Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff Vandermeer

“Using ‘us’ when thinking about the environment erases all the different versions of ‘us,’” Silvina once said. “Many indigenous peoples don’t think this way. Counterculture doesn’t always think this way. Philosophy, knowledge, policy exist that could solve our problems already.”

To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I had learned to care less. Silvina called it “the fatal adaptation.”

I had a vision of that last small expedition, the last group, setting out. Maybe it was just a dozen, maybe less. Tried to imagine it as Silvina had. Trying their best to overcome those obstacles. Each one of those individuals on an epic journey. One they never came back from. But: the joy. Even then, there must have been moments of joy and of contentment on the journey. Sanctuaries and times of plenty. It wasn’t just a winnowing. It was a life. I held fast to that. Even if it was selfish, for myself.

This stutter-step of disaster after natural disaster was just a blip next to LED lights, driverless cars, a possible end to poverty through gene-edited crops.

“Work toward a better world, but never forget what world you live in.”

Then, I loved drones. I loved how I could order something and it would be there immediately. I would toss the plastic in the recycling bin and never questioned the magic of how I had received yet another gift. We could do drones well, but we could not stop pouring plastic waste into the ocean.

“Transpose what is done to an animal onto a human,” Silvina said in the video. “If it is disgusting, wrong, unethical, immoral, then you know what the truth is.”

“As purses, handbags, shoes—even as heads on walls. Or as roadkill, unless it’s a fox or something we haven’t seen a hundred times before. The mind renders them as setting. But now I saw them everywhere—an ongoing, everyday exhibit of dead animals and their parts. A horror show. A vast extermination of lives and minds.”

Does analysis colonize you? Subject matter become the subject. Truth or cult.

Silvina wrote that even through the poisoned landscape, we must love it. We must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you’re still alive. That the world is alive.

We interfered with all, left nothing alone, as Silvina said. We could not leave anything untouched. And, for some, the compulsion grew not to simply do the deed, as my father did, but to be heroic for it. There, with the suffering, lay a further crime.

Or, better: this is progress. The new thing murdered, wanton and alone, gifted with credentials not yet earned.

The legend read “If it’s dead, we can fix it.” Even after death, we couldn’t leave anything alone.

“I woke up one night to the sounds of traffic on the street below. I woke to the light through my window. And the sound never turned off. The light never turned off. They just intensified. Ever after. No matter where I was. And if I sought sanctuary in wild places, it was selfish at first. Because I couldn’t tolerate life elsewhere.”

Weak men know they’re poor in virtue and take their self-knowledge as evidence others will plot against them. So they want to be the only ones who know things.

“We’re ghosts trapped in the wreckage of our systems. So why shouldn’t we haunt them? Why should we not avenge ourselves upon them? Why be merciful?”

Perhaps I felt apart from this, from this idea of “sustainability,” but I realized I could have gotten used to it. That it also felt like “sovereignty.”

Effective tactic: to accuse your enemy of the crime you had committed. Politicians did it all the time.

“If we could only see the world, really see the world, how radically we would change how we treat it. How different we would become.”

Sometimes I feel as if we live in hell and don’t even realize it. The lacerations are endless. The lies we accept, the rituals we perform. All these useless acts.

No way to find within my father the things I had needed from him—because they had never been there. Not withheld. Never present.

Extinction of H. sapiens is attributed to destroying its own habitat.

Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average.

“Landscape isn’t fragile. It’s what we impose upon it that’s fragile. We must be ruthless about the foreground. We must trust the backdrop. Do you know how to do that? Can we trust in that?”

“To be a weakness that is a strength. To let the world breathe into you and out of you. To find a path through.”

But once you got used to this new perspective, you’d look at the ground and it’d open up its layers, past topsoil and earthworms, down into the deeper epidermis, until you’re overcoming a sense of vertigo, because even though you’re standing right there, not falling at all, below you everything is revealing itself to you superfast. And maybe then, while still staring at the ground, even more would open up to you and you’d regress to the same spot five years, ten years, fifty years, two hundred years ago … until, when you look up again, there’s no street at all and you’re in the middle of a forest, and there are more birds and animals than you could ever imagine because you’ve never seen that many in one place. You’ve never even seen this many old-growth trees before. You’ve never known that the world was once like this, except in the abstract.

You’re, in fact, standing on an alien planet. And once you got used to that, maybe then … only then … you’d be able to reach a level in which you inhabit the consciousness of an animal—something less advanced, at first, like a tortoise or squirrel, and then work your way up to something “fairly” intelligent, like a wild boar or a raccoon. And once you’d worked your way “up” to human, or sideways to human, or down to human … whatever that looks like … then and only then would you be allowed to look to the future, to think of a time beyond, only then would you know enough because you’d feel it in your skin, and in your flesh … I don’t know if that

One hundred years. What is the world like now? What is the world like after the end of the world? Is there a hummingbird, a salamander? Is there a you?