"Growing up in the Anthropocene"

Growing Up in the Anthropocene - my recommendations for Five Books

Ken Caldeira, who is mentioned in the piece, has this: How far can climate change go?

Subsidies: a paper from ODI says  that for 42 developing countries where data are available...the scale of fossil-fuel subsidies to consumers, at $396 billion in 2011, is 75 times higher than the average annual approved climate finance of $5 billion from 2010-2012

In this piece Christopher Shaw argues that the 2 degree "dangerous climate change" threshold I mention in the interview is a distraction.

Photo: Igor F. Petkovic

(P.S. As it happens, The Guardian has just published an interview with Jeremy Grantham, who stood beside Hansen and others at the Keystone XL protest. )

'Gone'

Isabella Kirkland's picture is the subject of her talk at TedX's DeExtinction event today.

The revival of an extinct species - the Wooly mammoth - is now a real possibility, says Hendrik Poinar

Hannah Waters see narcissism in de-extinction. Stuart Pimm argues conservation of species still alive should take precedence.

Art and origin

The true cognitive depth to the palaeolithic sculptures – their challenge, ultimately, to our anthropological schema – seems to me the way they suggest how self-loss and self-consciousness were intertwined. The movement of the new world of representations was at least twofold. One aspect (and that I have concentrated on the little figurines does not mean I have forgotten, or mean the reader to, that the overall image-world of the Ice Age is oriented to the bison, the mammoth, the horse, the cave bear, the reindeer, the wolverine) involved the invention, by the look of it somewhat suddenly, of more and more ways to bring the realm of animals up close, imaginatively – into being, into movement. The painters and carvers seem to have been intent on staging and immortalising the human animal’s familiarity with – maybe its dreamed-of inclusion in – a world where the ‘human’ was only a small part of the show. 

– T. J. Clark

Among the dendroglyphs

The 'hum' I traced back to a mass of flies orbiting a protuberance impaled on a broken-off branch. I poked the limb with a pine stick & nearly retched, for 'twas a piece of stinking offal. I turned to flee but duty obliged me to dispel a black suspicion that a human heart hung on that tree. I concealed my nose & mouth in my 'kerchief &, with my stick, touched the severed ventricle. The organ pulsed as if alive! & my scalding Ailment shot up my spine! As in a dream (but it was not!) a pellucid salamander emerged from its carrion dwelling & darted along the stick to my hand! I flung the stick away & saw not where that salamander disappeared.

-- from Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Sound and light

The most powerful tool we have for understanding the universe is right between our two ears. And those same ears provide a wealth of information beyond what our eyes can actually see. When we open up our ears and open up our minds, we open up ourselves to an entirely new way of understanding the universe.

-- Robert Alexander, Using the Sun to Make Music

photo: NASA/GSFC/SDO

Old mind

What made animals the real stars of ice-age art? It may be because this art reflects a long-lost system of religious belief that saw animals as supernatural creatures, divine beings, gods.

It was the mammoth, the bison and the horse that captured the imaginations of these artists and inspired their greatest work...The modern human mind begins with the same questions about gods and monsters, the same curiosity about nature and capacity for fantasy, that have shaped it ever since.

-- Jonathan Jones.

See A bestiary of 25,000 years.

The space around the line

...we would assume that what it is we meant

would have been listed in some book set down
beyond the sky's far reaches, if at all
there was some purpose here. But now I think
the purpose lies in us all and that we fall

into an error if we do not keep
our own true notebook of the way we came,
how the sleet stung, or how a wandering bird
cried at the window...

-- lines from The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, quoted by Esther Woolfson in Field Notes from a Hidden City

"Our life is not the line, but the space around that line", writes Nat Case

Příhody lišky Bystroušky

The Cunning Little Vixen, at once a charming children's tale and a profound allegory of modern life, may be Janáček's greatest achievement. It begins innocuously, as a folksy old forester -- as a child Janáček dreamed of being a forester -- captures a fox cub and brings her to his home. She runs amok, slaughters the chickens, and in banished to the woods. There she finds a handsome lover and woos him to music that parodies Wagnerian opera, notably Strauss in his kitschier moods. In Act III, the vixen is felled by a rifle shot, and the opera takes on an altogether different tone. In the final scene the forester steps out of his folk tale role and meditates on the passage of time. He seems to be musing about the very opera that he's in. "Is this fairy tale or reality? Reality or fairy tale?" The forester falls asleep, and when he wakes the animals of the woods surround hum. He sees fox cubs play and realizes that they are the vixen's children. He then catches a little frog in his hand, thinking he's seeing the same "clammy little monster" whom he met in the first scene of the opera.

Forester: Where have you come from?

Frog: That wasn't me, that was grandpa! They told me all about you.

In other words, the animals of the forest have been telling stories about the forester over the course of their brief lives, as if he were a hero from long ago. In the disjuncture between human and animal time we see him -- and ourselves -- across an immense space.

 -- from The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross

The evening and the morning

I have often thought, as I have passed by it, that one day, under a special dispensation, I should received from this little pool of water, from this small, green stoup of lustral water, a whisper as to the secret of life. It will be revealed to me, I have thought, as surely and as naturally as the presence of dew makes itself felt on folded twilight flowers found suddenly damp to the touch after the dry butterfly periods of a summer's day.
     Always hoping for this hour of grace, I have loitered by the pond's edge at every season...It was on a soft evening of this last September that there came to me the breath of the knowledge that I sought...All was silent, all was expectant. The messenger for who I had awaited was at last revealed.
     It was a hare. I saw her from far away and did not so much as venture to move a finger...Nearer and nearer she came. Was she actually intending to drink?...The stillness of the evening was so profound that the fur of a field mouse's jacket brushing against the stems of its grassy jungle would have been audible, while against the sky, infinitely remote, the moon hung in utter calm.
     I was suddenly awakened from my rapture. I had heard a sound, a sound sensitive and fresh as soft rain upon a leaf. It was the hare drinking.

-- Llewelyn Powys

Suilven

In the chapter on the Barrel sponge, I wrote about Scotland's far north, where in some places metamorphic rocks from the Archaean form 'a magical landscape':

Promontories such as Stac Pollaidh and Suilven rise from these older rocks like the foundations of our own vanishingly brief moments of awareness.

Thanks to @Lines_Landscape I've just seen James Anderson and Niall Walker's film. For those of us who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing we like.

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means 

 -- Walt Whitman

Painting the invisible

Watercolor of Mycoplasma mycoides by David S. Goodsell, the Scripps Research Institute.

Section through a eukaryotic cell here.

Many real animals are stranger than imaginary ones

Nature allows every child to play tricks with her; every fool to have judgment upon her; thousands to walk stupidly over her and see nothing; and takes her pleasure and finds her account in them all.

-- Goethe 

The wealth of the soul exists in images. I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths. 

-- attributed to Jung

This post relates to Rereading: The Book of Imaginary Beings online at The Guardian. Short descriptions of a few imaginary creatures which Borges never knew can be found here.

In an essay published in 1971 the physician Lewis Thomas argued that a bestiary for our time would have to be a microbestiary, featuring the likes of Myxotricha paradoxa, Blepharisma and plant-animal combinations that mostly exist in the sea. Their meaning, he suggested, would be "basically the same as the meaning of a medieval bestiary. There is a tendency for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside each other, return to earlier arrangements, get along, wherever possible."

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings was partly inspired by Thomas's claim. I looked for real animals, stranger than imaginary ones, that could help me better understand the nature of being and beings. 

See also Nature Beyond Our Wildest Imaginings.

images: the Ornate Ghost Pipefish, Solenostomus paradoxus, and the Rosey-lipped batfish, Ogcocephalus darwini.

Imaginary Beings

This one is real

Jorge Luis Borges wrote The Book of Imaginary Beings before packet switched computer networking was a twinkle in Donald Watts Davies's eye.  These days anyone with access to the Internet can compile their own anthology of imaginary beings in minutes. Here are four:

The Hai in Embassy Town by China Miéville:

The principle imaginary beings in Embassy Town are the two-mouthed Hosts. Early in the book, however, the narrator refers in passing to the Hai, putative beings deep in the immer, the beyond-space that underlies or infuses the manchmal, or "this space where we live"

 "I've spoken to [space] captains and scientists who don't believe [the Hai] to be anything like life, only aggregates of immer, their attacks and jackknife precision just the jostles of an immer chaos in which our manchmal brains can't learn to see the deep random. Myself, I've always thought they were monsters."

The Mulefa in The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman:

These elephant-like creatures lack a central spine but instead have a diamond-framed skeleton.  They have four legs, short horns, and a prehensile trunk. Signing with the trunk is an integral part of Mulefa language. Lacking two hands, it usually requires two or more Mulefa trunks working together to accomplish complex tasks like tying knots.

The Mulefa use large, disc-shaped seed pods from enormous trees as wheels. The pods fit neatly onto a spur on their front and rear legs  They propel themselves using their two side legs, like a cyclist without pedals. Ancient lava flows solidified into smooth rivers of rock run across the land and serve as roads.

A creature in The Road by Cormac McCarthy:

In the dream from which [the man] had wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

Wentshukumishiteu

Wentshukumishiteu is said by the Inuit to fiercely protect the young of various animal species from human hunters. It is particularly fond of otters. It can travel anywhere on or under the water, and can break through thick ice. It can also move underground through rocks.

La velocità

Among his many skills, Chuang-tzu [or Zhuangzi], was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab.  Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house and twelve servants.  Five years later the drawing was still not begun. "I need another five years," said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

-- quoted by Italo Calvino in Quickness, one of Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

'Sixth Extinction'

We didn't mean to help make the mammoth extinct. The wonderful portrait of a mammoth in Pech Merle cave reveals that early homo sapiens was fascinated by these marvellous creatures. This masterpiece of cave art is as acute as any modern work of naturalist observation. The hunters who painted in caves showed the same passion for the natural world as their descendants do. Their culture must have been bereft when the mammoth vanished – even as they helped it on its way.

In the 21st century the same paradox endures. Human activity endangers entire species, yet human culture is profoundly rooted in nature. The loss of a species is also a loss of the images, stories, symbols and wonders that we live by – to call it a cultural loss may sound too cerebral: what we lose when we lose animals is the very meaning of life. Those first artists in ancient caves portrayed animals far more than they portrayed people. It was in the wild herds around them that the power of the cosmos and the mystery of existence seemed to be located.

-- Jonathan Jones

Endless forms

We have moved beyond a world of natural history into an era of what Richard Pell calls “postnatural history.” His new museum, the Center for PostNatural History, opened in Pittsburgh [in July 2012]. With it he endeavours to create a curiosity cabinet from the Anthropocene period - the age of man.

The only criteria for inclusion in Pell’s Wunderkammer are that the organisms have been intentionally altered by humans in a way that would be passed on through generations. Intentionality is the important bit, Pell says; after all, a museum of creatures changed by pollution, nuclear radiation or climate change would be endless.

--  from A museum of creatures re-engineered by humans

(Image: Guatemalan worry dolls constructed from cultured tissue, Oron Catts and Lonat Zurr)

Freedom, slavery or extinction

Reminded by Paul Evans's The Cave Horse of this from Thoreau's journal:

3 September 1851. I saw a man working with a horse in a field by the river, carting dirt; and the horse and his relation to him struck me as very remarkable. There was the horse, a mere animated machine — though his tail was brushing off the flies — his whole existence subordinated to the man’s, with no tradition, perhaps no instinct, in him of independence and freedom, of a time when he was wild and free — completely humanized. No compact made with him that he should have the Saturday afternoons, or the Sundays, or any holidays. His independence never recognized, it being now quite forgotten both by men and by horses that the horse was ever free. For I am not aware that there are any wild horses known surely not to be descended from tame ones. Assisting that man to pull down that bank and spread it over the meadow; only keeping off the flies with his tail, and stamping, and catching a mouthful of grass or leaves from time to time, on his own account — all the rest for man. It seemed hardly worth while that he should be animated for this... Now and forever he is man’s slave. [And] the more I considered, the more the man seemed akin to the horse...

Sublime horrors

What is at issue, it seems, is not the horror of alien life but of life in any form; not the existence of monsters but the monstrousness of existing. The dread that rises to the surface here hints at a culture variously afraid of sex, afraid of Darwin, afraid of DNA, afraid of aliens—afraid no matter which way it looks, forward or backward—and finding its way at last, as a last resort, to a planet of death.  

-- from a note by Geoffrey O'Brien on Prometheus

Mind-forged manacles

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transformite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratalogical Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism. . . . I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wilderness of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.

-- from The Total Library by Jorge Luis Borges (1939)

The Zone

Once I was a man, with a soul and a living body and now I am no more than a being...I hear and see, but no longer know anything...I now live in eternity. The branches sway on the trees, other people come and go in the room, but for me time no longer passes.

-- a schizophrenic patient as reported by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. The passage is quoted by Geoff Dyer in Zona.

The difference, perhaps, for sane humans in the Zone (which can be described as a place, or state, of heightened awareness to everything) is that, while we feel a sense of oneness with the Zone ('to be in the Zone is to be part of the Zone'), we do not altogether loose our sense of individuality. (The pain of individuality is, perhaps, what makes us sane.)  Even when we think we forget time we are still at experiencing it. Consciousness only exists in time.  Tarkovsky may be cinema's great poet of stillness, as Dyer writes, but his stillness is animated by the energy of the moving image.