Random Thoughts at Three a.m.: On Wall Cherries

Have been wandering around Facebook again. Came across another instance of the first poster on someone's wall claiming to have taken their 'wall virginity'.

As a pedant, I am strongly opposed to this whole new plethora of things for which one can supposedly lose one's 'virginity'. Really, it's just doing something for the first time. The first time I rode on a train, I did not lose my 'train virginity'. The first time I got drunk, I did not lose my 'alcohol virginity'. Likewise, (for fuck's sake!) the first time I went to a concert, I did not lose my 'concert virginity'. As far as I'm concerned, there are only two ways of losing any kind of 'virginity': sexual acts and going to your first screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show--which may fall into the former category, anyway.

But, as part of my general project to deconstruct the prescribed sexual dialogue of our society, I kind of like it.

On Nature vs. Artifice

I've started re-reading Rousseau's 'The Social Contract', preparing to write an essay on it. Like so many of his predecessors, Rousseau is concerned with determining which aspects of human society are 'natural' and which are 'artificial'. But I think they are setting up a false dichotomy.

I was particularly struck by a bit in the beginning of Chapter II, in which he claims, first, that the only truly 'natural' society is the family. Fair enough. But he goes on to claim that if any connection is maintained between a father and his children after those children have reached adulthood, it is so "no longer naturally, but voluntarily". As though voluntary human actions were somehow unnatural.

Now, before y'all start correcting me, I get what he's saying: he's using 'nature' to describe what comes forcefully naturally to our natures, like breathing. (We can control our breath to a certain extent, but we breathe without thinking about it and we cannot stop breathing or we die. I understand everything through analogy because I'm a bit simple like that.) Then he's using 'artifice' to describe those things which we do only through the exercise of our minds.

Our natural, human minds. I suppose my objection stems from the general separation of 'human' vs. 'nature', which is often simply false. I suspect a bit of it is religiously-based (God created Man and the animals, not Man of the animals), though even without religion there's a fair amount of egoism in our conception of species.

What I find particularly hilarious is the argument--based on agreement with the above--that 'believing in' global warming is somehow egoistic. "As though one single species could influence the whole planet so much!" What do these people think the atmosphere was like before algae and oceanic photoplankton?

Speaking of which: there was an article in the Guardian today saying that climate scientists are blaming global warming for the huge increase in Atlantic storms over the past decade. Well, freaking duh! I wonder how long it will be before someone takes [more explicit, publicised] note of the fact that the current changing rainfall trends, IIRC, pretty much mirror the changes seen at the end of the last Ice Age. Hmmf.

Anyway. The Guardian also had an article talking about Nature Writing as a genre. Which is all well and good. But what confused me was its tagline:

"A new genre of writing is putting centre stage the interconnectedness between human beings and the wild."

Excuse me? Okay, granted I haven't read any of the books it talks about, but in what way is writing about nature and natural things a NEW genre? Surely it's one of the oldest there is! E.g.:

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

- Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Writing about humans' interconnectedness with nature is new, then, eh?

Finally, there is the natural end of all life.




R.I.P. Ingmar Bergman.

.