Part One (…As the Snow on the Alps), Section VI
On the Basel ‘Crucifixion” of 1505
behind the group of mourners
a landscape reaches so far into the depth
that our eyes cannot see its limits.
A patch of brown scorched earth
Whose contour like the head of a whale
or an open-mouthed leviathan
devours the pale green meadow plains,
and the marshily shining stretches
of water. Above it, pushed off
to behind the horizon, which step
by step grows darker, more glowering,
rise the hills of the prehistory
of the Passion. We see the gate
of the garden of Gethsemane, the approach
of the henchmen and the kneeling figure of Christ
so reduced in size that in the
receding space the rushing
away of time can be sensed.
Most probably Grünewald painted
and recalled the catastrophic incursion
of darkness, the last trace of light
flickering from beyond, after nature,
for in the year 1502, when he was working
at Bindlach, below the Fichtelgebirge,
on the creation of the Lindenhardt altar,
on the first of October the moon’s shadow
slid over Eastern Europe from Mecklenburg
over Bohemia and the Lausitz to southern Poland,
and Grünewald, who repeatedly was in touch
with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,
will have traveled to see this event of the century,
awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,
so will have become a witness to
the secret sickening away of the world,
in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk
in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit
poured through the vault of the sky,
while over the banks of mist and the cold
heavy blues of the clouds
a fiery red arose, and colours
such as his eyes had not known
radiantly wandered about, never again to be
driven out of the painter’s memory.
These colours unfold as the reverse of
the spectrum in a different consistency
of the air, whose deoxygenated void
in the gasping breath of the figures
on the central Isenheim panel is enough
to portend our death by asphyxiation; after which
comes the mountain landscape of weeping
in which Grünewald with a pathetic gaze
into the future has prefigured
a planet utterly strange, chalk-coloured
behind the blackish-blue river.
Here in an evil state of erosion
and desolation the heritage of the ruining
of life that in the end will consume
even the stones has been depicted.
In view of this it seems to me
that the ice age, the glaring white
towering of the summits in
the upper realm of the ‘Temptation’
is the construction of a metaphysic
and a miracle like the one
in the year 352, when
at the height of the summer
snow fell
on the Esquiline
Hill in Rome.
Friday, December 8, 2006
Giorgio Agamben on Jakob von Uexküll
From Giorgio Agamben “The Open: Man and Animal” Chapter 10, “Umwelt”
It is fortunate that the baron Jakob von Uexküll, today considered one of the greatest zoologists of the twentieth century and among the founders of ecology, was ruined in the First World War… Uexküll’s investigations into the animal environment are contemporary with both quantum physics and the artistic avant-garde. And, like them, they express the unreserved abandonment of every anthropocentric perspective in the life sciences and the radical dehumanization of the image of nature (and so it should come as no surprise that they strongly influenced both Heidegger…and Gilles Deleuze…Where classical science saw a single world that comprised within it all living species hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms up to higher organisms, Uexküll instead supposes an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that, though they are uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive, are all equally perfect and linked together as if in a gigantic musical score…Thus, Uexküll calls his reconstructions of the environments of the sea urchin, the amoeba, the jellyfish the sea worm and the tick…”excursions into unknowable worlds.”
Too often, he affirms, we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to the things in its environment take place in the same space and the same time as those which bind us to the objects in the human world. This illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all living beings are situated. Uexküll shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as space and time that are equal for all living things do not exist. The fly, the dragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they share with us—or with each other—the same time and the same space.
Uexküll begins by carefully distinguishing the Umgebung, the objective space in which we see a living being moving, from the Umwelt, the environment-world that is constituted by a more or less broad series of elements that he calls “carriers of significance” or of “marks” which are the only things that interest the animal. In reality, the Umgebung is our own Umwelt, to which Uexküll does not attribute any particular privilege and which, as such, can also very according to the point of view from which we observe it….
(The tick) this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint with the help of only skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood.
…(for the tick), the Umwelt is reduced to only three carriers of significance (1) The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, (2) The temperature of 37 degrees (corresponding to the blood of all mammals), (3) The (hairy typology of mammals)…
The tick IS this relationship with its environment…
…A tick was kept alive for 18 years without nourishment, in isolation from its natural environment….What sense does it make to speak of “waiting” without time and without world?
It is fortunate that the baron Jakob von Uexküll, today considered one of the greatest zoologists of the twentieth century and among the founders of ecology, was ruined in the First World War… Uexküll’s investigations into the animal environment are contemporary with both quantum physics and the artistic avant-garde. And, like them, they express the unreserved abandonment of every anthropocentric perspective in the life sciences and the radical dehumanization of the image of nature (and so it should come as no surprise that they strongly influenced both Heidegger…and Gilles Deleuze…Where classical science saw a single world that comprised within it all living species hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms up to higher organisms, Uexküll instead supposes an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that, though they are uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive, are all equally perfect and linked together as if in a gigantic musical score…Thus, Uexküll calls his reconstructions of the environments of the sea urchin, the amoeba, the jellyfish the sea worm and the tick…”excursions into unknowable worlds.”
Too often, he affirms, we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to the things in its environment take place in the same space and the same time as those which bind us to the objects in the human world. This illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all living beings are situated. Uexküll shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as space and time that are equal for all living things do not exist. The fly, the dragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they share with us—or with each other—the same time and the same space.
Uexküll begins by carefully distinguishing the Umgebung, the objective space in which we see a living being moving, from the Umwelt, the environment-world that is constituted by a more or less broad series of elements that he calls “carriers of significance” or of “marks” which are the only things that interest the animal. In reality, the Umgebung is our own Umwelt, to which Uexküll does not attribute any particular privilege and which, as such, can also very according to the point of view from which we observe it….
(The tick) this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint with the help of only skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood.
…(for the tick), the Umwelt is reduced to only three carriers of significance (1) The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, (2) The temperature of 37 degrees (corresponding to the blood of all mammals), (3) The (hairy typology of mammals)…
The tick IS this relationship with its environment…
…A tick was kept alive for 18 years without nourishment, in isolation from its natural environment….What sense does it make to speak of “waiting” without time and without world?
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