Page 126 - Costellazioni 5

MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

plunge, a collapse averted, a disaster braked. In this way, to walk be-
comes an act of faith. We perform it daily: a two-beat miracle—an
iambic teetering, a holding on and le ing go. For the next seven years
I will plummet across the world.” 2
Something as quotidian and uncomplicated as walking is defa-
miliarized as a controlled fall, a risky action that exposes the subject
and evokes the perils of evolution: how the individual, embodied sub-
ject is vastly overpowered by evolutionary pressures. At the same
time, the highly embodied “two-beat miracle” of walking is inscribed
into the stylistic texture of Salopek’s language: it is an “iambic”
rhythm, which the passage first announces and then proffers through
the prosody of “a holding on and le ing go.” The “Out of Eden” proj-
ect thus appropriates the body as a site for negotiating the ideologi-
cally fraught boundary between our understanding of the human and
the spaces and temporalities that shaped the history of our species.
Salopek’s narrative speaks to contemporary claims about the ‘en-
meshment’ between the human subject and biological, climatological,
3
or geological processes—including evolution itself. If we take at face
value what science tells us, there is li le doubt that the human is an
ideological construction based on metaphysical beliefs: our species falls
on an evolutionary continuum with other species; human societies are
shaped by material things and processes and contribute to shaping
them—sometimes dramatically, as in anthropogenic climate change.
Narratives like Salopek’s translate this abstract realization into an em-
bodied, affective experience that is not only recorded by language
but—and this is my main claim in this article—conveyed to readers
through a mechanism of embodied simulation. Readers’ bodies res-
onate with the “two-beat miracle” of Salopek’s walk and thus serve as

2
Paul Salopek, “To Walk the World,” National Geographic, December 2013,
h p://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/12/out-of-eden/salopek-text.
3 See Richard Grusin, “Introduction,” in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard
Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), vii–xxix. “Enmesh-
ment” or “the mesh” are Timothy Morton’s terminology for the constitutive
interrelation of our species and material realities; see Timothy Morton, The Eco-
logical Thought (Cambridge, Massachuse s: Harvard University Press, 2010).

125