by Abi Andrews
Almost anything or any method of information transfer when intended for the future can be termed at one time or another a time capsule. So this written thing is a time capsule. Maybe all written words are time capsules. Virginia Woolf said of writing, arrange whatever pieces come your way, which sounds like time-capsule curation to me. Not collection as possession but a collection like that of the reverent bowerbird. So here it is, an affirmation of me, for you.
The Eskimo and the Inuit, known as Twospirit people, they know that genders are arbitrary because anyone can embody them, but they still use them to describe themselves. Identity and words are important for narrative. Scientific theories are only approximations to the true nature of things but sometimes the error is tiny enough for them to be pretty useful.
Like Newton’s world of solid bodies moving through empty space as an analogy for the realm of everyday life called the zone of middle dimensions. In the zone of middle dimensions you feel the effect of the apple that hits you on the head. It is not much use to tell Newton that the apple does not hit one’s head, not really.
I am not a singular organism but an amalgamation of organisms. I am the elected voice of this amalgamation, for the life inside my life and the mites in my eyelashes.
In taxonomy we separate things to make it easier to talk about difference. Taxonomy is a masculine language that dichotomises, like gender is a masculine language, structuring hierarchies. A colonising language; taxonomy is the colonisation of the natural world, but it is pretty useful because it helps you to tell the difference between goosetongue and arrowgrass and not die.
And if I am a woman I am a historically situated and contextual woman, but I am a woman all the same. And it only matters that in popular opinion I have been more social and permeable and collectivist and can identify more with trees and animals than a man can. But physics now says that everything is permeable. My feminisation was training in the interrelation of earth systems.
Lovelock gave Earth a feminine (historically defined) name because he valued the feminine (historically defined) characteristics of renewal, life-giving/-destroying and cooperation. History dictated that women understand more about empathy, starting with training in the home and ‘mother’ bonds. If women are better trained in empathy, then maybe women are a little more in love with the world.
The universe is perpetual motion and change but you can take a step back to where it comes into sharp focus as you look at it. Consciousness is integral to theories of matter because it is consciousness that creates the whole observation that changes the course of the universe, even if only in a very tiny way. It took a long time for things to get this complex and tangled and each of us is woven into this tangle inextricably.
Because it is densely tangled the web does not change very quickly or drastically, and in this way it gives the illusion of stability. When the speed of change is accelerated to an extent that it is a pace too fast for adaption, it gets very suddenly to a place where nothing is recognisable. Examples of this are mass extinctions, nuclear annihilation, or the loss of an indigenous culture. I call this danger velocity.
When they talk about space they still talk in terms of ‘nature’ or ‘wilderness’ like the Inuit don’t have a word for, because the only way to talk about a thing is to pin it down and quantify it. It has to be outside you in language. Otherwise science can’t work. But Bohr said this is just a trick and that the properties of an atomic object can only be understood in relation to the object’s interaction with the observer and that you can’t talk about nature without talking about yourself. And it works the other way too, in inverse.
This whole time I have been looking so hard through binoculars that I have not even noticed that I am looking through binoculars, which are a pretty nifty thing to have, or that they have been hurting my eye where I have pressed them against it. And I have been looking so hard through binoculars at what looks so far away that I have not seen what was right in front of me. It is all very well and good to build a castle, but you have to make sure not to build it on top of people, and I could have crushed a few people.
Another thing Thoreau said about foundations is we have not to lay the foundation of our houses in the ashes of a former civilization; here he meant literal houses and this is why he liked America, Land of the Free, more than Europe, where there were many civilisations under houses. The ambassador of American wilderness conveniently forgets his own impurity; he has still built his on top of a whole lot of native people.
Around me the cabin is still, quiet and dusty. Everything sits in its place as it has since the beginning, familiar and inexplicable. I feel how a swallow must feel getting the sudden inclination of the east, one day looking around itself and suddenly, nope, dislocated. It is all void of purpose now. The weather is turning, the berries are dropping, the gnats are dying off. The east, that is the place to be. The swallow can’t pinpoint when its purpose changed but it did and now everything has something different about it and it has to leave for home.
And its place and its nest and the time it spent there do not feel wasted or failed or empty because that is not the way it works for birds. And none of it matters for me either, all that time and all that work, it is not wasted but changed, stretched. It has fulfilled its purpose and the pieces of it do not fit together any more.
Like a reptile trying to shrug on the jacket of its old self to realise that it no longer fits. Only reptiles are not sentimental and do not keep their old skins in the dresser drawer with the other miscellaneous special things, but we do our baby teeth and that is part of what makes us human. Maybe you still have the baby teeth in the little silver box with the fairy on or maybe you lost them.
Somewhere in a parallel universe out east where summer is winter and winter is summer, it is winter and the swallows have already flown, and right now a swallow is pecking on a reptile’s discarded skin.
Enclosed in all of this are the maps, some pictures and drawings, the raw bits of film, my (our) diary. Because although I know my map is not this place, the map remembers an important place even though it only exists in the realm of my mind. Just because it can’t tell anyone else anything useful does not deny its significance to me (and you). That is the whole point of keeping postcards, right?
I would like to leave an epitaph because I think you will find it funny still, as I do now. It is a poem by a man called Stephen Crane. It goes:
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
‘It is futile,’ I said,
‘You can never—’
‘You lie,’ he cried,
And ran on.
From Erin in the cabin in our wilderness,
Denali,
Alaska,
Earth
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I can’t give enough thanks to Jack Underwood for telling me to carry on in the early days, to Harriet Moore for ceaseless support and tender critique, to Nick Sheerin for caring editorial guidance, to all my friends, but especially Claire Liddiard, Hatty Nestor and Zina Sarris, to the Sarris family for allowing me space in their house to write, and to Mum, Dad, Nan and J. J. x
I would also like to express gratitude to the following writers who allowed me to draw on their words and work in this novel.
The lines of dialogue attributed to Rachel Carson on pages 44, 53, 209 and 210 and the chapter title ‘THE CHEMICAL WAR ON THE GYPSY MOTH’ are taken from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (copyright © 1962 by Rachel L. Carson, renewed 1990 by Roger Christie) and are reprinted by permission of Frances Collin, Trustee.
The quotation from Sylvia Plath’s journals on page 83 is taken from The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–62 (copyright © The Estate of Sylvia Plath, 2000) and reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber.
The quotation from Ted Kaczynski on page 76 is taken from Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski (Feral House, 2010).
The chapter title ‘THE EARTH IS AN INDIAN THING’ and the quotation of the same line on page 110 are excerpts from On the Road by Jack Kerouac, copyright © 1955, 1957, by John Sampas, Literary Representative, the Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac; John Lash, Executor of the Estate of Jan Kerouac; Nancy Bump; and Anthony M. Sampas. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The chapter title ‘THE BEARD AND THE GUNS AND THE LITTLE SHORT SENTENCES’ is copyright © 2004 by Ursula K. Le Guin and first appeared in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, published by Shambhala in 2004, reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
The chapter title ‘I AM THAT I AM AND THE REST IS WOMEN & WILDERNESS’ is an excerpt from Dancing at the Edge of the World, copyright © 1989 Ursula K. Le Guin. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
The chapter title ‘THE WILD AS A PROJECT OF THE SELF’ is a quotation from Jack Turner’s The Abstract Wild (University of Arizona Press, 1996).
The quotation attributed to John Lilly on page 230 is taken from Tanks for the Memories: Floatation Tank Talks by Dr John C. Lilly and E. J. Gold (Gateways Books & Tapes, © 1995).
The quotations from Aldo Leopold on pages 252 and 291 are taken from A Sand County Almanac and are reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press, USA.
The words of Einstein on page 258–9 are © The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The chapter titles ‘THE KNOWING SELF IS PARTIAL’ and ‘MUCOUS MEMBRANE LINING THE GUT CAVITY OF A MARINE WORM LIVING IN THE VENT GASES ON A FAULT BETWEEN CONTINENTAL PLATES’ are quotations from the work of Donna Haraway and are taken respectively from Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (Donna Haraway, Feminist Studies, Vol 14, No 3, Autumn 1988, pp.575–99) and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Donna Haraway, Routledge, 1991).
The chapter title ‘THE CLITORIS IS A DIRECT LINE TO THE MATRIX’ is taken from a billboard created by artist collective VNS Matrix.
The chapter title ‘WHAT BOOK IS THIS THAT REFUSES TO END?’ is taken from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Princeton University Press, 2015).
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