Mites

The last part examines mobilized monstrosity—especially in the mode of nomad pastoralism, tracking deep into the undercurrents of our earliest social resistance movements, comprehending the latter “herder walkouts” as intentional or even unwitting attempts to rediscover a bigger generosity of being—against the predations and reductions of extractive economies and urban domination systems. The focus on freedom underscored here will emphasize the aim of such movements—just what kind of sustainable reciprocity does “liberation” anticipate stepping into, once it exits constraint? Such a revitalized mutualism—or “revamped monstrousness” in the language we are playing with in this writing—was first attempted in history in partnership with herd animals. And in consequence, an intensified reliance upon both wells and stars! Chapter 10 will probe an unlikely introit to such an exit, memorialized in biblical conceits as a renowned “Exodus,” almost laughably inaugurated therein by an “eco-marshaling” of mites. In this rendition, flies—and their kindred-ly-two-winged cousins, gnats—are explored biblically as parodic players referenced in the “finger of God” rhetoric of both Moses and Jesus when engaged in high stakes “throw down” with political opponents, leading to investigation of early Israel as a humano-insectual collaboration and raising questions for the insect-apocalypse of our time. Thus—a constructive foray: Israel, in Egypto-Hebraic mix, as a transformative “midges-and-marginalized” partnership, at least in its origins, in which gnats, flies, and locusts play a key role in securing Exodus-liberation for the slave-walk out. Followed by the 40 years of “schooling” in the desert where aphid-defection, glossed as a “what-is-this-stuff” manna-provision of the Sinai wilderness, becomes central to a relearned land-based nutrition—very different from the imperial food-as-weapon policy of Pharaoh, requiring slave-labor to build storage-cities for grain-hording—that is then memorialized ever-after in Sabbath-keeping ritual practice. And the Galilean back-to-the-land movement, nurtured by the Nazareth prophet, doing judo on a Beelzebub (“Lord of the Flies”) accusation early-on, not ever really refuting the charge, but raising as question the degree to which such a coalition of winged-mites and ambulating-animals and herding-humans might be paradigmatic for recovery from the entrapments and desecration of urban imperial enslavement and oppression.