The allure of nature

Three Russian guys in the middle of a field

Three Russian guys stand in the middle of a field. Some rotting logs strewn all over a slope crowned by a rail track, measly wagon on top, all looking into a sickly fog rising from chem-bleached treelines in the horizon.

"It's so beautiful. There's no one in here."

Boss Man guides the other two into a clearing leading to an old manor. He leaves the two to fence in an irritating duel between sciences and humanities. When he has a moment for himself, he sinks in the grass. Music with a very distinct mystic texture begins to swell. A tiny caterpillar crawls over the man's hand. Doesn't even cross his mind to hurt it. He flips over and then smiles. As much as a man can in a Tarkovski film.

1979's mosfilm movie STALKER has lived with me for a long time now. Being fifteen on first watch wasn't exactly the best recipe for a thorough understanding of a movie that was presented to me as some cerebral snoozefest. Certainly didn't understand half of it. But I liked it. So much it still captivates me to this day. Difference being that nowadays I have a more thorough understanding of its themes. I can now understand why I wouldn't enter that Room either and why I'd stand and watch it pour out of nowhere. But there's something I understood first watch.

Nature was the Stalker's refuge, and so was mine. So is mine.

To this day it's the movie I've rewatched the most.

Since then all of my favourite pieces of art have been in some way or another connected to nature. Nausicaä and its more thematically elaborate version Princess Mononoke, giving me some sense of euphoria by deifying a revenge on the excess of man (woman); Annihilation, a novel in which I frequently saw myself in the protagonist's shamelessly misanthropic love for quiet; Dead Man, where nature's brutality inspires a man's poetry; and games like AbyssalSomewhere and Signalis, with a conscious hyperrejection of everything non artificial that never ceases to horrify me.

I don't think it's a secret most of my art is set in nature, or is about nature, or has a theme supported by nature. I guess everyone who cares enough to read this has seen a piece of mine.

I've barely been able to think of something else. Because I'm a Stalker and nature is my refuge. And I like taking people there so they believe, for a bit.

Nature's she/her, or why I feel uncomfortable in makeup shops but love the swamp

I've had a conflicting feeling harmonizing my love for nature with my transness. Or rather, how I mostly feel euphoric about my transness while being in nature. There's a littany of woo woo bullshit ready to consume for middle aged proto-feminists who are still ashamed of armpit hair consisting in profiting off this messy internalized sense of inferiority by selling them a fucked-up regressive reversal of shame into pride. One simply has to take the natural traits that make them less and mysticize them to the point of godhood. Call them the divine feminine, powers of motherhood, feminine intuition. This sort of pop hippie bullshit reaches the trans community too. But I always hated spirituality. And using spirituality as a crotch to claim some sense of security derived from the same thing that makes others see you as a freak is a kind of mental weakness I can't stand.

Low tolerance for woo woo bullshit doesn't prevent me from seeing something special in my transness and how it relates to nature. Irritating as it is to hear about some deep connection to it because I was born a woman's soul, my woman's soul craves nature.

There is an essay by a Jackson Jesse Nash, about my favourite novel, Annihilation, which goes deeper into this shock reaction I feel. He notes that there is a body of justificative jerkoff material about transgender people, or queer people in general, or miscegination, or whatever you want to be mad at, that relies in applying the adjective "unnatural" to whatever is being critiziced. It's a compelling argument, if you're a complete fucking moron. At the same time he notices, along with Transecology, a book he frequently uses as a source, that a love for the natural world is a recurring topic in a lot of queer experiences, at least literary and film. Can't speak for others, but it certainly was in mine.

Nature makes most think of mountain men and hiking men and hunting men. And I'm unnatural, and maybe they're half right since I need chems to function. Yet nature only made me feel like a woman. I'm more secure of my womanhood in a tank top, stomping down on marsh mud than I am in a train under a dozen suspicious stares.

"You a boy or a girl?"

"Girl. Trying at least."

I remember myself sitting alone in a field overgrown by turnip flowers. "I'll do it one day" I thought. "Nevermind". Two years after I was at the doctor's office, shitting bricks, trying to convince him I loved dolls instead of watching Sam Peckimpah.

I still don't fully know how it played a role in that realization. But now I draw women in nature. All the time.

Maybe I'm as irrational as the hippies I hate.

The Van Gogh - Marinetti spectrum

There's an article by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, someone I deeply respect, in which he affirms, to explain the modern epidemic of panic, that panic is what happens when one can't fully understand what's passing by, the object trying to be understood running too fast to do so properly. An acceleration connatural to the information age overwhelming the mind's slow process of knowledge absorption.

I'm prone to panic attacks. Just never show them to anyone.

I feel like there's a certain mystique a lot of people crave in this time of frantic acceleration. Guess you could call it a mystique of pause. Forest ambiance videos on youtube have thousands of millions of views and comments full of people affirming it helps them study. It helps me study. There's a popular series of Red Dead Redemption 2 videos in which some guy hunts for 10 minutes and nothing else happens. Some people still like pause, and nature is a realm of pause.

A city usually compels people to move from A to B, to shop, to street, to go go go. Nature isn't temporal. It's an all-things. An absence of stimuli offensive to modern culture. And so absence of stimuli can be quite attractive when stimuli is the rule. People don't get into hiking for no reason. I've sat down in the high grass and faded for an hour. Meditating. I wish I was there right now. More often than not, I wish I could die there. Stay there.

There is a pain I feel when I am in nature. Pain of having to go back. Nature isn't my home, can never be, but I still feel pain when I leave. Even when I enter it, just having the thought of leaving inside my head. I'm an animal and it's my home here. I'm a furry after all. Please don't make me drive a fucking car again. I hate cars. I pray for roadkill, irreligiously.

And this is where a very interesting tension comes that I have noticed has a much appreciated niche of people. There is a sizable amount of art, online and offline, that merges machine and nature. Man-made and overgrown. Fascination with overgrown man-made structures can be seen in how urban exploration videos online were, and still may be, a viral phenomenon. In the aesthetics of The Last of Us and Metro. In the specific topic of overgrown robotics one can think of the Bastion trailer from the first Overwatch, in Simon Stålenhag's art, and in a personal addition, Fischlich from tumblr.

Machine meets nature. Death versus life. Humanity versus Earth. Metal versus leaf. And versus turns meets. And Machine meets Nature. And the ferocious devourer that is techno-progress meets a sense of benign pause, brimming with life.

And the robot can have a rest. Which makes it all the more painful when man catches up.

Otherkin blues

I don't feel like a human.

I think first time I ever heard of otherkin I stupidly understood it as some wackaloon internet subculture of disturbed gringos in desperate need of basic public mental health investment. Now I feel a half-baked connection to the artform. I have a sona already, I have two. A fox and a wolf. And a fish next. Hell my partner and I play sonas. I'm the big bad wolf or the nice house pup, depending on how the day goes. Who would even want to not go beyond the flesh. I command you: transcend.

I don't literally think I am a nonhuman, because much to my dismay I am. I fantasize about the idea of being a nonhuman because I am trash at being human.

There's obviously something wrong with me. My negative view of humans and their capacity for hate. My incapability to connect with other people. My terror at loud sounds. My terror at new people. My terror at everything normal.

In sum, I have an inability to be human. But not perceptible enough that I can justify it. Perfectly functional abnormality. Bureaucratically impollute.

So I go in nature, and find no resistance. No humans. The Stalker's words again, "it's so beautiful. There's no one in here". I trash the subtleties and think "it's so beautiful because there's no one in here".

I push a trunk and it doesn't budge. I move my hand down and I feel the scratching pain. Mosquitoes bite me but I don't care. It's hot, or cold. It's humid and dirty. It's all resistances. But none of them matter much. There's no judgement for my inhumanity. There's no welcome because of my humanity either. The entire thing ignores me. That means a lot for someone with a track record of being stared at in public.

I'm an animal and I'm at home here, even though I'm not. I think again: I wish I could die here. I wish I didn't have to return.

Somewhere beyond the sea

Sometimes I go out at sea, alone, late at night, drunk off my fucking mind making plans to end it all. I look at the stars and the sea, into an ancient darkness. Only a few plumes of foam visible and overwhelming fizz of retreating waves. A little boat drawing a dot of light in the distance. I hope it's not fishing. I should be afraid of the dark, of being alone, of being a woman alone in the dark in the sea. But I'm not a human but an animal and this is my home. My soul's animal, my body plastic-made. I am both but both are fantasies. Man-made against my will, plastic. Inside a soul that wants pause and wild, animal. I'm a robot in nature. I'm a furry in nature. I feel otherkin as ever. A mess of contradictions that will never be resolved unless I fill my pockets with stones and walk over the sea like I'm Virginia Woolf.

But I never do it.

There's my inspiration for tomorrow's drawing.

Credits, inspirations, further reading

Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature

“I Am Not Returning Home”: A Transgender Reading of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

La pregunta (Bifo Berardi)

MOVIE: STALKER, 1979 (Mosfilm)(Andrei Tarkovsky)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSTxzx46YBqGyAdul44WG6ZUw7s7f7XAd (RDR2 Hunting playlist)