WITH HEATHER

Johan Redin

Each day you have to break through the dead rubble afresh,

to reach the living, warm core.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

To this earth – this brown, grey, history-white, of satellite images blinding selfie blue, this filterless property that was never stolen and never given – to this earth is the animal destined, an animal fewer than the ants, fewer than the acari, fewer than the birds, fewer than the bees. The map reveals how everything is preserved in pieces; crack lines, conflicts resolved with rulers, or distances measured out by meticulous land surveying. Now we have what’s ours and we keep losing it.

What do you think about the earth? The question is so vague that it may seem preposterous; or you start, tentatively, to account for differences between countries and cultures, nature, misconceptions, climate change, history, our ability to conquer land and adapt to places; perhaps also to how we make the land adapt to us. Thinking about the earth naturally gravitates towards what is actually happening upon it: the human crowds, the animal territories, the division of countries, infrastructures, travel over time zones, political spaces, oceanic stretches: a globe, not only described but also imagined from an angle beyond our own atmosphere. Few of us have really been there; yet, ever since the first photographs from our space travels it is impossible to doubt this earth. The blue pearl. Few would consider, or even think the earth from below, even though that’s where we come from and whither we shall return. No one goes to heaven, ever; not without machines and oxygen masks. It is impossible to live in the earth, it’s only possible to live from it by living on it. On earth there is solid land, a false ground. How many times must we say it aloud, that this is our last place? The earth is comprehended as an outside.

All that is unmovable moves at one thousand miles per hour: landmasses, continents, the infinitely heavy mountains. Can you feel it? It is the same different land to all, a home at the same speed. Gravity is so instructive that it is never experienced, it becomes an illusion, an exam in school education. It is so instructive that the earth is motionless, like a dog we had ordered to lie down. It does not move under our feet, it rotates in science. The seasons are our dreams. It’s not the earth’s revolutions that count, or provide our past, but the remains of the piles we stacked and wrecked upon it. Nor does heaven have a history. Perhaps that’s why we crowded it with gods and indexed all the forces beyond our power. The sky in 1324, or 1856, is the same as in 2019, timeless under ever unique circumstances; dirtier with every year, but still so beautiful. The geology of heaven is its anti-strata.

Inversely, the underworld is an extreme form of archivist, the birthplace of the historical trace, multiplied in a variety of practices and museum rituals. Everything we built, everything we established on this earth, is bound in materials that have been violently extracted from its interior beneath us, and at the same time within ourselves. Geology is about underlying contexts, all born from collapse; a death of time while waiting for time to be invented. What’s in the stone that the stone never embodies? What is in our bodies that we never perceive as corporal? The world’s building materials already reside under the skin: coal, copper, sulphur, lithium, salts, magnesium, calcium, zinc, iron, gold. The organic body consists largely of inorganic elements, our entire species is, in fact, the consequence of a carbon component. When did you whisper in your child’s ear that this mineral is the one-point perspective of biogenesis, an abiogenetic memory in the form of a sensitive crystal, hidden within the world’s most violent animal? Man is involved in a more than two hundred and fifty generations long psychosis, the evolutionary establishment of the body’s barrier zones, the domestication of the remains of the universe that are still within us, this chemical, electric, oxygenic, and totally unlikely network that day after day echoes its mute geological monologue in our body.

We think of our body as an exteriority: it is mirrored, trimmed, exposed. See yourself. You are not alone in the stone; the stone that remains an outside even when you travel through it, in tunnels, or when you keep bulldozing it in millions of tons of residual material. With its arm in the ground, the hand of bronze is renewed. For some, the stone is nothing but arrested movement. Stones are bodies, this was obvious to the ancient philosophers of nature, and to metaphysical thinkers such as Spinoza and Descartes: substances, like ourselves. The word ‘body’ makes you think of an organic object, ‘a body’ is in some way associated with blood, and the movement of the blood is linked to heat. The word ‘stone’ only suggests a residue; it’s just there, lifeless, on site. We slowly learn the difference between subject and object. The modern predicament is born in the radical division between body and spirit. It sufficed for science, for technology, to know how to handle bodies, these simple bodies, these complex bodies. The industrial revolution was the first dominant force that consumes bodies as much as it produces them.

We understand history as an inside. It is literally unearthed, archeologically, and mined from the ground beneath our industrial projects; it is excavated in archives, revealed, brought to light, and transformed, like ore and copper, into products that deliver more than they contain. The earth is a medium for memory: a blind sentinel of carbon dioxide, where history is projection rather than conditions, which in turn makes the animal oblivious to all the waste that it not yet has not yet devoured. The animal polishes the theories about its prehistory, digging out bones and technological bodies that hide below the magnetic trees. The animal designs the chamber where it studies the Neolithic, neo lithos, the new stones. The animal choose among the findings, weighs them, compares them, and gently glues the pieces together according to an imaginary whole: its heritage.

Nature versus nurture. Environment and heritage. Outside the chamber, the battles rage, the silent everyday war against nature in a jointly repressed duel with the future. The animal flattens the mountains to get a sea view, a view of the approaching horizonless afterlife. The animal cannot excavate the sea, it has its history of extinct species and casino tokens from the Titanic. The North Pole has no history: It’s just a fallen sky of ice crystals, a white mass of non-time, as it all speeds up in a rising deep-blue lack of time. The animal is finally forced to retreat, and over time the asymmetric cities turn into what they once were, the open – fields of barren soil, fens covered with yellow, blue and red-violet heather. Soon the bees will return, they have no history.