825
the blurred relations between experience and intuition: the belief that all of the disciplines within human thought are connected, and easily revised. In other words, the
super-imposition of human life upon the biosphere has emerged, of late, without
any conclusions, but a vast amalgam of forensic evidence
3
pointing to our rapid
descent into madness.
That underlying perplexity (“naturalist confusions”) pertains to three fundamental aspects of the Anthropocene, species-wide implosions and corroborative manure,
as the subject of diagnosis, prognosis, and commentary. It is a plethora of unhappy
memes, tropes, and dark scenarios conflating non-fiction and fiction; imagination,
ethics, and nightmare; sins and misgivings, the faces of hopelessness, all the
Sisyphean tenacities, pragmatic repeals, and quixotic retreats. Notwithstanding a
rash of sustainability solutions, anodynes, diagnostics, and therapeutics, there is as
yet no all-encompassing vaccine for what humans do to the earth.
Combined, these myriad influences and behaviors comprise a frisson of substantialities that have painfully and self-referentially emerged on the remote geography
of our disappearance as a species: a hominin engendering the most concise of all
epitaphs. This biological remembrance of things present and past constitutes a deafening roar: a deep demography amassing more wounds than can be accounted for.
Conversely, aware of our dialectical behavior and vulnerabilities, it can be said
that within the entire annals of the natural sciences, there has never been so multitudinous the temptation to exist, as Romanian cynic Emil Cioran once described it,
4
but also the desperate injunction to remove oneself from the crowd and the suspect
hierarchy of taxonomy
5
where the conviviality of perfect naturalism is actually
overrun with our realization of pain everywhere. We want to be free of that penumbra that is our infliction. That desperate longing can go in one of three primary
directions: 1) the disappearance of Self; 2) an explosive social emergence of endless
debate (which we witness every day through strident trial and error); and 3) frustrated, pained, and unpredictable reactivity: Revolutions.
95.2 The Evolution of Solitaires
Regardless of the disputed cladistics, family trees, heritable traits, dispersion of
genes, suffering cuts across all previous barriers to distribution, the consequences of
our confrontation in the moment with our ecological fall-out can be described
mathematically, or according to certain laws of eco-dynamics (i.e., adaptive
3 See W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” The Philosophical Review. 60 (1) 20–43:
https://doi.org/10.2307/2181906, JSTOR 2181906, 1951.
4 See Features March 1988, “The anguishes of E.M. Cioran,” by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion,
https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/1988/3/the-anguishes-of-em-cioran, Accessed September
16, 2019.
5 Ereshefsky, M., 2000, The Poverty of the Linnaean Hierarchy: A Philosophical Study of Biological
Taxonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
95.2 The Evolution of Solitaires
the blurred relations between experience and intuition: the belief that all of the disciplines within human thought are connected, and easily revised. In other words, the
super-imposition of human life upon the biosphere has emerged, of late, without
any conclusions, but a vast amalgam of forensic evidence
3
pointing to our rapid
descent into madness.
That underlying perplexity (“naturalist confusions”) pertains to three fundamental aspects of the Anthropocene, species-wide implosions and corroborative manure,
as the subject of diagnosis, prognosis, and commentary. It is a plethora of unhappy
memes, tropes, and dark scenarios conflating non-fiction and fiction; imagination,
ethics, and nightmare; sins and misgivings, the faces of hopelessness, all the
Sisyphean tenacities, pragmatic repeals, and quixotic retreats. Notwithstanding a
rash of sustainability solutions, anodynes, diagnostics, and therapeutics, there is as
yet no all-encompassing vaccine for what humans do to the earth.
Combined, these myriad influences and behaviors comprise a frisson of substantialities that have painfully and self-referentially emerged on the remote geography
of our disappearance as a species: a hominin engendering the most concise of all
epitaphs. This biological remembrance of things present and past constitutes a deafening roar: a deep demography amassing more wounds than can be accounted for.
Conversely, aware of our dialectical behavior and vulnerabilities, it can be said
that within the entire annals of the natural sciences, there has never been so multitudinous the temptation to exist, as Romanian cynic Emil Cioran once described it,
4
but also the desperate injunction to remove oneself from the crowd and the suspect
hierarchy of taxonomy
5
where the conviviality of perfect naturalism is actually
overrun with our realization of pain everywhere. We want to be free of that penumbra that is our infliction. That desperate longing can go in one of three primary
directions: 1) the disappearance of Self; 2) an explosive social emergence of endless
debate (which we witness every day through strident trial and error); and 3) frustrated, pained, and unpredictable reactivity: Revolutions.
95.2 The Evolution of Solitaires
Regardless of the disputed cladistics, family trees, heritable traits, dispersion of
genes, suffering cuts across all previous barriers to distribution, the consequences of
our confrontation in the moment with our ecological fall-out can be described
mathematically, or according to certain laws of eco-dynamics (i.e., adaptive
3 See W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” The Philosophical Review. 60 (1) 20–43:
https://doi.org/10.2307/2181906, JSTOR 2181906, 1951.
4 See Features March 1988, “The anguishes of E.M. Cioran,” by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion,
https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/1988/3/the-anguishes-of-em-cioran, Accessed September
16, 2019.
5 Ereshefsky, M., 2000, The Poverty of the Linnaean Hierarchy: A Philosophical Study of Biological
Taxonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
95.2 The Evolution of Solitaires