Negative Earth Works
By Blair Bainbridge
This field note is meant as a dark meditation on the slow, violent histories we as a group bore witness to, either first or second hand, during our travels from Malartic to Kahnawa:ké to the Biosphere to the moon. It is a meditation on the loss of stable ground, both material and theoretical, due to long-term extraction and ongoing colonialism and enduring commitments to negative futures. A deep breath out, such that we might embark on something else.
"Thus, having cast a spell
the magician sings,
I topple the mountain, the mountain moves, the mountain crumbles away..."
(Marcel Mauss, The Gift)
This is a guided meditation to help you prepare for sleep.
Get into a comfortable position lying flat on your back, with your legs extended in front of you and your arms resting gently at your sides. You can close your eyes, or let your vision soften.
Notice your body making contact with the ground. Check for any sensations that are present, such as vibrations, tingling, tension, elasticity, coarseness, brittleness, granularity, metallicity, specular reflection. Notice these sensations without trying to change them or make them different. Simply acknowledge they are there.
Take a deep breath in, pausing for a moment at the end of your breath. Exhale slowly and completely, expelling the sedimented air from the depths of your lungs back into the atmosphere. Inhale again slowly, refreshing each and every alveolus with the crispness of a new breath. Exhale.
On your next inhale, allow your body to take over your breathing, relaxing into your own autonomic rhythm, becoming breathed. As you do, bring your attention to your body’s continuous, tidal participation in the global flow of oxygen. Become aware of the kind of breath your body breathes and the kind of planet your body labors upon.
Now imagine yourself walking through a stark rocky landscape, the ground a loose mixture of different types of stone. The sky is overcast, but bright, the sun a diffuse orb cloaked in a hazy atmosphere. You are not warm or cold. You feel no wind. You hear no sound. You see nothing but rock and sky, all radiating one luminous monochromatic gray.
As you walk, notice the textures of stone under your feet. Some slick and smooth like marble, others more granular or coarse, like limestone. Feel how their uneven shapes and sizes test your balance and slow your pace. Though each step is a challenge for you, you feel no need to look down, as you have a strong sense of where your body is in space. Your gaze softens, and so does your world, sky and ground merging into one on the horizon.
Continue to walk forward, with no destination in mind. With each step you take, the sky and the ground dim ever so subtly into a shade darker, like a touch lamp. You cannot detect it in the moment, but over time you notice your eyes adjusting to the ensuing twilight. Allow yourself to transition with your world into darkness.
Take a deep breath in. And out.
Take a moment to look around. Night has fallen on your mineral world, but the sky is clear, and a hundred billion stars now join you. You look up to see that the moon has replaced the hazy sun. It shines brightly, its contours sharp and clean. You admire the valleys and craters on its surface in all their miraculous detail. You have never seen them so clearly, and sense that your vision is enhanced, or extended. Take a minute to imagine what you might see if in the back of your eyes were tiny mirrors, like two reflecting telescopes.
Return your specular gaze to the landscape. The moonlight glimmers on the rough edges of the rocky terrain, once a single field now sparkling in variation. Allow your eye to slowly trace the jagged contours of the mineral forms peaking out of the shadows. Start with a rock just a few feet away, and let your eye drift toward the horizon on a current of intricacy, your vision razor sharp, each detail taken in as a moment unto itself, like the pleasure of reading a well-crafted argument. Allow yourself to become seduced by the sight of a million edges, of endless unfolding difference.
Now adjust your sight to a panoramic perspective. In the distance you spot something unsettlingly animate. A slow darkness snakes along the horizon, almost like an opaque fog, or a dispersing drop of dye, tendrils of vital blackness twisting portentously toward you. As they get closer, your breath quickens. You feel your stomach drop. You see now what you could not before:
not a fog but a void.
You realize in a panic that the ground is collapsing. The strange negative shape before you reveals a network of subterraneous caverns that had been beneath you all along, weakening the ground you walked on. Now the rocks are giving in, tumbling back into the earth. You feel the ground beginning to vibrate and shake, but you hear nothing. The rocks do not seem to topple as much as cede to gravity, and you never hear them land. The darkness continues to snake its way toward you silently. Your mind is roaring in anticipation of the oncoming fall. The background stars begin to spin and you shut your eyes tightly. You take a deep breath in.
And out.
Open your eyes. To your astonishment, you are still standing where you were before, except you are now on a tiny rocky island, about the length of a modest family home. The ground has collapsed all around you. Everywhere the planet was, there is nothing. Just a smooth, solid blackness. You take a few steps closer to the edge of your island and peer over. Though your vision is still sharp, you see no detail at all. You inch a little closer toward the edge. And then a little closer. You keep going until you can curl your toes over the ends of your island. You crouch down and stare into the great abyss. No matter how hard you look, how you try to refocus your lens, there is nothing. Imagine a bridge extending from your island into the distance - how far would it need to go to touch the next patch of ground?
While still crouched on the edge of your island, extend your arm out in front of you, with the palm of your hand facing away from you and your fingertips pointing up. Observe as the moonlight falls gently upon your skin like silk. The milky beams seem concentrated on you, illuminating your body against the utter emptiness, a glowing ghost. Now dip your hand into the darkness like you might at a river bank. Notice the feeling of absolute nothingness, not even a wisp of air, as if you had momentarily dipped your hand outside the atmosphere. Into utter emptiness. Take another long look into the abyss, this time in the direction of where you remember the horizon. Squinting, you wonder if in time your eyes will adjust to find the horizon populated with a thousand more tiny islands. (They won’t.)
Grab a rock below you, stand up, and hold it before your heart’s center. In the moonlight, and under close inspection, you now see your first hint of chroma - rose quartz. Without hesitation you toss the rock over the edge and wait. And wait. But there is no sound. You bend down and grab another rock, stand up, and hold it before your heart’s center. A dull tan rock with globules of white - a conglomerate. You toss this one too, and wait. Again there is no sound. You bend down a third time and reach for something heavier, and find a dense rock about a foot in length. You stand up, hold it before your heart’s center, and take a look. This one is pink as well, but peppered with black and white to form an interlocking texture - gneiss. You heave this one over and wait. Still no sound. You take a few steps back, sit down, and pick up another rock - milky white with thin strands of black - marble. You turn it in the moonlight to find tiny specks of gold sparkling before you. You turn it a few more times in your hand, set it down, stand back up and walk to the edge.
Close your eyes one more time. Feel the ground beneath your feet, your last point of contact with earth matter. Take a deep breath in. Now jump.
As you fling yourself into the emptiness, open your eyes. You are now floating on top of the event horizon. You are not sure if you are falling or suspended in mid-air. (Is this what zero gravity feels like?) Slowly rotate your body to face the place where you were just standing. Instead of the small mineral island, you are now treated to the most delightful scene.
Above you is the earth, but rather than convex it is concave, warped into a domed hemisphere whose equator touches down all around you. Everything is moving slowly as the day passes. It has been so long since you saw in color that the greens and blues of a living planet are almost blinding in their luminosity. The oceans and continents are expanding outward in every direction, at 67 km/s. You take a moment to think about what must now be infinitely far away. Of lives and histories as good as distant galaxies. Of the world-events, now just photons, crashing upon you like waves on an abandoned shore. You think of the small bright lights of short lives lived as pure energy emitting in every direction. How all of this energy will move through you eventually, move past you, continue on to touch other cosmic timespaces that you will never know.
Now return to your body. Sense it acting as a point source. Picture how your body, as light, will come to touch all the stars in the universe, your emission spectrum expanding into a ghostly image of a once concentrated effort of attention: a reunion of specter with spectrum. Think about the last long gasp of light you emit as you fall infinitely into this black hole. Close your eyes, and allow yourself to disintegrate into one last cosmic irradiant dance.
Epilogue
i have been searching for a place where i can no longer find myself.
it is here, i hope, in exhale.
i stopped for a moment along the way. and thought of rock that cannot come to rest.
rock that spun and spun hot. this is how we come to sense a planet. not at a distance.
(a planet is not something to see.)
but in shock.
Perhaps in Abitibi-Temiscamingue, the word for sorcery is ‘Anthropocene.’ The Canadian Shield watches its own body instantaneously fracture, deform, diarticulate, stress, strain, shear, and quake, the pieces - now particles - flung up into the atmosphere, spreading across the globe like a sudden and unwanted exhale.
Earth in upheaval.
If planetary history were condensed into the average human life span, 79 years, this act of sorcery would have elapsed over just 82 seconds. Is this a thing a planet can perceive? This transmutation of matter and relations in one extended instant?
82 seconds is a flash accompanied by the lingering visual effects of an unanticipated exposure, the after image transposing itself every place the planet looks.
The waste rock in my hand that day I picked up from five feet below my bodily center. It now sits in my pocket as I float around this pocked territory in a yellow school bus. It travels with me in the car, back to the hotel room in Abitibi-Temiscamingue. It follows me again back to Montreal, where I put it in my desk drawer. I take it back out, look again, and put it in my backpack. The rock accompanies me to the river, a river flowing through the great cleavage left behind by another upheaval of ground. And people. And modes of existence. And it comes to rest on my bookshelf, now just a prop to uphold ideas of the future. This rock once spun hot in space, 4.5 billion years ago. What a sad resting place it has now.
It seems fitting that in the midst of this 82 second planetary flash, our most useful methodological resource as yet has been to slow down. Perhaps, after all, the point of view of the human - the one that allows us to envision geological time as moving at an inconceivably slow pace - remains an important part of being with a planet.Perhaps this is part of a speculative methodology - a slow methodology that turns on speculation without diagnosis.Speculation without diagnosis: could this be a kind of contact without conquest in critical theory? If slowing down is a theoretical and methodological imperative, it requires that we forestall diagnosis or preemptive knowledge about what’s to come such that we may reintroduce the receding horizon of thought undergirding our confrontation with planetary futures. If a planetary future is inherently unpredictable, or if there is ethical potential in reserving it as such, perhaps the site for minding the unthinkable is the speculative, a coming to terms with our own theoretical uncertainty.
~
I don’t want to go to the moon. I want to stay with the earth.
The worked earth. With the manmade craters, the dark monuments to negative futures always already here.