Zombie Ants, Stalker (1979), and Jupiter/Uranus in Taurus
Or, How to Solve the Climate Crisis by Not Solving It
A few months ago my therapist (s/o to Tanya) sent me a recording of a lecture from philosopher Bayo Akomolafe, made at the 2023 Biootopia conference in Tallinn. I don’t remember what conversation prompted this link, though I can guess from basic pattern recognition and self-awareness that it was probably feelings of career directionlessness and fears around turning 31. Not important. I became obsessed with this lecture, I listened to it over and over again, I sent it to anyone I thought might even be vaguely interested (and even those who I’m sure were not). The source of my obsession was the lecture’s resonance with ideas that I had been struggling to verbalize, ideas that addressed some friction and incompatibilities that I’d been feeling since the pandemic to do with inside vs. outside, agency vs. surrender, fortune vs. fate (my natal Mercury is conjunct Saturn and square Pluto so the praxis of Hey Lady, Lighten Up is not one I’m super familiar with).
Akomolafe’s lecture is structured as a form of response to our human existential panic in the face of climate crisis. Often the refrain we hear when it comes to the climate crisis (and crisis in general) is one of action. There are things to be done, to confront, to attack. Our orientation as a culture when it comes to the problematic sits upon the axis of ‘at’ and ‘toward’, or ‘for’ and ‘against’; we must stare down the horror with an unflinching gaze and then, once that has been accomplished, we have to Do Something About It. Akomolafe argues that this insistence on forward orientation is a sub-problem of the climate crisis, both sourcing from the same poisoned wellspring. Isn’t a blind allegiance to progress what got us here in the first place?
I’m no longer in the acute obsessive phase with this lecture, but it circled back around to me as I was thinking about how to interpret the Jupiter & Uranus conjunction in Taurus that went exact for four days last week. This is a slow transit and, depending on the methods and orbs (proximity of planets in aspect by degree) an astrologer uses, the repercussions and effects can be said to reverberate for up to 14 months. Uranus, the planet of revolution, sudden change, innovation and breakthroughs, has been in Taurus since 2018. Jupiter joined it relatively recently in May 2023 and will leave for Gemini at the end of May 2024. The planets conjoined at 21º from April 17th to April 21st.
Astrologer Richard Tarnas — whose Cosmos and Psyche is largely dedicated to the history of outer-planet transits and their significations — describes the archetypal confluence of Jupiterian and Uranian energies as “[correlating] consistently with condensed waves of celebrated milestones of creative or emancipatory activity across many fields.”1 To give you a sense of the caliber of milestones we’re talking about, here is an incomplete list: the first publications of the Copernican theory of the solar system from Kepler and Galileo, the American and French revolutions, the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, the moon landing, the invention of the light bulb, the first radio broadcast, the first internet transmission, and the invention of the personal computer. And, I must emphasize again, that an abridged list of innovations. Jupiter and Uranus in aspect is like a divine crack in the wall of the known, a burst of previously unthinkable possibilities becoming possible, the prototypical Eureka.
Taurus is an interesting sign for this conjunction to occupy. It’s not Sagittarius (brilliant ideas), it’s not Aquarius (brilliant technology, peasant revolutions). Taurus is the sign of land, of slow growth and even slower movement. It is as reliable as it is stubborn, it does not deal with what it cannot see — not because it doesn’t believe in a higher power but because it won’t stress hypotheticals and it knows that if anything can be trusted in this world, it’s the law of cyclicality. What dies goes back to the ground and grows again, etc. To put a point on it, Taurus is the sign of capital-N Nature and her manifestation on earth. What happens when a conjunction tightly correlated with massive growth spurts of human innovation occurs in the realm governed by natural law? There are real-world, practical answers to this question that one could cull from headlines (Chani has a good article if you’re looking to get a practical grasp on what this conjunction means), but as a metaphor, it made me think about Zombie Ants, Stalker, and Annihilation.
Akomolafe offers up the idea of interruption as an alternative to ‘taking action’. To illustrate this, he employs the metaphor of Zombie Ants. A Zombie Ant occurs when the fungus ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects insects — ants — by sporulation. When the spore settles it overtakes an ant’s entire nervous system, limbs, and musculature (it’s literally the mushroom from The Last of Us). The fungus, however, leaves the brain intact, meaning that the ant knows that it is no longer itself. Once infected the ant will leave its life in the colony and succumb to the something-else it is becoming — not an ant, not not an ant, but rather another synapse of the mycelial network that infected it. It leaves its home in order to die and also in order to live as part of something bigger.
Capital-N Nature in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Alex Garland’s Annihilation (adapted from Jeff Vandermeer’s novel) is a re-ordering force. It shifts and upends narrative primacy, biological markers, and human desire in a fashion similar to the way the mycelium reorders the ant. When nature plays a role that isn’t just backdrop in a film narrative it is common to see it oriented in one of three ways: direct adversary (any disaster film), friendly-but-tough teacher to a white woman (Eat Pray Love, Wild), or as an M. Night Shyamalan stinker (The Happening and Old… somebody please remove this man from Hollywood). In each of these approaches nature is taken for granted as working on the axis of ‘for’ and ‘against’ the human to either uplift or torture (or make old really fast). Stalker and Annihilation are movies about what happens when the axis is a MacGuffin and the true engine of the story (Nature) is working both beyond and within the character’s agency and consciousness. In these films, Nature is a co-creator.
Both Stalker and Annihilation are about people who enter areas (or zones) in which a strange and invisible ‘event’ has occurred. The zones have been cordoned off by the government and deemed dangerous to humans, and a group of people identified only by their professions or social roles (the Biologist, the Writer, the Psychologist, etc) (technically the Hollywood-ification of Annihilation does actually give everyone names, the book version refrains) enter the zone to explore, delineate, and exploit. Instead, the group finds themselves at the mercy of the strange ecosystem they’ve invaded whose intelligence becomes a silent and total usurper. Words and names are lost, allegiances cast aside, thought patterns shift and change into unfamiliar and nonlinear organic spirals that seem to be the consciousness of the space made manifest. The concerns of the landscape become the concerns of the humans until the two are indistinguishable, or human concerns are rendered irrelevant.
Akomolafe employs the image of the Zombie Ant as an example of something he calls the ‘paraterranean’. The paraterranean is an alternative mode of being to modernity and modernity’s relationship to nature, a place outside the flatness of the anthropocen. As Akomolafe puts it: a “parallax of limbs, tentacles, and place-making gestures that sidles the dominant sensorial surface and disrupts the idea of justice.” The paraterranean (which Akomolafe himself admits is a term still seeking full definition, I can’t pretend to have a full grasp on it here), is simultaneously an unburdening from the colonial delusion that we are shepherds of the earth and a re-obligation to the earth as something from which we are inextricable. The axis of nature as something we are against or toward is an axis that flagellates itself by deploying ideas about morality. On the axis, we are constantly asking whether or not humans are good for nature and this planet, whether or not we ‘deserve’ to be here, whether or not we are worthy. When film represents (capital-N) Nature on this axis, it oftentimes can’t help but present us with a binary of awe: we are either humbled by nature’s great beauty or destroyed by its great force. In awe, we remain separate; in the paraterranean, we become capable of dialogue. “I think the only way we are going to address climate chaos,” Akomolafe says, “is if we get infected. […] We must lose our way… [and] come alive to other ways of being in the world.”
If we are the intrepid human explorers, the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction in Taurus is The Zone: a conception of nature in an infectious, intelligent, paraterranean form, blowing apart our shortsighted desires and white-knuckled plans. As the dual accelerants of Jupiter and Uranus are set to work in the key of deliberate and permanent Taurus we are prodded into different options of radicality. And there is a radicality in permanence, I think. In our current collective cultural hive-mind (speaking from the perspective of an American) the overarching tenor to conversations around environmental and societal collapse is one of doom and devastation with an extra defensive layer of cynicism and irony.
We seem to be preparing for the end before the end arrives, foreclosing on our own imagined futures when the imaginations in question doing the foreclosing are ones that have been dulled and flattened by the strictures of an extremely unimaginative present. We’re working with bad tools. We’ve become convinced that permanence is a state to be fought for and defended, but if Taurus is to be believed, nothing really dies and everything is given. The terror of climate chaos isn’t what will happen to earth, because the earth will be fine — what we’re scared of is what we will do to ourselves. The relief that the paraterranean and the archetypal experience of Jupiter/Uranus in Taurus might be able to provide is in the idea that the ‘answers’ we are looking for might lie elsewhere: in fungi, in plant rhythms, in other time spaces and other languages. That we would presume to know our own fate, now, from this incompetent state, doesn’t make much sense.
This is the dramatic choice of both Stalker and Annihilation: to explore what happens when you stop fighting the separation and allow nature to wreak its havoc and make its own intelligent judgements. In both films the organic is a silent and mysterious co-author — beyond ally, beyond antagonist, and beyond human. It is not something that can be fought or negotiated with, it is not something that works on human time or by human will. At the end of Annihilation Natalie Portman, at this point more likely than not a tentacle of Area X, leaves the Shimmer to reunite with her husband who is also a tentacle. The expected answers and vanquishing of the alien don’t occur. In Stalker, Anatoly Solonitsyn finds nothing but hopelessness in the Zone, but is inspired anew by the unflagging love of the Stalker’s wife. Neither he nor the other two men who entered the Zone came across the answers they expected to find and that was fine. Maybe when an unstoppable force (Jupiter/Uranus) meets an immovable object (Taurus), the result is not an impasse or an unsolvable question but a shimmering, mycelial, alien third thing, something so strange and new that in order to understand it we’ll probably have to get infected2.
Tarnas, Richard, “Cosmos and Psyche,” pg. 294
and if bird flu becomes a thing I’ll be deleting this post.