Erotic Ecologies
Not so long ago to read the poem On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) by the 1st century BCE Roman poet Lucretius was met with a death sentence. Drawn from the philosophy of Epicurus and allegedly written in an altered state produced by a love potion, the poem dismissed gods of any kind as impious superstitions while proposing a self-organizing universe made from the continual flow of matter, ceaselessly folding, weaving and unraveling again in systems of transitory phenomena. This did not go over well with the Christians and the book was often deemed one of the more dangerous and subversive texts to have survived from antiquity: see for example the fate of one Giordano Bruno; put to death for ideas inspired by this poem.
Nevertheless, the poem went viral.
One of its last remaining copies had been rediscovered in the 15th century, saved from oblivion and, after a thousand years of Christian repression, this arch-heretical text sprang to life. From then on it would be read and reread by a whole host of bigheads all over Europe, astonished to discover a profound exploration of the physical world without recourse to spirit. Helping in no small part to jump-start the renaissance and the scientific revolution, the poem would go a very long way towards forming modernity as we know it, producing a vision of the cosmos now foundational to the sciences—even including such far-reaching notions as the existence of other worlds, chaos theory and quantum indeterminacy. In the universe described by Lucretius life and meaning are not given to us by heaven, but rather grow up, by chance, out of the material conditions of the erotic earth—to which we are all subjected as we are subject to our own bodies.
It is helpful to note that the infamous and oft misunderstood 19th century philosophy of materialism—itself born whole-cloth from De Rerum Natura—is at the very least a valiant attempt to put some limits upon a psyche that is always threatening to spill everywhere. The main limit imposed upon psyche by Lucretius is that of mors immortalis, immortal death; and in particular the death of the soul; there is no afterlife in this world. For Lucretius, in an ultimately unknowable and ever-changing universe, located just this side of chaos, the fact of death becomes an immortal and ethical datum: everything must die. And not only organic life, as Marx notes (who read this poem closely) but philosophies too must perish, not to mention capitalist political economy—thanks be to god.
Anyways, in the end “death is nothing to us,” Lucretius says; the fear of death and the yearning for immortality caused by religion degrades this life here and now. In the cyclical movement of the universe, mortality is always transforming into life—death continually resolves into Eros.
“So things do not completely die, as they seem to do,
since Nature always re-creates one thing from another,
and nothing can be born save by another’s death.”
Our contemporary understanding of ecology—as a global system of living entanglements and nested complexities—finds its origin too in Lucretius. What we now call the law of conservation began in this poem: “and this is the first of Nature’s basic principles: / no thing can ever be produced by the gods from nothing.” And likewise: “things can never be reduced to nothing.”
These axioms, as integral to thermodynamics as to study of the biosphere, have the rather paradoxical effect of blurring the limit between spirit and mater, organic and nonorganic, animate and inanimate. In this world there is no life and death as such, but rather only the never-ending metabolic transformations of an erotic universe.
Primavera, 1480s, Botticeli (inspired by De Rerum Natura)
