"with all the unfaithful offspring of the sky gods, with my littermates who find a rich wallow in multispecies muddles... I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking.
My first demon familiar in this task? A spider, Pimoa cthulu, who lives under stumps.
The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere, in spite of the civilizing efforts of the agents of sky gods to astralize them and set up chief Singletons and their tame committees of multiples or subgods, the One and the Many.
With Pimoa cthulu, I propose a name for an elsewhere and elsewhen that was, still is, and might yet be: the Chthulucene (sic). Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene."Harraway's web is spun further by Berry in the current issue of AEON:
Labelling individuals as ‘animals’ – refuting their humanity – has long been a project of the racist, colonial, sexist imagination. Only by rejecting these legacies of white-settler anthropocentrism can we imagine better, less hierarchical ways of existing among, between, and within species…
When I heard about the exhibition… I signed up…And...found myself Immobilised in a straitjacket-like sleeping bag, with a headset puffing oxytocin at me, I tried to relax into my 25-minute experience. My field of vision became hallucinatory… Balloons expanded and contracted around my body, as if I were bubbling
Twice, I was nudged to open my mouth, and in went a… nibble devised through molecular gastronomy to mimic the proteins a slime mould would taste... the chatter of my mind began to fade… I forgot who and where I was?
Not that I had become a slime mould… I had become re-attuned to the limits and the thrills of my own sensory world… My Umwelt wobbled. There was so much I did not know about how to best occupy a body on our warming Earth.
Erica Berryis a writer and teacher based in Portland. She is the author of Wolfish: The Stories We Tell About Fear, Ferocity and Freedom (2023).
