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Canis lupus
A scene of rural domesticity:
I’m in my yard, stacking firewood beside the satellite dish. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse a movement in the salal bush at the edge of the forest, about fifty feet away from me. A deer, I figure. The woods up here are full of black tail deer and they are perpetually making forays into the lumpy meadow behind my house to nibble on the grass or sample the ornamental shrubs and fruit trees. I carry on stacking my wood, unconcerned. Another movement and I look up again. This time I see a long, black, canine snout and a stiff pair of triangular ears. I am met by a gaze that is at once curious and calculating. It is sizing me up. I suck in my breath and the face melts away into a viridian quiver of leaves.
As timber wolves go, this wasn’t a particularly large one. Wolves are a normal part of the ecosystem on Cortes Island and in my experience, they had always kept to themselves. I considered myself lucky to have gotten this close. Yet the wolf had seemed a bit brash. Unnervingly so.
I asked around a bit and soon discovered there had been a rash of wolf sightings by neighbours and those farther afield. Wolves were being spotted all over the place, loping through people’s backyards in the middle of the day and lurking around houses and barns. Dogs were getting killed. A neighbour’s Schnauzer was snatched from beside a popular hiking trail, a few feet away from its owner. The local wolves seemed suddenly to have lost their fear of man. A sense of alarm crept though the usually quiet community. Some folks already talked about instituting a wolf cull.
I recoiled at the prospect. I was familiar with the stories from the 70’s, when pick-up loads of dead wolves got paraded around the island after a concerted eradication campaign. Back then, the local ranchers poisoned, trapped and shot every wolf on Cortes Island in the name of protecting their livestock, which in those days was allowed to range freely through the bush. With the wolves gone, the deer population escalated, swarming onto the farmers’ fields, and into clear cuts, where they browsed the alder scrub that came up after extensive industrial logging operations. With such a bonanza of prey available, it was just a matter of time before new wolves started swimming over from the nearby mainland to take advantage of it. In the mean time, it had become less fashionable to kill wolves and so the migrants prospered, slowly returning the ecosystem to a sort of balance. Though rarely seen, wolves could often be heard howling on moonlit nights, invoking a frisson of wilderness in the hearts of the New Age refugees and dope farmers, who themselves were spreading out across the island. Occasionally someone’s dog would go missing or rarer still, a calf might get killed, but mostly the wolves kept a low profile.
Over the past few years though, their attitude was beginning to change. The wolves no longer seemed to be avoiding interactions with human beings and in a few cases, they were actively seeking us out. Several people had been surrounded by wolves while out in the woods, and they reported that they had come in uncomfortably close. Amidst a growing sense of unease, Sabina Mense, a local naturalist, invited a couple of wolf experts to field our questions at a public meeting. Speaking before a packed hall of what I knew to be some of the island’s more wolf-friendly people, Bob Hansen, a wildlife management specialist with the Pacific Rim National Park and Ben York, a provincial Conservation Officer, quickly disabused us of some of our more romantic wildlife notions.
Despite what I thought I had known from years of watching television documentaries and reading Never Cry Wolf as a kid, wolves can and will, under certain circumstances, attack people. This had recently started happening elsewhere on the coast and was about to, warned Hansen and York, happen in our neck of the woods, if we didn’t take necessary precautions. The irony was that wolves have changed their behavior in part as a reaction to our increased admiration for them. York recounted a recent incident in which a wolf badly mauled a sleeping kayaker, who had been camped out on the Broken Group Islands— a popular eco-tourism destination, famous for its spectacular scenery and abundant wildlife. The area’s wolf population is a prime attraction, providing a great photo opportunity as they forage on the beaches. But the Broken Island wolves were becoming pugnacious, lurking around camp sites and snatching provisions, having abandoned their traditional wariness of people. On several occasions, campers were literally driven off their tent sites by marauding wolves, and had to fend them off with paddles, while hastily breaking their camps and pushing their boats back into the sea. The wolves remained aggressive and several had to be shot by conservation officers, who then closed the campsites in the interests of public safety.
So what did this mean? Are wolves now suddenly more inclined to eat us? Should we revert to our childhood fears of Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs? The problem, say York and Hansen, is habituation. The wolves had learned to associate sea-kayakers with food. In a perverse permutation of the observer effect, the same nature lovers who had traveled so far and paid so much to view the wolves in their wilderness habitat, were changing the animals’ behaviour and getting them shot. To counter habituation, eco-tourism operators are now being asked to let clients view wolves only from a distance.
On Cortes Island, the situation proved somewhat different. What brings wolves into contact with people here is not so much the prospect of being fed hot dogs by tourist but rather the black tail deer and the delicious, easily-killed house pets that thrive in our lushly horticulturalized landscape of rural sprawl. Nevertheless, we were advised to aggressively haze any wolf that approached a populated area and to take serious precautions with our domestic animals and compost heaps. The wolves on Cortes were just at the point of getting dangerous, advised Hansen and York and we needed to turn back the clock.
Mike Davis in his Ecology of Fear details an analogous situation with cougars (a.k.a. ‘mountain lions’) who are recolonizing the affluent fringes of Los Angeles. Despite being persecuted since the early days of European colonization, the cougars there are making a comeback – paradoxically by hiding out in the canyons and foothills adjacent to suburbia, from which they emerge to stalk the lawn-fattened deer, wayward lap dogs, and sometimes the occasional human. Davis estimates there are now more cougars in the hills around Los Angeles than in the entirety of Yellowstone National Park - a place that for many Americans, epitomizes large carnivore habitat. As rural exurbs continue to ooze further into the hinterland, the real back country has become much less hospitable to the wolves and cougars that once belonged there.
On Vancouver Island, this is largely due to the delayed effects of industrial, clear-cut logging. Bob Hansen recounted the phenomenon of ‘ungulate barrens’ now surrounding Pacific Rim National Park. From the satellite photographs he showed, it was easy to see how the original stands of old-growth rain forest have been obliterated from outside the reserve’s boundary. For a while, the removal of forest cover actually increases deer and elk habitat, due to an initial flush of deciduous browse, but the landscape soon becomes useless to them as it grows up into an even-aged plantation of tightly spaced, coniferous trees, with very little of the underbrush on which they need to feed. The ungulates die off and the starving predators abandon the depauperate tree farms and head for the park. Hansen described a rash of incidents where emaciated cougars crawled out of the forest to die on the beach in front of horrified tourists. They were literally starving to death. Others, terminally weakened yet still able to move, stalked hikers along the park’s busy trails, until they too got shot, in the name of animal control.
Davis (somewhat ironically) quotes Gary Snyder:
The wild is perhaps the very possibility of being eaten by a mountain lion. The risk, even if vanishingly remote, is a trigger toward heightened evolutionary awareness and enjoyment of an environment shared with large animals
It’s hard to know what such a sentiment even means now. In this topsy turvy world, the best habitat for some of our most emblematic carnivores turns out to be the interstitial landscape outside our cul-de-sacs and sliding patio doors. Though timber wolves aren’t likely to invade big cities any time soon, their little cousins the coyotes are thriving in our urban environs. An image that will stay with me forever is that of a coyote I once saw, scampering along Vancouver’s heavily industrialized Clark Drive, at three in the morning. In the insalubrious glow of the sodium lamps, I could just make out a house cat hanging limply in its jaws – the fat, as it were, of the asphalt land. For its own part, the coyote looked proud and alert. The lord of its realm. It was here to stay.
I am the walrus
I am standing on a slippery rock next to a two thousand pound mountain of leathery blubber. Steam is coming out of her nostrils and she is turning her head toward me, wanting to get her whiskers rubbed. I’m a little freaked out but I oblige, and before I know it, I’ve fallen in love. Welcome to the walrus enclosure at the New York Aquarium. I recently spent the day there, looking behind the scenes, with a friend who has worked with the walruses, seals and sea lions there for years, training them and tending to their needs. Most of these creatures arrive at the aquarium as foundlings – in the case of the walruses, orphaned pups, whose mothers were killed in a subsistence hunt off the Alaskan coast. It didn’t take long for me to notice how mutually affectionate the relationships were between these animals and their caregivers – relationships that were so full of nuance and tenderness that it was obvious I was dealing with some pretty special creatures. Pinnipeds, as the members of the seal and walrus family are called, are easily as smart as dogs, maybe more so although it is hard to judge these thing precisely. They have complicated social hierarchies, can learn to respond to complex commands and like to play. They are the kind of animals we should feel a great fondness for but our species’ interactions with them have been violent throughout history. Perhaps it is because pinnipeds carry out the most graceful parts of their lives submerged in water, invisible and unknowable, that we have always felt compelled to set upon them as soon as they haul themselves out into our more solid environs. On some level, we must have always wondered what it might be like to be one of them, transiting at will between the world of land and air and the alien depths of the sea. Maybe we were even a bit jealous. But are the minds of animals really so unknowable? What is this separation between us and them? Is it all in our perception?
John Berger writes in his (1980 ) essay, “Why Look at Animals?” :
The eyes of an animal when they consider man are attentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look.
There is, as Berger points out a built-in asymmetry in our regard for other creatures. Yi-Fu Tuan, in his (1984) ‘Dominance and Affection,’ makes the case that our affection for animals is essentially inseparable from our desire to dominate them. This seems especially apropos to Western culture. Über-naturalist David Attenborough concurs, specifically blaming Genesis 1:28 :
“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
The exhortation to dominate other creatures has wreaked havoc on the planet ever since Attenborough points out. As God’s favored species, we stopped wanting to see the world through the other animals’ eyes and we soon found ourselves looking over at them from one side of an un-crossable gulf. The Industrial Revolution didn’t help either. Abandoning what vestiges of mystical attachment we might still have had for our fellow creatures, we used our new-found science of economics to reduce them to conglomerations of commodities – meat, fur and oil – to be commandeered, processed and sold to the highest bidder. Donna Haraway argues that an emerging science fetish exacerbated the disconnect between nature and culture, enshrining narratives of dominance into the Western world view, whereby it became axiomatic that nature had been put in place exclusively for our use. With nature reduced to something external, the industrialized killing of animals proceeded apace. Enter the golden age of whaling and the extermination of the bison. Our faith in the ‘naturalness’ of our dominance put an end to our qualms Devastation ensued, but the attitude continued.
So who cares? Whether by accident or divine right, our species made it to the top of the shit pile. For those of us living in the (as yet) affluent West, animal products such as meat and leather are cheap and readily available. Surely we can tolerate a bit of cruelty to afford us the things we, after all, deserve. So what if we wiped out a few species along the way? We have been ingenious. It didn’t take long for us to invent substitutes for whale oil and buffalo skins. Yet many of us have pangs.
Consider the pinnipeds. Their lot is still a difficult one. As I watched the seals and walruses cavorting against the backdrop of the Aquarium’s artificial sea cliffs, I found it hard not to think of the plight of many of their wild brethren. Every spring, between two and three hundred thousand harp seals are bludgeoned and/or shot to death off the east coast of Canada – the largest annual kill of marine mammals on the planet. A war of rhetoric has raged for years between the proponents of the hunt, staunchly backed by the Canadian government and a well-funded animal rights lobby, who have effectively leveraged outraged celebrities as spokespeople for their side. The government touts the economic benefits of the hunt and has sponsored a veterinary study that concludes the clubbing of seals with a spiked implement called a hackapik can be acceptably humane, if carried out correctly. But in a hunt of this magnitude, there are inevitable lapses, where the seals aren’t cleanly killed and visibly suffer. Some escape, mortally wounded, only to die later. The animal rights people have documented several of these disturbing cases, posting them on the internet to great effect. The veterinary report, though comprehensive in what it focusses on, deals primarily with the effectiveness of the actual killing technique – that is the effectiveness with which the seals’ skulls are crushed and cerebral hematoma ensues, after which the sensation of pain is said to stop. The data by and large corroborates the government’s view that the majority of the seals taken suffer little pain before dying. But these are the best case scenarios, carried out in the presence of inspectors. The science of suffering is a complicated thing. To understand it more fully, one need
s to look beyond the mere
instant of a seal’s death and consider the agitation it experiences before being killed. We face the same old problem again. We need to get inside the animal’s mind.
Temple Grandin has explored the terrain of fear and agitation in her groundbreaking studies of cattle on their way to be slaughtered. Her genius was to rethink the entire killing process from the cow’s point of view and to then to modify slaughterhouse accordingly, to minimize the animal’s stress at every stage up to and including the moment it dies. Grandin’s work even garnered her a PETA award for its contribution to the reduction of animal suffering – an amazing feat given the organization’s general antipathy toward the meat industry.
By this sort of standard, taking the animal’s psychology into account, the humaneness of the commercial seal hunt leaves a lot to be desired. The shifting North Atlantic ice is a far less controlled environment than a slaughterhouse and corners inevitably get cut. These intelligent and social animals are often killed within sight of each other or are chased across the ice floes, bullet-riddled and bleeding, before being finished off with the spiked clubs. Not surprisingly, this isn’t exactly soothing for the seals and though this kind of brutality occurs in the recreational and subsistence hunting of other species, the sheer scale of the seal hunt – the huge number of animals involved and the commercial pressures which the sealers are under to meet quota – put it in a class by itself. Industrial hunting is a recipe for animal suffering, even though we might intend otherwise.
But does it matter? This is after all a moral question. Temple Grandin entreats us to understand that “animals are not things.” Surely then we should accorded them some basic dignity. If, like Grandin, we were able to imagine ourselves in the animals’ place, maybe we’d start to treat them better. Inhabiting the animal mind though, isn’t really as easy as it sounds, especially if one lacks Grandin’s unique cognitive gifts. They are like us and not like us, according to John Berger. To think of animals merely as fuzzier, more primitive versions of ourselves does them as great a disservice as turning them into commodities. Since we can’t easily teleport an animal’s mind, how then can we even begin to appreciate its needs?
An intriguing way to think about this was proposed, way back in 1934, by the biosemiotician, Jakob von Uexküll. In his ‘Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,’ Von Uexküll introduced the concept of Umwelt, which he defined as an animal’s entire subjective, spatio-temporal world. This Umwelt is populated by a series of ‘marks’ or carriers of significance, which constitutes the entire universe of things a given animal cares about. This might include: others of its own species, predators and prey, or certain features of its habitat. Von Uexküll maps out the Umwelten of an assortment of creatures including sea urchins, honey bees and jackdaws. Sea urchins seem most concerned about the locations of shadows in their habitat, whereas jackdaws pay attention to their social networks and the dispositions of neighbourhood cats. Their Umwelt also includes internalized maps of the highly ritualized flight paths they follow around rooftops and trees. For a jackdaw, it is important not just to fly, but to fly in the right way.
Seen from the point of view of a seal’s Umwelt, the commercial hunt must be a horrific experience. There is, I think, a clear case to made for revisiting the standards under which the hunt is conducted and to focus on the agitation experienced by the animals prior to being killed. This hunt is a commercial enterprise and is allowed to continue primarily because of its contribution to the regional economy. But the cost to Canada’s reputation as a humane and progressive state should also have a place on the balance sheet. This debit has been building for years and is now accrued to the point where it might be too high.
Check out these beautiful little jellyfish I recorded at the Coney Island Aquarium . . .
colony 1
colony 2
We are never really alone. I’ve been out in the rain forest observing slime molds and am completely beguiled by them. These are the pictures I took yesterday. Ancient as time, the slime mold is a colony of tiny amoeba-like things that coagulate occasionally into a super-organism, which oozes toward new feeding grounds, or an auspicious place to sporulate. With its mission accomplished, the mass dissipates back into individual organisms and disappears into the soil. They have no brain or nervous system of any kind, yet slime molds are able to make complex decisions when they aggregate into these entities, including being able to solve mazes. This is accomplished via a secret chemical language that allows information to flow between adjoining individuals. When added together, this simple network creates a superior collective intelligence without the need for any kind of centralized command structure. When the urge to eat or reproduce besets enough individuals, they reach critical mass and just slime their way toward their objective. A simple but effective strategy. But if we adopted it, what would we do with all those bosses? Billions of years before the internet, and the slime molds had already perfected the cohering mechanism of ad hocracies like Digg or open source software development. The way I figure it, the status of the lowly slime mold needs to be elevated. They are such an inspiration. –Lord Running Clam, I salute you!
Virginia rail
Red-breasted sapsucker
Chestnut-backed chickadee
I don’t look for them particularly. I’m not what you’d call a bird ‘watcher.’ I’m more of a bird finder. I seem to come across them everywhere; injured, panicked or hopelessly lost. I’ve pried them from the jaws of cats, carried them quivering out of the buzzing labyrinths of shopping mall food courts and plucked them from windowsills where they have been battering themselves against their own reflections. Trembling, nictitating and bedraggled, the world’s birds are in trouble. Populations of many previously common species are now in free fall, both in Canada and around the world. We stand on the threshold of a bleak new age of summers where barn swallows no longer course through the warm evening air and the haunts of meadowlarks lie extinguished beneath strip mall parking lots.
And then there is the case of the crested myna. This jaunty, subtropical bird resembles a chunky starling with white wing patches. The mynas were brought to Vancouver at the end of the nineteenth century by Chinese immigrants, who kept them as cage birds. Inevitably some escaped or were set free and they managed to survive the clammy West Coast winters by holing up in attics and under bridges. Back in the early nineteen-nineties, I used to see mynas pretty often, hopping across the roof of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre or schnarfling up discarded pizza crusts between the trolly buses, in front of Golden Boys’ on Commercial Drive. Now the mynas are gone. The last known pair died out in Vancouver in the winter of 2002. Of course there are theories as to why. Perhaps these dreamy tropicalists couldn’t compete with the more aggressive and numerous European starlings, or maybe they found themselves excluded from their favoured attics by an epidemic of aluminum siding. It is hard to say. Whatever it was, I miss the mynas. Vancouver just isn’t same without them. My local pair used to nest inside the Spotlight Custom Collision sign on Clark Drive. In the midst of this industrial wasteland, devoid of vegetation, the mynas clung to life, incubating their precious eggs by the warmth of the humming fluorescent tubes, gazing out over the six lanes of howling traffic. One day as I was walking by, I happened to snap a picture. It was 1993, the first of June. I didn’t think much of it at the time. There was some high cloud, but the sun was shining. A glossy black bird sat high above me, surveying its asphalt domain. It was a day like any other. Back in the age of mynas.
Crested Myna in its habitat. Vancouver, June 1st, 1993.
Crested Myna close-up. Vancouver, June 1st 1993
burprestid 1
buprestid 2
He falls asleep in the woods one day.
Spent twenty years of his life that way,
Rip Van Winkle, Rip Van Winkle, Sleep, Sleep, Sleep.
And so go the words of an old and wacky song. Yet sleeping for twenty years is de rigeur for certain insects. In scientific terms this is called extended diapause. Every once in a while, I find one of these surrealistically beautiful, golden buprestid beetles crawling out of the floorboards of my house. They belong to the jewel beetle family and start out their lives as eggs laid in freshly fallen Douglas-fir logs. Now our house is mostly made of Douglas-fir, but it was built in 1979, so the wood isn’t exactly ‘freshly fallen.’ A little research turned up the fact that buprestids can diapause for up to 51 years, making them the Rip Van Winkles of the bug world. The larvae just keep sleep, sleep, sleeping, even while the log they’ve been living inside gets milled into lumber and incorporated into a building. Eventually, something (and it’s hard to say exactly what) tells them it’s time to wake up. I’ve noticed that firing up the wood stove, after the house has been cold for a while, can serve as a trigger for their emergence. The buprestids are sluggish when they first come out; a little dazed perhaps by the burden of their new responsibilities or the first rays of light they have ever seen, reflecting off their iridescent exoskeletons. Now that they are adults, time has lost its viscosity and they are launched into a frenetic trajectory of mating, laying eggs and dying, soon after. Their long, quiet decades of dreaming behind them, the buprestids crawl stalwartly toward their fate.
parking garage
tropical hammock ecology
What is it about Florida? As a kid, waiting out the long Toronto winter in my parents’ rec room, I often wondered what it might be like. I’d seen a picture in a book somewhere, of a down-at-the-heels, roadside serpentarium, where burly men in pompadours would wrestle alligators in a dusty yard. It was somewhere in Florida, the book said. I wanted desperately to go there. But it was not to be. Not until well into my adulthood anyway. And I never did find that serpentarium. So I had to settle for a kind of Florida of the mind. The television programs of the time were saturated with images of a fantastically exotic, subtropical America, where smiling swamp rangers skimmed across the Everglades on air boats, at the beck-and-call of puffy-faced little boys, who had winsome animal mascots like Flipper, the dolphin who just wouldn’t shut up and Gentle Ben, a toothless, overweight bear. During the commercials, the über-creepy Anita Bryant (soon to reign as America’s Queen of homophobia) warbled from a sound stage citrus grove, shilling genuine Florida ‘oinj’ juice to the pallid northern masses. So despite never having set foot in the place, Florida had pretty much colonized my young subconscious. So when I eventually visited there, sometime in my mid-twenties, things seemed strangely familiar, like the spectres of a remembered imagination.
This March, I returned again, to give a talk at a community college in suburban Broward County. Broward is part of a vast conurbation called the South Florida Metropolitan area that runs along the state’s Atlantic Coast. I met many kind and generous people there and it was great hanging out with the students, especially at their poetry slam, where I witnessed some of the most moving spoken word performances I’ve seen in years. Many of the young poets performed work addressing their daily struggles of life and in love in an increasingly polarized America. A young, African-American single mom did a piece about her struggle of trying to put herself through college, to give herself and her kid a better life. A young white guy gave a long, free form soliloquy about his feelings of political alienation, living in a state from which the presidency of his country had been stolen.
Florida is a complicated place. Oh, sure there are still beaches where you can sit in the talc-soft sand and stare out at the sea. This is the post card Florida of tasteful condominiums and toney ocean side eateries. But much of Florida, like the rest of North America, is imbued with a kind of Ballardian placelessness - its vast, flat expanses re-skinned with low-rise exurbs that ooze into a grid work of freeways. Except for the groves of palm trees, the landscape looks pretty much like the one in which I grew up, in Southern Ontario, having followed a similar trajectory of environmental liquidation. Occasionally you might see an ibis wading in the ditch water beside the interstate, but there really isn’t much else to remind you of where you are. This being America, there is an enormous gulf visible between the rich and the poor. Prowling the upscale shopping malls are legions of aged ladies who have had so much plastic surgery done that their heads look like they’ve been taken out of the spare parts cupboard of the Thunderbirds. Seeing these silicon injected marvels of taxidermy bobbling on the shoulders of geriatric bodies takes a little getting used to. But I suppose it is a logical outcome of a society where ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is defined as an inalienable right. Outside of the air conditioned confines of retail-land, in the ubiquitous palmetto scrub that grows on the sides of the roads and in the median strips, lives a ghost army of the homeless. Many are military veterans who have found themselves on the losing side of the class war. Perhaps the warmer climate makes being homeless in Florida a bit easier to bear. But happiness for these people still seems a long way off.
homeless man on traffic island
Yet shoehorned between the freeways and the golf-themed retirement developments, a few fragments of the original Florida still cling to their existence. Thanks to the kindness of an instructor at the college, I was able to spend a few hours amid the vegetative splendor of the last intact tropical hammock ecosystem, left in Broward County. ‘Hammock’ is a name given to little islands of self-perpetuating forest, which, because they are a few inches higher in elevation, manage to escape the worst of the seasonal flooding and fires that afflict the surrounding landscape. The result, as in the case of Broward’s 254 acre Fern Forest park, is a lush canopy of exotic trees such as gumbo limbo, strangler fig and surprisingly, red maple, a tree species I grew up with in eastern Canada. In the wetter spots of the forest, the roots of cypress trees form delightful ‘knee’ structures to cope with anaerobic conditions in the sediment. As I strolled beneath the dappled shade of rustling sabal palm fronds, watching the zebra butterflies sipping moisture from the swamp mud, I was able, just for a little while, to tune out the traffic drone of the nearby highway. It was as if I had been given a little window into the Florida of my boyhood mind.
Rules of Six by Benjamin Aranda et. al
DNA origami by Paul Rothemund
Sometimes an event comes along which manages to encapsulate emerging trends that in the future will be identified as defining our time. MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show is one of those instances. The exhibition has so much on offer that it is easy, when walking through the galleries, to get zoned out by over-stimulation. You pretty much have to avail yourself of the adjunct, on-line materials to provide enough context and detail to understand what you have just seen. But this is a small price to pay. ‘Elastic Mind’ highlights the great ‘re-biologizing’ that is taking over human thought, as we gradually abandon the mechanical world views we have held dear since the days of Newton, back in the seventeenth century. The clockwork metaphor of the universe is being replaced by that of a swarm, whose components self-organize and dissipate in concordance to the opportunities created by ubiquitous connectivity. Not the kind of show to make huge pronouncements, Elastic Mind, promotes the notion of ‘thinkering,’ encouraging its viewers to reconnect and remix the ideas it presents, in new and interesting ways. I’m not generally a huge fan of Flash-based web sites, but Elastic Mind’s site uses its animation to show the relationship ecologies that emerge between catalogue items, as we browse through them, offering us a whole other level of opportunity for serendipitous exploration.
crocuses/croci??
Viburnum bodnantense
Spending winter on the west coast of Canada is like living in a giant car wash with all the lights turned out. Spring however, comes relatively early, with the pussy willows and hazel catkins often making their appearances already by the end of January. By the time February is over, the crocuses have usually poked up their cheery little heads. Viburnum bodnantense is another extremely early shrub. Its pink flower clusters have a scent that reminds me of vinyl doll heads dipped in sugar.
old plum
old plum
Though it is one of the world’s most rapacious consumers of wood, Japan worships trees like no other place I’ve been to. Where else would such love and attention be lavished on a couple of four hundred year old plum trees, which, left to their own devices would have up and died ages ago? There is something intensely poignant about these venerable plums, brought from Korea back in 1609, to Matsushima’s Zuiganji temple. To keep them alive, the rotting trunks have been heroically patched with cement and the saggy, senescent branches propped up with poles. The trees are like ancient pets tended to by generations of Zen Buddhist monks, who are born and die in the span of time it takes the plum tree to accumulate a few infinitesimally thin growth rings. And the payoff? What is it exactly? A few ephemeral blossoms, pink and white, to herald the end of a long winter. It is heartening to know that despite the hundreds of years of turbulence, of typhoons, fratricidal wars and pestilence, an unbroken line of caregivers has thought these trees to be worth their attention. To be sure, the Japanese sense of duty must have had a lot to do with it, but there is something else too: a kind of appreciation of the fragile that in my mind has no equal anywhere else in the world.
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