All That Remains of the Changing Seasons
1.
By 2006, I could see death everywhere.
It had been a long time coming, of course; a slowly growing weed in the tangle of my unconscious, taking root since childhood, and firmly twisted and wrapped all around me by the time I took notice of it. One of us died way before their time, but my family—doubtlessly falsifying their emotions for my sake—appeared to carry it lightly. Joyful picnics at the cemetery; strolls around it, reading the headstones of the dead; practicing our math skills as we counted down the length of the poor souls’ lives—pausing respectfully when the number that came out was heartbreakingly low. Whenever this happened, my mother appeared to remain upbeat; though in hindsight, I think I could already sense in her the presence of something devastated, somewhere between the words. I used to tell my school friends, with some degree of pride, that we were “like the Addams family”.
2.
In the context of obsessive-compulsive disorders, intrusive thoughts are defined as repetitive, unwanted and unpleasant ideations, images or impulses causing particularly acute distress or anxiety. Most often, the attempt to suppress such ideas results in heightening the feeling of distress. People experiencing OCD with intrusive thoughts often become convinced that they are experiencing other, and more severe, pathologies, from schizophrenia and psychosis to clinical depression and bipolar disorder. Everyone experiences bizarre, unexpected or intrusive thoughts, and usually hardly takes notice of them; but OCD amplifies the compulsion to conjure the unwanted thoughts repetitively, aggressively, until the point that they become virtually unbearable.
3.
Having grown up in and out of cemeteries for most of my childhood and teenage life, I felt relatively safe, and at ease, when I embarked on the literature review for my M.Phil thesis, which, I had decided, would be dedicated to the invisibilisation of death in contemporary Western culture and to contemporary works of art that made mourning rituals, practices, and emotions visible. . I don’t know how other people write a literature review, but what I did was I spent week on week reading everything I could get my hands on about grief, death, dead bodies, psychoanalytical mourning, literary mourning, elegies, the abject decay of the flesh, the philosophy of absence, monuments, anti-monuments, and historical trauma. And so it was that I landed back in Italy for the summer holidays as a kind of erudite goth, seeking and indulging in the pleasures of all that was dark and borderline unbearable.
4.
And then, as though to put me back in my place and remind me that whatever I thought I knew, I really didn’t know anything at all, all of the dead, present and future, came for me. I’d walk down the street and every unlikely catastrophe unfolded before my eyes. Babies crushed by passing cars, pots of boiling water falling on people, cables were ready for strangling, knives gleaming and prepped for stabbing. Everything was violence, the promise of sudden death, everywhere I turned. This went on for a few weeks. Over time, I became convinced that what I was experiencing was something like psychosis and that, in such a state, I would be a danger to others. So, for most of that time I hid away, as best I could. I’d lock myself inside rooms. I began to notice that common language conjures words of death and mental illness all of the time, and in such cavalier and thoughtless ways. “I died laughing.” “It very nearly killed me.” “That drives me insane.” “That’s completely nuts.” I avoided these words like the plague.
5.
This happened, in fits and starts, in 2006, and again in 2007, 2008, 2010. In early 2011, I finally looked for help and met Su, a wise, kind, compassionate humanist psychotherapist, with whom I would spend the following seven years, through some of the most transformative milestones of a young adult’s life (we finally parted ways when my son was barely a year old). I remember pleading with Su to make the thoughts go away, to help expunge them forever, like an exorcism. To this day, her answer, which was both firm and kind, remains with me.
6.
In the tarot, the most frequent and undisputed interpretation of Arcana, XIII is not death but transformation.
7.
Not that there’s ever been much of a difference between the two.
8.
When we look at animals and plants, we often witness a kind of preparation upon the changing of the seasons: an evolutionary dance between weather and choice, where the very first hints of a transformation prompt a withdrawal of nutrients from leaves; the springing up of shoots and buds; the storing of foods and fats; the building of burrows and nests. In the face of transformation, our more-than-human companions may not know what lies ahead, but they do know how to prepare for it. Deciduous trees, whose connection between leaves and branches is ensured by a small system of tubules transporting nutrients and water to the tree’s extremities, sever said connection in autumn, first by draining the leaves of their chlorophyll, and later by sealing off the tubules and, in doing so, withholding their source of nutrients. In the cold absence of connection or nutrition, leaves give up and fall away in the autumn bluster. This kind of preparation for the changing of the seasons can sometimes be peculiar and endearing, like in the work of acorn woodpeckers, who create thousands of little holes in trees and fill each with a single acorn. It can be gruesome: there are moles that bite earthworms and inject them with a toxic substance that keeps them alive and paralysed throughout the winter, a larder of live prey at the ready, living through a kind of hell that only someone the likes of Cormac McCarthy could possibly have imagined it. Wood frogs will actually freeze solid, at least for the season.
9.
Winter comes, and the landscape itself prepares to die.
10.
But in cyclical time, death heralds the possibility of renewal. There is no finality in an end, only a transition to something else, or a return into a vaster whole.
11.
Anthropologist Ernesto de Martino spent much of his career witnessing and interpreting ends of worlds. This proclivity may perhaps be true of anthropologists in general, who so often have found themselves witnessing languages, epistemologies, and ways of life at risk of extinction (and before the discipline took a turn to the radical, probably accelerated those extinctions by their very presence). Whatever the case, de Martino, specifically, focused on the Italian South, that slow and glorious place of heat, faith, and decay.
12.
For de Martino, the end of a world occurs when “the very cultural ethos that conditions and supports it collapses”.[1] This is a loss of meaning as an intersubjective architecture, as the underlying structure that holds the world in place.
13.
A postcard from Argentina, March 2023, Museum of History and Anthropology. Director Pablo Montini speaks with deep knowledge and conviction. His Spanish is almost too fast for my ears, but he doesn’t wait for me to keep up. There is too much to tell, because too much of the history of this continent has been erased, from colonial terraforming to the displacement, genocide, and extinction of original peoples, landscapes, ways of knowing, stories, sacred beings. Almost none of the museum's objects found in the region of Rosario are from pre-colonial times. Most of the collection comes from the Andes, much further north, where colonisers concentrated material wealth, extraction industries, and artistic production alike. We walk through the rooms of what’s sometimes known as “arte coloniál”: Christian-themed imagery from the 16th and 17th centuries, created by local artists and craftspeople to imitate European iconography at the order of the local colonial powers. Montini points at the Christian saints’ auras: their hues, he says. Do you see their colours? Compelled to worship and depict the likeness of foreign deities, Indigenous artists hid local pigments, fundamental to sacred rites, in the images. Local seeds and animals appear in the patterns of gowns and curtains. Mountains give new, syncretic Madonnas their peculiar, triangular shapes. Like the woodpecker hiding an acorn in each hole in a tree, glimpses and echoes of a world at the brink of extinction are woven into the visual patterns of syncretic objects—like a ritual of mourning and memory.
14.
Then, in 2023, I picked up—at the behest of my friend Harald in Vienna, a philosopher-ecologist turned organisational mentor—a book called Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. By the time I began to read it, this book was already quietly but steadily making its way through the circles of social practitioners working between activism, organisational theory, and technology; people spoke in hushed tones about its teachings and what it managed to say about what it feels like to be alive and trying to do something worthwhile in the midst of all this mess.
15.
I’ve always been profoundly convinced that a cultural artifact—be it a book, an artwork, a poem, a story, a film, whatever—is all the more incisive upon its present the more it recognises, touches, and releases something that is already there, stuck at the back of everyone’s throat, not knowing how to come out lest the whole structure of the present collapses around it.
16.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, the author of Hospicing Modernity, describes it as a compendium of medicines, exercises, and tools to allow colonial modernity to die around us—but perhaps more crucially still, inside of us—and to do so with humility, discernment, and grace. To do so, Andreotti recommends learning from the palliative care movement. “Hospicing,” she described, “is about developing our capacity to stomach what’s difficult and nauseating without throwing up, throwing a tantrum, or throwing in the towel. It’s about staying with this death, approaching death, and relating to death very differentl—the death of the system, and our own death—in order to be able to live well.”[2] The stakes are high: modernity has caused a profound, civilisational cognitive impairment in Western, and in general dominant, cultures; one that makes it impossible to understand the human as a piece in a far vaster metabolic, planetary weave of connections. And this cognitive incapacity is putting the entire life-support system of the Earth in jeopardy.
17.
De Martino agrees, at least on the cognitive aspects of this particular, contemporary end of the world: “The insidious Western apocalypse […] is characterised by the loss of sense and of domesticity in the world, the failure of intersubjective human relations, the ominous shrinking of any horizon whatsoever of a future that is practicable in a communitarian way according to human liberty and dignity.”[3] In other words, the atomisation of individual consciousness and shutting away from the wider, planetary Mind are eroding the possibility of an experience of being that is developed in a community among human and more-than-human relations.
18.
For years, and definitely since working at the intersection of culture and the ecological, I have been trying to put words around the intuition that metaphors don’t exist.
19.
In Food of the Gods, prophetic philosopher and psychedelics evangelist Terence McKenna suggests that all life is communication: “The evidence gathered from millennia of shamanic experience argues that the world is actually made of language in some fashion […] For the shaman, the cosmos is a tale that becomes true as it is told and as it tells itself […] This is why the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist.”[4] “Plant use is an example of a complex language of chemical and social interactions. Yet most of us are unaware of the effects of plants on ourselves and our reality, partly because we have forgotten that plants have always mediated the human cultural relationship to the world at large.”[5]
20.
So perhaps to imagine that metaphors don’t exist is not to deny that the Earth is in infinite and perennial communication with and within itself and the wider, cosmic ecosystems—and that cultural forms and communal organisations of humans and more-than-humans alike depend on this endless stream. Rather, it is more like suggesting that the distance of a symbol (word, symbolic system) from the wider metabolism out of which it emerges is a fiction, imposed by modernity, that underholds the fiction that humans can survive alone, far from all relations. Today, we too often clamorously mistake arguing over the different possible meanings of a particular term for entering into a relation with the world. Signifiers float about, tethered to nothing. Before we know it, we’re floating about too, alienated and poisoned, in desperate, angry loneliness.
21.
This, I wonder, may be what the end of the world feels like when it is happening in real time: a progressive loss of meaning, a drive towards acceleration and annihilation, an acceptance of unspeakable horror as though it were ordinary. We call it “the polycrisis” and speak of it as though it were separate from us, as though it weren’t everywhere, including inside of ourselves.
22.
In the circularity of planetary time, there is no end without beginning, no death without transformation. From this point of view, then, it may be appropriate to stop trying to articulate solutions too quickly and to start, in the first place, exercising our capacities to hold, bear witness to, remember, and navigate this great churning. What habits of mind, what stories, what rituals may help us hold, and weather, change? What embers of what has been do we already hold? How to make space for what we may never experience? What questions can we pose to a world that’s ending? And here we come to one of the first glimpses of how we may be able to understand art (culture, stories, myths, songs, etc.) and its responsibility, agencies, and potentials. Because the space of a story, or an artwork, or—when done responsibly—a cultural space could be where complexity, ambiguity, discomfort, fear, and denial can be held with tenderness, without seeking immediate answers or resolutions.
23.
The first task of culture may simply be to notice, to stay.
24.
Terence McKenna again: “If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western civilisation.”[6] “Wherever and whenever the ego function began to form it was akin to a calcareous tumour or a blockage in the energy of the psyche […] [T]o appraise our dilemma correctly, we need to appraise what this loss of Tao, this loss of collective connection to the Earth, has meant for our humanness.”[7]
25.
In the spring of 2024, my frequent collaborator, writer, and curator Filipa Ramos and I put together a small exhibition for Vienna’s first “Klima Biennale”, titled Songs for the Changing Seasons. Songs was an experiment in trying to stay. It asked about art as forms of tuning into a world that’s changing irremediably—art as a place where we let go of what will be lost and find a cognitive capacity to grieve it; art also as a place where we store that which we hope will live through the great interregnum and into the next. We faced a challenge: How do we hold space for that which may need to be faced, without immediately trying to fix it? Can there be possible positions, for ecological cultures today, that refuse to lean on either information transmission or prototyped solutions? And perhaps most importantly, what is lost in the nuance of space, in the differential and differently distributed real-life instantiations of this current end of this current world, when the only options are boundless hope or nihilistic hopelessness?
26.
On the day the exhibition opened, the only word we could find for any of it was tenderness.
27.
And although the imminent falling of the sky had been forewarned time and time again, the easiest thing is always to look away. This is where the authors of the Dark Mountain Manifesto recommend making the unspeakable spoken and calling where we are what it is: “We believe that in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken—and that only artists can do it.”[8]
28.
In 2023, I visited Adrián Villar Rojas in his studio in Rosario, just as he was closing down the enormous infrastructure that had been set in place in order to fabricate the works for The End of Imagination, his exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales—a project the scale of which is nothing short of insane. For this particular “End” (all of Villar Rojas’s works since the Covid-19 pandemic have born the same title), the artist and his studio colleagues built large-scale, digital worlds, which were then populated by creatures, objects, monuments, landscapes, and materials. Time was then run at high speed through these metaverses, time with all its catastrophes: conflict, natural disasters, the geological pushing and melding of matter against matter, fusion. A lot of fire. Long stretches of time, thousands of years sometimes, created new materials, new patterns on objects, new skins. New sculptures, conceived in these “other” worlds and which the artist brought back into this one, experiments in tactile, material reality. As the wetlands ecosystems near Rosario burned with the wrath of anthropogenic fires, ignited to destroy protected ecosystems and their multispecies communities in order to take over land with more cattle infrastructure, Villar Rojas and his studio stretched and melted and burned—the gargantuan, geological actions of deep time on the planet being recreated at lighting speed inside the microcosm of the studio. As the works were being created, he tells me, smoke was everywhere, and wet towels had to be placed across windowsills and door frames. Briefly, I wonder whether particles from this particular catastrophe may have ended up in Sydney, fused into the sculptures, themselves echoes of digital catastrophes. The imaginal world and the physical world are but two stages in the same metabolic process.
29.
In Vienna, Filipa and I chose the word “songs” rather than, say, “gestures”. Almost unintentionally, it brought with it cultures of offering, of gifting, and of ritual and the sacred. It brought back the communicative possibilities that we may recognise in the world at large as the mothers of human language and symbol (hasn’t it been suggested, after all, that human speech was born from witnessing birdsong?). The exhibition proposed that collective art and culture still holds, in the best of cases, the inherent capacity to be the supportive tissue for a deep-time, long-term, more-than-human exchange of meaning, of gifts, of songs.
30.
The logic of planetary interconnection creates temporary thickenings and loosenings of its constitutive elements. This is true of bodies (of humans, of water, of anything), ideas, concepts, and cultural forms. Life, matter, and meaning organise themselves into temporary architectures (or mortal forms, our architectures of meaning), and as they do, they immediately set up the condition of possibility of their loosening again, dissolving back into their constitutive whole (our mortality, that of our kin, thoughts, cultural forms). In the face of the inevitability of dissolution, art and culture can midwife this loosening, holding space for the unavoidable cycle of endings and beginnings. It may do so by learning from palliative care tools, as Andreotti suggests, or at least consciously making itself aware that we are in a moment that may require some palliative care. At the ends of worlds, culture holds the memory of ancient forms, supporting the survivance (feeble as their signals may sometimes be) of ways of knowing, ways of being, worlds that once were.
31.
In my opinion, the space of culture today sits (or could sit) somewhere at the meeting point of palliative care for the end of a world (with all its memory-making functions), the development of tools for planetary belonging (with all its connecting and ego-dissolving functions), and the exploration of the possibility of alternatives (with all its imaginal functions).
32.
Of the palliative work that needs to happen internally as modernity loosens its grip on the world, Andreotti writes: “Allow what is agonising within you to die without trying to rescue the old state and its sensation of familiarity, coherence and stability—remember that the wider metabolism needs this space being cleared by the death of the old in order to strengthen its tether to you.”[9]
33.
And in midwifing many ends, art may also bring birth to, or make space for, beginnings, a re-anchoring of meaning to the material world; repairing the severed connections between symbol and ontology, re-thickening the world. Stitching the fabric back together, gathering and reconfiguring the pieces. Instantiations of devotion, of renewal.
34.
The connection between art and ritual is made possible by the existence of the sacred, which is an evolutionary and planetary necessity. Loosening and thickening the world, over and over again.
35.
Su’s answer to my wish for excision was that what would change, in time, would be my relationship to the unwanted thoughts—rather than their relative existence. In time, I learned that while one cannot always control what is to come, one can at the very least bear witness to it with truth and, hopefully, wisdom and discernment. Beyond the affects of doomsday nihilism or solutionist optimism, can we turn directly towards the present, face it, and start to act in response to what may emerge when we finally do?