The moment we are conceived, a clock begins to tick. That is the only indisputable fact in life. Everything has this clock, not just animals and humans. Things we create suffer the same fate. Everything has a time when it either breaks, decays, or becomes obsolete. It is the fate of everything. This is, in some sense, an incredibly depressing thought. One that does not warrant too much pondering. But we should not only see it as a negative. In decaying matter, a strange type of beauty can also be found.
Remnants from the past haunt us. Humans have infiltrated every aspect of the world. Plastics in various stages of breakdown, chains that used to hold something back, nets catching helpless fish, everything around us reminds us of this human enslavement of nature and everything linked to nature.
Philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment era, blinded by their own hubris, thought that the ultimate sign of human rationality was the control over nature. The mind-body problem stems from this era, in which the mind is seen as the signifier of rationality and the body a signifier of nature, untamed bodily emotional nature. The thought was at that time that we should conquer nature, the mind would lead the body, and rationality would look down upon nature.
But here we are, 200 hundred or more years after this hubris, burning in our own demise whilst floating in the riches of life. Along with these riches, we discovered the cure to many ailments, except our own hubris. In fact, I would argue, it only got worse. This fictional and faulty divide between human and nature, rationality and bodily, only deepened with time. Now, we cannot even think of a world in which we are not above nature. The infamous philosopher Slavoj Zizek famously said that for some it is easier to think about the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
The end of capitalism would, in some sense, mean the end of this faulty divide. We are fixated on the idea of ruling over nature. Vacant land is either seen as unproductive or dead land. There is no in-between. The problem here is that humans see themselves as the centre of the universe. Everything revolves around us. The desert is seen as a vacant space, in need of trees and cultivation. Yet, we do not understand the complexity of nature. Plant a million trees in the desert and the ocean dies, important nutrients are blown from the sand into the ocean, feeding the rich life.
Our hubris will be our end.
It does not matter where we go, everything is divided into squares of productive land or non-productive spaces. But even here, we find remnants of the past, decaying ideas, and deteriorating historical artefacts of a bygone era. Bolts and nuts, old coins and microplastics. Skeletal remains of bodies of war, ships, boats, the dead outlive the dying. Our ideas have a much longer lifespan than our flesh. Still today we feel the effects of actions set in motion long before we were ideas.
Long after we have passed on, our ideas will continue to live, even though their intended pragmatic use has capitulated itself to something else. The bottlecap is now a house for lost insects, old churches safe spaces for animals to give birth, and books containing ideas of some long-dead philosopher the fuel for a new tree to grow through.
For now, we can only watch the show unfold from the side. Matter decays, infrastructure deteriorates, people blow out their last breath, and the world still spins around its axis. The funny thing about all of this is that we should not be negative about it. I am not a nihilist, I am not trying to make anyone negative. It is merely a description of what is happening around us. We are merely inheritors of a previous world, we did not set the actions that determine today into play. Nor am I a determinist, the future is not cast in stone, even though we sometimes act like it.
Life just is, we cannot totally control everything. I have the free will to buy or not to buy milk in all its varieties at the store. But I do not have will or control over how that milk is contained, the plastic bottle or cardboard lined with plastic box, the plastic bag or the glass bottle, these things are not in my control. The consumer is mostly blamed for the situation we are in, but it is often forgotten that the market forced addictions on us, buy more, buy more, keep the economy alive and buy more. We live and breathe consumerism and this is not our fault, we were conditioned to buy more so that corporates can soak in the infinite growth. But in the same breath, we are chastised for the consumerism.
Life is just what it is. We cannot control the spiralling shipwreck that will inevitably arrive. Infinite growth projections cannot be sustained in a finite world. Our own hubris... I sound like a broken record plate. Our own hubris...
In any case, I hope that you enjoyed this rather philosophical post, my musings inspired by the decay of our creations are something I would like to carry on in more depth. At first, I started photographing movement in decaying driftwood, the lines inspiring me to take photographs of its stories. Now, I shifted my attention to rust, broken rope, and decaying chains.
For now, happy photographing and keep well.
All of the musings are my own, inspired by the photographs, unless stated otherwise. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300 and 50mm Nikkor lens.