count as much as a high-ranking or high-impact
journal article. So, whilst writing this book I kept writing articles and book
chapters, either appropriating and repurposing text from the book in pro
gress for them or vice versa. I wanted to write this book despite the stifling
metrification of academia and the prevalent culture of self-aggrandisement
through numbers. In this Anna Tsing’s writings have inspired me to become
more explorative and open when it comes to being with the world. Para
phrasing words from her epilogue I would like to forage in the commons we
need to maintain.29
In the book, a few words may look strange or novel to the reader. In most
cases they will be defined when they are first used in the text and then con
sistently used in line with that definition. However, two key terms will feature
that warrant an explanation here at the outset. Throughout the text I will use
‘the Moderns’ with a capital M, following Bruno Latour in signifying cul
tures and institutions rather than individuals. The notions of progress,
growth and enlightenment often follow in the same paragraph. These denote
a particular cultural logic that became the predominant understanding of the
terms emerging in Europe in the ‘long sixteenth century’ (1450–1640 CE) as
defined by Immanuel Wallerstein30
and picked up by Jason Moore.31
This
meaning will be elucidated in Chapter 3.
Another frequently recurrent key term is the notion of ‘entanglements.’ To
some, this may translate as an imprisoning imperative compromising our
ability to act and be. Whilst indeed entanglements connote a situation that is
difficult if not impossible to escape, to me it connotes deep involvement.
Throughout the book entanglements appear as earthly entanglements and
indeed my key argument is that there is no getting away from Earth. But this
Earth is not a prison, but a home full of potential in its multiplicity, a
singular presence far beyond what we can grasp or realise.
Notes
1 Ritchie and Roser, 2020.
2 Chakrabarty in Latour, 2016, p. 197.
3 Jorge Silva, miner, quoted in the New Yorker magazine, see Anderson, 2019.
4 Bjornerud, 2018, p. 147.
5 The GtC values can be transformed into GtCO2 by multiplying by 3.664, see
Ollila, 2019.
6 UNEP, 2018, p. xv.
7 Sauer, 1965[1941a], pp. 370–372.
8 Ollila, 2019.
9 Steffen et al., 2015.
10 Mann, Bradley and Hughes, 1999.
11 As long since recognised in debates around resilience, sustainability and land use,
see: Fresco and Kroonenberg, 1992.
12 Cook, Rickards and Rutherfurd, 2015, p. 235.
13 Wakefield, 2020, p. 31, see also Olsson, 2007, p. 4.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-26-320.jpg)
![Fluid being 23
What gets lost in this gnostic vision is the fact that the obstacle to our
fulfillment (our finitude) is a positive condition of (a limited) fulfillment:
if we take away the obstacle to fulfillment, we lose fulfillment itself (or, in
the terms of sense: if we take away the irreducible kernel of nonsense, we
lose sense itself).39
Žižek promotes an event-based understanding of radical change. The ques
tion is therefore about limits and the constructed boundaries of categorisa
tion. Who made those, how and for what purpose matters as well. In terms
of this current volume, the political implications of the material are of key
importance: the ways in which the material, and ultimately the Earth itself,
represents limits and the negotiations that need to take place to overcome, or
incorporate them. The fact is that we are continually in the process of nego
tiating our ways towards that which we aspire and our need to incorporate
matter into these movements to be.
The fact is that new materialism, in some instances, goes too far in loos
ening the efficacy of our agendas and deflating the political potency of
human intentionality through the valorisation of objects themselves. It is
indeed easy to get lost in the ‘Deleuzoguattarian radical chic’, but the chal
lenge is to try to follow the logic of the argument presented, of course not
doing away with the chic. It is about being attentive to the production of the
human in its various entanglements through practical action and networks of
signification. As mentioned before dreams and intuitions are properties
innate to us, which translate into traditions.
[i]ntuition and tradition can be seen as remedies, antidotes, or safety
valves with respect to an excessive reliance upon reason, to the sceptical
paralysis to which reason’s self-reflexivity can condemn us.… Putting too
much trust in tradition can lead to narrow-mindedness and obscurantist
conservatism. Putting too much trust in intuition can lead to solipsism
and unremitting neurosis.40
One particular manifestation of loosening the efficacy of intentionality too
much I find in the guise of object-oriented ontology (OOO), generally
attributed to Graham Harman and his PhD from 1999 about Tool-Being:
Elements in a Theory of Objects. In the book Art in the Anthropocene, Ursula
Biemann builds on the work of Karen Barad and provides a particularly
illuminating example of how matter and meaning are in fact mutually
articulated, and moreover politically relevant.41
Interviewing Graham
Harman, she explains how a tear-gas bomb from police battling the crowds
entered the scene at Tahrir Square, Cairo. As Biemann further clarifies:
Harman asserted that we should free our minds from the omnipotence
of the political just as the attack broke out. With this juxtaposition, the
scene dramatizes the significance of politics in relation to both](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-38-320.jpg)
![24 Fluid being
knowledge production and emergent reality; as Harman disavows the
potency of political life, the backformation of revolutionary street fighting
interrupts the calm of his allegedly neutral ontology.42
Here my intention is not to claim that OOO, as a particular manifestation of
new materialism is somehow politically neutral. In actual fact I greatly sym
pathise with the insightful theorisation produced under the guise of OOO,
the work of Timothy Morton in particular.43
His notion of hyperobjects will
be revisited later in this book. Inspired by his featuring of the boiling mud-
pots and fumaroles of Námaskarð, NE Iceland, we will see how the Earth
talks back. My intention is to be more processually oriented, drawing
inspiration from Deleuze and focusing on how objects come into existence
and endure over time in our wheelings and dealings under the terms of our
planetary state of emergency maintained by global capitalism. My intention
is to bring an earthly perspective into this context. An example of how OOO
could be thereby useful can be gleaned from this dialogue between Steven
Shaviro and Graham Harman, where the former claims:
The volcano is actual, here and now; we cannot expect to escape its
eruption. Our predominant aesthetic procedures involve sampling,
synthesizing, remixing, and cutting and pasting.44
Objects and matter indeed exist independent of our presence. Paraphrasing
Luce Irigaray: the Earth is not becoming continuously for me, it is what it is
because it corresponds to it being the Earth.45
The Earth and matter simply
are, and understanding that should instil a necessary degree of humbleness
into our cognition. But what matters about matter are those whose very
being consist of the acts they perform in our context. Accordingly, and in the
spirit of Shaviro’s words:
the universe consists in part of ‘contingent’ facts and relations, and in
part of ‘systematic relatedness,’ and that any definite character ‘is gained
through the relatedness and not the relatedness through the character.’46
As Bruno Latour would have it, quoted by Susan Ruddick:
Whether organism, animal, plant or stone, the body is folded into and
inseparable from the thickness of the world within which it emerges.47
Again, through the practices of relating in each and every encounter, mean
ing is made to matter. The new materialist take to be operationalised on the
coming pages of this book, is one which:
[f]ind[s] a way to differentiate between materialities (both animate and
inanimate) that seek their own equilibrium over time, and those](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-39-320.jpg)
![Fluid being 27
This is fundamentally a relational space, wherein places are ‘being in the
process of being placed in relation to rather than being there.’64
Distinguish
ing between spaces and places as somehow separate entities thus becomes
less of a concern, it is about the process of spatialization in ‘which place as a
mobile arrangement is given stability through difference.’65
Spaces and places
then become a multitude of differences whereby time and the material are
folded and arranged in complex assemblages and our agency and intention
exert influence.
The map itself is a geographer’s favourite metaphor of the world. This map
indeed makes for the space, but that map is a mere tool extending our par
ticular thoughts about ourselves and the world in which we live. Reverting
back to Olsson and understanding our fluid relational being. He says of
Gilles Deleuze:
Even though the (post)modernist Deleuzian is a schizophrenic, he is not
a crazy madman but an outstanding cartographer, a person who has
accepted the challenge of mapping the many connections that determine
what it means to be human.66
The schizophrenia Olsson refers to is Deleuze’s recognition of the incom
mensurability of that which stands on either side of the -, =, /. An affirma
tion of the ever-ongoing unfolding of relations that constitute the space in
which we find ourselves. More particularly, and in common parlance, we
usually find ourselves in particular places. But this ‘place is the in-between of
time and space: a singular—not particular—space-time.’67
Here, Sascha
Rashof is invoking place as a singularity. That is not to say that a place is
singular, a frozen point in time-space, it is a singularity. This particular point,
as a point that can be denoted x is in flux:
[t]he singular points of a curve, or the singular points constituting the
surface of an individuality, are not such singular intensities (dx), but
correspond to specificating encounters (dx/dy).68
Peter Borum draws on Deleuze’s book Difference and Repetition here, and
explains whereby a particular point is indeed to be found in the abyss
between meaning and matter. Moreover, in Borum’s understanding of
Deleuze’s Leibniz and the Baroque power comes to play, much like Gunnar
Olsson emphasises how power is the function of being believed.
To believe in this world is to believe that the phenomenal forms we per
ceive really express events capable of concerning us. The leap of faith
takes us from the individual point on the integral curve to the pre-
individual singularity it expresses, and from intensity as pre-individual
force to the contemplative self-enjoyment of the singular individual in its
absolute domain.69](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-42-320.jpg)
![Fluid being 29
Neither space nor place can provide a haven from the world. If time
presents us with the opportunities of change and (as some would see it)
the terror of death, then space presents us with the social in the widest
sense: the challenge of our constitutive interrelatedness—and thus our
collective implication in the outcomes of that interrelatedness; the radical
contemporaneity of an ongoing multiplicity of others, human and non
human; and the ongoing and ever-specific project of the practices
through which that sociability is to be configured.74
The process of spatialization and becoming-space needs to be open to its own
constant excess that is implicit in the ever-ongoingness of life. This ongoingness is
a sliding that frustrates the integrating drive of binary oppositions. The implica
tion is that one has to become the field of research as ‘we think that one cannot
write sufficiently in the name of an outside.’75
Thus researching and understanding
the process of spatialization becomes an event of experimentation and improvisa
tion that intervenes in the space under research, to reveal how manifold that space
is as well as the entities in it. Through experimentation and improvisation one can
show how each and every entity is emergent from the relations it is composed of.
By revealing how entities emerge from the relations that compose them, relations
are not to be pulled apart, but experimented and improvised upon to solicit these
relations, i.e. show how, by virtue of their emergent potential, they can become-
other, hence open them up.76
The entities themselves therefore are to be seen as
manifesting positive power of differentiation rather than being reduced to
uniformity or essences.77
The human thus is seen as:
acquir[ing] its form through the principles of associations while it is indi
viduated through the principles of passion. Affectivity activates a tendency
of the subject making her want to identify with the effects of her actions in
all cases where these effects are the result of the means chosen.78
Affectivity is thus about ‘non-representation’ and thereby in agreement with
the geographer Nigel Thrift:
I think a new and fertile ground is now emerging in which the practices
of affect might be better understood and worked with, and that ground
lies at the intersection of performance and technology in the reinvention
of various spatial crafts.79
The event of experimentation and improvisation puts emphasis on the ‘now
moment’ or the crest of emergence, that is on people’s actions and thoughts
as they are moving through space at each and every moment and each
encounter. Aiming to elicit this now moment is about seeing how people feel
and what occupies their mind at the same time that their activities are traced,
trying to make sense of the affects that potentially were being exerted upon
them. The emphasis is on getting to the ‘passions’ that individuate the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-44-320.jpg)
![30 Fluid being
subject without discarding the principle of association, which makes for the
emergence of this very subject.
Understanding and making sense of space is thus about mapping the
myriad relations that constitute space at each give moment. At the same time
recognising how ‘power relations are in and through space, we can see that
questions of space are inherently political.’80
Holding on to these power geo
metries inherent in spatialization addresses a concern raised about the de
politicisation of affect theory through the work of Deleuze upon which Thrift
draws. This concern is evident in the works of Jane Bennett, Karen Barad
and Rosi Braidotti, the triple B of associational affect theory from a post-
human, new materialist stance.81
The emergent politics rely on ethics focused
on entanglements and therefore responsibility ‘with’ not ‘for.’ Therein lie the
opening premises for the alternatives to rigidity, fixity and binary thinking.
The seeds of ‘new methodological procedures, narrative strategies, and
conceptual language all at the same time.’82
In a sense thereby I am proposing a more-than-human Marxian agenda
for research and analysis. One that is never all-encompassing: ‘there is a
living, creative potential in labour that is irreducible; that persistently sur
vives objectification by capitalist social relations.’83
Vinay Gidwani is quoted
here in a text by Jessica Dempsey and Geraldine Pratt who talk about
‘wiggle room’ and the necessity to ‘carefully map[ping] cramped spaces and
their histories, to understand the structuring logics, but also the disarticula
tions and contingencies and room for movement.’84
In that spirit, six points
presented by Nigel Thrift can wrap up the approach to understanding the
process of spatialization and how meaning matters.
• The world should be added to, not subtracted from. Invention should
lead to the actualization of the virtual, rather than the realization of the
possible. This is the principle of producing promise.
• The world should continue to be held to be multiple with all the con
sequences that flow from such a stance, and especially the need for con
stant ethical brokerage. This is the principle of ‘relentless pluralism’
(Thompson 2002, 186).
• The world should be kept untidy. It should have negative capability, or as
Keats put it ‘a man [must be] capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (cited in
Wagner 2001, 254). This is the principle of messiness.
• The world should be free to display its spectacular and amazing perfor
mances through the sacrament of the expressive sign that can pass their
energetic demands on. This is the principle of wonder.
• The world should be free to teach us. That means retaining difficulties,
uncertainties, inaccuracies since mistakes are a part of the lesson, proof
that the problem can still grip us. Indeed, one might argue that there is a
pragmatics of error which is crucial in all of this (Wagner 2001). This is
the principle of testing life.85](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-45-320.jpg)
![Fluid being 31
These hopeful prospects need to address real and pressing concerns in our
current day and age,86
but ultimately revolve around:
giving meaning to a world constructed in more immanent and processual
ways.… [and] draw upon an agential ‘bottom-up’ or immanent alternative
way of creative being, more attuned to new possibilities.87
The chapters that will follow are thus about how we can teach and learn how
to live with our planet and expand our relational repertoire to that of the
Earth itself—with all the baggage that comes with that. An Ante laden with
the potential for anti or a type of pre-positional geographies.88
Concluding points
So, we are fluid beings, but moreover, we are profoundly geo-graphical
beings.89
As Timothy Morton interprets Darwin’s legacy, ‘there are not spe
cies and they have no origin.’90
But we are very much creatures of the
making of the strictures imposed upon us by a long history of decisions and
things settled and seemingly fixed. Revealing their inherent fluidity does
indeed provide ‘wiggle room’ and places emphasis on the moments of
encounters, the abysmal lines where one becomes other or something else
through our practices of naming and pointing and being believed in doing
so. In our fast-paced world of ubiquitous connectivity it would seem we are
poised to become whatever we want and be wherever we feel. Nigel Thrift
quotes from the magazine Fast Company, wherein the author asks ‘How thin
can I spread myself before I am no longer there’ and warns that therein lie
the perils of the subject positions created by modern-day capitalism.91
Whilst
‘homo siliconvalleycus’ might seem to be picking up some kind of an evolu
tionary lead, it relies on the unaccounted work of so many slower, forcibly
marched to the tune of precarity and never-ending training and skills
development.92
There are indeed injustices in the current power geometries
as there have been through time as I will show in chapters to come. The
lines animating those geometries need to recognised and affirmed, but also
seen as full of potential.
In Umberto Eco’s fascinating novel about the Island of the Day Before he
explains at length attempts made during the European discovery of the
Americas and the Pacific islands at measuring longitudes.93
Mainly though
the search and establishment of the elusive 180-degree meridian, that divides
yesterday from today. From that dividing line, currently known as ‘the
International Date Line’ unfold amazing ideas from the voyages of discovery
explaining all kinds of ideas, for instance how God managed to flood the
planet using seawater from yesterday and pouring it over the line. In the
novel the protagonist is marooned on the vessel Daphne off an island he is
unable to reach as he cannot swim. He postulates that the island is the one of
the wealthy biblical places of king Solomon’s legacy. Thus, the island was](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-46-320.jpg)
![Mumbling mud 39
interconnected system, bound up with a sense of growing geopolitical integration
as processes of globalisation picked up pace.16
But we have been slower to grasp the paradox that the very configura
tion of the earth into a single, integrated system in the newly dynamic
earth sciences has been the condition of a more dis-integrated, fractious
and multiple vision of the planet (Clark, 2016).17
Indeed, although we can see the Earth as this communal habitable ball in the
image, we can never grasp it in its entirety.
Such a totalizing gaze and the very idea of universal scalability remain
instantiations of a fundamentally modern conception of space, rather than
being something genuinely new. After all, scaling is not merely a strategy for
representing the world, but rather a fundamental mode of producing it.18
Regardless of these means of production, the Earth itself always has ways
of evading. It always already has a multiplicity of possible states. Our con
ceptual capacity cannot make sense of the planet and all that goes on there
at each given moment in time, much less grasp how all those ongoings are
related and link up to form a global ecosystem, or what James Lovelock
termed ‘Gaia.’19
Only by moving to space we can sense a grasping of a
whole, as the philosopher Michel Serres put it:
Flying high enough to see her whole, we find ourselves tethered to her by
the totality of our knowledge, the sum of our technologies, the collection
of our communications; by torrents of signals, by the complete set of
imaginable umbilical cords, living and artificial, visible and invisible,
concrete or purely formal. By casting off from her from so far, we pull
on these cords to the point that we comprehend them all. Astronaut
humanity is floating in space like a fetus in amniotic fluid, tied to the
placenta of Mother-Earth by all the nutritive passages.20
Grounded, or on the Earth, we can never play this trick. The Earth, being
‘in-visible’ in this sense, reveals itself through a continual game of peek-a
boo. It makes itself sensed, felt, observed and grasped in short bursts or
fleeting instances that never allow for a holistic grasping. Grasping the earth
through relating to blurting mud pots is no more possible than grasping the
meaning of eternity or infinity through a moment’s epiphany. So, in that
sense the Earth resides in the hyphen, that which I deliberately place between
‘in’ and ‘visible’ and as goes with hyphens, by themselves they are really
nothing. ‘[C]arving out a s(ed)uctive black (w)hole in the Order of Things,’21
the Earth emerges as void, where we can always query its purpose and intent,
but never get any answers or definitions beyond those our own choices and
decisions bring us. As the philosopher Páll Skúlason remarks:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-54-320.jpg)
![yo quedé en el camino con aquellos dos que fueron tan grandes
generales del mundo. Cuando estuvo tan retirado de nosotros, que
mis ojos no podían seguirle, así como tampoco podía mi mente
alcanzar el sentido de sus palabras, observé no muy lejos las ramas
frescas y cargadas de frutas de otro manzano, por haberme vuelto
entonces hacia aquel lado. Y vi debajo de él muchas almas que
alzaban las manos y gritaban no sé qué en dirección del follaje,
como los niños que, codiciando impotentes alguna cosa, la piden sin
que aquel a quien ruegan les responda, y antes al contrario, para
excitar más sus deseos, tiene elevado y sin ocultar lo que causa su
anhelo. Después se marcharon como desengañadas, y nosotros nos
acercamos entonces al gran árbol, que rechaza tantos ruegos y
tantas lágrimas.
"Pasad adelante sin aproximaros: más arriba existe otro árbol, cuyo
fruto fué mordido por Eva, y éste es un retoño de aquél." Así decía
no sé quién entre las ramas; por lo cual Virgilio, Estacio y yo
seguimos adelante, estrechándonos cuanto pudimos hacia el lado en
que se eleva el monte. "Acordaos, decía la voz, de los malditos
formados en las nubes, que, repletos, combatieron a Teseo con sus
dobles pechos[83]. Acordaos de los hebreos, que mostraron al beber
su molicie, por lo que Gedeón no los quiso por compañeros cuando
descendió de las colinas cerca de Madián." De este modo, arrimados
a una de las orillas, pasamos adelante, oyendo diferentes ejemplos
del pecado de la gula, seguidos de las miserables consecuencias de
aquel vicio. Después, entrando nuevamente en medio del camino
desierto, nos adelantamos mil pasos y aun más, reflexionando cada
cual y sin hablar. "¿Qué vais pensando vosotros tres solos?", dijo de
improviso una voz, que me hizo estremecer, como sucede a los
animales tímidos y asustadizos. Levanté la cabeza para ver quién
fuese, y jamás se vieron en un horno vidrios o metales tan
luminosos y rojos como lo estaba uno que decía: "Si queréis llegar
hasta arriba, es preciso que deis aquí la vuelta: por aquí va el que
quiere ir en paz." Su aspecto me había deslumbrado la vista; por lo
cual me volví, siguiendo a mis Doctores a la manera de quien se
guía por lo que escucha. Y sentí que me daba en medio de la frente](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-56-320.jpg)
![arriba, la rechaza y aleja de sí. Por esta razón nos era preciso
caminar de uno en uno por el lado descubierto del camino, de modo
que si, por una parte, me causaba temor el fuego, por otra temía
despeñarme. Mi Jefe decía:
—En este sitio es preciso refrenar bien los ojos, porque muy poco
bastaría para dar un mal paso.
Entonces oí cantar en el seno de aquel gran ardor: "Summæ Deus
clementiæ"[84]; lo cual excitó en mí un deseo no menos ardiente de
volverme, y vi a varios espíritus andando por la llama: yo les miraba,
pero fijando alternativamente la vista, ya en sus pasos, ya en los
míos. Después de la última estrofa de aquel himno, gritaron en voz
alta: "Virum non cognosco"[85]; y en seguida volvieron a entonarlo
en voz baja. Terminado el himno, gritaron aún: "Diana corrió al
bosque, y arrojó de él a Hélice, que había gustado el veneno de
Venus." Repetían su canto, y citaban después ejemplos de mujeres y
maridos que fueron castos, como lo exigen la virtud y el matrimonio.
Y de este modo, según creo, continuarán durante todo el tiempo que
los abrase el fuego; pues con tal remedio y tales ejercicios ha de
cicatrizarse la última llaga.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-61-320.jpg)
![—Vuestras dulces rimas, que harán preciosos los manuscritos que
las contienen, tanto como dure el lenguaje moderno.
—¡Oh hermano!—replicó—; éste que te señalo con el dedo[86] (e
indicó un espíritu que iba delante de él), fué mejor obrero en su
lengua materna. Sobrepujó a todos en sus versos amorosos y en la
prosa de sus novelas; y deja hablar a los necios, que creen que el
Lemosín[87] es mejor que él; prestan más atención al ruido que a la
verdad, y así forman su juicio antes de dar oídos al arte o la razón.
Lo mismo hicieron muchos de los antiguos con respecto a Guittone,
colocándole, merced a sus gritos, en el primer lugar, hasta que lo ha
vencido la verdad con los méritos adquiridos por otras personas.
Ahora, si tienes el alto privilegio de poder penetrar en el claustro
donde Cristo es abad del colegio, díle por mí del "Padre nuestro"
todo lo que necesitamos nosotros los habitantes de este mundo, en
el que ya no tenemos el poder de pecar.
Luego, tal vez para hacer sitio a otro que venía en pos de él,
desapareció entre el fuego, como desaparece el pez en el fondo del
agua. Yo me adelanté un poco hacia el que me había designado, y le
dije que mi deseo preparaba a su nombre una grata acogida: él
empezó a decir donosamente:
—Me complace tanto vuestra cortés pregunta, que ni puedo ni
quiero ocultarme a vos: yo soy Arnaldo, que lloro y voy cantando:
veo, triste, mis pasadas locuras, y veo, contento, el día que en
adelante me espera. Ahora os ruego, por esa virtud que os conduce
a lo más alto de la escala, que os acordéis de endulzar mi dolor.
Después se ocultó en el fuego que les purifica.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-65-320.jpg)
![albergan al volver a ella, huían por todas partes las tinieblas, y con
ellas mi sueño; por lo cual me levanté, y vi a mis grandes Maestros
levantados también.
La dulce fruta que por tantas ramas va buscando la solicitud de los
mortales, hoy calmará tu hambre.
Tales fueron las palabras que me dirigió Virgilio; palabras que me
causaron un placer como no lo ha causado jamás regalo alguno.
Acrecentóse tanto en mí el deseo de llegar a la cima del monte, que
a cada paso que daba sentía crecer alas para mi vuelo. Cuando,
recorrida toda la escalera, estuvimos en la última grada, Virgilio fijó
en mí sus ojos y dijo:
—Has visto el fuego temporal y el eterno, hijo mío, y has llegado a
un sitio donde no puedo ver nada más por mí mismo. Con ingenio y
con arte te he conducido hasta aquí: en adelante sírvate de guía tu
voluntad; fuera estás de los caminos escarpados y de las
estrechuras; mira el Sol que brilla en tu frente; mira la hierba, las
flores, los arbustos, que se producen solamente en esta tierra.
Mientras no vengan radiantes de alegría los hermosos ojos que,
entre lágrimas, me hicieron acudir en tu socorro, puedes sentarte, y
puedes pasear entre esas flores. No esperes ya mis palabras, ni mis
consejos: tu albedrío es ya libre, recto y sano, y sería una falta no
obrar según lo que él te dicte. Así, pues, ensalzándote sobre ti
mismo, te corono y te mitro.[88]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-70-320.jpg)
![CANTO VIGESIMONONO
ESPUES de aquellas últimas palabras, continuó
cantando cual mujer enamorada: "Beati, quorum tecta
sunt peccata"[89]: y a la manera de las ninfas, que
andaban solas por las umbrías selvas, complaciéndose
unas en huír del Sol, y otras en verle, púsose a
caminar por la orilla contra la corriente del río; y yo al
igual de ella, seguí sus cortos pasos con los míos. Entre los dos no
habíamos aún adelantado ciento, cuando las dos riberas
equidistantes presentaron una curva, de tal modo que me encontré
vuelto hacia Oriente. A poco de andar así, volvióse la Dama
enteramente a mí, diciendo: "Hermano mío, mira y escucha." Y he
aquí que por todas partes iluminó la selva un resplandor tan súbito,
que dudé si había sido un relámpago; mas como éste desaparece en
cuanto brilla, y aquél duraba cada vez más resplandeciente, decía yo
entre mí: "¿Qué será esto?" Circulaba por el luminoso aire una dulce
melodía, por lo cual mi buen celo me hizo censurar el atrevimiento
de Eva; pues que allí, donde obedecían la tierra y el cielo, una mujer](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/24485990-250513052059-2a1bab46/85/Developing-Earthly-Attachments-In-The-Anthropocene-Edward-H-Huijbens-75-320.jpg)
Developing Earthly Attachments In The Anthropocene Edward H Huijbens
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- 6. Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene This book explores the development and significance of an Earth-oriented progressive approach to fostering global wellbeing and inclusive societies in an era of climate change and uncertainty. Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene examines the ways in which the Earth has become a source of political, social, and cultural theory in times of global climate change. The book explains how the Earth con tributes to the creation of a regenerative culture, drawing on examples from the Netherlands and Iceland. These examples offer understandings of how legacies of non-respectful exploitative practices culminating in the rapid post war growth of global consumption have resulted in impacts on the ecosys tem, highlighting the challenges of living with planet Earth. The book familiarizes readers with the implied agencies of the Earth which become evident in our reliance on the carbon economy—a factor of modern-day globalized capitalism responsible for global environmental change and emergency. It also suggests ways to inspire and develop new ways of spatial sense making for those seeking earthly attachments. Offering novel theoretical and practical insights for politically active people, this book will appeal to those involved in local and national policy making processes. It will also be of interest to academics and students of geography, political science, and environmental sciences. Edward H. Huijbens is a geographer and graduate of Durham University, England. He chairs Wageningen University’s research group in cultural geo graphy (GEO). Edward works on spatial theory, issues of regional develop ment, landscape perceptions, the role of transport in tourism and polar tourism.
- 7. Routledge Research in the Anthropocene The Routledge Research in the Anthropocene Series offers the first forum for original and innovative research on the epoch and events of the Anthro pocene. Titles within the series are empirically and/or theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic, captivating and highly relevant topics, drawing across the humanities and social sciences in an avowedly inter disciplinary perspective. This series will encourage new theoretical perspec tives and highlight ground-breaking interdisciplinary research that reflects the dynamism and vibrancy of current work in this field. The series is aimed at upper-level undergraduates, researchers and research students as well as academics and policy-makers. Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene Re-conceptualising Human–Nature Relations Lesley Head Releasing the Commons Edited by Ash Amin and Philip Howell Climate Change Ethics and the Non-Human World Edited by Brian G. Henning and Zack Walsh Involving Anthroponomy in the Anthropocene On Decoloniality Jeremy Bendik-Keymer Resilience in the Anthropocene Governance and Politics at the End of the World Edited by David Chandler, Kevin Grove and Stephanie Wakefield Climate Realism The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene Edited by Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinic, and Jeff Diamanti Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene Edward H. Huijbens For more information about this series, please visit https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-the-Anthropocene/book-series/RRA01.
- 8. Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene Edward H. Huijbens
- 9. First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Edward H. Huijbens The right of Edward H. Huijbens to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-56646-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-56652-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09878-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books
- 10. Those who wish to sit, shut their eyes, and meditate to know if the world’s true or lies, may do so. It’s their choice. But in the meanwhile with hungry eyes that can’t be satisfied shall take a look at the world in broad daylight. Tagore 1997[1896], p. 29
- 12. Contents List of illustrations Foreword viii ix Introduction 1 1 Fluid being 13 2 Mumbling mud 35 3 Where to start? 61 4 Changing mindsets: (Re)-value life 88 5 Changed practices 116 6 ‘Be kind to Earth, it gives us chocolate’ 141 7 Earthly attachments 168 References Index 179 202
- 13. Illustrations Figures 0.1 800,000 years of CO2 concentration measurements correlated with Antarctic temperature 3 0.2 The share of renewable energy in Iceland, the Netherlands and EU-28, 2008–2017 7 1.1 M.C. Escher’s ‘Part of Metamorphosis II’ 28 2.1 Ernir mountain, from Hóll 3 in Bolungarvík, NW Iceland 36 2.2 Snow avalanche evacuation map of Bolungarvík 37 2.3 Earthly entanglements 42 2.4 Model of the Arctic Henge 48 2.5 Laxabakki at the river Sogið, whilst being constructed in 1942 53 2.6 The decay of Laxabakki 55 2.7 Used toilet paper, repurposed 57 3.1 Me overlooking my fjord, summer 1983 61 3.2 The four major transitions of human societies 67 3.3 The periodisation of capital expansion and nature appropriation 70 3.4 The Vanishing Race (left) and American Progress (right) 73 3.5 World Merchant Fleet, Tonnage Registered per Ship Size, 1970–2015 82 4.1 The Netherlands at the end of the last ice age, 9000 BCE 107 4.2 Netherlands in 2120, envisioned through nature-based solutions 108 4.3 Netherlands today, but with East as North 109 4.4 Ocean chart 112 5.1 Kinderdijk, the Netherlands. Spring 2020 124 Table 3.1 Summary of the five modes of living occurring over human history, according to Lewis and Maslin 75
- 14. Foreword This book was conceived at sea, during my second Semester at Sea with the Institute of Shipboard Education in the autumn of 2018. Whilst crossing the Pacific on the final stretch to complete a near circumnavigation of the globe, a proposal was born that I took with me to my new post at Wagen ingen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherland, just a few weeks after arriving back to Iceland from my voyage. During my first year on the job I collected material, compiled a couple of draft chapters and presented my ideas in my inaugural address at WUR, whilst coming to terms with my role as the chair of the Cultural Geography Group (GEO). It was then in my second year that the book writing really took place, helping me to position myself vis-a-vis my group and my new working environment. What helped somewhat was the Covid-19 pandemic. Things slowed down markedly and, all of a sudden, I was not meant to be here, there and everywhere at the same time, merely online. This book is about being kind through developing an Earth oriented pro gressive outlook for global wellbeing and inclusive society in times of climate change and uncertainty. I want us to recognise that our knowledge para digms are profoundly emotional and have to do with what we chose to attach to and lend meaning. With the uncertain future the climate crisis is bringing us we are groping in the darkness of indeterminacy for concepts to orient our thoughts and actions. We need a new vocabulary and things to grab hold of. To me it is obvious what needs to be attached to and that is the Earth. But this is no simple matter, as the Earth is one and at the same time the many, and most certainly not a corresponding subject that can enter into a dialogue with an even more elusive entity we have labelled humanity. With this book I hope to give indications of how we can develop these attachments with my own examples and engagement with key concepts of geography for the last 15 years. In terms of acknowledgements, I would like to start thanking my wife, for making me able to follow my scholarly aspiration whilst at the same time having a supporting and loving family. Without the backing of my wife, I would not have been able to dedicate myself as much to academia and therefore would not be where I am now. Also, my kids I thank for being
- 15. x Foreword open and willing to join me on our adventures at sea and in moving from Iceland to a new country in the heart of Europe—from our perspective. Gratitude is also due to my parents who provided me with a nurturing home to grow up in and pursue my academic interests. The faculty of the geo graphy department at the University of Iceland I thank for opening my eyes, both to the magic of physical geography and environmental sciences and the enigmas of cultural geography. My supervisors, fellow graduate students and faculty of Geography at Durham University I would like to thank for helping me earn the degrees that have opened many doors. My main task after graduating from Durham University, and until my move to the Netherlands, was forming and developing the Icelandic Tourism Research Centre. For the opportunity afforded to me in running that Centre I am extremely grateful. There I had the freedom to explore issues of tourism and cultural geography. Through my colleagues and fellow faculty at the University of Akureyri I moreover gained my administrative experience and pragmatic academic approach. I would like to extend my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers Routledge recruited. Both provided enthusiastic support for the book and really gave me a drive to continue this project, despite self-doubt. Faye Leerink and Nonita Saha, my corresponding editors at Routledge I thank for embracing the project from the start and all those that contributed to the layout and making of the book. I also thank my proof reader Jean Tee for enthusiastically engaging with the text, fixing it and whilst at it, never seizing to convey her inspirations drawn from the text. These were encouraging and made me more confident about this book’s relevance and contribution. In terms of specifi following. • Roy van Beek of the GEO group for his thoughtful comments on my Dutch examples on bogs. • Ton Hoitink, appointed professor of Environmental Fluid Mechanics at WUR for his insights on sand in the Netherlands. • Karin Peters of the GEO group and Arnoud Lagendijk, professor of geography at Radboud University for their insights on bikes and biking in the Netherlands. • Frans Rip of the WUR GeoDesk for kindly making maps of the Netherlands upon request. Then I guess in the spirit of the book I should thank all the more-than human entities that make it at all possible to live and thrive on this fragile life supporting habitat we have devised on the crust of this planet Earth. Wageningen, the Netherlands As the second Covid wave gears up, October 2020 c chapters and sections therein I would like to thank the
- 16. Introduction I like to go camping in the summertime in my native country Iceland. I have spent a week or two in a tent with my family every summer since my children were born. The best place for it is by the sea or next to some running water. The soothing effect of water is amazing and it is wonderful to drift off as the water’s rhythm lulls you to sleep. But the ocean and running water are also immense sculptors of our environment. With each millilitre of running water and the crashing of even the humblest of waves on the shore, things shift, move, change and transform. Do this every second, every minute, every hour, every day for years on end and things really do change. After moving to the Netherlands with my family we resumed camping and in the school holidays in February 2020 we took to the road, the weather in the Netherlands then being much akin to a normal summer’s day in Iceland. We decided for a campervan as our gear was still in Iceland for the time being. Finding a spot for that type of vehicle is pretty hard in the densely populated and rigidly planned Netherlands. We found our campground at the outskirts of The Hague. More precisely on a brownfield site at a corner where the A4 motor way meets the A12 in a rather impressive spaghetti junction. There, the hum of traffic was our nightly lullaby. The incessant drone of cars being almost like a sizable river running past the grounds, all through the night and the day. It got me thinking, as I have also observed airplanes taking off or landing at Heathrow airport, Schiphol or Frankfurt, almost 24/7 all year round, year after year. Every car, plane and ship is like a river or ocean, moving incessantly and adding millilitre by millilitre NOxs, CO2, tire shav ings, car paint and other substances to the environment and atmosphere to the extent that we are starting to transform the Earth’s ecosystems, the cli mate in particular. Sit on a busy junction wherever in the world and you can see the terraforming practices of human mobility in action. Bit by bit, every second, minute, hour, day. Year in year out we are moving carbon from the lithosphere to the atmosphere by now to the tune of tens of billions of tons.1 This is a book about these changes we are making to our planet, especially the climate. Changes which are characterised for good reasons as an emer gency, yet we seem largely indifferent to. To address this the book will develop and explain an Earth-oriented progressive outlook for our own and
- 17. 2 Introduction global wellbeing and an inclusive society, picking up some key tenants from the oeuvre of cultural geography. Through numerous ways the Earth has become revitalised as a source for political, social, and cultural theory- making in our times of climate emergency. The empirical insights con tributing to this fostering of a regenerative culture are drawn from two vastly different, yet similar geographical contexts; that of the Netherlands and Ice land. Both contexts help gain understandings of how the post-war exponen tial growth of global consumption, with concomitant ecosystem impacts, has thrown into sharp relief the contradictions and challenges of living with planet Earth. At the same time, examples from these two settings provide indications for the Earth-oriented progressive outlook of the book. The implied agential qualities of planet Earth, and to which the book aims to orient you to, emerge most sharply in our reliance on the carbon economy, which tightly ties modern-day globalised capitalism to global environmental change. The implication is that we need ‘to think in terms of both the history of capitalism and its inequalities, and to place humans on the much larger canvas of geological and evolutionary times at the same time.’2 Both the Netherlands and Iceland are embroiled in the capitalist modus operandi, but will provide inspiration and rationales for coming to terms with our current environmental and societal challenges by unravelling them from the prospect of their potential to change and the ways in which the Earth peeks through in terms of possibility of being and doing otherwise. Through turf houses, cycling, stonehenges, sand motors, geothermal living and peat bogs, the book will underpin ways to facilitate a planetary ‘genre de vie’ within safe planetary operating zones. The Earth-oriented progressive outlook will be woven from a critical engagement with post-humanistic new materialism ontology and literature and debates about the Anthropocene. The main argument presented is how the Earth has trans-mutated from being perceived as a background surface for our inscriptions to being a dynamic foregrounded matter of concern arising both from the effects of the geoforce of humanity itself and our science-mediated attempts to map and exploit earthly functions. From the theoretical premises, primarily presented in the next chapter, the book will build an approach to grasp how the Earth in its entangled multiplicity com municates with us. The provided examples show how these possible means of communication can be brought to bear on current debates on climate change. All of us here realize we’re fucking the environment. It’s not like we want to—it’s that we haven’t found any alternative means to survive.3 This striking quote from the New Yorker Magazine from an illegal gold miner contributing to the devastation of the Brazilian Amazon shows that the need for real and imagined alternatives is urgent. The aim of the book is thus to underpin a science and a politics for re-assembling the collectives of humans and more-than-humans co-constitutive of the Earth for a convivial
- 18. Introduction 3 future. This assembling is an earthly matter of concern, having to do with responsibilities and attuning to more-than-human rhythms of life. Moreover, this assembling has the potential to foster an inclusive, egalitarian society allowing for individual equity and a post-capitalist world. The book will foster an understanding of our co-habitation with planet Earth, a planetary genre de vie which makes room for being kind with the Earth in our everyday life and practices. The context The ‘total cumulative anthropogenic carbon emissions to date are around 500 Gt, and a quarter of that has been released since the year 2000.’4 That would be the amount of C, carbon, not CO2.5 500 GtC is approximately all the water in Lake Erie in the US and within a year every carbon molecule released has spread evenly around the globe’s troposphere as CO2. These are worrisome facts. Moreover: Global greenhouse gas emissions show no signs of peaking. Global CO2 emissions from energy and industry increased in 2017, following a three- year period of stabilization. Total annual greenhouse gases emissions, including from land-use change, reached a record high of 53.5 GtCO2e in 2017, an increase of 0.7 GtCO2e compared with 2016.6 This should be cause for concern for anyone. Even though the looming climate challenges of CO2 emissions became popularised in the 1990s, nothing is being done to date that has any measurable impact. Yet climate change and land use change resulting in soil erosion have long been sci entifically recognised as the key challenges facing humanity in its cohabi tation with planet Earth.7 The current atmospheric conditions are unprecedented in at least the last 800.000 years for which we have reliable measurements of atmospheric composition in Antarctic ice core samples. Figure 0.1 800,000 years of CO2 concentration measurements correlated with Antarctic temperature Source: The Earth Observatory, 2011, reprinted with permission.
- 19. 4 Introduction Figure 0.1 gives a visual of these measurements and also the proven strong correlation between Antarctic temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration. What is truly eye-opening with Figure 0.1 is the fact that all throughout the 800,000 years the atmospheric CO2 concentration hoovers around 250 parts per million (ppm), never exceeding 300. At the time of writing, atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured at 417ppm and even if all pledges made in the Paris Agreement on climate change signed in April 2016 are met this measure will be around 688ppm by 2100.8 Now consider the timescale (x-axis) of Figure 0.1 and the fact that 688ppm is a more than doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in a time span that cannot even be represented in the graph. Just for ‘fun’ you can extend the line of the upper graph in Figure 0.1 to try and represent this change, and see where you end up on the page. The results for the lower graph seem quite clear, yet what that will mean for human civilisation—developed over the last 10.000 years—is very unclear. Uncertainty, to say the least, seems the only certainty at current. The facts are obvious and tell us, or rather shout at us, that we are playing a risky game, yet nothing much seems to change and indifference reigns. To be explored in this context must be some underlying factors. Something deep seated in our socio-cultural ordering of things. It seems to me that we are entering a crisis stage of spiralling capital accumulation really getting out of hand as is evident from the exponential growth of most socio-economic indicators and their concomitant measured ecosystem impacts.9 The hockey stick growth curve of atmospheric CO2 drawn on the preceding page is already the most famously recognised of these eco system impacts.10 The exponential growth of socio-economic indicators reflect immense prosperity as millions are being lifted out of abject poverty to live the widely perpetuated dream of Western style middle-class consumer culture. By bringing almost all people on the planet into the circuit of capital accumulation, by making consumers out of all of us, capitalism seems to be the only game in town. And indeed, were it to collapse wholesale tomorrow for some reason, we would all be severely affected, in particular those at the bottom rungs of the socio-economic hierarchy. Yet despite the growth and despite the measured prosperity, we seem to be going seriously wrong, as this is coming at the cost of the very fundament that sustains life. The socio-economic dynamics of globalised competitive capitalism, our drive to keep up with the Joneses and a climate and eco logical crisis are intricately entwined. These dynamics represent very dif ferent temporal and spatial scales, interwoven with earthly and ecological timescales.11 It is this weave that has prompted the adoption of the term Anthropocene and inversely, following the Australian geographers Brian Cook and colleagues: ‘If we accept the Anthropocene as a new interpretation of reality, how does it challenge us to think differently about space, time, and scale?’12
- 20. Introduction 5 The aim Adorning the entrance to the studio of landscape architect students at Wageningen University & Research is the slogan, ‘design simplicity is the key to lively diversity.’ The aim of this book is to contribute to the Anthropocene debate and re-envision alternatives to our ways of being and doing, co extensive with our Earth. Rethinking space, time and scale, the book will contribute hopeful amendments to ‘reinvent what it means to be human and dwell on Earth’13 and challenge you to ‘imagining and engendering just and sustainable alternatives to existing political, economic, and ecological prac tices.’14 At the same time I will make sense of human earthly entanglements in the face of naive technological optimism, through life affirming practices.15 Prime amongst these naïve feelings of optimism are proposals for geo-engineering. Following the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, I concur that ‘[t]inkering with atmospheric chemistry is a dangerous business; ungovernable forces can come out of thin air.’16 What I would therefore like to bring to the fore is a degree of humbleness and care that we need to exercise in our dealings with the Earth, put simply; being kind. I propose that we develop earthly attach ments in recognition of our ever ongoing earthly entanglements. In a nut shell; I will be adopting an affirmative pragmatic stance to the on-goingness of life and inherent open-endedness in and of the Earth; a rather simple design if I say so myself. What makes us (un)happy and fuels our aspirations is how we compare ourselves to others.17 The current growth-paradigmatic race to the bottom is fuelled by us comparing ourselves with the Joneses in terms of material wealth. Therefore, we need to establish other standards and find other ele ments to take pride in. As such the book will develop a type of Earth-centred narrative focused on telling stories about how we can take to heart any thing from stones, mud, molecules, trees, fish, sheep, bicycles, peat, windmills to the Earth itself, and let this guide our moral compass and everyday decision-making. A re-storying of our relations with planet Earth,18 calling for attentiveness to things we take for granted or even ignore. Transforming noticing into attentiveness—into the cultivation of skills for both paying attention to others and meaningfully responding.… Beyond viewing other creatures as mere symbols, resources, or background for the lives of humans.19 Realising how we are part of an intricate web of life, alive with what has been hitherto deemed dead or inanimate calls for a degree of respect, reverence and responsibility (a triple R). These are key words to guide our moral compass in times of climate emergency and crisis. From there we can start to see how our being is porous and relational in nature, requiring that we work with rather than on or for Earth and all that it is composed of. The life of the triple R is thus one of intelligent conviviality with a sentient, multiple Earth(s).
- 21. 6 Introduction It is only when caring is more than the obligation of particular indivi duals, and becomes a systemic project [through networks of care], that the radical potential of attentiveness can be fulfilled.20 Establishing and maintaining networks of care comes down to the stories we choose to tell and how we choose to make meaning matter. Iceland/the Netherlands The insights provided in this book are from the global North, more pre cisely Europe. Thereby the book, despite its aspirations, does not deal directly with marginalised voices or exploited communities of the global South. Whilst my aspirations, manifest in some of the PhD projects I promote, is to make more of these voices, my own personal research tra jectory has not allowed me to explore these. Thereby the book draws largely on my own mixed background of being born and raised in Ice land, but with relations and ties to the Netherlands, culminating in my post as professor at Wageningen University & Research. Chapters 2 and 5 will provide vignettes to ground the theoretical excursions that character ise the book and will lead to a progressive agenda for our common future in the concluding chapter. The two countries and their cultural contexts are vastly different yet in many ways the same. Both were settled and are currently dominated by peoples of similar cultural origins. Predominantly white, Teutonic, with spoken Germanic languages and both countries rank amongst the wealthiest and healthiest in the world. But one has a much longer history of settlement and of carving out a habitable niche for its population on an ancient glacial outwash plain. As opposed to the Netherlands, Iceland was only recently settled and the whole history of settlement has largely been dictated by the terms of nature on a relatively hostile, sub-Arctic volcanic island in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. As late-comers to modernisation, Icelanders have surely picked up pace in exploiting and manipulating nature in the post-war years, but with a large territory (103,000 km2 ) and a tiny population (345,000), these impacts can and are being ignored as there is plenty more of ‘pristine’ nature to exploit. At the same time in the Netherlands, there is not a square metre of the country that is not visibly altered through human habitation. Currently all 17.5 million, living on roughly 42,000 km2 busily carve out their spaces for living and working in addition to the fact that this small parcel of land is amongst the most productive in terms of agriculture in all of Europe and beyond. Intensively farmed and inhabited, with a long history of exploiting nature, which extends globally through colonial involvement, the Dutch context stands in rather sharp contrast with the Icelandic one, yet these two nations share many commonalities. One of the interesting features for comparison is the fact that the two nations have adopted two vastly different ways of propelling themselves. The
- 22. Introduction 7 Figure 0.2 The share of renewable energy in Iceland, the Netherlands and EU-28, 2008–2017 Source: Eurostat, 2019. recently built energy infrastructure of the Netherlands is predominantly fossil-fuel based and to date heavily subsidised, despite claims to the contrary by the government.21 However in the Netherlands, modes of transport are extremely varied and, in many cases, green. In the case of Iceland, the opposite is true, the similarly old energy infrastructure of Iceland is from renewable sources, whilst the only actual mode of transport in the country is the fossil-fuelled automobile (see Figure 0.2). Although cars dominate transport modes in Europe, the Netherlands is only rivalled by Austria and Switzerland when it comes to the proportion of people using trains and the country certainly tops the charts when it comes to the use of bicycles as a mode of transport.22 These differences in countries with similar cultures that are both thoroughly wrapped up in the capitalist mode of production are precisely what can help us to envi sion alternative futures for a global society aspiring to the same level of wealth, happiness and health. Recognising the leading role these countries play in terms of where global aspirations are directed is also about coming to terms with how these got there. Following Bruno Latour, the examples from Europe’s core and periphery can help in finding common future ground. Europe knows the fragility of its tenure in global space. No, it can no longer claim to dictate the world order, but it can offer an example of what it means to rediscover inhabitable ground.23
- 23. 8 Introduction A planetary ‘genre de vie’ I am finalising this book as the Covid-19 pandemic is gearing up to engulf the world. It would be completely disingenuous of me to pretend to address that in the pages to come. Therefore, you will only see the virus mentioned here and in the Foreword and not thereafter. What the pandemic simply proves to me is that we are all in it together on this one planet of ours. As a result, we need more community building and cultivation of our global village, not less. The nightmare scenario of ‘social distancing’ becoming the norm in our already atomised and individualised society is one that will play nicely into the hands of fearmongering politicians. I will argue that rather than looking inwards and outwards through the social media mediated screen, we need to nurture a sense of ourselves as one with this planet, embracing the entangle ments we have with the places we hold dear. This ‘mode of life’ is thereby one that is global, yet local. The ‘mode of life’ or genre de vie is an explicit refer ence to fin de siècle 19th -century Vidalian human geography. In its original guise, the genre de vie was about in-depth place-specific and regional descrip tions of the relations between life and land. A certain fixity of ‘the local’ seemed to emerge which early 20th -century geographers would meticulously document as a ‘botanist working on plants or an entomologist on insects.’24 It was this fixity [through force of habit and rootedness] which allowed geographers to study the geographical distribution of genres de vie, to cluster, classify and distinguish between them in the manner of the natural sciences.25 The descriptions often fetishised the local and even more sinisterly fed notions of environmental determinisms and ideas about ‘Blut und Boden’ (blood and soil) underpinning violent nationalism and racism which persist to date. Avoiding to ‘leave ourselves open to the seduction of proximity, nostalgia, or protectionism, engaging in a reductive strategy of triage.’26 I will claim it is only through the local that we can make sense of the global and in particular the Earth. I follow Latour in wanting to ‘rediscover the inhabitable ground’ where collective human organisation unfolds through an unravelling of our earthly entanglements to show how in the Anthro pocene our mode of life is fundamentally an earthly one. The recognition of the earthly entanglements constitutive of our planetary mode of life is at the same time a plea for timefulness: extending our temporary registers beyond that of the immediate present, even to that of geological time.27 We are thus both intemperate and intemporate — time illiterate. Like inexperienced but overconfident drivers, we accelerate into landscapes and ecosystems with no sense of their long-established traffic patterns, and then react with surprise and indignation when we face the penalties for ignoring natural laws.28
- 24. Introduction 9 The aim of the examples outlined in the book is precisely to reveal the earthly resonance of seemingly locally specific modes of living and thereby how this one Earth of ours is at the same time the many. As such the book engages with post-humanistic new materialism and Anthropocene theory to develop an idea of a planetary genre de vie enabling us to equitably live and communicate with the forces of the Earth. Thereby the book will develop a concept of post-humanism based on the Modern idea of emancipation and human agency, rather than portraying the emergence of Earth’s forces as somehow overriding human agency and foreclosing emancipatory possibilities. Structure of the book Following this introduction, six chapters will build up to the eventual con clusion on developing earthly attachments in the Anthropocene. The next chapter will lay the theoretical foundation for the book. Under the title of ‘fluid being’ a post-humanistic new materialism ontology will be explained in detail, both from the perspective of those lauded as key thinkers and their distractors and critical engagements therewith. The theoretical underpinnings will elucidate the spatialization immanent to meaning and its materialisation unfolding in everyday life. Chapter 2 will open with the entities conducive of this spatialization focusing on earthly entanglements in the case of Iceland. Entitled ‘mumbling mud,’ the focus is on how meaning made to matter is not one of foreclosure, but revolves around placing and spacing the things themselves within the power geometries of assembling what we then use or enjoy. The experimental incisions into our everyday presented in the chapter are meant to oper ationalise or ground notions of the fluid being, theorised in the preceding chapter. These set the scene for a more politically grounded and progressive agenda described in subsequent chapters. Chapter 3 will trace the conceptual lineage of the Anthropocene literature, its empirical foundations and debates around the start of the Anthropocene. Entitled ‘where to start?’ it provokes thinking about the stories we tell of our global state of affairs and the climate crisis in particular. The chapter draws attention to the problems associated with living on a planet damaged by the excesses of over-accumulated capital and where the roots of these problems lie. Choosing where to start has a great impact on the stories we tell and the conclusions we are able to draw. Provoking this question after setting out some theoretical foundations and demonstrating the range of voices that can be heard, sets the scene for the following chapters regarding changing mindsets and practices. Chapter 4 is entitled ‘Changing mindsets: (re)-value life’ and it builds on the repercussions of where I chose to start and how this narrative still unfolds in the Modern guise of the Enlightenment project and unchallenged notions of progress as presented in Chapter 3. The basic premise is that
- 25. 10 Introduction practices that can be loosely framed as neoliberal are starting to dominate our ways of being and doing, through processes of marketisation, financiali sation, austerity politics and individualist consumerism. The question is how these can be countered and how we can reorient global consumption? The chapter outlines how the vitalism inherent in post-humanistic new materi alism can be teased out in terms of valuing life in all its manifestations. Bringing in Darwinian evolutionary theory will hopefully underpin a fasci nation with life in all its splendour and thus lead to a new valuing of it. This valuing will form the substrate for our grasping of how the web of life is immanent to our planet and how it allows us space, albeit on ever-shifting ground. With this reoriented valuing, the subsequent question of how to change practices arises. In Chapter 5 the empirical insights from the Netherlands will be used to explore possible avenues. These empirical vignettes indicate that in the core of Europe, and that of global capitalism more generally, we find set ways of being and doing that could indeed be shaken up somewhat. The chapter lays the foundation for our future planetary genre de vie, learning lessons from Europe (Latour’s ‘old continent’) and its historical contingencies, taking into account how the manifold earthly and biological processes have come to play in the three cases presented. These are thus premised on culti vating the earthly attachments I see emerging from these entanglements. Recognising and cultivating concern for these is what will empower us to set course for an earthly future—one in which we are kind to Earth. With that, the last chapter before concluding the book is about the poli tical implications of changing mindsets and practices for the Earth itself. The proposed narrative and future vision for a planetary state of being, is one of responsibility, kindness and care. Tending to the small, the local and the everyday will cultivate global and earthly attachments. This entails a politi cisation of the environment based on the recognition of a multitude of potential socio-environmental futures and visions beyond those of neoliberal commodification and individualistic privatisation. The final chapter will present the books conclusion and provide a sum mary of its key points. The chapter will outline my main message of what a planetary genre de vie might look like through the multitude of voices and stories we share as people. In this way my hope is to analyse a rather complex, multifarious topic in a relatively straightforward and simple narrative way, infused with my personal reflections. Indeed, ‘design simplicity is the key to lively diversity,’ and straightforward stories are the key to a re-emergence of our own thoughts and stories. A slight note on words My most avid readers might recognise bits and pieces of text within some chapters. Indeed, with our ever-mounting pressure to publish in academia I
- 26. Introduction 11 was strongly advised against devoting time to a book, as it takes a long time to write and does not really count as much as a high-ranking or high-impact journal article. So, whilst writing this book I kept writing articles and book chapters, either appropriating and repurposing text from the book in pro gress for them or vice versa. I wanted to write this book despite the stifling metrification of academia and the prevalent culture of self-aggrandisement through numbers. In this Anna Tsing’s writings have inspired me to become more explorative and open when it comes to being with the world. Para phrasing words from her epilogue I would like to forage in the commons we need to maintain.29 In the book, a few words may look strange or novel to the reader. In most cases they will be defined when they are first used in the text and then con sistently used in line with that definition. However, two key terms will feature that warrant an explanation here at the outset. Throughout the text I will use ‘the Moderns’ with a capital M, following Bruno Latour in signifying cul tures and institutions rather than individuals. The notions of progress, growth and enlightenment often follow in the same paragraph. These denote a particular cultural logic that became the predominant understanding of the terms emerging in Europe in the ‘long sixteenth century’ (1450–1640 CE) as defined by Immanuel Wallerstein30 and picked up by Jason Moore.31 This meaning will be elucidated in Chapter 3. Another frequently recurrent key term is the notion of ‘entanglements.’ To some, this may translate as an imprisoning imperative compromising our ability to act and be. Whilst indeed entanglements connote a situation that is difficult if not impossible to escape, to me it connotes deep involvement. Throughout the book entanglements appear as earthly entanglements and indeed my key argument is that there is no getting away from Earth. But this Earth is not a prison, but a home full of potential in its multiplicity, a singular presence far beyond what we can grasp or realise. Notes 1 Ritchie and Roser, 2020. 2 Chakrabarty in Latour, 2016, p. 197. 3 Jorge Silva, miner, quoted in the New Yorker magazine, see Anderson, 2019. 4 Bjornerud, 2018, p. 147. 5 The GtC values can be transformed into GtCO2 by multiplying by 3.664, see Ollila, 2019. 6 UNEP, 2018, p. xv. 7 Sauer, 1965[1941a], pp. 370–372. 8 Ollila, 2019. 9 Steffen et al., 2015. 10 Mann, Bradley and Hughes, 1999. 11 As long since recognised in debates around resilience, sustainability and land use, see: Fresco and Kroonenberg, 1992. 12 Cook, Rickards and Rutherfurd, 2015, p. 235. 13 Wakefield, 2020, p. 31, see also Olsson, 2007, p. 4.
- 27. 12 Introduction 14 Braun, 2015, p. 239. 15 Noonan, 2018. 16 Bjornerud, 2018, p. 125. 17 Duke, 2018, p. 104, emphasis original. Citing: Lyubomirski, 2008. 18 See Chalquist, 2020. 19 van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster, 2016, p. 6. 20 Krzywoszynska, 2019, p. 672. 21 van der Burg, Trilling and Gençsü, 2019, p. 37. 22 Eurostat, 2016. 23 Latour, 2018, p. 101. 24 Deprest, 2011, p. 159. 25 Deprest, 2011, p. 161, see also Sorre, 1962. 26 Ruddick, 2017, p. 120. 27 Yusoff, 2013, p. 781. 28 Bjornerud, 2018, p. 7. 29 Tsing, 2015. 30 Wallerstein, 2011. 31 Moore, 2015.
- 28. 1 Fluid being Shortly after I started my post in the Netherlands as chair of the Cultural Geography Group (GEO) at Wageningen University & Research, my parents came to visit me. Both now retired, they spent their careers building their own business focused on health, well-being and organic foods. They have a background in industry, as a chef and office manager respectively. As such I am the first academic in my family and it remains a challenge to explain to my parents what it is that I actually do for a living. The teaching part they get, but the rest remains a mystery. As they came to visit, I proudly showed them around campus and my building, called Gaia, along with the adjacent in-door tropical gardens of the Lumen building. Upon entering my office, my father asked me ‘so you sit here, on your own, all day?’ A pungent question in the context of wondering if I actually did any ‘real work.’ The point stuck, for up to ten hours a day I indeed find myself alone in my office, but maybe not so alone. The computer in front of me is always online, and through a range of applications, I can communicate with people all over the planet in milliseconds. I plan events, write texts, review those of others and generally do what I suspect many a reader of these words will know all too well from their own daily routine. Finding the inbox bloated with messages from the Americas in the morning, mixed with end-of-day mails from East Asia and the ever confusing ‘which day is it’ down under, makes one acutely aware of time differences on the planet. As David Harvey stated; ‘Time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is.’1 With these commu nications, now simultaneously unfolding on a range of platforms, in a coun try of almost seamless ubiquitous connectivity, I am within constant reach and feel the challenge of keeping up with those myriad threads of corre spondence unfolding; I am virtually never alone. This is not only a virtual thing though. My virtual life is ‘an integral part of coming-to-the-globalised world,’2 and, more profoundly, this is a material thing as well. Beyond the very material infrastructure needed to maintain seamless and ubiquitous connectivity for these virtual realms, is the mounting demand of real-world connectivity. The people I correspond with online almost daily, I will have to meet at some point. The more we correspond, the greater this all too human urge. In doing so, we physically move more along with the virtual flows of
- 29. 14 Fluid being information, bites of money and ideas. Corresponding to all the virtual flows are therefore flows of actual people and materials, largely following the very infrastructure of virtual connectivity that has been laid out in very physical terms. Along established shipping lanes, underwater internet cables now mat tress the seafloor. Transmission and relay stations are built in ever-more remote locations to facilitate the diffusion of messages from an ever-growing layer of satellites and orbital objects, which also guide aviation.3 So, no, I am not really alone in my office, or ever for that matter. We always knew that no one is an island. Yet now this realisation is becoming more and more acute, as we live in a global village gone viral. It somehow becomes so visceral and tangible how we are indeed constituted through our relations in our current day and age, as is our world and our everyday life. We are supposed to be here, there and everywhere at the same time through our online networks and ever-more expansive ease of mobility. How do we array these networks and links? What and who do we incorporate and align in that process? And moreover, what does that mean to who and what we are, spatially and personally? How can we make sense of our networked bubble, or ‘nubble’ as my colleague Martijn Duineveld quipped to me once? From these opening ruminations I hope to set out what is at stake in this chapter. As a foundational chapter for this book it will present the opening theoretical underpinnings and inspirations for it, drawing largely on discus sions within geography. Roughly speaking the chapter will set out some basic premises of a relational approach to spaces and places, which revolves around a critical review of ‘post-humanistic new materialism’ ontology. These foundations will be iterated upon in chapters to come, adding layer upon layer on the perspectives of those lauded as key thinkers in this deliberately diverse amalgam of terms and their distractors. Beyond laying the substrate for the chapters of the book as a whole, these theoretical underpinnings will elucidate how one can come to terms with the spatialization immanent to meaning and its materialisation unfolding in everyday life. The objective here is to unmoor the seemingly fixed structures that allow us to take space for granted. This rigidity generally co-ordinates our thoughts and actions, but through demonstrating how these are con stituted through the ways in which we relate, how we incorporate them at the same time they incorporate us, their potential can be revealed. Focusing on these relations themselves, and in particular the moments through which relations and the seemingly fixed structures can emerge, triggers the realisa tion of space as void of predefined meaning and navigable co-ordinates. Thereby, this is a space of great potential, which can be realised in a myriad of ways. It is really about the encounter with it and the story we tell about it. The subsequent chapters will demonstrate some particular attempts thereof. As said, however, before engaging with space, I will critically lay out the constituent parts of a ‘post-humanistic new materialism’ ontology first. Being acutely aware of what has become planned obsolescence of theory in acade mia, symptomatic of our current ‘accelerationist times that generate endless
- 30. Fluid being 15 new “turns” and new “fields”’4 I will draw on the epistemological construc tion loosely framed as poststructuralism, with its focus on inventive and creative ways of dealing with problems, events and ‘subjectivised’ knowl edges.5 From that premise post-humanism and new materialism will be dealt with in turn, before deploying these on the world’s continually unfolding spatialization in the chapters to come. The post of ‘post-human’ Articulating what it means to be human is well beyond the scope of this chapter, or this book for that matter. My modest contribution in this section will build on the work of others in debating the terms of ‘post-humanism.’ To start I would like to unravel the connotation of ‘human’ as being something separate or special. First of all, we can see the species Homo sapiens as categorically distinct from other lifeforms on the great tree of life and thereby separate. But as the metaphor of the bifurcating trunks of the tree of life should indicate; this separateness only works if you freeze time and or trace your way back through the branches and to the trunk. That freeze trick and the retro-engineering of our particularity and speciality has been pretty dominating in our history. We see most religions reserving a very special place for humans, not least the Judeo-Islamic-Christian belief system, wherein God bestows upon ‘man’ (or even ‘Man’) mastery and domination over the world, i.e. nature and animals.6 At the dawn of the Enlightenment period, or the emergence of the Moderns, the separation of man from the rest become nigh on absolute in the Western worldview, with the adoption of Cartesian dualism. This framing, named after the mathematician and philo sopher René Descartes (1596–1650), assumes that the mind and the body are separate things; one capable of reasoning and abstraction, the latter reliant on primordial urges, embedded in space and place. This became the substrate for a worldview that set apart society and nature as ontologically isolated entities. The modern-day anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, however, will claim that ‘we have never been modern,’ in the sense that the separation of our world by the grand principally Modern ‘washing machine’ into society on the one hand and nature on the other, does not really hold once you take a closer look, and never really has.7 But it most certainly has a gravitational pull exerting its influence on Western thinking and worldviews more generally to date. Daniel Dennett uses this notion of gravity and explains: The problem posed by Cartesian gravity is sometimes called the Expla natory Gap (Levine, 1983) but the discussion under that name strike me as largely fruitless because the participants tend to see it as a chasm, not a glitch in their imaginations. They may have discovered the ‘gap,’ but they don’t see it for what it actually is because they haven’t asked ‘how it got that way?’8
- 31. 16 Fluid being Of great importance thereby is to recognise this gap and how it got that way. By which process is it possible to imagine a gap between mind and body, society and nature? Making for this gap is indeed one of the most powerful of seemingly fixed structures co-ordinating our thinking and being. For the benefit of understanding ourselves and our environment, we classify, com partmentalise and simplify in this dualistic way. It is an innate part of our being.9 The problem is when we assume that ‘reality,’ for lack of a better word, takes on the guise of these simplifications and abstractions. The most pervasive and indeed perverse of these simplifications is the separation of society and nature, and the belief that only the objective scientific inquiry into the properties of things ‘out there’ can reveal the ultimate truth. There are indeed many other dimensions of human existence than objective truth- seeking. This ‘ocean of consciousness’ as the historian Yuval Noah Harari terms it,10 is based upon a range of traditions, whose origin remain obscure or informed by intuition, aspirations and hopes. They co-exist within us along with the overlain Cartesian dualism. Dreams and intuitions are prop erties innate to us which do not lend themselves easily to objective rationa lisation. If only for these companions to our simplifications it can be safely said that reality eludes us. Thinking beyond the strictures of structure and thereby loosening the grasp of what is commonly perceived as real has happened to us collectively on a number of occasions. Every time it has come as a type of revelation when we realise that reality escapes our attempts at grasping and bounding it. One can follow Friedrich Weinert in his clearly written exposé of the his torical role of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud in creating some of the most recent moments of these revelations.11 Indeed think of the idea-shattering Copernican revolution, which placed humanity not at the centre of the uni verse, but as inhabitants of a mere planet orbiting a sun. Moreover, one sun of many such like, we later found out. Then comes the Darwinian revolution, and the crushing of our faith in the rational design of life by an omnipotent deity. Humanity is thereby revealed not as the pinnacle of creation or divine simulacra, but a mere reiterated evolutionary adaptation to particularities in our environment, part of an organic whole without purpose or goal.12 Then comes Freud, and the loss of transparency. Freud revolutionised ideas of motivation, intentionality and thought by explaining that we do not really always do as we say, nor act as we wish, or should for that matter. We are driven by unconscious and unexpressed desires of a mind that is still largely unknown to us. Although Freud claimed to have completed the Copernican revolution, decentring the human, more was to come. Now with the urgency of climate change and looming environmental catastrophes, we realise that our environment is indeed part and parcel of us, we become mere stardust,13 coexisting with the vagaries of our material surroundings. It is by these extensions to our surroundings that I would like to talk about ‘post humanism.’ It is not really post anything at all, but our Modern conceptions of what it means to be human, following Latour. To me ‘post-humanism’
- 32. Fluid being 17 thus provides a framework for understanding the growing role of material and more-than-human agency within institutions, societies and our lives, yet at the same time holding on to a meaning making sentient sapience we can call the human. From this rather general perspective of the post-human I will rely on Matthew Gladden’s comprehensive typology of the term to operationalise the ‘post-human’ as one that is; • Theoretical, in the sense that I will purposefully use it to enhance our understanding and expand knowledge possessed by humanity, for the sake of obtaining a deeper, richer, more accurate, and more sophisticated understanding of human beings and the world in which we exist. • Analytical, in the sense that ‘post-humanity’ assumes the role of a socio technological reality that already exists in the contemporary world and which calls out to be better understood. What this amounts to is what Gladden terms ‘“post-humanism of cri tique” that employs post-humanist methodologies to identify hidden anthropocentric biases and post-humanist aspirations contained within dif ferent 14 fields of human activity.’ It is thus about recognising the wealth of subjects and objects that have never before been fully acknowledged or accounted for in our conception of what it is to be human.15 Diagnosing these by applying the tools of geography to analyse its spatial manifestations thus becomes the objective. Using the perspective of how meaning matters, quite literally, seems a nice place to start. ‘Post-human’—what a word? It may indeed sound quaint to aim to elucidate on meaning and what I term fluid being, starting with the heading ‘post-human.’ At face value my aims and ambitions would seem precisely to make sense of the human, not neces sarily moving in any way beyond that or creating some dichotomies between what was ‘human’ and what is now post that. This is indeed the trouble with language. To explain things, they need to have some labels and these labels then need to be explained and we are most adept at explaining through juxtapositions and dualities, largely due to the dominance of Cartesian co ordinates to our thinking. One way of moving against this Cartesian legacy and the grain of dualities is the deconstruction of meaning through the triadic process of semiosis.16 The geographer Gunnar Olsson17 uses the study of semiosis (semiotics) to grasp our spatial being and what it means to be human, relating the process of labelling with how meaning comes to matter. In doing so he lays down the limits of language by drawing ‘lines of power’ that navigate between what is and what is to be understood and communicated. Thus, Olsson establishes the origin of power as being imbued in the ambiguity of the word ‘is.’ Much
- 33. 18 Fluid being like 20th -century traditions of phenomenology were based around under standing what ‘is’ is, Olsson explains the relevance of the word ‘is’ using three approaches drawn from Peirce’s semiotics: the icon, index and symbol, each symbolised with a different sign: -, =, /. With these he lays the ‘cornerstones’ for understanding the Modern’s constructs and taken-for-granteds.18 The first of the signs is the ‘Saussurean bar’ (-), referring to the semiotic tradition of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. This bar - represents a split and yet the unification of the sign into the signifier (S) and the signified (s), commonly represented as S . Meaning does not emerge from the identity or s essence of the signifier or the signified, but from the difference between them, the gap represented by the line. It is difference alone that allows a signifier to signify. Between these is therefore the ‘bar of power’ -, its power emerging from the fact that it transforms both signifier and signified. The second sign employed by Olsson is the equal sign (=). This is the sign of logic. But its power does not reside in the logical for the logical is pre dictable according to Olsson. The power of logic lies in the fact that it is inherently rhetorical so in order to exercise power when saying that one thing equals another, one needs to be believed. To be believed one needs to reason in a manner that increases one’s credibility. Thereby logic relies on trust, established when the reader or listener recognises him/herself. The tactic most frequently employed for this is to let the concrete rule over the abstract, the specific over the general (metonymy). All in all, according to Olsson, belief is the instrument of power par excellence, whilst it skips all the undulations of the middle whereby truth is made to work. The third sign is the ‘slash’ (/) and this stems from dialectics getting its convincing power from metaphor or imagined synthesis. With dialectics one cannot predict or command but only understand, in particular relations between the dialectically opposed. The slash more clearly represents the excluded middle, the gap, which is then a void between the opposites, an abyss of the excluded third, that which is outside the realm of naming, the synthesis to be. The slash signifies where nothing takes place except the place. In this void resides the political power since, for instance, how small must a minority be before it is excluded from the dialectical process, and how large a majority before it becomes such an integral part of the taken-for-granted that it turns silent? As Olsson claims, to be believed is to have power, power is the desire to control meaning and the prime symbol of meaning is the copula ‘is,’ a verb designating an event, an event taking place in the void of the excluded third.19 In his terms we need to recognise the limits of language as one at the cusp of this void which can only be navigated by naming.20 According to Olsson these are: the combined principles of geometry and naming, i.e. in the interface between the theories of picture-making and story-telling, on the one hand, and the practices of pointing and baptising, on the other.21
- 34. Fluid being 19 Telling the story and creating the image at the same time one points to things, is how meaning is made to matter and spaces become. The trick is to be believed whilst doing so. So, the void we navigate by naming is not one of nothingness, as the semiotician Umberto Eco would have it: But if the world were finite, Nothingness, inasmuch as it is nothing, could not be, and what then would lie beyond the confines of the world? The Void. And so, to deny the infinite we affirm the Void, which can only be infinite, otherwise at its end we would have to think again of a new and inconceivable expanse of nothing. Thus it is better to think at once and freely of the Void and people it with atoms, reserving the right to think of it as empty, emptier than any emptiness.22 The names and atoms we populate the void with are the illustrations of expla nations that are ‘in essence travel stories, infinite chains of metonymies in which one wor(l)d slides into another.’23 Indeed, ‘everything flows,’24 and as the phi losopher Michel Serres would remind us, ‘in the world of communication, power belongs precisely to those who control the channels.’25 Serres argues for how the one can be many and vice versa. Hence the one and the multiple as being the same. Meaning of this multiplicity is derived from the chasm, void or the abyss which Olsson signified with his three symbols.26 All the world, and us in it, is interlaced and emanating from the void, hence one has to focus on it as it transforms, joins and spurs novelty. All three of Olsson’s symbols are possessed with the same mimetic desire; what stands on one side wants to merge with the other side. This desire is defined by its impossibility, but paves the way for ongoing inconclusivity and hence the open-endedness of our being, which then generates potential and beginnings, not closure from the event of being here and now. As Olsson concludes the preface to his latest work: Breathe normally. And you too might experience how the prow shears through the night and into the dawn.27 So, with a smiley composed of the three symbols, Olsson urges us to recognise and move beyond the extensiveness of our being, our ongoing openness and how we make meaning matter through exercising the power of naming. In this sense we become ‘post-human.’ An in-between-being, one that was never one, nor the many, but with the potential and power to be through all that is. But before moving on to explain the spatial ramifications of this process of making meaning matter, a recourse into matter itself is of importance, to explain the latter half of the ‘post-humanistic new materialism’ dyad. The material and the ‘new materialism’ The recognition of the role of the material and understanding the interac tions between matter and the social world is not a new undertaking per se.
- 35. 20 Fluid being Anyone familiar with Marxian social theory will recognise the notions of historical and dialectical materialism, operationalising theories of matter to bring about emancipation or social transformation. ‘New’ materialism is not to be juxtaposed to these earlier versions, but in the words of Charles Devellennes and Benoît Dillet, it is opted for as an ‘intensification and a multiplying of materialism.’28 What brings about this multiplicity and intensification in their view is the combination of new materialism with ideas of post-humanism. Moreover, new materialism relates to biopolitics and technology, and thus how technological artefacts are making us, for instance how our iris allows us to enter countries and pacemakers prolong our lives. This book will not pursue these lines of inquiry, but is written more so from the perspective of new materialism becoming about the very materiality of Earth and how it is seemingly ‘talking back’ to us as we unravel global environmental challenges and our current state of planetary emergency. This will be revisited throughout this book. But for my inten ded purpose here these three strands of post humanism, technology and earthly materialities allow for the prefix ‘new’ to be added to the notion of materialism. Foregrounding the primacy of matter and demonstrating how seemingly inert matter affects change in meaningful ways is the point of departure of Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter. Therein she asks us to loosen ‘the connections between efficacy and the moral subject’ and further states that we need to broaden the range of places to look for sources of change, and transform our relations with mute objects ‘into a set of differential ten dencies and variable capacities.’29 In her view, this enhancement through matter allows for creativity and opportunity, as opposed to strictures of a superstructure or otherwise scripted futures of some particular Marxian bent. Through this enhancement a fuller theory of emancipation and change can be developed, rendering many of the seemingly givens of our day and age as fluid and dynamic constructions that we can affect change upon. Thus, it allows for a dynamic conception of our innate hybridity, not least in times labelled the Anthropocene (see Chapter 3), where the whole planet is one of our own making, but at the same time not. Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’ draws attention to the potential latent in everything around us, and all that we can relate to. And it is in the moment of relating that the potential for change actually resides. Placing emphasis on the relating, however, also reveals that not all matter is equally vibrant and it is the relating that matters. For instance, Timothy Neale, Alex Zahara and Will Smith argue against ‘the generalised vibrancy of matter in new materialism.’ Through a focus on the elements and that which often is beyond direct observation, they claim ‘that some matter is not con tingent; it wagers that some matter, following Braun, is “determined to be determined”.’30 The point being that assigning vibrancy to matter is unquestionably important for a correct distribution of agency in a post- Enlightenment era, but engaging the human purely on these terms overlooks
- 36. Fluid being 21 the mechanisms operating through the regulation of the distinctions we make in making meaning matter.31 The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is well suited to further theorise matter and not least methodologies to come to terms with its affectiveness through relation in my opinion. It is most certainly impossible to synopsise his work in simple terms, or do any justice to it in a paragraph or two. But two key terms which can be attributed to him relate to the ongoing discussion, namely that of ‘becoming’ and ‘radical empiricism.’ In terms of the latter, as Constantin Boundas explains in his introduction to Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity: A more helpful definition of empiricism, in Deleuze’s estimate, must respect the irreducible dualism that exists between things and relations, atoms and structure, perception and their causes and also relations and their causes.32 This irreducible dualism is the incommensurable gap, chasm, abyss or void talked about in the above. Through it we can settle on a definition of the world as emergent through potential that is immanent to relations. Matter becomes an emergent relational entity not reducible to a ‘whole’ that is a mere aggregate of parts, but a relational whole that is immanent to its interaction through relations with other entities (bodies and objects that themselves are relational). These are ‘bundles of human and extra human nature,’33 which, while being human can be viewed as a deeper- seated equilibrium of relations or as a more intensely ordered relational effect than a table or a dog. Exerting power from our state of equilibrium goes some way to explain the host of designations and affirmations of a human being’s character and personality. But moreover, a human being emerging from more sets of relations holds considerably more potential to become. As the human body is a set of more intensely ordered and immediately active relationalities than what we see in seemingly inert matter, we can focus on questions such as who, how and why as matters of concern. That is, one can loosen the bonds with predefined categories, not allowing oneself to fall back upon explaining things, people or phe nomena as manifestation of some essential quality. Rather than sticking to these reductive strategies we should strive to add, show more, unravel and unfold ever more. For instance, you will have to ask in the context of your reading of my writing why I am doing it in this way, but cannot simply brush away my approach by saying: oh, this is because he is Ice landic. In Deleuzian terms, a relational attachment dictated by questions of who, how and why demands that one has to be ‘radically empirical’ when researching these relationalities—one has to become one with the field. The researcher is another assemblage component added to the rela tions unfolding, but with intentionality and powers that need to be reck oned with. This is a relatively radical departure from the traditional
- 37. 22 Fluid being empirical approach to knowledge creation, whereby it is assumed that what is to be known is simply out there, readily representable. In privile ging the experience of what is to be found ‘out there,’ the classical empiricists overlook their own assumptions and ways of constructing and adding to their mode of engagement and knowing. As a geographer in love with maps, one can easily relate to how easy it is to fall prey to the temptation that the world can simply be represented through a compre hensive exercise of mapmaking. Not least today, augmented by techniques of global positioning (GPS) and geographical information systems (GIS). Not falling prey to this temptation, we need to realise that the ‘out there’ resists mapping and a holistic grasping. Through Deleuze’s detailed exposé of the unruliness of things he concludes that one needs to ‘become’ the field of study in an immersive exercise, recognising and continually ques tioning the epistemic violence wrought by assuming the representability of what we encounter. In this recognition lies the former key term I would like to attribute to Deleuze, becoming. Immersing oneself radically in the field of research, let ting oneself go into the void, entails a process of becoming the field of inquiry—becoming a part of the relationality of the field and being aware of that is empiricism gone radical following Deleuze.34 At the same time my ambition is to hold on to the critically political bent of the Marxian materialism oeuvre. It is impossible to a-historically consider any moment of potential change at any given moment in time. As I put it in my doctoral dissertation, these moments have ‘sedimented’ to form the socio spatial structures that surround us and direct our everyday.35 So although indeed sources for inspiration and change do reside in the vibrancy of matter, and zooming in, each moment of transformation is about relating, a con sideration for all the changes that have happened so far is needed as well and which structures have impact.36 The weight of history and the dominance of capital concerns Slavoj Žižek, who engages with Deleuze adding this dimension and stating: Deleuze and Guattari are therefore aware that capitalism is not only incredibly flexible and adaptable, but that sooner or later, the neoliberal ontology would have to resemble that of the Situationist ethos or the Deleuzoguattarian radical chic. Second, Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses of late capitalism cannot be entirely relevant today given the changes in the modes of production and consumption.37 What Žižek is pointing out is that open-ended and fluid theorising on matter and agency has served particular purposes to the advancement of power for the few. Having us all believe that all politics get flattened and power geo metries do not exist serves those currently in power in a world characterised by ever more wealth inequality.38 So, adding to the Deleuzoguattarian project, Žižek states:
- 38. Fluid being 23 What gets lost in this gnostic vision is the fact that the obstacle to our fulfillment (our finitude) is a positive condition of (a limited) fulfillment: if we take away the obstacle to fulfillment, we lose fulfillment itself (or, in the terms of sense: if we take away the irreducible kernel of nonsense, we lose sense itself).39 Žižek promotes an event-based understanding of radical change. The ques tion is therefore about limits and the constructed boundaries of categorisa tion. Who made those, how and for what purpose matters as well. In terms of this current volume, the political implications of the material are of key importance: the ways in which the material, and ultimately the Earth itself, represents limits and the negotiations that need to take place to overcome, or incorporate them. The fact is that we are continually in the process of nego tiating our ways towards that which we aspire and our need to incorporate matter into these movements to be. The fact is that new materialism, in some instances, goes too far in loos ening the efficacy of our agendas and deflating the political potency of human intentionality through the valorisation of objects themselves. It is indeed easy to get lost in the ‘Deleuzoguattarian radical chic’, but the chal lenge is to try to follow the logic of the argument presented, of course not doing away with the chic. It is about being attentive to the production of the human in its various entanglements through practical action and networks of signification. As mentioned before dreams and intuitions are properties innate to us, which translate into traditions. [i]ntuition and tradition can be seen as remedies, antidotes, or safety valves with respect to an excessive reliance upon reason, to the sceptical paralysis to which reason’s self-reflexivity can condemn us.… Putting too much trust in tradition can lead to narrow-mindedness and obscurantist conservatism. Putting too much trust in intuition can lead to solipsism and unremitting neurosis.40 One particular manifestation of loosening the efficacy of intentionality too much I find in the guise of object-oriented ontology (OOO), generally attributed to Graham Harman and his PhD from 1999 about Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects. In the book Art in the Anthropocene, Ursula Biemann builds on the work of Karen Barad and provides a particularly illuminating example of how matter and meaning are in fact mutually articulated, and moreover politically relevant.41 Interviewing Graham Harman, she explains how a tear-gas bomb from police battling the crowds entered the scene at Tahrir Square, Cairo. As Biemann further clarifies: Harman asserted that we should free our minds from the omnipotence of the political just as the attack broke out. With this juxtaposition, the scene dramatizes the significance of politics in relation to both
- 39. 24 Fluid being knowledge production and emergent reality; as Harman disavows the potency of political life, the backformation of revolutionary street fighting interrupts the calm of his allegedly neutral ontology.42 Here my intention is not to claim that OOO, as a particular manifestation of new materialism is somehow politically neutral. In actual fact I greatly sym pathise with the insightful theorisation produced under the guise of OOO, the work of Timothy Morton in particular.43 His notion of hyperobjects will be revisited later in this book. Inspired by his featuring of the boiling mud- pots and fumaroles of Námaskarð, NE Iceland, we will see how the Earth talks back. My intention is to be more processually oriented, drawing inspiration from Deleuze and focusing on how objects come into existence and endure over time in our wheelings and dealings under the terms of our planetary state of emergency maintained by global capitalism. My intention is to bring an earthly perspective into this context. An example of how OOO could be thereby useful can be gleaned from this dialogue between Steven Shaviro and Graham Harman, where the former claims: The volcano is actual, here and now; we cannot expect to escape its eruption. Our predominant aesthetic procedures involve sampling, synthesizing, remixing, and cutting and pasting.44 Objects and matter indeed exist independent of our presence. Paraphrasing Luce Irigaray: the Earth is not becoming continuously for me, it is what it is because it corresponds to it being the Earth.45 The Earth and matter simply are, and understanding that should instil a necessary degree of humbleness into our cognition. But what matters about matter are those whose very being consist of the acts they perform in our context. Accordingly, and in the spirit of Shaviro’s words: the universe consists in part of ‘contingent’ facts and relations, and in part of ‘systematic relatedness,’ and that any definite character ‘is gained through the relatedness and not the relatedness through the character.’46 As Bruno Latour would have it, quoted by Susan Ruddick: Whether organism, animal, plant or stone, the body is folded into and inseparable from the thickness of the world within which it emerges.47 Again, through the practices of relating in each and every encounter, mean ing is made to matter. The new materialist take to be operationalised on the coming pages of this book, is one which: [f]ind[s] a way to differentiate between materialities (both animate and inanimate) that seek their own equilibrium over time, and those
- 40. Fluid being 25 materialities (whether made or evolved) that are unable to do so.… It is the human assembly that must return to the world of matter and there participate in ethical and political relations with the other participants who can all speak for themselves.48 So, the new materialism presented here is a process-oriented ontology, asso ciated with the Deleuzian term of becoming, but recognising the necessity to prevent the use of ‘becoming’ or ‘process’ as a-historical, undifferentiated, catch-all terms. ‘Our being as living wants us to become,’49 but herein, ‘the human is not a constitutional pole to be opposed to that of the non-human. The two expressions “humans” and “nonhumans” are belated results that no longer suffice to designate the other dimension.’50 In other words, humans owe their agentic efficacy and capabilities to the larger assemblage of ele ments that they are part of. It is only when completely detached from human actions, perception and existence that materiality is all that there is to objects.51 Holding on to the human is why I set the intermezzo of explaining the post-human with Olsson’s ‘schizologie’ as it is more thoroughly wedded to the process of semiosis and storytelling, both particular trades of what makes us human according to Olsson.52 The method to be adopted is thus one that is nuanced, nimble, immersive and at the same time radical and empirically informed. All our accounts of the world thus have an implicit inexhaustibility, and geographical research is an ongoing inter-subjective objective activity, a never ceasing doing of research that constantly transforms the researcher as much as the researched and the research itself and only has to be recognised as such.53 Introducing agency of the material and more-than-human is not about seeing researchers being more conscious or aware of what they are doing. It is about seeing researchers as being more attentive and feeling the unintended consequences of actions upon the researcher. As long as we are living and respectful of our difference(s), we preserve between us a space in which we can live and a space in which we can build.54 By opening space in relating and interacting, one knows that conscious ness and awareness can never mean full control.55 This is a complex enter prise and what has repeatedly frustrated me when reading accounts inspired by the above theorisation, is that that is just about as far as they go. One can witness ‘spinning’ when unpacking the relations of the ‘real’ world and self, but without recognising it as the infinite regress it is and hence lends the self-disclosing reflexive stance ‘a pontifical prerogative to expose the self- contradictions of the observed.’56 This means that if research is not practiced with care, it gives the researcher a favoured position in understanding, that is not recognised on those terms and hence one runs the risk of becoming a researcher best captured with a quote from Dick Pels:
- 41. 26 Fluid being I, the reflexive sociologist, knowing myself, also know who you are, where you come from, what your deepest interests are, why you remain unconscious of what you actually do and why you entangle yourself in performative contradictions. If you are unprepared to ‘know thyself’ on my theoretical conditions, you are an unreflexive bastard, and I must tutor you in my explanatory theory, which will liberate us both.57 The following chapters intend to steer away from this pontifical stand and exercise care for the fact that ‘life is an elaboration out of matter.’58 Living life and understanding matter thus means that we need to become attentive and attune to more-than-human rhythms of life, we need to learn to listen to more than that which is articulated by our logic. Attuning is one key word here. As Joanna Zyliniska put it; we need to be attentive to matters’ intrusive in-cisions and have these inform our de-cisions.59 These decisions then become incisions on the ground, or simply the space in which we live we so take for granted. Spatialization Every relation gives rise to asymmetry. Through asymmetries power emerges. In the inclination power shows itself. Through inclination difference is created. Difference takes place.60 Summing up the preceding discussion in Abrahamsson’s aphoristic phrase harkens to Olsson’s question of what it means to be human.61 Bringing the material to bear on how we live out our spatialised lives brings about a slight re-inclination of our conceptual register. We are quite adept at thinking through the meaning of our actions and how we objectively make sense of space, but not so much about how meaning matters. In geography, a long line of theories that have generally been labelled ‘humanistic geographies’ deal with this sense-making or how we make for a place in a historical-hermeneutic context.62 In these traditions, primacy is on place, as juxtaposed to space wherein the material is presumed to be arranged. But as Stuart Elden will argue: Space is encountered in everyday life, and lived in, not encountered in geometrically measurable forms and shapes and distances.63 What is important to recognise is that from our conceptions of ourselves emanates that which we label and describe as space. This is not the Euclidian geometric space, somehow out there to be calculated and mapped. This is not a space subject to the geometricisation of the Moderns whereby the main motif is the Atlas, wherein the world and space become a fundamentally human project, and moreover a project of logic and capital accumulation.
- 42. Fluid being 27 This is fundamentally a relational space, wherein places are ‘being in the process of being placed in relation to rather than being there.’64 Distinguish ing between spaces and places as somehow separate entities thus becomes less of a concern, it is about the process of spatialization in ‘which place as a mobile arrangement is given stability through difference.’65 Spaces and places then become a multitude of differences whereby time and the material are folded and arranged in complex assemblages and our agency and intention exert influence. The map itself is a geographer’s favourite metaphor of the world. This map indeed makes for the space, but that map is a mere tool extending our par ticular thoughts about ourselves and the world in which we live. Reverting back to Olsson and understanding our fluid relational being. He says of Gilles Deleuze: Even though the (post)modernist Deleuzian is a schizophrenic, he is not a crazy madman but an outstanding cartographer, a person who has accepted the challenge of mapping the many connections that determine what it means to be human.66 The schizophrenia Olsson refers to is Deleuze’s recognition of the incom mensurability of that which stands on either side of the -, =, /. An affirma tion of the ever-ongoing unfolding of relations that constitute the space in which we find ourselves. More particularly, and in common parlance, we usually find ourselves in particular places. But this ‘place is the in-between of time and space: a singular—not particular—space-time.’67 Here, Sascha Rashof is invoking place as a singularity. That is not to say that a place is singular, a frozen point in time-space, it is a singularity. This particular point, as a point that can be denoted x is in flux: [t]he singular points of a curve, or the singular points constituting the surface of an individuality, are not such singular intensities (dx), but correspond to specificating encounters (dx/dy).68 Peter Borum draws on Deleuze’s book Difference and Repetition here, and explains whereby a particular point is indeed to be found in the abyss between meaning and matter. Moreover, in Borum’s understanding of Deleuze’s Leibniz and the Baroque power comes to play, much like Gunnar Olsson emphasises how power is the function of being believed. To believe in this world is to believe that the phenomenal forms we per ceive really express events capable of concerning us. The leap of faith takes us from the individual point on the integral curve to the pre- individual singularity it expresses, and from intensity as pre-individual force to the contemplative self-enjoyment of the singular individual in its absolute domain.69
- 43. 28 Fluid being What emerges from these quotes is the key role of context, the encounter in the field and how matter can be expressed to make sense to us; from the pre-individual singularity it expresses, towards informing our decisions. Sascha Rashof thus explains place as ‘an agglomeration of dis crete platial potencies’70 . The neologism platial is to be found in Stuart Elden’s book Mapping the Present, where he explains how place, placing, local and locality are in effect platial potencies constitutive of the presence of the being in Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetry.71 What I take from this is that the present and place, the here and now, are situ ated presences, reliant on the encounter. This in an emergent space, and thereby emergent society and culture and it matters what we do, from the smallest to the biggest. It calls for a maintenance of a horizontal rela tionship with our surroundings in Jane Bennett’s words. As the sketch by M.C. Escher reproduced in Figure 1.1 makes clear, any slight adjustment to the blocks on the left will play out in structures further down the line of time. The year I was born, 1976, the geographer Torsten Hägerstrand wrote: But as soon as we begin to view things in terms of their local connec tions then we must go further and realize that any configuration of local connections is in itself locally connected to other configurations. Indeed, the surface of the whole earth and perhaps also phenomena outside it form a synergistic whole where the ingredients touch each other shoulder by shoulder as it were.73 In his short article about the study of the interactions between nature and society, Hägerstrand is keen to study in depth the ‘togetherness’ of phenom ena in space and time and direct our scientific endeavours and concept development thereto. The geographer Doreen Massey explains this togetherness as a dynamic challenge of continuing interrelatedness: Figure 1.1 M.C. Escher’s ‘Part of Metamorphosis II’ Source: © 2020 The M.C. Escher Company BV. The Netherlands. All rights reserved.72
- 44. Fluid being 29 Neither space nor place can provide a haven from the world. If time presents us with the opportunities of change and (as some would see it) the terror of death, then space presents us with the social in the widest sense: the challenge of our constitutive interrelatedness—and thus our collective implication in the outcomes of that interrelatedness; the radical contemporaneity of an ongoing multiplicity of others, human and non human; and the ongoing and ever-specific project of the practices through which that sociability is to be configured.74 The process of spatialization and becoming-space needs to be open to its own constant excess that is implicit in the ever-ongoingness of life. This ongoingness is a sliding that frustrates the integrating drive of binary oppositions. The implica tion is that one has to become the field of research as ‘we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside.’75 Thus researching and understanding the process of spatialization becomes an event of experimentation and improvisa tion that intervenes in the space under research, to reveal how manifold that space is as well as the entities in it. Through experimentation and improvisation one can show how each and every entity is emergent from the relations it is composed of. By revealing how entities emerge from the relations that compose them, relations are not to be pulled apart, but experimented and improvised upon to solicit these relations, i.e. show how, by virtue of their emergent potential, they can become- other, hence open them up.76 The entities themselves therefore are to be seen as manifesting positive power of differentiation rather than being reduced to uniformity or essences.77 The human thus is seen as: acquir[ing] its form through the principles of associations while it is indi viduated through the principles of passion. Affectivity activates a tendency of the subject making her want to identify with the effects of her actions in all cases where these effects are the result of the means chosen.78 Affectivity is thus about ‘non-representation’ and thereby in agreement with the geographer Nigel Thrift: I think a new and fertile ground is now emerging in which the practices of affect might be better understood and worked with, and that ground lies at the intersection of performance and technology in the reinvention of various spatial crafts.79 The event of experimentation and improvisation puts emphasis on the ‘now moment’ or the crest of emergence, that is on people’s actions and thoughts as they are moving through space at each and every moment and each encounter. Aiming to elicit this now moment is about seeing how people feel and what occupies their mind at the same time that their activities are traced, trying to make sense of the affects that potentially were being exerted upon them. The emphasis is on getting to the ‘passions’ that individuate the
- 45. 30 Fluid being subject without discarding the principle of association, which makes for the emergence of this very subject. Understanding and making sense of space is thus about mapping the myriad relations that constitute space at each give moment. At the same time recognising how ‘power relations are in and through space, we can see that questions of space are inherently political.’80 Holding on to these power geo metries inherent in spatialization addresses a concern raised about the de politicisation of affect theory through the work of Deleuze upon which Thrift draws. This concern is evident in the works of Jane Bennett, Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti, the triple B of associational affect theory from a post- human, new materialist stance.81 The emergent politics rely on ethics focused on entanglements and therefore responsibility ‘with’ not ‘for.’ Therein lie the opening premises for the alternatives to rigidity, fixity and binary thinking. The seeds of ‘new methodological procedures, narrative strategies, and conceptual language all at the same time.’82 In a sense thereby I am proposing a more-than-human Marxian agenda for research and analysis. One that is never all-encompassing: ‘there is a living, creative potential in labour that is irreducible; that persistently sur vives objectification by capitalist social relations.’83 Vinay Gidwani is quoted here in a text by Jessica Dempsey and Geraldine Pratt who talk about ‘wiggle room’ and the necessity to ‘carefully map[ping] cramped spaces and their histories, to understand the structuring logics, but also the disarticula tions and contingencies and room for movement.’84 In that spirit, six points presented by Nigel Thrift can wrap up the approach to understanding the process of spatialization and how meaning matters. • The world should be added to, not subtracted from. Invention should lead to the actualization of the virtual, rather than the realization of the possible. This is the principle of producing promise. • The world should continue to be held to be multiple with all the con sequences that flow from such a stance, and especially the need for con stant ethical brokerage. This is the principle of ‘relentless pluralism’ (Thompson 2002, 186). • The world should be kept untidy. It should have negative capability, or as Keats put it ‘a man [must be] capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (cited in Wagner 2001, 254). This is the principle of messiness. • The world should be free to display its spectacular and amazing perfor mances through the sacrament of the expressive sign that can pass their energetic demands on. This is the principle of wonder. • The world should be free to teach us. That means retaining difficulties, uncertainties, inaccuracies since mistakes are a part of the lesson, proof that the problem can still grip us. Indeed, one might argue that there is a pragmatics of error which is crucial in all of this (Wagner 2001). This is the principle of testing life.85
- 46. Fluid being 31 These hopeful prospects need to address real and pressing concerns in our current day and age,86 but ultimately revolve around: giving meaning to a world constructed in more immanent and processual ways.… [and] draw upon an agential ‘bottom-up’ or immanent alternative way of creative being, more attuned to new possibilities.87 The chapters that will follow are thus about how we can teach and learn how to live with our planet and expand our relational repertoire to that of the Earth itself—with all the baggage that comes with that. An Ante laden with the potential for anti or a type of pre-positional geographies.88 Concluding points So, we are fluid beings, but moreover, we are profoundly geo-graphical beings.89 As Timothy Morton interprets Darwin’s legacy, ‘there are not spe cies and they have no origin.’90 But we are very much creatures of the making of the strictures imposed upon us by a long history of decisions and things settled and seemingly fixed. Revealing their inherent fluidity does indeed provide ‘wiggle room’ and places emphasis on the moments of encounters, the abysmal lines where one becomes other or something else through our practices of naming and pointing and being believed in doing so. In our fast-paced world of ubiquitous connectivity it would seem we are poised to become whatever we want and be wherever we feel. Nigel Thrift quotes from the magazine Fast Company, wherein the author asks ‘How thin can I spread myself before I am no longer there’ and warns that therein lie the perils of the subject positions created by modern-day capitalism.91 Whilst ‘homo siliconvalleycus’ might seem to be picking up some kind of an evolu tionary lead, it relies on the unaccounted work of so many slower, forcibly marched to the tune of precarity and never-ending training and skills development.92 There are indeed injustices in the current power geometries as there have been through time as I will show in chapters to come. The lines animating those geometries need to recognised and affirmed, but also seen as full of potential. In Umberto Eco’s fascinating novel about the Island of the Day Before he explains at length attempts made during the European discovery of the Americas and the Pacific islands at measuring longitudes.93 Mainly though the search and establishment of the elusive 180-degree meridian, that divides yesterday from today. From that dividing line, currently known as ‘the International Date Line’ unfold amazing ideas from the voyages of discovery explaining all kinds of ideas, for instance how God managed to flood the planet using seawater from yesterday and pouring it over the line. In the novel the protagonist is marooned on the vessel Daphne off an island he is unable to reach as he cannot swim. He postulates that the island is the one of the wealthy biblical places of king Solomon’s legacy. Thus, the island was
- 47. 32 Fluid being named after him by the Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña in 1568. Thereby the protagonist identifies one of the numerous arguments he finds for this island and the line dividing the world as producing the inverse or flip side of all that is European, civilised and established. In a sense the whole novel spins of that elusive dividing line and thus chimes with ideas of the caesura, or /, that which divides, is neither or, but allows for all. Our geo-graphical more-than-human being is about this line. The place, the platial, where all things and the Earth of which we are made unravel and unfold. It is the singularity, apprehensible in each encounter, with a history and power geometry that can be unravelled, but more over allowing for a gaggle of voices and opportunities to emerge. With that I would like to move closer to the ground in the next chapter, entitled ‘mumbling mud.’ Notes 1 Harvey, 1990, p. 240. 2 Boos, 2017, p. 9. 3 Khanna, 2016. 4 Dillet, 2017, p. 519. 5 Ibid. 6 Glacken, 1967. 7 Latour, 1993. 8 Dennett, 2017, pp. 20–21, emphasis in original. 9 Chandler, 2019, p. 304. 10 Harari, 2017, pp. 409–427. 11 Weinert, 2009. 12 Dennett, 1995. 13 Sagan, 2013, pp. 53–59. 14 Gladden, 2016, p. 43. 15 As opposed to the post-human genetically engineered, technologically augmented future Homo Deus of Harari, 2017. 16 Eco, 1976. 17 Olsson, 1992. 18 Olsson, 2020, p. x. 19 See Irigaray, 2019, p. 11. 20 Olsson, 1991. 21 Olsson, 1998, p. 147. 22 Eco, 1994, p. 429, see also Irigaray, 2019, pp. 15 and 17. 23 Olsson, 2007, p. 67. 24 Serres, 2018, p. 6. 25 Serres, 1995, p. 104. 26 Olsson, 2007, or ‘Birds in Egg - Eggs in Bird’ as Olsson originally explored in terms of planning and design, Olsson 1980. 27 Olsson, 2020, p. xi. 28 Devellennes and Dillet, 2018, p. 6. 29 Bennett, 2010, pp. 32, 37 and 108. 30 Neale, Zahara and Smith, 2019, p. 126. 31 See e.g. Povinelli, 2016. 32 Boundas, 1991, p. 6, emphasis original. 33 Moore, 2015, p. 7. 34 Deleuze, 1991; see also Hayden, 1998.
- 48. Fluid being 33 35 Huijbens, 2005. 36 Particularly informative here is Wakefield’s (2020, p. 38) reading of the US East Coast power blackout in 2003, which as opposed to Bennett’s (2010) focus on material agency saw the vulnerability of infrastructures in a globalised world. 37 Dillet, 2017, p. 523. 38 Smith, 2005, p. 894. 39 Žižek, 2004, p. 187. 40 Barden and Baruchello, 2018, p. 60, Harari (2017) argues that ‘science always needs religious assistance in order to create viable human institutions’ (p. 219, see also p. 230). 41 Biemann, 2015, pp. 120–122. 42 Biemann, 2015, p. 122. 43 Morton, 2013. 44 Shaviro, 2011, p. 290. 45 Irigaray, 2019, p. 52; ‘a flower does not flower for me, but because flowering corresponds to its being a flower’. 46 McGilvary, 1941, p. 214, quoting Whitehead, 1922. 47 Ruddick, 2017, p. 127. 48 Conty, 2018, pp. 76 and 88. 49 Irigaray, 2019, p. 104. 50 Latour, 1993, p. 137. 51 Pyyhtinen and Tamminen, 2011, p. 141. 52 Philo, 2012, p. 285, see also Harari, 2015. 53 Pels, 2000, see also England, 1994, p. 82. 54 Irigaray, 2019, p. 83. 55 Latour, 1999. 56 Pels, 2000, p. 2. 57 Ibid, p. 8. 58 Grosz, 2011, p. 31, my emphasis. 59 Zylinska, 2014, p. 98. 60 Abrahamsson, 2018, p. 129. 61 Olsson, 2007, p. 4. 62 Unwin, 1992, pp. 150–153. 63 Elden, 2001, p. 17. 64 Hetherington, 1997, p. 188, emphasis in original. 65 Ibid., p. 192. 66 Olsson, 2007, p. 141. 67 Rashof, 2018, p. 132. 68 Borum, 2017, pp. 111–112. 69 Ibid., p. 112. 70 Ibid., p. 147. 71 Elden, 2001, p. 37, see also p. 91. 72 www.mcescher.com. For the story n-escher/atrani/. 73 Hägerstrand, 1976, p. 331. 74 Massey, 2005, p. 195. 75 Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 23. 76 Doel, 1999. 77 Chandler, 2019. 78 Boundas, 1991, p. 17. 79 Thrift, 2008, p. 254. see: www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/verhaal-va 80 Elden, 2001, p. 151, emphasis original. 81 Bennett, 2010; Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2019. 82 Moore, 2015, p. 5, emphasis original.
- 49. 34 Fluid being 83 Gidwani, 2008, 225. 84 Dempsey and Pratt, 2019, p. 276. 85 Thrift, 2005, p. 474. 86 See Castree et al., 2010. 87 Chandler, 2019a, p. 698. 88 See e.g. Abrahamsson, 2018. 89 Gren, 2012, p. 34. 90 Morton, 2013, p. 29, quoted in van Dooren, 2018, p. 169. 91 Thrift, 2005a, p. 152. 92 Thrift, 2005a, p. 151. 93 Eco, 1994.
- 50. 2 Mumbling mud Thinking about the experiences gained through this research, trying to come to an understanding about the ways in which humans relate to their (material) surroundings and the ways in which these surroundings respond to interven tions made me wonder if there is potential for regarding these relations as muddy. For me this provides the shortest answer to my Main Research Question How can current-day practices of dealing with deltas be understood as politics of ontology?, namely to consider these practices as muddy.1 The opening quote of the chapter is from a recent Dutch PhD entitled Mud. Deltas Dealing with Uncertainty. The message resonates nicely with the message of this chapter, namely that in engaging with space we actually have to get our hands dirty and lower our ears to the ground. The title of this chapter is the title of a 1,500m2 exhibition by the internationally acclaimed German artist Katharina Grosse, featuring five site-related, immersive installations. I saw these installations in Shanghai in November 2018 and the exhibit reminded me of Morton’s reference to the boiling mud-pots of Námaskarð, NE Iceland.2 Standing at that site, as I have done more times than I can count, one can hear the blurting sounds of soil and rock which have been cooked by sulfuric acid and pressurised boiling water. The gurgling of the mud pots gives me a sense of how mighty the Earth’s geothermal forces are. This experience is a particular slice of the Earth as ‘hyperobject’ in Morton’s parlance, a ‘platial’ incision that can inform decisions,3 which in the case of Iceland have underpinned the ways in which the population practices ‘Geothermal Living.’4 This chapter will introduce three narratives from Iceland, including this one on the mud pots. In addition to the geothermal, the earthly attachments afforded by turf-houses and arctic henges will help develop insights into the creative means by which people have come to terms with cohabiting with planet Earth and making sense of it. These experimental incisions into under standing materiality in our everyday environment are meant to oper ationalise or ground notions of the fluid being, as theorised in the preceding chapter, and set the scene for a more politically grounded and progressive agenda to come in subsequent chapters.
- 51. 36 Mumbling mud The insights here are based on personal experiences and research in Iceland. Having travelled my country for decades, from beach to moun tain, its barren rugged landscapes have always fascinated me. Moreover, what has intrigued me even further is how people lived on the sub-Arctic island through centuries of relative isolation and inclement weather, with out the aid of modern housing or apparel. It is a story that is not specific to Iceland, and can indeed be transposed onto any setting with seasonal temperature fluctuations. Humankind has developed numerous coping strategies through time and transformed every environment we have ever encountered or inhabited.5 In that sense there is nothing peculiar about Iceland per se, but my own exposure to its landscapes. One particular place I have had the good fortune of spending a couple of weeks in every summer, is Bolungarvík. There, at the NW-most extremity of Iceland, with the next-door neighbour being the nigh uninhabited east coast of Green land, I have taken a fancy to a mountain. Ernir (696 mamsl, Figure 2.1) is a typical mountain of the Westfjords, with a flat top and scree-ridden slopes exposing layer upon layer of lava, each representing pre-historic eruptions millions of years ago, which all together formed the island of Iceland. Staring at that mountain and the eons it represents, the way it has some how always been there, at least the last 12,000 years roughly in its current form, makes one perceive time differently. The daily toing and froing of the sheep at the foot of the mountain, going into pasture in the valley shaded by the mountain in the morning and to the plains in front in the evening, seem so miniscule in comparison. Yet these are dictated by the mountain, the shade it provides and the boulder-strewn scree slopes the sheep have to navigate. From another angle, the Icelandic Meteorological Office has mea sured and made sense of the mountain in terms of avalanche risk, and thus Figure 2.1 Ernir mountain, from Hóll 3 in Bolungarvík, NW Iceland Source: Picture, E. Huijbens, 18 July, 2019.
- 52. Mumbling mud 37 Figure 2.2 Snow avalanche evacuation map of Bolungarvík Source: ©Veðurstofa Íslands, 2007, with permission from the Icelandic Meteorological Office. it, along with other mountains around the town of Bolungarvík, set the terms for the town’s growth and expansion (Figure 2.2), expressed in very physical terms now by the built-in snow avalanche barriers. Now the mountain Ernir does not care about any of this per se. It is not deliberating the parameters of our being. Yet as Aldo Leopold so beauti fully put it ‘Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.’6 As I understand this statement, it is only with time that you can start to appreciate the fluidity and perishability of all form and all that is. The mountain ‘knows’ that the wolf’s howl is a mere ephemera of an ephemeral being that will take on other forms, with time. Starting to gauge these depths of time, the interconnectedness of all things starts to emerge in one’s mind. As Michel Serres would have it: ‘Behind the few hundred tiers of short-schemed history unfurl millions of levels in which the entire Universe enters into time.’7 These emergent moments are difficult to capture and describe and I most certainly am not a novelist nor a poet, who can jolt the mind with an acute agility of prose. I will simply rely on relatively straightforward stories, which I hope can convey this experience of ‘Timefulness’ as Marcia Bjornerud called it.8 And also, for the very same reasons, Bjornerud writes about how—in ‘How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World’—through an understanding and appreciation of earthly rhythms, mountains, and the earth for that matter, are given their ‘objective’ stance.
- 53. 38 Mumbling mud Now before plumbing the depths of time through my narratives from Ice land to reveal the malleability of form and yet our anchoring in it, one thought needs to be added. Namely, that the earthly rhythms of mountains do not have to span eons. What does indeed set Iceland somewhat apart from most places in the world is the very dynamic character of its landscapes, through active volcanism and viscous glaciers. In the ‘land of ice and fire,’ as the tourist image would like to have it, even mountains tend to visibly shrug.9 Whilst Ernir and the fissures that created it have long since moved from the centre of volcanic activity through plate tectonics, Iceland is still in the making, where the two tectonic plates of the North Atlantic diverge. The anthropologist Gísli Pálsson grounds this ever-present geoforcefulness in his semi-auto biographical account of the Westman Islands. He explains how mountains shrugging, new mountains forming and islands emerging there in 1963 and 1973, transformed the livelihood and landscapes of the inhabitants. The uprooting of their earthly attachments through landscape dynamics explains the ensuing ‘solastalgia’10 partially present in his account, but moreover goes a long way to explain how we make sense of ourselves through our surroundings, that we incorporate mountains, literally and fig uratively. To help gain ways to recognise this process, I would like to con tribute my own narratives to make for an inclusive yet muddy ontological politics of our earthly entanglements. One that allows for a range of voices, knowledges, histories and ways of being, along with the material surround ings. These can be the voices of trees, mountains, wolves and bees as they can be heard, perceived and represented. I will visit these again in Chapter 4. But the ultimate substrate, that needs to be foregrounded in these entanglements, is the Earth itself. From the Earth In 1972, the crew of Apollo 17, on its way to the moon, looked back and snapped a picture of the Earth later to be called The Blue Marble. This moment, dubbed ‘cosmic birth’ in a recent documentary celebrating 50 years since the US landed a man on the moon,11 is about grasping the planet in its entirety and indeed features repeatedly in the literature on our current environmental predicament. As I understand this, the Earth emerged then in the minds of those extending the colonising project of the Americas to the moon12 as a graspable entity bringing issues of global challenges to the fore, in particular the fact that this is indeed humanity’s communal home and there is no other.13 Upon the Earth’s crust and up to around 5,800 metres above sea level, the global human population has managed to sustain itself and provide a habitat.14 This ‘critical zone’15 is the only place in the universe we know we can inhabit in such a way and conditions in this biosphere have remained relatively stable since the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago. Arguably the International Geophysical Year of 1957/58 represented the first major step in thinking about the Earth as a single, dynamic and
- 54. Mumbling mud 39 interconnected system, bound up with a sense of growing geopolitical integration as processes of globalisation picked up pace.16 But we have been slower to grasp the paradox that the very configura tion of the earth into a single, integrated system in the newly dynamic earth sciences has been the condition of a more dis-integrated, fractious and multiple vision of the planet (Clark, 2016).17 Indeed, although we can see the Earth as this communal habitable ball in the image, we can never grasp it in its entirety. Such a totalizing gaze and the very idea of universal scalability remain instantiations of a fundamentally modern conception of space, rather than being something genuinely new. After all, scaling is not merely a strategy for representing the world, but rather a fundamental mode of producing it.18 Regardless of these means of production, the Earth itself always has ways of evading. It always already has a multiplicity of possible states. Our con ceptual capacity cannot make sense of the planet and all that goes on there at each given moment in time, much less grasp how all those ongoings are related and link up to form a global ecosystem, or what James Lovelock termed ‘Gaia.’19 Only by moving to space we can sense a grasping of a whole, as the philosopher Michel Serres put it: Flying high enough to see her whole, we find ourselves tethered to her by the totality of our knowledge, the sum of our technologies, the collection of our communications; by torrents of signals, by the complete set of imaginable umbilical cords, living and artificial, visible and invisible, concrete or purely formal. By casting off from her from so far, we pull on these cords to the point that we comprehend them all. Astronaut humanity is floating in space like a fetus in amniotic fluid, tied to the placenta of Mother-Earth by all the nutritive passages.20 Grounded, or on the Earth, we can never play this trick. The Earth, being ‘in-visible’ in this sense, reveals itself through a continual game of peek-a boo. It makes itself sensed, felt, observed and grasped in short bursts or fleeting instances that never allow for a holistic grasping. Grasping the earth through relating to blurting mud pots is no more possible than grasping the meaning of eternity or infinity through a moment’s epiphany. So, in that sense the Earth resides in the hyphen, that which I deliberately place between ‘in’ and ‘visible’ and as goes with hyphens, by themselves they are really nothing. ‘[C]arving out a s(ed)uctive black (w)hole in the Order of Things,’21 the Earth emerges as void, where we can always query its purpose and intent, but never get any answers or definitions beyond those our own choices and decisions bring us. As the philosopher Páll Skúlason remarks:
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- 56. yo quedé en el camino con aquellos dos que fueron tan grandes generales del mundo. Cuando estuvo tan retirado de nosotros, que mis ojos no podían seguirle, así como tampoco podía mi mente alcanzar el sentido de sus palabras, observé no muy lejos las ramas frescas y cargadas de frutas de otro manzano, por haberme vuelto entonces hacia aquel lado. Y vi debajo de él muchas almas que alzaban las manos y gritaban no sé qué en dirección del follaje, como los niños que, codiciando impotentes alguna cosa, la piden sin que aquel a quien ruegan les responda, y antes al contrario, para excitar más sus deseos, tiene elevado y sin ocultar lo que causa su anhelo. Después se marcharon como desengañadas, y nosotros nos acercamos entonces al gran árbol, que rechaza tantos ruegos y tantas lágrimas. "Pasad adelante sin aproximaros: más arriba existe otro árbol, cuyo fruto fué mordido por Eva, y éste es un retoño de aquél." Así decía no sé quién entre las ramas; por lo cual Virgilio, Estacio y yo seguimos adelante, estrechándonos cuanto pudimos hacia el lado en que se eleva el monte. "Acordaos, decía la voz, de los malditos formados en las nubes, que, repletos, combatieron a Teseo con sus dobles pechos[83]. Acordaos de los hebreos, que mostraron al beber su molicie, por lo que Gedeón no los quiso por compañeros cuando descendió de las colinas cerca de Madián." De este modo, arrimados a una de las orillas, pasamos adelante, oyendo diferentes ejemplos del pecado de la gula, seguidos de las miserables consecuencias de aquel vicio. Después, entrando nuevamente en medio del camino desierto, nos adelantamos mil pasos y aun más, reflexionando cada cual y sin hablar. "¿Qué vais pensando vosotros tres solos?", dijo de improviso una voz, que me hizo estremecer, como sucede a los animales tímidos y asustadizos. Levanté la cabeza para ver quién fuese, y jamás se vieron en un horno vidrios o metales tan luminosos y rojos como lo estaba uno que decía: "Si queréis llegar hasta arriba, es preciso que deis aquí la vuelta: por aquí va el que quiere ir en paz." Su aspecto me había deslumbrado la vista; por lo cual me volví, siguiendo a mis Doctores a la manera de quien se guía por lo que escucha. Y sentí que me daba en medio de la frente
- 57. un viento, como sopla y embalsama el ambiente la brisa de Mayo, mensajera del alba, impregnada con el aroma de las plantas y flores; y bien sentí moverse la pluma, que me hizo percibir el perfume de la ambrosía, oyendo decir: "Bienaventurados aquellos a quienes ilumina tanta gracia, que la inclinación a comer no enciende en sus corazones desmesurados deseos, y sólo tienen el hambre que es razonable."
- 58. CANTO VIGESIMOQUINTO RA la hora en que no debía demorarse nuestra subida, pues el sol había dejado el círculo meridional al Tauro, y la noche al Escorpión: por lo cual, así como el hombre a quien estimula el aguijón de la necesidad, no se detiene por nada que encuentre, sino que sigue su camino, de igual suerte entramos nosotros por la abertura del peñasco, uno delante de otro, tomando la escalera, que por su angostura obliga a separarse a los que la suben. Y como la joven cigüeña que extiende sus alas deseosa de volar, y no atreviéndose a abandonar el nido, las pliega nuevamente, lo mismo hacía yo llevado de un ardiente deseo de preguntar, que se inflamaba y se extinguía, hasta que llegué a hacer el ademán del que se prepara a hablar. A pesar de lo rápido de nuestra marcha, mi amado Padre no dejó de decirme: —Dispara el arco de la palabra, que tienes tirante hasta el hierro. Entonces abrí la boca con seguridad, y empecé a decir:
- 59. —¿Cómo es posible enflaquecer donde no hay necesidad de alimentarse? —Si te acordaras de cómo se consumió Meleagre al consumirse un tizón—respondió—, no te sería ahora tan difícil comprender esto; y si considerases cómo, al moveros, se mueve vuestra imagen dentro del espejo, te parecería blando lo que te parece duro. Mas para que tu deseo quede satisfecho, aquí tienes a Estacio, a quien pido y suplico que sea el médico de tus heridas. —Si estando tú presente, le descubro los arcanos de la eterna justicia—respondió Estacio—, sírvame de disculpa el no poder negarte nada. Luego empezó diciendo: —Hijo, si tu mente recibe y guarda mis palabras, ellas te darán luz sobre el punto de que hablas. La sangre más pura, que nunca es absorbida por las sedientas venas y que sobra, como el resto de los alimentos que se retiran de la mesa, adquiere en el corazón una virtud tan apta para formar todos los miembros humanos, como la que tiene para transformarse en ellos la que va por las venas. Todavía más depurada, desciende a un punto que es mejor callar que nombrar, de donde se destila después sobre la sangre de otro ser en vaso natural. Aquí se mezclan las dos, la una dispuesta a recibir la impresión, la otra a producirla por efecto de la perfección del lugar de que procede; y apenas están juntas, la sangre viril empieza desde luego a operar, coagulando primero, y vivificando en seguida lo que ha hecho unírsele como materia propia. Convertida la virtud activa en alma, como la de una planta, pero con la diferencia de que aquélla está en vías de formación, mientras que la otra ha llegado ya a su término, continúa obrando de tal modo, que luego se mueve y siente como la esponja marina, y en seguida emprende la organización de las potencias, de la cual es el germen. Hijo mío, la virtud que procede del corazón del padre, y desde la cual atiende la naturaleza a todos los miembros, ora se ensancha, y ora se prolonga; mas no ves todavía cómo el feto, de animal pasa a ser
- 60. racional: este punto es tal, que uno más sabio que tú incurrió con su doctrina en el error de separar del alma el intelecto posible, porque no vió que éste tuviese ningún órgano especial adecuado a sus funciones. Abre tu corazón a la verdad que te presento, y sabe que, en cuanto está concluído el organismo del cerebro del feto, el Primer Motor se dirige placentero hacia aquella obra maestra de la naturaleza, y le infunde un nuevo espíritu, lleno de virtud, que atrae a su substancia lo que allí encuentra de activo, y se convierte en un alma sola, que vive, y siente, y se refleja sobre sí misma: a fin de que te causen menos admiración mis palabras, considera el calor del Sol, que se transforma en vino, uniéndose al humor que sale de la vid. Cuando Laquesis no tiene ya lino, el alma se separa del cuerpo, llevándose virtualmente consigo sus potencias divinas y humanas: todas las facultades sensitivas quedan como mudas; pero la memoria, el entendimiento y la voluntad son en su acción mucho más sutiles que antes. Sin detenerse, el alma llega maravillosamente por sí misma a una de las orillas, donde conoce el camino que le está reservado. En cuanto se encuentra circunscrita en él, la virtud informativa irradia en torno, del mismo modo que cuando vivía en sus miembros; y así como el aire, cuando el tiempo está lluvioso, se presenta adornado de distintos colores por los rayos del Sol que en él se reflejan, de igual suerte el aire de alrededor toma la forma que le imprime virtualmente el alma que está allí detenida; y semejante después a la llama que sigue en todos sus movimientos al fuego, la nueva forma va siguiendo al espíritu. Por fin, como el alma toma de esto su apariencia, se le llama sombra, y en esa forma organiza luego cada uno de sus sentidos, hasta el de la vista. En virtud de este cuerpo aéreo hablamos, reímos, derramamos lágrimas y suspiramos, como habrás podido observar por el monte. Según como los deseos y los demás afectos nos impresionan, la sombra toma diferentes figuras: tal es la causa de lo que te admira. Habíamos llegado ya al círculo de la última tortura, y nos dirigíamos hacia la derecha, cuando llamó nuestra atención otro cuidado. Allí la ladera de la montaña lanza llamas con ímpetu hacia el exterior, y la orilla opuesta del camino da paso a un viento que, dirigiéndose hacia
- 61. arriba, la rechaza y aleja de sí. Por esta razón nos era preciso caminar de uno en uno por el lado descubierto del camino, de modo que si, por una parte, me causaba temor el fuego, por otra temía despeñarme. Mi Jefe decía: —En este sitio es preciso refrenar bien los ojos, porque muy poco bastaría para dar un mal paso. Entonces oí cantar en el seno de aquel gran ardor: "Summæ Deus clementiæ"[84]; lo cual excitó en mí un deseo no menos ardiente de volverme, y vi a varios espíritus andando por la llama: yo les miraba, pero fijando alternativamente la vista, ya en sus pasos, ya en los míos. Después de la última estrofa de aquel himno, gritaron en voz alta: "Virum non cognosco"[85]; y en seguida volvieron a entonarlo en voz baja. Terminado el himno, gritaron aún: "Diana corrió al bosque, y arrojó de él a Hélice, que había gustado el veneno de Venus." Repetían su canto, y citaban después ejemplos de mujeres y maridos que fueron castos, como lo exigen la virtud y el matrimonio. Y de este modo, según creo, continuarán durante todo el tiempo que los abrase el fuego; pues con tal remedio y tales ejercicios ha de cicatrizarse la última llaga.
- 62. CANTO VIGESIMOSEXTO IENTRAS que uno tras otro íbamos por el borde del camino, el buen Maestro decía muchas veces: "Mira, y ten cuidado, pues ya estás advertido." Daba en mi hombro derecho el Sol, que irradiando por todo el Occidente, cambiaba en blanco su color azulado. Con mi sombra hacía parecer más roja la llama, y aquí también vi muchas almas que, andando, fijaban su atención en tal indicio. Con este motivo se pusieron a hablar de mí, y empezaron a decir: "Parece que éste no tenga un cuerpo ficticio." Después se cercioraron, aproximándose a mí cuanto podían, pero siempre con el cuidado de no salir adonde no ardieran. —¡Oh tú, que vas en pos de los otros, no por ser el más lento, sino quizá por respeto!, respóndeme a mí, a quien abrasan la sed y el fuego. No soy yo el único que necesita tu respuesta, pues todos éstos tienen mayor sed, que deseo de agua fresca el Indio y el Etíope. Dinos: ¿cómo es que formas con tu cuerpo un muro que se
- 63. antepone al Sol, cual si no hubieras caído aún en las redes de la muerte? Así me hablaba una de aquellas sombras, y yo me habría explicado en el acto, si no hubiese atraído mi atención otra novedad que apareció entonces. Por el centro del camino inflamado venía una multitud de almas con el rostro vuelto hacia las primeras, lo cual me hizo contemplarlas asombrado. Por ambas partes vi apresurarse todas las sombras, y besarse unas a otras, sin detenerse, y contentándose con tan breve agasajo; semejantes a las hormigas, que en medio de sus pardas hileras, van a encontrarse cara a cara, quizá para darse noticias de su viaje o de su botín. Una vez terminado el amistoso saludo, y antes de dar el primer paso, cada una de ellas se ponía a gritar con todas sus fuerzas, las recién llegadas: "Sodoma y Gomorra," y las otras: "En la vaca entró Pasifae, para que el toro acudiera a su lujuria." Después, como grullas que dirigiesen su vuelo, parte hacia los montes Rifeos, y parte hacia las ardientes arenas, huyendo éstas del hielo, y aquéllas del Sol, así unas almas se iban y otras venían, volviendo a entonar entre lágrimas sus primeros cantos, y a decir a gritos lo que más necesitaban. Como anteriormente, se acercaron a mí las mismas almas que me habían preguntado, atentas y prontas a escucharme. Yo, que dos veces había visto su deseo, empecé a decir: —¡Oh almas seguras de llegar algún día al estado de paz! Mis miembros no han quedado allá verdes ni maduros, sino que están aquí conmigo, con su sangre y con sus coyunturas. De este modo voy arriba, a fin de no ser ciego nunca más: sobre nosotros existe una mujer, que alcanza para mí esta gracia por la cual llevo por vuestra mundo mi cuerpo mortal. Pero decidme, ¡así se logre en breve vuestro mayor deseo, y os acoja el cielo que está más lleno de amor y por más ancho espacio se dilata! Decidme, a fin de que yo pueda ponerlo por escrito, ¿quiénes sois, y quién es aquella turba que se va en dirección contraria a la vuestra? No de otra suerte se turba estupefacto el montañés, y enmudece absorto, cuando, rudo y salvaje, entra en una ciudad, de como
- 64. pareció turbarse cada una de aquellas sombras: pero repuestas de su estupor, el cual se calma pronto en los corazones elevados, empezó a decirme la que anteriormente me había preguntado: —¡Dichoso tú, que sacas de nuestra actual mansión experiencia para vivir mejor! Las almas que no vienen con nosotros cometieron el pecado por el que César, en medio de su triunfo, oyó que se burlaban de él y le llamaban reina. Por esto se alejan gritando "Sodoma;" y reprendiéndose a sí mismos, como has oído, añaden al fuego que les abrasa el que les produce su vergüenza. Nuestro pecado fué hermafrodita; pero no habiendo observado la ley humana, y sí seguido nuestro apetito al modo de las bestias, por eso, al separarnos de los otros, gritamos para oprobio nuestro el nombre de aquélla, que se bestializó en una envoltura bestial. Ya conoces nuestras acciones y el delito que cometimos: si por nuestros nombres quieres conocer quiénes somos, ni sabré decírtelos, ni tengo tiempo para ello. Satisfaré, sin embargo, tu deseo diciéndote el mío: soy Guido Guinicelli, que me purifico ya por haberme arrepentido antes de mi última hora. Como corrieron hacia su madre los dos hijos al encontrarla bajo las tristes iras de Licurgo, así me lancé yo, pero sin atreverme a tanto, cuando escuché nombrarse a sí mismo a mi padre, y al mejor de todos los míos que jamás hicieron rimas de amor dulces y floridas; y sin oír hablar, anduve pensativo largo trecho, contemplándolo, aunque sin poder acercarme más a causa del fuego. Cuando me harté de mirarle, me ofrecí de todo corazón a su servicio con aquellos juramentos que hacen creer en las promesas. Me contestó: —Dejas en mí, por lo que oigo, una huella tan profunda y clara, que el Leteo no puede borrarla ni obscurecerla: pero si tus palabras han jurado la verdad, dime, ¿cuál es la causa del cariño que me demuestras en tus frases y en tus miradas? Le contesté:
- 65. —Vuestras dulces rimas, que harán preciosos los manuscritos que las contienen, tanto como dure el lenguaje moderno. —¡Oh hermano!—replicó—; éste que te señalo con el dedo[86] (e indicó un espíritu que iba delante de él), fué mejor obrero en su lengua materna. Sobrepujó a todos en sus versos amorosos y en la prosa de sus novelas; y deja hablar a los necios, que creen que el Lemosín[87] es mejor que él; prestan más atención al ruido que a la verdad, y así forman su juicio antes de dar oídos al arte o la razón. Lo mismo hicieron muchos de los antiguos con respecto a Guittone, colocándole, merced a sus gritos, en el primer lugar, hasta que lo ha vencido la verdad con los méritos adquiridos por otras personas. Ahora, si tienes el alto privilegio de poder penetrar en el claustro donde Cristo es abad del colegio, díle por mí del "Padre nuestro" todo lo que necesitamos nosotros los habitantes de este mundo, en el que ya no tenemos el poder de pecar. Luego, tal vez para hacer sitio a otro que venía en pos de él, desapareció entre el fuego, como desaparece el pez en el fondo del agua. Yo me adelanté un poco hacia el que me había designado, y le dije que mi deseo preparaba a su nombre una grata acogida: él empezó a decir donosamente: —Me complace tanto vuestra cortés pregunta, que ni puedo ni quiero ocultarme a vos: yo soy Arnaldo, que lloro y voy cantando: veo, triste, mis pasadas locuras, y veo, contento, el día que en adelante me espera. Ahora os ruego, por esa virtud que os conduce a lo más alto de la escala, que os acordéis de endulzar mi dolor. Después se ocultó en el fuego que les purifica.
- 67. CANTO VIGESIMOSEPTIMO L Sol estaba ya en aquel punto desde donde lanza sus primeros rayos sobre la ciudad en que se derramó la sangre de su Hacedor: el Ebro caía bajo el alto signo de Libra, y las ondas del Ganges eran caldeadas al empezar la hora de nona; de modo que donde estábamos terminaba el día, cuando nos divisó placentero el Angel de Dios, que apartado de la llama se puso en la orilla a cantar: "Beati mundo corde," en voz bastante más viva que la nuestra. Después dijo: —No se sigue adelante, almas santas, si el fuego no os muerde antes: entrad en él, y no os hagáis sordas al cántico que llegará hasta vosotras. Así habló cuando estuvimos cerca de él, por lo que me quedé al oirle como aquel que es metido en la fosa. Elevé mis manos entrelazadas mirando al fuego, y se representaron vivamente en mi imaginación
- 68. los cuerpos humanos que había visto arder. Mis buenos Guías se volvieron hacia mí, y Virgilio me dijo: —Hijo mío, aquí puedes encontrar un tormento; pero no la muerte. Acuérdate, acuérdate... y si te guié sano y salvo sobre Gerión, ¿qué no haré ahora que estoy más cerca de Dios? Ten por cierto que, aunque estuvieras mil años en medio de esa llama, no perderías un solo cabello; y si acaso crees que te engaño, ponte cerca de ella, y como prueba, aproxima con tus manos al fuego la orla de tu ropaje. Depón, pues, depón todo temor; vuélvete hacia aquí, y pasa adelante con seguridad. Yo, sin embargo, permanecí inmóvil aun en contra de mi conciencia. Cuando vió que me estaba quieto y reacio, repuso algo turbado: —Hijo mío, repara en que entre Beatriz y tú sólo existe ese obstáculo. Así como al oír el nombre de Tisbe, Piramo, cercano a la muerte, abrió los ojos y la contempló bajo la morera, que desde entonces echó frutos rojos, así yo, vencida mi obstinación, me dirigí hacia mi sabio Guía, al oír el nombre que siempre está en mi mente. Entonces él, moviendo la cabeza, dijo: —¡Cómo! ¿Queremos permanecer aquí? Y se sonrió, como se sonríe al niño a quien se conquista con una fruta. Después se metió en el fuego el primero, rogando a Estacio, que durante todo el camino se había interpuesto entre ambos, que viniese detrás de mí. Cuando estuve dentro, habríame arrojado, para refrescarme, en medio del vidrio hirviendo; tan desmesurado era el ardor que allí se sentía. Mi dulce Padre, para animarme, continuaba hablando de Beatriz y diciendo: "Ya me parece ver sus ojos." Nos guiaba una voz que cantaba al otro lado; y nosotros, atentos solamente a ella, salimos del fuego por el sitio donde está la subida. —"Venite, benedicti patris mei"—se oyó en medio de una luz que allí había, tan resplandeciente que me ofuscó y no la pude mirar.—El Sol
- 69. se va—añadió—, y viene la noche; no os detengáis, sino acelerad el paso antes que el horizonte se obscurezca. El sendero subía recto a través de la peña hacia el Oriente, y yo interrumpía delante de mí los rayos del Sol, que ya estaba muy bajo. Habíamos subido pocos escalones, cuando mis sabios Guías y yo, por mi sombra que se desvanecía, observamos que tras de nosotros se ocultaba el Sol; y antes de que en toda su inmensa extensión tomara el horizonte el mismo aspecto, y de que la noche se esparciera por todas partes, cada uno de nosotros hizo de un escalón su lecho; porque la naturaleza del monte, más bien que nuestro deseo, nos impedía subir. Como las cabras que antes de haber satisfecho su apetito van veloces y atrevidas por los picos de los montes, y una vez saciado éste, se quedan rumiando tranquilas a la sombra, mientras el Sol quema, guardadas por el pastor, que, apoyado en su cayado, cuida de ellas; y como el pastor que se queda fuera y pernocta cerca de su rebaño, para preservarlo de que lo disperse alguna bestia feroz, así estábamos entonces nosotros tres, yo como cabra, y ellos como pastores, estrechados por los dos lados de aquella abertura. Poco alcanzaba nuestra vista de las cosas que había fuera de allí; pero por aquel reducido espacio veía yo las estrellas más claras y mayores de lo acostumbrado. Rumiando de esta suerte y contemplándolas me sorprendió el sueño; el sueño que muchas veces predice lo que ha de sobrevenir. En la hora, según creo, en que Citerea, que parece siempre abrasada por el fuego del amor, lanzaba desde Oriente sus primeros rayos sobre la montaña, me parecía ver entre sueños una mujer joven y bella, que iba cogiendo flores por una pradera, y decía cantando: "Sepa todo aquel que preguntó mi nombre, que yo soy Lía, y voy extendiendo en torno mis bellas manos para formarme una guirnalda. Para agradarme delante del espejo, me adorno aquí; pero mi hermana Raquel no se separa jamás del suyo, y permanece todo el día sentada ante él. A ella le gusta contemplar sus hermosos ojos, como a mí adornarme con mis propias manos: ella se satisface con mirar, yo con obrar." Ya, ante los esplendores que preceden al día, tanto más gratos a los peregrinos, cuanto más cerca de su patria se
- 70. albergan al volver a ella, huían por todas partes las tinieblas, y con ellas mi sueño; por lo cual me levanté, y vi a mis grandes Maestros levantados también. La dulce fruta que por tantas ramas va buscando la solicitud de los mortales, hoy calmará tu hambre. Tales fueron las palabras que me dirigió Virgilio; palabras que me causaron un placer como no lo ha causado jamás regalo alguno. Acrecentóse tanto en mí el deseo de llegar a la cima del monte, que a cada paso que daba sentía crecer alas para mi vuelo. Cuando, recorrida toda la escalera, estuvimos en la última grada, Virgilio fijó en mí sus ojos y dijo: —Has visto el fuego temporal y el eterno, hijo mío, y has llegado a un sitio donde no puedo ver nada más por mí mismo. Con ingenio y con arte te he conducido hasta aquí: en adelante sírvate de guía tu voluntad; fuera estás de los caminos escarpados y de las estrechuras; mira el Sol que brilla en tu frente; mira la hierba, las flores, los arbustos, que se producen solamente en esta tierra. Mientras no vengan radiantes de alegría los hermosos ojos que, entre lágrimas, me hicieron acudir en tu socorro, puedes sentarte, y puedes pasear entre esas flores. No esperes ya mis palabras, ni mis consejos: tu albedrío es ya libre, recto y sano, y sería una falta no obrar según lo que él te dicte. Así, pues, ensalzándote sobre ti mismo, te corono y te mitro.[88]
- 71. CANTO VIGESIMOCTAVO ESEOSO ya de observar en su interior y en sus contornos la divina floresta espesa y viva, que amortiguaba la luz del nuevo día, dejé sin esperar más el borde del monte y marché lentamente a través del campo, cuyo suelo por todas partes despedía gratos aromas. Un aura blanda e invariable me oreaba la frente con no mayor fuerza que la de un viento suave: a su impulso, todas las verdes frondas se inclinaban trémulas hacia el lado a que proyecta su primera sombra el sagrado monte; pero sin separarse tanto de su derechura, que las avecillas dejaran por esta causa de ejercitar su arte sobre las copas de los árboles, pues antes bien, llenas de alegría, saludaban a las primeras auras, cantando entre las hojas, que acompañaban a sus ritmos haciendo el bajo, con un susurro semejante al que de rama en rama va creciendo en los pinares del llano de Chiassi, cuando Eolo deja escapar el Sirocco. Ya me habían transportado mis lentos pasos tan adentro de la antigua selva, que no podía distinguir el sitio por donde había
- 72. entrado, cuando vi interceptado mi camino por un riachuelo, que corriendo hacia la izquierda, doblegaba bajo el peso de pequeñas linfas las hierbas que brotaban en sus orillas. Las aguas que en la tierra se tienen por más puras, parecerían turbias comparadas con aquellas, que no ocultan nada, aunque corran obscurecidas bajo una perpetua sombra, que no da paso nunca a los rayos del Sol ni de la Luna. Detuve mis pasos, y atravesé con la vista aquel riachuelo, para admirar la gran variedad de sus frescas arboledas, cuando se me apareció, como aparece súbitamente una cosa maravillosa que desvía de nuestra mente todo otro pensamiento, una mujer sola, que iba cantando y cogiendo flores de las muchas de que estaba esmaltado todo su camino. —¡Ah!, hermosa Dama, que te abrasas en los rayos de Amor, si he de dar crédito al semblante que suele ser testimonio del corazón; dígnate adelantarte—le dije—hacia este riachuelo, lo bastante para que pueda comprender qué es lo que cantas. Tú traes a mi memoria el sitio donde estaba Proserpina, y cómo era cuando la perdió su madre, y ella perdió sus lozanas flores. Así como bailando se vuelve una mujer, con los pies juntos y arrimados al suelo, poniendo apenas uno delante de otro, de igual suerte se volvió aquélla hacia mí sobre las florecillas rojas y amarillas, semejante a una virgen que inclina sus modestos ojos, y satisfizo mis súplicas aproximándose tanto, que llegaba hasta mí la dulce armonía de su canto, y sus palabras claras y distintas. Luego que se detuvo en el sitio donde las hierbas son bañadas por las ondas del lindo riachuelo, me concedió el favor de levantar sus ojos. No creo que saliera tal resplandor bajo las cejas de Venus, cuando su hijo la hirió inconsideradamente. Ella se sonreía desde la orilla derecha, cogiendo mientras tanto las flores que aquella elevada tierra produce sin necesidad de simiente. El río nos separaba a la distancia de tres pasos; pero el Helesponto por donde pasó Jerjes, cuyo ejemplo sirve aún de freno a todo orgullo humano, no fué tan odioso a Leandro, por el impetuoso movimiento de sus aguas entre Sestos y Abydos, como lo era aquél para mí por no abrirme paso.
- 73. —Sois recién llegados—dijo ella—; y quizá porque me sonrío en este sitio escogido para nido de la humana naturaleza, os causo asombro y hasta alguna sospecha; pero el salmo "Delectasti" esparce una luz que puede disipar las nubes de vuestro entendimiento. Y tú, que vas delante y me has rogado que hable, dime si quieres oír otra cosa, que yo responderé con presteza a todas tus preguntas hasta dejarte satisfecho. —El agua—le dije—y el rumor de la floresta impugnan en mi interior una nueva creencia sobre una cosa que he oído y que es contraria a esta. A lo que ella contestó: —Te diré cómo procede de su causa eso que te admira, y disiparé la nube que te ciega. El Sumo Bien, que se complace sólo en sí mismo, hizo al hombre bueno y apto para el bien, y le dió este sitio como arras en señal de eterna paz. El hombre, por sus culpas, permaneció aquí poco tiempo: por sus culpas cambió su honesta risa y su dulce pasatiempo en llanto y en tristeza. A fin de que todas las conmociones producidas más abajo por las exhalaciones del agua y de la tierra, que se dirigen cuanto pueden tras del calor, no molestasen al hombre, se elevó este monte hacia el cielo tanto como has visto, y está libre de todas ellas desde el punto donde se cierra su puerta. Ahora bien, como el aire gira en torno de la tierra con la primera bóveda movible del cielo, si el círculo no es interrumpido por algún punto, un movimiento semejante viene a repercutir en esta altura, que está libre de toda perturbación en medio del aire puro, produciendo este ruido en la selva, porque es espesa; y la planta sacudida comunica su propia virtud generativa al aire, el cual girando en torno deposita dicha virtud en el suelo; y la otra tierra, según que es apta por sí misma o por su cielo, concibe y produce diversos árboles de diferentes especies. Una vez oído esto, no te parecerá ya maravilloso que haya plantas que broten sin semillas aparentes. Debes saber, además, que la santa campiña en que te encuentras está llena de toda clase de semillas, y encierra frutos que allá abajo no se cogen. El agua que ves no brota de ninguna vena
- 74. que sea renovada por los vapores que el frío del cielo convierte en lluvia, como un río que adquiere o pierde caudal, sino que sale de una fuente invariable y segura, que recibe de la voluntad de Dios cuanto derrama por dos partes. Por esta desciende con una virtud que borra la memoria del pecado; por la otra renueva la de toda buena acción. Aquí se llama Leteo; en el otro lado, Eunoe; y no produce sus efectos si no se bebe aquí primero que allí: su sabor supera a todos los demás. Aunque tu sed esté ya bastante mitigada sin necesidad de más explicaciones mías, por una gracia especial, aún te daré un corolario; y no creo que mis palabras te sean menos gratas, si por ti exceden a mis promesas. Los que antiguamente fingieron la edad de oro y su estado feliz, quizá soñaron en el Parnaso este sitio. Aquí fué inocente el origen de la raza humana; aquí la primavera y los frutos son eternos: este es el verdadero néctar de que todos hablan. Entonces me volví completamente hacia mis Poetas y vi que habían acogido con una sonrisa esta última explicación: después dirigí de nuevo mis ojos hacia la bella Dama.
- 75. CANTO VIGESIMONONO ESPUES de aquellas últimas palabras, continuó cantando cual mujer enamorada: "Beati, quorum tecta sunt peccata"[89]: y a la manera de las ninfas, que andaban solas por las umbrías selvas, complaciéndose unas en huír del Sol, y otras en verle, púsose a caminar por la orilla contra la corriente del río; y yo al igual de ella, seguí sus cortos pasos con los míos. Entre los dos no habíamos aún adelantado ciento, cuando las dos riberas equidistantes presentaron una curva, de tal modo que me encontré vuelto hacia Oriente. A poco de andar así, volvióse la Dama enteramente a mí, diciendo: "Hermano mío, mira y escucha." Y he aquí que por todas partes iluminó la selva un resplandor tan súbito, que dudé si había sido un relámpago; mas como éste desaparece en cuanto brilla, y aquél duraba cada vez más resplandeciente, decía yo entre mí: "¿Qué será esto?" Circulaba por el luminoso aire una dulce melodía, por lo cual mi buen celo me hizo censurar el atrevimiento de Eva; pues que allí, donde obedecían la tierra y el cielo, una mujer
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