Excerpt from
Anachronicles
COMPOSTING FABULATIONS
by Jacopo Ducato Ruggeri
ABSTRACT
Anachronicles are a collection of accounts without fixed chrono- logy, a weave of stories that play together, cross paths, and at times fold into one another. They loop and mingle, borrowing and blending, until they form a fertile arrangement of compost. No story is wholly original or alone; each has been told, retold, and reshaped through time, yet in their new connections lies the possibility of surprise. Anachronicles are an outlook on time and space, indeterminate and poly-temporal, attending to both the vast and the intimate. They are composting fabulations, shredded, shared, and digested in the storytelling act that both nourishes and troubles the creative agenda.
Death in the Anthropocene
Prompting this chapter is the film Strangers in Good Company by Canadian filmmaker Cynthia Scott (1990). A busload of older women is stranded in rural Quebec when their vehicle breaks down on a country road. Catherine, a nun with mechanical skill, tries to fix the engine but concludes they must spend the night in an abandoned cottage.
Cissy walks down to the lake, two milk churns in hand. She pauses, entranced: swallows skim and drink from the lake’s silvery surface, their calls rippling through the air. Returning to the cottage, the soundscape shifts, grasshoppers replace the swallows. Mary and Constance sit under the veranda eave. Constance leafs through Mary’s watercolours, a sequence that begins with cut flowers and moves toward dead songbirds.
She pauses at one image: killed by a cat is written below. “Did it kill it to eat it?” Constance asks. “No, no,” Mary replies. “They’d leave it for me to paint. Very nice of them.” “What do you do? Tell the cat: go kill me a bird?” Constance laughs. “Yeah…” Mary murmurs, distracted.
They identify each bird, yellowthroat, song sparrow, before Constance remarks, “We’ll never see it again. Death is about us everywhere.” She admires the book, then recalls her own abandoned artistic skill, put aside when she left art school to raise children, “busy breeding and mating, mating and breeding.”
Fig. 2. Scenes from the movie “Strangers in Good Company” directed by Cynthia Scott, 1990.
The scene moves fluidly from the vitality of swallows to the still beauty of Mary’s dead birds, from life to death and back again. The choice of modern birds, descendants of dinosaurs, is apt: they embody both survival and the shadow of extinction. After the bus accident, Mary and Constance, like the birds, are wayfarers facing the inevitability of living and dying in unexpected company.
This awareness sits within the layered complexity of the Anthropocene. Coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, the term names a new geological epoch in which human activity has outstripped the Holocene’s rhythms, driving a dizzying extinction rate across all taxa. Humans seem intent on making as many new fossils as possible, recent fossils, like Mary’s painted birds, reminders of lost plumed dinosaurs.
How should we respond to the ethical claim this loss makes on us? Philosopher Thom van Dooren, in Flight Ways, offers mourning as one response, an alternative space for sustained remembrance that draws us into “an awareness of the multispecies continuities and connectivities that make life possible for everyone.”
Mourning invites us to live with our ghosts, dwell in our losses, and renew our relationships. Like Constance, grief can open a path toward understanding our entanglements. Like birds, living and dying, we are “at stake in each other’s company.”