Mother Earth; our very own Santa Muerte. Hell is literally derived from her. We are born out of sunlight; Sol our very own prime mover. Always on the move, hunted by voracious wolves. Are they not her own shadow?
Consumption isn’t just an act of submerging the Other into the Self. It is a way of giving back. Of expelling a part of the Self onto Earth. Death, as such, must be understood as the subject of the Earth. By consumption, the Reaper takes back what was borrowed from her. But she always gives back in the form of life. We are her excrement in the most literal sense. Only in her dance with the ever self-consuming explosions of the Sun do we live:
“The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.” (Bataille, George. The Solar Anus. 1931. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/georges-bataille-the-solar-anus)
As much as the night is being hunted by the Sun, we are in a way being hunted by Death. Being consumed, literally or figuratively, by our distant siblings may be the most natural thing to die. Maggots to the Earth or by the very monsters of our own imagination. By our very own body in cancerous or autoimmune self-consumption, in which our bodies reveals themselves to be as foreign to us as teeth penetrating our skin.
I met someone interesting today. Someone who pointed me towards the point of no return, by showing me the virtual surface of clay. Ceramics is a parody of life. We build our lives with it; forming our very own little earth, of the Earth. As much as life is a fractalization of the Mother Earth; ceramics are the fractalization of the human earth. A patterning of its own kind.
It is though, a parody, only so far as it is its own becoming-out-of-earth. For clay has no going back; it lacks consumption. It is the Earth othering itself, with no point of return. Ceramics is thus violent in its own kind. It pulls out something from the body without giving anything in return. Thus, it bears its own curse of stagnation.
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” (D&G, A Thousand Plateus – blablabla you all know I’m a D&G fan so go find the page yourselves).
Isn’t this striking? That philosophy in many ways is a form of ceramic sculpturing; it contains the same violence. Though, as with ceramics, do not offer a remit. It is only in decay that thought can perceive patterns, and there are always a redundancy of decaying courthouses of reason; whole crowds of architectures and sculptures of thought, piled on each other in layers and layers. Decaying. Refusing to go away.
This is its own catastrophe. There is a point of no return in thinking. We can only throw so many bricks through the window. We can only hope for a shore of ceramic shells. A desert of the ruins of our minds.
I want to divulge Death in this way. There is another Death, more primal than that of Hel. There is a Death of No Return.
Humans are made of clay, it is said. But, in this interpretation, we are not made of clay in substance, but in form. A life, as such, is clay in form; all life does return, by the rules of consumption. But it is not a return of “the same”; it is a return of difference:
“The eternal return does not bring back ‘the same’, but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different. Such an identity, produced by difference, is determined as ‘repetition’. Repetition in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different.” (Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition.)
Thus, what is meant by life as clay in form, is that life as such will only return on the basis of the difference. Thus, ceramics uncover that the new is conditional. Only will the curse of ultimate Death be lifted by the return of something different. The horrors of stagnation is much greater than the horror of being (self-)consumed, because, stagnation itself points towards a threshold; that of the Point of No Return. The Sun only shines in the promise of its own demise. This is the promise of ceramics. And thus, maybe Prometheus is the parody of Pandora and not the other way around. Prometheus gave us hydrogen bombs; Pandora gave us difference.