Silence for a while. “So that’s what what’s got you down,’ Eileen says.
“What?”
“The Red Mars party—out of favor.”
“Out of existence, you mean.”
She considers it. “I never could understand the Red point of view—”
“Few could, apparently.”
“—until I read something in Heidegger, where he makes a distinction between earth and world. Do you you know it?”
“No.”
“Earth is that blank materiality of nature that exists before us and more or less sets the parameters on what we can do. Sartre called it facticity. World then is the human realm, the social and historical dimension that gives earth its meaning.”
Roger nods his understanding.
“So—the Reds, as I understood it, were defending earth. Or planet, in this case. Trying to protect the primacy of planet over world—or at least to hold a balance between them.”
“Yes,” Roger says. “But the world inundated the planet.”
“True. But when you look at it that way, you can see what you were trying to do was hopeless. A political party is inevitably part of the world, and everything it does will be worldly. And we only know the materiality of nature through our human sense—so really it is only world that we know directly.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Roger protests. “I mean, it’s logical, and usually I’m sure it’s true—but sometimes—” He smacks the rock of their shelf with his mittened hand. “You know?”
Eileen touches the mitten. “World.”
Roger lifts his lip, irritated. He pulls the mitten off and hits the cold rock again. “Planet.”
Eileen frowns thoughtfully. “Maybe.”
‘Earth’ by Mark Weaver, 2009.
Excerpt from Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Green Mars’, a short story in his book The Martians, 1999.
On the same day that I read the passage above I received a framed copy of the ‘Earth’ print. Here it is at home.
I chose this pairing because I like how Roger and Eileen’s discussion about the mediated nature of all human experience ties Weaver’s print to thematic arc of representation in art. Specifically, read through the context of their discussion, Mark’s decision to label his representation of an astronaut ‘Earth’, for me evokes Magritte’s, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe,’ in which he labeled the painting of a pipe with the words, ‘this is not a pipe.’ As Magritte reminds us that representations are separate from what they represent, Weaver is points out that we are incapable of experiencing anything directly and that like an astronaut in space everything we encounter is filtered through myriad human creations, the most basic of which is language.
