THE SHOW SO FAR

Scorched Buddha found at Hiroshima

Frog Woman

 

Last week, I looked up from my rather louche nightly routine of eating spumoni while watching the simulated autopsies of Crime Scene Investigation and suddenly I realized that it was all over. Summer that is . . .

The end of summer has always been a poignant time for me. Like most children, I was anxious about the coming school year, wishing I could somehow stop time and savour the vanishing season for just a little longer. During these last warm days, the tangibility of summer’s once endless possibility seemed to slip through my fingers like warm sand, dissolving into memory where it fell, leaving my empty hands to grasp onto what? Inevitability?

But a shimmering blue sky can emanate its own darkness. It was from just such a sky, on the morning of August 6th 1945, that Little Boy fell, unstoppably, towards his target.
That morning, Claude Robert Eatherley gave the fateful weather report from aboard his B-29 Superfortress:
“Hiroshima without any clouds, very good weather, excellent visibility,”
which was the go-ahead for Little Boy’s evil to be unleashed. Driven mad by his culpability in what happened next, he spent the next three decades in a mental hospital, endlessly repeating weather reports, until finally he died.

Another clear blue morning, this time early in September. I am in a canoe, lazily paddling down the Mississippi, as it winds through the black earth country of Wisconsin’s Driftless. Along the banks, the leaves of willows and poplars scintillate in the morning sun, their green lushness having grown a bit waxy from the summer’s long heat. Scattered golden leaves are already quivering on the thorny branches of the honey locusts, the first tree to change colour in response to the newly cool air of the night. Here and there clots of turtles bask on half submerged logs, some stacked two and three deep, like shiny black bowls, upturned and left to dry by the kitchen sink. Craning their wrinkled necks and stretching out their webbed feet, they strain to expose as much of their cold reptilian skin as possible to the precious rays of the late summer sun. For they know that it is waning. As they see my canoe approach, they plop into the water and disappear, waiting in the murk for me to go away. Somewhere in the distant reed beds, a bittern makes its crazy pumping sound, like it has since the beginning of rivers.

That evening I return, exhausted and elated, falling into a deep and primal sleep. Just after sunrise, the silence is broken by the ringing of the telephone, pregnant with the news of what had just happened in New York. September 11th, 2001. I awake to find that everything has changed. A fault line in history has quaked and the world lurched forward into an unlooked for new singularity, born in flames like a malevolent phoenix, amid the perfect blueness of a Tuesday morning sky.

As a boy growing up in Toronto, in what my nostalgia has coloured into a kinder, gentler age, the end of August was when the first cool nights happened— so soothing after interminable weeks of snatching sleep from sweat-soaked sheets in the stale, furnace-like air of our little bedrooms. We called this magic time “Exhibition Weather” after the Canadian National Exhibition which, like a great, dilapidated old prostitute, came out of hiding at the end of every summer to expose her sagging, perfumed flesh to the last of the season’s warmth. Even though the “Ex” meant that the idleness of summer was almost over for us, we looked forward to it intensely. Going there was both cathartic and an affirmation of the passage of time. So beguiled were we by the fair’s blend of luridness and folksiness, that if we could, we went back two or three times, before it all got taken down at the end of Labour Day. It was the climax of summer and we never felt so free. . .

I remember The Ex’s sprawling grounds as a phantasmagorical mishmash of architecture. I loved the soot-stained friezes of the art deco Horse Palace, the shocked, streamlined horse heads, fossilized in mid-rampage, staring out forever at their mechanical replacements, howling along the Gardiner Expressway.

I loved the High Modernist suavity of the Bulova tower— its glassy Lego blockiness exuding a minimalist cool. The graceful, gravity-defying parabola at the Dufferin Gate, soared like the frozen trajectory of a bouncing super ball, up beyond the impacted neo-English brickscapes of the surrounding neighbourhoods and out into the Space Age.
After passing through one of the gates, my school chums would immediately head for the seething throngs of the Midway, eager to slam around the gut-wrenching turns of the Wild Mouse and then be spin-dried by the great Tilt-a-Whirl, whose bottom would drop out half way through the ride, leaving its shrieking human cargo plastered against the sidewalls held up by mere centrifugal force. Their boastful reminiscences of projectile vomiting became a staple of our school yard banter for the rest of the year. Suspicious of the machinery, I shunned these rides, especially knowing that the boozy carny mechanics entrusted with maintaining them were lurking in the shadows underneath, leering at the torsos of the school girls filing past their greasy faces. I once got lured into a sweaty Freak Show tent, its fleshy banners having promised me untold marvels. All I got for my buck was a glimpse of a sad and excemacious Lizard Boy and someone (or something), purporting to be a headless woman, propped up in front of a lurid, orange mural of a car, smashed up beside a lonely desert highway.

Inevitably though, I would take refuge from the din and head for the floral coolness of the Horticultural Building’s Victorian crystal palace domes. Of course this did make me the object of some derision. I was the only one in our little group who would openly confess to loving such bric-a-brac wonders as a set of gigantic French poodles, looking as if they had just walked in from planet Venus, made entirely of orange and yellow chrysanthemum blossoms— or a demented floral clock, a kind of homage to the beauty of xeriscaping, painstakingly constructed from hundreds of tiny pots of cacti. But my credibility returned somewhat, when I came home one time, having found the coolest Exhibition souvenir ever—a live Venus Fly Trap, growing in a transparent plastic cup. The endless hours we spent feeding it bits of meat that fall, earned me a respite from taunting, at least for a while.

Food Building (built 1954)

One thing we could agree on though, was that we all loved the Food Building. We would float deliriously through its great halls, like foraging whales, inhaling countless free samples of convenience foods until we were gorged to the bursting. I often detoured to admire the enormous butter sculptures, which in various years included a life-sized replica of the Beatles and once, a complete diorama of Neil Armstrong standing beside his lunar module. Quickly, I would rejoin my friends so I could stuff myself with even more free food. On the long ride home we would collapse onto the subway seats, pleasantly hallucinating from the amount of advanced chemistry we had just eaten, all thoughts of school happily expunged from our minds.

Back in those days, I never thought much of the future. There would always be another Ex, and fall would always follow summer in a predictable cadence of weather. But now I’m not so sure.

Three and a half decades later and I am living on the Pacific coast. This summer was kind of a low-key affair here and the first cool rains of autumn have already started. Yet just a few weeks ago, scientists confirmed that human-induced global warming has reached a tipping point, effectively saying that we have passed the point beyond which the consequences of our actions on the earth’s climate can be readily reversed. Shortly after this announcement, nearly the entire city of New Orleans is obliterated by a massive hurricane, caused by excess heat in our atmosphere.

On damp evenings, a little tree frog climbs into my bathroom window, as if to wish me good night. In Haida and Tlingit culture, Frog Woman, is one of the oldest and most powerful deities, an embodiment of nature and a repository for our collective memory of natural disaster. Though the frog seems frail and defenceless, her wrath, when unleashed, knows no bounds. But this only happens when we cause her the deepest of grief. In a little park in downtown Victoria, Frog Woman’s long wooden tears drip down from an old totem pole. In her arms, she holds the body of her dead son who has been thrown into a campfire by a callous young chief. She scorches the earth in her vengeance, killing everyone except for two women, who go on to become the ancestors of all subsequent generations. It is said that as the Frog Woman’s fire approached the people’ villages, they offered up their prayers, begging her for forgiveness. But it was too late. Her anger once released could no longer be abated. Time could just not be turned back.

turkey vulture 1

turkey vulture 2

One swallow does not a summer make or so goes the old parable but when they start appearing en masse it makes it official. Undeterred by this year’s cool, wet summer, these winged sprites dart around me in figure 8’s and tight ellipses, schnarfling up the tiny insects disturbed by the progress of my sodden feet across the emerald dewiness of Pacific lawns. Locked into an hyper-accelerated life, they fly to eat and eat to fly. They mate, raise their young and then fatten themselves up for the long flight back to South America —all within the span of just three months. Yet in their grace and aerial spretzatura, swallows reveal nothing of their burden. Could they be enjoying themselves?

The mythical swallow-like martlet was said to have achieved such mastery of the air that it lost its feet, thereby freeing itself from all earthly bounds.

But for me, the true lords of the air are vultures. These majestic birds transform the putridity of death into poetry of the sky. Turkey vultures are an ubiquitous part of summer here, effortlessly spiralling up and down the air columns with barely a twitch of their wing feathers, Carrion is in abundant supply at the moment—the twisted corpses of yearling deer litter the roadsides, their stiff, cracked tongues splayed out of mouths gaped open in shock, trailing stalactites of dried spittle. Their noses, once black and glistening are now as dull and parched as abandoned wallets. Banished by their mothers to make way for the birth of new fawns, these yearlings have wandered dejectedly into the path of night-time cars like members of some Japanese high-school suicide cult. The despair of adolescence it would seem, knows no bounds.

As the first rays of morning sun begin to flood over the carnage of the night, the vultures swoop down to clean up the mess, swarming over the carcasses with a great flapping of wings, jostling to gain sufficient purchase from which to plunge their naked heads into the still steaming viscera. Those lower on the pecking order bide their time, hunched like scruffy black wigs on the dusty trees at the roadside, silently waiting their turns. The only sign of their impatience, an occasional nictitating of their cold eyes. A car approaches and the whole sullen flock lifts simultaneously in the sonic tide, those closest to the dead meat flapping perfunctorily up to the lowest branches. The car passes and each settles back to its place, like black wraith stars in a shifting constellation.

The vultures complete their grim task with amazing speed, returning repeatedly to gorge themselves, until in a few days there is nothing left but scattered bones and gristle. Were I to drop dead in the meadow in front of my house, I wouldn’t have to wait too long before they obliged me with a similar sky burial, my remains quickly reduced to squirts of guano deftly voided from the great blue heights and atomized by the warm summer breezes.
In Canada, at least, such bird-borne body disposal is illegal but this is not the case in India, where for centuries the Parsis have fed their dead to the vultures, in accordance with their Zoroastrian faith. Sadly the vulture population there is undergoing a catastrophic collapse. 98% of India’s vultures have disappeared in the last ten years — a rate of extinction even faster than that of the dodo.They are dying of kidney failure, which happens after they feed on the carcasses of livestock that have been treated with the common veterinary drug—diclofenac.

The effect of the vultures’ disappearance has rippled through the subcontinent, creating a glut of carrion, which in turn has led to an exponential increase in the population of feral, carrion-eating dogs. They increasingly attack humans, causing injury and spreading rabies. India now has the highest rate of rabies in the world, killing over 20,000 people each year. There is a demented kind of circularity to all of this that gives us an ominous foretaste of the Dante-esque effects we will routinely experience as the current mass extinction continues to run its course. If the loss of just a few species of vultures already leaves us to wring our hands while drowning in corpses and set upon by rabid dogs, what further delights might the future bring? Whatever is in store for us, we probably deserve it.

Slime molds, unlike humans, seem to be able to organize themselves to flow in the direction of their collective good. Without a brain, nervous system, or any other hard-wired command mechanism, individual slime mold cells will coalesce into a collective super-organism called a pseudoplasmodium when something important needs doing, like finding a better feeding ground. Once aggregated, the whole goopy assemblage then oozes across the forest floor until it arrives at its destination, where it comes to rest. The super-organism then disperses back into individuals who quickly melt away into the forest duff. This is all co-ordinated without any bosses or hierarchy and yet it works perfectly. Each individual slime mold cell is pretty much like every other, quite unremarkable, and yet in concert they are truly magnificent—an entity much greater than the sum of its parts. The secret to slime mold society is in the phenomenon of emergence—complexity emerging from simplicity. By harnessing the distributed cognition of individuals, the slime mold super-organism can solve sophisticated problems, even navigating its way through mazes that scientists set up for it. Not bad for a blob of slime. . .

In Philip K. Dick’s (1964) Clans of the Alphane Moon, a telepathic slime mold—Lord Running Clam— intervenes to help the protagonist, who has lost all hope and is about to commit suicide. Lord Running Clam fixes him up with a girlfriend and a job.

slime mold

Selfless in their selfishness, complex in their simplicity, perhaps we can take a few pointers from Lord Running Clam and his tribe. Our salvation may lie in emulating their style of adhocracy.
Lord Running Clam reminded us that —”No Terran is an island”— which should provide us with some solace. Of course he might have been referring to his prowess at telepathy.
Thanks to this summer’s rather damp start, conditions here have been perfect for slime mold viewing. I got to spend some quality time with one a couple of weeks ago. Its distributed self had coalesced into an orangey-yellow pseudoplasmodium, perched, as if ready to hold court, on a throne-like, mossy stump. In the presence of the slime mold, I felt like a penitent from a less advanced society, my existence still quaintly dependent on neurons and hierarchies. For its part, the slime mold remained inscrutable. Was it reading my mind?

Nature in its prelapsarian state continues to evaporate like a puddle on a midsummer highway, but beauty is everywhere, if you know how to find it—accented perhaps by the poignant sense of fin de siecle that now seems to permeate everything. I find it in the interstitial landscapes, so fetishized by Ballard and Gibson, increasingly the backdrop for our anomic lives. The vast edge city that sprawls across the Lower Mainland of British Columbia is such a case in point. It offers us a vista at once repellent and beguiling.

I love Richmond near the Vancouver Airport, particularly the vicinity of Bing Thom’s lego-like Aberdeen Centre, a sort of post-modern waiting hall at the foot of the great sky bridge to Asia. The trans-Pacific jets thunder overhead. In them, passengers are folding or unfolding their newspapers, getting ready for the long haul to Taipei or Narita or having just come from there, anticipating the sharp tang of New World air. The planes are so low, you can see the faces pressed against the windows. What are they thinking? On the ground, Shibuya hipsters and Korean Buddhist nuns head for the vast food court at Yaohan, while elderly white farmers sit in lawn chairs, staring uncomprehendingly at the freeway off-ramps, disgorging endless streams of traffic past their once quiet, ranch style homes.
Inside Aberdeen Centre’s atrium, an enormous fountain pullulates jets of water in time to a hollow-sounding recording of Enya, the computer-controlled hydraulics wheezing with effort. Asian shoppers sit impassively on its absurd bathtub-like rim, their backs to its failed spectacle. There is something so pathetic, clunky and yet beautiful in this fountain’s attempt to emulate . . . what ? . . . Nature ? It makes me weep. We have tried so hard and have failed so beautifully. . .

water feature

“The world around us is a mystery,” he said. “And men are no better than anything else. If a little plant is generous with us we must thank her, or perhaps she will not let us go.”
Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan

This seems to have been the month when things, once seeming dead, suddenly came back to life.
A shriveled, crocodilian, door knob-shaped object sits in a flowerpot on my windowsill. Slightly larger than a golf ball, a few warty tubercules are scattered over its gray-green surface, each ending in a drooping little tuft of white hair. Most of the year, it just sits there, inscrutable, unchanging and to all intents and purposes, ‘dead.’ But once a year, sometime in May, if the sun has come through the window in just the right way, a small purplish-white flower emerges from its centre. In less than two days, the flower withers and falls off. It’s an easy thing to miss, but this ephemeral little flower is the only obvious external manifestation of the biochemical magic that seethes through the body of the peyotl, peyote or “tufted thing,” a plant so powerful that it is revered as a living god. When eaten, the peyote acts as a “revealer,” bending time and space into a crystalline continuum of an infinite now.
The peyote can take up to 30 years until it is ready to bloom, although this can be speeded up under cultivation. I don’t exactly know how old “mine” is. I hesitate to say “mine” because the concept of ownership doesn’t seem to apply to an entity that holds within it the pharmacological keys to the universe and which could, conceivably outlive me. In any case, I got the plant while I was a member of the local Desert Plant Society, over ten years ago, at a cactus swap meet. Its growth since then has been almost imperceptible. It seems to be waiting to tell me something. Maybe I’m not ready to hear it yet. . .
Perhaps the peyote would tell me that the secret to the universe is patience.
Does it require patience to be in a coma?
The BBC recounts the case of a fireman Donald Herbert, who, comatose since 1995, suddenly started to talk. His first sentence:

“I want to talk to my wife,”

The article continues with 56-year-old Jule Bridgewater’s reminiscence of being in a three-and-a-half week coma, an account uncannily like that of a peyote trip:

“During that time, something occurred that I had a sense of, it’s a sort of lost time-and-space thing,” she says. “It’s not like I was very aware of what I was doing, as I am now.”
“I was looking at myself from a great height, observing myself but not necessarily knowing that was myself or my unconscious or subconscious. I can’t define it as conscious intelligence.”

Are we waking up in a different world when we enter a coma or hallucination, just as we appear outwardly, to be retreating from this one?
In his brilliant (1971) The Futurological Congress, Stanislaw Lem explores the liminal between such cognitive states. He imagines how governments might one day be tempted to create a kind of “cryptochemocracy” in which public perception of an increasingly unpleasant reality would be managed using psycho-tropic substances, “Benignimizers,” added to the water supply. In this world, the most seditious act, punishable by death, is to take reality-inducing drugs, “vigilanimides,” to counteract the ubiquitous collective hallucination that everyone else inhabits. As the dosage of anti-hallucinogen is increased, the revealed reality becomes grimmer and grimmer. I’ll let the protagonist, Ijon Tichy, describe the experience:

“My hands were trembling as I pulled the cork and lifted the flask to my nostrils. A whiff of bitter almonds made my eyes well up with tears, and when I wiped them away, and could see again, I gasped. The magnificent hall, covered with carpets, filled with palms, the ornamented majolica walls, the elegance of the sparkling tables, and the orchestra in the back that played the exquisite chamber music while we dined, all this had vanished.”
“We were sitting in a concrete bunker, at a rough wooden table, a straw mat—badly frayed—beneath our feet. The music was still there, but I saw now that it came from a loudspeaker hung on a rusted wire. And the rainbow-crystal chandelier was now a dusty, naked light bulb. But the worst change had taken place before us on the table. The snow-white cloth was gone; the silver dish with the steaming pheasant had turned into a chipped earthenware plate containing the most unappetizing grey-brown gruel, which stuck in globs to my tin—no longer silver—fork.”
“I looked with horror upon the abomination that only moments ago I’d been consuming with such gusto, savouring the crackling golden skin of the bird and crunching—in sweet, succulent counterpoint—the croutons, crisp on the top and soaked with gravy on the bottom. And what I had taken for the overhanging leaves of a nearby potted palm turned out to be the drawstrings on the drawers of the person sitting (with three others) right above us—not on a balcony or platform, but rather a shelf, it was so narrow. For the place was packed beyond belief! My eyes were practically popping from their sockets when this terrifying vision wavered and began to shift back, as if touched with a magic wand.”

And what of those two, old Japanese soldiers, who have spent the last 60 years hiding in the jungles of Mindanao in the Philippines, left behind inside the hallucination of a long-finished war? To the rest of the world it was as if they had come back from the dead, but wait—did they really exist? It seems that the pair had become wary of the rapid influx of media into the area and have slipped back into their parallel universe. Who can blame them? They took a peek outside their own world and didn’t like what they saw. Maybe they are comfortable living inside their extended World War II hallucination. It seems somehow cruel to wrench them away from it.
In a strange twist of fate, both the ivory-billed woodpecker and W. Mark Felt, the man known from the Watergate era as Deep Throat, recently emerged from deep inside the collective American unconscious and out into the cold light of day. I am old enough (barely) to remember the zeal with which many people followed the televised Watergate hearings of the early 1970’s, tracking the cast of characters with the relentlessness of bird-watchers closing in on an endangered species. Interestingly, both the woodpecker and Deep Throat’s identity were unveiled within the very contemporary constraints of brand management and confidentiality agreements.
The Guardian reports on the strict code of secrecy maintained by Vanity Fair’s editors, while they were fact-checking Mr. Felt’s story, prior to his exclusive “outing” as Deep Throat in their magazine. This was made all the more difficult because they were loathe to consult Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, Deep Throat’s original contact during Watergate, who upon learning that Felt was ready to reveal himself, might have bolted off to preemptively release his own story.

While an obsession with information management might have been the understandable legacy of Watergate, it is less understandable in the world of ornithology. The ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to have been extinct since about 1944, has been a kind of holy grail among birder-watchers whose hopes of adding it to their life lists have long been buoyed by repeated rumours of its sighting. Nicknamed the “Lord God bird, ” because of its size and spectacular plumage, this large woodpecker fell victim to the liquidation, in the 19th century, of the once vast riparian cypress forests of the American Southeast. It became, along with the passenger pigeon, a kind of poster species for America’s fall from grace with its wilderness. When credible reports of ivory-billed woodpecker sightings started emerging from the Big Woods region of Alabama, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology sent a team headed by Tim Gallagher accompanied by the Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, whom the Sierra Club points out is a former lobbyist for the logging and mining industries and an advocate of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge up to oil drilling. The Christian Science Monitor reports that Gallagher and bird-watcher Bobby Harrison spotted an ivory-bill, before they could get their cameras in focus. All members of the research team were then asked to sign a confidentiality agreement until further corroboration of the bird’s existence could be achieved. A couple of months later on April 25, Dr. David Luneau of the University of Arkansas, shot about four seconds of blurry video from his kayak, wherein what purports to be an ivory-billed woodpecker, can be seen flying through a few of the frames. Ironically, according to the Monitor, the bird was flushed from the vicinity of a freeway overpass. Shortly thereafter, Luneau posted the enchanting little video clip directly to his website. Sadly, the clip can no longer be found there and it now exists only in a version book-ended inside a video press release, branded by the Nature Conservancy and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. While the organizations in question are no doubt doing important work in the field of avian conservation, it seems a pity that we can no longer be trusted to view the un-packaged, un-enhanced, un-spun footage of the striking black and white bird, simply ghosting its way across the dun background of a flooded forest—a Lazarus species, flying out of the past and across our own time, magically, and for its own sake.

Bernard Henri Levy in the first of his series of articles in The Atlantic, entitled America in Foreign Eyes, sums up America’s bizarrely inauthentic relationship to the objects of its past:

What is at stake . . . is a relationship to time, and in particular to the past—as if, with this nation so eminently oriented toward its present and, especially, its future, regret for the past occurs only on condition that the past can be re-appropriated with well-calculated words and deeds. As if with all one’s strength—including the strength and power of myth and forgery—one has to reassert the power of the present over the past. Or the opposite, which comes down to the same thing: as if the pain was having not enough past rather than too much.

bat pose

meditation

I recently came upon a plaintive little notice stapled to a utility pole :

Missing + Scared !

“Ollyver” the brown cat !

He fell out of the window + is hurt.

He is big, brown with stripes and spots.

$1000 REWARD

A thousand dollars is enough to buy dozens of cats, but that is not the point. The disappearance of my namesake, “Ollyver” has left a hole in someone’s heart.

Over at F-Train, Paul Ford posts a moving eulogy to his cat ‘TK,’ whose “thumb-sized heart” suddenly stopped beating while he was having his belly stroked on the floor of Ford’s New York apartment.

In Whitby, Ontario, the owners of a deaf, white cat (also curiously called “Oliver”) mourn over his death. He was, according to his owners:

“the softest and just . . . the best.”

There is something singularly poignant about the loss of a cat, even when it doesn’t share my name.

The filmmaker’s filmmaker Chris Marker, frequently incorporates cats in his films and is said to respond to requests for his photograph with a picture of a cat. In the narration to his (1983) film Sans Soleil he tells us:

In the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity, the lack of affectation when a couple comes there on behalf of their missing cat, Toro; the lack of affectation can’t be captured on film.

The raw emotion with which we love our cats reflects our deep longing to inhabit their animal alterity – a longing, which by its very nature can never be consummated. When we share our lives with them, sometimes, we get just the briefest glimpses into what it might be like to be them -or at least we think we do- and that is enough to beguile us forever. But the territory in which our lives intersect is tentative and conditional. When cats abandon us, when they die or succumb to wanderlust, our consciousness is quickly reeled back into its own human torment. The sad and certain thing is that we will never really know them.
The cats populating Marker’s films stare out at us from the screen, timelessly and omnisciently, as if to say: “I pity you,” which of course they have every right to do. Yet, whether they are mincing through the ashes of an Icelandic volcano or through the ashes of Communism, Marker’s cats, like all cats, steadfastly remain just cats, intent upon killing the next bird or jumping onto the next warm lap, leaving us to stew in the dilemmas of history.

Our delight in cats seems to have a lot to do with our flip-flopping perceptions of them, oscillating between – “It’s an animal!” and “It’s a little man in a fuzzy sweater!”, or something like that. The cat’s ability to inhabit this interstice between ‘intimate’ and ‘other’ might have been what prompted Schrödinger to cast one in his famous thought experiment, in which a cat simultaneously exists in two states- alive and dead, when its destiny is ordained by quantum theory. To liberate the universe from this disconcerting paradox, my friend Anne named her cat “Schrödinger”, allowing it to occupy a third state, that of the Gedankenexperimentor himself, thus closing the teleological circle and allowing us all to breathe a deep sigh of relief.

Of course quantum theory implies that getting too close to our cats invokes a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in which our desperate tendency to anthropomorphize actually obliterates any possibility of understanding them. When carried to extremes, this can have a demented beauty of its own. Witness for example the following images from pet office’s site, the very embodiment of the saccharine Japanese concept of kawaii.

pop cupid

pop kirakira

pop elephant

I don’t imagine that my cat Weens will be wearing a ‘pop kirakira’ outfit anytime soon. I once had the misguided notion to put a collar on him, in hopes that the two little bells I had attached would warn defenseless birds of his approach. The arrangement lasted less than a week. One morning, in the middle of some urgent computer work, I had to banish Weens from my office, as he was in one of those moods where he was trying rather imperiously to command my lap. I put him out in the hall and shut the door, thinking that that would be the end of it. A few minutes later, his collar, bells and all, came skidding under the office door, landing with a tinkle at my feet. The message was obvious: I was as much his pet as he was mine and I had not lived up to my end of the bargain. Weens is the living embodiment of the old adage that cats are the only animal to have domesticated people, or more succinctly:

“Dogs have masters. Cats have staff”

Although unapologetically an animal, casually snapping the neck of a rat one minute and soliciting a belly rub the next, Weens does occasionally exhibit, what to me are, rather astonishing feats of cognition. Some time ago, my friend Sue came over to my house, along with her 3-year-old son Joseph. While we were chatting, Joseph started scrabbling up the back of a rather rickety chair to try and see my softshell turtle, swimming in its aquarium, well above his eye level. Joseph, understandably, got upset when we plucked him off of this unstable arrangement, just as he was about to get a good look. Within seconds, Weens, who had quietly been watching the commotion, scampered over to the windowsill, picked up a small wooden model of a turtle in his mouth and brought it over to Joseph. We were speechless. Did Weens understand the language of symbols?
In between episodic bursts of semiotic bravura, Weens spends the majority of his time, in typical cat fashion – sleeping, eating and destroying the furniture. He has however adopted the rather singular affectation of staring into space with his limbs folded under him akimbo, giving him the appearance of a demented fruit bat. When he sits like this, he appears to be thinking. What I wouldn’t give for a just one peek inside his mind . .

wedge graft on Malus fusca

bridge graft on Malus fusca

crown graft on Malus fusca

Each spring, I take advantage of a narrow window of opportunity to perform some funky arboreal ‘hacking’ on fruit trees in my garden. Just before they come out of winter dormancy, it is possible to splice twigs from one tree onto the roots of another. Usually, both have to be from the same family, i.e. apples twigs should be grafted to apple trees, but there are some interesting exceptions. This year for example, I became intrigued by an Elizabethan recommendation that (sic):
The medlar is best be grafted on the hawthorn
(from Certain Experiments Concerning Fruit Trees by John Taverner, Gentleman
London, January 22,1600)
Now the medlar is an unusual, little fruit tree of ancient European lineage. It has fallen out of favour in recent centuries because (gulp) the fruit has to literally be eaten rotten, to be properly enjoyed. Why bother growing them, you might ask? Well, the beautiful white flowers are certainly a compensation. And there is something transgressive about growing a tree whose fruits in Shakespeare’s England were referred to as “open arse” and by the French at that time as “cul de chien” or dog’s asshole. (these facts courtesy of the wonderful blog, Giornalo Novo). Such frank pomological discussion certainly lends a new understanding to Mercutio’s remarks concerning Romeo, in Romeo and Juliet.
If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.

In addition to scatological intrigue, the medlar tree posesses the unusual ability to occasionally form a graft hybrid or chimera when grafted to a hawthorn. This is true botanical weirdness in which the scar tissue that forms where the two plants join actually branches out and becomes a new kind of plant, an interspecies amalgam that is like a perfect morph of its two parents.
My grafting obsession started a few years ago, when I noticed some peculiar little apple-like trees growing in a thicket of salmonberries, in swampy area, quite unsuitable for growing conventional apples. A quick perusal of Pojar and Mackinnon’s Plants of Coastal British Columbia told me that these were Pacific crabapples or Malus fusca, a common, shrubby inhabitant of coastal wetlands. Unfortunately the crabapple’s fruits, while edible, were described as tiny and extremely tart, a poor substitute, I thought, for the Gravensteins, Yellow Transparents and Lord Lambournes I had been trying to establish in my garden. Many of the nursery grown apple trees I had been planting were disappointing in their slow growth, some even succumbing to diseases such as anthracnose canker. In marked contrast, the wild crab apples, seemed to thrive on neglect, successfully prevailing over the rampant salmonberries and bad drainage, with no human help. Would it be possible, I wondered, to somehow channel the vigour and disease resistance of these wildlings into the production of the succulent European apples I so wanted to eat? I decided that some experimentation was in order. . .
One day early in the spring, I grafted a few twigs from a Rhode Island Greening to one of the scraggly Malus fuscas, using simple wedge grafts and bandaged them up with strips of plastic cut from a grocery bag. In a few weeks, the buds on the Greening twigs started to swell as if they were still growing on their original tree and the joint where the twig had been grafted was starting to heal over. A short time later, a couple of lovely apple blossoms formed, along with some lush new leaves. I was elated! The experiment had worked.
The following spring, I got into a kind of crabapple grafting frenzy, grafting as many as five different apple varieties onto a single Malus fusca and trying out other techniques such as the crown graft and (the louchely named) whip and tongue graft. Perhaps my most ambitious effort was a bridge graft, which I used in resurrecting a crabapple tree someone else had tried hard to kill. The tree had been almost completely girdled, its trunk hacked into with an axe. It clung precariously to life with only a thin sliver of bark remaining to connect it to its roots. To remedy the situation, I performed a kind of bypass operation, grafting suckers that grew up from the base of the tree, around the wound and back into the trunk, to allow the sap to once again travel unimpeded. The result, while weird looking, was a completely reinvigorated crab, which quickly began to flourish, onto to which I grafted even more apples.
Most of my grafts “took” and, suckled by the sap stream of the fecund Malus fuscas, made astonishingly rapid growth. By the next year, most of the twigs had grown into substantial branches, poking up through the salmon berry thickets, and early that fall I was rewarded with a few plump Rhode Island Greenings from the graft I had made the previous year. Five years later, my little thicket of modified crabapples now yields bushels of juicy apples of several varieties, ripening from July right through to November with absolutely no effort from me -except for picking! While not completely eliminated, the effects of diseases such as canker seem to have been reduced -cankers appearing on the scion, now often spontaneously heal. Perhaps the native crabapple transfers some of its own immunity to apples grafted onto it.
As artificial as it sounds, grafting does occur naturally. Occasionally, trees will graft into each other at the places where neighbouring branches touch. This is often also seen in old hedges and ivy vines. Once connected, the branches start to exchange nutrients through their shared cambium, the inner bark containing the little tubes analogous to our own blood vessels. Other trees, like Douglas firs, patch into their neighbours’ roots, forming subterranean networks, sharing food, symbiotic fungi and even information, in the form of phytochemical secretions, turning the entire forest floor into an interconnected network of tree cognition. A few years ago, on a hike in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, I came across some ohi’a trees that were engaged in these enchanting, almost tantric grafts. It was as if I had stumbled onto some lignified, slow motion orgy, which had been ponderously playing itself out for centuries.

natural grafting

ohi’a trees, Volcano National Park

The early spring sun is beginning to pierce the crepuscular gloom of the coastal winter, caressing the sleeping forest awake into yet another iteration of its annual orgy of photosynthesis. The blood of mighty trees has started to course again, awakening their buds into a tentative, glistening turgidity. Torpid frogs, aroused from their frosty beds, begin to croak. Crocuses the colour of ear wax explode from the monochromatic detritus, doggedly tracking the ever strengthening scent of sun with relentless cybernetic petals. Days are now longer, the shadows are shorter and everything is besotted with the anticipation of the great growing that is to come.


Six days into The Year of the Rooster, a magnificent rough-legged hawk screamed out of the reddening canopy of alders, exploding my favourite cockerel into a snowy supernova of feathers. The rooster’s twisted, arrested corpse lay at the point of impact, a neat incision in the breast, where his living, bleeding heart had been plucked out and subsumed into the hawk’s great gullet -still beating, no doubt, with unmet aspirations.


As we arrived, in media res, the hunter grudgingly abandoned his kill, flapping languidly up to a snag. He glared down at us with piercing, nictitating eyes, full of disdain at the maudlin banality of our sentiment -yet keenly alert to our tiniest movements, eager for a chance to gorge again on the sweet, sweet meat. Reading, the unlooked-for entrails, it would be easy to lapse into the platitudes of the armchair soothsayer, bemoaning what would seem, on the face of it, to be a bad omen. Yes the cockerel, that hopeful harbinger of the coming year had been struck down. But how beautifully he was in his death -our reassurance that the wild and seething rain forest spring was here again.


In a vast hydrodynamic reciprocal to the melting of the snow, the sweet sap surges up through countless throbbing columns of xylem, preparing the crowns of the towering big-leaf maples for their upcoming eruption of verdure. Like a hungry snow leech drawn to the plump, blood-filled leg of a hapless bather, I drill small holes into the trees’ rough bark and bleed away some of the copious, yet highly diluted, nectar. As I boil it down relentlessly, the inside of my house becomes a steaming Carboniferous swamp and I slither through the kitchen dreaming of the great anvil-headed salamanders that spawned our forefathers, toasting all biology with a cup of its precious, brown sweetness. After all, sugar is energy and (to quote William Blake), “Energy is Eternal Delight.”

sucking the sap of the big-leaf maple

Alexander Rodchenko, Pioneer Girl, (1930)

There she was:

Rodchenko’s incomparable Pioneer Girl. Her defiant, unblinking, proletarian eyes stared out at me from across three quarters of a century. My own eyes started welling up with tears.

One look at her and I knew that the gleaming, newly transmogrified MoMA in which I was standing was in fact the smouldering ruin of a failed revolution. Welcome to Art Disney. Perhaps the finest collection of modern art on the planet has been now been repurposed into a glossy exercise in high concept lifestyle marketing aimed at the affluent, authenticity-hungry global shopper.

The new, compulsory $20 admission fee, now makes MoMA the most expensive art museum in New York. Pioneer Girl is hanging in an institution rendered largely inaccessible to the very proletarian masses of which she once was a part. The poor and the working poor won’t be able to afford to see her anymore, nor any of the other great art works of the 20th century, housed within the building’s mesmerizingly luminous architecture. The compassion, revolution, and aesthetic rapture that such art is able to inspire in people will be unavailable to the vast swath of society that works for the minimum wage, except for during a four hour window on Friday evenings, during which discount retailer Target sponsors free admissions.

Those that can’t get that time off from their Mac-Jobs, will just to have to go home and lose themselves in the great stultifying vortex of network television, which will reassuringly provide endless, all you can eat electronic Soma, “fair and balanced” and free of charge. What more could anyone want?
For his part, Rodchenko, that great stylist of the workers’ utopia, lived out the last years of his life painting pictures of sad clowns in his Moscow apartment, having been discredited by his party as a bourgeois formalist. Then, as now, the Left just seems to eat itself. You’d think we could figure out how to stop . . .

Those able to pay MoMA’s price of admission however will find themselves in an undeniably exquisite building. The architect Taniguchi’s ethereally white halls exude the kind of fetishistic seamlessness more reminiscent of Dutch airport design or Prada retail than of a people’s temple of art. And, in keeping with its new role as high art theme park, MoMA now allows the public to photograph its works with impunity, albeit sans flash. The museum air is filled with the whir of focusing servos, as thousands of tourists inhale the history of the 20th century’s art into the cosseting safety of their cameras’ memory cards, convenient and contained–much less risky than being scorched by the spewing aura flux emanated by an unmediated original. Being able to take pictures of MoMA’s collection, while doubtlessly useful to the serious student of art, still feels a little weird, especially since this is still forbidden at most institutions. Watching a group of tourists gleefully photographing each other in front of Picasso’s holocaust-inspired Charnel House, I felt as if I had fallen through some strange looking glass, directly onto the pages of Walter Benjamin’s (1936) “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

While Benjamin argues that an object’s authenticity and therefore its historical testimony is jeopardized by reproduction, I think there is something about the new MoMA building that jeopardizes the authority of the objects within it. The institution’s not-so-subtle new interplay between architectural grandiosity and entertainment-oriented marketing conspire to create a viewing experience that clearly diminishes the aura of some of the collection’s most important works. This was at its most egregious in the case of Monet’s (1920) Water Lilies, which could formerly be enjoyed within the relative tranquility of a three sided alcove. After the renovation, Water Lilies has basically become “lobby art,” hung in the distracting, over-lit shrillness of MoMA’s atrium, having to jostle uncomfortably for attention with Barnett Newman’s precarious-looking Broken Obelisk. Matisse’s once deliriously happy seeming (1909) Dance has been similarly banished to the realm of building decor and now hangs sad and alone in a stairwell. In both these cases, iconic objects of the 20th century’s art are subordinated by the building’s insistence on playing the architectural drama queen. The viewer is the loser when the aura and historicity of the art objects must succumb to the insatiable demand for easily-digested spectacle and the ego of an architect.

MoMA’s New Lobby/Atrium

Despite all of this, MoMA’s new up-market incarnation has a silver lining, in that far more of the museum’s collection is now on display. The exhibition space has grown substantially, from 85,000 to 125,000 square feet, providing a new vista of serious curatorial opportunity that could be taken advantage of when some of the Uber-hype blows over. Of course MoMA might still prance down the primrose path of reductive populism, following the spastic footsteps of the Guggenheim. the institution that brought us Armani , The Art of the Motorcycle and (sigh) Norman Rockwell – Pictures for the American People Only time will tell.

I walked out of MoMA, sad and exhausted, feeling like some atavistic Marxist coelacanth, left alone and stranded on the cold, dry beach of Late Capitalism. In the past, I’ve always left MoMA feeling elated, even as recently as last summer, when I was raving about the Lee Bontecou show at MoMA Queens. Obviously, I was having a crisis of faith. Does art even have the ability to effect social change anymore, or have we gone so far down the road of commodity fetishism that this now impossible? Is the word ‘revolution’ so hobbled by the cult of irony that we can’t use it anymore?

Of course my conundrum is nothing new. Over the years many artists have railed against New York City’s unstoppable culture of free-market meritocracy and its streets are littered with their steaming corpses.

Just a short walk from MoMA, looms the imposing art deco GE Building (originally the RCA Building), the focal point of the famous Rockefeller Center. These days the building is known primarily as the home of NBC Studios, where the increasingly lacklustre “Saturday Night Live” and the always lame “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” originate. In 1933, the building’s lobby was the scene of an epic battle between its owner, John D. Rockefeller and the remarkable revolutionary muralist, Diego Rivera. Rockefeller commissioned Rivera, a favourite of his wife, MoMA co-founder Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, to paint a huge mural with which to adorn the the skyscraper’s lobby.

Rivera, an avowed Marxist, started work on the monumental piece entitled “Man at the Crossroads.” In a naive misappraisal of his patron’s tolerance for free artistic expression, he incorporated a portrait of Lenin into the 63-foot-long tableau, without approval. All hell broke loose, and Rivera was ordered to remove the ‘anti-capitalist’ image at once. He refused and was summarily fired and banished from the site, albeit after having been paid his fee in full. Rivera’s mural was promptly destroyed by workmen with axes and replaced with, American Progress and Time, by Jose Maria Sert. There is something particularly poignant about how Rivera’s vision of “man at the crossroads” and its depiction of the great workers’ movements of the early 20th century was literally smashed to pieces to make way for a sanitized representation of the corporate myth of “American progress.” Progress indeed, for the folks who own the skyscrapers. I snapped a few camera-phone pics of Sert’s mural, just to remind myself of who has always pulled the strings in America’s public discourse and how quickly even the most compelling narratives, (if they dare question capitalist orthodoxy), can be obliterated.

Jose Maria Sert’s American Progress and Time

Obliteration is a word that certainly applies to the thriving art scene that used to define the East Village. Some of the many artifacts from this demimonde have been plucked up from the debris field of its implosion to be put on display at the New Museum’s “East Village USA” show, in Chelsea. A former meat packing district, this part of Chelsea has been transformed into a toney art ghetto, reminiscent of one of those windswept outlet store clusters found along the Pennsylvania Interstate. There is a pervasive bleakness to the area that makes it feel disconcertingly isolated from the comforting thrum of the rest of Manhattan.

“East Village USA’s” riotous and sometimes schlocky selection of paintings, photographs and videos underscored for me just how much jouissance New York City has lost in the years since the art was made. It’s impossible to imagine the kind of a scene depicted in the New Museum exhibition, existing in the gentrified East Village of today. The kind of low rent languidity that once encouraged such anarchic cross-fertilization between art and pop culture, just doesn’t exist here anymore. The prohibitive expense of living in today’s New York has driven away much of the innovative and transgressive street culture, which once so characterized life in this city.
The artists in “East Village USA’s” day obviously had their antennas out and it was clear many sensed they were living at a kind of fin de siecle . Lady Pink’s sad little painting, “The Death of Graffiti,” serves as microcosm for what happened to New York and kind of says it all. It depicts a subway train crossing an overpass, against a setting sun, being watched by group of adorable little monsters. The first half of the train is covered, “bombed,” with the colourful wall-to wall-graffiti typical of NYC subway cars in the early 1980’s. The second half of the train has had its graffiti removed, stripped right down to the soulless, gleaming metal.

New York, January 2005

It’s early January and I’m back wandering around New York. It is cold and the streets are full of abandoned Christmas trees, tumbling around in the bitter wind. They are everywhere, like the fallen foot soldiers of a migrating forest, who, lost in this maze of stone, steel and glass, gave up hope and died en masse. Killed by an epidemic of Christmas. It is the end of things and the beginning of other things. The great, looming buildings prognosticate under the harsh winter light of the north-eastern sun, staring across the teeming streets into each others’ myriad glinting windows. Perhaps they already know what kind of year it will be.

Lost late last month in the torrent of overwhelmingly sad tsunami news was an item in the New York Times announcing that the Bush Administration had eliminated all existing obligations to keep fish and wildlife species from becoming threatened or endangered in America’s national forests in favour of a new laissez faire directive which lets industry set its own environmental goals and practices. To make these changes easier to implement, the Administration has also cut back on requirements for public participation in forest planning decisions.

This edict condemning the national forests to death by privatization and industrial liquidation reminded me of a formative cinematic experience I had when I was a child, in the guise of the (1972) science fiction film, “Silent Running.” The protagonist Lowell Freeman (played by Bruce Dern) and his crew are entrusted with tending the last remnants of America’s national forests, which have been sealed into enormous, transparent terrarium domes, borne on a fleet of American Airlines cargo ships in orbit around the sun. Back on earth, there is no more room for forests and people have forgotten about them, beguiled instead by the comforts of artificial food and a constant ambient temperature. Eventually the spaceship crew is ordered to nuke the forests and return the crafts to commercial cargo service. At this point Lowell, the gentle and earnest space forester, goes berserk and embarks on a killing spree to try and save the forests from oblivion. His attempt to do so is both heart-wrenching and hubristic and ultimately, mostly futile. Still, he manages to save a single dome. At least for a while.

With the planet’s wild forests rapidly vanishing, perhaps, like Lowell, we should focus instead on saving a few trees. Many species, like the ginkgo and the dawn redwood have been rescued from oblivion by horticulture and form a kind of post-natural, anthropogenic urban forest, curated into the streetscapes of the built environment.

Dawn redwood, a living fossil, Houston St. NYC

One of my favourite arboreal refugees, classified as vulnerable in its own native habitat, is the enigmatic Monkey Puzzle Tree (or Araucaria araucana), a native of the far south of Chile but commonly planted in temperate, oceanic locales such as Vancouver and the British Isles. This formidably spiny tree, whose manner of growth takes the form of a kind of bottle brush, fractal, voodoo assembly, seems to engender unbounded delight in those who have seen it. Oddly, the Araucaria genus has been coming up a lot for me during the past week. My friend Matthew has been collecting the edible seeds for me from one of the large female monkey puzzle trees growing in East Vancouver, which I will try to propagate in my little nursery when I return to the west coast. On the flight from Vancouver to JFK, we ran into the peripatetic Mark, who (and I don’t know how this came up) told us of an endearing game he and a friend used to play, while driving around the streets of Vancouver. The first one to spot a monkey puzzle tree would call out, “Monkey Puzzle Tree, No Returns!” and promptly pinch the other, with no opportunity for reprisal, until the next specimen was spotted.

A few days after I got to New York, a reader in Australia sent me this interesting link on an unusual member of the Araucaria family, the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis), which exists as a relic, living fossil population of less than 100 individuals. It was discovered in 1994, growing deep within a canyon in New South Wales. Horticulture offers one of the few options remaining to insure the Wollemi pine’s long term survival, as the tiny wild population is at great risk to human borne diseases and natural disasters.

Some living botanical fossils might be saved by our indefatigable instinct to curate the rare and unusual into our gardens and streets, but deprived of their natural ecologies and the complex relationships in which they once existed, they become relegated to the status of mere commodities, sad curiosities adrift out of place and out of time. In New York City, this seems to have happened to art as well, but I will leave that to my next posting. . .

The Deluge tablet of the Gilgamesh epic

“You, the wisest and bravest of the gods,
how did it happen that you so recklessly sent the Great Flood to destroy mankind?”

The Epic of Gilgamesh
Sin-liqe-unninni (version) circa 1300 B. C.
The oldest story has once again become the newest story, in the waning days of a year that has been relentlessly epic in its carnage. Cyclical tragedies of obliterating scale have always been part of the human condition and are in fact responsible for many key historical bifurcation points, but 2004 seemed to hit a new benchmark in human suffering. It was as if the Riders of the Apocalypse had once again been unleashed to thunder across the blood-soaked dust of a withering world, leaving Darfur, The Democratic Republic of Congo and Fallujah in their wake. Weakened and fractured by the relentless pounding of the great war horses’ hooves, the earth’s crust heaves, sending vast waves to suck tens of thousands of innocents into the roiling blue oblivion of a suddenly angered sea.
To try to comprehend the incomprehensible, humanity turns to its ancient texts. The most ancient of all is the almost 4,000 year-old Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, which Stephen Mitchell has exquisitely revivified in his Gilgamesh – A New English Version. Gilgamesh, on which large parts of so many ‘upstart’ later works such as the Bible and the Iliad were based, comes to us from a series of clay tablets that were lost for almost two thousand years, until serendipitously rediscovered in 1853, buried under the ancient ruins of Nineveh in what is now Iraq.
Mitchell describes the epic’s hero Gilgamesh as:
an antihero, a superman (a superpower one might say) who doesn’t know the difference between strength and arrogance. By preemptively attacking a monster, he brings on himself a disaster that can only be overcome by an agonizing journey, a quest that results in wisdom by proving its own futility.
Suddenly terrified of death, Gilgamesh travels to the underworld to seek out Utnapishtim, the sole survivor of The Great Flood, who alone among men has achieved immortality.
“Must I die too?” he asks Utnapishtim
Utnapishtim replies:
“But man’s life *is* short, at any moment it can be snapped, like a reed in a canebrake.
The handsome young man, the lovely young woman- in their prime, death comes and drags them away. Though no one has seen death’s face or heard deaths’s voice, suddenly, savagely death destroys us, all of us, old or young. And yet we build houses, make contracts, brothers divide their inheritance, conflicts occur- as though this human life lasted forever. The river rises, flows over its banks and carries us all away like mayflies floating downstream: They stare at the sun, then all at once there is nothing.”
Incredibly, Utnapishtim had been tipped off to the Great Flood by the gods, who exhorted him to build a reed ship and to “gather and take aboard the ship examples of every living creature.”
This week’s horrific earthquake/tsunami disaster with its unprecedentedly immense loss of human life was made all the more disturbingly Gilgameshian by the revelation that for some reason, there appeared to be no recorded animal deaths in the tsunami zone, despite the fact that areas with abundant wildlife such as Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park had been inundated, and the surrounding human population decimated.
“The strange thing is we haven’t recorded any dead animals,”
H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of the Sri Lankan Wildlife Department, told Reuters.
“No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit,” he added.
“I think animals can sense disaster. They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening.”
Perhaps the wily Untnapishtim had carried them off on his reed ship.
For the rest of us, as for Gilgamesh, there is still no escape.

It’s winter here and the sky has tucked the land and sea in under its thick grey quilt.
Mostly it rains. It rains lightly. It rains heavily. It rains pretty well every way that it can rain and then it rains some more. The days, which are already absurdly short, have a strangely crepuscular quality about them – mere “less dark” punctuations to a default condition of deeper darkness. South-east gales howling in from the Straight of Georgia, knock down the power lines at least once a week and my wooden house moans and creaks like a recalcitrant ship, straining against its mossy moorings. I scuttle around the darkened halls, like a mole in its warren, pausing from time-to-time to squint incredulously out a fogged-up window, at the meteorological havoc raging outside. The sun is ephemeral and insipid, showing itself seemingly only once every few weeks. When it *does* show its timid face, it barely peeks out over the southern horizon, illuminating the towering fir trees from such a low angle that their bases seem to float on a pale cloud of topaz light.
The season’s pervasive shadows have, however, seemed like a bit of a refuge from the frenetic world of summer light, giving me some time to reflect and look critically into the deep, dark pool of the fading year, to see what has been lurking below the surface.
The most frightening and atavistic spectre, gnashing its teeth and growing fat in the darkness of my peripheral vision, has been the politics of faith and its increasing control over American public institutions. The steaming entrails of the November 2nd election have by now been picked over by anyone who has cared to, but history will no doubt see this moment as the consummation of a malignancy that had been a long time in coming. Whether due to mass psychosis or endocrine disrupters in the water supply, a disconcertingly large portion of America’s population has discarded the great secular gifts of the Enlightenment,-rationalism and empiricism-replacing them with political and religious fundamentalism. They are, in effect, checking their criticality at the doors of their churches, en masse, and letting God and the President sort it all out. Faith not reason, is now the order of the day, and we have only begun to see the consequences. “Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11″, “global warming is a myth”, “God created the world in seven days” and “Walmart always has low prices,” are now the mullet-mouthed mantras of this (to borrow Martin Bax’s phrase), “crucifixion disease.”
Evolution has long been a relatively unassailable empirical fact. The flu virus mutates and evolves every year and hospitals struggle to contain new strains of bacteria that evolve resistance to antibiotics. Fossil evidence of evolution is voluminous and genetic sequencing has confirmed empirically-deduced trajectories of common descent, for example, between chimpanzees and people. While Darwin’s original theory of evolution has proven over time to be less than comprehensive, in light of modern understandings of self-organizing systems and emergence, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that it forms a reasonable, if a bit simplistic, basis for understanding the phenomenon
Nevertheless, there has been a concerted effort by conservative think tanks in the United States to impute that evolution is somehow scientifically controversial and they have successfully lobbied school boards to mandate what they call “critical analysis” of evolution in science curricula. Wired magazine recently ran an exposee on the intelligent design movement, the latest incarnation of “stealth creationism,” whose premise is basically that evolution cannot account for the complexity of life and therefore there must be an intelligent designer, i.e. “God,” responsible for it all.
A belief in God isn’t, of course, mutually exclusive with one’s ability to accept the ubiquitous, obvious phenomenological evidence for evolution, unless one is a fundamentalist. The intelligent design movement uses the *language* of science to cast doubt on observable, empirical fact, i.e things that can be *seen* happening in the world around us, with the ultimate aim of distorting our perceptions through the fun house mirror of religious faith. This begs the question, what kind of society emerges when large numbers of people jettison their own criticality and allow themselves to be guided by their fundamentalist beliefs? Who stands to gain in such a situation? The answer of course has been played out across all of the “red states” in America. A population that has collectively given up reason for blind faith is ripe for the picking, and the conservative Christian carrion birds have swooped in to hork back their fill of the soft visceral spoils of unambiguated power.
When the level of cognitive dissonance between observable reality and fundamentalist conviction becomes untenable, the theocrat must use the levers of the state to force reality into congruence, which is what America is now in the middle of, both domestically and in its foreign policy. The anti-intellectual, “my way or the highway” state fundamentalism, promulgated by the current administration is probably the greatest threat to global stability since the nuclear arms race, and shows no sign of stopping, perhaps because facilitating the end of the world is the desired result. The Economist ran a piece on born-again Christian Armageddon cults, whose membership, it claims, now numbers in the millions. The article provides a link to “raptureready.com,” which helps prepare born-again Christians to be literally snatched up into heaven, just before the Apocalypse, which the site assures us will occur “in the near future. ” According to biblical prophesy in the Book of Revelation, non-believers will be left behind to succumb to hellfire, war and plagues.
Paradoxically, while scriptural literalism and evolution-bashing have become hallmarks of America’s governing Christian right, their beneficiary, the US defence department seems not to be so encumbered. Both The Guardian and CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition ran stories on the recruitment by the Pentagon of Andrew Parker, an Oxford evolutionary zoologist, and specialist in the Cambrian explosion– one of the key events in evolutionary history. Parker’s book “The Blink of an Eye” aroused the interest of military planners, who were interested in using the theory of evolution to create a computer program to predict future terrorist attacks. Parker was whisked off to a secret location near Chesapeake Bay Maryland, into which 20 Pentagon staffers had been brought by helicopter. There he presided over a five day discussion on how the seething seas of the Cambrian resembled an arms race, in which the pressures of explosive evolution had forced sea creatures to continually evolve new defence and predation strategies and how these ipso facto phenomena of evolutionary emergence could be computer modelled and utilized.
“One of the big surprises was how seriously I was taken,” the Guardian quotes Parker as saying.
“It was all a bit surreal.”
It must have been (sigh) . . . quite a revelation.