By DEBORAH DANOWSKI*
Excerpt from newly released book
Perceptual and affective transformations in the Earth Age
All those of us who, in one way or another, take seriously the reality and gravity of global warming and the disruption of several other parameters necessary for the maintenance of life on Earth in its current form are, I believe, in some way, transported, or taken, by the imagination of a future world very different from our present world, and much worse.
Whether they hope that this dystopian future can be avoided, or whether they fear that it will inevitably happen and affect everyone, their perception is repeatedly displaced, their point of view changed into one coming from a foreign time, from other people, close to us or far away, who will have lived and experienced the climatic and ecological catastrophe – that is, from those who will have lost their world, and who will nevertheless have to live in what is left and with what is left of a world; the point of view of those same people who perhaps look back seeking to understand the mystery of the combination of “scientific advances” with the political paralysis (or, worse, with the political suicide) of our time.
The philosopher W. G. Leibniz said that we know what we are by the place where we are, that is, by the place occupied by our body, even though our soul reaches out to the entire world, perceiving what is near and what is distant, the great and the small, the past, the present and the future. Being in a body implies that, of all the infinite things that our soul expresses, it perceives most clearly and distinctly our own body, what it does and what happens to it most immediately, the things that are most directly affected by it.
This is what characterizes our own point of view, our perspective. Furthermore, the body we have restricts the way we perceive phenomena. Normally we will not see what, for example, a microbe sees. This does not mean that we cannot, provided we are equipped with an appropriate key (a microscope, let's say), provisionally enter other phenomenal levels, appropriate to other types of bodies.
But to involuntarily confuse perspectives, or to have our own perception taken over by the perception that should be that of someone else, of other times or worlds, of other bodies, indicates that something is not right with us, or that something very strange is happening. And isn't this also, precisely, the Anthropocene, a very strange thing that is happening to us, a generalized mutation?
The science fiction classic The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury is perhaps one of the most profound and fascinating literary experiments on perceptual displacement. The novel is a composition of episodes ordered chronologically (from 1999 to 2026) and linked by the operation of an incessant movement back and forth between Earth and Mars, of exchange between the points of view of the inhabitants of Earth and Mars.
After the first chapter, “The Rocket Summer”, in which the author describes a kind of miniature climate change, the transformation of the Ohio winter into summer due to the heat released by the rocket that takes off carrying the “first expedition” to Mars, the narrative jumps to the beautiful, strange, delicate and fragile Martian landscape, more precisely to the environment that surrounds the life of the couple formed by Ylla and Yll.
The narrative jumps, but the waves of the changing air surrounding the rocket in Ohio reach Ylla, whose thoughts and affections are occupied by an alien perspective, so clear that she senses the arrival in her world of something or someone that neither she nor her husband knows who it is. She “hears” a song sung in English, repeats the verses even without understanding them, and falls in love with this stranger who will soon land on her planet aboard a shiny rocket, and will be immediately killed by Yll, overcome by jealousy.
The first Earth expedition to Mars thus fails, but it is followed by several others, and little by little the red planet, its cities, landscapes, bodies, technologies, and culture are invaded, polluted, and devastated by humans, who replicate the same crimes and destruction they inflict on their own people and their home planet. Almost all Martians die from the chickenpox brought by the first human crews, but some survive in spectral bodies and continue to inhabit their spectral cities, while the invaders end up witnessing from afar the destruction of Earth by an atomic war.
Furthermore, the spatial displacement is complicated by another displacement, temporal: what is experienced as past and future in each of these two worlds continually changes with the points of view, so that no one on either side, much less the reader himself, knows whether he is witnessing a past, present or future reality.
In the chapter “Night Encounters”, the Martian Muhe Ca and the Earthling Tomás Gomez meet at night, under the stars; they introduce themselves to each other, exchanging a few phrases telepathically; but when Tomás tries to offer Muhe a cup of coffee, they realize that they cannot physically touch each other or touch each other’s belongings; their hands pass through and through their bodies, each seeing the night sky and the stars behind their new friend.
And most importantly, their temporalities diverge. While the landscape observed by the Earthling on Mars was that of an invaded planet, with dry canals, dusty streets, all the Martians dead and their cities destroyed; before him, the Martian clearly saw his beautiful and fragile cities still shining and full of people, their crystal towers intact, women strolling through the streets, the canals overflowing with lavender wine. “But the ruins prove it!” says Tomás, “They prove that I represent the future, that I am alive and you are dead!” To which Muhe Ca replies: “I see only one explanation. You are a vision of the past!”
A bizarre nocturnal encounter between two incompossible worlds, both spatially and temporally. The Martian chronicles are also chronicles of different experiences of extinction and extermination: the present of Earthmen on Mars rejects the Martians into a past of ashes and ruins and simultaneously projects them into a future of purely phantasmal, spectral existence.
It turns out that even specters have their own ways of continuing to exist among material bodies. And little do the colonizers know, but they too are dead, since they will soon be able to watch with the naked eye as their homeland plunges into a great and final war, and they will quickly set off back in their rockets to join their fellow countrymen.
Everything then seems to indicate an almost total incomprehension and incompatibility between their bodies, cultures, times, sufficient reasons (because, in fact, it is of sufficient reasons that we are talking about when we say “the ruins prove it”, “I see only one explanation”). The Martians live in a world much stranger and more alien than the Earthlings imagined (whether they came to Mars to colonize it or to escape the slavery to which they had been subjected on Earth). Everything is different, nothing conspires.
However, throughout the book, from the first to the last episode, we witness paradoxical intersections, temporary portals that lead to a vision and visitation of another world and another time, captures of perspectives that allow the passage of affections (love, jealousy, friendship, hope, fear, curiosity, cunning, hatred, desire for revenge, disbelief, loneliness...), ultimately enabling encounters, but also conflicts. The Martians were there long before the arrival of the first crew from Earth.
Dead or alive, materially solid or mutable and ghostly, speaking through words or telepathy, they are still there, somewhere, at a time we cannot specify. By becoming imperceptible to Earthlings, they have escaped the invaders and their world; they have almost disappeared, like the names of their cities, mountains, rivers and forests, buried under the names imposed by the colonizers. But they will still be there after the last humans have abandoned the red planet.
Let us recall Russell Means' prophecy, pronounced in 1980:
And when the catastrophe is over, we, the Native American people, will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere. It doesn’t matter if we are just a handful of people living high in the Andes: the Native American people will survive and harmony will be restored. That is revolution.
The Martians have entered a kind of imperceptible becoming to escape the human invasion, but they continue to appear, here and there, infiltrating the newly renamed cities from time to time, starting friendships like the one between Muhe Ca and Tomás Gomez, or stealing the identities of dead humans in order to get closer and receive the warmth and affection of their missing relatives.
They are refugees from the past (but is it really from the past that they come?), in a way somewhat similar to the way that, today, here on Earth, refugees from the past-future, indigenous warriors of various ethnicities, children and young activists from various corners of the world, take to the streets of many large adult cities, creating cracks in their Anthropocene perspective: “You say you love your children above all else; but you are stealing their future before their very eyes.” (Greta Thunberg). “We don’t want to die again” (Davi Kopenawa).
*Debora Danowski is a philosopher and professor emeritus at PUC-Rio. She is co-author, with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, of Is there a world to come? Essay on fears and ends. (ISA Publishing House).
Reference
Deborah Danowski. Rain Washes Away All Facts: Essays in Philosophy. São Paulo, n-1 editions, 2024, 370 pages. [https://amzn.to/4bvILA6]
The launch in São Paulo will be this Saturday, March 15th at 03 pm, in the Conservatory Room at Praça das Artes – Av. São João 14.
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