Stranger things in heaven and earth

Petroglyphs etched into desert varnish, Utah

I've written about Weird Life by David Toomey for the May edition of The Literary Review, and have put a version online here.

Two posts on this blog in March touch on Toomey's work and some of the issues it raises. They are Cloud beings and In the long term.

Lee Billings invites us to broaden our ideas of what Earth-like planets could be like.

"The land about you is changing every hour, as surely as your own body and as irresistably"

Lie awake at night even in our composed Britain and think about how the land about you is changing every hour, as surely as your own body and as irresistably. Here small avalanches are spilling down cliffs, there miniature land spits are drawing clear of the sea, everywhere hills are being attacked and worn away. If our ears were keen enough, we should be able to hear the rustle of perpetual movement, a stirring of the silence not much greater than that made by the petal of a flower as it opens or closes.

-- from A Land by Jacquetta Hawkes (1951)

Torpid state

One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. 

-- from Walden

Quviannikumut

Helen Silverman, whose graduate work included a study of the social organization and behavior of narwhals, describes as typical the following scene, from her observations in Lancaster Sound. "On one occasion a group of five narwhals consisting of two adult males, one adult female, one [calf] and one juvenile were moving west with the males in the lead. The group stopped and remained on the surface for about 30 [seconds]. One male turned, moved under the [calf], and lifted it out of the water twice. There was no apparent reaction from the mother. The male then touched the side of the female with the tip of its tusk and the group continued westward."

-- from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez (1986). I've had the good fortune to reread parts of this book over the last couple of days.

'A quivering shiny brown black purse'

Sitting after lunch we heard them outside, & on Sunday there they were again hanging in a quivering shiny brown black purse to Mrs Thompsett's tombstone. We leapt about in the long grass of the graves, Percy all dressed up in mackintosh, & netted hat. Bees shoot whizz, like arrows of desire: fierce, sexual; weave like cat's cradles in the air; each whizzing from a string; the whole air full of vibration: of beauty, of the burning arrowy desire; & speed: I think the quivering shifting bee bag the most sexual and sensual symbol. 

-- from Virginia Woolf's diary, quoted by Olivia Laing

'Caught in the very act of becoming'

This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one's sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple matter, too, as altering the position of one's head, a different kind of world may be made to appear. Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs til you see your world upside down. How new it has become! From the close-by sprigs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity. In no other way have I seen of my own unaided sight that the earth is round. As I watch, it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles -- though bristles is too much commotion for it. Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the earth must see itself.

From The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

'On Extinction'

Mel Challenger is detained by flu in the family so is unable to take part in an event at the Bath Literary Festival today. I will be there to read some extracts from her book on her behalf, and to talk about the issues it raises. Please join us if you can.

Here is an extract from her marvelous, disturbing account of an abandoned whaling station in South Georgia:

Beyond this large building, freakish instruments and workings cluttered the landscape. There was an overgrown toothed object like a saw, curved and beautiful as a Norse carving. I could see chains under fragile bonnets of snow with links bigger than my hands. In the distance, the disintegrating platforms of mortuary metal were apparent, proportioned to the massive bodies of whales. A short walk away from the strandline, I stumbled across a large tarnished tank on which the words BLUBBER COOKERY were painted in faded white lettering. At the front was a bolted, square-shaped opening. I immediately thought of the pictures in my childhood copy of Hansel and Gretel, the entrance into the oven where the siblings shoved the witch who held them captive to satisfy her monstrous appetite. But perhaps most startling of all was one of several oil vats, a round structure of astounding proportions, bulging through time and disuse. Sunlight nudged into its snowy circular border, and I too nudged forward, amazed, appalled, snow falling soundlessly around me.

'Adders have faces intense with hatred; hot with it...'

What had caught my eye in the heather was the zigzag, a pattern too clear to look natural. The shadows cast by bracken leaves have similar shapes. In these shadows, the zigzag evolved, presumably, but somehow the scatter of light and shade on the forest floor became on the snake a regular wavy line. It breaks up the animal’s outline. Hawks and crows see the snake from above. People do too. When the snake moves, winding through stalks and shadows, the zigzag goes in different directions, confusing the eye. On a motionless snake, it is insolently clear. In the heath’s debris, the zigzag looks stylized, like a printed or ceramic pattern, a logo or uniform, a badge of power and purpose.

-- from Our Adder by Richard Kerridge

'To find or follow a track'

photo: Guy Moreton

'It seems to me,' [Wittgenstein] will recall years later of these months, 'that I had given birth to new paths of thought within me': 'Es kommt mir so vor, als hätte ich damals in mir neue Denkbewegungen geboren.' The word he uses for 'paths of thought', Denkbewegungen, is a coinage that draws attention to itself. It might be translated as 'thought-movements', or 'thought-motions', but with the added implication of thoughts that are brought into being by means of motion along a path (Weg). The coinage recalls the etymology of the English verb 'to learn', which has its roots -- its routes -- in the proto-Germanic term *liznojan, meaning 'to find or follow a track'.

-- from Way Rights by Robert Macfarlane in Archipelago 6, another collection of essays and other works as polished and beautiful as river pebbles. Catchments by John Elder -- a meditation on the work of Tim Robinson in Connemara and Elder's own Green Mountains in Vermont -- is a wonder.

If tracks can be ways of thought then single words can sometimes be marker stones pointing the way.  Among those I have learned or rediscovered today are:

tombolo 

polypody 

naled

'First there was an island -- then there was a boat'

What draws me to these places is hard to define. The journey is part of the magic. The sea is endlessly, and wonderfully alive; unlike concrete, unlike tarmacadam. No two sea journeys are ever the same. On the trip to North Rona, we met families of dolphin, Risso’s, basking sharks and minke whales. The sea was calm, the swell long and leaden. The night-time journey back was before a north-easterly gale, sailing only on the jib. Driving southwards at eight to ten knots, we listened to the clicking of a school of pilot whales some three miles away.

-- John Cumming, Cape Farewell

Island life

Daily, our sense of time slowed, days expanded like a wing. The days were long in the best, high-summer sense; at night we put up storm shutters on the bothy to make to dark enough to sleep. Time was clouds passing, a sudden squall, a shift in the wind. Often we wondered what it would do to your mind if you were born here, and lived your whole life within this small compass. To be named for the sky or the rainbow, and live in constant sight and sound of the sea. After a mere fortnight I felt lighter inside, as though my bones were turning to flutes.

-- from On Rona, a small masterpiece by Kathleen Jamie

Hypnagogia

I have put a version of Hypnagogia (which appears in Archipelago 5) online here. Andrew McNellie, the editor, prefaces edition 5 with this from William Blake:

But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees.

William James wrote:

When we take a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is the different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be an alternation of flights and perchings.

Some photos from the day described in Hypnagogia can be seen here.

'Surrounded by ghostly objects'

In Nature Writing, a contribution to Archipelago 5, Tim Dee quotes Vladimir Nabokov (1962):

Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information: and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with the botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know and more about one thing but you can ever know everything about one thing: it's hopeless. So we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects.

Dee also quotes Aldo Leopold:

Whereas I write a poem by dint of mighty celebration, the yellowleg walks a better one just by lifting his foot.

P.S. Freeman Dyson gets a lot of things wrong (some of the flaws in his approach are well covered here); but he recently wrote something sensible:

Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

Some of all our awes

Alain de Boton is right that our culture has become sentimental about nature. It's true, too, that we can experience awe by looking out into the universe. But it would be a mistake to assume that we can no longer experience awe by looking at living things and the systems of which they are part here on Earth.

We may have royally messed with the planet, exterminated thousands of other species, and live in fear of our continuing ability to destroy; but we have not 'mastered' nature. [1]  The scope, scale and complexity of life and Earth systems (not to mention their frequent beauty) continue to be more than a match for our capacities, attention and wonder. [2]  Those who have looked deepest into space often come back to Earth with greater concern and love for what is most extraordinary about life on our planet. [3] As Georg Christoph Lichtenberg put it, 'the construction of the universe is very much easier to explain than that of a plant.'

de Boton writes that 'artists may have no solutions, but they are the ones who can come up with the words and images to make visible and important the most abstract and impersonal of challenges.' Regarding some responsibilities of, and opportunities for writers, consider this from Italo Calvino:

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes' into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world. [4]

Footnotes:

[1] As James Lovelock put it, 'nature is not fragile; we are.'  It's also possible that some or many human interventions will be weirdly creative.

[2] To recover awe with regard to even some of the 'lowest' forms of life, one can do worse than start with Carl Zimmer's Microcosm: E.Coli. and the New Science of Life (2008).

[3] The cosmologist Martin Rees is one example. John Huchra, who became passionately concerned about anthropogenic climate change, was another.

[4] From Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1985), previously noted on this blog at Weaving a Rainbow

Attention

A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch; its reflection suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floating, so that I couldn’t see the creek bottom, or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from the cloud on the water, water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down with the current in the series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moon. I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spider webs made invisible by the gathering dark, or to take a chance on seeing a carp, or scan the mudbank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying up-stream with their tails forked, so fast.

-- Annie Dillard (1974)

'...to see what is really there'

Man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the introvert, but physical fear, cold sweating fear for one’s life, fear of the unseen menacing beast, imminent, bristly, tusked and terrible, ravening for one’s own hot saline blood.

-- J A Baker

Extrahuman

The preface to Contours of climate justice (pdf) includes a note written in 1951 by Dag Hammarskjöld which, say the authors, show with particular clarity his deep bonds with the wilderness. What mattered for Hammarskjöld was the:

…extrahuman in the experience of the greatness of Nature. This does not allow itself to be reduced to an expression of our human reactions, nor can we share in it by expressing them. Unless we each find a way to chime in as one note in the organic whole, we shall only observe ourselves observing the interplay of its thousand components in a harmony outside our experience of it as harmony.

I find that last sentence confusing, but the main drift of the passage is probably on target.

Rarity

[Toby] shared the bathroom with six illegal Thai immigrants, who kept very quiet. It was said that the CorpSeCorps had decided that expelling illegals was too expensive, so they'd resorted to the method used by farmers who found a diseased cow in the herd: shoot, shovel, and shut up.

On the floor below her there was an endangered-species luxury couture operation called Slink. They sold Halloween costumes over the counter to fool the animal-righter extremists and cured the skins in the backrooms...The skinned carcasses were sold on to a chain of gourmet restaurants called Rarity. The public dining rooms served steak and lamb and venison and buffalo, certified disease-free so that it could be cooked rare - that was what "Rarity" pretended to mean. But in the private rooms - key-club entry, bouncer-enforced - you could eat endangered species. The profits were immense; one bottle of tiger wine alone was worth a neckful of diamonds.

-- from The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

P.S. 17 Sep: Bonnie Greer's review here.

P.S. 18 Sep: and in her review Jeanette Winterson writes:

Atwood is very good at showing, without judging, what happens when human beings (usually men) cannot love. In the worst of them, like Blanco the Bloat, brutality and sadism take over. In the better of them, like Crake, a utopian desire for perfectability re­places the lost and lonely self. Crake designs out love and romance because he wants to design out the pain and confusion of emotion.

Weaving a rainbow

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various “codes” into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

-- Italo Calvino (1985)

The numberless goings-on of life, inaudible as dreams

I imagine standing upon a Cambrian shore in the evening, much as I stood on the shore at Spitsbergen and wondered about the biography of life for the first time. The sea lapping at my feet would look and feel much the same. Where the sea meets the land is a patch of slightly sticky, rounded stromatolite pillows, survivors from the vast groves of the Precambrian. The wind is whistling across the red plains behind me, where nothing visible lives, and I can feel the sharp sting of wind-blown and on the back of my legs. But in the muddy sand at my feet I can see worm casts, little curled wiggles that look familiar, I can see trails of dimpled impressions lefts by the scuttling of crustacean-like animals. On the strand a whole range of shells glistens -- washed up by the last storm, I suppose -- some of the mother-of-pearl, others darkly shining, made of calcium phosphate. At the edge of the sea a dead sponge washes back and forth in the waves, tumbling over and over in the foam. There are heaps of seaweed, red and brown, and several stranded jelly-fish, one, partly submerged, still feebly pulsing. Apart from the whistle of the breeze and crash and suck of breakers, it is completely silent, and nothing cries in the wind.

I wade out into a rock pool. In the clear water I can see several creatures which could fit into the palm of my hand crawling or gliding very slowly along the bottom. Some of them carry armour plates on their backs. I can recognize a chiton, but the others are unfamiliar. In the sand there are shy tube-worms. A trilobite the size of a crab has caught one of them and is shredding it with its limbs. Another one crawls across my foot, and I can feel the tickle of its numerous legs on my bare flesh -- but wait, it is not a trilobite, but a different kind of arthropod with eyes on stalks at the front and delicate grasping 'hands'. Now that I look out to sea, I can see a swarm of similar arthropods sculling together in the bright surface water -- and can that dark shape with glistening eyes be Anomalocaris in pursuit? Yet, for the top of its body briefly breaks the surface, and I can glimpse its fierce arms for an instant. Where the water breaks it shines luminously for a while in the dying light -- the seawater must be full of light-producing plankton -- and I have to imagine millions more microscopic organisms in the shimmering sea.

-- Richard Fortey (1997)

Image: Tiger Iron