Darwin inconsolable

"What do I care about? Look we are all parents to everyone, even when we are not parents to anyone."

Anonymous on the phone on the 30 express bus, Rome

I thought about it.

And I could only think of this way to say it

L: You know the weeping willow tree?

Yes, the one all leafy, upside down, catching the wind, rustling, swaying, almost cradling...one is comfortable leaning on it under to light...

M: that from grandmother? Yes. It also serves to sleep.

L: yes also...

L: What if I ask you for a human figure from associate with the weeping willow?

M: Our Lady of Sorrows. Also several martyrs.

L: to catechism only bent figures show you?

M: Even Grandfather Alexander, tall tall, always curved.

L: All right, sure.

L: An animal instead?

M: The elephant.

L: You think so?

M: Yes, he dangles, and he ducks as soon as he can. And the weight, if he could he would crawl, but he has paws, it's uncomfortable to crawl; however basic, he dangles downward. And then, besides the proboscis, he has downward eyes, like Dad's, who is a bit willowy himself. Not you, you are more dog-like."

And this is the interview to my 9-year-old daughter Margaret.

It is an age, that age, in which everything is connected without much distinction of categories. The real is all on the same plane.

Then no. The adult separates.

But if you think about it, all it takes is a Madonna, a willow tree, an elephant, a grandfather Alexander with all their corollary of symbolic and concrete lives, sap, feces and pigments, souls and ladybugs, gregariousness and solitudes, to put you in touch with a particular poetic mystique of the interspecies.

If one reasons in this sense, i.e., of the all with all in the all, there emerges a pattern of linkages between the levels of the bios, not quite consonant in that it is non-pyramidal, non-anthropocentric, perhaps not quite verbalizable,where dis-asc-transcendencies are off the charts, where kinships, ties, lives are intra-inter exchangeable to level of value and evolution.

A world where ultimately transubstantiation-conversion of the substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ and the wine, into the blood of Christ-and the passage from caterpillar to butterfly become distant cousins, acted upon by the same ingenuity.

Although it is always nature that invents and man, "ahinoia," that copies. Never vice versa.

Last step.

You know compost?

That place of existence long before his name and even yours, where the mixing and macerating between individuals of different species and cosmogonies, the decaying and chafing of sugars, protein levels, and amino acids in the soil coincides with generating/feeding the future of a basil or other kind of life?

Here, I feel I can begin to to say, although it sounds strange to me for now, and only a part of me understands it, that both you and I, all the others, daughter, willow and company above included, all of us, are compost.

And from here, from this observation that it is an end of thought, how can we not rely to on a story to continue?

Mine is that of an elderly mother, pretending to be dead in order to get some attention from these children, so busy, so distracted, so unloving, aggressive as they are absent. She simulates death. Thanatosis. A very common practice among animals that to escape predator aggression, "play dead."

It could be a warning, a reminder, a warning, a metaphor.

A mother symbolizing the planet? Perhaps. Children symbolizing us? Possibly. But none, certainly goodness. Nor guilt. Or fate. No one is a victim. Everyone is creature and nature, and they have their own predatory survival strategies as a bee, a radicchio, a sea urchin has them, because "Everything is people." "Everything is person." Everything wants to live and nothing knows how to die anymore.

Lucia Calamaro