Pralaya (An Anticipatory Story) 1:9
SEASON 1, EPISODE 9
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes were made.
From Christopher L. Fici, Ph.D
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The Manuscript (##annotations)
assorted ecotheological fragments
fragments from entangled sources in gold
original fragments of the manuscript in common
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To theologize (especially perhaps to ecotheologize) is to ground the language and experience of faith. The ecotheologian places the experience of the Divine within the dirt and messiness and pain and injustice of our lives and systems. Ecotheology is dirty theology.
The Irish author Paraic O’Donnell expresses this exquisitely and clearly when he writes that:
To care for a garden, you have to know it deeply. You have to know it carnally. You have to touch it intimately, get under its skin. You have to go down on it, taste its undermurk, get as filthy as it wants, let it claw you, mark you, draw blood. You have to ache from it, stink of it, reel from it. Because that’s how you remind yourself, how you know. Because when you stagger inside, fouled and lacerated, you glimpse something of what you were, something original and uncorrupted. It’s everywhere on your skin, in the muck savour and the lush reek of chlorophyll. It’s in your blood, when you taste it from your torn wrists. You’re wasted, undone, as good as dead. But you know this much. You can just about sound out the words. They’re singing in you, sweet and ragged under everything. This is what I belong to. This is what I am for.
Pariac O’Donnell, “Pariac O’Donnell: MS is meticulously destroying me. I am being unmade.”
The Irish Times, published February 11, 2020, accessed at https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/paraic-o-donnell-ms-is-meticulously-destroying-me-i-am-being-unmade-1 .4168380?fbclid=IwAR2PwmuhbAVfS-dD2MwvRDy4CByrPWmiJwSNvTblafn5r0BmEZkzspHqxmk
It is the common root of devotion (what my fellow Hindus describe as bhakti-yoga, the yoga of devotion) which moves through our various gardens of faith. The Now What? is the embryo within the pregnant emerging rhythms of Earthy chaos and rupture. This embryo dances along with the strange merciful beats of resurrection and reincarnation. From this Earthy jazz and funk, as rendered in their endlessly diverse tastes, smells, and hierarchies of blessed, damned, and doomed, a sympoetic, collective, sympathetic, intimate, erotic, and compassionate bonding creative energy re-emerges.
Haraway describes this seed as a “carrier bag for ongoingness, a yoke for becoming-with, for staying with the trouble of inheriting the damages and achievements of colonial and postcolonial naturalcultural histories in telling the tale of still possible recuperation.” (Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 125.)
Anticipation is the practice of insisting that the answer to the Now What? is the answer of becoming-with, of staying with the trouble of the emergency, of healing the colonial wounds which have created the emergency. The questions of the Now What? are calls to the practice of anticipation and a call to devotedly understand, re-create, and co-create anew and again the anticipatory community.
Nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.—WALTER BENJAMIN
I set forth how this project—as in the method of smashing an atom—releases the enormous energy of history that lies bound in the “once upon a time” of classical historical narrative.—WALTER BENJAMIN
— Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia) by Catherine Keller, Mary-Jane Rubenstein
What is the nature of the relationship between the eternal and transitory, the infinite and the finite? Benjamin contends that “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” exists in this very structure of the thick-now, which the historical materialist “recognizes as a sign of a messianic cessation of happening”—a rupture in the continuum of time—a break from the unilinear conception of temporality as the continuous unfolding of the past into the future. The radical political potential that exists in the thick-now of this moment requires thinking time anew—diffracting the past through the present moment, like the play of light inside a crystal.
Karen Barad, “What Flashes Up: Theological-Political Fragments”
— Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia) by Catherine Keller, Mary-Jane Rubenstein
ReMembering is first and foremost a set of practices which fulfills desires for Earthy intimacies.
human-being is always Earthy-being
then to reMember is “to learn from nature today is to know that a human is, at core, a part and parcel of the ecosystem in which she breathes, drinks, eats, defecates, falls in love, gives birth, raises children, and encounters the Divine.” ( Sara Jolena Wolcott, “Public intellectuals at the dawn of the Anthropocene Age: can we reMember,” Religious Studies Scholars as Public Intellectuals, ed. Sabrina D. Misirhiralall, Christopher L. Fici, and Gerald S. Vigna (New York: Routledge, 2018). 165)
The practices of reMembering especially grounds the anticipator firmly within the Earthy dirt, mess, and abundance of the eco in ecotheology. Anticipation is also a decolonizing experience emerging from the experience of messianic spacetimemattering. The anticipator “recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework.” (Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (Boston, Mariner Books, 2019), XVII, 110.)
The anticipator frames her spacetimemattering always in the “revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.” She includes her fellow Earthly creatures, ecosystems, and watersheds as those beings and life-systems which have been outcast, who need inclusion in the revolutionary chance. She always considers and plays with the what-might-yet-have-been-and-might-yet-be, knowing that the very practice of anticipation, the very dance of anticipation, is to bring to fruit the historical possibilities of liberation which always exist in the very fabric of creation.
Since consciousness-raising has been used by all kinds of subjugated groups, it would perhaps be better to talk now of subjugated group consciousness rather than (just) class consciousness…Subjugated group consciousness is first of all a consciousness of the (cultural, political, existential) machineries which produce subjugation-the machineries which normalize the dominant group and create a sense of inferiority in the subjugated. But, secondly, it is also a consciousness of the potency of the subjugated group-a potency that depends upon this very raised state of consciousness.”
Mark Fisher, “No Romance Without Finance”
Ecotheologians express devotion through the experience of a Divine being/presence who is the source of creation, who as this source is profoundly beyond and different from creation, but who is also, simultaneously and inconceivably, deeply embedded and embodied within each and every element, each and every atom, each and every move of the quantum dance of Earthy creation…ecotheology is open, willing, and aching for the remembrance and return to the intimate embrace of our planetary neighbor in their animacy and in their divinanimality.
Ecotheology is geared to the unique languages of repentance and reform, of doing first works over, which is not a guilt-stricken ascetic exercise of devitalizing flogging, but instead the gentle but firm tending of our existential and Earthy wounds. Ecotheology naturally has a width and depth to always include, embrace, and affirm the flourishing of Earth and our planetary neighbors, but it also always tends to the well-being of the oikos of our very human body politic. Ecotheologians know that political and cultural vectors such as race, gender, caste, and the struggle for everyday human dignity, in the age of Trumpism and its cousin ascendant nationalisms, are always elements deeply interwoven into ecological concerns.
Ecotheology as living theology is also always an existential theology, always making the common-sense assertionyet often untended to by scholars, movement activists, and everyday people, that the health of our internal ecology, the ecology of our physical and psychological well-being, is intimately linked to the health of our planetary ecology. The self-poisoning of alienation within one's mind and heart, which poisons our capacities for existential well-being and self-realization, inevitably manifests as the lead which poisons the drinking water we give to our children.
We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic. We surround democracy’s false image in order to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a decision, we’re undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, we’re unwilling. Every time it tries to take root, we’re gone (because we’re already here, moving). We ask and we tell and we cast the spell that we are under, which tells us what to do and how we shall be moved, here, where we dance the war of apposition. We’re in a trance that’s under and around us. We move through it and it moves with us, out beyond the settlements, out beyond the redevelopment, where black night is falling, where we hate to be alone, back inside to sleep till morning, drink till morning, plan till morning, as the common embrace, right inside, and around, in the surround.
— the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study by Fred Moten, Stefano Harney
the point is: to explode the temporality of the modernist conception of science, understood as a progressive process of knowledge accumulation, one embraced not only as the epitome of progress but as its very ideal; to blast apart the notion that science is an independent field of thought driven only by empirical findings devoid of any metaphysical, theological, or political commitments; and to destabilize the high authority accorded to science over all other ways of knowing.
Karen Barad, “What Flashes Up: Theological-Political Fragments”
— Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia) by Catherine Keller, Mary-Jane Rubenstein
Regenerative intimacy is the key which unlocks our regenerative capacities. Intimacy is the energy which can draw down the dangerous potential of ecofascism and climate totalitarianism.
As Berry teaches “intimacy with the planet in its wonder and beauty and the full depth of its meaning is what enables an integral human relationship with the planet to function. It is the only possibility for humans to attain their true flourishing while honoring the other modes of earthly being.” ( Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), xi.)
Earthiness as a measure and experience of devotion where Divinity and Earth meet is also a measure and experience of what Weber describes as erotic ecology. The erotic nature of ecological systems reveals an instinct for communion and connection which is antithetical to the lowest common denominator of the survival of the fittest. As Weber explains “in erotic ecology, the feeling of joy is an integral component part of a flourishing ecosystem...Through this experience-and this is precisely what makes it erotic-every creature can perceive its reflection in every other, because we have a sensitive, vulnerable body that depends as much on bonds as on the air we breathe. According to this deep principle, we know how other beings feel, because they have bodies like we do. The affection of this body is mercy, not greed.” (Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014), 10)
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The Manuscript (##annotations)
assorted ecotheological fragments
fragments from entangled sources in gold
original fragments of the manuscript in common