Bestial Oblivion by Benjamin Bertram

Author:Benjamin Bertram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

When the father kills his son, he is ridding the world of the “faint soul” occupying the flesh from his “mould.” The father does not share his “insubstantial spirit” with his son and has no qualms about ridding the world of this “shame of nature.” This spirit is really the life force of war that makes Tamburlaine valiant, proud, and ambitious. Calyphas is more of a threat—his father calls him his greatest enemy—than emperors and kings, because he stands outside the logic of perpetual war, making an alternative—albeit a laughable one—at least imaginable. The son first arouses his father’s wrath when he twice utters the most defiant word imaginable: “enough.” This word is not only a challenge to “glory”; it is also a challenge to military codes and the disciplined quest for practical knowledge that can make a battle successful. “But while my brothers follow arms, my lord,” Calyphas says, “Let me accompany my gracious mother,/They are enough to conquer all the world/And you have won enough for me to keep” (2:1.5.66–8). Part of the humor here, of course, is that he allows for his father’s global domination, only questioning the excess beyond that.

In addition to Aristotle’s theory of four elements in constant strife (each seeking its own “place” but never succeeding), Marlowe may have drawn from pre-Socratic philosophers such as Empedocles or Heraclitus.22 Whichever of these views of the elemental cosmos he favored, what is notable is the way he focused on strife without allowing for any peace or stability whatsoever. Empedocles’s system, for example, saw the binding force of love as a counter to the chaos of strife. Strife, of course, is more suitable for tragedy, but there may be another reason for Marlowe’s choice, and it is one that is echoed in ecomaterialism today, namely the sense that, as Jeffrey and Lowell Duckert eloquently put it, “peace doesn’t stand a chance in the flux of Empedoclean love-strife.”23 But among the many differences between Marlowe’s philosophy of endless war and today’s ecomaterialist engagement with catastrophe and strife is that the latter challenges the human-centeredness and narcissism that undergird the former.

Empedocles believed human bodies to be microcosms: composed of all four “roots,” with love and strife as roiled soul. Yet earth, air, water, and fire do not exist in order to become anthropos. Human form is simply one composition among many, not the measure of the world. Material affinity unites the elemental cosmos and the little universe that is the human, an intimacy rather than an invitation to dominance, an ingress for human knowing of world that would otherwise exceed. Strategic anthropomorphism is allied with the elements, and its goal is to decenter the human from its accustomed universal midpoint.24

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