Deep dives, transmuting archetypes & plural individuals
Act III Hydrocosmos: on the need to establish respectful and reciprocal relationships with bodies of water, in three acts: dance, cry, dive.
Diving often heals me when my humanness becomes scared and forgets how to be fluid. Afloat in water, the gravity felt by body and thoughts alleviates. Water can tenderly bring back somatic memories of the maternal amniotic lake who first nourished my lungs, long before they knew how to breathe air. I return home into my body of water and breath easier. This relationship is not led by control but consent. When I immerse myself I do it with porous intent, in conversation with the water. She whispers of what needs letting go.
I believe that it is through such conversations with other ecosystems that we establish the oxymoronic interlacings that are us: plural individuals. Hominid and bacterial cells in conversation with all other expressions of ecosystemic life. A subjective experience of a relational and fractal existence.
There is no life in vacuum. The hydrobiotic organisms that survive it, like Tardigrades, do it by ceasing all metabolism and engaging cryptobiosis, only returning to life once the environmental conditions allow the porous conversation to resume: digestions, decompositions, rhythmic consumptions… Knowing this, separation and self-sufficiency could never be a sustainable way to be alive.
Thus, the anthropocentric perfection and geometric simplicity of the squares and circles that isolate the Vitruvian Man dissolve. Central and measurable entity, Separation, interrupted by organic relationships!
‘Men’ metamorphoses into plurality, fluid ecosystem, interlacings of water and pollution, conversation with symbionts and parasites, imperfect unit of the whole.
Our separation from the Earth’s ecosystem by epistemic and anthropocentric shapes is the cradle of the continuing socio-ecological violence of modernity. Thus, we must dive deep into our definitions, archetypal patterns and history, to observe profoundly where separation roots, so that we can transmute it, compost it, in service of sustainability.
Individualism is an essential scaffold of modernity’s viciousness. Thus, the eradication of the conceptual individual is a possible reaction when craving systemic change. But this reasoning can perhaps trap us in echoes of the cultures we abhor, because it sounds similar to the simplistic and binary narratives that the oppressive system delights in: “Either there’s value in the individual and each must stand out from the whole, or we should only be concerned with the collective average and the individual does not matter”.
Many utilitarist violences have been committed by ‘either/or’s. The objectification of individual as dispensable unit fills museum drawers and laboratory cages in the name of the loving study of life (I speak with experience and accountability). Without urgent collective and creative discussions of alternatives nor critical discussions of the inherited prescriptions that dictate compassion to be put aside in science realms. Institutions invent tools to incentivize individuals to dwell in guilt but never in power, so that there are less and less demanding change and becoming accomplices.
Each lizard in a population has a (hi)story that albeit similar, is unique. Each individual has a molecular, genetic, philosophical, cultural (hi)story that albeit echoed, was never before lived and expressed in that specific tapestry of ephemeral patterns.
Perhaps each individual deserves respect and compassion as a temporary and (likely) irreproducible expression of life’s complexity. Perhaps and individual is not a biological unit we can measure in isolation, but a shapeshifting biochemical, transcendental, and poetic (hi)story woven in porous relationship with the Earth’s ecosystem. If we accept individuals as fractals: unique and echoed tapestries who are part of the uniquely collective tapestry, then, when we overexploit and objectify one life we betray the diverse whole we pledged to honor and care for.
Individual: a porous unit of the cosmic metabolism, a plural singular
While we understand that the molecule is not river, we know that the molecular characteristics of the hydrogen bonds in each H2O are what allows water to change molecular partner up to 100 billion times per second, remaining stable in liquid form while absorbing enormous quantities of energy. It is the constant molecular transformation that, paradoxically, confers water the stability to regulate the climate. So, as the individual interacts with systemic forces and shapeshifts, so does the hydrologic cycle: river, cloud, rain… Evidently, systemic transformation is not upheld by the individual in isolation. Individuals need to align bonds, echolocate grief, for change to move and permeate levels incrementally more collective: community, institution, culture, ecosystem... Those levels then echo back into individual actions, in conversational revolution.
There is power in individuals aware of their connection and porosity across levels of change, breaking through illusions of isolation and hopelessness, joining others in the work of resisting stagnation and acquiescence.
In a time that urges us to embrace uncertainty and fluidity, perhaps we need not to eliminate the conceptual individual. Rejecting still the “tools of the master”, maybe we can evolve an ontological definition of individual that can guide us in the prevention of unnecessary usurping of life, and feed stamina that fights until freedom and justice are a participatory possibility for all individuals and not only the average.
Maybe water can be our cartographer as we dive into rivers of radical uncertainty and creativity searching for a definition that deposes the fallacy of separation and interrupts its narcissist value, through transmutations of archetypes and aseptic cultural inheritances that, left unrecognized, keep us trapped in circles of loss.
Narcissus comes to mind. He is evoked often as condition of utter centralization of one’s isolated self in hierarchical superiority and annihilated empathy: narcissism. It is treated as finite and permanent diagnostic, while greatly rewarded by much of the prevailing cultures of the institutional West. A recipe for utter stagnation.
My hope demands uncertainty and wonders if Narcissus could transmute after drowning. What if Narcissus could learn to Echo-locate beyond his definitions of self and learned to see the river in reciprocity and respect, instead of just his reflection… Perhaps Narcissus could then ask the river’s consent to dive past the surface in search of a beauty that is conversation and connection with deeper, darker, waters. Perhaps Narcissus would emerge from the river with a definition of mirrored beauty that includes the water, the excretions, the muds, the parasites, the shadows…
One day, everything we call ‘individual’ will unavoidably and completely re-transform and journey into other bodies of water, other stories… Til death do us whole, maybe we could dive in the paradox of being a plural individual searching for the relationships who break us free from boxes and circles of perfection, and the echoes that invite us to dive deeper.
Questions for reflection: