ON INERTIA

NICK RIBOLLA

INTERTIA

“Even as a tree, Apollo loved her. He placed his hand against the trunk, and felt her heart still beating under the new bark. Embracing the branches as if they were limbs he kissed the wood, but, even as a tree, she shrank from his kisses. Then the god said: ‘Since you cannot be my bride, surely you will at least be my tree.’ ”

—Ovid, Metamorphoses

In October 2018 it felt like something might burst. Over the course of one weekend, Congress held a Supreme Court confrmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a crisis report. While the report found that some things change––300 years of industrialization will catch up with us much sooner than we’d thought––Kavanaugh’s hearing confrmed that others stay the same.

ON INERTIA Tat week, everyone talked about the hearing. We formed societies of scandal, squeezing in as much outrage as possible before professors arrived and dimmed the lights. Tis wasn’t a complicated policy issue; it was sex. But I was certainly caught of guard when my art history professor entered the classroom and mumbled: “Before we begin, I’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about the news this week.” I thought he meant the Kavanaugh hearing; he meant the IPCC report, the frst I’d heard of it. And as anxiety transfers from one thing to another without friction, it didn’t matter. We

spewed worries about widespread food shortages, rising sea-levels, and wildfres with the force of a discussion about sexual assault. One of my peers, with medium hoops and a polite gray sweater, confessed, “I feel like the only option is to leave everything, get a cabin in Montana and prepare for shit to hit the fan.” I couldn’t disagree.

After some time, we returned to art history, now a seemingly fat topic. Tat week’s painting was Gustave Courbet’s Te Artist’s Studio. In the image, Courbet sits before a canvas in the center of a studio so grimy and crowded that one can practically smell the mingling of body odor and mildew. Even the walls look unhappy to be there. I looked around the classroom; the grains of the wooden table, the metals inside the projector, the fabrics draped over our bodies––all of it was no longer neutral. Somehow, somewhere, they’d come from Earth, and the getting-themhere was part of something slow and unstoppable.

works at his canvas, paying no mind to the flthy walls and huddled fgures around him. Behind the artist, clutching a white silk robe, stands a voluptuous naked woman, breast exposed, head tilted. She stares longingly, not at Courbet, but at his canvas, an idyllic landscape of emerald pines and crystal waters, far from the stench of urban Paris. Tis is Courbet’s portrait of a Rousseauvian idealism that has no reference point in this dank studio; none, that is, except the woman’s milk-white body.

Te class ended quickly (we’d spent half of it talking about the impending apocalypse) and I rushed of with Courbet’s fgure seared into my mind. As I power-walked through the October chill to yet another stufy room, I returned to how the Republican National Convention (RNC) referred to the Kavanaugh hearing as a witch hunt. It’s a typical phrase that Lindsey Graham types throw out in furious disbelief at someone who is held accountable. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought the RNC description was unintentionally right.

Historically, witches were hunted out of fear that their rituals overturned God’s natural hierarchies. Until the 17 th century, Earth was seen as a goddess, the female soul of the world. Nature, Earth, and matter were feminine; ideas and the higher mind were masculine. And so the human body, indeed more often the female body, was the medium for understanding nature. Earth’s fuids were likened to mucus, saliva, sweat; rivers fowed in circuits and veins much like those of the human heart. And this understanding of Earth as a motherly body also constrained

how that body could be treated. Edmund Spenser, the 16 th century poet, and John Milton, another poet, writing a century later, for instance, condemned the rapid growth of mining practices across Europe as a sinful penetration of the maternal Earth, a perverse digging into her “holes and cracks.”

ON INERTIA Tere was no diference between the witch and the object of her will, Caroline Merchant notes in Te Death of Nature. Tese mystical wills accessed the spirits of all animals and plants, usurped the higher realm of masculine ideas and controlled natural forces, causing plagues, hailstorms, and famine. Witch trials, therefore, allowed a tormented public to gain a sense of stability. Surely there’s someone to blame for this disorderly world. In a sense, then, the Kavanaugh hearing was a kind of witch trial. Wouldn’t this man have incredible power over nature? Couldn’t he rule on ofshore drilling, emissions, clean drinking water? Wasn’t this a man determined to reach the object of his will––to rule, to frack, to fuck?

For all of its pornography, American culture retains a strangely puritanical bent. We’ve placed our sexual energies elsewhere: we triumph, take-what’s-yours, erect buildings, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we rise-and-grind. Sex, however, remains hush-hush. Tat is, of course, until it goes horribly wrong. When American politicians are revealed to be sexual aggressors, all this suppressed tension bursts forth. Sex suddenly becomes much more important than politics. Nobody asked Brett Kavanaugh about his position on carbon emissions, ofshore drill-

ing, fracking, or nuclear energy. How could we? It was almost a moment of release, a macabre sexual snuf flm, a chance to burn somebody at the stake because it was visceral, it was real. And God, it felt so good. S till picturing Courbet’s porcelain-white woman and deep green canvas, I arrived at my next class. I reconsidered the affnity between natural and bodily bounty. Something about blooming, sprouting, spreading, dripping, dewy forms. Te natural-sexual equation was now doubly illuminating. To compare your lover to a summer’s day says arguably more about the summer’s day than about the lover. Te warmth, the humidity.

Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne appeared on the screen at the front of the room. Te sculpture depicts the climax of the myth, when Daphne escapes from predatory Apollo by turning from a wood nymph into a laurel tree. According to Ovid’s retelling of the myth, Apollo tells Cupid he will never be a warrior. In response, Cupid, denied his manly violence, decides to torment Apollo with a diferent kind of violence––insatiable desire. He pricks Apollo with an arrow that makes him long for Daphne. When Apollo sees Daphne, he is set afame. In the story, as she fees, Apollo cries out: “Stay, sweet nymph! You fee as the lamb fees the wolf, or the deer the lion, as doves on futtering wings fy

NICK RIBOLLA from an eagle, as all creatures fee their natural foes! But it is love that drives me to follow you.” Apollo insists that he is not a ravenous beast, but rather the thinking, loving god of music and art, pinnacles of culture and human progress. Just as this Renaissance Man is about to quench his desire, Daphne implores the other gods: “If you rivers really have divine powers, work some transformation, and destroy this beauty which makes me please all too well!” In his sculpture, Bernini captures a woman who morphs into a tree to remain unsoiled. Really, she just changes from one object of desire into another, as Apollo, undeterred, reaches for Daphne’s waist from behind, pulling her close. In turn, she recoils in horror, mouth agape, hands fung upwards in prayer. Her delicate fngertips transform into twigs, her fair skin into scaly bark, her legs into the furrowed roots of a laurel tree. Bernini transforms hard marble into soft fuid forms. From the side, Apollo and Daphne’s bodies are indistinguishable helixes. Tough the scene is one of sexual denial, attempted rape and escape, Bernini depicts victim and predator as two parts of an inseparable whole.

In the 17 th century, when Francis Bacon posited that violating nature was akin to violating a human body, he irrevocably changed the framework of ecology. Te English philosopher and godfather of the scientifc method theorized man

as a pioneer who wrestled nature’s secrets to master her operations. Far from the animist goddess of the middle ages, Bacon wrote in Te Masculine Birth of Time, nature was now a “common harlot,” with an appetite for chaos, who man must “subdue” through technology. “Bind her to your service and make her your slave,” he added of nature. And if we “restrained” nature, he continued, we would fnd “many secrets of excellent use” inside her “womb.”

If science was now an endless inquiry into the Earth, and if nature was a corpse to be plundered, investigated, subdued, then witches no longer posed a problem. In fact, Bacon thought science might emulate witches’ by “entering and penetrating into the holes and corners” of nature. Once again, the language of sex became the language of certainty. It was no longer a constraint; barely veiled under scientifc jargon, sex was a sanction.

Francis Bacon’s philosophy of science was quickly absorbed by philosophies of consciousness and government. René Descartes and Tomas Hobbes, two 17 th century philosophers, championed the view that nature should correspond to predictable behaviors, mathematical laws for man to act upon. Force was not an occult quality inherent to bodies, but a measure of their mass and velocity. Nature was not an immanent, self-actualizing, living being but a system of dead, inert particles to be manipulated and understood. For Hobbes in Leviathan, nature was an indiferent machine:

For, seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artifcial life: For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels.

Descartes and Hobbes saw man’s conquest of nature as ordained by reason. Like Apollo, they insisted that they were not sexual beasts, but rather thinkers and cultural stewards. However, there is something distinctly hungry and indulgent in this Hobbesian idea that bodies are moved only by external contact with another moving body. O ne implication of the current climate change debate is that we are misbehaving gods and that our abuse of reason and science has steered us towards apocalypse. But rather than admit this, rather than admit that our basest parts pull us forward, we instead continue to reach out and grab invisible forms in the soil; soil that, in time, we will all return to; soil that also once wanted to laugh, to eat, to scream, to push, throb, pulse, grind, to fuck, fuck, fuck.

INTERVIEW:

MICHAEL ROTH