FICTION: “Dominions Within Dominions,” by Adam Cavanaugh
Illustration by Michael Workman / Michael Workman Studio.
FICTION
Dominions Within Dominions
By Adam Cavanaugh
I was shopping for a suit to attend several weddings in the summer of 2023 at an obscure vintage clothing store in Knights Hill, London which I initially mistook for being closed. I rang the buzzer twice before a short, well-dressed Italian led me from the sparse alley into a room densely packed with clothes, where you had to maneuver between stacks of pants, shirts and stands overflowing with belts. The proprietor, Massimo, brought me one suit after another, making adjustments to his mental estimate of my frame, while fabric piled over the door of the change room,
It’s not enough to like it, you only leave with a suit you love,
he said, and heaped another three over the top. The brown suit with stout, retro collars caught my attention and fit me well. I bought it and traveled the forty minutes back to where I was staying with a sense of achievement, but while unbagging the garment I was met with outsize disappointment. Reading in Italian the materials 75% poliestere, 25% viscosa, the suit changed before my eyes into a drab costume, the glow of this experience, searching for the store, the individuating feeling of talking to Massimo—to be seen, and fitted—all of this interaction instantly subverted. I left with something I loved, I arrived with something I resented.
As I regarded the suit with embarrassment, I began to wonder why I thought it was possible to avoid the allure of simulacra and what, in any case, was the basis of this sense of deception? It is partly the feeling of falsity, of not getting what I intended that perturbed me. The idea of vintage suit shopping was partly about evading the snares of modern production. This principle was synthesized with typical organic supremacy, as if to step away from natural materials is to escape the vulgarity of commercial tactics. But artifice is sublated to nature. Why should I feel greater affinity with the cotton plant or the sheep than I do with the polyester yarn production facility workers in 1970s Palermo?
No consumer decision can be made that is not abetting humanity's ambivalent waltz towards environmental catastrophe. The question of how to escape this feeling of damnation, through the exercise of human will is one littered with hubris, self-delusion or simple denial. Ensnarement is unavoidable. What came to mind, though, rather than IPCC reports, ethical clothing companies or Greta Thunbeg, was the 17th century Dutch philosopher of substance monism, Baruch Spinoza, and the ethical system that flows from his work. His seminal, posthumously released Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order was a system wherein the study of nature’s eternal laws were to bring us in accord with our own nature as god’s nature, one we cannot help but to partake in the outpouring of essential substance of the universe. A beautiful thought for a baleful period in history.
The day after my visit to the clothing store, walking across London bridge past Borough market, I saw a sign in front of a café that said “Coffee pods made from plants,” a striking absurdity that seemed to congratulate humanity for packaging a configuration of one plant in a reconfiguration of another. The movement of substance from one form to another is a mystifying process. In antiquity, gods toy with humanity by shifting from one form to another, and we contemporary people can relate to the reproach they might have felt, the doubt this inspires, such as my own, not to see beyond appearance.
Spinoza’s picture is of the necessity of all expressions of universal substance in all particularities. We may wonder if Spinoza would have retained this view in light of climate change, for in his time, examples of material transubstantiation were relatively wholesome. Spinoza was a lens grinder: sand to glass to optical enhancement. To bring him into the light of the 21st century is to wave towards a kind of polyester monism, the necessary flow of all attributes, organic and non, and find a possible guiding principle–a lens– by which to see beyond the present gloom towards, perhaps, the afterglow of human extinction. Or to recognize that inorganic substances have emerged from the natural world from which we and all expressions of our labour and culture are inextricable.
What it comes to is a feeling that polyester is impure and did not come from the earth. Yet it did, as did the petroleum creating it, as did heavy metal, radiation, fascism and pre-made pumpkin spice latte flavour dust. Polyester. Polymer + ester. Polymer, a large molecule consisting of a chain of smaller molecules. Ester, a chemical compound produced by acid or gas. The reconstructive mode of polyester production takes recycled plastic, shreds it, heats it, extrudes it through a sieve into long rope, shreds that, bales it, produces a felt sheet of material, then spells out threads on bobbins, then looms it onto sheets. I folded the brown polyester suit into my suitcase and brought it to Ireland. It traveled with me, crumpled, disavowed, the mere sight of it filling me with strange guilt.
Polyester was one of several microplastics found in all marine environments throughout the world (along with PET, cellophane, polyethylene and cellulose). We can only speculate as to the long-term effects, but there is strong consensus among scientists that the superabundance of microplastics in the ocean will have lasting and irrevocable results. The absorption of microplastics by humans will result in endocrine disruption as well as a laundry list of cellular defects, yet humans are expected to increase production of plastics in the next forty years to keep up with developing markets. Plastic is forever, once a slogan of enthusiasm, now an epigram of despair. It lasts anywhere from 20 to 1000 years, and even then, only gets smaller.
This scale of time is hard to hold in mind. I had been thinking about time in the leadup to my travels in Ireland—a place my ancestors are from—time, with its invisible corridor to past generations and faint genealogical insistence of belonging. What affinity could we possibly have with the distance of history but a certain faith? Ireland is a good place for this type of contemplation, since one of its major tourist attractions seems to be its ineffable sense of ancestral return, an international preoccupation that the Irish bear with good nature.
For this reason, I was fascinated by Newgrange, an Irish neolithic burial site that seems to encapsulate the deep lacunae of our human past. Newgrange is a 5000-year-old stone passage tomb. It is so old, it predates written language in the area. Although I visited County Wicklow, and a manor that was a lightning-rod for Canadians investigating their ancestry, I struggled to be interested—as if to stand in the place your relatives stood could really animate anything about their lives or the existential borders of your relation to them. Still, when it comes to ancient remains I feel a deep yearning for collective belonging with the great chain of genetic predecessors winding us through the years to a point beyond human speciation.
A strange consequence of Spinoza’s monism is that every finite particular, whether shamrock, sheep or shrub, has a mind. Another way to put this is that every particular thing is one part of God/Nature’s infinite mind. Clearly this betrays our most common presuppositions—even if you could accept the idea that non-humans have minds, which most people cannot, how could something without a brain, central nervous system, or beating heart have a mind? For the longest time, a kind of panpsychism was more prevalent. It strikes a romantic note that all things should be expressions of the same universal necessity. This recognition of the universal mindedness of all things is merely a reframing of all material of reality without the belief in ontological separation, a restoration of the fluidity of existence. We might see it as an invitation to review our relationship to the earth and each other, to all items, as one of hospitality rather than extraction. I was interested in this—not as deducible truth, but as intuition, just as intuitions are often the bedrock of cultural belief, much as my revulsion towards my suit was not, precisely, a belief as much as an instinct.
Newgrange is in County Meath. Tall shrubs bordered the narrow roads leading towards the exhibition grounds on a cloudy day in early June. When I arrived at the ticket booth, the seller wore a placid expression of obstinance as they explained that tickets had sold out for the day. Instead, for a cost of twelve euros a person, disorganized visitors such as myself could walk through the small educational exhibit beside the gift shop. Otherwise, there was a lookout near the café where a few coin-operated spy-viewers were available to see groups being led across the green fields some kilometer away at the Newgrange site, a short, wide circle of kerb stones topped with emerald turf.
I paid twelve euros to walk the short exhibit. Lighting simulated the variegated shadows through branches onto a leaf-covered forest floor, to simulate the effect of neolithic ancestors walking through the Meath landscape near the Newgrange site. Recorded chanting and humming attempted to reproduce qualities of ritual practices. Informational panels speculated religious orientations such as the meaning of circular patterns carved into the stone, the way light illuminated passages of the Newgrange stone temples during the winter solstice. The manner in which human remains have been discovered suggests the Neolithic people distributed their kinsfolk with the substrate of the burial grounds, possibly using their ashes in future ceremonies, seeing human embodiments as a temporary, reshaping of the original substance. Neolithic symbols are found throughout, notably the triskelion, three-legged spirals whose meanings are as varied as their appearance throughout the period. Newgrange is one of the oldest sites of this symbol. Some say the image symbolizes momentum forward: three legs in rotational symmetry always moving, overcoming, etc, though an important point with regards to Newgrange is that while archaeologists, historians and mythologists have been hard at study since its rediscovery in the modern era around 1699–then again around 1800 and finally, with massive restorations performed in the 1960s—while all these industrious, fascinated antiquarians and scholars have been hard at work on the site, most of their theories have been disproven one after another.
Newgrange is a site of ritual visitation, both by the ancients and by us. It is a window to a pre-Christian era. The placement of the roof box, a small lintel opening, allows light during the winter solstice to illuminate the tomb passages. The sun entering the tomb could symbolize the sun god’s sexual congress with the earth god, bringing the onset of spring, or it could be a means of revealing the exit to souls trapped within the passage tombs. Some have suggested this, and other aspects of its design enabled ritual practices meant to simulate the mythic aspects of their pre Celtic gods, Tuatha Dé Danann, specifically Dagda, his wife Boann and their son, Oengus. These divine rulers were understood to have an ability to manipulate time, a quality the roof box seems to emulate in the prediction of celestial events. Some have suggested that Newgrange, and the megalithic structures alike, would also have functioned as mnemonic devices for pre-literate civilizations, ways to recall the mythic cycles that bound their cultural identities.
Who were these people? Early myths attest to familial origins, which, according to some genetic traces within the tombs, bears partial truth. One discovered man had two sets of similar genomes, something that is strongly indicative of incestuous forebears. The incest taboo is rarely broken outside of elite family assemblages throughout the world, suggesting, perhaps, some affinity with the myths of Tuatha Dé Danann. Given that archaeological traces provide evidence that these were neolithic farmers, the inhabitants were likely from Anatolia rather than the megalithic hunter-gatherers who predominated Ireland from around 8000 BCE.
This all confuses the idea of origins greatly as an endless, dark corridor, whose passages deepen every step further within. Who knows what anyone visiting Newgrange is looking for in their visits, but probably not the sacred, incestuous union between Anatolian siblings. Anyone expecting identification with Newgrange as symbolic of ancestral sites must look much further afield.
Since the oral tradition seems to have some truth, at least with regards to the brother-sister marriage, perhaps therein lies a tapestry of clues. The tale of Dagda and his life at Newgrange is mentioned in De Gabáil in t-Sída, part of the Ulster cycle, whose incomplete form was discovered in The Yellow Book of Lecan, a composite manuscript from the c17 Connacht. This collection of manuscripts had been found with Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, whose clan were one of the last families of traditionally trained Irish Gaelic Scribes. Dubhaltach being the last in that line who, according to one account, was murdered in his eightieth year while on his way to Dublin, staying in a small house run by a young woman when a boy by the name of Crofton came in propositioning her. To dissuade him, the young woman said they would be seen by their lodger, an old man on route to Dublin. Enraged, the Crofton boy went to his room and stabbed Dubhaltach in the heart.
In the intergenerational scribal work of house Mac Firbhisigh, they chronicled mythology and then later, in the work of Dubhaltach, genealogy, which ultimately seems an extension of the same desire for world-belonging. Dubhaltach’s main contribution was an epic genealogical work whose breadth is compared with The Annals of the Four Masters, a medieval account of Irish elite descent. Whereas the latter was undertaken by chroniclers funded by a Lord of Coolavin, little is known of how Dubhaltach funded his own work, nor his reasons for doing so, for it seems to have been less to do with preserving a knowledge of royal lineage, therefore a project of prestige, than a decisive and complete genealogy for any Irish family, independent of class standing.
Both myth and genealogy are preserved, somehow, in the story of Dagda, Good God, who was the original resident of Newgrange, or Síd in Broga, which his son Oengus tricked him into giving up by begging for Newgrange as his home. Dagda denied him and Oengus pleaded for at least a day and a night at Newgrange, but when day and night were up, and Dagda returned, Oengus proposed that all reality is comprised of day and night, and so Dagda had given him all of day and all of night in the home. The basis of this deception arises from the fact that in Old Irish, there is no indefinite article; things are ambivalently particular and general. If Dagda was a god known for his ability to manipulate time, and his son deceived him based on verbal contortions of its expression, this seems to consummate a pre-Oedipal logic. Yet this exasperation of language by time suffuses Newgrange, where tourists visit out of desire to join their particular existence with ancestral generality.
We hate to be led astray by desire, or worse, to discover the objects of our desires are illusory. For Spinoza, desire is one of the three primitive affects, along with joy and sadness. Desire, he tells us, “can be defined as Appetite together with consciousness of the appetite.” He says that we do not desire good things, but consider things good insofar as we desire them—folly, for desiring is but a form of striving. The experience of reading Spinoza is of being pulled from one definition of a word straight into another. Part three of the Ethics is where Spinoza offers a taxonomy of the affects:
Most of those who have written about the affects, and men’s way of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of Nature, but of things which are outside Nature. Indeed they seem to conceive man in Nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs rather than follows the order of Nature, that he has absolute power over her actions, and that he is determined only by himself.
He goes some way to convince us that although we feel conscious of our actions, the decisions we make to act are little more than appetites themselves. We must look past the appearances of these affects if we expect to understand. Such working out of their interrelations can, at times, feel less the result of his geometric method than the bizarre efforts of a precocious alien during their first day on earth, eg,:
Gladness is a joy, accompanied by the idea of a past thing which has turned out better than we had hoped
Shame is a sadness, accompanied by the idea of some action which we imagine that others blame.
Though when we understand the causes of our affects as situated within nature rather than external to it, we cease to be so swept up, and recognize our place within Nature’s eternal unfolding—the polymerization of history. Even what we see as negative byproducts have some role to play in the universe.
The brown polyester suit presents a way to fit within a substance of the present. The broader concern here is to find a way to move, a freedom within the present that does not risk losing belief in our fundamental connection to all points in history, past, present, present-past, future and future-past. How to avoid the gloom, the sense of inescapable falsity, the desire to disconnect from the malignance of overproduction? How instead to foster connection with the very basis of malignancy, a potentiality as inseparable from that of health and profusion of existence?
Joy is what increases our ability to act, sadness, the opposite; this is how Spinoza sees the affects. If the planet is damaged, but survivable, as the result of our productive habits, we must, in spite of our natural reactions, practice joy—how? What is existence without joy but the ritual procreation of shameful animals? To live in the shadow of guilt is to justify the sorrow of the present.
We must see polyester along a line that extends towards perfection, even if it is one that is outside the scope of our perspective to understand. Some would call this faith. Spinoza would call this reason. I will call this myth. How and why you should feel joy around loss and harm is a creative problem, an interpretive problem, one requiring a plastic capacity to bend affects and reinterpret our connection to ourselves, each other, the past, present and future. A recognition of toxicity of these byproducts is our process of remediating our industrial practices, albeit on a futile-seeming timeline, one that will continue to push us to extremes of political correction until, stubbornly, we improve our relation to the earth. In this case, we are striving towards perfection. Otherwise, we drive ourselves and many animals to extinction, destroying the basis for much of life we have come to see as equivalent with planetary identity—the object of our desire—we mourn the loss of this, but a new ecological system will overshadow us in an unknown bounty.
Why should we mourn unless we doubt the process that tends necessarily towards perfection? In whatever shape or outcome, we must rejoice: a tundra of flowers, the skies replete with magpie, sparrows and blackbirds, an ocean of tardigrades, earth’s floor laden with vines and moss, the air thick with mosquitos–how strange, forbidding, marvelous it is that what might remain, evolve. We must wonder at these possibilities, even if what we mean by we expands to the point of absolute distension. As it does backwards to Newgrange, so does it forward. We all leave with something we love.
WORKS CITED
Benedictus de Spinoza, Benedictus. Ethics. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton University Press, 1994.
Ó Muraíle, Nollaig. “Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh and County Mayo.” Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society. Galway Archaeological & Historical Society, 2006.
Adam Cavanaugh is a writer and librarian living in rural Ontario. His writing has been published by The Baffler, Art Metropole, Common Measure and Commo Mag, with work forthcoming from The Dalhousie Review.
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