by Abi Andrews
More facts (or speculations). Dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with risk-taking and therefore adventure. It gives us a reward hit when we accomplish a task. The more risk involved in the task, the bigger the hit. A reason not everyone wants to be a Mountain Man could be that some people make less dopamine than others. Dopamine is associated with the left side of the brain while serotonin is associated with the right. As a general trend men are associated more with the left side of the brain and women with the right.
Dopamine is associated more with antisocial personality disorders and serotonin with borderline personality disorders. A person with antisocial personality disorder lacks empathy for other people while a borderline personality disorder feels like empathy you can’t control, boundary issues making it difficult to share another’s pain without feeling it too much as your own (the process of osmosis until the saturation point is reached).
These are very general trends. There are more Mountain Men than Mountain Women. But a siphon movement can only start when an outside pressure has been added. A dead hand is an undesirable and persisting influence. And if you pour liquid into a mould to set it will set in the shape of the mould. Learned behaviour has been proved to actually change genetic make-up, so even biological sex is in a process of transformation always.
The evolutionary biologists say that maybe the dopamine in the brain was the thing that sent us out of Africa. Maybe it is the chemical of species proliferation. Maybe it made me leave home. Maybe it sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon.
But could be it is not quite an innate and natural impulse like that and the real reason is that NASA were very selective about who could join Apollo. Some psychologist did a personality assessment of all the Apollo astronauts and concluded that they were all ‘Type A’. A Type A personality is very competitive, rational, ambitious, you could say glory-hungry and selfish. And this could have to do, the psychologist said, with the fact that they were all the eldest sibling or the only son, and had patriarchal military-type fathers (remember the original desert solitude-seeking nature solace Mountain Man with the most famous absent father, our Lord Jesus Christ).
And women can be Type A too, but maybe it would be better if people stopped being Type A altogether, or if we at least stopped letting Type As do all the important and influential stuff. And if Type A is still the type that provides the most astronauts, then the space colonies are not going to be much fun, are they?
The ‘primitive’ necessarily gets meaning from the contrast of civilisation. And besides, you did not ever manage to shrug off civilisation. You worshipped mathematics as absolute.
But mathematics puts another false map on the world, which pretends to be a territory but is really just another map, same as the others. It is a thing we invented based on spatial allegories coming from our bodies and their interaction with the outside. There are different mathematics and they are inconsistent with each other, but are perfect systems. They are not real or true in your absolutist sense, so they went against your project of wilderness. It is the belief in this reduction that drives your Machine and you do not even see it.
My main point is we are at a place in time now where we can be reflective. It may have been almost inevitable that our symbols would do this to us, but now we have the reflectiveness to be critical of them. But we need our symbols in order to be able to talk and think about ourselves. And to change the paradigm.
Aldo Leopold said, ‘a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ And I think this is a philosophy to live by. Our challenge is to remember that we are a part of this biotic community, and once we have remembered, to act accordingly.
In a way you are right for wanting to emulate ‘primitive’ cultures. Indigenous cultures generally are more partnership-oriented and feminine. But let us not also forget that they were not perfect; Palaeolithic man may have wiped out the woolly mammoth and some Native Americans used to run whole herds of buffalo off cliff-sides just to watch them disappear. And neither is the natural world a perfect system to emulate; Inuit get annoyed at orcas for killing so many seals just for the fun of it. But you are wrong to say there is a right-just-objective way and it is the old way, the law of the wild. There is no ahistorical way of being. If you burned all the libraries how would you have ‘known’ nature without the naturalists?
We can learn from the past but also need to adapt to the future. Women are, in our society, simultaneously social and maternal, crazy and wild. The relationship we need with the natural is one that is feminine. Admitting this and ending the unfair and ungrounded exclusion of women from your philosophy of wilderness is an important step in deconstruction. I am leaving my cabin now, but it is because I have got everything I need. I have got what you were trying to keep from me.
The Machine is perpetuated by us and we are inextricable from it. We need to change the collective conscious to change the direction of the Machine. You are not an isolated ego. Even you, the hermit, exist in relation to your polar antithesis, society. We find ourselves in relationship to the other. When we do not, complexity is lost and we are diminished selves.
I know of a pipe that you made for a friend on which you hand-carved the words ‘Mountain Men are always free’. Mountain Men shun society, yet their solitude relies on the continuation of the system to contain the rest of humanity and leave room for their wilderness. You cannot escape the fact that you are a human being and wherever you go others will want to follow. Scythes cutting through thickets.
On a final note, I know of some people who you might like to get in touch with. They are called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. With your fame I am sure you could rally to their cause by hunger-striking to death in prison. I have a friend who followed your logic and did exactly this. He was much braver and sincere to himself than you have been with your letter bombs. You could honour his life better by admitting your faults of logic.
Reform over revolution.
Down with patriarchy,
Erin Miller (QUEEN OF THE WILD)
THE CLITORIS IS A DIRECT LINE TO THE MATRIX
Rachel Carson says it is finally time to lay her to rest. She has taught me what there was to learn. I lay her down in a long wooden canoe. This is so I can set her out, flowing back to the sea to commune with the whales. I set the canoe on fire. I have to set it on fire to fumigate her spirit. This is to try to get rid of some of the imprints the dead leave once the spirit has dissipated. She explains that, more and more, it is impossible to fumigate entirely. Left behind the body is always a fine powder, unnervingly green. It is a lifetime’s accumulation of polychlorinated biphenyl and endocrine disruptors and bisphenol-A from the liver (the chains that cannot be dismantled). These cannot transmigrate into the spiritual realm, but they can’t be reabsorbed back into the natural world either like the ashes can. They remain in the physical realm as a negative imprint.
(But there is also the positive charge and that stays too because ideas can’t be set on fire. I feel shards of it slide into me, like chakra disks that do not hurt.)
As the canoe glides across the ocean it burns up and gets less and less until nothing is left. Then the soul is completely free to transmigrate. Part of the soul slips into the ocean because that is where it wants to be. This soul attaches to a Siphonophore, an odd creature that looks like a jellyfish so that sometimes it is mistakenly identified as one.
But these creatures are really a unity of tiny cellular creatures, simultaneously individual and collective and multicellular. Each member of the colony has a different function towards benefiting the organism as a whole. No member could survive independent of the others that do the things that it can’t. They are genetically the same and they live and die as one. And all are connected to a stem and to a circulatory system, and they develop from the same embryo, like sprouting a Siamese twin from your side again and again and again.
(But then, what wit
h global warming and the acidification of the oceans, lots of the sea creatures will die and she will have to transmigrate again. Where will all the souls accumulate when there are not the billions of small creatures and no room for more big and potent ones? What havoc will they play, waiting for a body?)
WHAT BOOK IS THIS THAT REFUSES TO END?
When the Helios 2 probe launched in 1976 it was the fastest spacecraft ever built, its top speed reaching 157,000 miles per hour. Proxima Centauri is our nearest star and it is 24 trillion miles away. If Helios 2 were to head directly for Proxima Centauri at its top speed it would take 17,000 years to reach it; 17,000 years is a span equivalent to the one that separates modern-day humans from Cro-Magnon cave painters. If Voyager 1 were to travel the same distance it would take it 74,000 years; 74,000 years ago early Palaeolithic people were almost killed off by a supervolcano that erupted in Indonesia and spread ash around the whole planet.
On and on the little spaceship goes. So far in time it is thirty-seven years away. The year Voyager 1 launched was 1977. That year there were eleven major plane crashes, Harvey Milk became the first openly gay elected official in the US, American man Roy Sullivan got struck by lightning for the seventh time, Spain had its first democratic election since Franco, Queen Elizabeth II opened the parliaments of Australia and New Zealand, the Bucharest earthquake killed 1,500 people, Jimmy Carter became the thirty-ninth president of America, Gary Gilmore from Utah was the first person to be executed after the death penalty was reintroduced in America, Hamida Djandoubi was the last person to be executed by guillotine in France, smallpox was eradicated, Elvis Presley died, optical fibre was first used to carry telephone signals and the Big Ear radio telescope, which would eventually be taken down to make way for a golf course, picked up its famous Wow! signal from deep space. This was on August the fifteenth, twenty-one days before Voyager 1 was launched.
The year I was born was 1993, the year of the Velvet Divorce, and when guys from the IRA perpetrated the biggest robbery in US history and set off a lot of bombs, the year the Chemical Weapons Convention was signed, Bill Clinton became president, Russians mounted the first art exhibition in space and no one went to see it, Kim Campbell became the first female prime minister of Canada and resigned the same year, a van bomb killed six at the World Trade Center, there was the Great Blizzard of 1993 on the east coast of the US, South Africa abandoned its nuclear weapons programme, the US Air Force let women fly war planes, a Unabomber bomb injured a computer scientist at Yale, a floating chapel sank and killed 266 people, the nineteenth G7 summit was held, the public were allowed into Buckingham Palace for the very first time, China undertook a nuclear test and it ended a worldwide moratorium, the European Union was established, A Brief History of Time became the longest-lasting bestseller and Freya Stark, Deke Slayton of the Mercury programme and William Golding all died.
Written into the Big Bang theory are Cosmological Horizons. These horizons mark the limit of our Observable Universe. The Observable Universe has a spherical distribution with an observer at its centre. Events outside this radius have not had time for their light to reach the observer yet and never will. The Cosmological Horizon is the shady border to the furthest point the observer can retrieve information from. Likewise, light emitted by the observer might not ever catch up to distant and exponentially receding objects in an expanding universe. This is the Future Horizon, and events which are past here the observer can have no influence on. Every single point in the universe can be the centre of a different observable universe and parts of all can overlap.
I will start my journey home a voyager called back like a well-trained falcon. Only there is no calling back the actual Voyagers; they will keep on going if we like it or not. Voyager 1 could go on travelling for ever and ever into the wild yonder on its own velocity. And Voyager 1 is its own central observer, it can leave our observable universe and enter a new one of its own.
Voyager 1 is our time capsule into another universe. It might be that no one who ever finds it will understand what it means. But they would likely understand that it has intent, and even though the intention fails it is the drive behind the intent that will live on, sinisterly, like the twitch of the almost-dead baddie at the end of the horror film.
The Voyagers are relics of a time when people thought missions to space held integrity and wonder. But the next big missions to space will be commercial ones because the public are bored now. The moon is awe-sapped enough that we do not mind mining it. And when the miners have opened the emigrant trails we might colonise our brand-new tabula rasa. Space X wants to launch missions to mine minerals from space and create the world’s first trillionaires. Virgin Galactic will take a bunch of rich and famous people to the moon. On board the inaugural flight will be James Lovelock. Either he had a change of heart in old age or he is going along as a suicide bomber.
And then if the Curiosity rover were to find a pictogram, or a bipedal vertebrate fossilised on Mars, or the archaeological remains of a complex civilisation, then it would mean that life had appeared elsewhere in another Cambrian Explosion, and that life is probably quite good at forming complex life elsewhere too. But it would also mean that it is not so great at making life whose destiny is to propagate apart from the other life that binds it. It could be a premonition. A great biblical fossil lizard to the Victorians. Or a cautionary symbol.
There is maybe one small redeeming thing, because the thing about horizons is you are never any closer to them. That is just the nature of horizons. Even Voyager 1 can never catch up with the future, and after billions of years I suppose it must disintegrate or something and that will be it, us out in a little plume, a little puff, but whether it does or not there will always be another horizon and there will always be epistemological wilderness just beyond it.
Once I had everything packed away in the cabin, the board replaced under the desk and the items exactly as they were when I came, all was ready for a layer of dust to settle again. The dust is made of particles of me now. It is also made of the particles of other things: pollen, spores, space rocks, spiders, wood from the cabin itself. Dust seems a nice legacy to leave behind. I did not even fumigate my litter in the fire. Instead I put it all in a plastic bag and carried it with me out of the wilderness, because to leave the plastic particles in the air from the burning to me seemed too much a desecration.
Could be I was always on it but I began my long journey home. When I left the cabin, my cabin, I pulled the door to quietly as though to not disturb the dust as I left, like I could have come and gone on that very first day and just left silently while the cabin slept and it never even noticed me. I turned around to look at it when I had got a little away, alone and small and heavy and dawny in the 4 a.m. morning light, and took a picture which I shall keep always but show no one.
I really hate goodbyes. I think goodbye when it is a forever goodbye is the saddest and most beautiful word. It is a contraction of god-be-with-you, which is touching because even without a god what you are saying all at once is ‘I hope that the shining light that guides you whatever it is is always with you and you don’t ever lose your way or yourself and we won’t ever meet again now but I want for you to always be safe and happy’.
It is saying you will be apart from me now but a shard of you will always remain. Another part of me will go with you, because we are always taking and giving shards from each other and you always lose a part of yourself when you say a forever goodbye. You lose the person they make you. Fear of this loss sometimes drives people to isolation, but this in itself is a tenfold loss. I will always carry Damon with me as a shard, like shrapnel.
We are perpetual motion and change, but there is something that endures and it changes, but gradually enough that some of it endures. You would not be able to know yourself, at least only a little and only sometimes, without this enduring thing. It is maybe ‘I do really hope the light is always with you even if the light can’t be said to be unchanging but whatever your new light is I h
ope there is one and I will always hope it will be with you still’.
Because it is the light that will guide you onwards to the next thing. If there is not this enduring thing, this kind of gravitational force, then we can lose our way completely and forget that carrying on and not losing the way as much as possible is the whole game. The light is a baton and life is the race and goodbye is the passing of the baton but you have to keep on running and keep on passing that baton but each time you pass it you actually swap it, someone gives you a new one.
That we can feel sad at this motion and this parting and feel a genuine want that although this thing or this person will go on in its own way without you, that it does so with this light even though you can never know it really, this is a beautiful thing. I bawled my eyes out as I walked away as I am in the habit of doing when I feel the pass of the baton occur.
The only astronaut to admit to crying on the moon was Alan Shepard of Mercury and Apollo 14, and this is just proof that they sent the wrong people to the moon because it is good to cry. Crying is the most honest way of saying (and better than with corrupting words), hey, outside world and other beings, I feel you being there.
A LETTER TO MY FUTURE SELF
Dear Erin of the future,
This all seems glaringly obvious to you now, but perhaps you will have forgotten some things. I want you to remember how you got there. That is why I decided it was okay to keep some of the project in Eskimo secret because that way the only person I can colonise is you and that is actually a desirable thing (I like to be consistent). It is to shout I EXIST, which is not a conceited thing to do if you only shout it in your own face.