Among real coexisting things—the things that ecological thinking is about—Nature is nowhere to be found. I can see bunny rabbits, I can see mountains, I can see rivers, but I can't see Nature. If we expand the list, we still won't arrive at Nature: we can see glowing plutonium pellets, we can see global warming patterns, we can see minnows and rock salt and mitochrondria—still no Nature to be seen. In this essay, I shall capitalize Nature to return it to its some of its ‘unnatural’ arbitrariness.
Nature no longer fits an ecological age in which we realize that everything coexists in a biosphere. Nature is set up to be ‘over yonder’ in a way that is now no longer tenable, since I know that my body contains symbionts, mercury, viral code insertions in my DNA and so on. It simply fails to be possible to draw a line that is inclusive enough around phenomena and brand them Nature: unless by Nature we now mean absolutely everything, in which case the concept loses all its teeth. Nature is the product of a modern age, a product that is designed to look old, like an ‘antiqued’ Christmas ornament. It is of relatively recent pedigree however. Nature arose during the Enlightenment and subsequently during the period of the Romantics, in order to describe what (human) society wasn't: man is born free, but is everywhere in chains, and so on (Rousseau 1997: 41). Nature is the cognitive equivalent of an optical illusion, created by the strict demarcation modernity produces between humans and nonhumans. As an optical illusion, it is necessarily vague and aesthetic, a matter of feel and intuition. Nature is always just off to the left or the right, as it were, never glimpsed frontally—like Artemis of old, frontal visions of Nature are forbidden.
I examine a life form. For the sake of argument, let it be myself. I find that I am a symbiotic community of primate, bacteria, small crustaceans that live in my eyelashes. I discover that this symbiosis goes down to the cellular level. Inhabiting ‘me,’ giving me energy, are mitochondria, bacterial symbionts that have their own DNA. The mitochondria
are evolved from anaerobic bacteria hiding from their own version of ecological emergency, the one we call oxygen. These bacteria brought the emergency on themselves by excreting oxygen—a fact that should reveal to us that what is called Nature is better described as a palimpsest of catastrophes, a mystic writing pad (as Freud said of the unconscious), inscribed with layer upon layer of traumatic events (Freud 1953: 9.225–232). My very body, then, is not strictly me or mine, a fact that should strike us with a degree of uncanny horror. I can type these words because a bacterial symbiont supplies me with energy. When I look further, down to the genomic level, I also discover symbionts, viroids, virions, viral code insertions, retroviruses. A retrovirus, ERV-3, possibly codes for immunosuppressive properties of the placental barrier (Bloxam 1993: 905–909). This means I am here typing this because a virus in my DNA overrode the tendency of my mother's body to abort me.
The uncanniness of my own body, all the way down to the genomic level, is uncanny in the strictly Freudian sense: it is evidence of repetitions that precede my factual existence, which comprise me and yet which differ from me, making me strangely familiar and familiarly strange. Repetition—the persistence of mitochondria hiding in my cells, the very replication of DNA itself—hails from a realm of death, a frantic attempt to cancel out inconsistency that strictly precedes life as such. The single-celled organism from which Freud formulates his concept of the death drive is much, much farther downstream in the course of evolution than molecules that replicate. These replicants even precede organic chemistry. Since DNA requires ribosomes and ribosomes require DNA, there must have been an RNA world in which RNA type molecules hitched a ride on some nonorganic replicator such as a silicate crystal. Death really does come before life.
Or consider the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), further upstream than the bacteria that are now my mitochrondria, but downstream from RNA world. LUCA inhabits my body still, in the proteins that my ribosomes produce. They are like words that pre-exist the radio program that is currently broadcasting them. Five to eleven percent of the proteins in my body are common to all existing lifeforms. Biology is now able to speculate that these proteins belonged to a gigantic entity, a sort of oceanic body without well-defined cell walls, over two and
a half billion years ago. Pieces of this gigantic ocean now circulate in my body. When we talk about place we are talking about lifeforms—and when we talk about lifeforms we are talking about LUCA, traces of a lifeform big enough to encompass an ocean. The iron and chalk hillsides we walk on are fossilized crustaceans and bacterial excrement. The oxygen we breathe is bacterial pollution from billions of years ago. Place just is the uncanny presence of coexisting lifeforms.
Now this is going to get a stranger still— if it wasn't so already. In this essay I argue that ecology is also without the present. Consider LUCA: it is still with us, after all this time. Consider mitochrondria—replicants of a three billion year old catastrophe. Consider the roughly eight percent of proteins common to all lifeforms, letters from LUCA's alphabet still coexisting with us 2.9 billion years later. Consider RNA itself—we might hypothesize that in its attempt to erase its inconsistency, a self-replicating molecule ironically reproduces itself. The compulsion to repeat, predicated on the desire to rid ourselves of a trauma, just is a repetition of this ancient trauma, which may better be thought of as geotrauma, the trauma of the Earth as such (objective and subjective genitive), from the realm of death beyond life.
Place is simply a palimpsest of crisscrossing traumas, events as inscriptions on some inscribable surface, a mystic writing pad. There is no way to draw a thin, rigid boundary between where one place stops and another starts, since the inscriptions on the mystic writing pads always by definition exceed any aesthetic, sensual or conceptual grasping of them, any demarcation of ‘here’ and ‘there’. This does not mean that place does not exist: instead, it means that place is irreducibly uncanny. When I experience the uncanniness of a place, I am experiencing something like the biological reality of evolution in a phenomenologically mediated way. Thus the strangeness of place, its strange familiarity, is irreducible: I have been here before, or rather, it has been here before—LUCA, DNA, silicate crystals, bacteria.
To be ‘in’ a place then, is to be displaced, that is, to inhabit a sickening multiplicity of timescales, like sitting on a train stopped at a station, with trains beside it moving at different speeds, imparting the feeling of relative motion. Place refuses to stay still, because it just is the confluence of different entities with different timescales, a carnival of ghosts and zombies, in which it becomes impossible to distinguish rigidly
who is alive and who is dead, who was never alive, who is undead from who is ‘normal.’ The environmentalist sense of place as authenticity, then, is nothing but a disturbing cover-up of this crisscrossing, a crisscrossing that is more real than ‘my’ street, ‘my’ town, Nature, ‘my’ place. Place is a charnel ground, not a manicured park or even a pristine wilderness. Place is where the undead haunt.
Here is bisected by a plenitude of ‘theres’ such that it becomes impossible to maintain a rigid separation between here and there. For the same reason, now is bisected by a plenitude of ‘thens’. What we are talking about is, roughly, the past. A colossal palimpsest of shifting pasts, a train station full of ghost trains all moving at different speeds. Memory is inscribed into things—everything is a mystic writing pad. A table bears the scratches of children playing with forks. Bleached coral tells a story about carbon emissions. The memory of a thing is its form, as in a memory stick or a hard drive, or a vinyl LP. A place tells stories, and these stories are not just meanings but direct inscriptions, notches, carvings, gouges, traces, trauma, footprints everywhere. ‘Dust in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended’ (Eliot 1971: 139). Weighdess, my brain stops receiving stories about my body, held down by another thing, the globe of the Earth: ‘I'm the only one I know that sleeps floating. It's delicious. You don't know where you are, and after a while, because your limbs aren't touching anything, you lose sense that you even have them’ (astronaut Story Musgrave; Musgrave 2012). When another object accesses my body in some way—Earth via its gravitational field—I feel it, the heaviness of my arms, the dull inertia of my head. In outer space, it is curiously withdrawn from my access. We shall return to this fact fairly shortly.
A thing is printed with memories: form is memory. Yet this is only half of the story. It would perhaps be disturbing enough if our world were not here and now based on this charnel ground of appearances, without a discernible bottom. When I look at my face, I see a map of everything that happened to it. When I talk to a psychoanalyst, I unlock decades old traumas still revolving in my psyche. My ego just is ‘the precipitate of abandoned object cathexes’ (Freud 1989: 24). Freud chooses a term, ‘precipitate’ (Niederschlag), that refers not even to organic chemistry, let alone biology. A precipitate is what is left after processes of evaporation and cooling have taken place. My ego, a
precipitate: dare we invert this coupling so that any entity at all—this coffee cup, this small pile of shredded lemon slice—is also a precipitate of abandoned object cathexes, that is, a record of what happened, or to use the Aristotelian term, form? Freud's talk of precipitates and mystic writing pads opens the door to thinking of all objects whatsoever—spoons, LUCA, proteins in my body—as records of abandoned objects that left their footprint, their distinctive mark. These crumbs tell the story of how my teeth intersected with a forkful of lemon slice, how gravity, an emission of a gigantic being called Earth, pulled the tiny flakes of icing sugar to the surface of the plate, how my tiredness, brought on by sleepless nights of writing, interacted with my mouth and my hand—eye coordination to leave behind a sloppy record. Every object is archaeological. Form, appearance, is the past.
When I look at this cup, I am looking at the past: not just because of relativity, but because of the fact that this cup just is how a mould interacted with a lump of clay, how the heat of a kiln hardened the clay, how aesthetic conventions dictated what shape the mould should take. The cup implies another entity and more: a lump of clay and a mould, a kiln, some heat, humans who use coffee cups. The here and now is just a fiction—the reality is the bottomless time of form upon form upon form. I never discover the prime matter at the very bottom of the series: cup, lump of clay, region of soil … It looks as if we shall have to dispense with matter as well as with Nature, if by matter we mean some formless substrate of things. All I ever encounter are forms: patterns in cloud diffusion chambers, spheres of clay, cups, forks, lemon slice. Mr. Spock is quite wrong, despite his Vulcan intelligence—there just cannot be matter devoid of form (Star Trek 1968).
So what on earth is this cup, this trace of lemon slice? When I reach towards it, I simply produce more forms: these words about the crumbs, some smaller crumbs when I probe with my fork, some extra sugar molecules in my body if I lick up the crumbs. This crumb, supposedly right here, right now, withdraws from me, not simply into a potentially infinite chain of ‘pastness,’ appearance, but absolutely, irreducibly. No other form just is this crumb or lemon slice. The essence of a thing is not hidden behind or within the thing, as if we could cut it open to find it—then we would have two or three forms, which in turn would be as mysterious as this one.
Things are getting out of hand. Appearance is the past. Yet the reality of a thing is not encapsulated in any of its forms. The essence is always withdrawn, namely it is to-come: it exists unspeakably, inaccessibly. If the lemon slice itself were to sprout Muppet-like eyes and a mouth, its own monologue about itself would not be the lemon slice. Eyes and mouth, the taste of lemon slice, lemon slice poetry, the archaeology of lemon slices, are all belated in relation to the slice itself, which opens irreducibly, is opening: the essence of the slice is openness. Every being is a not-yet. It fails to be fully present to arrive on time, to contain itself neatly within itself. Least of all does a thing open itself for thorough inspection. The openness of a thing is its secrecy: a thing is an open secret, like a lie in the form of the truth. A poem does not yet mean: its meaning is futural, not that we shall understand it totally at some now-point yet to be determined, but that such a now-point will never arrive. Essence is the future.
Appearance is the past; essence is the future. There is nowhere in this queasy collision for the present, for presence, for any kind of ontic givenness that is not a caricature of a real thing. The shifting ghost trains of the past are bypassed by another altogether more uncanny being, the ghost of the future. A place is where past and future cross one another without touching. Temporality—pastness and futurality—are emitted from objects in the same way that a live wire emits an electromagnetic field, or a planet emits a gravitational field: indeed, the last example is quite literal, since relativity demonstrates that time just is an emergent property of objects, not some neutral space in which objects float. Time emanates from things, like radio or the smell of violets. We suppose essence to be behind things or inside things or underneath things. According to the view expounded here, however, essence is the future of a thing, which is not a point ‘over there,’ but rather the withdrawn openness of a thing, its open secrecy, the fact that the more we handle it, the stranger it becomes. Science makes the world more uncanny, not less. A lemon slice just is this lemon slice: its essence is not in some beyond, not elsewhere. Yet ‘here’ and ‘now’ are fictions: the unspeakable uniqueness of a thing bursts the bonds of ‘here’ and ‘now’ like a gorilla trying to wear a tuxedo.
The rift (Greek, chōrismos) is found in a thing in itself, prior to its relations with other things, since we have ascertained that there is no prime
matter: that form is not just some kind of decorative candy on the ontological surface of a thing, but is instead the sparkling uniqueness of a thing. A poem just is its form: just this rhyme scheme, just this rhythm, just these images. A person just is her form: just these memories, these traumas, these configurations of flesh and personality. Yet a thing is also an essence, not some bland cupcake underneath the candy, but the withdrawnness of a thing, how nothing, including itself, gets a total handle on it. This means that an entity, any entity whatsoever—a paperweight, a manatee, a statue of Buddha, a flurry of dust in a shaft of sunlight, a schizophrenic—is both itself (essence) and not-itself (appearance). And since the rift between essence and appearance is not locatable ontically—you can't specify where on the paperweight appearance ends and essence starts, or when in the life of the schizophrenic her essence stops and her appearance begins—this must mean that a thing is both itself and not-itself simultaneously, a fact that violates the so-called law of noncontradiction on which classical logic rests.
Although the law of noncontradiction (LNC) has never been proved, most philosophers hold that something can't be p and not-p (¬p) at the same time (p ^ ¬p). Yet there are compelling reasons, both within and outside logic, why we might want to let LNC go, or slide a little. If we do let it slide, what we begin to tolerate are called dialetheias, things that are double-truthed (from the Greek for two and for truth). Psychoanalysts and Lacanians in particular are very familiar with dialetheias—indeed, they are de rigueur for a Lacanian, since the split subject is a dialetheic being. Lacan parses Descartes' cogito ergo sum into a wonderfully convoluted chase down winding corridors, ‘I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think’ (Lacan 1977: 166). This convolution is precisely a signal of the doubleness of personhood. Lacan bases the notion of the barred subject ($) on the Liar, a paradox that is perhaps the first Western dialetheia: ‘I am lying’ or ‘This sentence is false.’ As Lacan argues, the subject of the enunciated differs from the subject of enunciation. The gap between these subjects cannot be located in ontic space, which I why I can say, ‘the Liar’ or narrate a story in the first person, or just plain lie.
The trouble with dialetheias is that they force upon us a tolerance for dissimulation. Dissimulation is groundless, or as Lacan says, ‘What
constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not' (Lacan 1981: 48). If you knew it was pretence, then in a strong sense it would not be pretence. The trouble with illusions is that they might not be. Any attempt to reduce the dialetheic status of beings to single truthedness is thus bound to result in paradoxes. These paradoxes can be worse than the original paradox, as if dialetheias were like viruses that evolved to adapt to the new truth conditions. Suppose I decide that ‘This sentence is false’ is not a sentence. This is the move made by Tarski, who developed the concept of metalanguage precisely to deal with dialetheias. Fine: but you can now say, ‘This is not a sentence’ and I am in worse trouble than before. However much I try to up the metalinguistic ante, I just can't escape the gravitational field of dialetheia. Why? I believe that this is because reality is in fact dialetheic. The more ‘meta’ I become, the more brittle my logic, becoming ever more fragile in its attempt to cordon off an area of single-truthed things.
Lacan is famous for having proclaimed, ‘There is no metalanguage’ (Lacan 1977: 311). This puts him firmly in the anti-Tarski camp, which means that Lacanians should be somewhat accommodating to dialetheias. This in turn means that it is possible, within Lacanian theory, to suppose that beings—not just human people but crocodiles, salt cellars and opium poppies—are also split, or as Levi Bryant puts it, ‘split objects’ (Bryant 2011: 69). If there is no metalanguage there is no way to escape what phenomenology calls ingenuousness or sincerity, which means that I cannot peel myself away from my experiences. If we then hold that grasshoppers and washing machines can also be split objects, anything at all is hopelessly enmeshed in its coexistence with other things, inaccessible behind or above or beyond its appearance. As my car wing mirror reminds me, ‘Objects in Mirror Are Closer than They Appear’. Yet because a thing is dialetheic, this proximity does not add up to a solid, unitary place but rather floats in a shifting zone of illusion. The charnel ground is a place of deceptions as well as a place of ghosts and demonic forces. We seem to have returned, willy nilly, to a Trickster rather than to Nature, via a fairly rudimentary contemplation of some of the more recent discoveries in contemporary science, coupled with the clarifying urgency of the ecological era, and a little bit of philosophical chutzpah.
The Trickster—the mesh of life and non-life—is an aesthetic dimension that floats ontologically in front of things, but which is not an optional extra: it is welded to the very fabric of reality. Indeed, this dimension is where causality happens, as relativity and quantum theory have taught us: time is not a box, but an emergent property of things, and at least on small scales (though now it has been shown on scales higher than the merely electronic) things interact aesthetically, that is nonlocally. We are not living in a candy store with a whirring machine of causality in the basement. We are living in a weird carnival of charnel ground corpses, animated specters, zombies—are they alive? Am I? Are they intelligent? What is mind?
Any attempt to reduce the aesthetic dimension to mere superficial appearance fails, because then we end up with worse paradoxes. An object floats through space, but how? If time is a succession of now-points—an atomic view of time—then it becomes very difficult to imagine how this seemingly simple everyday fact occurs, because Zeno's paradox holds and an object will never reach its destination, because we can always subdivide the sequence of now-points ever finer. Yet if an object is itself and not-itself simultaneously, then it moves just fine all by itself. It simply means that we must drop the concept present, and instead imagine that an object ‘breathes’ within the rift between essence and appearance. Indeed, recent experiments show that left to its own devices, a tiny fork thirty microns long both vibrates and remains still at the very same time (O'Connell 2010: 697–703). This would appear to suggest that a thing is dialetheic, and that it somehow sends out isotopes of itself, simulacra that fool us into grasping them as singular and exemplary. Thus any approach to place that does not include the aesthetic and the uncanny as irreducible properties of things (p ¬p is about as uncanny as it gets) will be brittle and susceptible to the slightest suspicion.
What we need, then, is not only ecology without nature, for which I have argued elsewhere (Morton 2007). We also need ecology without the present. Indeed, one could successfully argue that it is the presentism of contemporary environmentalisms which put them on the wrong side of history. This presentism manifests itself in a wide variety of ways. Consider the rhetoric of immediacy common to what I have called ecomimesis: stop thinking, go out into Nature, turn off your irony (Morton 2007: 29-78).
Presentism also manifests in the injunction to stop thinking and do something, the paradoxical form taken by the contemporary beautiful soul, a defining, overarching subject position of modernity that has been with us since the late eighteenth century. All too often the siren song of the beautiful soul these days comes in the form of a call to act, now! In this sense it appears to be its opposite. Consider a brief example from a recent Twitter exchange, based on a comment I had read there: ‘Michael Moore is self-serving because his movies have not created real, substantial social change. The point is to change things, now.’ It sounds powerfully like the Nature injunction: ‘The point is to stop thinking, stop reflecting, go out and act.’ For this reason, it makes this ecological philosopher uneasy when encountering Ray Brassier's translation of Quentin Meillassoux's speculative realist cri de guerre: ‘the great outdoors’ (Meillassoux 2009: 7). This idea, of an outside that is free and healthy and uncontaminated, has been used as a stick with which what Meillassoux calls correlationism beats itself, correlationism being the dominant philosophical mode of modernity (the last two centuries), a mode in which only human access to reality, not reality as such, is thinkable. Forever out of reach, healthy masculine Nature beckons with its pristine presence, a presence that is now known only to be a cognitive optical illusion. As an environmentalist philosopher (or Nature writer) working within modernity, I use this beyond to lament my imprisonment in the correlationist cage, even as I reinforce the bars of the cage via the very same lamentation.
In the age of global warming, we can now see around the stage set that establishes the difference between ‘indoors’ (human subjectivity) and ‘outdoors’ (everything else). We don't have to be mystics: all we need is a working knowledge of biology and evolution, ecology and climate, and a willingness not to get caught in that other trap of modernity, reductionism, the belief that smaller things such as molecules are more real than medium sized things such as horses, or that medium sized things are reified photographs of larger processes—a horse is just a slice of the flow of life, for instance, as a Bergson or a Deleuze might think. Global warming is not just a run of bad weather. It is an irreducible being, like a lemon slice or a coffee cup.
A place is not nothing: a scientistic reductionist might want to argue at this point that there is no such thing as place. I am, by contrast, arguing
that place is a fully uncanny being, its uncanniness not simply an affect of my human awareness, but ingrained into the beings that comprise it, beings whose history is inscribed in their form, their appearance, yet whose essence is not exhausted by this inscription. A place opens in its very specificity: it is not a vague blur or whateverness waiting to be filled in by my (human) cognition or manipulation. It is already at work, already in process, underway. What I call my place—the conventional sense of place—is an uncanny superimposition or demarcation of this more basically uncanny realm. A small corner of a graveyard I call home.
The cynical ideological distance typical of modernity is maintained by injunctions to act rather than think. These injunctions paradoxically induce the guilt that cripples genuine action—which of course includes reflection and art. But more importantly for our purposes, the entities that contemporary biology and ecology disclose themselves prevent us from being presentist. Think about global warming: a massively distributed entity that occupies a high dimensional phase space, such that three-dimensional beings (ourselves) can only ever experience thin slices of it: a tornado, a drought, a tsunami. Global warming is shockingly vast, yet not infinite: its sheer quantity humiliates the grand human desire to span the infinite. I may be able to comprehend infinity in the Kantian sense, but I can't count up to one hundred thousand: one hundred thousand years from now, seven percent of global warming effects will still be operational, slowly being absorbed by igneous rocks (Archer 2008). Global warming makes very clear that what is called present is only ever a flimsy cordon drawn with varying degrees of inevitable arbitrariness around a certain region of space-time, one that is meaningful for me, a human, for certain reasons. At a stroke, a nonhuman entity abolishes the default Cartesian mechanism that we still hold to be the case, in which time and space are hollow boxes, or in a more sophisticated Kantian mode, transcendental conditions of possibility for the existence of things (Kant 1996: 201, 202, 232–237. This mechanism is only the product of affiliations between beings, not something decreed from on high. The human relationship with piezoelectric crystals, for instance, has resulted in the persistence of this Cartesian illusion in a post-Einsteinian age in which our physics knows better than to say that space and time are boxes for things, but in which we act as
if this were the case. An age in which we know that causality is not the whirring of cogwheels underneath appearances, but simply the very ocean of appearance itself (Morton forthcoming).
The present is precisely nowhere to be found in the yawning opening between future and past, essence and appearance. We simply make it however big we want, and this product of our imagination is a fetish, a fiction: one second, one hour, one day, a century. The overbearing metaphysics of presence inscribed into every timekeeping device—especially the digital ones—is responsible in some measure for the psychic distress of modern humans. There is a very simple explanation for this distress: there is no present, yet the clock screams that you must change your focus now and have that meeting, pull that face on the chat show, sign the divorce paper, buy the product, save the planet, donate.
Please don't think that this is a Luddite primitivism, or an ostrich sticking his head in the sand. Quite the opposite: ecological awareness forces upon us the necessity of living like a grown up—that is, of tolerating an extremely high level of ambiguity. What could be more ambiguous than the weird crossing of past and future, appearance and essence? It is difficult to believe, naturally, when one is immersed in a vast ocean of presentist metaphysics inscribed into every device about one's person. In fact, this solution to presentism is not a quasi-Buddhist ‘living in the now’ popular with forms of Nature mysticism. Nonhuman sentient beings, for instance, are admired (or pitied) for living in this ‘now.’ A cat is supposed to be in a state of bliss, either ignorant or spontaneously wise, because it is thought not to be afflicted with a sense of time. But if time leaks willy nilly from lemon slices and tornados, cats surely are plagued with temporality, whether they know it or like it or not. In admiring (or pitying) nonhumans according to our sense of their sense of time, we only see them as instruments of our technological era, extensions of the ticking clocks of metaphysical presence. This is by no means a progressive ecological strategy. Like Nature, like Matter, the Present has not served ecology well.
The ideology of ‘living in the now’ deletes the uncanny, and in so doing it airbrushes out of the picture what is disturbing about cats, lemon slices and coffee cups: the fact that they are sequences of ghost trains, that they exist in the crisscrossing waves of past and future that ripple from all beings. ‘Living in the now’ is the very quintessence of
modernity's technological domination of beings, its reduction of them to manipulable instruments: in short, what got us into this pickle in the first place. Far from being a barricade against modernity, living in the now is modernity, lived in a certain way: a modern style of consumerism that is now untenable. What on Earth is this ‘now,’ given the hundred-thousand-year future of global warming?
I shall not advocate presentism to fight presentism. Rather I am suggesting a kind of aikido—an exaggeration of the lack of a true now. What is called nowness in Buddhist contemplative theory is not a point or even a bubble, no matter how wide, but a fluid, uncanny washing back and forth like a tow and an undertow. This is what I call the rift between essence and appearance, the slide between future and past. The exaggeration of the rift of no present is given to us by the huge entities that have shown up on our monitoring devices: biosphere, magnetosphere, the bow shock of the Sun, the Japanese earthquake of 2011, radioactive materials, global warming, LUCA, that uncanny oceanic lifeform whose proteins still inhabit us.