Pralaya (An Anticipatory Story) 1:2
SEASON 1, EPISODE 2
From Christopher L. Fici, Ph.D
Scottish Highlands: 2025
The pralaya is the regularly scheduled destruction of the universe according to Hindu cosmology; the Natya Shastra also describes it thus:
“Pralaya (प्रलय, “fainting”) occurs due to too much toil, swoon, intoxication, sleep, injury, astonishment and the like. Loss of Consciousness should be represented by inaction, motionlessness, imperceptible breathing and [finally] by falling on the ground.”)
It’s remarkable to think how normal that day and that week still felt even as everything we take for granted was tossed up into the wind. It was an unconscious revolution that suddenly and violently became conscious like a volcano. It was Earth penetrating all of our consciousness’ with a message so urgent we all had to stop and listen. There was little other choice.
I write this to you now from our farm in the Scottish highlands. The person I was before the pralaya, the person I was during the pralaya, and the person I am now after the pralaya is certainly on a continuum of funky spacetime with a mind of its own. It’s a leaky one. That is how we have to tell the stories. It has to leak through the spectrum-what has come before, what is now, what is to come. All of these experiences are always already connected. Not exactly a snake devouring its own tail, but not exactly cause-effect-Cartesian cut.
The reason I write this story is because I believe I can reach back to that person I was before to guide them to be the person I am now. I believe I can reach out to the person I am still to become. This isn’t (just) because I spend a good deal of time now learning about the philosophical and dare I say theological implications of quantum physics. I sit here in my cowshed/office, looking out at the highlands outside my dear, precious Edinburgh. The combination of spectral mist, the undulations of the bogs, the ever-present sea spray vibe, the sheep and cottages in the distance which have been there seemingly for centuries-I cannot describe the metaphysical pull this ecosystem has on me. A fancy way to say I fucking love this soil, these cows, this landscape in which the Goddess whispers and roars.
Julia’s Land Rover rumbles up the road to our humble homestead. She is a regenerative ecologist I befriended when I landed at Cambridge one year ago. She’s a scientist. I’m the ecotheologian. Scully and Mulder. We are working together on the Anticipation Project. The Anticipation Project strives to be a bulwark against the ecofascists beginning to emerge in full force in Central Europe, in some parts of Russia and Austraila, and of course everywhere in America.
The pralaya did not make everything automatically hunky dory. Instead, the best and worst of the impulses of that impenetrable social animal, the human being, have been unleashed and unfiltered.
Julia and I are going to meet the Agential Realist. It’s a hike, due east to the docks off of Portobello Beach. Julia’s schooner, originally her uncle’s, is a sleek machine, weathered, embittered, and efficient. We need to take it out to Inchkeith, the island where the Realist has his garden. It was off of Inchkeith where many, many people saw a giant spacecraft enter the water two years ago almost to this day. There is video documentation of the spaceship on the encrypted networks that were set up after the system buckled.
Three hours later, through the sea-mist, tasting the rasa of ages and cliffs and castles and the endless grey eternity around the sea, after a 45 minute mostly uphill hike to the garden, the Agential Realist meets us at the holy basil he is growing at the front gate. He eyes us with mischief.
“Terminal-stage capitalism is UPS charging you $285 to send a 1 oz package across the Atlantic. They say you’re essentially paying for a plane ticket for the pots and pans you’re sending to your wife. Terminal-stage capitalism is everyone who continues to die in high-rise building fires, the same way they died a century and a half before in the tenements on the Lower East Side.”
The Realist snaps a few holy basil leaves into his wicker basket. He’s wearing that same factory worker outfit that Pete Townshend wore on the Tommy tour for the Who in 1969, except in classic Aston Martin green. The Realist is wiry, plucky, not exactly slight, apparently has a black belt in judo (“so I can kick Putin’s ass” as he once joked). His father was from Kerala. His mother from Edinburgh. Haggis masala.
We follow him into the sprawling ranch house at the southwest end of the garden, closest to the sea. You can see from the sea from his attic, intentionally so he says. The tea is always flowing in the house. So is the Scotch. So is any number of pharmacological manifestations. Orchids and pine and leaves leaves everywhere, spackling the soft sea light flowing in from the numerous skylights.
Because this is a work assignment, we take the tea on offer. For all of the Realist’s eccentricities, it’s just Earl Grey in the pot, “my one concession to imperialism.” Before we begin, as always, the Realist can’t help but engage in some “shop talk” with Julia and I. Again he has the dog-eared, annotated copy of the book on anticipatory communities and the art of anticipation that Julia and I self-published with the Kabir Initiative earlier this year.
“Climbing toward the fog” LHOON
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He eyes Julia with that mischief, and reads this paragraph from our manuscript:
This book asks a fundamental question: what will we do, what do we do, when the shit hits the fan?
“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst” my wife always says. I never really like it when she says it, because it both punctures my uselessly naive romantic side and makes my cynical side feel overly competitive. I want to be the dark sullen old poet wandering around Edinburgh in this relationship!
But that is what marriage tells us, what religion tells us, what our politics tells us, and increasingly what Earth is telling us: hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
In this book we will talk about preppers and lifeboat politics and ecofascism and climate totalitarianism. We really shouldn’t avoid these topics. We need to understand what it means to anticipate a more beautiful, resilient, and just way forward. Otherwise the implications are frightening. We may descend into models of authoritarian and totalitarian forms of governance as the climate catastrophe overwhelms our borders and boundaries. Nothing in recent human history tells us that this hellscape is impossible. It is already the everyday reality of countless people on this forlorn Planet Earth
In this book we attempt to ask a very simple but complex question: do we expect the best of each other or the worst of each other when the shit hits the fan?
Are we mere survivalists or are we anticipators?
It is the practice, the art, of anticipation and our networks of anticipatory communities which will create the regenerative bulwark against the worst of our temptations to detain and gas the problem away.
The practice of anticipation has an inner flame: think of the anticipation one feels when one is falling in love with someone, or when one is aching deeply for a return to one’s Earthy roots, or when one is aching for a reunion with the divine beloved (these are often one and the same experience). That ache, that sense of devotion, in which prayers for such a reunion rise naturally like incense from the heart, is the inner flame of anticipation which makes the practice of anticipatory community possible.
“The inner flame of anticipation…” The Realist closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He begins laughing that samurai laugh.
To Julia (never to me for some reason): “Do you have the answer yet? The best of us or the worst of us when the shit hits the fan?”
Julia looks at me (as she always does in these situations) and sharply says to him: “They’re fucking coming.”
“This way, eventually” I add.
The hermitage silence is gently broken by the wind chimes which are the ringtone of the Realist. His IPhone 9, the screen cracked of course, is still linked to the encryption. Moving like a Zen cat, the Realist takes the call in his solarium, whispering so we can’t hear him.
I get up to stretch my legs and enjoy my Earl Grey. On the wall is this passage embossed in black and a hint of neon molten gold
Discourse is not a synonym for language. Discursive practices are the material conditions for making meaning. In my posthumanist account, meaning is not a human-based notion; rather meaning is an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility.
Intelligibility is usually framed as a matter of intellection and therefore a specifically human capacity. But in my agential realist account, intelligibility is a matter of differential responsiveness, as performatively articulated and accountable, to what matters. Intelligibility is not an inherent characteristic of humans but a feature of the world in its differential becoming. The world articulates itself differently.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Being.
Ah yes Barad. For me the equivalent of listening to a very technically complex but very evocative prog rock album. It had become a narrative in the classrooms I inhabited before and after the changes: Indigenous peoples never forgot this seemingly complex knowledge your Western scholars are “discovering.” This is always a completely compelling accurate critique. Why fold the erotic, the loam of Earth, into so many syllables, symbols, and notes?
Still Barad, especially on some of those pharmacological manifestations available in the house, was marvelous. Her writing is like diving into the atomic freeways of the microcosm, beholding the theology of the quantum paintbrush of the Divine-at least that’s how I took it. The erotic and the devotional all entangled like limbs and hopes and little deaths in every quanta and every superposition and every concrete kiss on the lips. That’s reality. That’s what we stupidly call “God.” Dancing in the moonlight, on the shore of the Yamuna, forever in embrace, that is it.
“For clearly what is at issue in the shift from classical to quantum physics is not merely the nature of human knowledge but also the nature of being.”
The Realist comes back into the dining room next to the kitchen. He shares a quick look with Julia (always with her) that communicates that he has completely heard what she (we) just said. They are coming here and they are coming here soon. To get the kids.
Nevertheless he glances back at our manuscript. Another point the Realist wants to make. This is also part of the real work too, he often says, always looking at me, gauging whether or not I’ve finally given up on the dream of a tweed tenure-track, an office high in the tower, with stain-glass windows, endless bookshelves, my pipe, that pipe dream…
“Organic intellectuals we are,” reading from the manuscript while he prunes his butterfly bush.
We have to do the ecotheology!
The anticipator is an organic intellectual in the Anthropocene, with a primary emphasis on the organicness, the Earthiness, which defines and forms the intellectual content of her work. She does not demand regeneration as a linear progress. The messiness of her Earthiness as an anticipator contains within itself certain creative energies which refuse to be tamed or ordered or domesticated. The anticipator gives herself to the vulnerability of becoming in the service of regeneration. The anticipator even questions traditional languages of revolutionary thought and practice. Too much attachment to revolutionary fervor also implies an over-attachment to massive structural change at the expense of local and organic change. As the political theorist William E. Connolly argues “the point today is not to wait for a revolution that overthrows the whole system. The ‘system,’ as we shall see further, is replete with too many loose ends, uneven edges, dicey intersections with nonhuman forces, and uncertain trajectories to make such a wholesale project plausible. Besides, things are too urgent and too many people on the ground are suffering too much now.” William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 42.
Anyone who practices anticipation must avoid the temptation for a change which is either too big or too small. If it is too big it will not provide the kind of radical intimate creativity which is necessary for vulnerable becoming and regenerative practice at the grassroots level. If it is too small it will not attend to the massive systemic evils of the Anthropocene. If it is too small it may attend to sufferings only in the key of charity and not in the key of justice. The anticipator insists on justice, for “charity means helping the victims. Justice asks, ‘Why are there so many victims?’ and then seeks to change the causes of victimization, that is, the way the system is structured.” Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 201.
Anticipation as regenerative ecotheology is always a seeking a queer hope and opportunity in the movements between homesickness and homegoing. It lives and moves with and within the unbounded yet still coherent rhythms of watersheds and ecosystems, of forest groves and pandemics and People’s Shocks from below, from the “underconscious” and/or what the Black American poet/scholar Fred Moten and his colleague Stefano Harvey describe as the undercommons. The anticipators in the undercommons are the people who create “disruption and who consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval...to renew by unsettling.” Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 20.
Moving to the Earthy rhythms of the undercommons is to move within the faith, put into practice, that the impossible is possible. Anticipation, especially in its political key, demands that the only real possibility is that which the turbo-capitalist considers impossible. These are the possibilities of regenerated Earthy flourishing, hand-in-hand with a defiant Earth which is not our enemy, and certainly not our redeemer, but instead our fierce, mysterious, and motherly companion in this Great Work. Rooted again and anew in this Earthy body politic, we become rooted and connected to everything around us and within us and we become creators of everything which must change. As Moten and Harvey declare “we owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination.
We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”
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“We have to do our ecotheology. It’s also part of the work,” he says, again staring right through me.
Back to pruning. Back to Earl Grey. The one thing about Inchkeith is the silence. It’s so enveloping. No one can be manic or static here.
“It seems that we must unsettle and entangle and anticipate and grieve. Isn’t that what we have been doing all this time. What makes this time any more or less special?” Pruning the butterfly bush.
Julia gets that look in her eyes, that Scottish fire again. She says to the Realist
“They know that we are here. The ones who want all the remaining free lands.”
This time he looks at both of us. He knows who they are, the people who are coming. He knows because he was once one of them, the tech bros of the Book of Revelations, the Singularity seekers, the planetary travelers of the new century (at least until Musk died trying to flee to space).
The Realist puts down his pruners. He finishes his tea.
“What I have been thinking about so much lately is whether or not it’s true that we can control our destiny. Is astrology right? Is quantum physics true? No, it’s not such a binary. It’s never a binary. The Lord is the Illicit Lover. He breaks apart the world of karma and of normal relationships.”
He looks at us. “That’s A.K Ramanujan, my favorite poet. From Speaking of Siva”
“Does the universe respond to our desires and actions, like pulling on the matrix to shape life the way we intend it to? Which means we must be very careful to know what we intend. Most of the time what is unconscious is the coal in the engine. The unconscious is always striving to become conscious. When we ignore her…Or are we just being dragged around by a bunch of damn planets all of the time? Anyway it’s all just fucking exasperating. Bunch of hockum.”
He comes over close to both of us. “The kids at the farm. They’re coming first for them?”
The kids are a brilliant group of young Scottish youth who have destroying fossil fuel infrastructure all over Europe. Really they’re the best of the various groups of youth who have been doing this all over the world for the last three years. All of them brilliant jewels. We made the farm in the highlands expressly for the purpose of protecting them, sheltering them, and giving them the contemplative space to strategize. (Imagine the conversations I had to convince my city-slicker wife who is scared of cows about this entire plan. Earth had ways of making the choice not only obvious, but urgently necessary)
The Realist looks closely at us this time (not through us). Tears are in his eyes.
“Either protect them there or get them out ASAP.”
We make the three hour journey back. Julia and I don’t speak much. We never really do. But we both know who we need to be in touch with to protect the kids.