49
And just as an Albrecht Dürer felt compelled to return to the subject of St. Jerome
with his lion at least six times; a compulsion one can easily factor into the evolution
of biophilia across every Renaissance, with its tempting transcendence beyond
blunt bifurcation points in the history of anthrozoological thought—the heroic lion
ultimately gracing the set of “The Wizard of Oz,”—the explosions of meaning, their
fractions, margins, and colorful shrapnel in works by the likes of Willem de Kooning
and Jackson Pollock are equally adept at advocating for a theory of paradox that
keenly tells of the human psyche. All of the grand clichés and invocations come
back to haunt us: That which we wish for; intuition before logic; greener pastures;
patience is a virtue; time will heal all… have been fractured.
But again: Do we, can we, perceive rightly was is happening? The sum total of
destruction?
Genetics, mathematics, neurophysiology, biochemistry, psychiatric studies, the
history of ideas, anthropology, computational ecology, every discipline that speaks
to evolution all chime in so as to better grasp the preconditions of this self-doubting.
There is much companionship in this misery of philosophical print; nearly as many
autobiographies as there are slaughterhouses.
Each increasingly dire premonition throughout human history yields to a specific
story of its author and enshrouding cultural context, the cumulative harbingers of
widely suffused revelations from aboriginal and Biblical hermeneutics. That nihilism which in an Ecclesiastes can collate life with death in imagery given to a similitude of opposites; of genealogies all verging upon the extinction of family names,
annihilation of the least identity, the deeply embedded quashing of all vanities, so
much later fortified in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”
Only the vague taxonomies of structural nomenclature dating to before Linnaeus
are able—however contested and changeable, like those of the Medieval Zen philosopher Dogen’s famed Asiatic mountain and river sutras without end
8
or the late
eighteenth-century Rev. William Gilpin’s elusive reference to “some third species”—to focus our nomadic concentrations upon actual organisms of interest. But
to be anointed in this manner, consorting with the prolix identities of a biosemiotic
family tree (a biocultural phylogenetic array of both ancestral and current interspecies relations), each member of which will die out, in turn, is to court the most
despairing of existentialisms.
That fatalistic disposition accompanies our entire known history, as a species.
Every massacre, each action motivated by disturbance, hindrance, and ill-will furthers its verisimilitude. We cannot possibly be who we think we are. As Vladimir
Lenin pointed out that “imperialism” was the highest form of capitalism, our biological studies, commencing long before the work of Aristotle, have only confirmed
in reckless perpetuity our species’ hubris and self-interest. Such biographical delusions which, in the twenty-first century, have been readily seized by the notion of
our teleological purpose, our sovereignty, and—combining these two stark
8 See the superb translation by Arnold Kotler and Kazuaki Tanahashi, https://www.upaya.org/
uploads/pdfs/MountainsRiversSutra.pdf, Accessed December 5, 2018
6.2 The Sum Total of Destructions
And just as an Albrecht Dürer felt compelled to return to the subject of St. Jerome
with his lion at least six times; a compulsion one can easily factor into the evolution
of biophilia across every Renaissance, with its tempting transcendence beyond
blunt bifurcation points in the history of anthrozoological thought—the heroic lion
ultimately gracing the set of “The Wizard of Oz,”—the explosions of meaning, their
fractions, margins, and colorful shrapnel in works by the likes of Willem de Kooning
and Jackson Pollock are equally adept at advocating for a theory of paradox that
keenly tells of the human psyche. All of the grand clichés and invocations come
back to haunt us: That which we wish for; intuition before logic; greener pastures;
patience is a virtue; time will heal all… have been fractured.
But again: Do we, can we, perceive rightly was is happening? The sum total of
destruction?
Genetics, mathematics, neurophysiology, biochemistry, psychiatric studies, the
history of ideas, anthropology, computational ecology, every discipline that speaks
to evolution all chime in so as to better grasp the preconditions of this self-doubting.
There is much companionship in this misery of philosophical print; nearly as many
autobiographies as there are slaughterhouses.
Each increasingly dire premonition throughout human history yields to a specific
story of its author and enshrouding cultural context, the cumulative harbingers of
widely suffused revelations from aboriginal and Biblical hermeneutics. That nihilism which in an Ecclesiastes can collate life with death in imagery given to a similitude of opposites; of genealogies all verging upon the extinction of family names,
annihilation of the least identity, the deeply embedded quashing of all vanities, so
much later fortified in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”
Only the vague taxonomies of structural nomenclature dating to before Linnaeus
are able—however contested and changeable, like those of the Medieval Zen philosopher Dogen’s famed Asiatic mountain and river sutras without end
8
or the late
eighteenth-century Rev. William Gilpin’s elusive reference to “some third species”—to focus our nomadic concentrations upon actual organisms of interest. But
to be anointed in this manner, consorting with the prolix identities of a biosemiotic
family tree (a biocultural phylogenetic array of both ancestral and current interspecies relations), each member of which will die out, in turn, is to court the most
despairing of existentialisms.
That fatalistic disposition accompanies our entire known history, as a species.
Every massacre, each action motivated by disturbance, hindrance, and ill-will furthers its verisimilitude. We cannot possibly be who we think we are. As Vladimir
Lenin pointed out that “imperialism” was the highest form of capitalism, our biological studies, commencing long before the work of Aristotle, have only confirmed
in reckless perpetuity our species’ hubris and self-interest. Such biographical delusions which, in the twenty-first century, have been readily seized by the notion of
our teleological purpose, our sovereignty, and—combining these two stark
8 See the superb translation by Arnold Kotler and Kazuaki Tanahashi, https://www.upaya.org/
uploads/pdfs/MountainsRiversSutra.pdf, Accessed December 5, 2018
6.2 The Sum Total of Destructions