“Thank you for the dedication, dear Jamal! It turned out to be a very fine episode, right down to the sensual ‘presence intoxication’ ... The Brecht quote fits perfectly. The workshop version has its very own charm. This is an exciting writing experiment, thank you for your openness and your encouragement to get involved.” M.

As part of an initiation event, the Orokaiva people of New Guinea instill fear and terror in their offspring. Masked men drive children with lances “into the center of the fear rituals”. They force them to experience being prey. The “esoteric tortures” are the beginning of extensive instruction. At the end, those trained receive their access authorization to the hunting community. The next step is to establish a family and household.

Quotes from Pola Oloixarac’s “Wild Theories,” Wagenbach

Oloixarac’s protagonists Kamtchowsky and Pablo ask themselves:“What is in the oldest chambers of consciousness?”

Where does the memory of humanity begin?

If you want to name the beginning with one word, then fear is the word. Kamtchowsky puts it in a nutshell: On the trail of memory we still suffer the horror of the advanced “primate who, in the transition to becoming a human being ... becomes the prey of predators”. The premium primate remains at the mercy of animal processes, although it has grown beyond them.

“Our ancestors’ fear provides us with key concepts. After being an inferior element on the menu of predators for millions of years and therefore constantly on the run, humans use ... weapons to strike the first blow against the power of the beasts.”

The ego comes with the spear.

Movement and consciousness are two sides of the same coin. The spear becomes the ego. A good man is a good weapon. In the unleashed “we,” modern man creates the superiority over the beast. But an indomitable egoism forces him to isolate himself again and again. “The verbs of the warrior (hunt, kill, fight) are the prelude to sexual relations,” says Kamtchowsky. “All forms of understanding are psychological lime deposits from the first encounter with wild animals.”

Consciousness and Prey

Feinberg/Mallatt also developed a theory according to which consciousness is a function of hunting.Consciousness came into play “so that the first predators could kill their prey and the first prey could escape them”.

“The verbs of the warrior (hunt, kill, fight) are the prelude to sexual relations.”

*

In a closed system, entropy never decreases. This sentence from thermodynamics can be applied to communicative systems in which desire, power, and language circulate. What begins as playful exchange necessarily intensifies, condenses, demands ever-new stimuli, until the system reaches its limits.

We left Upington early in the morning. Mist clung to the landscape, barely more than a fleeting veil, a last breath of night. I drove. We spoke little. Was it melancholy? Already I was shaping a version of events in which all of this lay in the past. I was remembering the desert even as I was still experiencing it. The asphalt of the R360 stretched ahead. Hours passed without any variation in the scenery. Only heat and red Kalahari sand, clinging to everything. Camel Thorn trees, termite mounds, a bleached antelope skeleton. A sun-bleached cattle skull.

We reached the desert outpost of Rietfontein. The sun hung low, the sky shifting from flaming orange to hallucinatory violet. Night fell. Even in the darkness, the day’s heat shimmered over the road surface.

I watched nothing but cinematic effects. Every scene felt like something out of a film, so unreal, so ghostly. The little town exhausted itself in a collection of corrugated iron roofs, closed petrol stations, and shuttered shops.