THE LEAP

Robert Cheatham

  1. I've woken before in the middle of the night, half conscious, head on arm, peering blearily at what seems undoubtedly a reptilian appendage at the end of my arm: curved, clawed, and ready to strike. At any rate, for a brief moment my hand seems animal and not human. Which is crazy, because I AM an animal. Right?
  1. There are times in restaurants or at home, when I decide to have a piece of meat or a steak. Of a sudden I have to suppress the thought that I'm eating an animal, flesh that has a face attached to it. I'm not a vegetarian and I've never been queasy about it before. "The question is no longer one of knowing if it is 'good' to eat the other or if the other is 'good' to eat, nor of knowing which other. One eats him regardless and lets oneself be eaten by him. [….] The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one MUST eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there's no other definition of the good , how for goodness sake should one eat well.?" Jacques Derrida, "Eating Well": an interview, p115
  2. When I eat something, the formerly living thing makes the move across an almost imperceptible border into me. Something leaps across a species barrier.
  3. I might be willing to eat YOU under the proper (or improper) circumstances. As I understand it, you would taste like pig. But anyway we ingest each other.
  4. I always wanted to have a pet chicken, even though I was attacked by a rooster when I was five. Or maybe BECAUSE I was attacked.
  5. The precariousness of the human/animal interior duality is almost perfectly expressed by the biohazard symbol. Developed in 1966, the closed interior circle is nevertheless opened at it's center by another ducted circle and surrounded by a triumvirate of opened circles which function effectively as thorns or pincers. The more one meditates on the symbol, the less clear it becomes: or rather the more that it oscillates between two poles: is it a warning about keeping something out or a warning about keeping something in? The symbol functions as a Mobius strip, transporting the inside to the outside and the outside to the inside, all action rotating about the still, open axis at the center, a point of monstrous indifference where animal and human meet, where toxicity and exuberance merge and become each other, a pharmakon. It works also as a 'stopped' and swollen swastika, one of the oldest of human symbols, conveying a primal cosmic movement. (In fact the development team charged with coming up with an image started with triangular swastika shapes.) But instead of movement and cosmic time, the symbol conveys a malign fecundity, a time that has become directionless and fully immanent, a time that only metastasizes into and out of itself.

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  6. The analysis by Jakob Uexküll of Ixodes ricinus, the tick, occupies a highpoint of modernist antihumanism, according to philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Uexküll, a pioneer of biosemiotics, came up with the idea of the umwelt, the life world and perceptual world of animals. In his analysis, all these lifeworlds intersect but do not meet, each occupying its own species boundaries and perceptions.
  7. The tick can 'wait' on the end of a blade of grass or twig for years before leaping to its prey. Uexküll demonstrated that it can wait for up to eighteen years without nourishment; it is in some sense of suspended animation perhaps but still 'cocked' and in a state of anticipation. It has somehow formed a relationship with its warmblooded prey (which actually consists of three elements: the smell of butyric acid in the sweat of mammals; a blood temperature of 37 degrees centigrade; and the sort of skin characteristic of mammals). But the question to be asked here is: what sort of time does the tick occupy in this interregnum? It seems almost a mathematical or geometrical space; at the very least nothing that we would not recognize in any sort of lived human time trace, or even of animality as we generally know it. It seems to be a chilled, crystaline spot which it can occupy seemingly neither dead or alive. The chill of Agamben's statement regarding the tick's world seems to uncannily resonate, but certainly not coincide, with a postmodern technical immanentized world: "How is it possible for a living being that consists entirely in its relationship with the environment to survive in absolute deprivation of its environment? And what sense does it make to speak of 'waiting' without time and without world?" Doesn't the technical world we have cocooned ourselves with sometimes feel this way? It is the inhuman gaze which H.G. Wells years ago attributed to another steely life form, his fictional Martians: "vast, cool, and indifferent."
  8. 7. In the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche had a mental breakdown leaving him an invalid for the rest of his life. Upon witnessing a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse's neck and collapsed, never to return to full sanity.
  9. "To breed an animal with the right to make promises --- is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding man?"

    10. Genealogy of Morals, F. Nietsche

  10. "We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled." Henry David Thoreau
  11. In Heronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthy Delights, we see what would become of humankind had the Fall not happened, if we had remained at one with our animal nature, not succumbing to a painful split borne of guilt, conscience, a certain unbearable knowledge. (And what is that knowledge? Acknowledgement of the split between human and world, human and animal, human and divine.) The painting's fulfillment (which coincides with its simultaneous decline and extinction) of human history coincides with libidinous desires and the consolidation (and consolation ) of the human flesh, a flesh which is always on the verge of becoming something other, chimera or cryptozoological beast. There do not seem to be theriomorphs, or beast-gods; or more properly, the landscape itself has become a morphing beast-god, the vast, slow vegetative wave combining with the animal and human, almost as if some other form of techne were used, something more akin to pagan magic.
  12. This fairy world exists on the cusp of syncope, a fainting and falling away, never to be revived, animal-like changelings subsequently substituted for the human , and/or harpazo, a rapturous seizure and incline to the marvelous and absorptive disappearance of boundaries. Both 'falls' function as a leave-taking perhaps never to return, a peculiar combination of immanent and transcendent, of animal and divine, precipitating out the human, always manifesting in the uncanny (both aspects celebrated not only in fairy lore even now, but also the magical realism of technical media's take on the collision of those two).
  13. The Garden of Earthly Delights perhaps serves as a propaedeuctic to Agamben's analysis of animal headed humans at the end of time as portrayed in an ancient Hebrew Bible held in the Ambrosian Museum. It is then somewhat startling to think that at least one take on the demonic is "that which confuses the limits among the animal, the human and the divine, and which retains an affinity with mystery, the initiatory, the esoteric, the secret or the sacred." (The Gift of Death , J. Derrida) Given this scenario, the very act of 'redemptiom' is at the very same time the remonstrance of the 'middle way' of the daemonic, and that the task of redeeming humans, nature, and god(s) resides in the task of radical impurity, hybridization, and fluidities and that the fulfillment of humanity will not be a separation from its animal kin but fusion
  14. Humanism's battle cry has always been the motto of the lurid current movie called AVP or Alien versus Predator: "Whoever wins -- we lose", no matter whether the animal comes from an immanentized interior realm --the alien, descending the alimentary canal in a pale imitation but reversal of, eating as impregnation, subsequently turning into a monstrous form of 'pregnancy' -- or a transcendental realm of the theriomorphic 'animal-god': the predator, coming from outer space, but a monstrous hybrid of all of humanism's worse imaginings concerning it's ur-monsters, the ur-Leviathans which haunt the human predatory imagination. The 'human', attempting to divest itself of its own inner animality as well as in the process of containing all the 'monsters of God' on the planet, perhaps finds itself not in a Garden of Earthly Paradise but a denuded plain of bare encapsulated life.