years of bacteria in action. So, the puffs of CO2 she releases in breathing don’t make her an alien, a ‘monstrous insect’, but a breather among billions of breathers that some take advantage of to form the wood of the forest of beeches in whose shade she gets her breath back. Which makes this walker a pedestrian in an immense metropolis that she covered on foot one fine afternoon. Outside, here in the middle of nowhere, she is housed inside a conurbation that she can never leave without promptly dying of suffocation.
What a shock it is for Gregor to realise that manufacture, engineering, the freedom to invent, no, the obligation to invent, can also be found in what he took to be the air he breathed, the atmosphere, the blue sky, in the days when he was just a human reduced to a wire figure like his unworthy parents. For there to be a dome over his head, for him not to choke when he goes out – but that’s just it, he doesn’t really ‘go out’ anymore – what’s needed are still more workers, still more animalcules, still more subtle arrangements, still more scattered efforts to hold the tent of the sky in place; one more long, immensely long, history of manufactures, just for there to be an edge, a vast canopy that’s a bit stable and for him to survive in it for a while. If I want to swiftly learn from Gregor, the bug, how to conduct myself, I have to accept that it’s through technical devices, factories, hangars, ports, laboratories that I’ll best be able to grasp the work of living organisms and their capacity to change the living conditions around them, to build nests, spheres, surroundings, bubbles of conditioned air. It’s through them that we can better understand the nature of ‘nature’. Nature is not first and foremost ‘green’, it is not first and foremost ‘organic’; it is above all composed of manufactures and manufacturers – provided we leave them the time.
It’s strange that geology and biology manuals marvel that ‘by chance’ living organisms found the ideal conditions on earth in which they could develop for billions of years: the right temperature, the right distance from the sun, the right water, the right air. We might expect serious scientists to be less keen to embrace such a providential version of the harmony between organisms and their ‘environment’, as they say. The slightest experience of turning into an animal leads to a completely different view, one much more down-to-earth: there is no ‘environment’ at all. It’s as if you [vous] were to congratulate an ant on how lucky it is to find itself in an anthill that’s so providentially well heated, so pleasantly ventilated and so frequently cleaned of its waste materials! The ant would no doubt retort, if you knew how to question it, that it and billions of its congeners have emitted this ‘environment’ that emerges from them, just as the city of Prague emanates from its inhabitants. The idea of an environment scarcely makes any sense since you [vous] can never draw a boundary line that would distinguish an organism from what surrounds it. Strictly speaking, nothing surrounds us, everything conspires in our breathing. And the history of living beings is there to remind us that this earth that’s so ‘favourable’ to their development has been made favourable by living beings to their designs – designs so well hidden that they themselves know nothing about them! Blindly, they have bent space around them; they have more or less folded, buried, rolled, balled themselves up in it.
Now I’m a bit better oriented, after all, because I’m beginning to get close to what is really ‘outside’. In the tales of my childhood, when castaways washed up on a beach somewhere (like Cyrus Smith in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island), they always raced to climb up onto some summit to check whether they happened to be on a continent or an island. Disappointed if it was an island, but reassured even so when it spread out before them, vast and diversified enough. We, too, realise that we’re confined, certainly, but on an island that is still nice and sizeable and whose edge we can figure out from the inside, sort of against the light, as if we were in the middle of a Crystal Palace, a greenhouse, or the way a swimmer sees the sky when he looks up from underwater, at the bottom of a lake.
Of that outside – this is the most amazing thing – I long ago learned we never have a direct experience. Even the most daring cosmonaut won’t repeat her spectacular space walks unless she’s carefully squeezed into a tight ad hoc suit – a mini-sphere that connects her to Cape Kennedy as if by a solid cable anchored in the ground and which she can’t quit without promptly perishing. As for the numerous testimonies about this vast exterior, about all that lies beyond the threshold, we read them, we learn them, we calculate them, but always from the inside of our laboratories, our telescopes or our institutions, without ever leaving these. Unless through imagination – or better still, through illustrated knowledge, via scientific inscriptions. As stirring as the view of our planet seen from Saturn is, it was inside a NASA office, in 2013, that the image was pieced together, one pixel at a time: to celebrate its objectivity, forgetting about the connections that let the earth be seen from a distance, is to misunderstand the object as well as the aptitudes of subjects to know with any certainty.
Crawling from room to city, from city to mountain, from mountain to atmosphere, sticking to the model offered by termites – the narrow conduit in which they make their way – I still don’t know where we are, but I feel I can stick a stake in the ground so I don’t get lost again next time I set out looking for locations. This side of the edge is the world which we have experience of and where we everywhere encounter various kinds of compatriots, who, through their engineering feats, their daring deeds, their freedoms, are able to build whole compounds that they organise in their fashion and that are more or less interconnected. The results of their inventions always surprise us, but we nonetheless feel that they share with our own people something like a family resemblance. Beyond the edge, it’s a very different world, one that’s surprising of course, but one we have no direct experience of except through the aid of illustrated knowledge; it will never be familiar to us. The outside, the real outside, begins where the moon revolves, this moon you [tu] were right to contemplate with envy as a symbol of innocence, alien, incorruptible in fact and, so, reassuring, understandably, for those who will always live in lockdown.
I’m looking for a name that clearly distinguishes inside from outside. It needs to operate like a great wall, a new summa divisio. I propose to call what’s on this side Earth and what’s beyond – why not? – the Universe. And those who live on this side, or rather those who agree to reside on this side, could be called the earthbound, or terrestrials. They’re the ones I’m trying to enter into a relationship with in launching my calls. The names are provisional, all else being equal; I’m still only at the first sightings phase. But we already sense that Earth is experienced up close, even if we don’t know much about it, whereas the Universe is often much better known but we don’t have direct experience of it. It would be good if the rest of us, we terrestrials, prepared to don gear designed differently depending on whether we intend to travel on one side or on the other of this boundary, of this impassible limes. Otherwise, strictly speaking, we won’t be able to grasp what enables the living to make the earth habitable; we will make life impossible for ourselves.
3 ‘Earth’ is a proper noun
For the moment, the thing that’s making life impossible for us is this generational conflict so perfectly described in the tale of Gregor Samsa. In a way, since lockdown, every one of us has been living through it in our own families.
In Kafka’s novella, there is the family of wire figures on one side – the obese father, the asthmatic mother, the infantile sister – to whom must be added the tedious ‘chief clerk’, two young and horrified maids, the ‘all-bones’ charwoman and the three interfering lodgers. And then there’s this Gregor whose transformation into an insect foreshadows our own. He is thicker now, heavier; he has more trouble walking, at least at first; his more numerous legs hamper him; his rigid back makes a dull sound when it hits the floor, but he can connect with many more things than they can – to say nothing of the fact that he can climb up to the ceiling … And so, he feels more at ease, as there’s nothing in his peregrinations as a creature who can pass through walls that doesn’t remind him of his competence fairly freely to build nests,
