Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green

Grey

270 Grey is the fate of color at twilight. As the sun’s radiance dwindles, objects receive less light to scatter and absorb. They yield to the world a diminishing energy, so that the vibrancy of orange, indigo, and red dull to dusky hues. A grey ecology might therefore seem a moribund realm, an expanse of slow loss, wanness, and withdrawal, a graveyard space of mourning. Perhaps with such muted steps the apocalypse arrives, not with a bang but a dimming. Or maybe ashen grey is all that remains after the fires of the world’s end have extinguished themselves, when nothing remains unburned. Yet this affective disposition in which greying signals depletion and lifelessness reveals only the stubborn embedding of our anthropocentricity: as if the earth greys to mourn with us, to lament the absence of our tread. Entre chien et loup, twilit grey is materialized uncertainty. The shade marks a moment of mesopic vision, when the colors constituting the small portion of the spectrum humanly apprehensible recede, but they do not take the world’s vitality with them. The grey hour is liminal, a turning point at which owls, mosquitoes, monsters, and the wind thrive, when stone cools for a while and persists in its epochal process of becoming dust, when animals and elements continue indifferent to our proclivity to think that an evening’s color drain is a metaphor for human impermanence, a cosmic acknowledgment of our little fits of melancholy. Grey includes exhaustion, even obliteration, but also reminds that death is a burgeoning of life by other means. Grey is unimpressed by fantasies of disaster and finality. We J E F F R E Y J E R O M E C O H E N For Michael O’Rourke Grey Grey 271 are too enamored of the red and blue of catastrophe—of a world destroyed in flame and flood—and of the etiolation that follows. We like to imagine our own end and assume at our demise the world likewise terminates (fade to black) or that planet Gaia returns to the balance it possessed before apes became profligate humans (fade to deepest green). The apocalyptic imagination has difficulty discerning the vibrancy of grey. The gloaming is a place of life, but not necessarily in those sublime forms we expect life to assume. Despite our indolent habit of aligning dusk and evening with the declining and the still, neither are terminal. Grey mornings inevitably arrive, with roiling fogs and air restlessly astir. A sensual grey ecology is inhuman, but that does not render it misanthropic , disembodied, or wholly foreign. Inhuman signifies “not human,” of course, and therefore includes a world of forces, objects, and nonhuman beings. But in-human also indicates the alien within (any human body is an ecosystem filled with strange organisms; any human collective is an ecosystem filled with strange objects), and requires as well a consideration of the violently inhumane.1 Grey, polychrome hue of the in-between and the uncertain, a miscellaneous zone, is not easily circumscribed. Like a cloudbank, a grey ecology teems with varying densities of matter and shifting velocities: stormy thicknesses as well as serenely heterogeneous clumps (cloud, after all, comes from the same word as clot and clod), composites and microclimates. Grey rolls, thins, inspissates, comes on little cat feet. It is an open aesthetic. If an ecology is an oikos, a dwelling or a home, it must also include the one who writes about grey materiality while sitting at a laptop on a particularly fine morning just at the border of Washington, D.C., listening to traffic and birdsong through an open door. I know that nature is not outside with the melodies of trucks and finches, but resides also within this house (a structure built of trees, after all: birds are not the only architects of arboreal habitations), a home shared with a spiny-tailed lizard named Spike and a basil plant and dust mites and a ridiculous number of small rocks I have brought indoors. This porous and fragile dwelling is built on both life and death, and not just because its foundational soil is a seething expanse of decay and renewal, a necropolis of vitality. This field become a little yard was probably at some point worked by enslaved people. Not far from here is the church attended by those transported into hard lives they did not 272 Jeffrey Jerome...