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The following article is an attempt to understand the correlation between natural processes and writing. I was introduced to the topics and texts by a number of people during the past year. In that engaging process an underlying, unspeakable, assumption started to appear, a speculative hypothesis. It encouraged me to investigate the possible consequences of the global, economical, ecological collapse; that these processes of disintegration might continue to break down the boundaries between humans, and our environment.
In the acknowledgements of his most recent novel Satin Island (2015), Tom McCarthy causally mentions that gazing at images of oil spills for days on end inspired him to write his book; a novel about the disenchanted attempts of a modern day anthropologist who works for The Company whilst ‘feeding vanguard theory back into the corporate machine’. Throughout Satin Island, the anthropologist becomes very excited about the possibility of a ‘present-tense anthropology’, and so did I. It would be an ‘anthropology that bathed in presence, and in nowness – bathed in it as in a deep, bubbling nymph-saturated well.’
Strangely enough I recently found myself doing the exact same thing, gazing at images of oil spills, but also many other environmental disaster scenes – projecting them on the walls in my living room, thinking about their representation in the popular media and musing on the effect they have on our collective consciousness. The ‘days on end’ spend in the companionship of these images didn’t lead me to write a book, as they did for McCarthy. But they did allow me to access a new way of thinking about the way that notions of preservation, environment, and presence might be linked – and how they would direct us out of the corporate machine.
But it’s difficult to turn that into a proposition. The way I understand ‘the anthropology of presence’ is that it overthrows the persistent approaches of categorization, chronology, and reification. Its manifesto should not be written by the common scientific mindset that created the society of reasons. It should be brought into existence, written, by the unfathomable twists of life itself.
Perhaps comparing McCarthy’s book with other, related, texts will help us get closer.
Satin Island is a brilliantly crafted web of references and exciting insights, but the novel eventually disappoints. Because, similar to his previous novels, Remainder and C, the dislocated protagonist ‘cut off from all sites of spiritual and moral meaning’ (Marcus; 2015) is continually lost in space. For McCarthy there is no way out of the mutation and migration of thoughts, of intellectual, and cybernetic connections. Attempts to look at what lies beneath these surfaces of data can only result in the unveiling of a void, an incomprehensibly vast lack that lies at the core of our culture and our individual lives. What eventually makes up for this void is not the promise of presence, but more estrangement, more empty intellectual babble, sex, or – if we’re very lucky to read between the lines – human relationships.
This interpretation of the failure of transcendence reminded me of Uncivilisation: the Dark Mountain Manifesto, written in 2009 by disillusioned environmentalists. Instead of circling around the void of which McCarthy speaks, they encourage the reader to jump into the gaping abyss. For them the chasm opens up with the realization that we cannot fix our planet. The only thing left to do, or so the initiators of the Dark Mountain proclaim, is not to try and change the state our world is in. What we can do, as McCarthy does so well, is rewrite the prevailing narratives: alter the course that keeps us whirling around in the violent currents of corporate culture. But what are these new stories, and what power do they actually possess to change the dominant narrative structures of capitalist society? Can stories change reality?
Tom McCarthy would be the first to agree that reality is a literary convention. It has nothing to do with authenticity. Its significance is in the construction, and we cannot escape the lack of meaning that lurks behind the book. Ever since McCarthy made his introduction into the art world by publishing his first novel, Remainder (2005), in a gallery in London, I felt that the insights of the characters in his books were mine. I recognized myself in them entirely – especially their fetishization of presence. But I wouldn’t agree that it is meaninglessness that lurks behind his books. What I sense instead is a subliminal, subterranean, green pool of grinning cynicism. The romantic sing-along bonfire that fuels the Dark Mountain’s escape into the literary tradition seems to be the opposite line of flight. But, whether they would like it or not, both share a few observations on which I would like to focus. Hopefully, these observations will allow us to develop an approach to the nearing ‘end of a civilization’ that isn’t entirely naïve or cynical.
In 1951, Jacquetta Hawkes, a British archaeologist, prehistorian, writer, and journalist published her book A Land,which sets out to tell the story of Britain. But Hawkes’ approach is not that of a conventional biographer, historian, geologist, or archeologist. She sets out to describe the growth of consciousness as it emerged for the first time out of the ancient soup, the primordial slime at the banks of oceans and rivers that now flow through the Island, up to the reflective experience she has when laying in the back of her garden in London. The experience of her body laying on the soil gives access to all the other forms of life that have preceded her in their existence on this planet. This summer the official biography of Hawkes’ will come out. I look forward to reading how the author, Christine Finn, will inherit Hawkes insightful perspective; that wherever one starts to dig, be it in the soil, in a person’s personal life or a bodily experience, one inevitably ends up at the borders of an ever deepening (sedimentary) connectedness of life-forms.
In his article ‘Memoirs for the Earth’ (2012), social geographer Hayden Lorimer enriches our understanding of this peculiar piece of writing in terms of the (bigger) perspective it gives on the ‘self’ and its relationship with the environment. Where Hawkes paints the picture of the origins of consciousness (starting with her own experience before delving back into prehistoric time) J.G.Ballard would, 11 years later, project that imagination into the future of ‘speculative fantasy’, where protagonists swim around as reptiles in a tropical dystopia. Ballard’s vision is absurd and delirious, but frighteningly contemporary. Perhaps current day reasoning hasn’t yet reached a point of regressing to a primitive reptilian brain, but to be honest, we might be close - and some of the Earth’s population is in fact currently swimming between buildings. Ballard, aware of the writer’s capacity to ‘invent’ a reality, might have sketched a very realistic picture, but not one that could change the course of history, as the Dark Mountain secretly hopes. We might need something more material than beautifully crafted narratives.
In 1972, American Land artist Robert Smithson turned around Hawkes geological reading of consciousness. In his essay ‘The Sedimentation of the Mind’ (1968), he states that:
‘One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.’
At that time, the industrial interference with earth-processes could still be celebrated as an aesthetic sublime. Smithson applauded the raw and material implications of erosion and actively contributed to this muddling with matter in his works of art. The copper quarry was seen from a sculptural point of view, the gallery merely a temporal station in the course of the rock on its journey in and out of the arts. But today we know more about erosion. We have seen its effects on the soil on which we live. We have seen its analogous implications on the mind: when cultural heritage or values continue to decline. We fear the disintegration of the mind, the threat that Alzheimer disease poses. We regret the neglect of today’s cultural landscape, the arid plain that it has left behind. But our consciousness has evolved since the 70’s. Our ideas have, in time, also crystallized to take on other, new and different forms. Nonetheless, it is interesting to consider – with Jacquetta Hawkes in the back of our minds – that consciousness and matter are linked in ways that are beyond our current understanding. If we consider literature as a project of consciousness par excellence, then both Hawkes and Smithson bring in an interesting perspective; that matter gives shape to (literary) thinking.
With our mineral minds we jump back to McCarthy’s Satin Island. Halfway through the book, the protagonist contemplates: ‘When oil spills, the Earth opens its archives. That it takes the form of vinyl when it hardens is no chance occurrence; what those men in body-suits on beaches should be doing is not brushing it away but lowering a needle to its furrows and re-playing it all, and amplifying it all the while to boot; up and up, exponentially, until from littoral to plain to mountain, land to sky and back to sea again, the destiny of every trilobite resounds.’ The vinyl record of our intellect crackles. It snaps and pops off the track. It jumps into another modulated spiral groove, resounding an old idea from Rilke. In his essay ‘Primal Sound’ (1919) Rilke imagines ‘lowering a needle to the fissures of a human skull to find out what sound would be emitted by that delicate layer of bone that protects our mental capacities and all of our inner riches’.(Artist and filmmaker Duncan Marquiss introduced me to this beautiful text. His most recent film ‘Evolutionary Jerks & Gradualist Creeps’ explores speculative analogies between fossils and information storage media.) Rilke continues his imagining: ’… what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense.’ Thus, it is the materiality itself that should be given a voice, not the endless chatter of our intellectual speculations or literary sensitivities. These are merely repetitive. Matter is inherently transformative. The fissures in our skulls might have a different story to tell or song to sing. I’m sure Jacquetta Hawkes and Robert Smithson would agree. Each of us is a chalky LP record, or a fleshy mystic writing pad, in the Freudian sense, ‘a model for consciousness and, ultimately, for life. We are all writing machines’.
So how do we, as mystic writing machines, made from the stuff of stars, of oceans and oil spills, actively produce new realities? Can we produce these realities somehow outside of our skulls? Can we carry these newly wrought, infantile, productions of reality beyond the persistently solipsistic, cynical or naïve confines of our individual skulls? Can we make music?
When I opened my laptop to start writing this text I read that the coming year will be the hottest year ever. The previous one was the wettest in 45 years.
These warnings travel to me with the speed of light, faster than the sun, but are much colder. What are we to do with these cybernetic predictions? Don’t they eradicate any possibility for an unknown and more optimistic future? On the other hand, what are we to do with the confident solutions offered by a technocratic, capitalist, system that prevents us from facing the negative consequences of our behavior?
While I dwell on these thoughts and questions, every year the waves of the ocean crush more deeply into the British shores. Rivers expand beyond their borders. Muddy water eats away the edges of the Island both from within and from without. ‘For geologists this is a feast’, my neighbor downstairs told me, proudly showing new acquisitions from the Sahara. ‘We can pick up new specimen of fossils in between the rubble of houses that have slid from their cliff, or collect rare stones from the earth that has been exposed under the tarmac of devastated roads’. My neighbor has his house filled to the brim with pieces of Earth and traces of life on the planet from centuries ago. Surrounded by such geological marvels one starts to wonder. What relevance do the disastrous events that are taking place at present have in this light? How do we, as human beings, relate to these global environmental occurrences? How do we make sense of the wave of gloomy information that reaches us each day? How do we respond to the acute physical reality that we so easily ignore the next? To be sure, the quickening process of erosion exposes not only new layers of sedimentary rock, but also the fragility of our human dwelling on earth - and perhaps it has a third effect as well; the erosion of the mind.
If we want to counteract the erosion that is taking place at present, brace ourselves against the force of corporate culture, we will have to rewrite its dominant narratives. But I’m not that sure if novels, articles, and pieces of literary criticism will develop a ‘better story’ than the one our daily lives provide. Rilke made quite a big deal out of stating that the European poet relies too much on only one of the senses, and in very varying degrees. I’d say we go outside and let the scent of a garbage heap, the texture of mud and the taste of the oceans inform our inner writing-pad, fuel the machine with new impressions. I don’t really know where to go next either, but instead of struggling with our desire for, or inability of, transcendence I rather focus on what is there, right at my feet. Let’s focus on transformation. Real, material, palpable trans-formation: from primordial slime to consciousness, from mineral to mind, from luminous idea into impenetrable black ink - from book to mountain boot. An ‘Anthropology of Presence’, whatever that might mean, may be a better idea than McCarthy allows himself to believe. I’m going out, and take that as a proposition. Who wants to join?
Jasper Coppes (Amsterdam 1983) is a visual artist and writer living between Amsterdam and Glasgow. He recently received a practice development fund from the Mondriaan Fund in the Netherlands. This spring he will record on 16mm film a journey through the ‘Flows of the Future’ - the largest area of blanket bog in the world located in Caithness (flow country), since 2012 on the tentative list of UNESCO world heritage sites.
Source list:
J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, (Liveright: 2013)
Paul Kingsnorth, Dougald Hine, 'Uncivilisation: the Dark Mountain Manifesto' (2009)
Jaquetta Hawkes, A Land, (Collins, June 7, 2012) (first published 1951)
Hayden Lorimer, 'Memoirs for the Earth: Jacquetta Hawkes’s literary experiments in deep time', (Cultural Geographies January 2012 vol. 19 no. 1 87-106)
Tom McCarthy, Satin Island, (Jonathan Cape: 2015)
Tom McCarthy, Remainder (Vintage: 2007)
Tom McCarthy, C (Vintage, 2011)
David Marcus, Men in Space, The novelist of disenchantment finds meaning, New Republic (2015)
Rainer Maria Rilke, Primal Sound’ (The Cummington Press: 1943)