I have a lot of my essay figured out, my research and everything. But am looking for a narrative around it. I looked at an interview with Alex Garland on Annihilation as I was interested in how he came to this idea. I know there is a book, but Garland’s adaptation is a bit different and closer to what I want to explore in my essay. There was in particular two moments in this interview that relates strongly to my text:
This self destruction is even verbalised in the movie. I know the character Dr.Ventress speaks of how we as humans have self desctruction coded into us.
He is talking about something being “off” in the film and how to create that, dressing up a forest was one way to achieve that otherness. This is something I want to create in the visualisation of this text. Like something taking over or creeping in on the pages over the text. I do not want to portray nature as this beautiful green leaf but rather like a growing living organism.
The text deals with the construction of the self, so that comes with a historical review of Cartesian logic, some Kant and how that relates to feminism and how it relates to humans relationships with the forest. There are a lot of disciplines overlapping in this text, I feel as if I have put myself in quite deep water.
A Ted Talk on the complex social lives of forests:
I want an academic build up to this essay, to write everything accordingly and then form a conclusion where refraction or mutation is the only answer. Meaning that I want to create a sort of unexpected posthumanist sci-fi turn at the end, that at the same time convincingly seems like a logical conclusion. I have been reading and looking at posthumanism, but Annihilation is the one reference that actually deals with this kind of mutation, that I can find and relate to at least.
Interview
I wanted to conduct an interview, or rather a conversation with a woman I know, her name is Anna. I wanted to see if her viewpoint on my idea for the essay could direct me towards any particular research. I also wanted to hear her dissect this view point, and share hers. We share a lot of fundamental beliefs, but have quite different perspectives. As my idea had appeared in my confinement, in front of my computer, out here in the forest, I needed someone who could force me to ransack some parts of the idea and help develop other parts. I first messaged her the premises of this conversation and she replied with an initial response per text:
“We tend to see nature as some kind of origin, a “place” that is sort of breathing truth: “the right thing”. But human nature, the origin of homo sapiens, is much more about social community than anything else. It is the language, the ability to tell stories, knowing each other and working together that defines us more than anything else.
To separate oneself from a destructive social context, in order to recharge in nature is something I believe can be healthy, but to stay there means enormous sacrifice for the average homo sapien. We literally die without other people. So I say no to a woman being able to fully exist in nature, at least not alone.
On the other hand, it would be extremely reasonable for women to break away from the current social context together with other like-minded people and try to build something more constructive.
There is also a connection between our transition from a life in harmony with nature (as hunters and gatherers) to settlement and agriculture, and all the social structures that limit women.”
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We later had a lengthier conversation on the phone and below are some extracts that would prove useful to the direction of my essay and some selections of references and research.
“If you are going into nature to avoid communities and do it alone in an ambition to ascend into nature, if you remove the social context, you are not really human. If you go out into nature alone, it is like renouncing one’s humanity. Because social togetherness for me is to be human, the thing that distinguishes our species, cooperation makes us successful in our species. No human-like friends can create human-like interactions.
You stop being human. There is difficulty of being human if one renounces the social context.”
This reasoning strongly relates to Hannah Arendt and the chapter Action in The Human Condition where she states in a very similar manner, that removing oneself from other people and being “deprived of speech and action” means not being a human. And according to Hannah Arendts, literally being dead. The premise of being human is being along with others.
Anna later added that in order to separate oneself from other people one:
Mutates into something that is not human–one becomes a kind of being.
I shared my thoughts on dissolving in or mutating with the forest. And we discussed it vaguely back and forth and she had a hard time seeing how this morphing into nature would be a way to be complete. When I asked her when she feels as she can be 100% in her ‘self’ she turned quiet for a while and then said:
“When I am one with nature, underwater. I strive to be as deep underwater as long as I can without dying. I want to get so deep into this state and be far away from the world beneath the surface. I want to be underwater for a long time and lose touch with what is above.
That condition is a 100%, to be very much in my body I guess not to look at myself from the outside to be 100% inside myself. This is facilitated by being cut off from other people, I am alone, do not communicate and I am in an element where I can not talk, I can not breathe.
As it happens we have a diving reflex that happens to have a physiological reflex that reinforces this feeling the heart beats slower to save on oxygen and save energy, a mechanism that is specially developed for water, if we get wet in the nose of the face.
And it is only in nature this feeling or state can appear, it is not as satisfactory to do this in a swimming pool. It has to be in the sea, swimming 15 meters down and pausing there. Then I feel so small and insignificant, pushed down by this enormous mass of water. It is a kind of longing that I have, that I wonder if not many others might share, to become this grain of dust in space.”
She continued to tell me about how after diving 20 meters down in the sea, you can stop swimming, as you are drawn down. This is called “freefall” and the feeling is described as being pulled down.
As we finished our conversation she was speculating back and forth how and where to stay in that feeling of being complete. But always came back to the reasoning that humans need the social context.
She said:
We can not escape from our social context
I guess we have to wait for the apocalypse
or make your own apocalypse
We end our conversation with her commenting the idea:
“You are putting the finger on a troublesome existential question, which particularly many women struggle with. We are in a system that feels so hostile to people.”