New transformative social networks in the human undergrowth

This is a double story (and interview) of intraspecific languages and natures. "Patrick Lacan's 'Green Metamorphosis' with drawings by Marion Besançon (tunué, Euro 34.90, trad.it. Stefano A. Crespi) is a comic strip parable that would have appealed to Professor Umberto Eco, a lover of graphic novels.

After Covid-19, explains Lacan, author of the texts, 'the pandemic has planted more concretely the seeds of the consciousness of our fragility, the road has opened up. I was a nurse for a long time, parallel to my profession as an author, I had health problems, I feel this fragility and the need to act. To improve our relationship with Life, we need simple but essential words: love, welcome, consideration, gentleness, peace, respect, breathe, open, hope, collect, sublimate, feel, react, reflect, patience, liberate, confront, empathy'.

What has caused the metamorphosis of history has something to do with capitalism, perhaps pollution, or large scale: 'Some people continue to destroy, to have more and more profit, more and more growth,' Lacan reflects. 'What is the end if not to fill an inner void...? It is an instituted egoism. We are surrounded by much violence, when we need gentleness. Today, messages pass better when communicated through beautiful emotions. Understanding Life and returning to an understanding of nature is a poetic weapon, the only one that will last. Because it is deeper emotionally,' Besançon adds: 'We are in the midst of climate change, at the point of no return. One of the ways to deal with it, psychologically, will be to develop stories related to this change. Stories help us understand reality, and sometimes give us concrete solutions, or help us imagine alternative futures'.

We are in the age of surveillance capitalism and social isolation, but Lacan observes, 'new networks are connecting, without worrying about the ultra-liberal world stirring nearby. Like the subterranean networks of mushrooms connecting the trees, they are forming locally, slowly, with an awareness of the urgent need to proceed differently'. Which ones?

"Energy self-sufficiency, circular economy, mutual aid, 'becoming oneself', gender, sexuality, feminism ... Women have a more direct relationship with life, seem more interconnected with nature and have much to offer the world. All these are sprouts, each growing at its own pace. But inexorably so in the long term'. In the same vein, Besançon: 'It is we who invent our society, the rules and what we believe in; we can also imagine something else. We are animals like others and our time on Earth is limited; nothing we do will last forever, every now and then we might reconnect with this fact to rediscover what really matters to us, individually and collectively'.