The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard, where she writes about far reaching damage caused by human affectivity on the environment, encourages me to dwell on a need for clarity in my interconnectness, but I struggle with a sense of diminishment as I contemplate how much I am connected and how far my affectivity reaches.
This shrinking occurs along a Scale of Reach rather than size. I don't shrink in stature like Alice in Wonderland, instead it is as if I am Plastic Woman; my body stays at a fixed point on an x axis of time and y axis of space but my uncountable multitude of arms reach out, forever lengthening, all around me in space, and to all positive points in time - and I cannot account for what they touch.
The potion served up to me in ecological philosophy does not shrink me to a speck in the universe; it connects me to everything. I am a point on a mesh and as a result I fear to move for all the new connections I might make.
This knowledge has continued to develop throughout my life - I am nearly 50 - so I have experienced having my thinking thrown from once thinking I was one thing; an organism of me, to knowing that I am actually a multitude of other organisms which 'happen' without any consciousness on my part. What's more, this multitide that I nominally think of as 'I' affects a much larger world also made of almagamated parts. It's hard to think of oneself as being a multiple unit, of being affective and of being interconnected. That's a lot of connective states of beings.
The bit of my body called my mind was tumbling in this way when I spied a collision of objects on my bedside table:
This is a screwed up discarded muscle strapping from my frozen shoulder somewhat flung on top of my copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Word for World is Forest. It helped me think about how I relate as an individual to large concerns; or rather how I struggle to relate, or normally evade thinking about relating altogether.
So, on the scale of reach, the unit of amalgamated-one is dwarfed by an immense amount of entangled relations, relative influences and other unknowable connections. This is a problem because, when this scale of reach is multiplied, as it is in the even larger scale of the future, it really matters. It matters if we are cogs who feel like non-cogs in a vast world-tangle configured out of a combination of our discarded first bodies (our waste) and which we inhabit as enmeshed second bodies. We need to be able to take control of the waste we create. And that's just a start of our new mode of being.
So let's start with these two things and go from there.
What things made the strap? What things made the book?
These are objects with complex births. They don't appear to have much in common to entangle them other than time, place and me, and that similar colour blue that caught my eye. True to say then that these things do have me in common. Let's start again there.
Though I cannot feel I exactly own the book - although I undoubtedly do own the object 'the book,' the words inside are authored by another and I do not own the copyright. But what else? They have been consumed by me and discarded by me. It occurs to me that it is hard to think of things as having connections to each other if not via the self.
I read the book; ingested Le Guin’s words and ideas. I also wore the strapping on my body for a couple of days. I used them and then I discarded them - well, I put them down in this shabby fashion which alludes to the fact that my time with them is done. Did my association with them then end there? This leads me to ponder: was I associated with them before they even came into my possession?
Time exposes matters of affect. In the age of global warming and global supply chains what matters most is affect and the focus on the provenance of goods has increased massively over the last few decades. We care about not only what these objects are but how they came to be and how they got here? Was that any good, and how do we judge that 'goodness,' if we can manage to ascertain what happened in the first place?
Before I start: what is judging itself but a way of ascribing certain ethical values to a scale within a dilemma, meant to provide a way forward from that dilemma - and I want a way forward from this scary place - so judging is going to have to happen. Of course, it's more straightforward to judge quantity over quality, so let's start there.
1. It could be claimed that the book is a more complex object than the strap. The book, once written - a process requiring fuel of probably protracted duration to the writer, then requires other processes and persons to bring it to fruition; for designing, printing, manufacturing; all kinds of publishing and marketing demands: meetings, cups of tea and conversations (another kind of energy,) minutely amended spreadsheets; and then there were the machines and materials; transportation to multi-destinations across land and sea, and my travel to go and buy it. Frenetic activity that brings just one iteration of Le Guinn's work to become laying here and others elsewhere - kept perhaps (as mine will be) but in becoming 'shelved' is this not just discarding delayed?
2. The strap is a part of an oilpaper-backed roll meant to be cut to size and corners rounded with scissors so it doesn’t catch on clothing. Besides the discarded corners, I can attest it is not a perfect design: mysteriously it can cause plainful blisters an inch or so away from where I put it, however it provides support and some relief from pain by forming to my body like an external muscle. Like the book it required designing and manufacturing, meetings, spreadsheets, etc. However, I have no use for it after a few days and must throw it away, adding it to the pile of things in landfill that I have put there. Therefore, waste is built in to this product - yet, I really appreciated it.
Looking closer at the strap, I deduce it is probably made of plastic, or perhaps some kind of rubber. I doubt it will quickly biodegrade. I look it up on the Green Matters website, which says it is made of cotton with a plastic core. So, yes, not all good for sure. The book however, is made of paper in the main, but there is quite a bit of glue in there, so perhaps not as good as I hoped. * The balance of my judgement in terms of waste matter falls positively towards the book because it is built to last in a way that the strapping isn't. But then I needed the strapping in a way that I didn't need the book.
This is so difficult to judge.
With guilt, I notice now that in my photograph the casually dropped strap forms a frowning profile towards the book, and I feel an even greater sense of horror as I admit that I couldn't finish reading Le Guinn's novel. I'd read about the book in several essays and articles about revered artists and thinkers, and I knew the ending, and without optimistic hopes for a good ending her vision was just too grim for me to stay the course.
But let's face it, I'm not going to throw her book away; it's book after all, and a daughter of teachers does not do that, but one day surely it will go... so I can't claim wastage, even delayed, as a major difference between objects.
Perhaps this inability to stay to the end is configured in the same way as is my struggle with diminishment, an inability 'stay with the trouble,' as Donna Harraway names it.
More about the enmeshed second body in this book by Daisy Hildyard.
Link to Donna Harraway 'Staying with the trouble'
Ursula K Le Guin 'The Word for World is Forest'
So, leaving aside my unethical behaviour for a bit and to go back judging provenance - I realise my connectedness is never going to be 'good', but always 'not as bad as.' I think this is central to my unhappiness about Reach.
I realise I haven't come to a conclusion. I don't have an answer. I needed the strap - it helped me heal my body - but also the book - even though I didn't finish it, helped me learn something.
I haven't asked if I had an ethical right to healing or learning, nor have I tracked down what affects I created before or after my ownership of them - these are still vast, still unknown.
When I think about making art, these same concerns definitely stymie my production as well as shape its outcome. I'm often thinking about what to do with the waste I produce when I plan to make a thing, and this often leads me to put off potentially matter-wasting experiments, or persaudes me not make anything - this can look like procrastination. Positively, it does lead me to often involve the wasted matter in the work. I put my brain to task in thinking up ways to use the waste productively to meet a personal and outer demand to make art. I think that is 'not as bad.'
This post was amended on 1 Nov 2022.
