--The Great Journey--

Renewing a Power of Faith to the Earth as Translators of the Anthropocene

The beginnings and a fork in the river... which path have you taken?

 You may be thinking already: What inspired the great movement of storytelling into the realm of the new, the unfamiliar, the Anthropocene? Well, the answer is as diverse as it is unending. As a translator, it is your job to determine this yourself. Here I will show you one path that can be taken when viewing this concept, among many. My loose definition for the Anthropocene is that it is the modern geological age where humankind has reached an era of post-imperialism, surpassed the Holocene, and now begins to question how our growth has directly influenced the natural ecosystem of life on Earth and how our stories evoke this concept. Here in my piece, you will not read about the scientific pursuits which led to the inception of this concept, for that is not my role as the storyteller.  

My role is to implore you to become a sojourner of the Anthropocene with us--with me, to deeply explore questions such as the one above, and perhaps become a storyteller yourself upon completion (or even a translator). On this journey, we will not be alone, there are many figures with us who will offer their perspectives and provide guidance as we proceed.

Before I can take you any further along this great journey, however, we must begin at the fork in the river. It is possible you have already explored some of the pathways of interpretation in the other works in this guide. But for this study, we must go back to where the stories began, with Nietzsche and Conrad. There is one last item that should be covered before we set off, and that is the question: how can a human be a storyteller of inhuman concepts?

It is important to outline the reality of the problems with this question and our concept of the ‘storytellers guide’. Dipesh Chakrabarty, a scholar of the Anthropocene, has said,  “...the planet is different. We cannot place it in a communicative relationship to humans.”^[1] Chakrabarty is positing that complex language is a human construct, and for the most part, we can only communicate in full with ourselves, not in relation to the Earth. There is no organic communication between us and ‘nature’ (to use the umbrella term for all life on Earth). He further claims, “We simply come too late in the story to be its protagonist” and that story of the rise of the breathing, living Earth is not one of, “...humans or human life but complex, multicellular life in general.”^[2] We will not be hijacking the story of the Anthropocene in this guide, we will be translating it. Chakrabarty’s points are crucial, because there is a caveat to our journey. In order to be translators, we have to position ourselves as an equal, as fellow species on the Earth alongside all others, rather than one above all others. Now let us delve into the thoughts of the German philosopher who said it best: Friedrich Nietzsche.

Arguably Nietzsche’s most personal manuscript, the half-fiction, half-poem of Thus Spoke Zarathustra^[3] may have inspired the revered and controversial Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, published only 6 years following Nietzsche’s work. From Zarathustra’s editor, Alexander Tille, Zarathustra is conceptualized as a “ghost.”  A ghost of what though? Tille claims the character is a ghost of an, “...ideal reflected in human image.”^[4] In this guide, I will transvalue Nietzsche’s ghost for use in determining the ideals of earthiness that are morally correct for humans (specifically, translators) as fellow species of Earth.

I can’t help believing this is what Nietzsche had in mind when he created this character, even if it was originally meant as a reflection upon the study of himself and religion. Zarathustra implores us to return to the path of the organic Earth. He says: “Remain faithful unto earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Lead back unto earth the virtue which hath gone astray.”^[5] Possessing the ‘power of virtue’ to the Earth is another way of being in agreement with nature. This proclamation foreshadows concepts of defamiliarization that resonate in Heart of Darkness, a book which embodies those who ‘hath gone astray’ from virtue. Together, these foundational texts have set in motion the epic story of humans as a species on Earth, our subsequent recovery in regaining our species’ virtuous roots with translation, and finally through the stories found in literature we engage with the morality of how to treat earthiness as a concept. I am here as your storyteller, your guide, and this is the path you have chosen.

Welcome... to the Anthropocene.

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Conrad and the Heart of Darkness, a manifestation of all who ‘hath gone astray’

         Our first case study should be an example of what needs to be left behind in order for us to move into a notion of virtue in the future. Here on this journey, I show you where translation goes wrong and the reality of a path humanity took almost a century ago, and is only beginning to escape today. This is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,^[6] the defamiliarization of the Anthropocene. While the disembodied voice of Nietzche’s character Zarathustra shows us how to think about our relationship to life on Earth, Marlow and his depiction of Africa, the natural wilderness, and the language he uses to express this, embodies the most harmful piece of canon to exist in the Anthropocene.

The novel takes place at the turn of the 20th c. as Marlow, a European guide for an expedition up the Congo river, searches for the elusive Colonel Kurtz; the main proponent of European imperialism in Africa. Chinua Achebe, an acclaimed author and critic of Conrad’s work, describes how, “For Conrad, things being in their place is of the utmost importance.” (An Image of Africa, 5). The apogee of Achebe’s conflicts with Conrad’s novel is the iniquitous depiction of the indigenous African people that occupy the story. Achebe adroitly notices how Conrad, ‘puts them in their place’ as sub-human. This is famously illustrated in the line where Marlow describes his own uneasiness with the African people: “...and the men were--No, they were not inhuman.”^[7] The unspoken addition to Marlow’s thought is that these indigenous Africans were not human either, they were something in between.

In this guide, I will not propose an examination of the racial conflicts in Conrad’s novel, as Achebe has already illustrated this perfectly in his own manuscripts. It is time to leave those toxic conflicts behind to the annals of history. But that is not all. There is one aspect I will demonstrate that Achebe has left out of his critical response: the eco-disposition displayed through Marlow’s judgments on nature. This is a topic Achebe has failed to outline, although many of his ideas are reminiscent of the study. He aptly notes that this novel, “...was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination.”^[8] In Heart of Darkness, there is one item that is immensely out of ‘place,’ and ‘dominant’ in the novel: the depiction of nature as something to be feared for being untamed.

Yes, the cruel depiction of black men in the story is an image that has become long-standing and dominant in Western imagination and that is certainly something worth thinking about. Added onto that problem is also the human image of the untouched wilderness as a thing that needs to be “shackled” and “conquered”, in order to be earthly. Nature in its untouched state is “Unearthly” through Marlow’s eyes.^[9] The ghost of Zarathustra would say that this is painting an unfaithful view of all multicellular life, such as the omission of the indigenous voices in the novel, and the way their culture is symbiotic to the Earth. There is no ‘power of virtue’, no agreement with nature. Heart of Darkness presents a negative bias of its world, justifying the conquering of its elements instead of a communion. Achebe asserts that the book is telling us to: “Keep away from Africa, or else!”^[10] More specifically, Keep away from these inhuman people and keep away from this unearthly part of Earth, or else find yourself in darkness! The two interpretations go hand in hand. Achebe has greatly helped us see the two avenues for why this novel needs to be left behind in the Anthropocene. Now we shall put one last nail in this proverbial coffin that will hold Conrad's canonical work.

This final nail is why Heart of Darkness is ultimately a defamiliarization of the Anthropocene. The novel fails to tell a story about humans, us, and our role in the Earth ecosystem. For all its language of nature, the novel offers no solace to the exploration of our relationship with our organic beginnings. Achebe says that, “In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done to words and their meaning.”^[11] This ‘business’ has already been implemented with Marlow’s comments on Africa being ‘unearthly,’ but you are about to see this negative eco-disposition manifest even further. In one scene, Marlow discusses his surreal experience in telling the story of the Congo and Kurtz, identifying his own role as a storyteller:

Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation… No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation  of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible.^[12]

This gap in storytelling, an inability to address reality, is unfittingly vague to us as explorers of the Anthropocene. When I read these words, I only see the effect of the wilderness, the realities of a man who has been touched by nature’s raw elements, which has caused him to become defamiliarized with the earthiness he has been taught to fear. Marlow is certainly not talking about Kurtz anymore when he comments on the ‘life-sensation’ of a ‘given epoch’ of ‘one’s existence’. He has seen deep inside his own position in relation to nature and how he, ‘hath gone astray’, to refer back to our ghost of Zarathustra.

Instead of translating the elements of nature to us, Marlow has tried to find a way to perpetuate its meaning as a human, to hijack the narrative, instead of work with it, as a species. But he finds that it is ‘impossible,’ and the notion has caused him to fail as a storyteller, and ultimately prevent him from ever becoming a translator. In this lack of clarity, Conrad himself as the scriptor is emitting a micro-‘violence’ with the words we seek to understand.  Now why does this raving monologue defamiliarize us with the Anthropocene? Poet Yeddi Morrison is here to answer that question.

In her bio-centric erasure poem of Heart of Darkness,^[13] Morrison decided to completely erase this whole excerpt that I quoted above, and instead create the one moment in her entire poem with only a single word filling an entire page, symbolizing the importance of her erasure.

The word left behind?

“Rotten”  

Now I cannot say for sure why Morrison made this literary decision, but I can only guess that in attempting to interpret the meaning behind this passage, she came to the same conclusion that we have: Marlow is a ‘rotten’ storyteller. There are no answers here, only questions, and none useful at that. What does it mean to convey a “dream-sensation?” Conrad himself as the scriptor of this novel writes through Marlow that it is ‘impossible’ to determine.

Therefore, this line of thought, interpreting the Anthropocene through Heart of Darkness, is also ‘rotten,’ a literal dead end in our journey of discovery. Conrad’s book has left a stain on the mark of equality, humankind’s natural connection to the Earth as a species, and given us no clues for how to translate this epoch. There is nothing salvageable here, and manifests as all that is wrong with the path of abuse, instead of virtue, that humanity has decided to take towards nature. In this emotionally tough section of our journey we have come to a realization. Conrad has essentially told us it is ok to leave him behind, by not attempting to answer these questions. And leave him behind we will. The next step in this great journey will be to explore a work of literature that does actually remain ‘faithful’ to the Earth.

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Ghosh’s ghost and The Hungry Tide... What does being ‘faithful’ to the Earth look like?

Our next case study will be Amitav Ghosh’s novel, The Hungry Tide.^[14] This particular work of literature will examine an experiment in faith to the Earth, a book that positions humankind in a periphery and nature as the focus. To understand where Ghosh is coming from, apart from his commentary on climate change, I shall bring back our fellow journeyman, Dipesh Chakrabarty. He says, “To encounter the planet is to encounter something that is the condition of human existence and yet profoundly indifferent to that existence.”^[15] In Hungry Tide, As I have said before, humankind is a species of this Earth, and especially given we are the only ones who can translate its record, we are immensely important to its story as a whole. But the dominant characters in question are not human, at least for this part of our journey they aren’t. Prepare for a story about nature in its realized form, as told through humans as a vessel instead of as a conqueror.

Amitov Ghosh translates his view of nature using the ‘ghosts’ of a human to define nature’s superiority, rather than the ghosts of nature defining human superiority. More specifically, the journals of Nirmal, who exists as a voice from beyond the grave in the story, posits how difficult it is to translate the agency of nature. The plot of Hungry Tide is unimportant to this study, but it is essentially two characters, Kanai and Piya, who travel to the Indian marshland of the Sundarbans to study a rare species of dolphin. The sundarbans are a dangerous region, where nature reigns supreme and death is never too out of sight or out of mind. Kanai acts as Piya’s literal translator, as well as the carrier of Nirmal's lost journals. Nirmal is Kanai’s uncle, who has since passed away.

In one moment of the story Nirmal translates, “I am afraid because I know that after the storm passes, the events that have preceded its coming will be forgotten. No one knows better than I how skillful the tide country is in silting over its past.”^[16] Nirmal is able to recognize the force of a storm, the violent conjunction of the elements of nature in the dangerous region he calls ‘tide country’. In this region of the sundarbans he inhabits, nature is just as brutal as what was seen in Heart of Darkness, if not more so. There is all the reason to fear it. But Nirmal is fascinated by the raw expressiveness of the elements around him, he is not afraid. At this moment, Nirmal is a translator. But as we will see, he does not remain one. The wilderness in Conrad’s piece was supposed to be feared then captured, and that caused Marlow to be afraid.

No, Nirmal does not fear nature itself, he is afraid of how nature can erase things, ‘silting over the past.’ Hungry Tide has begun to see past the fallacy Conrad created in viewing nature, but it does not see the relationship completely, in regards to the future...

...and that is ok. For now.

Here, we are given a problem, and that is enough. How do we translate our position, and the history of nature itself, when it is constantly being erased? This is what Nirmal questions, and why he possesses the power of translation in this moment, rather than a mere storyteller. Before we can answer his question, we must analyze what Nirmal means when he refers to the ‘past’.

One aspect that makes up this story is the presence of ghosts in telling tales of the past. Nirmal describes, “The specialty of mangroves is that they do not merely recolonize land; they erase time. Every generation creates its own population of ghosts.”^[17] Ghosts are that period of time and thought that have been erased, and they need not apply to mangroves themselves. They can be like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who has been buried by Conrad’s canon. Again, this is what Nirmal is ‘afraid’ of, he does not want to see movements of life be destroyed, even if it is being destroyed by something other than humankind. He has taken a very important step in remaining faithful to the Earth. He is thinking about how we can transcribe the past that nature has erased, rather than become an eraser ourselves. He just needs to get a bit more future-oriented to be a full translator.

This is a representation of the ‘ideals’ that the ghost of Zarathustra gives to us as explorers of the Anthropocene. Recognizing how we are just a small part in a large system of planetary species, but a large part in the role of transcribing a voice for Earth. A storm is a much greater force of nature than us, but we need not try to overcome it through force, that is impossible, for only through language are we any stronger. Hungry Tide is the application of the original insights produced by Zarathustra, but it is not quite the fulfillment of those insights. It is just another stop on our journey through the Anthropocene. Notice the progress we have made from Nirmal’s insights in comparison to Nietzsche and the opposition from Marlow. Now, let us attempt to answer the question raised earlier.

If we are constantly being erased by the greatest forces of nature such as a powerful storm (that only gets stronger as we pump more CO2 into the air), how do we maintain an identity in the world of the Anthropocene? Nirmal asserts this notion, “...it seemed to me that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil.”^[18] Nirmal’s translation of nature amounts to a realization that nature is accusing us. We are in an age of post-imperialism, where we have a position on every single continent in the world. No longer are we simply living from, ‘the water and the soil’. We are being accused of abandoning our earthiness. Notice this step back for Nirmal. When Zarathustra tells us to return to our ‘earthly’ beginnings, is this what he means? Is he also accusing us? Do we have to sacrifice everything we have built, or is there another answer?

It is here that we bring in the forerunners of the Anthropocene concept, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin. In their magnum opus on the subject, they say, “Once we recognize ourselves as a force of nature, we will need to address who directs this immense power, and to what ends.”^[19] This is what it looks like to be faithful to the Earth, as human beings with a spoken language. We ‘address’ our meteoric rise, the rise that has contributed so much to a volatile nature, one that we know we will never be able to control, only mitigate. Being a translator is about maintaining the balance of power, creating an environment where nature is the primary agent and generative of a society that works to repair what has been erased over time.

We don’t necessarily need to abandon our ways, but there needs to be a system of mutual living, symbiotic living. An agreement, as Zarathustra tells us. One where we come back to recognizing nature as a part of us, not divided from us. The science fiction of literature allows us the space to think about these concepts. Nirmal proposes the start of this practice, but he doesn’t reach the full virtue of what inspires his unique disposition. He still sees nature as a cruel force, and human species as the victim. In order to come to a complete understanding of how we ‘direct’ our power moving forward, we must explore one last novel, one that takes this conflict beyond our own planet and into space itself. Our question: How do we mitigate the inherent force of nature that humanity has become?

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Le Guin and the Voice Which Constitutes a Translation of our Epoch

A translator is someone who can tell stories within the Anthropocene while also being aware of their human species bias. Ghosh helped eliminate this bias for us. The best way for a translator to tell a good story is to tell a story that puts themselves in the periphery of the Earth. Nirmal was able to see past his own species to begin contemplating our relation with nature. Here, we will examine the literature that completely embodies this framing and determines the correct moral stance to take; the stance that best resembles a ‘lead back’ to our earthly and ‘faithful’ origins, as Zarathustra has implored us to do. This is why I present to you Ursula Le Guin’s novel, “The Word for World is Forest,”^[20] our final case study in this great journey. Before we can enter into her world, we must complete the idea of the translator.

In the curatorial art of “The Word for World is Still Forest,” which builds on the aspects within Ursula Le Guin’s novel,  Anthropologist Eduardo Kohn joins an interview to discuss the implications of what we have been exploring thus far in our journey within the Anthropocene. Kohn says, “...humans are not the only living entities capable of thinking, even though this deep-rooted and crucial distinction has been used to set humanity apart from other lifeforms.”^[21] Kohn remarks on the human’s role as translator and how that ‘distinction’ of human thought causes problems with our ‘deep-rooted’ assumptions of superiority in nature.

What if we could hear the words of the Earth, speaking to us? Thinking about us?

What would it say?

Ghosh came close to answering these questions with Nirmal’s grounded position towards his natural elements, but he was still merely a human throwing language onto an ecosystem with no voice. We will now translate Ursula Le Guin’s novel ourselves, which grants nature its much needed voice. Here is what it has to say.

Le Guin creates the role of the Athshean, a non-violent forest species, content on using ‘dreams’ to bond with the planet they inhabit. In this scenario, which takes place in a distant future, humans have colonised the solar system and beyond, using this Athshean planet for resource extraction, notably, the collection of its trees. The protagonist of this story, a member of the indigenous species named Selver, describes, “The yumens poison themselves in order to dream… They did not know what was within them at all”^[22] In the book, humans must ingest psychoactive drugs in order to create an ostensible bond with their organic roots. The result is the illusion of a bond.

Davidson, a military captain on planet, is one such example of someone who is incapable of bonding with his natural world. He expresses Kohn’s warning of the ‘deep-rooted’ bias that Ghosh carefully dodged. Davidson remarks to his partner Kees after being told that he must stop his brutal extraction of the local ecosystem: “When I say Earth, Kees, I mean people. Men. You worry about deer and trees and fiberweed, fine, that’s your thing. But I like to see things in perspective, from the top down, and the top, so far, is humans.”^[23] Davidson actively seeks to drive himself further away from the virtues that make a species. He serves as a reminder, here in our journey, of what it looks like to not be a storyteller or a translator. Le Guin may be writing science fiction, but these concepts are all too real. We saw it barely manifest in Marlow, and only begin to break the surface for Nirmal. We as humans think we see things in ‘perspective’ when in reality, the opposite is true. Even Nirmal, who saw himself below nature, had trouble comprehending what nature was trying to tell us, falling on a defensive stance to what he saw as an accusatory conceptualization of his human condition.

Let us now take up once again, the wisdom of Selver, who is literally capable of communion with his planet, a process we are incapable of achieving ourselves. He says that the humans,

...have left their roots behind them, perhaps, in this other forest from which they came, this forest with no trees... Therefore they go about in torment killing and destroying, driven by the gods within, whom they will not set free but try to uproot and deny…afraid to see their own faces in the dark.^[24]

Selver translates for us that power of virtue that makes up the morally correct ideals in a species. There are ‘gods’ within that must be considered sacred, that cannot be killed. These ‘gods’ are the ideals of earthly consciousness that Zarathustra implores on us. Selver tells us, from outside the realm of human experience, that we are ‘afraid’ of our ‘roots’, and make up for it by exterminating, even killing, any reminder such as in Heart of Darkness, or with Davidson’s scorched earth policy towards the end of Le Guin’s novel. We can’t be afraid of nature, but we must learn how to mitigate its growing strength, before it becomes as much an eraser as we are now. Selver advocates for a balancing of power, rather than an imposing of it.

This whole idea of repressing the human race as a species is resonant in our society, ever since those first harmful depictions of nature in Heart of Darkness. I will now bring in another quote from Kohn, our anthropologist. He adds, alongside commentary by the curator of Word for World is Still Forest, “In order for the human to become a little more ‘worldly’ [we must] attempt to think beyond our “all-too-human” worlds.”^[25] Selver is not only given a voice, the ideal of the ‘worldly’ species, but humans are also represented as the antagonist in the novel, thus eliminating the ‘all-too-human’ world where we are the heroes (or the victims).

Our dreams are our literature. That is how our species connects stories to the earth. Taking that idea even further, we are literally using the trees of the Earth to tell stories on paper. An eye for an eye, and we must deliver.  Selver concludes, “A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest”^[26] Combining the two words ‘world’ and ‘forest’ allows the discovery of a whole new perception in how we organize our society away from earthly concepts. We have to re-address the separations in our own language and how certain stories can defamiliarize us. Learn to be earthly by pushing Conrad’s work behind the work of these modern writers, Ghosh, Le Guin, who translate our future.

Le Guin's novel is the culmination of everything that we have worked to discover. We are led back to our ‘faith’ in the Earth, rather than continuing on a path of ‘defamiliarization’ first initiated by Conrad. The best translations of nature voice a re-familiarization of what nature truly represents for us. The Earth is not unearthly, we only make it so with our own language. We must continue to venerate inhuman things. That is the role of the translator, repairing what nature has done to our ways of thought, moving beyond the words of ‘violence’ that corrupt us, and creating new literature that embodies these virtuous ideals. Selver translates our re-familiarization with his example. His dreams unlock communion to his planet, a ‘faithfulness’ in being a proponent of continuing health for all life, rather than a destroyer of all that isn’t.

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The panacea of translation in the human condition

I have one last argument I would like to bring forth, representing our human condition. Why is the Anthropocene important beyond the argument I make here? Columnist Peter Brannen, a writer of geological history, has a particular bone to pick with the Anthropocene concept.^[27] He posits that nature will always overcome the human presence, tectonic plates shift, and human civilization is slowly absorbed into the planet, in due course. As is the way of the universe, isn’t it? In fact, he considers mankind to be just an ‘event’ on the hundred-million year journey of the Earth. In this, we have discovered a central question.

What are we if not for our mundanity?

I would like to present Brannen’s opening line. He says that we live in a “...geological age of our own making.” That is the answer right there.

An epoch is a distinctive period of time, a moment where a species has uncharacteristically marked the Earth, with no definitive rule for how long that mark should apply. For us, our own presence is cause for concern because it can end the epoch of millions of different infinitesimale life forms that exist symbiotically in our world (present company not excluded). Consider the pill bug, which has existed for millions of years, and still exists today, with great impact.^[28] It is through their lifestyle that we can continue breathing whatever fresh air is left in this world (alongside the work of thousands of other species). They deserve a healthy Earth as much as we do, and it is our goal to provide for all life because if not for that, what are we here for? That is why the Anthropocene is important and relevant on the geologic time scale, because we want to live on the Earth for as long as that pill bug (with that pill bug), and it is possible for us to do so.

So the question now is: We are here. Can we overcome our presence?

The answer is yes, yes we can.

The panacea of the Anthropocene is organizing a new translation of the human condition, one centered towards a reparative view of the Earth. Only then can we be the protagonists of this story. And only then, maybe... can we reach a stage where we even save the human presence on Earth, and all life that resides on such a beautiful world. Now that you have completed this path of the great journey, you have become a sojourner of the Anthropocene, but for change to occur you must become a translator, a permanent resident. Remember the way that we went about this journey, how each text spoke to us in different modes and feelings, not necessarily in their contexts either… After all, nothing is certain in the Anthropocene. Go out, explore your own literature, write your own literature, continue to be a guide (or even a translator) for our world so we as a species can come back to ‘faith’, back to a familiarity with earthiness. Good luck, the forest is counting on you.

You are now one with… The Anthropocene.

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