infinitely entangled with…

∞ infinitely entangled with ∞

ruminations on learning to be lovers of holes, students of metabolisms & symbiotic multitudes in times of extinction

Everything I am, sense, feel, think, speak, metabolise, write in this life and also in this text is deeply indebted to a myriad of other beings, contexts, collectives, ecologies, friends. I am nothing without a world that sustains me. In the text below I remix anecdotes, perspectives, resonances, quotes, reflections, dreams of being otherwise present in the here and now. All of these are non-linear and open-ended wonderings on perforating and letting go, in order to rehearse wider and deeper connections. I dip into different waters that I have been swimming with for the past year, the past ten years, my whole life, 10 thousand, 10 million years. You are invited to flow with these ruminations and hopefully they can offer some curiosity and agencies for the holes in (y)our worlds.

∞ in this text means “infinitely entangled with”

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holes

My daughter tells me a joke: “mama, what does the zero say to the eight?” After a little excitedly anticipating pause she bursts out with joy and laughter: “nice belt!”

The zero is a hole. The eight is a hole twisted in the middle creating two holes. Flipped on its side it becomes infinity: an infinitely complex multitude of holes. Mostly when we speak or think of holes, we refer to ontologically parasitical holes, that is, the holes that are in something else and cannot exist in isolation like holes in a cheese or potholes. Sometimes we sense into scientific holes, like electron holes or super massive black holes as phenomena that exceed our event horizons. Psychologically we indicate holes in memories, blind spots in our perceptions, gaps in our knowledges, holes as indicators that information is missing. We go down metaphoric rabbit holes, try to dodge bullet holes, and do mental gymnastics around wormholes. Our body—topologically speaking—is a donut^[1] with the mouth-anus line, our digestive tract and gut, being the hole in its middle. We eat, metabolise and shit, play, reproduce and see, smell and hear with and through holes; they are our lifelines, connectors between insides and outsides, somehow involved in and/or part of everything that keeps (us) alive. We always know too little about (our) holes, about the holes that constitute and sustain us.

Then there is also the way in which our perception and senses are organised. Laying under a tree and looking up, we see the leaves and the branches. We don’t really see the holes between them. Or even if we see them, we don’t perceive them as anything of importance. Looking at the sky on a clear dark night, we see stars. We don’t see what’s in between and yet it makes sense that in the light years of what we perceive as emptiness, infinite processes and phenomena are happening.

Holes are often perceived as something scary. They make tangible the edges of our understanding, the limits of human senses and knowledge. Conspiracies of control treat them as mistakes that need filling, mending, or fixing to maintain the illusions of coherence, separability, and universal law. Scientific experiments, as intriguing as they are—for example the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) or the Human MicroBiome Project (HMP)—show how far humans are willing to go to confirm the coherence of their own belief systems, or put differently: to get rid of the holes, the inconsistencies, instabilities, and ambiguities holes bring along. It makes sense that the observer changes the experiment. In a way—unless we are willing to let go of our attachment to our mirrors—we will mostly see ourselves, our knowledge and belief systems reflected back to us, no matter what we are studying. No matter which hole we are staring into, we will stare right back at ourselves. So, I wonder: can we develop a different, more finely tuned literacy for, with, and through holes, something that changes us—the observer—profoundly? Can holes give us the courage to change our perceptions of, as well as our experiences and practices of ourselves, in order to get out of this mirror cabinet?

My whole life I identified as a hole. Especially when I was younger, I had a hard time with concepts like “knowing yourself“ or “having a sense of self” and shamefully felt a black hole full of multiplicities and incoherencies instead. Only in recent years—through my fascination with metabolic ecologies and their holes—have I come to understand holes as great sites of training relational muscles that decentre the mind and centre the gut instead. I came to understand holes as impressive sites of empowerment and agency. As important elements of aliveness and its contradictions. As indispensable tools to rehearse connection through being immersed within, without the illusion of control.

My body is a donut, the hole inside me is the world.
My body is a donut, the hole inside me is the multiverse.
My body is a donut, the hole inside me is all beings.
My body is a donut, the hole inside me is life.

OOOOO – I scream,
a sequence of holes touching each other across different planes.

metabolic literacies

What does a commitment to finetune and co-sense^[2] with the complex metabolic ecologies and processes that the gut offers to us reveal about our relationships with Earth’s and humanity’s evolution? About holes and uncertainties, about love, multitudes, responsibilities, and agencies, and about our infinite entanglements with the beautiful, the broken, the ugly, and the fucked up?^[3] What do the vastness, diversity, and unmanageable complexity of the gut biome, amongst other things offer as a non-metaphorical example of what can and does happen inside holes? Holes are full of aliveness, full of—causal and acausal—awe-inspiring complexity, full of constant conversion of one thing into another, leading to “inexorable new growth and constant transformation.” ^[4]

Metabolic literacies encompass the invisible microbial and mycelial threads that connect us to everything that exists, they are a possibility to be moved by, through and with the world and all its beings, to rehearse listening and paying attention to what already is—and what wants to be recognized for—being in touch with us. In these acute times of extinction, metabolic literacies ask us to be intimate with what happens when we break down mass into energy, and how we are present with the web of relations that makes these processes possible. Our metabolic literacies are mirrors of how we live, how we love, how we kill, and how we relate to each other and all beings on this planet in the midst of this poly-crisis. They insist that we matter and everything matters through us, beyond destructive illusions of subjectivities and separateness. They are an appeal to be(come) what we inquire. They are an invitation to humble (and/or blow-up) our minds and co-speciate with our guts, our intuition, our wisdom, instead. And to co-sense and listen into the complexity of millions of microbial tongues and languages that each co-create the immense web of entangled multitudes in intimate, erotic relation with one another that we call life. Metabolic literacies are literacies that embrace, make and consist of holes. Metabolisms and holes are infinitely entangled.

in ∞ stable worlds

Beyond the drama of separateness that any representational model of reality is based on, there are erotic ecologies too complex and entangled for human intelligence or knowledge systems to grasp. Francisco Varela shows with his experiments in the ‘70s around light and colour that colour, scientifically, does not exist. Through that revelation he reveals the interesting discrepancy of how you and I are put together in relation to a fictional, but stable reality that we can literally dip into. In this clash between something we can dip into and the way we seem (internally) coherent, the world emerges. He also points out that between the clash of what the cells in our eyes are doing and how our brains process this information emerges a stable reality we all agree on: colour. He concludes: simply said, the brain is a system constructed to create a stable reality, it is not a device to pick up information.^[5]

It is hard to know if stable realities are entirely man-made. We know that even if other species have completely different perceptions of the same world, they don’t accidentally bump, fly or swim into one another, so there seem to be some shared “stable” parameters that are useful in cohabitating spaces. To be governed by this need for stability however, and live by it, has catastrophic consequences. Stability is an illusion that anthropocentric humans have created and live by, elevating the brain and its faculties—mind and reason—to the apex of human existence, disconnected from valuable information that conditions a liveable world for all beings. There is an immense world out there that instinctively knows—without the reasoning interface of the modern human brain—that we all feed—and are nourished by—one another, that we could not exist without each other and behave and live accordingly. Within entangled networks of fluid exchanges, stability does not exist. Everything is digesting, transforming, growing, collapsing, and composting. With the uncountable simultaneous processes the human gut hosts and connects all the time, how can we reclaim it as a more suited system to pick up information? One that is full of holes, inconsistencies, constant transformation, and inter-relatedness.

black holes

A hole sometimes asks with great gravity to be filled. But does it really? Or is it rather the empowering possibility of a hole to suck in and metabolise that which does not serve aliveness into an exquisite game of remixing and rewiring?

I am a black hole.

Because of my black hole multiverses cannot be described exactly by physical laws. What of you dissolves when you put your hand into my black hole? Isn’t it interesting when observations and sensations don’t conform to our standard templates of how things behave?

Black holes bend spacetime so greatly that even light behind me curves so much that it can hit you through my transformations. I’m not mocking you but asking you: please, try and figure me out, play with me without ever fully understanding. I am part of the black hole initiative, drawn to the limits, drawn to the edges of understanding. Surrender is touching the no beyond. There is a mechanism for how information travels in and out of a black hole. We can’t read it with our eyes or mind but we can encounter it through transformative touch.

Very scientific of me to say: this has the right feel!
For change.

complex worlds

If I orient myself towards the infinite complexity at the gut of aliveness itself, can I let go of metaphors, instead of using them to cosy up to the comfort-seeking parts of myself, the ones that seek to cover up my ontological laziness? In an infinitely complex and entangled world there is no world behind the world needed. There are just relationships and phenomena that reveal themselves through how we are able to co-sense within these relationships. In any inquiry worth my life time and my energy, there is no space for a pretence severance of what I inquire. There are only invitations to become and co-sense with what I observe and what I am curious about. While metaphors can still guide us in exploring and understanding connections across scales, realms, and forms within our current structures—even though, like language, they may reinforce an illusion of separation—we often become trapped in reductive interpretations, shielding ourselves from the overwhelming vastness surrounding us at every moment.^[6] While I am aware that this text can be read to highly rely on metaphors, the relational complexity I am trying to wake up to and train with—and that I describe or share in my work—is not metaphorical. The holes inside me are the world. They are also theirstory, the recording surface of every being that has ever lived. The story of the evolution of life in all its complexities is inscribed into all living matter. The primordial soup that has created everything around us is the mucus membranes that line our guts. Blood is seawater, and while we carry the terrestrial sea within us,^[7] we also carry the slimy and messy metabolic acts of symbioses and everything they entail, without them needing to represent something or become symbols for something else. A complex world is full enough.

micro-biotic co-speciations

A complex world is a relational gym. A complex world is full of holes.

Those were the days when we were all at sea. It seems like yesterday to me. Species, sex, race, class: in those days none of this meant anything at all. No parents, no children, just ourselves, strings of inseparable sisters, warm and wet, indistinguishable from one another, gloriously indiscriminate, promiscuous and fused. (…) we were whatever we were up to at the time. Free exchanges, micro-processes finely tuned, polymorphous transfers without regard for borders and boundaries. There was nothing to hang on to, nothing to be grasped, nothing to protect or be protected from. Insides and outsides did not count. We gave no thought to any such things. We gave no thought to anything at all.^[8]

And then something happened: the first step in the origin of eukaryotes from prokaryotes was related to survival in the new oxygen-containing atmosphere: an aerobic prokaryotic microbe was ingested into the cytoplasm of a heterotrophic anaerobe.^[9] Lynn Margulis offers us the discernment into evolution through describing life as symbiosis. Symbiosis means many things, describing countless relationships profoundly differing in kind: mutualistic ones, commensalistic ones, mimicking ones, cleaning ones, amensalistic ones, parasitic ones and—similarly to the night skies and the vast spaces in between—a myriad more that we can neither sense nor describe. Margulis offers us an alternative to the Darwinian model and its toxic and narrow narratives of evolution. Hers is based on cooperation, interaction, and mutual dependence among organisms; “life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”^[10]

The fig and the wasp, the mycorrhiza and the tree, the archaea and the bacteria, just a few examples of a myriad of symbiotic relationships, each one full of infinities and holes, full of transformations, metabolisms, co- and inter-actions.

I wonder.

symbioses ∞ metabolisms

Both symbioses and metabolisms are phenomena involving a movement of multitudes so varied, complex, and omnipresent in all layers of existence that it makes sense—as a first step and non-negotiable given—to always honour the holes, partialities, inconsistencies, dissonances, and gaps present in every moment of our journey to co-sense, unlearn, listen to, and transform with all the contributing factors.

How much opposition can a life-form tolerate within itself? How much opposition is necessary for the process of life to progress at all? How crucial is this idea of opposition, or paradox, to our understanding of life? (…) A cell only functions (…) because it is incompatible with itself. Because its component parts are irreconcilable. Every cell is its own contradiction as long as it is alive.^[11]

Etymologically speaking, metabolism means change. A striking feature of metabolisms is the similarity of the basic metabolic pathways among vastly different species. For example, the set of carboxylic acids—intermediates in the citric acid cycle—are present in all known organisms, being found in species as diverse as the unicellular bacterium E-coli and huge multicellular organisms like elephants^[12] These similarities in metabolic pathways are likely due to their early appearance in evolutionary history and show us that metabolic patterns never only appear on one scale or isolated location, but that they, similar to symbioses, are networking activities that span across species over the entire biosphere.

Albeit they are not the same, metabolisms and symbioses are infinitely entangled. Their connections shape the beautiful, awe-inspiring, and incomprehensible paradoxes of life. The deeper we zoom in, the more we realise there is nothing to grasp, nothing to hold on to. As soon as we start metabolising, we are severed, and at the same time our metabolisms are constant manifestations of our interdependence and connectedness. We all come from wombs in which our current form was made possible by someone else’s metabolisms.

Our phase of life in our mother’s body is the ecological archetype for a connection-in-separation (…) The healthy connection is one of close connection, not symbiosis. Only because the mother is herself alone, and not the foetus, is she able to give the child what it needs. A connection is only possible because both are distinct from one another.^[13] 

The foundation of this distinction is connection. To be pushed out and become our own being means to always carry the memory of inter-dependency deep in our every cell, deep inside all the billions of beings that compose and sustain us.

Metabolisms are self-organised systems. They are horizontally guiding us through the phase of our presence where we constantly negotiate our severance with our interconnectedness, until we merge back into the soup—or erotic lasagna^[14]—of existence. Metabolisms are sacred sites of co-speciations; every time we shit, it is a prayer, a material reminder that we come from and go back into our microbial mothers, that we are always also-them, coming from and going back to infinity and one-ness, dancing between formlessness and form. Metabolisms are acts of multi-species love and transformation. They guide us through the part of our journey in which dualisms will—through living and dying—merge back into non-dualistic dances of being. While we ingest, we are also being ingested, while we metabolise we are also being metabolised, while we excrete we are also being excreted.

In an average grown-up the gut microbiome makes up at least 2 kg of your body weight. One part of the complex co-speciation in the perplexing ecologies of your gut are bacteria. They alone weigh close to 1.5 kg and are made up of about 1 trillion cells, equivalent to the total number of cells that make up the human body. They are passed on to us by our mothers. And their mothers. All the way back to all of our mothers swimming in the primordial soup, which still lives inside and shapes us. Whilst the microbiome is dispersed across our bodies in different niches, when we say gut, what we mostly mean is the colon, as this is where most microbes exist. Amongst other things, our gut biome shapes our immune system, our sexual behaviour, our brain and thoughts, our moods and feelings, our intuition, and also our childhood and death. In other words, many things we would call our mood, personality, character, or spirit. All of these are connected and shaped by our metabolic processes. This is only part of the story, as our Umwelt^[15] is in constant communication and co-speciation with our microbes: where we live, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the medicines we take, who we share our intimate spaces with, and of course war, ecological disasters, industrial pollution, soil depletion, trauma, poverty, and stress all shape our exposome,^[16] which is constantly transforming through microbial exchanges, through invisible microbial patterns of connection. All biomes of Earth are infinitely entangled with and through boundless multiplicities, composing one important plane of our shared collective body and its metabolisms: the Global Microbiome.

multitudes ∞ ecologies

Multitude is a term for a group that cannot be classified under any distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence. Humans contain and compose various uncountable, possibly infinite multitudes. We are constantly interacting as and with innumerable multitudes. They can be described as vast networks, as open-ended relational systems that are too complex to be specified, so our engagements with and understanding of them can always only be partial and inconsistent. Multitudes are full of holes.

Ecologies and multitudes are infinitely entangled.

What makes a healthy microbiome is as complex of a question as what makes a healthy forest. When it comes to microbes, context and relationships are everything. To a scientist trained in reductionist models of disease, these concepts can be challenging. To an ecologist trained in understanding how systems function, the principles upon which health depends—biodiversity and balance—are familiar.^[17]

In various diseases, such as type II diabetes, metabolic syndrome and cancer, normal metabolism is disrupted. The metabolism of cancer cells is also different from the metabolism of normal cells, and these differences are interesting information, revealing disjointed, toxic patterns appearing on all scales of human existence that neither serve us nor any other living being.

An appropriately biodiverse and functional gut microbiome is our most sophisticated defence against inflammatory disease. The less diverse our gut microbes are, the more inflamed we seem to be. A lack of gut biodiversity is as associated with cardiovascular disease, asthma, allergies, obesity, diabetes, suicide, colon cancer, Alzheimers disease, inflammatory bowel disease and autoimmune disease. In this area of active research, early indication suggests that a microbiome that lacks diversity cannot produce a balanced immune response.^[18]

If a lack of diversity cannot produce a balanced immune response, it will not produce any other balanced responses. Be they thoughts, behavioural patterns, or feelings.

fire

“If your house were on fire and you could just take one thing, what would you take?
I would take the fire.” ^[19]

super metabolisms

“Once we lose the bacteria that temper inflammation—and they can disappear over a single human generation—it is not clear that we can ever get them back.” ^[20]

The global community of bacteria, which are responsible for the transport of carbon, nitrogen, and all other cycles of the biosphere, is almost four billion years old. Not just the status quo of our planet, but its entire evolution are recorded—at least partially—in your gut. Bacteria are the elders of planetary life forms, and they co-compose all living forms including our own. They contain the past, present, and future of life that humans are merely a humble part of.^[21] We don’t just ingest, metabolise and excrete, we are also metabolisms, ingestions, and excretions within the shapings of inner and outer ecologies alike. “The world is not an aggregation of things, but rather a symphony of relationships between (immeasurable) participants that are altered by interaction: a necessarily erotic interaction.”^[22]

Different from the sexuality of organisms with a cell nucleus (one cellars, plants, fungi, animals), the sexuality of bacteria crosses boundaries of species, without species conservation playing a role. In principle, bacteria are sexually involved in all genes in the world. The Canadian bacteriologist Sorin Sonea draws attention to the fact that bacteria, with their ability to freely exchange genes across all supposed species boundaries, cannot actually be assigned to any species at all. In this constant dance and transformation through horizontal gene-transfer with their infinite number and metabolic diversity, they form a global superorganism whose bodily outlines are those of the biosphere itself. Lynn Margulis writes that this superorganism is clearly sexual, because its countless parts exchange genes independently. It literally has sex with itself, she concludes. I wonder if this process could also be described as a super-metabolism that constantly metabolises and transforms parts of itself, extending into and including our human guts.

There is as little romantic, pure, or innocent about erotic interaction as there is about symbioses, metabolisms, or coevolution. Touch means change, and as we know touch is not always good. There are many traces left by touches that we did not choose. And then there are traces of touches that make us expand, be open, curious, and porous without falling apart. One of the most important laws of microbial multiverses is that everything changes. If change is touch, doesn’t it make sense that everything touches as well?

intimacies

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. (God is Change).”^[23]

Where are you? You are opaque to me. That is okay. But living and loving entails the risk of revealing yourself, of breaking out of yourself, of being ready to let go of parts of yourself. Of reaching out, making yourself vulnerable, sharing, exposing yourself in possibly disturbing ways. Intimacies are risky, they require revealing your insides and allowing them to melt into your outsides. How much time and energy do we invest in social, familiar, financial stability? How many hours of our lifetime do we dedicate to maintaining the things that make us feel safe? How many boundaries do we put up in order to protect ourselves from pain and ultimately deprive ourselves of the possibility of intimate connections and the deep transformations they make possible? And how much time and energy do we dedicate, truly commit to connection and intimacy? How much of our lifetime are we devoting to being students of touch and connection?

In a world where intimacy and intimate relationships are equated with property relations, generosity is exploited. Patriarchal and hetero-normative templates erode our ways to practise love into some kind of investment, where we “count” on relationships “in return” for our time, care and engagement; where we “use” others as “objects” to fulfil our needs and desires; where we measure how advantageous someone or something is for our agenda or growth; and where we manipulate them—albeit often unconsciously—to give us what we want from them. This is when intimacy is confused with convenience. Earth is crying, and I echo her cries, as I resonate with my wells too often just being taken for granted. Those most generous towards us we often disregard, devalue, minimise. They have to fight harder than strangers to be recognized by us. Deep down inside our holes we know we are infinitely indebted, and the discomfort it creates to owe somebody or something, to actually owe them more than we could ever pay, makes us shamefully disregard them, often without noticing. It takes humility and generosity to be indebted to someone, to truly credit and honour a being that has made so much for, and of, you possible. Because everything we are, say and do comes from elsewhere, it is crucial to proactively pay tribute to the lineages and webs of relations that sustain us at prime value, instead of just grabbing whatever we need when we like it, to the point where we forget where it came from. To actually listen to the needs of those whom you claim to love; to be of (devotional) service to their needs, instead of staying within defensive and righteous safety that makes you feel and look good; to manifest unconditional regard and recognition to the ones who nourish you, love you, and continuously offer their relational wealth to you; to honour your metabolic lineages is significant. Too often we just ride on a beloved’s bus, tasting and ingesting all it has to offer, making it our own and then just blend out whose relational dedication and embodied labour has made it possible for us to be fed in those ways. And we all collectively echo these erosive patterns of intimacy with Earth’s body, that has given and made possible everything for us.

The way we see and relate to (our) metabolisms says everything about how we relate to intimacies. Many children still learn that food is something you throw into an oven that gives you energy by burning it; severed, broken down, measured, and calculated in ridiculous units like calories. On Wikipedia, “metabolisms” are described as “the sum of all chemical reactions that occur in living organisms, including digestion and the transportation of substances into and between different cells.” But metabolisms are not “engines” that “fuel” “transportations” of “substances,” limited to “chemical reactions” within a cell or body; and to view them as machines and read their processes as mechanical is fatal, also to our capacities for intimacies. Our literacies around intimacies are similarly crude, dangerously flawed, and as limited as our metabolic literacies. We need to urgently expand our intimacy literacies in ways in which they can mirror and honour aliveness’ holes; in which we allow ourselves to be marvelled by the unexpected movements and connections they enable. Metabolisms are transformative relational systems of encounters, spanning across and connecting all living beings of the biosphere. Can there be something more intimate? They are living proofs of manifesting intimacies through change by touch in processes too far reaching and complex to be described by simplistic models of cost-benefit, master-slave, or even reciprocity. They are miraculous. We are infinitely indebted to the myriad of beings that make us possible, but instead of celebrating these deep dependencies with committed practices and service, we disregard how and what we eat and metabolise in similar ways as we disregard what we love.

“Ensoulment is ensoilment. Soul is soil.” ^[24]

Intimacy means to get our hands dirty. Put your hands into the soil and let me put my hands in yours. Stop thinking and talking, and allow the relational up- and downloads to perforate you, to let go of the façades that you need to maintain your subjectivity. Shit into a bucket, dig a hole, and compost yourself. Metabolic processes are by themselves oriented towards intimacies. Consisting of them, they are vectors always seeking connections. All we have to do is to get out of the way.

Tell the Earth I love you, I can’t live without you. (…) Spend time with her. Ask her what she likes, wants and needs and then try to give it to her. Admire her views often. Circulate erotic energy with her, smell her, taste her. Touch her all over. Hug and stroke their trees, talk dirty to her plants. Lay on top of her and let her get on top of you. Do a nude dance for her, sing to her, kiss and lick her. (…) Love her unconditionally even if she seems angry or cruel. If you see her abused, raped, exploited protect her as best as you can. Vow to honour and cherish the Earth until death brings you closer together forever.^[25]

Regular and consistent rituals of regard are indispensable to grow more conscious in all our relations, to live in deeper and wider intimacies—beyond consumerist and extractive practices. True encounters and connections require intimacy. And intimacy requires the work of constant negotiation. Multiple different scales of intimacies are happening within and around us all the time. Unfortunately, ego and mind are not the places where intimacy just happens. It takes continuous work and awareness to ask yourself what it will take to be and feel genuinely closer to another being, what it would take for that being to genuinely feel closer to you, be the other being human or not.

The Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective invites us to ask ourselves questions that feel generative for our pursuit of wider, deeper, and more complex intimate relations:

Where is your motivation grounded? Is it sustainable? Do you have enough sense of urgency and importance in relation to this issue to do the challenging and painful work of dis-investing in harmful behaviour and the risky, difficult and uncertain work of getting rewired into building more generative relationships? Are you aware this will not be a quick ride, and that even your sense of urgency might have to be rewired away from exceptionalism so that it does not lead you to fall into the trap of illusory quick solutions?^[26]

erotic epistemologies

I am laying under an oak tree in a hammock next to the river Alva. Sunlight reflections breaking through the leaves first look like hands, later like fractals that assemble above me. Sounds rush through as little movements of my limbs caused by the ticklings of various insects. Thoughts come up, I breathe in and out, counting. Nobody needs thoughts, especially not right now, as I try to weave into the leaves and the holes between them. Zooming in and out of states of presences: counting ones, breathing ones, liminal ones, letting go ones, listening ones.

More and more I disappear into the complexity, and at the same time simplicity of it all. DMT visceral portals remember how everything is one giant being, polyphonic breath-time. Again interrupted by thoughts. “Love is not loud”, one of the leaves whispers, “once you let the prison of yourself disappear, the world opens. Once you are truly indifferent to yourself—you start to matter.” Mattering with the leaves, their veins, the spaces in between, the lights, the sounds, the infinite fullness of the moment, I am in love and union, for an infinite breath of a moment. The driver jumped out of my bus.^[27]

toxic relationships

Susan Forward uses the term toxic when referring to the effect of people who do not act on behalf of aliveness but seek to whitewash their own fear of it – toxic as in a mercury solution that poisons a river and kills its many inhabitants. When people are toxic, it is always a conspiracy against aliveness, including their own. People are toxic when they consider themselves as deeply inferior and therefore wish to control everything simply so that alleged truths over themselves do not come to light.^[28]

We all have a toxic passenger or two on our buses, as unfortunately we all embody parts of the conspiracies against aliveness. Trauma, especially childhood trauma, will deeply inscribe itself in a person’s sense of aliveness. The mantra “trauma unrecognised is trauma replicated” can be extended to—and is closely interrelated with—toxicity. “Those whose aliveness has been trampled will desperately use others, in order to enliven themselves.”^[29]

The using of the other as a resource without any regard on how this severs them from their aliveness is abuse. We are all complicit in toxic relationships, especially when it comes to our relationships with lands and their species, with bodies of water and air. And whilst there are different degrees of complicities and different degrees of toxicities—to face where we participate in conspiracies against aliveness, including our own, is heartbreaking and yet utterly necessary. To locate the problem outside of oneself, over there, elsewhere, is part of the problem. The only agencies I have are orienting my own multiplicities towards aliveness, even if—maybe especially when—some of my rivers have been poisoned. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse on a lifelong healing journey, I don’t write these words lightly. My life is dedicated to rehearsing connection from an embodied struggle of being profoundly severed.

Accept that we all contain and produce toxicity. Insist that we have agency on what forces and energies within us we strengthen, and which ones we perforate, disengage from, compost, metabolise, and transform. From one holobiont to another: can you stir (not shake) my biomes up a little, babe?

perforatrix calling

My holes are burning: horny, holy, whole, hoarse, hoes, whores.

Gut lining is slipping, blood is dripping, sea water is retained in the saps of my eye sockets, tear pockets revealing the spiritual blockages of the infinities that compose my entangled existences. Deep down in the darkness of my biomes I know that it is impossible for me to go anywhere,

matter∞energy∞spirit can neither appear nor disappear. Ecologies are erotic acts of transformation. Death is just a conceptual crutch. Death is change.

Can you put your fist inside my change please? Can you create the silence in my head that comes when adrenaline rushes, serotonin clashes, oestrogen pumps, and dopamine flashes? Holing describes the practice of making holes. Also, within and in-between the substances and substrates we can, and we cannot identify. The ancient goddess is a perforatrix, a shapeshifter, a transformer, a snake whose tail has been ripped off and that couldn’t care less and be more excited about the skulls it will bite itself into, to spread its magical venom putting minds into the surrender where they can flourish. Reminding them that they are servants and not masters to the cosmic and Earthly forces of life. Sedate my mind. Meditate my consciousness with the snails. Tell me tales I did not hear before.

gut matters

Modern humans are suffering from narrative dysbiosis. The violences of modernity have acted like an over-prescription of antibiotics, effectively killing off healthier, more magical modes of being so regularly that it has become difficult for them to grow back. What has been left behind culturally is similar to my scorched gut. Too much empty real estate.^[30]

There are things I just can’t stomach anymore.
There are many things I just can’t stomach anymore.
There are too many things I just can’t stomach anymore.

The amount of violence we are co-being with is beyond comprehension. The unspeakable atrocities of the world are also within us. In an infinitely entangled world disconnection is impossible. Everything that is happening in the world is also happening inside my body. Too much extinction. Too much extraction. Too many genocides and ecocides. “No wonder toxic figures and (power) constellations grow like candida.”^[31]

Can the righteous passengers and the innocence-seeking ones, the apathetic, the tantrum-throwing ones, and overconsuming folks on our buses please stand up, move aside, and quiet down for a moment? Can we move a mirror in here to look into and face that we are all violators and assholes through which the excrements of this civilisation are flushed into toilets instead of being composted in collaboration with soil? It is self-evident that to feed and nourish our collective biomes, we need to feed the soil. Already in 1940, at a time when modern, chemical-based industrialised agriculture was just beginning to radically alter food production, Albert Howard stressed the importance to practise “the sacred duty of handing over unimpaired to the next generation the heritage of a fertile soil,”^[32] which is pretty safe to say that as a civilization we have collectively and utterly failed at. Despair needs to be earned, also metabolically.

The biological consequences of an increasingly sterile planet are visible both in the world and in our bodies. At an Earth-system level, widespread deforestation and industrial agriculture are causing the loss of rich microbial diversity in the soil, a living key to carbon sequestration and water retention. The lack of soil biodiversity also impacts our health in many ways. Foods that are grown in sterile soils are less nutrient dense, specifically in those molecules that counteract inflammation. The microbiota in the soil are linked to those we host in our human bodies and we are discovering more about those interrelationships every day. (…) At a planetary level, colonialism transformed the interactions between ecologies in the web of life. Species that hadn’t been in contact before were brought together by accident or design. In response, hygienists wielded tools of eradication and sterilisation along lines of supremacy. This is why the war on microbes is inseparable from the cultural matrix that sustained it; hygiene coincided with the birth of eugenics, the heyday of Orientalism, and the expansion of the European empire.^[33]

Isn’t the first step to see where we are complicit, where we are constantly in our micro-movements and -movings violently disconnecting from the relational and reproductive web of life? We pass on so much shit all the time—and with our shit macrobiotic information, relations, patterns, and ways of moving and thinking; mostly without even noticing or being curious about the uncountable ways in how that matters.

Our holes say a lot about us. Open your fridge and you see the world. The world you are participating and complicit in, the one you are perpetuating and digesting, and at the same time painfully failing to digest. Look at my shit, it is blood.^[34] On so many levels we mirror and perpetuate the violences that happen on a global scale deep inside our guts, and their intricate complexities. Our metabolic capacities are not infinite, but they are astonishingly responsive and adaptive. What on our collective plates do we need to digest, and what can’t we and hence must refuse, disengage from, boycott? In our own inte(re)stine? The deserts, oceans, and forests without are the deserts, oceans, forests within. While we cannot choose the macrobiotic capacities we are given, we can train them, nourish them, listen to them, un/learn with them, and be guided by them to collapse the façades of stability and separability.

I hold the dying children. I hold the soldiers who have killed them. I hold them as children. I hold their mothers. I hold their mothers as children. I hold myself as a killer. I hold myself as a child, praying that I am capable of killing less. Praying that I can stop being somebody. Surrendering into becoming nobody. Praying to that which is behind our somebody-ness that connects us all.

We are connected by the heart. We are connected by that which created the heart. The violator and the violated, they don’t just run in our blood, but rather they are part of, co-composed with, and by, our (micro)biomes. The heart and the gut of the world break on the shores of Gaza. Can our hearts and guts break open, not apart?^[35]

extinction

The microbial life inside us that co-organizes our survival, moods, and character is about as known to us as dark matter. In other words: they are, similarly to black holes, sites where the certainties of the so-called physical laws of the universe are breaking down, and the crude limits and violence of our systems of knowledge become apparent. No matter how much computing power we put towards the “scientific study of objective knowledge,” “the dissecting to ‘understand life’ by killing it”,^[36] the self-fulfilling prophecy of sequencing and classifying a poly-complex multitude like the Human MicroBiome, will—to understate it kindly with Ram Dass—continue to manifest “as the blind reiterating what the blind have been doing to stay blind.”^[37]

The conceptual framework that we have invented to understand organisms is the deeper reason for our (…) catastrophe. We are extinguishing life because we have blinded ourselves to its actual character. We treat it so cruelly because we believe it to be machinery, raw market fodder, scrap material. But when the Earth is devoid of other creatures, we will be much lonelier. Perhaps then we will realise that we have annihilated a part of ourselves.^[38]

We host up to a trillion microbes who, together with the specific niches they inhabit, make up the human microbiome. In our gut alone, billions of galaxies of bacteria, archaea, viruses, phage, fungi, helminths, and protozoa circle around the life-giving heat of a single human star. If at this point you are still denying the devastating systemic destruction and atrocities caused by the organised and far-reaching states of reduction, separation, and disconnection which characterise modernity’s ideas of progress, then be assured that these denials will not protect you or your loved ones from what is inevitably already manifesting within your guts. “The microbiome includes the collective genetic material and activities as well as the conditions surrounding these organisms: in sum, their theatres of activity.” ^[39]Your exposome markers can and will only protect you so far.

Human microbiota comprise nearly 2000 different species. A generative analogy for the digestive system is a dense, teeming and enchanted forest that borders two worlds within a single ecosystem, a transition zone of what we call ‘the world’ and what we call ‘our bodies.’ Like coral reefs and trees we are holobionts, assemblies of plant, animal, microbial, viral and fungal ecologies.^[40]

We are and have increasingly become disconnected from the ecologies that sustain us: the lands, soils, forests, mountains, and oceans; these disconnections and their devastating consequences are mirrored in our internal ecologies, and so is their rapid decline.

We often think about the consequences of climate change in terms of the loss of biodiversity of trees, plants or fish, insects and animals. But the greatest biomass and biodiversity on our planet comes from microbes. We can’t even see most of them because 70 percent of all bacteria and archaea live at least three miles underground, with a total biomass estimated to be about twenty-three billion tonnes. Bear in mind there are only about 385 million tonnes of humans. Feeding into and exacerbating the climate crisis is our addiction to consumption. In 2020, human made mass reached about 1.1 terratonnes, exceeding the total global biomass on this planet. This makes humans the greatest hoarders that have ever lived; if we continue in this vein, anthropogenic mass is projected to triple global biomass by 2040.^[41]

I wonder how that is even possible.

Our bodies are after all extensions of the land. Our bodies and Earth’s body are infinitely entangled. Our gut is the coral-reefs, bleached and dull,^[42] and it is the Amazon rainforest on fire. It records the atrocities in Gaza, Congo, and other places alongside all the toxicities produced by the abysses of our so-called civilizations. Gut microbiota are a hugely underestimated intermediary in the toxicity of (environmental) contaminants.

Petrochemicals are used to make thousands of products, perhaps the most important of which is plastic. The plasticene has important implications for our health, not least because we inadvertently consume about 5g of it per week. An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but it contains an average of 195,500 plastic particles per gram, (…) Because plastic has become part of our environment, it is changing our microbiology through drastic changes to our microbiome.^[43]

We don’t understand that being disconnected from the ecologies that sustain us also and mainly means being increasingly disconnected from ourselves, not least from our own guts and metabolic processes. Like in any hypercomplex system, directionality, feedback, and temporal order are impossible to determine. The decline of our internal ecologies co-evolves with, and at the same time, conditions our destructive ways of thinking and behaving. Microbes teach us that patterns of relationality never only occur on one level. Could a microbial turn, a probiotic shift be a possibility to change our patterns from within? Can activism start in the gut? “Activism is not about winning; it is about creating a record of opposition to the status quo.”^[44] How can we deeply and widely support evolution, instead of falling into the traps and cravings for revolutions?

Can we cultivate new forms of metabolic agency to counter the conspiracy against aliveness that is manifesting in our guts and that we perpetuate on many other levels? How removed can we be? And how can we rehearse connection from within the deep time of the land and the gut? From within our holes? Who is missing from our (micro-)biomes might be as—or even more—important than who is there.^[45]

∞infinitely entangled with…  

life

To be a student of life means to be a student of holes.

Everything that is alive metabolises. Everything that metabolises contains multitudes.

Everything that contains multitudes is full of holes. Every hole contains infinities, and every infinity contains holes. Everything that metabolises seeks connections. Every connection encompasses touch. Touch is encounter.

Encounter is transformation. Transformation is intimacy. Intimacy is constant negotiation. Transformation needs holes. Holes are part of and contain seemingly paradoxical patterns. Holes collapse subjects and objects, insides and outsides, spaces and times. Holes are sacred sites of intimacies with the unknowable. The unknowable reveals itself to us through patterns. Patterns appear across scales. Metabolic patterns infinitely repeat in myriads of ways. They are spirits or beings in themselves across species, times, and boundaries. They include us, but are in no way exclusive to us. Living beings have great digestive capacities. Digestive capacities of finite beings are never unlimited. When the digestive capacity of an entity or structure is exhausted, it collapses and is being digested in turn. If the thinking subject is metabolised, its mental categories can be composted. Letting go of seeing things as separate existences allows the mind to be digested into the gut of aliveness. The emergence of holes gives rise to a perforated self. A self can only consist of multitudes. Multitudes consist of holes. I am hole.

Thank you Sarah Amsler, Dani d’Emilia, and Berno Odo Polzer with the emergence of this text and thank you Sara Leghissa, Roni Katz, and Nattan Dobkin with the emergence of the performative sculpture GUT MATTERS.

---

Endnotes

This text is part of a larger research cycle titled GUT MATTERS – YOU ARE A DONUT, THE HOLE INSIDE YOU IS THE WORLD, which premiered February 2025 at Kunsthal Gent.

An extended version of this text is part of the GUT MATTERS reader which will be published later in 2025/2026.

GUT MATTERS – performative sculpture & exhibition 
07/02/25 – 04/05/25 @ Kunsthal Gent
GUT MATTERS – symposium & performative sculpture 
14-16/03/25 @ Kunsthal Gent icw. Viernulvier as part of 
WOMAN & CHILDREN FIRST FESTIVAL

For full credits, program and more info on GUT MATTERS please visit
www.danielabershan.com/gutmatters 

^[1] The human body has seven holes: the eyes, the ears, the two nose holes and the mouth. So, strictly speaking, the human body is a donut with one big and six small holes.

^[2] Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness, Dani d’Emilia, V. Machado de Oliveira with the GDFT collective

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017

^[5] Francisco Varela in Monte Grande: What is Life?, film by Franz Reichle, Icarus Films, 2004

^[6] Thank you Sarah Amsler for pointing this out.

^[7] Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones, Digital Woman and the New Technoculture, Fourth Estate London, 1998, p.248

^[8] Ibid., p.1

^[9] Michael W. Gray, Lynn Margulis and the endosymbiont hypothesis: 50 years later, The American Society For Cell Biology, 2017

^[10] Lynn Margulis, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution, University of California Press, 1997

^[11] Weber, Matter & Desire, p.50

^[12] E. Smith and H.J.Morowitz, Universality in intermediary metabolism, 2004

^[13] Weber, Matter & Desire, p.110

^[14] Card is the footnote

^[15] Umwelt is the specific ways organisms of a particular species experience the world, which is dependent on what their sensory organs and perceptual systems can detect and interpret. Jakob von Uexküll considered it to be “the biological foundations that lie at the very centre of studying both human and non-human animals.’’ The term is usually translated into English as “self-centred world.”

^[16] The exposome is a concept used to describe environmental exposures that an individual encounters throughout life, and how these exposures impact biology and health. It encompasses both external and internal factors, including chemical, physical, biological, and social factors that may influence human health.

^[17] James Kinross, Dark Matter: The New Science of the Microbiome, Penguin Books, 2023

^[18] Rupa Marya & Raj Patel, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, Allen Lane, 2021, p.121

^[19] Jean Cocteau in response to an interviewer, 1951

^[20] Marya & Patel, Inflamed, p.115

^[21] Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the evolution of Human Sexuality. Summit Books, New York, 1991, p.30

^[22] Weber, Matter & Desire

^[23] Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993, p.1

^[24] Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, Sacred Planet Books, 2022

^[25] Annie Sprinkles, The Ecosexual Manifesto. 2011.

^[26] From Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective website www.decolonialfutures.net

^[27] Methodology by Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. https://decolonialfutures.net/portfolio/the-bus/

^[28] Weber, Matter & Desire, p.141

^[29] Ibid., p.142

^[30] Strand, The Flowering Wand, p.157

^[31] Remixed from Strand, The Flowering Wand, p.157-158

^[32] Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament, Oxford University Press, 1943

^[33] Marya & Patel, Inflamed, p.115

^[34] GUT MATTERS, from text of performative sculpture, Dani Bershan, to be published in 2025

[35] In resonance with the sentence “Collectivize your heart so that
it breaks open and not apart.” From the text Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness, by Dani d’Emilia and Vanessa Andreotti (2020)

^[36]  Weber, Matter & Desire

^[37] Baba Ram Dass, transcribed from Point at the Moon Lecture, addressed to the American Psychological Association in Montreal, Canada, 1980 – from today’s perspective this might be read as an ableist comment, however Ram Dass is referring to a collective spiritual blindness.

^[38] Weber, Matter & Desire

^[39] Marya & Patel, Inflamed, p.115

^[40] Ibid.

^[41] Kinross, Dark Matter, p.147

^[42] Ibid., p.157

^[43] Ibid., p.147

^[44] Patrick Califia, formerly Pat Califia in this interview

^[45] Kinross, Dark Matter