The Birth of the Mesozoic Era

[Image courtesy of Florian Gerbaud]

“What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess; but the pictures had been there.” (Lovecraft, Shadow Out of Time)

“Man came silently into the world.” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man)

“Thickness of the past, Grundbestand of the real body.” (Merleau-Ponty, Nature)

Our recent work into the archaeology of the human body led to the discovery of a series of fossils contained mostly in the torso and head of the body. Varying in weight and size, our excavation of the body, all carried out under the strictest zoological, archaeological, and ethnographic supervision, established the evolutionary role these fossils played in shaping human life on the planet earth. It was only later—indeed, much later—that we established that these fossils were termed “organs” and that they were required for the homeostatic operation of life.

Thanks to the late work of Merleau-Ponty, we are now able to provisionally conceptualise this work. We can achieve this by placing the existence of the human body in relation to the fossils, of which the former is composed. “The body-object,” so writes Merleau-Ponty in his lectures on nature, “is only a trace—Trace in the mechanical sense: present substitute of a past that no longer is—the trace for us is more than the present effect of the past. It is a survival of the past, an enjambment” (276). Merleau-Ponty inverts the materiality of the body, revealing to us its collision of absence and prehistory in the flesh that has outlasted the passing of time. The body as a substitute, a token gesture for a history that cannot be fathomed by any finite thing.

Deep time has assailed us, and we are placed now in Mesozoic era. It is an era in which we witness the birth of the primate: “The trace and the fossil: ammonite” (Ibid.). This is the alternative history of the human body, a history that is told from dark spaces inaccessible to the flesh alone. For in the flesh, we confront only that which “is no longer there but it is almost there; we have the negative of it” (Ibid). Merleau-Ponty thus assigns a ghostly presence to the still forming, still living human body. Doing so, he breaks the sovereignty of the body as the rational subject. “Humanity” is an outgrowth of an indifferent libido, which, were it not manifest in this bipedal entity we have termed the “human body,” then might just as easily find expression in the rodent faced aye-aye of Madagascar.

But the human body has evolved, and until now has carefully resisted extinction from the known plant we inhabit. What does the body want from this world? Or rather: what does the earth want from this human body? The question must be posed, not at the particular body that actually has life in the phenomenal realm. Of that body, we know only of a transient movement, the value of which is illuminated in the glare of what Merleau-Ponty terms “the genesis of a wake” (277). The invocation of birth as a continuity of a prehistory is where the future of the body lies. What we see in the genesis of life on earth is not the development of one form over another, but the folding back into a deep history that is only disclosed in the fleeting moments where a thing comes into being, before receding into the darkness of living time once again. In that birth, the Mesozoic Era lives alongside the contemporary world. Here, a symbiotic body is established, in which prehistoric alien life gazes tentatively at the fossils implanted in the human torso and head, each indirectly recognising one another in their mutual familiarity and strangeness.