Category: earthling

Look at Us

Albums in space.

We started with the basics––abstractions, really: circle, star maps, a few terms. Then the images of planets, as if to open conversation. Have you seen this, too?

Look at our moon, we are so proud. See our double helix, watch our cells divide! Behold our anatomical diagrams. Here is conception, fetal development, birth. Nursing mother, father with child; now a family. Consider continental drift, oceans, desert, shore, dunes; consider forest, leaf, mushroom, sequoia, snowflake. Insect, vertebrate, seashell. Dolphin, school of fish, tree toad, eagle, crocodile.

Yes, some notable omissions: war, poverty, disease. Idea being, best foot forward. Also omitted: visual art. Whatever would we choose, and how would we explain ourselves to our critics? It’s like that with art.

Animals at a waterhole, hunters in the bush. Craftsmen, dancers, pipe smokers. Mountain climbers, Olympic sprinters, schoolrooms, children at a globe. Harvests: cotton, grapes, fish nets, supermarkets. Shared meals, construction. Architecture, cityscapes, factory interiors. Trains, planes, radio telescopes.

Here is a page from a book. One of our astronauts: how like the floating fetus with its cord!  Now a shuttle launch, now a string quartet. We convert these images to sound, place them on a record.

Hello, can you hear us? Are you there? Do you understand?

Have you seen anything like this before? 

How about since?

What now?

***

Inspiration: Jon Lomberg’s “Pictures of Earth,” in Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, by Carl Sagan, Ed.Drake, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg, and Linda Salzman Sagan.

Waking

When the ice thins.

After the long search, hungry; after securing the space and leaving the guards, after the long drop into winter shade with your muted heart, wake.  Now emerge. Watch as you enter this peril to begin again, your life.

***

Inspired by this article about findings from recent studies on hibernation habits among bears and other mammals, with particular focus on adaptations to global warming.

Soliciting Questions

Wise fools convene at the threshold.

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Your local fools!

Not interested. We’re doing serious work here. 

On?

Existential matters. You wouldn’t get it. Bye, now.

But some problems have a way of lurking at the threshold. What better subject?

With enough construction within the discipline, anything can be explained. You really must depart now.

You mean from standard principles?

No, I mean from my porch. But yes, that too.

And yet, even the most careful practitioner rarely gets above theory.

Sure, but finding a given to begin with is harder than it seems.

Can you hold this?

Being, when it isn’t sticky, tends to be too slippery.

You could try putting your hand in a jar of honey. 

I know, then try to feel where hand ends and honey begins. Old hat.

Well, to the extent that being can be known, it won’t be with knowledge.

Maybe not, but you can use what you know to construct beings in sequence.

What do you know?

I really don’t have time––

Here’s a mirror! Wanna start with the eyes? Then you can get to all things seen and unseen, and the whole arrangement until you get to the point where you are asking why we’re here and not there, while––

Really, I don’t––

Awww, look at this cat! Hi, kitty! Oh, aren’t you gorgeous! Okay, yes, yes.

That’s my cat, Oliver.

Are you sure?

That’s enough.

Oliver is licking his teeth and turning away now. How do you read that, exactly?

I’ll ask him later. But now I really have to––

You know, you may be waiting a very long time for an answer.

Speaking of time, I can’t––

Maybe we ask questions like daubing at paint, to give us something to do––

––I have plenty to––

––with the eternities we can’t seem to keep from conjuring, even as our skins crack in recognition.

Of what?

Of the endless amusement we provide at our own expense!

You’re not leaving, are you?

Maybe later, but I’m really into petting this cat right now.

Well, do you want a chair?

Nope, just wanted to leave you this paintbrush. Later!

Sooner?

That’s it!

Animal Histories

Early theories about Birds of Paradise.

Perhaps they were fallen angels, these wingless birds. Their plumes were like haloes. Perhaps they moved as comets across the sky, in perpetual motion and only occasionally visible. They might be immortals in the flesh, or they might be the Phoenix. Whatever the case, it seemed impossible that they could land, given that they had no feet.

Theories sprouted. That the female must lay eggs in an internal chamber of her body where she incubates them until they are ready to begin lifetimes of continual flight. Or that they might rest after all, from time to time, using their featherless extensions like strings from which to suspend themselves from the branches of the highest trees. Perhaps they would twine these together while mating. Here is an image of one. See how it drinks the rain. 

Some hypothesized that the birds would never submit to close study, so averse are they to the prospect of being sullied by this world. As context for these speculations, it can be helpful to consider the earliest arrival of these birds on the continent. They had arrived, after all, as the precious cargo of a colonial ship, far from their songs, their homeland, and their days of flight, with legs and wings removed.

***

Inspiration for this post: This morning I learned that today is the birthday of Conrad Gessner (1516-1565), the renowned swiss zoologist who published the Historia Animalium (History of the Animals), which was the most widely read natural history in Europe during the renaissance.  It was summarily banned by the Catholic church as heretical. Having once been harshly scolded as a first grader in Catholic school, for depicting a unicorn at the center of my elaborate marker drawing of the Garden of Eden, I felt my sympathies drawn toward Gessner’s work. In my unsuccessful efforts to find a readable digital copy of this extensive work, I came across this article about early theories of birds of paradise. To his credit, Gessner was among the first to speculate that the birds must not subsist entirely on air, rain, and vast internal fat stores, but must eat actual food, somehow. 

Minor Challenges

Interrogations at terminal velocity.

First, a threshold. Questions about the roots of things tend to call common sense from the jury box to the witness stand. Being may be what knowing apprehends, but answer: can you point to an essence outside knowing? Yes or no.

No further questions, Your Honor. 

Recess. Outside, cellophane angels drop into boxes. Here are the signs. We’ll attach them like armor, with the same duct tape used to silence those objecting to being objects of study. 

Bells again, wait. We were at a threshold, trying to begin––what, though? And were we calling it? I’ve lost––the engine’s speed has thrown me back again, and as for the thread I meant to follow, before the angels and the tape, where now?

In Search of Lost Time

Overheard.

What are you looking for?

Time, I was going to reference an old story––

That’s gone out of print. There’s no catching it now,

but get this. A ventriloquist and a bullfighter walk

into a bar and learn that it isn’t one. The place is

a bank now. “I disagree!” remarked one or the other,

you can never tell with ventriloquists. They walked

out dazed, looking for a sign they could read.

Hello, Stranger

For the love of seaweed.

There is the familiar arrangement of well-known symmetrical forms, the sort that draws comments of Cute, and Beautiful, exclamation mark. These are not that. Slick like raw meat, covered with film over knotty, bulbous appendages, they were dubbed the useless class of botanists. Perhaps it is the fate of things deemed useless, to be collected by fringe enthusiasts, who pressed them between paper, offered collections as gifts. They would sell them during the first world war, to raise money for wounded soldiers, and this is one of those things I can’t stop thinking: how when a continent was immersed in mechanized violence on a scale unprecedented in human history, some responded by collecting delicate specimens of fragile ocean life, to press between pages. 

***

Inspired by Sasha Archibald’s Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album in the Public Domain Review.

Sanctuary

Protection is a delicate dance.

After the wetlands disappeared, many feared the cranes were gone, too. Extinct, many believed. The horror of this. What are we without our cranes? They are our loyalty, our longevity. And when they dance! A wonder to behold.

Farmers on the island began to sprinkle corn. Schoolchildren would perform this ritual every morning. Superstition, an outsider might say, this feeding of the disappeared.

But then the birds began to return. Encouraged by this glimmer of hope, more took up feedings. Ah, says an old woman now, I can’t go anywhere because of these birds. I worry about them if they don’t show up, but of course we want them to fly off, be wild again, whatever that means.

Some dig wells to create ponds for the cranes. An old man, bringing smelt to one of these ponds, spots a crane couple. He waves his arms and one of the cranes waves back, as if to dance with him.

***

Inspired by, and using borrowed phrases from this wonderful article by Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida in today’s New York Times.

Among Ancients

Old growth wisdom.

The Pando, a trembling giant, is the oldest living organism on earth––also the largest and most dense, its name means I spread, which it does over one-hundred and six acres.

How old? I wondered. Some date this clonal colony back 80,000 years, a moment that roughly corresponds to the first known human burial. This seems significant.

There is a woman who travels the earth photographing the old trees. Time is the trunk, she says. Notice the split, she says, pointing to one of the ancients. To accommodate the storm.

She looks and looks. In each careful frame, she watches the old souls, how they shape the light. Making a record, she says. Lest people forget who they were, in the event of further collapse.

In their presence, she finds a reminder. There is still grace. There is still beauty. There is something and it’s made of grief but also beyond it, and it is still here.

***

Inspired by this article on photographer Beth Moon’s quest to photograph ancient trees, and also by this articleabout the world’s oldest clonal colony of aspen. I learned about the earliest known human burial here.

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