Medieval Nature Class 2: Alexander and Dindimus again

In 2012, my article pairing Alexander and Dindimus and Chaucer’s lament “The Former Age” appeared in the anthology Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts. My beast was “the human.” I called the article “A Fourteenth-Century Ecology”: apt,^[1] because the article, as I now recognize, reaffirmed, or contributed, to the common currency of ecocriticism. Here’s some of what I wrote:

By not splitting nature from culture, by suspending hierarchy, and by recognizing the interconnection of everything, they [that is, the Brahmins and the people of the Golden Age] think ecologically, which is to say, they see the potential interconnection between all things and they refuse to grant any one worldly being, human or otherwise, a central, properly dominant status.^[2]

Yes, sort of. Some thirteen years later, I’m ready to complicate my claims. To my own credit, It’s not that the earlier article is entirely uncomplicated. Despite the clichés, I do wind things up by observing that Çhaucer’s attitude towards his primordial, Golden Age people is at once admiring and contemptuous. He compares their food, and by extension, them to pigs, perhaps the only animal raised exclusively to be slaughtered and eaten. Alexander at least compares the Brahman to wolves; the pig comparison is perhaps worse. And, as I observed, as melancholy as the modern person might be about the compromises of the present, they have no more than the desire to be thought to want the supposed simplicity of the distant past, or distant peoples, and they can thank their lucky stars that the simplicity was, as it still is, inaccessible. Paradise is always lost, thank goodness.

Today, I’m complicating things further by asking us to ask to what degree Dindimus or even Alexander are part of the “world” or “nature.” What’s at stakes in fantasies of interconnection, harmony, entanglement, of erasing boundaries between the human and the everything else?

Last Fall, I structured my undergraduate History and Literature course around fantasies of the primeval. We read Robinson Crusoe, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, the story of Memmie le Blanc – one of very few pre-twentieth-century feral children records about a wild girl – and, as today, the Alexander and Dindimus material. I began with several review articles on myths of paleolithic people: the most common one is based on studies of modern people supposed to still be living as did our universal ancestors, before we invented agriculture, who were supposed to have lived a life of abundance where they had to forage only twelve to nineteen hours a week to feed themselves. The numbers are off, which, I hope, is no surprise: the anthropologists who tallied the hours didn’t count tasks like butchering meat, grinding nuts, making tools, and porting water, which collectively raises the workweek to more than 42 hours. But we’re still not done counting, because, on top of this, there’s still childrearing. We might wonder where healthcare fits – perhaps not too demanding, since studies of such modern analogs of our ancestors are studies of people who seem underfed and tired, who live, on average, to only some 30 years of age. Combine that with our species nearly having been wiped out some 800- to 900,000 years ago – we are all of us descended from roughly 1000 survivors, a number that scarcely improved over the next 100,000 years^[3] – combine that too with the people now able to live into adulthood who couldn’t have then, and it’s hard to offer paleo anything as any more than the possibility of exchanging one misery for another. So much for “harmony” and the “old ways.”

The paleo hope, nonetheless, is the hope for a “natural” fit between humans and the everything else. It is a hope, arguably, of erasure, of being what you are supposed to be, of paring away all the excess by getting “pure” and “authentic.” Unpasteurized milk. Running shoes with ten toes. No vaccines. A fantasy of natural entanglement that’s also a fantasy of mastery and independence. And who better represents that in our reading for today than Dindimus and his Brahmans. This is an encounter of the supposedly historical, Alexander, with the nonhistorical, the philosophers who live outside of “progress,” because outside of movement, who are where they are supposed to be and nowhere else, who wait for us always to be able to tell us how we should live.

They are made to say that they live a “simple and pure life.” For, asks Dindimus “who can improve on nature’s work?” It’s not just that they’re naked; it’s that they don’t even cover themselves with houses. They live and die and are buried in holes. Their speech eschews eloquence. They find all the pleasure they need in delighting in birdsong.

They accuse Alexander, essentially, of a lack of simplicity: not just because of the fundamental dissatisfaction that compels him to be a conqueror, but also the multiplicity of his gods, which correspond to the multiplicity of his body and its needs. “You worship,” he writes, “as many gods as you have limbs in your body.” One God should be enough for the simple and the pure.

But note that Alexander does not praise separation from nonhuman world. He recognizes, instead, that that world like the human body itself is irreducibly multiple: “a man’s desire is variable and changes as the sky changes…when the day is clear, then a man’s desire and mind are joyful but when the day is murky, they are sad.” The world for Alexander is a crowded, mobile place, stirring up desires and stirring us up. Is he “entangled”?

Are the Brahmans not? They live in this world “as pilgrims…since we die and make our way to our father’s dwelling-places.” The earth is their mother, and she gets their bones, but the goal for simplicity is to seek out the father, to become liberated, self-sufficient, undecorated, and as much as possible like god. If they’re ecological subjects entangled with the world, they’re also always looking for a way out. In what way does this material do otherwise than offer a “ecological ethics” of “relationality”? Let’s talk about that.

We can ask, too, about the desires that produce this exchange of letters: all of this is of course refracted through stories of Alexander, as part of his story, not part of theirs. The Brahmans are not meant to have a story, one presumes, because that would interrupt their purity.

And we can ask how all this intersects with what Swarbrick and Trembley say about the “hyper-humanism” of the fantasy of “pastoralism,” which “calls to make good of tragedy by returning” – that word, returning – “to an ethics of care, kin, and world,” an ethics, as they write, that “act as screens for our images of human authenticity.” I should hope you have something to say about all this and Swarbrick and Trembley on the “willfully optimistic” “ethics of harmony” and the “idiom of entanglement” that’s their target in Negative Life. Let’s see what we come up with.

1. A fourteenth-century ecology:“The Former Age” with Dindimus.” In Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts,ed. Carolynn van Dyke, pp. 185-199. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2012. ↑
2. Daniel Immerwehr, “Paleo Con: How thought leaders resurrected the myth of a carefree prehistoric lifestyle,” The New Republic March 24 2011; Udi Greenberg, “The Abuses of Prehistory,” The New Republic May 10, 2024.↑
3. Hu, Wangjie, Ziqian Hao, Pengyuan Du, Fabio Di Vincenzo, Giorgio Manzi, Jialong Cui, Yun-Xin Fu, Yi-Hsuan Pan, and Haipeng Li. “Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition.” Science 381, no. 6661 (2023): 979-984. ↑