Mesodma
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An artistic life reconstruction of Kimbetopsalis simmonsae. Image credit: Thomas E. Williamson et al / Unsplash / Sci-News.com.
How I long for pre-civ stories to satiate my imaginings of uncivilized life. Not stories wholly invented, but based in sensual experiences and events, pre-historical fictions of sort. There has been nothing close to when William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, fearlessly took on the challenge in The Inheritors, a telling of a band of Neanderthals’ first contact with Homo sapiens. But now here comes Julian Langer with Mesodma, a work on absurdity and extinction, a telling of a rodent species surviving a mass extinction event. He’s a burrowing creature who experiences the world through habits of waking to birdsong, the feel of the sun, and searches for nuts, with a rich range of sensations, feelings and wisdom of embeddedness in wildness. Ah, to live moment to moment in animality, if only by mind escaping through a story. Pure wild freedom, as opposed to civ’s pseudo- spoon-fed freedom doled out in exchange for staying between its lines. Unfettered freedom to act, like meandering a path toward a pond to drink and wash, or settling on a rock under a fern to be unnoticed in restful solitude.
Life is just being with events just happening. What is it like to experience a major ecological disturbance, not as a modern survival prepper, but purely intuitively responding to the change? The book and movie Into the Forest and other pop-media portray humans going feral in apocalypse, but Mesodma reveals the experience of a free being experiencing suddenly harsh conditions, changes entirely obliterating habitat cues, disrupting habits steeped in deep belonging. The struggle, as altered senses, feelings and lifeway spontaneously keep striving in and adapting to harshness, bringing about transformation into a more resilient way of being.
My only dispute with the story is the same contention I have with the author. While a-civ creatures sometimes did and do procreate during extinction events with “visceral, irrational, primal & absurd desires”, for me the wild calling of humans in this civilization-caused extinction is a calling to not breed, to ease civilization’s harm to ourselves and wild beings. Neither raw desire nor extinction sadness is enough to overrule intuitively sensing that 7 billion is ecologically unwildness and responding accordingly is part of the primal way of civilized humans going feral. That point is essential to somehow work in after the well done sex scene, that as species sometimes breed during harsh times, they too sometimes don’t breed for desires equally visceral.
Thank you Julian for the gift of this mind escape, relieving the burden of civilization, if only for a moment. It’s more potent than psychiatric medicine and may even make more sense than suicide.
