The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  What she has been saying about negative imprints and energy; we are a very potent species, we have a very heavy imprint. I think about what Larus said about aliens leaving messages in our DNA and, well, we have already left our own messages in the earth at Hiroshima. We made rockets to go to the moon and look at ourselves. But the technology that built the rockets to go to the moon was adapted from the same technology that the atom bomb was made from. Nuclear radiation is the negative imprint left by our glorious inventions. We did it! We made something to give us immortal remembrance!

  What is the message of this, our most enduring time capsule? Its content is senseless, it is a messageless symbol, a dead language. But even where a message fails, the time capsule itself still conveys an intent. It is a pointing finger, you just can’t see at what it points. What is the prerequisite for intent? Just a self-conscious marking? With the Wow! Signal they were looking for a pattern repeated enough for it to seem unlikely to be a coincidental and natural occurrence. In his whale graphs Larus was looking for the frequency with which certain distinct data occurred. Maybe these graphs could not be used to interpret our waste depository sites because we use pictorial symbols rather than language as language is one more degree of symbolism removed. But the pattern and symmetry and frequency of the pictorial symbols should also suggest intent.

  So the symbols at the waste depository sites would have to be something that can’t occur naturally like giant sculptures, rock carvings, detailed pictograms. Something with the human stink about it (patterns suggest a maker). But if you don’t know what is the human stink, then maybe you will not smell it (there are patterns and symmetry in nature and these have already been used to argue for a teleological proof of god, which I know to be misleading).

  The occurrence of the waste depository sites would be infrequent, making them anomalies, and suggesting unnatural origin, unlike signs that are said to point to intelligent design, which are everywhere, so the intent would be recognised, and would colonise and corrupt the epistemological wilderness of the future. It says without saying SO THAT WE MAY LIVE INTO YOURS. Any attempt to share meaning and a message with the future will probably fail but what probably will not fail is this meaningless scribble. It is a desire that manifests itself a lot in our culture, the desire to leave a mark; graffiti in a bathroom stall, vandalism, a signature: all a defiance of time. We have sown our signature into the soil. We have survived time.

  And what is your message?

  The light shapes shifted only slightly, it was their vague wave of intensity that had woken me up. As my eyes came to, their change in colour, at the shadows borders, dancing around the edges, rendered the billows of light like a petrol rainbow.

  The T-shirt I had tucked into the window to keep the light out was clinging on by one sleeve where the stitching bunched the fabric, like it does sometimes when the wind makes the old latches slide down a little.

  After having only seen the Northern Lights in time-lapse that is how I thought they moved. Licking the sky like a green flame. In real time they hardly move at all. Serves me right for knowing a natural phenomenon only by watching it on the internet. It jarred me, I had to move to check I was not having a sort of stroke and seeing everything in slow motion; a momentary lapse like climbing the last stair that is not there. They moved, but not in big winding ribbons, more rapid little flames within big ribbons that moved more slowly. There were different states of focus; a school of fish that ribbon like a sea serpent.

  Eskimos think the lights are the spirits of the animals they hunted. Beluga whales, deer and seals. Native Americans from Wisconsin think that the lights are manabai’wok, giants who are the spirit form of great hunters and fishermen. Other natives see them as the spirits of ancestors, and all interpret them as a benevolent force. And in a way they are all right, given metaphoric licence. The lights are the physical manifestation of a magnetic field that deflects high-energy solar radiation, protecting life on Earth. The lights are particles that have made it through where the magnetic field is weaker at the poles, and collide with gas particles.

  Cultures see in the constellation of stars things that feature in their vernacular of images. Carl Sagan said that when the ancient Egyptians saw the Big Dipper they saw a horse carrying a man leaning back followed by a hippo with a crocodile on its back. What will people of the future see in the nuclear trefoil? It looks a little like a peace sign, or an X-marking-the-spot.

  In the narrative of conception the egg is the conquest, but in a photomicrographic image of sperm cells meeting an egg, what really looks like the most ‘powerful’ on a comparison of constructed scales of significance? Why do we talk of sex in terms of penetration, rather than a cave mouth swallowing? What is our own significance against the vastness of space?

  Take something vague like the Lights and make it into something very specific depending on your myths. We are all saying the same thing in different ways. But that is just it; a vernacular. Aliens who find our time capsules would not share any kind of vernacular with we who are under the anthropological umbrella of ‘Life on Earth’, so Larus is wrong to be looking for pi in space. The Human Interference Task Force were wrong to try to find universal symbols.

  Ah, Larus. The Northern Lights are super-rare in the Alaskan summer. I thought I must have still been sleeping. But then I remembered like an echo what he had said, that there was going to be a magnetic supercharge this year. He said that the sun’s activity goes in cycles that peak every eleven years, and that this year is the eleventh. I forgot everything for a second and got an urge to talk to him and tell him. He would have liked to know.

  In a way I am starting to feel a little bit better about the betrayal, because the flaws it gives him free me from his tether. He taught me a lot, but he is still quite blinded by his man-vision. John Lilly did not treat the dolphins with the reverence he preached they deserved, he was a hypocrite and he brought a lot of discredit to the study of cetaceans. But that can’t undermine the few really pertinent things he also said about other-than-human consciousness. Larus and his ulterior motive do not make everything that I did learn from him null. Because imagine if we took the personal lives of great thinkers as their oeuvre. Sure, we should hate them for it, but if we ignored all of the wife beaters, all of the wife silencers, all of the wife killers, wouldn’t we have some gaping holes in history?

  HOW MUSHROOMS CAN SAVE THE WORLD

  My comrade reindeer came back again. I know for sure it is real now because I have pinched myself when I have seen it and I have filmed it on camera and watched it back several times over just to make sure. I find it very strange that the reindeer is always alone. This is not the usual behaviour of a reindeer, and this fact makes me think it really is my comrade. But then, this is the part that cannot be theoretically tested. The reindeer could just be a lost and lonely reindeer.

  It has not tried to talk to me or tell my future like she said it might. But I do not know if maybe I am looking too hard and thinking too literally. Like looking too hard with my actual physical eyes instead of looking more indirectly with my third eye, which really only means feminine perspective, as in admitting there is not one truth, there are many narratives, there are many names for mountains, and by taking on the perspective of the reindeer I will actually see myself and my future. It is simple and rational, like how Jung said that you can predict the future if you just know how the present has evolved out of the past.

  THE vANITy OF MODERN ExISTENcE

  INT. CABIN, SUNLIGHT – Erin on cot, camera on desk opposite – in shot are cabin cot, Erin and the window, legs draped over edge of cot, her hands stiffly under the diary as if at a lectern – she looks up from it and directly at the camera – there is something unsettling in the way her eyes look – wide, imploring/haunted –

  ERIN: ‘KACZYNSKI IS GOD’ is scrawled in capitals on the title page of the diary. I have read the first half. Like the title suggests. Damon is pretty much Kaczynski

  – she looks dow
n at the diary and pauses with a hand hovering over her bookmarks, little scraps of paper – she picks the first and carefully turns to its page – pages are stiff from years sat pressed together –

  ERIN: So like here he says

  – she takes a breath –

  Once upon a time there was a land covered with pristine virgin wilderness. Where colossal trees soared over lavish mountainsides and rivers ran crazy and free through deserts. Where eagles wheeled and beavers beavered at their dams and people lived in concord with bare nature. Achieving everything they needed to achieve by the day using only rocks. Bones and timber. Padding softly on the Earth and living to full personal potential. In a peaceful state of anarchy

  – she looks back at the camera –

  ERIN: Which is lifted right out of Kaczynski. And then this

  – she turns to another page –

  That summer there were too many people around my old cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I hear there are handlebars and viewing plateaus specifically plateaued for viewing at Yosemite now. They think that wildness can be put in a box and looked at. John Muir was a douchebag

  ERIN: Saturation again. Damon must have been in another cabin somewhere a bit less remote before he came to this one. Kaczynski did that too. He got upset when some bulldozers tore down his favourite thinking spot and that’s what sent him further out into the wilderness and into madness and made him send the letter bombs

  – she sits looking at the diary in her hands with slumped shoulders – she looks back at the camera –

  ERIN (QUIETLY): It’s really fucking sad if you think about it

  – then she smiles weakly, turning to another page –

  ERIN: And then this. Before the forgetting existence was a mosaic of beauty. It is the iron fist of technology that has smashed that to smithereens. And we are the shards. Each just a remnant of this beautiful mosaic. Discordant from our true nature

  – she stares at the page – looks up –

  ERIN: And it’s all very hyperbolic but I get it

  – she turns to another page –

  Technological society is a leech on the soul. Existentialism is its result. Primitive man had a challenging existence. He had to fight off predators and other men and hunt and kill. He was raw and fully alive. He was not safe from failure but he was not hopeless to all of his threats. He could act on them. Modern man is under constant threat by things he has no power to control. Nuclear weapons. Pollution. Carcinogens. Our environment is already radically altered from its natural state. Soon man will be as radically different as his modern environment

  ERIN: He man he. Of course. But he goes into this more. He says that

  – she turns to another bookmark –

  Nature is not a feminist. Nature is ruled by chaos and competition. Strength and cunning. Nature made a human creature that must fill the roles of care and duty to offspring. So that the species may flourish. They are weaker and domestically minded. This obviously makes them social beings and so more suited to civilisation. This is why the mountains are not peppered with women. They will be more cumbersome during the revolution and will also fare worse. But of course they will be necessary after the revolution. So we must take care to recruit them

  – she frowns down at the diary – makes a kind of ‘huuumph’ sound – bounces the diary a little in her hands, absently – chews the inside of her lip – she turns to another bookmark – the pages stick together – she peels them apart –

  The enemy is the machine. We should not make enemies of ourselves

  – she looks back to the camera, bouncing the diary in her hands again – the stiff pages hardly move –

  ERIN: You can see the way his philosophy develops. He starts going then into how the revolution should work and what his idea of utopia after will be like. All the time going back to this idea of freedom freedom freedom, which he always writes in capitals. He wants to destroy everything institutional and symbolic. Factories, of course, but also hospitals. And libraries. And he says there will be many casualties. He says that death and chaos are the sacrifice needed. That freedom and dignity are more valuable than a life free of pain. That to die fighting for survival is more fulfilling than a life void of purpose

  – she is absorbed in her trail of thought – she does not notice the book in her hands – her hands play with it absently – apparently she does not notice because she does not treat it with the delicate reverence she did before –

  ERIN: And then if you follow his logic. And you end up with this post-technological society. Then doesn’t feminism have what it wants anyway? Because if like I believe there is no natural way of being. And patriarchy is just scaffolding. Then does taking down the scaffolding not solve the problem?

  – the diary slips from her hands and lands on the floor face down – a page is dislodged and slips across the floor with the gust the book’s landing made – Erin looks reproachfully at the piece of paper – she bends and reaches to pick it up, gathers the diary as she does – she sits back on the cot and looks at the paper, places the diary besides her – then she unfolds the piece of paper – her lips move silently as she begins to read –

  – her face caves in on itself – she brings her hand to her mouth and the other begins shaking – she lets out a whine that is broken and animalistic –

  – then her eyes dart suddenly to an area behind the camera and to the left – she brings away her hand as though to talk – her face has a receptivity to it now, like it is in the act of communication, all parts expressive in a way that had not been in evidence to the inanimate camera – as though there is someone in the room with her whom she is addressing –

  ERIN: He… He killed himself

  – and then, shaking her head desolately –

  ERIN: I don’t. Don’t know

  – in the background through the window looking out into the trees that get denser and denser until they are forest a dark shape comes forward from the obscurity – it is small because it is in the distance, it would be easy to miss – Erin slowly shakes her head at the point behind the camera with her mouth a big ‘O’ – eyes are drawn to it because it is sudden movement in a previously inert space – in contrast to the space around it it becomes clear – a large animal with long spindly legs –

  – Erin’s expression droops and her eyes slip diagonally down to the camera – she blinks at it then slowly rises, slowly, like her body is almost too heavy to lift – she leans across the floor and reaches out –

  CUT

  WEST, WEST, WEST, DESTINy, DESTINy, DESTINy

  After I read it I went a bit dizzy like I had to sit down and get moving acutely at the same time. I got the fear/adrenaline that perhaps a rabbit feels being run into the ground by a fox; a chemical consolation prize for its oncoming doom. And there must be one, a payoff, I think, otherwise the rabbit would just lie down and let the fox take it, not prolong its own suffering. There must be a small part to the death chase that feels good.

  I packed up my bag to move back out to the fire tower. Damon’s quest and the distance he went on it had put my own feeble experiment into perspective; in contrast a glorified camping trip. He too saw the hypocrisy of the Mountain Man but he actually followed through on it with frenzied sincerity. A distance so far and so absolute as to never come back. In fact the only absolute solitude.

  An event horizon is a place in space-time and events beyond this point can’t reach an observer who is outside of them. It is a point of no return and on the other side of this point the gravitational pull turns so intense that escape is impossible. This is a black hole.

  Here in the cabin there is always looming the possibility that Stan will come to find me. This is reason enough to leave for somewhere more authentically distant. And I shall not take my map. A map is a corrupting thing, an imposition on the wilderness it tames, translates to the symbolic. And it is a mapping for others to follow, like Thoreau mapped for others to follow him on his philosophical terrain but by
talking about it he took away its agency, its pure wildness. Because pure wildness is the absence of words, is self-willed. Damon found this out and had to give up all of his words.

  I cannot take the camera because it is more than the documentary now. Documenting too throws a quadrant on a thing, pins a thing down like a specimen for dissection. You cannot document a wilderness because that undoes its wildness, its being apart and for itself, and now I understand this. To document is to litter, to litter photographs of the tundra in the tundra behind you. And besides, it diminishes the directness of the experience, which becomes once removed via a superficial lens of viewing. Can you even have a feminist documentary on wilderness? Can you even have a word for wilderness? Do the Eskimos and the Inuits have one?

  It is like Sam told me; the categorising of indigenous people is a colonial pursuit that controls their identity with words. Like in the Indian Act. It is a way to distinguish in white law who gets status or non-status, who gets what.

  We map them out, draw out their boundaries, like when I entered Denali Park or you enter any park and there is a visitors’ centre roping off the inside from the outside, nature from non-nature. Gender is another act of division, deciding who gets what admirable qualities. There are no Mountain Women because the Mountain Man will not call her Mountain Woman. The Mercury 13 were ready for space flight, but NASA wasn’t ready to call them astronauts. (Side note: Athabaskans had a matrilineal society before rights were given to their men in white law.)

  All along I have been catching butterflies, pinning them in a glass case and putting a name to them: my own name. I had thought it so innocent, the calling of things by their real names. The good truth of speciesism; helping me to see difference. But it is not, it pins the animal to a system that pretends to be truth, static and mechanical, it reduces the luminous and the complex. This makes the thing, the animal, lose its deeper truth. William Blake the poet got upset at Newton and the Enlightenment scientists for ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’. I have been trying so hard to put it into words but I have been struggling because it can never really be worded without making its immediacy dissipate. I have been unweaving rainbows.