survival Archives

what survives

On the Guam Kingfisher (Sihek) and the Preservation of Bodies

This is a story of extinction that appears as a continuance of life. In which the life in question persists in captivity. Where the life in question is removed from her presence in a world. This happens when the life in question has survived the loss of a world.

For what purpose, this silence? This heavy-handed saving. This bird. These brilliant blue wings. These heads of rusty cinnamon.

She of the long-ago understory of limestone forests, who birthed within the soft rot of trees left standing, of a wilderness allowed to age—until progress arrived.

Who needed darkness without predation to sing the day through her light.

Legends called her the loud woman bird. She of the bright fabrics—until.

This is a story of snakes who came in on cargo ships in the wake of the war, who raided the nests at night in forests raided by day, until the remaining canopies stopped speaking back, and presence became a memory.

This is how captivity preserves the body whose world has gone. The body whose world has gone goes on living, held in an unfinished until.

Context: I am working through some memoir material and it needs a larger container. So I’ve been researching species declared extinct in my formative years, and working toward understanding various connections between these stories and my own, which was largely dominated by a sense of horrors happening quietly without comment by anyone in my immediate environment. Considering each lost species in a space outside of these longer, more complicated essays-in-progress helps me to gradually understand the relationship. Thank you for reading with me.

From the Book of Survival

To hold the gaze

When they came for the silence of our sacred
hiding weapons behind badges, the guards
by way of greeting, shouted Speed! planting flags
in the flesh of our flesh

When I passed, I saw where you had waited
beneath those windows, hunted bodies, and our light
along those points of fracture where it shattered
before cracks from our seeming solids in the dark
went –––where everywhere we look
there we are in pieces––

Palms behind us, trembling–––shadows across carpet
past our feet and the racket of the voices absorbing
those parties of projections, leaking to and from.

And after the cries stopped, we held our gaze.

***

Adapted from Flight Songs (2024, Finishing Line Press)

Imagine

When despair is beside the point.

What is needed now is a bravery reason can’t summon, a hope that persists beyond all rights to it; a solemn acknowledgement that our despair is none of our business.

The greater the possible effect of our actions; the less we are able to see it. When senses become myopic, only imagination will do. It seems our capacity for fear is too small, outstripped by the magnitude of the moment. How strange, to need the courage to be frightened; to frighten thy neighbor as thyself with fearless, stirring fear. To understand how fear for is distinct from fear of.

Camouflage, once needed to hide from an enemy, now prevents the actor from knowing what is being done. Strip meaning from language and the lie no longer needs a disguise.

Let us remember, repeated frustration does not refute the need to repeat the effort. Every new failure bears fruit. Instead of deferring to experts, may we collectively interfere with established pretenses of expertise.

What would happen, one among us asks, if you dared to make yourself as big as you actually are? And what could happen, echoes another, if we do not?

***

Inspired by (and with borrowed phrases from) the philosophy of Günther Anders.

Survival

A dance lesson.

No, it’s not a luxury you said, of your art.

Dear poet, show me, please

––some lesson in survival.

In lieu of an answer, you took position on the line.

There’s safety within the perimeter, they say.

Do you know this? Perhaps, and still reject it.

Or perhaps not, because for you that inside

is no such thing. Your silence won’t protect

you, you whisper––then sing, to signify the

alchemy by which you transform its impulse

into language, the language into music, into

a body’s dance along the wire.

Cohesion

There are techniques you can use to wrestle free from an alligator, evade a charging reindeer, an angry gorilla, a runaway camel, and killer bees.

You can survive a shark attack by hitting back, a giant octopus by pulling away. Do not go limp. Try somersaults and aim for the surface. If lobsters escape in the kitchen, it’s okay. You can retrieve them. Use a pot lid to herd and wear oven mitts. Grab from behind.

There are methods, you know, for discouraging an attack by mountain lion. Hold your ground. Do not run. Do not crouch or turn. If wearing a jacket, open it out to appear larger than you are.

There are techniques you can use to wrestle free from an alligator, evade a charging reindeer, an angry gorilla, a runaway camel, and killer bees. If there are piranhas in the river, you can cross at night.

You can avoid sinking in quicksand if you carry a stout pole. You can smother a grease fire with baking soda.

You can land a hang glider in a wind shear, survive a riptide, drive in a blizzard, find water on a desert island.

Name another disaster. I bet there’s a way. But what do you do when it doesn’t come? How do you survive the space between calamities? What do you do with the sudden shattering behind the next breath when the laughing child before you, so suffused in the laughter of the moment, claps his hands to announce, “Again!”

*Ideas for this list were culled from The Complete Worst-Case Survival Handbook, by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht. Chronicle Books, 1999.

For the Birds

“i hope i die
warmed
by the life that i tried
to live”
–Nikki Giovanni

**Image:** Regent Honeyeater by Michelle Bartsch on flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 2.0 License

The regent honeyeaters of Australia have been dealing with a serious problem. It started in the usual way––with their massive disappearances, caused by habitat destruction; but this is a different problem, one left to those remaining. Apparently, there aren’t enough mature birds around to teach the young males to sing. The new guys are doing their best, imitating the songs of other birds and sometimes improvising here and there, but the females of the species are listening for some very specific notes. If she doesn’t hear them, mating season can’t go on as usual. The problem is raising alarms among ornithologists worldwide. One solution is to bring some birds in on a sort of contract basis, like visiting professors. Early trials of this method are promising.

Humans have a hard time resisting the impulse toward anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, and most other inclinations toward turning a given fact about the natural world around something applicable to human behavior. As one, I can’t help thinking about all the time we’ve ever wasted teaching anyone anything except with the impulse toward song at the center. Doing or not doing this becomes a matter of species survival. Maintaining protected spaces for development and nourishing of song becomes a matter of fundamental security. Maintaining an ecosystem in order to ensure that an emerging song, when it finally surfaces, will not be drowned in a constant din of noise, becomes a matter of painstaking vigilance, as with the protection of any species of newborn life, anywhere.