NEANDERTHALS “R” US
The strange stranger is not just the “other”—the “self” is this other. Since there is no (solid, lasting, independent, single) self, we are the strange stranger: “I is another.”138 Percy Shelley describes an encounter between a poet and an antelope in Alastor: he would linger long
In lonesome vales, making the wild his home,
Until the doves and squirrels would partake
From his innocuous hand his bloodless food,
Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks,
And the wild antelope, that starts whene’er
The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend
Her timid steps to gaze upon a form
More graceful than her own.
(98–106)139
The antelope seems capable of aesthetic contemplation, appreciation for no reason. Does she think, “This form is more graceful than my own”? We shall never know. Shelley doesn’t say “a form / That she thought more graceful than her own.” That’s the beauty of narrative thoughts not tagged with an obvious “she thought” or “she remarked to herself that ...” Not knowing opens up inner space, the space of the other mind. We glimpse the possibility that the nonhuman world is not impersonal. The police know that being startled is highly revealing of cognitive states.140 Like Clare’s wild duck, Shelley’s antelope “suspending” her steps makes us wonder—could she be conscious like us?
Humans maintain the human–animal boundary by erecting rigid walls made of quasi-humans, humanoids, hominids, ambiguous nonhumans, or unhumans. The discovery of Neanderthals in 1848 opened up new areas for wall building.141 Strangely, ideology (not science but scientism) craves a straight line from three-million-year-old Lucy the australopithecine through Homo habilis to humans, bypassing our near neighbors the Neanderthals. 142 Yet humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor half a million years ago.
One brick in the wall is the idea that proper humans, unlike Neanderthals, possess an imagination, so they can think creatively about survival. 143 Yet recent research suggests that Neanderthal tools were at least as well made as human ones.144 Neanderthal DNA contains the FOXP2 gene, suggestive of language use. The Neanderthals buried their dead with tools, in the fetal position, surrounded by horns, flowers, and herbs, and strewn with ochre.145 You would have thought that this would have clinched it, but some still maintain that their burials were not elaborate enough to indicate imagination.
Or what we think of as “imagination” is just an after-image, an extrapolation we make when we notice people using language. Maybe an ant walking over the sand doesn’t have a “picture” of the sand; maybe she just walks, as I did over the moraine glaciers of Mount Kailash.146 I didn’t have many ideas about moraine glaciers; I was just trying not to fall. We don’t have to imagine intelligence as a way of picturing the world, as if each sentient being had to know Platonic solids before it could crawl.147 Furthermore, do we have a sense of world in our heads, a background against which we can operate? Are certain discriminations really human—do they conform to some pre-given “world” of humanness? Perhaps the pre-givenness of the world is just a feature of its relatively slow rate of change, like the evolution of our bodies. If there were a Communist revolution, or if we suddenly grew an extra ear, things might seem different. Is education about conforming to a horizon at all? What if we ourselves were just following lists of instructions, plus awareness? What if our minds were just flipping back and forth from left to right brain activities, without a background or world?148
Anti-AI philosophers claim either that there are definite “things” that a mind thinks that are not reducible to other things; or that there is a definite world. The pro-AI view can’t address the strangeness of the strange stranger. In each case, humans are too like nonhumans for comfort. Darwinism asserts that humans are “evolved apes,” while pre-Darwinist thinking labeled apes “degenerate humans.”149 Linnaeus thought that orangutans should be classified as a species of Homo, and there is a movement afoot to reclassify bonobos this way—yet note in passing that there is no movement to reclassify humans as a species of Pan (chimpanzee), even though, technically, we are the third chimp, having more in common with them than gorillas do.150
There is a wonderful moment in the cartoon series The Simpsons, during the opening credits (whose final shot varies in each episode), where the original Simpsons meet their more recent incarnations.151 Both families scream and run away from their doppelgängers. This captures precisely what is strange about the strange stranger, the implication of something that Darwin squirrels away in the first third of The Descent of Man: “In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point when the term ‘man’ ought to be used.”152 If transitions are smooth and incremental, we can’t notice them. But by the same token, any successful variation tends to become less and less like its neighbors. The familiar becomes strange. The human–chimp boundary occurred as recently as six million years ago, which is last week from Earth’s point of view.153 Like many features of life forms, distinctive Neanderthal skulls evolved by chance.
Jean Auel’s Neanderthals in The Clan of the Cave Bear are decidedly patriarchal, acting out scenes from a postwar America with an absurd combination of male sports and women’s cook-offs. William Golding’s world in The Inheritors, conversely, is matriarchal, and the different minds of the Neanderthals are deeply rendered in the descriptive layers of the narrative. Golding’s Neanderthals are an endangered species, hunted and killed for sadistic sport by humans. It’s not clear whether Lok and the others are Neanderthals.154 By the time we find out, we have identified with them. Auel portrays the life of a human adopted into a Neanderthal clan. The clan finds it hard to accept a woman who is taller and smarter than anyone in their densely hierarchical and patriarchal structure. Despite being promoted to Medicine Woman, she is raped, beaten, and banished and separated from her son. The Neanderthals mirror contemporary human racism (“racism is Neanderthal”). This doesn’t really abolish the human–humanoid barrier. Yet radically, sex between human Ayla and Neanderthal Broud results in a baby. Human and Neanderthal, then, are not so distinct.
Both novels examine the idea of the “dead end,” evolutionary blind alleys that are hard to appreciate if we cleave to rigid models of “fitness” and metaphysical concepts of Nature. From the point of view of Auel’s Clan, the human Ayla and her son are monstrously deformed. Even the tolerant medicine woman Iza, inheritor of a threadbare matriarchal tradition, offers to kill the boy.155 The Clan’s encounter with Ayla and her pregnancy via her rapist Broud force upon the most intelligent ones (Ayla and the medicine man, Creb) the conclusion that they must be generated through sex, not by spirits battling in an unseen world. The encounter with the strange stranger provokes science and thus a loss of “world,” for which Ayla is scapegoated. When Broud becomes leader of the Clan, he instantly banishes Ayla out of murderous envy.
“He is a horse that thinks!” In his disturbing lyrical ballad “The Idiot Boy,” Wordsworth describes a horse leading Johnny, a mentally disabled boy, through the forest.156 Darwin remarks on reason in mules, finding it “even in animals very low in the scale of nature.”157 Wordsworth juxtaposes a less intelligent human with an intelligent nonhuman. The idiot boy is riding to fetch the doctor for his mother, a mission he never completes. The thinking horse resembles the thinking body of the old man traveling in “Animal Tranquillity.” The boy’s mother, Betty Foy, and the narrator, must detect this “thinking” in the horse’s body—unless they can speak horse. Meanwhile, the idiot boy grins and burbles. His body doesn’t speak: it just exists, inertly spasming. The tale is as inertial as Johnny. Many have deemed “The Idiot Boy” an idiot poem.158 Johnny loses his way in the forest, and the narrator wonders halfheartedly whether he is going on some picaresque adventure. There is an unsettling blank at the heart of the poem, as Johnny and the horse wander aimlessly.
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Wordsworth takes us to a zero level of living beingness and to a subaesthetic level, a place that isn’t pretty. He confronts us with strange strangers—discharged soldiers, blind beggars, grief-crazed mothers.159 Sometimes the environmentalist passion for “animals” leapfrogs over these difficult strangers. The ecological thought thinks the strange stranger as the other mind, the other person, the neighbor, to use the Judeo-Christian term (“Love thy neighbor as thyself”). The ultimate neighbor is the zombielike “Müsselman” of the Nazi concentration camps, so resigned to fate that she or he appears to have lost the will to live or communicate in a “human” way.160 Modern society has horrifying methods for reducing humans to a barely functioning zero level of aliveness, “vegetables” on life support or state terror victims, reduced to being “lower than dogs.” Only consider Pope John Paul II’s and President George Bush’s so-called culture of life.161 The CIA code word “rendition,” used to describe the transporting of “terror suspects” to countries that torture, resembles the word for melting down the bones and marrow of livestock for glue and pet food.162 If environmentalism means biopower—if “reducing” humans to animals means reducing animals to vegetables—the ecological thought wants nothing to do with it.
The boy speaks something like a poem at the haunting close of “The Idiot Boy”: “The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, / And the sun did shine so cold” (lines 460–461). Compare Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna”: “It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry, / The sun so hot, I froze to death, Susanna don’t you cry” (lines 7–8).163 While some discover miraculous imagination in lines like these—out of the mouths of babes—I can’t help hearing the record of unspeakable suffering. In “Oh! Susanna,” the speaker’s journey has driven her or him mad—is he or she a runaway slave, as Foster’s original lyrics suggest? Johnny patently doesn’t understand his world. The images of freezing sunshine are records of pain. Icy fire is Petrarch’s image of love on the brink of insanity. At the place where the strange stranger appears, there are intensities we can’t understand. Wordsworth manages to exit the aesthetic without losing contact with perception. He takes us into a world of confusion and stupid suffering. All we can offer here is care and concern.
The ecological thought contemplates a subaesthetic level of being, beyond the cute and beyond the awesome. We can’t call it beautiful (self-contained, harmonious) or sublime (awe-inspiring, open). This level unsettles and disgusts. It doesn’t mirror our fantasies. It isn’t hard to love Nature as a reflection of oneself. It isn’t hard to love Nature as an awe-inspiring open space. It’s far harder to love the disturbing, disgusting beings who do not so easily wear a human face. Some of these beings are human. One task of the ecological thought is to figure out how to love the inhuman: not just the nonhuman (that’s easier) but the radically strange, dangerous, even “evil.” For the inhuman is the strangely strange core of the human.
This inhuman core swirls at the heart of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside—
Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship’s huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water snakes:
The moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The selfsame moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
(4.263–291)164
Somehow the Ancient Mariner, tormented by fiendish spirits and disgusting life, manages to bless the water snakes “unaware,” as if unconsciously. There are several mutually exclusive interpretations of “O happy living things! no tongue / Their beauty might declare” (282–283). Perhaps the Mariner is exclaiming spontaneously. We hear this in the “O” at the start of the line. The Mariner appreciates the snakes for no reason. The phrase, “no tongue / Their beauty might declare” could mean “They were indescribably beautiful,” or “It was impossible to describe them as beautiful.” Could something be so sweet that it’s sickly? Could something be so beautiful that it’s ugly? Or is the ugliness, or the beauty, strictly unspeakable? There is an openness here. It would be disastrous to maintain that the Mariner blesses the snakes only unconsciously. It would mean we could only ever perform groundbreaking actions if we’re already wired for them. Coleridge wants the issue to be more open-ended: “unaware” doesn’t mean “mindlessly” or “automatically.”165
The time-lapse lines about the Moon slow down like clotting blood. Experience becomes richer, more painful, more blissful, more uncertain. In depression, we experience time slowing. We feel heavy, literally and figuratively. We’re forced into a contemplative space, but it isn’t pretty. Surely this is what any genuine meditative experience feels like. We become conscious in a situation where we have been acting unconsciously. It’s bound to be ugly and painful. We fall into the gravity well of depression. Where there is no hope, there is no fear. For a moment, there is absolute openness—“O happy living things!” This doesn’t guarantee that we’re out of the well. In the Mariner’s case, there are several hundred lines of mind-bending horror to go.
Kant would call the openness aesthetic appreciation, beyond concept. It certainly is this way for the Mariner, but in a manner that is stranger than Kant intended. We can’t call the Mariner’s experience aesthetic. It’s experience in its sheer, traumatic rawness. To appreciate beautiful things properly, we have to learn to spit out ugly things. In a sense, good bourgeois taste is about (as Captain Beefheart puts it) how to vomit beautifully.166 But the Mariner doesn’t spit out the snakes. How can he? He is frozen. This is a mutation of Kant. It is profoundly purposeless. The Mariner gains nothing from his appreciation—that is, until he can pray and the albatross slips from his neck, in a moment of blessed relief. The snakes themselves have no purpose: they just coil and swim. Their beauty (or incredible ugliness) is pointless and aimless, with their “tracks” like snail trails or the drips of an abstract painter, fireworks of slime.167
Appreciation for no reason may be an experience not of beauty but of ugliness, not of happiness but of compassion. Instead of bypassing it, the ecological thought seeps into the aesthetic dimension. It makes room for what we call, inadequately, the subjective and subjectivity.
LET ME TAKE YOU DOWN
The ecological thought realizes that all beings are interconnected. This is the mesh. The ecological thought realizes that the boundaries between, and the identities of, beings are affected by this interconnection. This is the strange stranger. The ecological thought finds itself next to other beings, neither me nor not-me. These other beings exist, but they don’t really exist. They are strange, all the way down. The more intimately we know them, the stranger they become. The ecological thought is intimacy with the strangeness of the stranger. The ultimate strangeness, the strangeness of pure semblance, is (feminine) subjectivity, whose essence is radical passivity.168 Interdependence is the coexistence between passivity and passivity. The zero social level is this sheer coexistence.
Intimacy is never so obvious as when we’re depressed. Melancholy is t
he earth humor, made of black bile, the earth element. Melancholy art, such as the German “suffering play” (Trauerspiel), speaks the truth of pain.169 This art might be more ecological than sunnier versions. To be intimate with the strange stranger is to be in various kinds of pain. Being glued to a heating world that might overwhelm or kill us is bad news. Ecology is stuck between melancholy and mourning. Nature language is like melancholy: holding on to a “bad” object, a toxic mother whose distance and objectlike qualities are venerated.170 Environmentalism is a work of mourning for a mother we never had. To have ecology, we must give up Nature. But since we have been addicted to Nature for so long, giving up will be painful. Giving up a fantasy is harder than giving up a reality.
The attitude of Nature worship is like a depressed closeted gay man who insists he is straight.171 Melancholy has a “sickly” quality of excessive devotion, excessive fidelity to the darkness of the present moment. Yet isn’t this excessive fidelity exactly what we need right now? Dark ecology oozes through despair. Being realistic is always refreshing. Depression is the most accurate way of experiencing the current ecological disaster.172 It’s better than wishful thinking. Through dark ecology, we discover that ecology is everywhere our minds go. We don’t have to think special thoughts, in a special way, to be ecological.
Even at the limit of dualism, we encounter ecology. Descartes argued that animals were unfeeling machines that humans could vivisect with impunity. Descartes promoted a dualism of subject and object that many consider to be one of the bases of ecological catastrophe. But Descartes himself begins the Meditations with the idea of an environment: he is sitting comfortably by a fire, holding the very page we’re reading.173 Doubt, intrinsic to the ecological thought, starts as a thought by that fire—is this really me? How can I tell? These aren’t thoughts we should banish from an ecological society. Far from being the death knell of human harmony with the world, Descartes’ doubting mind is profoundly ecological. There is more faith in honest doubt when it comes to feeling our way around the ecological thought, like a blind person.
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