Dear companion,

Something irreversible is happening.

These creatures, whom we call homo sapiens, are following a scenario they call ”modern“. They are eliminating our species and our refuges. Cheap resources are gone, Nature is exhausted. We must build, in every way imaginable, homes that can shelter new tomorrows. Right now, the Earth is full of pests, human and non-human, without refuge.

I couldn’t care less about those minds with their eyes fixed on the sky, waving their insatiable desires as their only projections for the future. Our fellow creatures are quite different. I imagine them full of whiskers, antennae, fingers, tails, cords, flagella, legs and unruly hair. They frolic in humus teeming with other pests. Agents of terrestrial processes, they belong to no one and care nothing for necrophilic economies. Thriving in multiple forms and under multiple names, they scurry everywhere above and below ground, swing through the air and wriggle in the water. They make and unmake; they are made and unmade. They are the ones who are. They make being.

It’s about causing harm. Harm to whom, to what? Harm means resistance, harm means disobedience, harm means sabotage. It’s not just about being ineffective, it’s about forcing things to slow down. Harmful because they are undesirable, parasitic, disposable. Vermin. The great machinery likes to claim to be pure, made of brushed steel, “recycled” plastic and data clouds, with an undeniably smooth, white and clean aesthetic. Trying to make us forget that the grease that lubricates its mechanisms is made of blood and sweat. The pest prefers to fertilise the compost. In the compost lies the carrion that for years was my body. It is impossible to distinguish the matter that for years was your body from the matter that for years was mine. In the compost, insects swarm and devour what for years were our bodies. In the compost grow plants that for years nourished our bodies. Thus our bodies carry under their nails the earth of all those who helped to cultivate it. Our bodies are gifted with fatigue, laziness and wandering. Surprising in their vulnerability and weakness. Effective in their idleness. Sweating with emotions and sensitivities. Thick, dirty, frail, plural, our bodies take care of other bodies. They work to live and die. They enter the cracks of well-oiled systems, sticking their sticky tentacles into their gears, gradually creating stories in terracotta and papier-mâché, in the company of siblings of all kinds. Territories with complex entanglements, desires for play, friendship and interdependence. Territories where it is good to live, good to die, good to be reborn. Where the rain benefits our soil. Our survival depends on ancestral functional ecosystems and their balance; a balance torn apart by stubborn policies, spearheads of the illusion that is progress.

We have not learned to do otherwise. To make do. We have certainly forgotten the lessons of those who came before us, who still inhabit our bodies in some way. We are doing our best here, we continue to learn, to explore other possibilities, some of which we have joyfully embarked upon. Let us continue to dig. That is what we have left to (re)do.

The timbre of our voices is polyphonic, sometimes whispered, sometimes chanted. You will recognise my letter by its shape. You will understand the urgency and gentleness in which we find ourselves, on this last day of June, from Fossile Futur. Stunned by the incessant hubbub of the world, we find refuge in the design of the letter, then the entire alphabet. We are aware that this will not save us. It is not a decoy, it is a cairn, a knife, a sweet fruit.

Let us spread a wild thought. Let us sow worlds with mismatched ideas and forms. Let us undo the ties that bind us to the great capitalist game, to try to collaborate with others. To those who metabolise the remains of hydrocarbons present in water. To those who aggregate excess phosphates to build their shells. To those whose song is heard only by beings with sonar ears. To the nocturnal creatures. To those who live among the rocks, who communicate through vibrations, who stalagmitise, calcify, regurgitate, metabolise, swallow. To the pests, welcome!

Pestilential kisses,
A specimen

❦

With excerpts from Living with Disorder by Donna Haraway, We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour, Darwin’s Enchantment, The Language of Plants by Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers.