Branches by Michel Serres

Author:Michel Serres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Advent

How are we to be reborn? Through good encounter [encontre]

‘She came through the doorway, and, like lightning, I was struck by love at first sight,’ he says. Disquieted, he retracts this: ‘Have I really forgotten it?’ He nevertheless persists: ‘To my recollection, the passion that caused me to worry for so long began that morning, the one with the soft sunlight, light breeze and transparent September mist licking the tree in front of the house. Starting from that encounter [encontre], my life bifurcated.’ He returns to his doubts: ‘Nothing happened on that morning.’ Yet he affirms: ‘How can it be denied that there was a before and an after? The more time goes forward, the more importance this moment of nothingness takes on, which no doubt had no importance when it happened.’ Great loves begin with neither lightning nor strikes. With its prefix indicating repetition, rencontre [encounter] shows to those it causes to be born or reborn that they have forgotten their encontre, that is to say, the first time: always virgin at this advent.1

At the junction point between the twig and its stem, the event causes bifurcation; the advent, for its part, marks, on this same point, a birth. The event can remain sterile, whereas the advent produces; tearing up a monotonous format, the event emerges as an exception to a rule, a deviation from a habitual equilibrium, an interruption of a sequence; the head of a sequence, for its part, an exit, the advent causes, in addition, an existence to emerge, causes subjects, a history … to be born, soon to be equipped with long laws: production, origin, beginning …, the appearance of this rameau [branch], which, in French, has the same root as racine [root].

From where do these newnesses gush forth? Are they announced on dove’s feet, like a thief in the night?

Autocatalysis

There are no glaciers on the Canadian Shield or across the Siberian tundra. Yet, on the same polar cap, at the same latitudes and therefore in the same climates, Greenland’s soil is buried every year under the weight of an ice sheet several thousand metres thick. Why don’t the same causes produce the same effects?

This is why: long ago, during a winter, it snowed a little there, at altitude. Very little, barely above equilibrium. But the thin layer deposited in that way did not melt the following summer, cooler than usual. These long cold spells arrived; no one noticed them. The next winter, it again snowed little but enough to cover over the previous snowfall, already frozen. From the second year on, the crust so formed defied the summer thaws, weak at those high latitudes. This recommenced so that once the thickness of the ice was sufficient, no month of July could ever melt it. So, a self-perpetuating cycle started, which ended up in those gigantic glaciers, which territories that didn’t experience such beginnings, almost unobservable, were lacking. Thus Greenland is crushed under dense masses that can’t be found in Canada, its neighbour, or in Siberia, farther away.

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