Space is something you can use but don’t need to use.
The first aspect of space is abundance.
Take a walk in a wood. Look around you. You see animals and plants which are thriving or dead. For a living thing once weakened cannot fend for itself and quickly dies. So the living thing before you is strong and fit. It may harbour parasites, it may in a hard winter have endured hunger and cold, but these privations can never have been seriously debilitating or they would have killed it. And just the variability of the creature’s conditions — weather, seasons, prevalence of food and material — guarantees that if all but the hardest of times are survivable then other times must be fat.
For in life there is a strange imbalance, present in all species and perpetuated through all the eons of natural history. Every living thing is born, and dies, so that the number of deaths exactly equals the number of births. And yet over and above birth and death there is life, which seems to be a pure surplus, balanced by nothing. For example, a hundred deer live in a wood. Every year twenty are born and twenty are eaten by wolves. Where then do the hundred come from? Oh of course they come from history: there have been times when the births of deer exceeded their deaths and the population waxed, and other times when deaths exceeded births and the population waned — a hundred is just the rough number of deer extant from year to year in the present historical circumstance. And yet is it not remarkable that while the number of deer waxes and wanes it is never zero? Of course no species lasts forever, and one day the number of deer will indeed decline to zero and the form of the deer will be extinct. But by then another new species of animal will have arisen in its place. For as it is with the number of animals of a species, so it is with the number of species — the number may wax and wane but it is never zero. Always over and above birth and death, and over and above emergence and extinction, there is life. The extant populations of all the extant species here and now at this moment are this moment’s over-fullness, like a ripe strawberry, this day’s surplus over need, killing, death and consumption. Life is literally abundance.
How clever that the world is so arranged that things kill many times yet die only once.
The wolves eat all they want, and yet still there are the hundred deer.
Birth and death are points at either end of a line, which is life. Death exists, and the privation which brings death. But privation and death are quick. Life is longer, and while it lasts is lived in surplus or abundance.
The second aspect of space is looseness of fit.
In general the living thing has only a loose fit with its environment. The creature thrives amid a range of climates, sea or soil types, foodstuffs and surrounding species. The environment for its part has only vague requirements of the creature, and could get along with a different creature or with none. (There are exceptions at the margin — species which are dependent on a single other species.)
Wolves eat deer, but also goats, hares and fish, fruits and vegetables, rodents and insects. And wolves forage in many different habitats — in forests, grasslands, steppes, tundra, deserts.
Kranich here …? The organisation of the animal looks inward rather than outward. Its interior relationships are tight, its exterior relationships normally loose. Yellowstone got along without the wolf, and the wolf got along without Yellowstone, but the wolf’s heart cannot get along without its lungs.
The third aspect of space is light.
And here between surplus and action are found light and intelligence. For these illuminate the surplus space in which a creature stands, and enable the creature to grasp that space, and grasp its own infinity in the space, and determine its actions.
The fourth aspect of space is movement.
The wolf has the power of movement.
Although the constraints of physics and the needs of metabolism and reproduction constrain the movement of an animal in space, they do not bind it to a fixed path. Except at the margins close to death, living things act freely. A wolf is constrained to hunt, but not this prey, in these woods, here, now. The wolf is constrained to mate, but not with this mate, here, now. The actions of the wolf are logical, but arbitrary: logical because whatever the wolf is doing — sleeping, travelling, hunting, resting, mating, playing, howling, gazing — is a logical act for a wolf; yet arbitrary because there was no necessity for the wolf to do what it is doing, or to do it here or to do it now.
The fifth aspect of space is the body given to the other.
Space is abundance of something, and light reflects from something, and intelligence is of something, and movement is over something towards something. So space is made of non-space, and the emptiness of space is made of the fullness of something else.
Land, sky, water …
That fullness is the wolf’s own body. The wolf’s substance is another’s space. Wolves host parasites and suffer diseases — heart worm, hookworm, tapeworm, liver fluke, blastomycosis, tuberculosis, lice, rabies, distemper, mange. And top of the heap as it is, even the wolf has enemies — grizzly bears, polar bears and tigers may kill a wolf, and many creatures will scavenge its corpse.
For everything which enfolds the matter of the world into its own body, in the same instant gives that body back to the world as a part of the world’s stock of abundance.
The final aspect of space is enargeia.
In Homer enargeia is the bright unbearable reality of a god or a goddess when they appear on earth to mortal people. For gods are the epitome of the logical (in their exercise of power) and the arbitrary (in their absolute freedom to exercise their power as they please).
Something merely forced has no standing-forth, no blazing reality. Only the inexplicable is real. (This needs to be qualified, or the inert will have no reality — something in conflict with Infinite eye. It is correct to say that only the inexplicable is real, but even the inert is inexplicable in its own terms. There is perhaps a problem, that in Infinite eye I have already treated the image as effectively enarges — glare, grip, etc. One is speaking in this blog post of a different kind of infinity — space not continuity — and it is infinity in general which is enarges rather than specifically the infinity of space.)
The wolf too then is enarges, in its form which is logical in its environment and yet also arbitrary. And in its actions, which are logical for a wolf and yet arbitrary. And in its body, which is given away so logically and yet so arbitrarily to despoliation and death.