Demonic Geography: Part 1 — A Harmony of Murder
Something has gone wrong. What was once a post oak savanna that served as a segue between prairies and rolling hills has suddenly and drastically had its entire biosphere repurposed by a single organism that, much like viruses, blurs the criteria for what constitutes a living creature. And also like viruses, no directive can be forseeably traced to make sense of its ecological function, if there even is any to be uncovered. What we have been able to figure out is that it appears to have originated out of a symbiotic relationship between homo sapiens and petroleum that developed rapidly and seemingly from a top-down method. Although, the term “symbiotic” seems to be inaccurate, as petroleum has recently developed far more leverage in the relationship than humans: Almost begging to be siphoned out from the crevices of Earth’s interior and burned up akin to how certain fruit yearns to be defecated to begin its fertilization process. If we were to conceptualize of viruses as manifestations of pure biomechanical directive, this can be viewed as a transformative journey for petroleum that transcends both time, distance, and mortality: A first for bio-organisms.
The fermented outcome of ancient discarded biomass beckons one of the youngest mammals on the planet to bring it up from geologic stasis just to be burned and rise into the atmosphere where it begin a warming. Oh, that warming is so familiar: The same heat from which the foundations of life arose in the primordial oceans. Recreation necessitates atmospheric warming, and humankind’s relationship with petroleum seems to be facilitating exactly this. Some would say that we are going to be reborn as a new phase of life that fully synthesizes both the tool and the creator in a literal sense. But others deject, claiming this to be manufactured consent to make one give up the bundle of experiences that come with modular agency and gives the tool the freedom instead. But what they don’t realize is that this has already happened within the second major revolution cycle of modernity, and the price paid for it was a sprawling petroleum monoculture that has shifted the balance of mass on the planet by simply outproducing itself relative to the amount of total biomass.
We tell ourselves fictional stories of a new type of fungus or parasite evolving in such a way to take over organs as complicated as the human brain not to terrify us but rather to comfort us, as speculative evolution can dwell in the security of ambiguous timescale. Whereas, the psychological domination of geological viruses like petroleum is observable as evolving on human timescales precisely because we are the existing catalyst. Comprehending such a thing is far more horrifying because it illuminates a prevailing apathy which is around us, as opposed to the crushing apathies of an indifferent universe far outside of our heavens and indifferent time far beneath our feet. Yet, it’s this knowledge that makes the products of petroleum’s relationship with us the best method to measure our inability to intake the proper scale of our own ecosystems alongside preexisting ones. It is within the roadways of North America that we find the greatest example of the so-called obscenity of the natural world reflected in the artificial: If the world wasn’t already preconceived as violent, then one will do their damnedest to ensure that it’s recalibrated in such a way that unnecessary suffering is part of the design.
Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they — they sing. They just screech in pain. It’s an unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is — is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever … goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has — has created in anger. It’s the only land where — where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at — at what’s around us there — there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of … overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle.
— Werner Herzog
That is the great irony of the first nations imbued to the pact with Petrol: That which was civilized had to be razed to the ground and become uncivilized for the New World to be born. Harmony was deemed impossible to achieve with a world innately predisposed to an apathetic view on violence and death. The cascading toppling — of a centuries-long process of intercontinental political ecosystem generation — allowed for Petrol-controlled population groups to fill the vacuum left by peoples traditionally motivated by survival and sustenance with new settlers that had goals utterly alien to living prosperity. Well, they did adhere to some concept of it, to be fair, but their idea of it had resided somewhere beyond the human experience: Somewhere admonished deep underground, far from the admirers of the heavens that civilized the landscape prior. This material virus would slowly remake their world by quite literally building landmarks to this relationship — not “cities” as they’re traditionally called — on the foundations of civilizations that mended the very dirt to create their celestial centers. What once pointed towards the stars of the deep heavens downwards towards the maw of deep time, all at the expense of the deep ecology that traditionally served as the synthesis between these two glimpses of eternity.
If Petrol has any capacity of choice, then it chose us because of our ability to construct against the odds. We indeed did possess the mental fortitude after such biblical disaster completely upended notions of harmonious relation with the natural world that was necessary to initiate the pact. It made arguments that were hard to counter: How could we be virtually living in paradise when a group of people from another landmass can cause the destruction of entire worlds without ever coming into contact with them? For all our stories of highly destructive gods that slaughter people in the millions, how do we know that these incidents aren’t just another cleansing event for the next iteration of life on Earth to thrive in wake? The first rationalization English settlers had upon seeing the gradual decline of coastal communities along the Dawnland was that God had cleared the land of Indians for them to settle it as their own. Confidently, I can say that this was not the God of the heavens but rather the demonic beckoning of forces deep within the planet. What else would have such venom to reenact an extinction event within human history except that which has been formed through the passing of many previous ones? It’s well acquainted as opposed to the nascent deity of compassion and proselytization brought about by human reasoning.
The Americas are lands of great superficial mining, with Indigenous populations of the Keweenaw Peninsula — located in present-day Michigan — being blessed with the largest deposit of native copper in the world, meaning that it was ready to harvest and not bound to ores that required a smelting culture to utilize. This likely created a precedent that avoided the temptations to mine deeper into the planet and foster an extractivist view of the world’s resources in relation to human potential. They could not predict what interactions they would have with peoples whose mythologies have been long forgotten. If they were remembered, there would have been a profound recognition between the ancient Europeans and Northeastern Indians, for both were peoples who had the immense responsibility of aiding the reconstruction of a world made devoid of life in the wake of colossal glaciation. But the fundamental difference in their cosmologies was where man had been positioned in the cycle of creation, with the Germanic peoples beginning their creation with an act of violence where the colossus Ymir was slain to create the realms of existence from his decomposition. The Algonquian peoples they met would have proclaimed man to be the last of creation bestowed to the Earth, with every other creature being ordained prior to his arrival upon the Manitou molding the four corners of the world into a miigis shell. In one, man’s decomposition had birthed the universe, while the other places man’s genesis at the peak of it.
Indirectly or not, the Germanic mythology favors a Promethean worldview that, by rendering the Earth as the decayed remnants of once legendary humanoid beings, can be more eloquently applied to the history of hyper-extractivist society; favorably as the stitching and reanimating of the long-dead appendages that once animated the predecessors to human life as distinct from all other forms. In Algonquian mythology, the earth has already began living and will continue to do so, with no need to resurrect that which is presumed killed and rotting. But, after the unfathomably ravaging power of Eurasian disease in the American continents, there no longer remained the adequate, cultivated biomass to drown out the signals from decayed life signals deep in the planet, and the clueless Europeans had no idea what was generating them, but their drive insisted that it be followed. Any remaining indigenous life that persevered through first contact should be quickly lumped as an ecological boundary and dealt with as a problem of divine engineering. The question of the theological implications of violence had long been halfway answered after the Albigensian Crusade: Discrimination was God’s responsibility, and the forces of mass death were a means to an end. If there were any debate over how much the additional actions of the perpetrators mattered, it was long irrelevant to the capitalization of death.
A land that has been made devoid of people is no longer a land that has to be interacted with politically: Logistics takes over and remaining populations become mere logical problems for whatever settler impetus overrides the remnants of once important concerns like biogeography, sustainability, or population stability. When the world is viewed in the present as the culmination of dead matter, human populations begin to act as long-term decomposers ecologically speaking, and the dead matter left upon the Americas mere years after European arrival was a problem (or perhaps the better term is “opportunity”) that encouraged greater and more elaborate methods of operating and facilitating this decomposition. The remnants of once thriving Mississippian communities communities — nay, worlds — was the fertilizer that made plantation owners override an agricultural landscape intertwined with the trinitarian permaculture of the Three Sisters with an almost mindlessly abrasive monoculture that grew to service needs found an entire ocean away. This is not conducive to increasing productivity but rather is indicative of a growing need to decompose: To bring the world back to a point where it resembles the appendages of Ymir, rotting in all their transformative potential.
Because the original cosmologies of the land had been trampled and rendered unfit for settler adoption, all that was left to explain the origin of the world to future descendant populations — that would never know of Europe intimately — was that the world was birthed in violence. Therefore, one’s attachment to land was less determined by the capacity to live on and with it and more determined by the scale of violence inflicted to possess it. This new mode of propagation for population growth was highly beneficial to Petrol, since it focused exclusively on creating a labor force, composed of people who know no origin outside of what their labor called them to do, instead of dignified human societies. The major consequence of this was that regionalism had to be destroyed and artificially reinstated as the demand for a unique culture among colonists grew in the absence of rectifying understandings of societal place, leaving ultimately culturally identical people lacks to cling onto for a sense of ethnic pride that is so prevalent throughout the Old World. This was the inevitable future of an ecosystem that had decomposers at the top of its food chain, with apex predators and other layers of the hierarchy being notably absent in the wake of a mass extinction event for human culture.
The Germanic peoples, emboldened by their second millennia history of taking whatever opportunities they can get to ransack ruined civilizations, manifested the spirit of Lebensraum in North America centuries before its literalization in the second World War, which itself was a narrative conclusion to previous German imperialism and missionary work in Baltica in the Middle Ages. In America’s 19th century, the concept of Manifest Destiny was not as much of a certainty as it’s viewed looking back now: It was a tumultuous discourse that was inched along with the expansion of slavery economics and debates over national representation. But the temptation to utilize the reclaimed agrarian power of the once flourishing Mississippian civilization to see just how much memetic viruses — now firmly lodged in the mental apparatuses of all settlers as the extinction reverberates across the continent — can be successfully implanted across all forms of natural resistance was too strong. Despite the murmurings of human rationality among American leaders, Petrol’s beckoning kept driving more and more selfish failures from Europe and proxy Europes into the bubbling residue of the sweltering core beneath the Earth. Historians will tell you that this was a mission to redeem the history of barbarity that plagued the Old World and grant a new beginning to arguably its biggest loser: Europe. By their hands would heaven be brought to Earth to fulfill the covenant God had made to His people so long ago, similarly to the promise He made to Moses that began the Postdiluvian era.
This created a new type of sin that Old World mystics would never have guessed would come to define the new banality: Convenience. When all anthropic boundaries are easily plowed through with enough military might, ecological boundaries are overcome through the memes that Petrol had implanted into the minds of willing settlers. In the normal, unassuming sense of the word, convenience refers to the idea of making existing interactions with the world easier or less subject to unnecessary friction. But in demonic inversion, interaction with the world is completely reworked to something alien from what was originally desired. Convenience, in a demonic sense, can only come to fruition through remaking the world so that our experiences with its conveniences are predesigned, fulfilling an allotted quota rather than enriching real experience. More insidiously, demonic convenience is the meme by which Petrol facilitates its unearthing. All the whimsical narratives of European colonists using the vacuumed Americas as a canvas to create a new world order are anthropocentric lies perpetuated to help those greatest influenced by Petrol feel a sense of organic place and time in the world. The disquieting truth is that entire generational existences remain a footnote in Petrol’s ambitions for a very long deep time reign, where biological welfare is disposable the instant the human culmination of it decides to keep Petrol in the ground.
In settler consciousness, for convenience to have been achieved satisfyingly in an area, it must tame the natural world, fighting against ecological foundations already there until they’ve been subdued and dominated. It is after all the same natural world whose natural laws allowed for incredibly senseless and destructive pathogens to annihilate millions like in Europe a mere century prior. What is owed to a world that frequently leaves men in states desperate enough for resources to conquer and subjugate one another? Unless of course that violence is a metaphysical instrument in the Creator’s grand design; much as it is witnessed in the ordinary act of killing and consuming other forms of life on a regular basis. Petrol offered the perfect ethical solution to the problem of having to rely on the cacophony — nay, orgy — of death that defines consumption of the natural world as a given without bending one’s will to an unthinking machination. It’s disturbingly genius for inanimate matter: People will consume that which has died so long ago that the mere act of consuming them can be conceptualized as reanimation. By this natural ontology, the Indian is the unethical actor, believing they can live in harmony with a world that frequently allows for the existence of disruptions that throw such a notion into heavy question, especially the disease the Europeans brought with them.
The actuality of how humanized the landscape of the Americas were prior to colonization didn’t matter for the campaign against naturalism: Their accomplishments of one of the richest astronomical corpuses in history did not earn them the appropriate reverence as expert stargazers and having a zionward eschatology. No, that does not matter for the imperative of convenience above genuine technological innovation, as can be artistically represented by how the Newark Mounds of Ohio — the largest earthen enclosure in the world — had a golf course built over them for settler amusement. Petrol despises the original stargazers of the Americas because they properly recognize that the spirits within deep time should remain buried lest they return to cause another extinction out of spite. Petrol doesn’t favor those who build to complement a world that, despite all the suffering it has, they respect as their originator. Despite how acutely aware their cosmological models are of the dreamlike nature of material reality, they foresee consequence as the valuable backdrop for individual experience that it is. Petrol is envious to see the ancient echos of stars that the conscious residue that composes it once experienced an inconceivably long time ago. The deep past yearns to break the cyclic nature of the planet that buried it in Hades by convincing linguistic animals that they can preserve a stagnant individuation forever: That they never have to wake up from the dream.
