Midnight and the Black Box

Abstract

The parasitic relation is intersubjective. It is the atomic form of our relations. Let us try to face it head-on, like death, like the sun. We are all attacked, together. What is this sudden dangerous noise at the door that prevents me from finishing and leads me to other actions? Michel Serres tells me that I emerge in debt. In another universe, I don't know this cat in my lap. Her human companion and I passed each other by, we never became lovers. I don't know whether she is dead or alive. One of the earliest Buddhist teachings is the twelve-fold chain of dependent co-origination (pratītyasamutpāda). The basic idea is: “That being, this comes to be; from the arising of that, this arises; that being absent, this is not; from the cessation of that, this ceases” (Nāṇamoli and Bodhi 655–56). Through a wide-ranging process of evolution, this deceptively simple observation has become the notion of “interdependence” so beloved by ecologists. But the basic idea is entanglement, about which we are understandably profoundly ambivalent. We cling to reflections of our own independent agency, and this clinging binds us to others. Deep connection is thrilling, but unfreedom is not.