Monstrance

Chapter 3 camps out on the recent emergence of a “shot across the bow” of our species’ aggrandizement on the globe in the form of a tiny “syllable” spoken by the bat community. Or more accurately, an adaptive “improv” lancing out from the microbial zone of innovators we label “viruses” without quite being able to grasp their input as either living or inanimate. Here the RNA Prince (“Coronavirus”) will be tracked in advent from natural habitat among wingeds to routinization in our own species’ articulation of a regime of plunder and decimation epitomized in global capital. Innocuous within its habitat of origin, the virus was effectively weaponized in our racialized political and healthcare systems such that poor and BIPOC peoples and the Global South inordinately experienced infection and demise. But for a historical millisecond, this micro-creature shut down the macro-monster of a globalized economy! This chapter continues the probe of the word and the reality, tracing medieval eucharistic exhibitions of a Jesus-rendered plant-human-mineral-astral “Presence” in a monstrance—an entire ecozone concentrated in a wheat-wafer consumed by an eye—through a backwards trek to the apparent Proto-Indo-European (PIE) origins of the word “monster” in a cluster of related concepts including “memory” and “premonition” and monument (among others), and forward to a more generalized consideration of monstrous epiphanies in indigenous languages and mythologies. By way of our own “monstrance-showing” of what such an interdependent promiscuousness looks like when our eyes revolt against colonial reductions and begin to register some of the wonder otherwise eclipsed, we conclude the foray by profiling the amazingly monstrous symbiosis orchestrated by whales with the aid of plankton and krill in southern oceans and the milk-culture miracle of steppe peoples for 3000 years buoyed and fed by a monstrous microbial complex of diary-preparation, yurt cooking, wooden-barrel-storage, sheep-gut processing, etc.—in spite of being lactose intolerant and minus the requisite gene!