Cold Hard Nature & The Moving Blood

'You gotta be fucking kiddin'!'  Windows

 Peak light!

 Leaves of light and water...

Death is all around.... Death? Are you crazy? There ain't no death here... What there is is a continuation of ontogenesis... decomposition-reconstitution... Death exists only for the ego-bound self...

In winter, it's imperative for any lifeform to warm itself up and engage its central heating system. The best and easiest way to do this is to move. The kinetic body is a warm body; a fluid body that is connected intimately with the airscape it is moving through. Oxygenation is vital for the blood to maintain its own kineticism. The 'moving blood' is what keeps us warm when we are out in freezing temperatures. In this way, and as the iceman Wim Hof regularly states, 'the cold is our warm friend'.

Yet, we have allowed this to be usurped by an excess of 'coats'. Nowadays the pet-like human doesn't have to move, he can just turn on the heating, or stick another jumper on. Moreover, we often discriminate against the cold and would lock it away if we could. Yet, this is just another turning away from Nature - another misunderstanding of what 'the cold' actually is - and another short fall from the aliveness we used to inhabit.

Artificial warmth has taken over our habitat - and made of the human a thing that can be clothed, decorated and manipulated into an ever more comfortable existence. Yet if comfort is not earned (true comfort is born out of discomfort and hardship) then it is a perversion of comfort, and simply adds to the top-heavy (out of kilter) disequilibrium that man has become. As John Carpenter astutely noticed in the eighties 'Man is the warmest place to hide'. And he is, because of all this anti-nature unnatural decoration and fashioning. One might even argue that at the heart of the horror of Carpenter's film, The Thing, is this anti-nature being called 'man', the consequence of being assimilated by the monster of modernity, and by unnatural comfort, ease, and convenience.

Indeed, man has made himself so warm that he has ceased evolving from the inside-out. He has become a tool amongst tools, unthinking, unfeeling, mechanical and disconnected. The 'thing' is born. Maybe, there's a reason why Carpenter set his story in Antarctica. The thing 'from outer space', apparently, is not too fond of the cold. Moreover, it flails about maddeningly when upset, and likes to 'assimilate' and consume.

Of course, the monster - the eponyomous thing - is modern man. Let's not forget that global warming is firstly a tale of human warming and the separation/alienation of the human animal from its natural habitat and ways. The ultimate in alien terror is man's own alienation from himself.

So, get that blood moving, embrace the cold, go easy on the coats...