The Saving Verge: Woolf, Cézanne, and Things
Above all, by means of remarking that “great moth” imaged as “sailing through the room” under the logic of “as if,” we may remember the “uncertainty” of our presences, along with the gifts which the indeterminate bestows on us, since any “ambiguity” can be reshaped, reproportioned—remade. From the concept of remaking, we might just possibly learn the human duty to rescue what we know as the world from our destruction of it. Should that knowledge materialize through species self-interest, I hope only that moths, that waves, that pluralities of things survive the time needed for us to comply with listening to it, with heeding what Jonas’s essay, “Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics,” announces in 1972 as “the critical vulnerability of nature to man’s technological intervention—unsuspected before it began to show itself in damage already done” (9). Yet, so far as our desires presuppose a visuality that must be there, absolutely, a “Gaia” meant for the taking, the necessity of reparation will, for us, never stop:
This discovery, whose shock led to the concept and nascent science of ecology, alters the very concept of ourselves as a causal agency in the larger scheme of things. It brings to light, through the effects, that the nature of human action has de facto changed, and that an object of an entirely new order—no less than the whole biosphere of the planet—has been added to what we must be responsible for because of our power over it. (9)
While the texts we have been lingering over may encourage our aptitude for meditating on the human and the non-human, such encouragement occurs by virtue of the “living system” that predicates their interdependence. And our responsibility for the character of how we touch-on, how we verge-on, that interdependence is a lesson which merits all the dedication we can bear to concentrate on learning it.
