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Feral Life: Meditations on Rewilding and Anarchy

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Feral Life: Meditations on Rewilding and Anarchy Feral Life: Meditations on Rewilding and Anarchy “I want crystal clear air and water everywhere on Earth.” President Donald Trump “Langer is a bag floating in the wind” Kevin Tucker Feral Life: Meditations on Rewilding and Anarchy Written by Julian Langer Edited by Emma Kathryn https://ecorevoltblog.wordpress.com Liscensed under the Creative Commons Other Books By The Author Feral Consciousness: Deconstruction of the Modern Myth and Return to the Woods Feral Iconoclasm: Anarchy as Rising and Dying Mesodma “I rebel, therefore we exist,” Camus, The Rebel Acknowledgments A great deal of the motivation behind writing this book came from the appreciation a dying man showed me. My gratitude for him is immense. As well as this individual, who I will not name, the encouragement of Aragorn!, my former editor and publisher at Little Black Cart , fuelled the fires of my creative desires and it is deeply saddening that I cannot thank him as I knew him for this, with his death. My decision to not to pursue this project with Little Black Cart has come after serious self-reflection and consideration of what this project means to me. Also, if it were not for the love Katie has continually provided, throughout continued personal health concerns I have been attempting to heal from, this book would not likely have happened. My love and gratitude for her remains a continual presence in my life. This book is dedicated to all those rebelling against Leviathan – human and non-human. Introduction This is a work of appreciation and critique. It has been motivated by personal thought and honest feeling. Everything seems both impossible and inevitable. In some parts, this is an unreasonable collection of ideas. In other parts, I have sought to be fairer. This started though as a singular thought. The thought was deconstructed and each piece considered and complexified, as far as I ventured. Some of these led to further explorations and some to points where I could only go back, or stay still. I could have attempted to venture further and some might think I went too far, but this is my wandering. The thought was – “what does it mean to live a feral life, right here and right now”. Unlike my other Feral books, I have not approached this in an analytic sense, which might be more preferable to many readers than the approach I have taken. Embracing instinct and intuition through my meditations, I have approached this from the position of an animal immersed in a forest, who might climb a tree to see further, but knows that they cannot know the ground from this position, or the other side of the tree. And when venturing to the ground, to see the other side of the tree, knows that the treetop has changed and that they do not know it. By keeping this more personal, I have embraced a similar form of egoism to that of individuals like Nietzsche and Muir, and assumed an interest “in me” on the part of the reader. I have attempted to explore this as what Camus called metaphysical rebellion, though I prefer the term ontological anarchy. Metaphysical rebellion is a refusal to obey the Reality of the humanised condition. Rejecting History and totalitarianism, ontological anarchy is a mad space of becoming-animal – of primal anarchy. This is an embrace of free play – the event(s) where Humanity is no longer the centre of the universe. As with the other books in my Feral collection, I have written this in a some-what schizophrenic manner. In many ways, the thinking here is within that unacceptable realm of the excluded middle. Here is also multiple different places, like how when I subscend my body I find that I am a multiplicity of living entities, all of whom are different places. In a schizoanalytic sense, this is a work of intensifying differentiation and unity. There are here 146 meditations, which are reflections on points of the deconstruction/complexification of the thought that this started with. These have been written as aphorisms, rather than as essays – I couldn’t have written this as essays, given the way I have approached this project – as a non-holistic presence. I have included 130 exercises, maybe games, to think upon. I am not encouraging anyone to do anything that might put them at risk. They are intended as images for any reader to reflect upon and to consider whether or not this is actually happening in the world – in a similar way to how The Little Book of Chaos is not actually a series of recommendations, but an opportunity for someone reading to imagine doing “this”. Now, destroy Reality! Part 1: Meditations and Exercises “Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.” Guy Debord Desire For Growth “Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” Rumi I find myself in this present moment undergoing a visceral desire to grow. Where the roots of this desire are located, if that even is of any significance, or could even be signified, do not matter to me. I doubt that the oaks that grow near my small house on Briton question why they are growing, or why they desire the light of the sun. They just become-as-they-desire. My growth is a manifestation of my desire and I find my desire, as a process thrown into the world, is pulled by something-akin-to gravity towards growth. I feel my desire emerge from with myself, as myself, like a fire bursting from my chest and out of my mouth. By the thrownness of my desire, I mean my desire is unbound to any logical machinery – it is a primal, authentic desire that is gravitationally pulled towards earth. That desire is non- political, a-moral, unrepressed and entirely selfish. These desires are primal and do not fit the mechanics of monetary quantifiability, nor any other reductionist means of consuming and quenching this sensation. By my growth, I do not mean only in embodied strength and wellbeing of the body-I-am, though that is definitely included within the multiplicity of desires I am meaning by growth here. The strength of my muscles, while valuable and something I wish to grow, is not enough on their own for me to reach where I want to-Be. Skills, knowledge, emotional wellbeing and psychic strength are also included in this sense of growth I desire. My desire is to learn ways of living, of rebelling, of creating, of destroying. The manifestation of this growth is power. What I mean by power is not to-dominate, i.e. authority, as is often assumed when discussing the desire for power. This will-to-power is will- to-life, as the overcoming of conditions that lead to death. It is power as the energy of life, flowing through the world, as the manifestation of actuality. Power as energy-within, not authority-over. The dissipation of energy that is death is, of course, inevitable. It is inevitable that all that is will be impossible, as the motion of flux changes what is now into what is-now – impossibility is the only certainty. Life has always been the possible, manifest from worldly potential. This worldly potential becomes actualised-as-possible through the processes of free, living beings creating the world that they are. This is true of ants creating colonies, just as much as it is of rhinos fertilising the nitrogen- depleted soils they live upon, of rivers shaping the landscape with their dances and far more examples that we can ever hope to know. That worldly potential inevitably will-Be impossible in what now-is from this actualisation of the possible. What manifests as potential, from the now-impossible, is regrowth – the wild will-to-life, striving for power-as- becoming. Forests are created where the body of the impossible, the dead, lies within the earth. Predator’s power comes from the impossibility of their prey’s survival. Herbivores power comes from the impossibility of the flora they consume still being. The transformation of impossibility into possibility is the actualisation of worldly potential. All the ecosystems and communities of living beings are part of these processes of worldly potential. From the death of what is, manifests the life of what is. As a process we are all immersed in, we will become whatever is possible, as the potential of the impossible. How this space manifests will be the freedom of the will-to-life, through will- to-power, of those who take action to transform spaces into impossibilities via destruction, that manifest the creation of new possible spaces. As for my desire, I wish to create impossibilities through the destruction of what is possible, so my will-to-power acts as the manifestation of the potential of will-to-life. I want my growth to be the growth of possibility, as what is impossible dissipates into Nothingness, that is more than negation, as the affirmation of worldly potential. [Ex1: Plant a tree in a public park, somewhere that local authorities won’t want to remove straight away.] Smash The Jam Jar “When all is said and done, it’s with an entire anthropology that we are at war. With the very idea of man.” Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection It would seem to me not surprising to say that everything is in every present moment engaged in the process of becoming. Whether it is becoming hungry, becoming tired, becoming (as a) dancer, becoming (as a) nihilist insurrectionary, or becoming through any other process that amounts to the actualisation of worldly potential, all that is seems part of processes of becoming.
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