Terror Ecology: Secrets from the Arrakeen Underground

Terra‐&‐Terror Ecology: Secrets from the Arrakeen Underground Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Western University, Canada It is […] vital to an understanding of Muad'Dib’s religious impact that you never lose sight of one fact: the Fremen were a desert people whose entire ancestry was accustomed to hostile landscapes. Mysticism isn’t difficult when you survive each second by surmounting open hostility […]. With such a tradition, suffering is accepted […]. And it is well to note that Fremen ritual gives almost complete freedom from guilt‐feelings. This isn’t necessarily because their law and religion were identical, making disobedience a sin. It is likely closer to the mark to say they cleansed themselves of guilt easily because their everyday existence required brutal (often deadly) judgments which in a softer land would burden men with unbearable guilt. Dune I (576‐77) This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always is, was, and will be an ever‐living Fire, igniting and extinguishing in equal measure. Heraclitus Fragments (DK B30) [F]orm is nothing but holes and cracks […] with a nature that has no hardness or solidity. Ancient Buddhist saying. Frank Herbert’s science‐fiction classic Dune1 is a literary work about political, religious, military and ecological design: a design in which Dune’s desert‐planet is, like fire, a perpetually self‐consuming political, religious, military and ecological topos and in which human beings— among other things like water, sand‐worms and religious doctrines—are the fodder that fuels what could be called the ‘Great Ecology’ of planetary regeneration and desertification. The project of “planetary ecology” is established in the first book as the imperially‐sanctioned 1 Frank Herbert’s Dune, a thematically rich and varied work of science‐fiction, is the first novel in a trilogy about the desert planet Arrakis, or Dune, and the rise to power of Paul Atreides, its messianic leader […]. Ultimately, Herbert produced six novels about Dune prior to his death in 1986 […]. These six novels comprise what has become known as The Dune Chronicles […]. The intricate ecology of the planet—encompassing the Fremen natives’ desire to turn Dune into a ‘green and fertile world’, and the need of the Empire for the indigenous spice mélange to facilitate space travel—forms the backdrop for Paul’s struggle to overcome his enemies, control the planet, and fulfill his personal destiny. Throughout the novel, Paul must meet and overcome challenges that serve to confirm him in the minds of the Fremen as being their messiah. Paul does not seek this position, but is instead caught up in the events that lead to his deposing of the emperor and control of the throne” (Parkerson 2010). Nandita Biswas Mellamphy 1 ecological redesign of the planet Arrakis from a desert environment to one that is, on the one hand, hospitable to terra‐form life (via the creation of grassland ecosystems, surface bodies of water, etc.) and that will, on the other hand, “achieve the stature of a natural phenomenon” (Dune I: 310‐11). “A planet’s life is a vast, tightly interwoven fabric. Vegetative and animal changes will be determined at first by the raw physical forces we manipulate. As they establish themselves however, our changes will become controlling influences in their own right, and we will have to deal with them too […]. [W]e need control only 3% of the energy surface—only 3%— to tip the entire structure into our self‐sustaining system” (ibid.). This Gaian2 eco‐vision, aimed at physically transforming the living surface of the landscape, is upheld by an imperial politico‐economic apparatus entirely driven by the hegemony of ‘spice’ (a byproduct of the biological workings of an indigenous life‐form on Arrakis, the sand‐worm), which, when ingested, has hyper‐cognitive effects that allow its consumers a kind of ‘prescience’ or ‘second sight’ of the flux of time (or “time nexus”; Dune I: 332). Manipulation of this temporal structure is what makes time travel and interplanetary navigation possible in the empire (the latter being extensions—or more precisely, techno‐ pharmacological transductions—of Arrakeen worm‐holes3). The first book of Dune explains how the mystical religion of the Fremen—the autochthonous desert nomads of Arrakis—centers on the figure and function of the sand‐worm (Shai‐Hulud), and how, by way of imperial imperatives to control spice‐production, the acquisition and transfer of Fremen knowledge regarding sand‐worm ecology becomes a key concern for the political future of planet Arrakis. Although such a Gaian ecological vision dominates the first book of Dune, it is not this ecology that dominates the subsequent volumes. Indeed, one of the most important overarching lessons of the Dune series is the failure of the Gaian political ecological vision once it has been realized, and its role in directly bringing about the extinction of Arrakeen life‐ forms—namely the sand‐worm and, by extension, the entire Fremen civilization. From the second book onward, the project of planetary ecology literally goes underground, becoming by definition chthonic (i.e. “in, under, or beneath the earth”),4 no longer focused on manipulating 2 From the Greek Gaia, mother of the Titans, personification of ‘earth’ as opposed to heaven, ‘land’ as opposed to sea, ‘land, country, soil’ as collateral form of ge (or the Dorian ga), meaning ‘earth’, of unknown origin, perhaps pre‐Indo‐European. The Roman equivalent earth‐goddess was Tellus (see tellurian), sometimes used in English, poetically or rhetorically, to designate ‘Earth personified’ or ‘the Earth as a planet’ (cf. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gaia). 3 As the Princess Irulan announces in the opening scene of David Lynch’s film adaptation of Dune (1984): The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the spice has mutated over 4,000 years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space. That is, travel to any part of universe without moving” (cf. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dune_%28film%29) 4 From Greek chthonios, ‘in, under, or beneath the earth’, from chthon, ‘earth’; pertaining to the Earth; earthy; subterranean) designates, or pertains to, deities or spirits of the underworld, especially in relation to Greek Nandita Biswas Mellamphy 2 the planetary surface and no longer developed as a widespread political, ecological and cultural project involving the colonized—Fremen—in cooperation with the colonizer or imperial system. Instead, Arrakis is returned to the Fremen, who, in keeping with their mystic autochthonous theocracy, submit themselves to the rule of their prophesized messiah qua God‐Emperor (who, over the course of the chronicle, metamorphosizes into a human/worm chimera) whose only goal is to return Arrakis to the desert and to return the Fremen to their chthonic, hence underground, ecology. Throughout the course of the entire Dune chronicle, we come to see that what begins as a Gaian (terra‐surface) imperial ecology turns into a covert hence “larval”5 terror‐ecology that operates underneath the [terra]surface of planetological perceptions and sociocultural consciousness, and that uses war, fear, and ideological obedience as tools of ecological transformation. The terrible secret of Dune—one that only the human/worm chimera i.e. God‐Emperor knows—is that the survival of autochthonous Fremen culture requires returning Arrakis to the desert. “At their roots the Fremen remained special‐application animals, desert survivors, governance experts, under conditions of stress” (Dune III: 33). Dune’s chthonic/ autochthonous eco‐vision is that of a desertification in which the human is submitted to the desert, overrun by it, and ultimately transformed by it into something other than human (this is “the amor fati which I bring to humankind: the act of ultimate self‐examination. In this universe, I choose to ally myself against any force which brings humiliation upon humankind”; Dune III: 270). This necessitates pulling an ecological conceptualization of earth or of earthliness down from a ‘surface’‐ or ‘ground’‐level perspective to an ‘subsurface’ or ‘underground’ one. The politico‐ecological vision in which the human is submitted to and retranslated by the desert, and consumed in its ongoing conflagration, is one that is by necessity terrible and terrifying: the human becomes, not just an ‘agent’ or merely a ‘tool’, but the ‘material’ to be consumed, transformed, or transduced in the conflagrational battle‐space created by chthonic interaction between human and sand‐worm; the effects of ecological transduction ripple and extend not only throughout the desert‐planet that produces the ‘spice’, but also across the empire’s entire trans‐planetary political‐economic network which is dependent on (indeed addicted to) spice. My aim in this short discussion is to think ‘ecology’ transductively, taking an ec(h)o‐ formative perspective on this intensive and constitutive activity of interaction between various materials/material environments, for example sand/water, worms, and human beings: “The concept of eco‐formation (formation by things) transforms itself into oïko‐formation (the Greek religion. The Greek word chthon is one of several for ‘earth’; it typically refers to the interior of the soil rather than to the living surface of the land (as gaia or ge does) or to the land as territory (chora) does. 5 From Latin larva (plural larvæ), earlier larua ‘ghost’, also ‘mask’ (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=larva). Nandita Biswas Mellamphy 3 oïkos designating [habit/habituation/]habitat), and finally the notion […] of ec(h)o‐formation attempts to account for the interactions between these different poles” (Denoyel, trans. Mellamphy 2013: 14). This “interaction” “articulates interrelations that are both material (i.e.

Load more