Men must be crazy....

Reading The World without Us by Alan Weisman, an imaginary account of what would happen to the world if mankind would suddenly (saddenly) disappear, but not in a cosmic cataclysm or in an alien invasion, not even in an self-made enviro-catastrophe. Rather, just vanished, just disappeared one of these days. Starting rather dramatically, with how fast the matchbox houses we live in would disintegrate and vanish beneath the ever-advancing vegetation and unforgiving elements. (Experienced something of sorts myself, as he describes it all starting at the humble chimney, where the roof starts to leak, but anyway...)


Then it meanders all over the place, New York City, and Africa, and Turkey, and Cyprus and London, and North Pacific, nice meanderings, interesting meanderings, though I'm growing tired of the Wall Street Journal style - I think it's called - that introduces many chapters, even some sections: "So-and-so remembers the summer day he got that call" or "So-and-so has known the so and so desert for three decades..." wherefrom he proceeds with a story of who So-and-so is, even what he looks like whether he is bald or stalky or tall or what not... and only then goes into what so-and-so did and what his claim to fame is, which is really what the book is about.

But most of all his meanderings tell a grim story of a parasitic homo sapiens at strange odds with nature, and not since the beginning of the industrial revolution either, but since almost day one, or at least since day one anywhere else out of Africa, particularly here, in America, where, the story is beginning to go, the first people to arrive (what were in due time to be called "Amerindians") apparently put an end to all big fauna, either by hunt or by virus-induced disease (oh, the irony...!) Naturally, a controversial theory with the Indians. Jared Diamond spins the same yarn (sorry, Mr. Pynchon, that's just too good to pass) somewhere, and it kinda makes sense. So much sense that, when you add to it the crazy ivory-induced butchering of elephants in Africa in the late 20th century, the North Pacific Garbage Patch (the Gyre, look it up), the image of "plastic is for ever", and, on top of it all, the image of a universal nature calmly reclaiming every nook and cranny that we ever turned into a hellhole and then left alone, sprouting its flowery and grassy fingers everywhere to upturn pavement and buildings, you end up with the strange feeling of rooting for nature in this bizarre contest with homo sapiens. You end up wondering whether this guy who keeps starting many of his sentences with "if we were to disappear" knows something you don't know, or is just yanking your chain.


So much sadness overcame me (the word I'm looking for is m'envahit, but English doesn't have it or if it does I have not found it) at our stupidity that I even passed on watching the PBS special on democracy in Athens, that normally would have kept me glued to the TV, like anything else vaguely Greek. Instead I switched to Foucault, which I distinctly remember having started to read (in French) a while back, though for the life of me I don't know where I would have found the French edition (GSU, perhaps? gotta check). And after going again through three thirds of the interminable first chapter on Velazquez's painting I skipped ahead to chapter two, which I also know I had read...because I remember all his comments on "convenience" and "aemulatio"...

I also remember once I did a similar "telling" of a picture, though not with the kind of philsosophical perversity he seems to put into his, for look, just look what he says:

"It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other's terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say" (Order of Things 9).

Seeing the difference

οὐ γὰρ μόνον ἵνα πράττωμεν ἀλλὰ καὶ μηθὲν μέλλοντες πράττειν τὸ ὁρα̂ν αἱρούμεθα ἀντὶ πάντων ὡς εἰπει̂ν τω̂ν ἄλλων.αἴτιον δ' ὅτι μάλιστα ποιει̂ γνωρίζειν ἡμα̂ς αὕτη τω̂ν αἰσθήσεων καὶ πολλὰς δηλοι̂ διαφοράς .

(Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.980a)

The notion being that always, whether we plan on doing something or not, of all the senses we prefer seeing because "it helps make clear (evident) most differences."
I won't dispute whether indeed sight is our most discerning sense. Intuition would seem to agree with this. The thing that fascinates me, though is Aristotle using "seeing the difference" as grounds for superiority or at least for preference. Seeing the difference means breaking the world objects in pieces in order to understand it/them. Keeping lists of the pieces we broke the world objects into, readily available for comparison and for observing the things things have in common just as we note what keeps them apart. I can see how seeing differences might be an evolutionary advantage (is this red berry just like that other red berry Bob ate the other day and died?) or an evolutionary handicap: "to be or not to be" mused the young, wise prince who was going to die young, wise, childless.

Roland Barthes: “The Photographic Message”

His definition of the (newspaper) picture as "message without a code" rubs me the right way. Pinpoints something that I knew was wrong with our insistence that websites be graphically rich and textually poor. And then here it comes to me, from an article written sometime in the sixties, way before there was any www. Our desire to take cognitive shortcuts, to achieve the ultimate in communication, an almost telepathic togetherness with (someone else's) reality. The idealism of laziness.