Waterbear

Space is the place. Saturn backlit - NASA

Thirty-second in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 23: Waterbear

page 322: space is not a comfy place for a human. See, especially, Packing for Mars by Mary Roach. Even on that comparatively short trip, the biggest threat to human voyagers would be the cumulative radiation exposure during the long trip.

page 324: [the waterbear's] ability to wait out the most unfavourable times. Some months after completing the book, I re-read Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams (one of my top ten nature writing recommendations) and came across this passage which I had quite forgotten:

The coming and going of the animals during the short summer gives the Arctic a unique rhythmic shape, but is is to be felt only in certain places. Mostly, summer and winter, the whole land is still. The arctic explorer George de Long called it “a glorious country to learn patience in.” Time here, like light, is a passing animal. Time hovers above the tundra like the rough-legged hawk, or collapses altogether lie a bird keeled over with a heart attack leaving the stillness we call death. In the thick film of moisture that coats a bit of moss on a tundra stone, you can find, with a strong magnifying glass, a world of movement buried within the larger suspended world: ageless pinpoints of life called water bears migrate over the wet plains and canyons of jade-green vegetation. But even here time is on the verge of collapse. The moisture freezes in winter. Or a summer wind may carry the water bear off and drop it among bare stones. Deprived of moisture, it shrivels slowly into a dessicated granule. If can endure like this for thirty or forty years. It waits for its time to come again.

page 325: to fill empty places with phantasms. In an LRB review-essay titled That Wilting Flower, Hilary Mantel observes that ‘until the idea of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods’:

On the lonely road by moonlight, the parts of ourselves oppressed by our intelligence come out to play. We meet ancestral selves, neither gods nor demons but short semi-humans with hairy ears and senses differently attuned – the eyesight of an eagle, the nose of a hound. The phenomena are internal, generated by the psychological mechanisms that connect us to each other and to our evolutionary past.

page 329: endurance.  Some are optimistic about human exploration of space. On Earth,  microbes will rule the far future.

The Long Garden

I am seven, and I am in the yard at Brosscroft. I am playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up, some shift of the light. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, in the long garden. It is, let us say, some fifty yards away among coarse grass, weeds and bracken. I can't see anything, not exactly see, except the faintest movement – a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl of flies. But it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift makes my stomach heave. I can sense, at the periphery, the limit of all my senses, the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it invisibly. I am cold and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking as if pinned to the moment. I cannot wrench my gaze away. I am looking at a space occupied by nothing. It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless. It moves. I beg it: stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body. I pluck my eyes away. It is like plucking them out of my head. Grace runs away from me, runs out of my body like liquid from a corpse. I move from the spot. My body weighs heavy. My feet have to be hauled up from the ground as if they were sticking in gore. I walk out of the sunlight, through the glass place, into the enclosed dimness of the cold kitchen. I say, 'Mum, I want to come in now. Can I do some drawing?'

-- from Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel

A state of ghosthood

Rilke's Orpheus:

is a book about death and the lyric, how we are a product of two realms: the here and the not-here, the temporal and the a-temporal (or the eternal) because we have foreknowledge of our own deaths. [1] So essentially we're in a state of ghosthood, which is unusual for a mammal so how do you deal with that? Well, the way we deal with it is by singing across the gap and listening to the echoes that come back from the realm.

-- Don Paterson in interview

Note

[1]  Scot Atran's phrase for this state is "the tragedy of cognition"

A different kind of ghost

I have become accustomed to the use of 'ghost' to describe a species that still hangs on even though the ecosystem of which it is part has largely or wholly been destroyed. [1]

But the word is also suggested for something very different: an invasive species that disrupts an ecosystem and drives native species to extinction without necessarily thriving itself. [2] These 'ghosts', notes Olivia Judson:

have been detected in mathematical models more often than they’ve been sighted in nature. In fact, it’s not clear that they exist.

Footnotes

[1] See, for example, this from Scott Wiedensaul, 2002. I first used the term this way in a talk in June 2007. It appears in the title of a piece by Robert Macfarlane discussed here.

[2] The ghost of competition present. Miller, T. E., Horst, C. P. and Burns, J. H. American Naturalist 173: 347-353. (pdf )

Ghosts and shadows

Granta 102: The New Nature Writing contains much that is very fine. Pathologies by Kathleen Jamie, for example, is close to as good they come [1]. Robert Macfarlane's Ghost Species is also outstanding [2], but cracks for a moment here:

Historically, the idea of ghosts has been confined to non-human kingdoms. But sitting in Eric's kitchen that day, it seemed clear that there were also human ghosts: types of place-faithful people who had been out-evolved by their environments - and whose future disappearance was almost assured.

'Out-evolved' is a shard of social darwinism, probably accidental and certainly unfitting of an author who surely knows that the processes that have driven smallholders out of the fens has nothing to do with natural selection, and everything to do with economics, politics and history [3]. The displacement (and in many other cases slaughter) of large number of humans by other humans (who may or may not have altered the environment on a large scale) is not natural selection.


If, however, humans were completely displaced, slaughtered wholesale or radically subjugated by another life form (or post 'life' form) then we might be talking (or rather, not talking).

The prospect of such destruction by a superior intelligence or more resourceful predator looks like science fiction to some (see, for example the dreams reviewed here) but not all (including, perhaps some who were here). Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence argues scientists need to work pretty hard to develop Gandhian, 'friendly AI'. [4]

How many humans would a really smart (compassionate) being want around? About six million, as there (probably) were at the end of the Paleolithic? About five hundred thousand, if the abundance of humans were linked to their size and fitted on the curve from mouse to whale? [5] How would these humans be kept in control?


Footnotes

1. Pathologies is not available online, and this is too bad. Quoting a snippet out of context doesn't work well: thought and feeling mobilise and develop through the full arc of the essay. Find and read the whole thing if you can! Among the essays that are available online and are worth reading (besides Macfarlane's) is Second Nature by Jonathan Raban, although he skates over what may prove to be the most significant and lasting Euro-American legacy in the Pacific Northwest: the radioactive waste of the Hanford complex [P.S. 11 Sep: on which see No More Bomb-Making, but Work Aplenty].

2. See this review of The Wild Places. For an earlier example of the use of the phrase "ghost species" in non-technical writing see, e.g., this by Scott Wiedensaul.

3. If history (the first time in tragedies such as "racial hygiene") repeats as farce then Steve Jones may nail it with "evolution is to social sciences as statues are to birds: a convenient platform on which to deposit badly digested ideas"(Darwin's Ghost). That said, Jones may not be completely immune from the virus of social darwinism himself. See his comments on the "iron rule of greed" which I criticise in a review of his book Coral. (For a really good book on coral reefs see Veron. )

4. See also, e.g., Technology That Outthinks Us: A Partner or a Master?

5. Darwin's Ghost by Steve Jones, page 313.

Images

Top: Bagged thylacine, 1869.

Middle: Truganini and the other last Tasmanian aborigines, 1860s.

Bottom: Petroglyph of a thylacine from Murujuga, Western Australia. The animal has been extinct on the Austrlian mainland for several thousand years.

Shadows

One might hazard that Buddhism teaches that life is a compulsive cycle of suffering and rebirth (as animal, human, ghost), a sleep of ignorance from which is possible to awake through awareness and compassion. In defining it so summarily one might be neither right nor wrong.


By all outward appearances, humans seldom lose their fascination with creaturely life. The caves at Dunhuang, for example, amply record this amongst the wealth of images and other artefacts, now threatened by too much breath and too many feet [1].


The silk paintings at Dunhuang were viewed ambivalently by Buddhist monks because their manufacture required the death of the silk worm, writes Colin Thubron [2]. But silk with rich designs and images continued to prove irresistible (as it had for several millennia beforehand), enchanting peoples in the furthest reaches of the world:

By the time their silk banners unfurled before the dazed Roman legionaries at Carrhae, the Parthians had been trading formally with China for half a century. Their decorative inheritance was an ancient Mesopotamian one, rich with the hunt and beasts of Assyria and Babylon, and in time Persian silks woven with Chinese yarn, came to beguile the West. As early as the fourth century AD, a Christian bishop was rebuking his flock for wearing imported silks that portrayed lions, bears and panthers instead of the disciples; and a silk cope enclosing the corpse of St Mexme survives at Chinon on the Loire, blazoned with cheetahs chained to a Zoroastrian fire-altar. [3]

Footnotes:

1. See Buddha’s Caves by Holland Cotter.

The Diamond Sutra says, "Thus should one view all of the fleeting world - a drop of dew, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a star at dawn, a phantom, and a dream". Its colophon is human (and generous): like a precursor of Creative Commons or PLoS, the manufacturer, a 'self' named Wang Jie, says that the Sutra is made for 'universal free distribution', and honours his parents, locating all to a specific time and place. Thubron (see note 2 below) writes that some religious manuscripts were 'stiffened by used paper that often turned out to be more informative than they did, [including]...even a funeral address for a dead donkey.'

2. Shadows of the Silk Road, page 94 (The book got mixed reviews; see, for example, the Guardian/Observer here and New York Times here)

3. Ibid. page 283.