by Suprabha Seshan
I wrote this one night at
3:00 a.m. I'd been awakened by the sounds of the forest, and a powerful dream.
A question arose: if I had only one chance to write something what would it be?
The peg this piece hangs on is the notion of human supremacy. Thank you,
Hardnews magazine for publishing it.
I am witness to the
murder of forests. To be silent in the face of this is unconscionable.
I am witness to the birth of forests. To be silent in the face of this is unconscionable.
I am witness to, nay, I’m beholden to, nay, I’m alive and breathing and
who I am because of the work of
forests. To be silent in the face of this is unconscionable.
Moreover, I am daily witness to the immense and fecund intelligence of
forests, and of every human and nonhuman in my forest home. Above all, to be
silent in the sure awareness of this is unconscionable.
***
I write tonight to add to the growing but still- too-feeble litany of
rage, despair and revolt against the continued murder of forests, a litany that
is still powerless in any way whatsoever to counter this greatest of all crimes.
Whatever any of us says or does, and no matter who flags the horror, or
attempts to counter the crime, the reality on the ground is nothing short of
holocaust, one that is being perpetuated by the hour, despite every looming
sign of planetary doom.
***
While
rulers argue on news-screens and in boardrooms about the action that needs to
be taken with respect to deforestation and climate change, the reality on the
ground is escalating murder.
While
salesmen bombard zombie shoppers with organic, green and climate friendly
solutions, the reality on the ground is burning, burying, conversion,
clearance and pollution.
While
scientists prevaricate endlessly about the meaning, purpose and value of the
living world (and the universe); and economists write copious audits assigning
dollar values to the living world (and the universe); the reality on the ground
is rampant species extinction.
While
technologists dream up quick fixes by the hour, and fabulous contrivances to
manipulate energy and toxic waste; contrivances designed to aid and abet this
insane and unsupportable way of living called modern industrial civilization;
the reality on the ground is omnicide i.e. the death of all life, including
humans.
While
spiritualists con the masses into mindgames of transcendent truths in outer or
inner space, games that ignore the indigenous, the animate, the sensuous, the
embodied, and the interdependent; the reality on the ground is traumatized
psyches, of traumatized peoples in traumatized ecologies.
***
We
know all this of course. The lies are being ferreted out, exposed and
denounced.
***
Revolt
is afoot on all continents, in every ocean and in the air, revolt by humans and
nonhumans, wherever anyone not yet co-opted, or shutdown, or freaked out with
grief and despair, is witness to the savage dismemberment of the body of the
biosphere.
Elephants
in my forest are revolting, as are fungi, and plants, and the great planetary
winds, and everyone else still wild and free, as are the indigenous people in
the forests of central India, adivasis.
Anyone
with half a brain, who is half alive, can hear the unmistakable roar of life,
including, the cells in our own bodies.
***
But
there is a glaring hole in the discourse, however it takes place. This rests on
notions of human supremacy, and of intelligence as a feature primarily of the
modern human brain.
Before
we all die in this global omnicide, I wish to state in no uncertain terms that
this is the biggest lie of all. And that this lie makes all the other lies
possible, and makes holocaust possible. It operates on the same logic and
rationale that Hitler did with his slogans about the Aryan race. It is about human supremacy, mostly white, mostly male, and the rest us who are brown,
yellow, black or red, have been whitewashed or coerced into following
this, and now too many of us believe in the white dream. Except we call it happiness, the good life, and the
economy.
The
longer I live in a forest, the more and more I see of this whitewash. I see how
every other form of human and nonhuman life is now subject to this lie and
therefore doomed.
The
whitewash is tantamount to total control: of body, mind, woman, other, all
life, and the universe.
***
By now it’s clear that I live in a forest.
There are numerous others here, other intelligences, they speak to me
everyday.
In this daily living with a million other awarenesses, it is absurd and
heinous that I don’t say what I know about them, from them and with them.
In fact, I write this in collaboration with all these others I live
with. Everyday, every hour and every second, they show me what intelligence is,
all the many ways it can express itself, and how, above all, intelligence
nourishes diversity.
So, I wish to do more than negate the white dream, I seek simultaneously
to honour the old peoples of this world who knew and still know otherwise, and
what the forests themselves know, and what those of us half crazed humans
(ignored and silenced by the materialist so called rationalist cabal that rules
the world) have slowly and too belatedly woken up to, about the non locality of intelligence, which is
paradoxically, deeply personal.
It is personal, and yet, it cannot be contained.
It is of course yours, but it is not only yours, or mine, or hers, or
his, or its, or ours, or even human, while it is all that.
It is not only in grey matter (as opposed to haemoglobin or the cells
lining the fallopian tube, or amoebae, or chlorophyll or root tips or stem
cells, or fern fronds, or water cohesion or sunlight, or air pressure or
gravity or magnetic fields).
It
is not only a property of the central nervous system. It is not only axon and
neuron driven. It is not only of the amygdala or the pituitary gland or
the left hemisphere or the right, or the neo-cortex or the myelin sheath, or
the synapse, or the neurotransmitter or the hippocampus, i.e. the three pound
organ, the human brain.
It
is definitely not only human, nor mammal, nor bird, reptile, nor amphibian, nor
fish, nor echinoderm.
It
is not only here on this planet, nor somewhere else in the far reaches of this
or other galaxies.
***
It
simply is, everywhere, of the whole in all its parts, at every level of
coherence, communion and experience. It is a quality of existence, it is the
way of life: individual and collective, atomic, organic, ecologic, biospheric,
cosmic.
***
Animals and plants in my forest home offer the sweetest response to
questions of: where and what is intelligence? They insist, yes
the whole, of course the collective, but always experienced through the
personal, the intimate, and the embodied.
The
paradox, they say, cannot be understood by exiting the personal to
embrace a collective, for this makes the collective a pure abstraction,
leading to a profound and dangerous disconnect, allowing for every delusion
from nation states, to egos, to the caste system, to private property to
industrial capitalism to factory farming, to empire, to machine worlds to
patriarchy, to planetary scale toxicities.
Intelligence,
they say, flows from the personal to the personal, it is known, experienced and
lived through the personal, and enacted through the personal. It goes from this
elephant, to that tree, to that bird, to that valley, to that river, to
this land, to this sea. It
is deeply personal to
each of my white blood cells, to each of the trillions of bacteria in
every gut, to every vein in every body, every enzyme in every gut, every tree
in every forest, and every star in every galaxy.
Intelligence, they say, in fact, requires
the personal, the beloved, and the rooted. It requires you and me.
The
last thing we need to do, in this last hour, is prove or measure or debate it
or put dollar values on it, or bottle it up for posterity. Just listen to your
body.
***
What
then of the machine, the greatest achievement of modern man, a globalized
artifice that now runs the show?
Is
this not the part of that same intelligence? One of myriad intelligences?
Do
you wonder what supports the machine? Where does its fuel and form come from?
What is its body made of? Who died so this computer could come into being (and
what abuse of language, to call this, a body, a being!)?
And
what of the living world does this machine support? Does it support my life, or
yours, my actual body, my flesh, my people, my land base; does this give rise
to more intelligence? More life, more diversity? More possibilities for every
member of this universe?
What
do you eat? Food, or reconstituted petroleum? What do you breathe? Air,
or toxic waste in a gaseous sewer? Whom do you love? A human, or a product?
Where do you live? In the real world, or a digital world?
***
Living
beings know that failure to support others, and failure to adapt or change
equals death, and because this machine way is now so widespread and pervasive,
it, for sure, is hell bound to implode, or explode, and most likely take
everybody down with it.
Is
a machine aware? Is a machine intelligent? Does a machine have will? Does a
machine reproduce? Does a machine care? Does a machine attend to your life?
Does your iPad love you?
Does
this petroleum guzzling non-sentient non-aware non-reproducing non-supportive
toxic product of modern industrial civilization, in its multifarious forms,
qualify as intelligent?
Or
is it a one-way system? Life
goes in, and death by decimation, processing
and packaging comes out. Thus, is it your agent in holocaust, destruction by
proxy?
Or
is it just stupid? Without you or me, what is this machine?
And
worse than stupid, is it just utterly mechanical, in the way machines are, and
thus in the known history of the universe, rather unique?
***
While skeptics of nonhuman intelligence work that out, and devote billions of dollars to researching artificial
intelligence, I’m preparing myself to
dismantle it (the machine), and the system that supports it, before it devours
the planet, my home.
While religious scholars and priests, ponder upon this, eyes closed,
senses shut down, negating life to worship manmade gods and manmade thoughts
and manmade artifacts, men who organize the living world by stacking or hacking
the rest of us to support their material and spiritual conquest of reality, I’m
taking lessons from animals and plants I live with, to use every strategy to
end insanity.
While scientists, armed by their technocratic henchmen, probe the
secrets of the universe, and of every cell, through telescoping, magnification,
extension, dissection, dislocation and isolation, and explain it all through
mystifying equations (incomprehensible mantras of the dominant culture),
actions that further devour the body of
the world, I'm growing allegiances with non humans and humans in my own
community.
***
I write this for the rest of us, for those who are still alive, yet
enslaved to the emperors who command the machine, to those of us dimly aware
there is something missing in the insane logic we are bound by.
We know that the death of the living world (and this includes humans)
goes hand in hand with the proliferation of the machine, systemic, and particulate,
a construct, both psychological and material, worshipped by modern man, who in
the most tragic and macabre of ironies is now enthralled by the very monster he
pieces together out of the body and flesh of the living world.
Why do we support this monster? Why do we succumb to its power? Is there not another way? Can we not
ally with the rest of the living world, and halt the machine?
This does not necessarily mean death, nor killing anybody. On the
contrary, it means, life. For everybody.
Picture a world, where trees,
plants, frogs, tigers, humans, rivers, mountains, winds, waters, soils,
communities coexist, each supporting the other, each in relation to the other,
each conspiring to add beauty to the world, each giving life, so all may live in
beauty.
Before I die, and more importantly, before the forests are vanquished, I
believe we are required to engage directly with the truly intelligent members
of the universe, those who have figured out how life supports life, and how
death supports life, how death doesn’t lead to immiserated
oceans, and toxified air, and
collapsed forests, and extirpated tigers, and devastated humans; and how
intelligence and life are to each other how the wave is to a particle, or a
river to water molecules, or blood to every cell.
And I believe that love, beauty, real life, and a vibrant planet
are born from this, wholly.
Thank you: Hardnews for
carrying From this wounded forest: a
dispatch; Sadiq Naqvi and Amit Sengupta for your welcome; Hartman de Souza
and Derrick Jensen for cheering this little dream-nourished piece; Valli
Seshan, Lorenzo Castellari, Stefi Barna, Sonali Sathaye, Sujata Goel, Shirly
Joseph, Diba Siddiqi, for listening; Pradip Krishen, Robert Stewart, Tanya
Balcar and other ecogardener friends, for extending the magic of plants; Young
friends, students, researchers and toddlers, for curiosity and affection for
nonhumans; Biologist friends for dialectics on science, taxonomy, ecology,
forest dynamics; Activist friends, for ferocity in battle; for vigilance, alarm
calls, and for your teaching: those who destroy forests destroy humans, and are
destroying the planet; Educator friends for sending your students again and
again to the forest; Friends at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, for your
indefatigable inspirational work with the plants of the Western Ghats; Paniya,
Kurchiya, and other neighbours in beautiful Wayanad, for your continued presence in the same place for decades,
centuries, millenia; Yellow browed bulbuls, hornbills, racket tailed drongoes,
tinkling frogs, brown fish owls, cicadas, langurs and elephants, for your
welcome to the jungle orchestra; Plants and streams and mists, all non humans
and all ecological processes of the Western Ghats, for being you.
Photo
Credits: Sandilya, GB
