and cement. But why then would you feel ill at ease? Nothing is alien to you anymore; you’re no longer alone; you quietly digest a few molecules of whatever reaches your intestines, after having passed through the metabolism of hundreds of millions of relatives, allies, compatriots and competitors. You’re not in your old room now, Gregor, but you can go anywhere, so why would you continue to hide away in shame? You fled; now take the lead; show us!
With your antennae, your articulations, your emanations, your waste matter, your mandibles, your prostheses, you may at last be becoming a human being! And it’s your parents, on the contrary, the people knocking on your door, anxious, horrified, and even your dear sister Grete, who have become inhuman, by rejecting becoming an insect themselves? They are the ones who ought to feel bad, not you. They are the ones who’ve metamorphosed, the ones the climate crisis and the pandemic have transformed into so many ‘monsters’? We’ve read Kafka’s novella the wrong way round. Put back on his six hairy legs, Gregor would at last walk straight and could teach us how to extricate ourselves from lockdown.
Since we’ve been talking, the moon has gone down; it is beyond your [tes] woes; alien but in a different way from before. You don’t look convinced? The uneasiness is still there? That’s because I reassured you a little too glibly. You feel even worse? You hate this metamorphosis? You want to go back to being an old-fashioned human being? You’re right. Even if we became insects, we would still be bad insects, incapable of moving very far, shut away in our locked room.
It’s this ‘return to earth’ business that’s got my head in a spin. It’s not fair to push us to come back down to earth if they don’t tell us where to land so we don’t crash, or what will happen to us, who we’ll feel affiliated with or not. I was a bit too quick off the mark. That’s the problem with starting with a crash site, I can no longer position myself with the aid of a GPS; I can no longer overfly anything. But this is also my chance: it’s enough to start where one is, ground zero, and then try to follow the first track that crops up in the bush, and see where it takes us. No point hurrying, there’s still a bit of time left to find a place to nest. Of course, I’ve lost my nice stentor’s voice, the one that used to hold forth from on high addressing the whole human race, off-stage; like Gregor’s to his parents’ ears, my diction is in danger of sounding like mumbling, that’s the whole problem with this becoming-animal. But what counts is to make heard the voices of those groping their way forward into the moonless night, hailing one another. Other compatriots may well manage to regroup around those calls.
2 Locked-down in a space that’s still pretty vast
‘Where am I?’ sighs the person who wakes up to find they’re an insect. In a city probably, like half my contemporaries. Consequently I find myself inside a sort of extended termite mound: an installation of outer walls, pathways, air-conditioning systems, food flows, cable networks, whose ramifications run beneath rural areas, for a very long way. The same way that termites’ conduits help them get into the sturdiest beams of a house made of wood even over great distances. In the city, in a sense, I’m always ‘at home’ – at least for a minuscule stretch: I repainted that wall, I brought this table back from abroad, I accidentally flooded my neighbour’s apartment, I paid the rent. Those are a few tiny traces added forever to the framework of Lutetian limestone, to the marks, wrinkles and riches of this place. If I consider the framework, for every stone I find an urbanite who made it; if I start with the urbanites, I’ll find a trace of every one of their actions in the stone they’ve left behind – that big stain on the wall, still here twenty years later, is my doing, and so is this graffiti. What others take for a cold and anonymous framework, for me in any case virtually amounts to an artwork.
What goes for the city goes for the termite mound: habitat and inhabitants are in continuity; to define the one is to define the others; the city is the exoskeleton of its inhabitants, just as the inhabitants leave behind a habitat in their wake, when they go off or waste away, for instance when they’re buried in the cemetery. A city-dweller lives in his city the way a hermit crab lives in its shell. ‘So where am I?’ In, and through and partly thanks to my shell. The proof of this is that I can’t even take my provisions up to my place without using the lift that allows me to do so. An urbanite, then, is an insect ‘with a lift’ the way we say a spider is ‘with a web’? The owners still have to have maintained the machinery. Behind the tenant, there is a prothesis; behind the prothesis, more owners and service agents. And so on. The inanimate framework and those who animate it – it’s all one. A completely naked urbanite doesn’t exist anymore than a termite outside its termite mound, a spider without its web or a forester whose forest has been destroyed. A termite mound without a termite is a heap of mud, like the ritzy quartiers, during the lockdown, when we’d idly amble past all these sumptuous buildings without any inhabitants to enliven them.
If for an urbanite, then, the city is not exactly alien to his ways of being, can I actually go a bit further before I encounter something that really is outside? This summer in the Vercors region, at the foot of the Grand Veymont mountain, a geologist friend showed us how the entire top of this spectacular cliff was a graveyard of corals, another gigantic conurbation, long deserted by its inhabitants, whose remains, heaped, compressed, buried, then lifted up, eroded and suspended, had engendered this beautiful Urgonian chalk whose white stone with its fine crystals sparkled under his magnifying glass. He called these calcareous sediments ‘bioclastic’, which means ‘made of all the debris of living things’. So there is no break, then, no discontinuity, when I go from the oh-so-bioclastic urban termite mound to this valley in the Vercors that a glacier once carved out of a cemetery of countless living things? As a result, I feel a bit less alienated; I can go on crawling along like a crab further and further. My door is no longer locked shut.
Especially as, climbing up towards the Grand Veymont, I’m reminded by the giant anthills punctuating our walk every hundred metres that they, too, lead the life of busy urbanites. Gregor must feel less alone, since his segmental body has been resonating with his stone Prague whose every aggregate of cristals preserves an echo of an ocean of shells clinking together. Enough to leave his family laid out on the tiles, imprisoned at home, in their poor human bodies delineated the old-fashioned way like figures made of wire.
When he was in his room, Gregor suffered from being a stranger among his nearest and dearest; a wall and bolts were enough to lock him securely in. Once he’s an insect, he’s suddenly able to walk through walls. From now on he sees his room, his house, as balls of clay, stone and rubble that he has partly digested then regurgitated and that no longer limit his movements. Now he can go out at leisure without being mocked. The city of Prague, its bridges, its churches, its palaces? – so many clumps of earth that are a bit bigger, a bit older, too, more sedimented, all of them artificial, manufactured things emanating from the mandibles of his innumerable compatriots. The thing that may well make becoming an insect bearable to me is that, going from the city to the country, I find myself faced with other termite mounds, mountains of limestone, every bit as artificial, bigger, older, even more sedimented by the long shrewd labour and engineering of innumerable animalcules. The confined deconfines himself perfectly well. He begins to rediscover enormous freedom of movement.
Let’s follow this fine conduit, let’s prolong this minuscule intuition, let’s doggedly obey this bizarre injunction: if I can go from the termite mound to the city, then from the city to the mountain, is it possible to go to the very place in which I once had a hunch that all a mountain did was ‘be located somewhere’?
For an ant, the work of the anthill forms a bubble around it while maintaining its temperature and purifying its air; and the same goes for Véronica, who heaves as she breathes, on the strenuous climb towards the Grand Veymont. The oxygen she inhales doesn’t come from her, as if she had to lug on her back the heavy bottles the men who conquered Annapurna had to carry. Others, innumerable and hidden, invite her free of charge – for the moment – to fill her lungs with the stuff. As for the ozone layer that protects her from the sun – again,
