THE PETRIFIED
The cats are all over the place: out on the streets, in the garden, at the door. They have a semi-domestic existence, they depend on us, but then they behave as though our presence is irrelevant. For now, my co-existence with a non-human being appears to be limited to these cats around. Every now and then a hedgehog appears out of nowhere, varied birds fly over, or sometimes come close. But then, my ‘world’ is always haunted by the vanishing of millions of members of species that I have not seen yet. The ‘away’ that we dump human detritus in anthropocene, the temporal ‘far away’ that we realize our own mortality to be is where non-human beings perish by the millions.
That is why we are haunted by the ghost species, 70 percent of whose population had been wiped out in the past 50 years, while the biomass of livestock on earth exceeds that of humans by a factor of two. Eating carcass aside, the long lineage of life-forms from charismatic mammals to bacteria contaminates one’s apprehension of ‘nature’. As Timothy Morton writes, we should altogether get rid of the term and call it the symbiotic real. The tree of life and the immensely fractal gradation of beings from simple to complex are like the electro-magnetic spectrum of visible light: you never know where green ends and yellow begins. When there are no quantum leaps, all life is sentient.
Perhaps the real problem is not what mystical powers we moderns attribute to ‘animals in nature’, but to the complex relation of humankind and non human beings in deep history. Observing from the Chauvet cave to Göbeklitepe and after, we had constructed the illusion that humankind had an equal footing with animals in a kind of fusion of souls, in an enchanted world. That the human gaze had been reciprocated as if the animal had returned the look on an equal footing. And that the superior trait of each animal had been transferred to the human in ritual: in death the humankind and the non-human became fused.
The question is not what we see at Göbeklitepe (even though almost all of the members of species in stone had disappeared) but what we do not: the silent disappearence of millions of invisible species, some even before they were ‘discovered’: the ghosts that haunt the humankind. The latent evil that the ‘pastoralists’ and ‘nature lovers’ find hard to comprehend is the ‘human nature’. To call it capitalocene instead of anthropocene does not solve the problem. One’s awe in front of all the ‘still-lives’ in the museums of natural history can only evoke one’s short term survival as a spectator.
Around fifteen years ago, Göbeklitepe of tenth millenium BC. supposedly matched the description of eden out of the sacred texts, like a collective fantasy. Around Urfa, the barren hills with sometimes a solitary tree keep generating the gardens (of eden) out of stone, the real stuff of life. The stones predict the destiny of souls and loneliness of beings…
November, 2022