Abstract

Looking the contemporary climate emergency in the eye without fantasy compels, for a rampaging species such as ours, a full halt: what does it really mean to be human? Have we always been self-destructive and thus in need of something like a heretofore unattainable (much less unimaginable) revolution? Or did we once know the mutualism inherent in eco-systemic viability over long stretches of time that allowed both human and more-than-human flourishing in a co-communion simultaneously magnificent, but also uncompromising in its enforcements of limits? In exploring such, the résumé of chapter topics herein pursued will wantonly “skip”—with indigenously-provoked curiosity and biblically-exercised exuberance—across seemingly unrelated subjects, ranging from mountains to metals, mules to muck, menhirs to mites. But exercising the writing unrelentingly will be this concern for limitation! How to get our species to stop assuming its supremacy and recommit to a reciprocity with the more-than-human world that might actually have a future? Organizing the inquest here is the trope and reality of monstrosity. How to approach the world of plants and animals, waters and minerals, peaks and winds as a domain of peers and teachers and even “elders” underscoring the fact that monstrosity is our condition, whether as a now outsized species-terror ravaging all else on the planet and provoking the biosphere to respond in kind, or by recovering our ancestral role as symbiotically embedded collaborator with forces larger than our formulas (such as oceans) and more minutely potent than our microscopes (like viruses)? Patent for the “Christian” leanings of the effort—piqued, schooled, and downsized by indigenous challenge—will be the way these “monster agencies” intersect with the tradition’s fascination with angels both beneficent and “fallen”—as Messengers elaborating wisdom or as powers engendering destruction. In the mix the introductory sketch organizes the venture as “Monsters we need to meet” as well as “Monsters we have mobilized” across many millennia as companions, likewise positing as provocation the idea of monsters musing through us, mentoring all around us, and meddling with us—all “from without” in origin and aim, serving an intention mysterious and beyond our comprehension, but ineluctably involving us (and ultimately “eating” us!), whether or not we would cooperate in kind. And obviously the goal is not tight argument but fecund wonderment.