The Humanization of Nature

Exploiting nature has denatured it, while denaturing humanity. The nostalgia for a primitive nature and for its impossible return is the morbid consolation of a society sick with economy. It’s not a question of re-naturalizing people and the earth, but of humanizing them by giving primacy to the living energies they harbor.

The exhaustion of natural resources and of human nature draws a demarcation-line between the men who work at it and succumb to it, a line that defines the one great confrontation to come. While the parties of death dip deeper into the well of fear and draw out the power to reign over the ruins of the spectacular and financial edifice, a unanimous cry is rising from the streets, from the forests, and from hearts: “Life above all else!”

Before these rumors even reached public opinion, their echoes were heard in the enemy’s ranks, since there are no polluting commercialists and enterprises that don’t think it advisable to campaign around “saving lives”. Don’t the nets of the commodity catch up the natural products, the herbal medicines, and the ecological packaging too?

Now, it is not necessary that mercantile recuperation, the bric-a-brac of new age mystics and the dumpster-scrapings of religiousness hide what is authentically revolutionary about the will to reconcile one’s daily existence with living matter, with the omnipresence of the body, participated in inextricably and con-substantially by every particular being and phenomenon, every individual, social nucleus, animal, plant, mineral, all the air, fire and by the earth, which the Indians assure us possesses the art of regenerating itself, in spite of having been wounded by the contemptuous ignorance of the vermin of business.

It’s not unimportant that little by little the feeling of a coexistence of different life-forms is spreading, and that the consciousness of that feeling perceived not by the Spirit, issued by celestial oppression, but by the body on its quest for psychosomatic plenitude. To feel good around children, in the company of animals, around a tree, upon touching the earth or a stone — this no longer recalls the passivity of the faithful and of a contemplative state; it’s the start of a new language spoken by the individual with him or herself and with his or her peers; it is another way of being and acting, in conflict with the behavioral mechanisms which secularly impose power and marketability.

The awakening to the absolute prerogative which earthly species demand today is what will give foundation to a life-style, an attitude, in which the privilege of existing will be exercised at the moment when I accord the realization of pleasures precedence over the necessity that spoils them by paying them off and making them pay. I for one have the stubbornness of a nature that is ceaselessly being reborn — that of the ivy that breaks through the concrete — and against me there is the usury that the system of wage mediation and commodity mediation still demands.

The human approach to omnipresent nature sets spinning again a process of evolution in which individuals will create their destiny by creating a milieu that is in tune with their desires. The era of economy and of nature bendable at will is nothing but a sterile and cumbersome form, which keeps humanity from being born unto itself.

After the transformation of libidinal energy into work energy comes a will to live which draws its creative powers from the simple attraction of enjoyments.

The Rehabilitation of Animals

Reconciling with infancy coincides with rehabilitating the animal, granted its autonomous life.

The affection displayed to animals is not in itself a new phenomenon; still, it must not be confused with pity — that canker, which needs to excite to unhappiness and suffering in order to develop — nor with the bitter spite of loving one’s dog out of contempt for humanity. I am speaking here about the surges of the heart, open to everything that is alive, and which finds things to be pleased by in every privileged relationship with a domestic or family animal.

What is new, on the other hand, is the nature and stylishness of such solicitude. Not only does it not limit itself anymore to guests in the immediate environment — dogs, cats, birds, baby goats, sheep — and embraces the so called savage beasts as well, but above all it intends to recognize them in their autonomy and independence, and no longer seeks to tame or subjugate them — it no longer has the pretension of being their master.

Must it be recalled that an ensemble of mercantile interests has grafted itself onto the movement towards rehabilitating animal species, suddenly concerned by the comfort that is due to alley cats, and a tourist market that, after having sold impaled gorillas, saves the last specimens and gives them, like they gave to the Indians, the right to survive in reservations or reserves? Here as well commercial exploitation stimulates, fetters, and hides the consciousness of the living and its will to expand.

In less than 10 years, the children begin to reject the predatory behavior that so many generations had assumed was a natural trait of their being. Without a love for life, experimentation usually ends up treating animals as objects and people as guinea pigs, whether it is the work of children or of wise men. Would anyone believe that sensory intelligence, which awakens the children to the marvels of discovery without them needing to pick fledglings from their nests, destroy flowers, or tear the wings off flies, could be foreign to the revival of love?

If the child shows himself to be curious about beings, animals, things in their environments, etc., with a wisdom that is inseparable from tenderness, isn’t that just an absolute affection which gives him the right to autonomy and slowly dissolves the archaic and authoritarian family structure?

Such a freedom would not be possible without a modification in the relation between individuals and society that takes place through the impulses of the body, which was for so long identified with a compulsive bestiality.

The Emancipation of the Body

Now that the time is coming when earthly economy will take revenge on the heavenly economy which discredited it in the name of the religious spirit, a vengeance of the body has built up, in which work makes concrete the repressions of a producer-civilization and at the same time concretizes the measurelessness of an animalness that aspires to flow out “beyond good and evil”. The materialist philosophers, the ideas of Sade and Nietzsche, fascist ideology, the hedonism of the end of the 20^th century — they ended up merely translating the diverse stages of a planetary conquest for the glory of the commodities of the machine-men.

While the body is being militarized in the service of capital, the shame of repressed animalness bursts out in social celebrations of brute aggressiveness, defense of the homeland, the competitive elimination of the weak, the right of the strongest, necessary sacrifice for the health of the species — so many frivolities reputed to be “natural”, which arose to such a degree that they gave a basis for making colonialist piracy, the statist safeguarding of capital, and the putting down of the proletariat considered universally reasonable. And so, a raped and violent nature gives way to the fatigued hubris of the gods.

The triumph of the musculature in the apotheosis of productivity has its outlet in the exaltation of earthly animalness, the celebration of instinct over the dethroned spirit of the heavens. The mechanical progress of the body, tortured to improve yield and earn time, gives rise to the spectacle of sports competitions, and there’s nothing in the body, eventually, not even the brain, which doesn’t get muscular and suffer cramps.

But this muscle-bound body is nothing but the counterweight for the archaic head, with its will to power, its calculations of interest, its virile simulations, its litanies of the best and of the strongest. Anti-intellectualism is only the cynical spirit of the earthly economy, dragging to the gibbets those gods whose guarantees weren’t necessary for it anymore; it is the spirit of competition, taking on, in wartime, the ruddy discipline of armies, the orgiastic and bloody decompression of battles, and in times of peace, the warlike virtues of sports, hunting, and the “get out of there because I’m coming in” that, up to present times, is a function of social norms.

We know how the work of obligatory consumption has turned the authoritarian violence of production into a lying faith; we know to what extent the marketed leisure has “offered” to the body, broken by fatigue, the onerous prostheses of comfort and frozen pleasures; we know, in effect, how poorly the phony image of enjoyment resists the reality it abuses.

While the commercialism of the olympic stadiums serves the release of a soldier-like militancy — according to a competitive principle played out in its purely destructive function (and what goes for soccer and football goes for scholarly, literary and musical competitions too) — the children of today are demanding the pleasure of playing without the anguish of having to win or lose.

It’s all over for the rancor of oppressed animalness, that animalness that kills, which is not manifested by the leisurely hunter of game who takes up the gun to add a young partridge to his menu, but by the sport-hunter, who dreams not of adding to his soup bowl but of appeasing his death-instinct by proving his power over everything that moves.

While we wait for the displeasure of killing an animal to eat it to disappear along with the rest of our carnivorous habits, or for the discovery of one of those solutions that a changing society brings — like the threat of earthly overpopulation, after having found the remedies to be worse than the sickness (war, famine, epidemics) finds a solution in the choice that is taking shape today to not have babies unless one desires them passionately for their own happiness — it is comforting that the cruelty of the hunt is moving aside for the development of what it took pleasure in repressing: wanderings, the patience of hiding in wait, and skill are now finding themselves more agreeably employed in approaching, observing, and photographing animals in their natural environment.

Denatured Death

There is no humanly acceptable death outside of the instant when life grants repose to its oeuvre of perpetual creation.

Death has been seized by denaturation at the same time as water, the earth, the air, fire, minerals, vegetable, animals, and the human have been stricken by commodity pollution. Instead of beings and things coming to their natural end, there is now a social mechanics in which, under the pretext of preventing the random deaths of beasts, life is denied and reduced to such a miserable extent that it comes to desire a natural passing-on as though it were a blessing.

The obligation to renounce one’s desires, in order to assure oneself a job one might survive on, feeds daily a corpse which has no trouble taking the place of the living prematurely. The act of dying is most often a usurer’s bill that has all the power of a legal murder.

That the medical art and a few comforts accorded to survival have checked the progress of the epidemics, of senility, of infant mortality, of sicknesses that yesterday were incurable, is this a reason to fail to understand that death, as we experience it, is just the effect of a failure to live, an inversion in the order of existential priorities?

If they won any victory, it was only the victory of socialized death over actual death. But who besides those in their death-agonies would be concerned with the prodigious advancement of euthanasia? It would be sufficient for me to have a life where death would only be a long sleep after making love.

The Desacralization of Death

Death comes off like a dry fruit dropping from the tree of the defunct gods. The Fates are nothing but the social reasoning behind the great mill where every destiny gets stretched out, woven, and broken according to the boring comings and goings of current affairs and business. Is there any natural death more typically and banally experienced than that of the daily slamming of the door on the fingers of a desire that had tried to get out and sow its wild oats a little? Spread out over boredom, death has lost its customary shimmer, and its horror usually gets put out by a great weariness. It’s become the bitterness on pleasure’s lips, the sweat of a febrile and vain activity, the sudden cold in loves that are unmade by a lack of attention.

It is a well known feeling that passion that doesn’t lead to love leads to death. How can we take the time to love when the time belongs to stress, to the rhythms of the machine which breaks biological rhythms, ties up muscles, jams up emotions, and shatters the heart? To resign yourself to work is to resign yourself to dying in the morbid familiarity of a daily agony; it is to pass the death sentence — which the less barbaric countries have effaced from their law — on yourself.

We are still a part of the generations that battled death, instead of fighting to live every day as if every day was an entire life. To stand up against death is to stand up against yourself, and, in the final analysis, to take the part of denaturation and annihilation against the will to live which is naturally present.

Hic, Nunc et Semper

The return to nature does not signify a regression to the animal state. People don’t have to die of the mechanization of the body, nor do they have to die abandoned to the rigors and dangers of their environment.

I see no other antidote for denatured death than the humanization of everyday life.

To face every day as if it contained the totality of existence, whether lived intensely or in a mediocre way, seems to me to be a disposition in which individual destiny makes the surest bet that it will realize itself, knowing full well its cause.

Whatever anyone says, the important thing isn’t to succeed or to fail to attain a goal; the important thing is to almost forget the target in the vibration of the arrow and of the act itself; a stubborn demand to recreate, every morning, the birth of time; to leap from gathering pleasures to seeding pleasures, with as much sincerity in joy and melancholy as one feels upon marveling when the evening, or the sleepiness, of death comes.

The point, it should be understood, is not to live better than others, but to live simply in the alchemy of your desires. Enjoyment has no gauge to offer to the spirit of competition and emulation, and withdraws from it. It takes its own road, as if it were alone in the world, and the world belonging entirely to enjoyment convinces it that it carries within it a great force, and the most authentic of revolutions.

What enters into the attraction of enjoyments energetically is a part of creation, not of work; it is a part of emotional relationships, not of commodity relationships, of a civilization made by human beings, not a civilization that economizes them.

Everyone has their own poetry, whether it comes forth from the mist over the trees, from the caresses of love, the first sip of coffee, the beauty of an art, the hazards of the game, the awakening of consciences, the joys of the dance, of encounters, of friendship, of three notes playing out airs of reverie, everything and nothing, as long as the body feels itself to be in harmony with what is alive, and is filled with that plenitude that alone gives one the freeness of pleasures.

In every moment offered to the living, there is the eternity of life. It is that way throughout [Hölderlin’s] Hyperion; non più di fiori[5]. The time of cherries and the perfume of the linden tree are reborn ceaselessly, saving from death forever those who long ago wrote, composed, and planted all these things, with the grace of an offering to themselves, which is an offering to all.