compelled, i think, to motion.

radical love letter #60

Dear ones,

On a hike up a mountain last week, I start to think again about the relationship between beauty and the climate crisis. Sweaty and a little out of breath, my hiking partner and I stretch our calves against a rock, the burning pain of elongating a tight muscle mixing with the tall, tall trees, the clear bright air, the feeling one gets from being high up. We have been buzzing with the beauty of our surroundings all afternoon, and yet we know this moment is a contained one, a well-trodden path for tourists and a secluded pocket that is juxtaposed to wildfires and pipeline expansion and mountaintop removal. It is easy to be awed here, among the still surviving trees, it is easy to name that this picturesque landscape is worth saving. 

“Natural aesthetic evaluation … has made a terrific difference to American conservation policy and management,” says environmental philosopher J. Baird Calicott. “What kinds of country we consider to be exceptionally beautiful makes a huge difference when we come to decide which places to save, which to restore or enhance, and which to allocate to other uses.” 

As a branch of philosophy, aesthetics began as a means of understanding our perceptions of formal works of art (painting, music, etc) but, as we can see in the quote above, the framework has expanded as a space to theorize our relationship to beauty more broadly. Aesthetics comes from the Greek word aisthetikos, meaning "aesthetic, sensitive, sentient, pertaining to sense perception," which before that came from aisthanomai, meaning "I perceive, feel, sense.” At its core, aesthetics asks us to consider, What are we drawn to? What repulses us? Why? Too often these questions are removed from the body, and the concept goes from an exploration of sensory possibility into art criticism. What makes for good art, or what is or isn’t beautiful, to me, seems a less pressing inquiry than what we turn toward or away from, and the stakes of those impulses. In this way, the aesthetic question is also a phenomenological one.

In relationship to climate change, I feel both curious and suspect about Calicott’s claim that beauty will compel us, as a human species, to preserve the livability of the planet. So much of the natural world fits into normative standards of beauty, and state economies across the globe rely on land as valuable insofar as it can be commodified for sight-seeing and tourism; and yet here we are, experiencing apocalyptic levels of ecological destruction. Neither the cuddliness of the polar bears nor the majestic heights of the redwoods have been enough to save them. 

And sometimes we are actually more inclined to turn towards the horrible, aren’t we? A few weeks ago, the sun had a shocking glow of tangerine orange-red. That morning I posted a picture of it on my Instagram stories, stunned by what I thought was a gorgeous version of our hot plasma star. Not long after I learned that the hue of it was actually a result of the fires raging in the western part of the United States. My stomach sank. How awful of me to be enamoured by something so tragic. 

But what if that’s helpful?, I wonder later in conversation with my friend, S. Maybe there is something useful in wanting to look towards the horrific? That destruction in this case was somehow inching toward sublime? I am hesitant to share this -- with them, with you --- but I try to explain: “Not in a poverty porn kind of way. Not in a Sara McLachlan commercial kind of way. But in a Jenny Odell ‘what you behold you become beholden to’ kind of way, or a Robin Wall Kimmerer ‘focus attention to…[live] awake in the world’ kind of way.” 

S indulges the reflection, but pushes back a bit: “The aestheticizing of the apocalypse has made us into the perfect spectators.”

They are right, of course; and spectatorship is consumptive, not liberatory. But maybe this is only a problem if we continue to understand aesthetics as about representation rather than actually about our bodies, sentients, and the sensory. I still press on: can we turn our bodies towards destruction in a way that transforms the conditions of it?  

“What robs us of understanding is in fact the fracturing of a whole sensuousness into quantified, mediated, and quarantined senses...To quarantine the senses and prevent them from merging again, the apparatus isolates the intimate senses (touch, smell) while bombarding the expansive senses (sight, sound) with a deliberate surplus of non-reciprocal media,” anarchist writer Alex Gorrion reflects. “Within this controlled landscape of loss, people are more apt to chase after an attractive aesthetic because the transcendent beauty one encounters in the merging into sensuousness has been made strange, even uncomfortable.”

There is so much medicine in the uncomfortable, so much space for possibility if we can sit and situate ourselves within it. If we let our bodies interact -- in touch, taste, smell, as well as in sight and sound -- with the state of things, there will be inevitable shifts. And if we let ourselves, in stillness, be actually moved, we will ultimately be compelled, I think, to motion.

“In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations,” writes Donna Haraway. She continues:

“Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” 

Haraway is arguing for a rejection of a dialectic that relies on simple binaries. What if change happened not because of a mechanistic cause/effect pattern, but an animistic one, where time and space are not linear, where we “stay with the trouble” as our more-than-human neighbors must? What if we recognize that we are simply “mortal critters entwined” with the others? What if we remember, like an EJ slogan reminds us, that: “We are nature defending itself”? Naming that we are not separate from the Earth -- in all its beauty and also in all its ugly pain -- requires an ability to let our bodies, more than just our minds, really feel into ecological devastation (and also ecological flourishing). To me, this is the value of aesthetics in the current moment. What is our relationship to what we are seeing, and more importantly how does that witnessing show up in our body? Where does that take our body next?

We are taught that we have the luxury of looking away, that the state will take care of it for us, but it is the state that brought us here. Last summer, cities across the country burned in rebellion, alongside the combustion of trees on parched earth. If we’re honest, the forest fires and the burning of the 3rd precinct are born of the same flames. The anguish of the planet and of the people -- they are one. Now is the time to look straight in the face of it. But not in the way of toothless “Don’t look away!” cries from social media. Don’t scroll the headlines and feel terrible; instead, we must throw our body into the elements, and stay with every sensation that arises. Let the looking be fully somatic; let bearing witness mean sinking our toes into soil, digging holes to plant native seeds, swimming in seas, paying attention to breathtakingly beautiful plants and gloriously hideous fungi. For some, let it also mean destroying machinery, building encampments, shutting down roads and ports. (“This is our work,” Kimmerer reminds us, “to discover what we can give.”)  

At the top of the mountain, the land below is stunning, and my muscles are burning again. It’s good pain, though, the way your body feels when it’s pushed. We can show up to the land like this, even when it’s hard to bear in our bodies. We can sit in discomfort, we can endure it, we can look at and feel it. And then we can act in solidarity -- rather than rushed saviorism, or numb spectatorship --  with our “kin” (back to Haraway again) with whom we “become-with [and] compose-with.” Can we let looking, fully, at the beauty and the terror, lead us here? To responsibility? And can we begin to understand responsibility, humbly, as part of the reciprocity the Earth has always offered? I think we can. (I see it, already, all around.)

I love you. 

love & solidarity,

raechel