Once upon a time, there was a giant love for nature

Once upon a time, there was a giant love for nature.

Desire!, the fictional magic of desire.

A deep and extended longing.

That hug was imagined as eternal and supportive.

A nap… sleeping in the tranquility of the end of animal extermination. Mission accomplished and dream achieved.

Closeness and contact… the caress.

A coexistence: the great wager for another economy of relationships between the animal and the human.

What tranquility there is in dreaming of oneself precisely doing and being where one is! Dreaming of sleeping, the dream that eats its own tail, a uroboric dream. What is genuine will become an eternal, twinkling star, like a giant eye in the night sky.

Do we think of ourselves as a difference?

Agamben writes in his book The Open, chapter Cognitio Experimentalis: “If animal life and human life perfectly overlapped, neither man nor animal – and perhaps neither the divine – would be thinkable.”

A few paragraphs later, he quotes Thomas Aquinas:

“In the state of innocence, men did not need animals for any bodily necessity. Not for covering themselves, because they were not ashamed of their nakedness, since there was no disorderly movement of concupiscence in them. Not for nourishment, as they obtained their sustenance from the trees of Eden. Not as a means of transportation, due to the robustness of their bodies. Rather, they needed them to obtain from their nature an experimental knowledge.”

Once upon a time, a commitment was made with the beauty of a painted image. Once upon a time…

Once upon a time… this is how the stories we’ve passed from mouth to mouth begin. An introductory and retrospective phrase… now we go for the “will be one day,” this time a projective phrase of a program that tests the power of a posthuman community.

Amen!

Fernanda Alvarez D’Ielsi, 2021