No 139 - Imagining zoo animals

 

The huge black bear patrolled the edge of the water, pacing menacingly back and forth. Perhaps he was protecting a smaller bear slumped against a rock shelf behind him. No one said much. A baby squealed; a man flicked a cigarette butt which fizzled out in the moat. The bear paid not the slightest attention to either. He paced on, back and forth, until you noticed that on each and every pass he made his great feet landed in the exact same rhythm on the exact same spots. You could see that those particular slabs were worn pale with repetitive use. Far from being menacing, this bear was bored out of his skull. It was a classic case of a repetitive-movement syndrome exhibited by animals whose condition of unnatural entrapment has utterly crushed their spirits.

It was London Zoo in 1979, and I’ve loathed zoos ever since. Many have improved on the cramped, sterile quarters I saw that day, but many have not. Over the years some zoos have developed sophisticated scientific rationales for still keeping animals imprisoned, but I’m seldom convinced. Some try to breed endangered species, others characterise themselves as “orphanages”  or “sanctuaries” devoted to saving the animals from yet worse confinements. There’s something in that; but ... I visited a Big Cat Sanctuary in the US, where a black jaguar rescued from a circus paced its cage with the same repetitive motion of the London bear. Hopefully it was en route to something better, though he could never be wild again. Even in the Sanctuary’s bigger, more vegetated pens, a solitary serval was clearly stressed by the visitors peering in and making stupid kitty-kitty noises, which would have been interpreted by her as threats.

Just about all the world’s animals are now entrapped or constrained by human activity in some way, whether by “park” fences and walls and roads, by snares or gin-traps or bullets or hooks or strychnine, cages or garden fences, collars and chains, by the destruction of habitats and food sources, by the interruptions of migration routes on land and air and sea, by the intrusive sounds of shipping and airliners and chainsaws and wind farms, by the ravages of the wildlife trade that Vanda Felbab-Brown calls the “extinction market”. Less intentionally, perhaps, human activities have laid down a planet-wide, finely-meshed net of intrusion, poison, disease and deprivation that subtly but lethally affects even the most remote colonies of Antarctic penguins and the plankton-eaters of the deepest ocean trenches.

But zoos are a peculiarly self-serving variety of anthropocentric animal confinement.

It dawned on me that my bookshelves harboured a number of literary works concerning zoo animals. What does this literature have to say about the phenomenon?  Speaking of black panthers, it feels appropriate to start with Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous poem, “Panther” (here in my own translation from the German, which naturally I prefer to anyone else’s):

 

His eyes are so tired now that they observe

nothing beyond these circling bars:

to him, no furnishings but a thousand bars,

and behind the thousand bars, no world.

 

His supple grace, elastic and contained,

pacing and pacing his shrunken ring,

is a dance of power about the dying

centre where a massive will stands drained.

 

Just once, or twice, the curtained pupil

is soundlessly unveiled – an image gleams,

glides through that intensity of limbs –

and in the silence of the heart, is stilled.

 

Says it all, I think.

As Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier richly chronicle in their big book, Zoo, the history of zoos is a long one, entangled with the development of human power over the natural world, through increasingly powerful technology and the urbanisation that alienated many from nature. For centuries wild animals were captured for human entertainment, collected by or gifted amongst potentates as reflections of their power and self-regard. So rarely seen were some of these animals that they were walked literally across continents and became celebrities. At what psychic cost to the bound and chivvied animals one can only guess.

            Michael Allin relates just such an epic trek, by a giraffe whom humans named Zarafa. Zarafa (1998) is an historical account – Allin conceived it as a novel but found the facts quite compelling and colourful enough. By 1824, when Zarafa (the Arabic word from which ‘giraffe’ derives) was born and captured in the Sudan, 17th-century ‘cabinets of curiosity’ and the European elites’ 18th-century ‘menageries’ were giving way to less artificially designed ‘gardens’, later to be termed ‘zoological gardens’ – zoos. Colonial conquests were making more exotic specimens available, and after the French Revolution the gardens were increasingly taken out of aristocratic hands, democratised and commercialised. Muhammed Ali of Egypt’s gift of a giraffe to Charles X of France was a bit of a throwback, then, entangled with the aftermaths of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt. Also, the zoological sciences were becoming professionalised, and an actual ‘scientist’, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, was assigned to make sure the poor animal survived the 500-kilometre walk from Marseille to Paris. She did, despite what must have been the terrifying noise of enraptured crowds all along the route. She died in 1845, and remains, stuffed, in the museum at La Rochelle. Zarafa is a lively period-piece, though less about the giraffe’s experience than about the human culture she found herself entrapped by.

            The same might be said about a parallel story, J M Ledgard’s Giraffe (2007). Here the year is 1975, and a team of Czechs are in Africa capturing a whole clutch of giraffes to be shipped to Prague, home to one of the more prestigious European zoos. Colonial-style plunder continuing, in effect. The novel begins with a section related from the giraffe’s point of view, a tricky thing to pull off, especially when the giraffe starts naming boats and countries and relaying conversations translated from the Czech. There are only a couple more short such passages, however; the novel is otherwise about the humans’ journey into a country undergoing a kind of identity crisis as part of the “Communist moment”. The animals have to be transported by barge through West Germany, an ideologically unsettling experience for the crew. Among the latter is a Saint-Hilaire figure, a haematologist: how do giraffes pump blood  all that way up to their brains? After all this, little is learned; the giraffes are really just pawns in games of commerce, theatrics, and national pride – a sordid cocktail of motives governing most zoos ultimately. But the verbal flesh Ledgard puts on these bare bones is extraordinary: poetic, haunting, unflinching. The fate of the giraffes likewise: a grievous echo of Cold War paranoias about zoonotic pandemics – and prescient, given the more recent Covid outbreak.

            Most zoo animals are fated to be obtained by violence and to die behind bars. A few may be born in captivity; even fewer escape. But escape they will – like the tiger in South Africa recently that had finally to be shot by its ‘owner’/captor. Conservation value of all that: zero. Some inmates may be liberated by compassionate humans. This is the theme of Russell Hoban’s delightful and quirky Turtle Diary (1975), in which an ill-matched couple hatch a plot to liberate two turtles from London Zoo, and release them into the ocean at Polperro on England’s south coast. The unlikely thieves are deftly portrayed in the film of the book, by Vanessa Redgrave and Ben Kingsley. (I went on a Hoban pilgrimage to Polperro, disappointed to find that this was clearly not where the film ended up, charming though it is.)  

            Another escape story, even more fantasial, is Nancy Farmer’s children’s novel The Warm Place. I’ve written about this elsewhere, so here will just say it involves a group of talking animals conspiring, with the help of one small human, to escape a North American zoo and get back to Africa. (Indeed, if you Google lists of zoo novels, the vast majority are children’s stories.)

           

A reverse sea-borne journey is described in Yann Martel’s magnificently odd novel, Life of Pi (2003). This might be explored in the colonial/postcolonial context, too, since the eponymous Pi is son to a zoo owner in Pondicherry, India, mimicking the dynamics of Western zoos. (Not that India doesn’t have its own venerable history of capturing and taming wild animals, notably elephants.) Pi’s Indian zoo has proved commercially unviable, however. As Pi puts it, zoos have become pretty “precarious ... neither big enough a business to be above the law nor small enough to survive on the margins. To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech ...” (Tell that to the Chinese, who have many zoos, some of them reportedly horror-shows – notoriously for Zimbabwean baby elephants, gifted in mediaeval potentate-style to President Xi.)  Pi tries to suggest that zoo animals, when adequately treated, are content to settle into conditions safer than the wild. Puzzlingly, many still try to escape. In the novel, the animals are not freed but shipped across the Pacific to other zoos in North American. Unfortunately, the ship goes down in a storm, leaving Pi stranded on a lifeboat with a few animals, including an orang-utan, a zebra, a hyena and the tiger. It’s a microcosm of wilderness, and a mocking echo of the Ark (which some zoos also call themselves). After all the cruelty, terror and deprivation, Pi is nevertheless rather miffed when ‘Richard Parker’ the tiger finally walks away from him without a backward glance. So would all wild animals, given the chance.

One more big cat, in local context. Henrietta Rose-Innes’ fine novel Green Lion (2015) is set in a slightly-futuristic Cape Town, centred on the remnants of a zoo alongside Table Mountain (fenced off as an enclosed reserve). One of two zoo lions has mauled its keeper; the second, of course, eventually absconds, to become the elusive, almost mythical terror of local urban civilisation. There are echoes here perhaps of Nadine Gordimer’s short story, “A Lion on the Freeway” (1980), whose setting is haunted by the roar of lions in the nearby zoo – tragic precisely because there is no lion on the freeway, reclaiming his country.)

Zoos, I hazard, are first and foremost venues of ‘power-over’ rather than ‘power-for’, places where the ‘wild’ can be trammelled and effectively subordinated to human society, consumed only in digestible bits, decontextualised, infantilised. Arguments that the public are fruitfully educated by viewing captive animals are flimsy, argues staunch and controversial anti-zoo writer and literary scholar Randy Malamud, notably his book exploring a swathe of older literary works entailing zoos, Reading Zoos. A very short version can be found in an article, aptly named “The Captivity Industry”. It is co-authored with elephant-activist Gay Bradshaw, who has also been involved in efforts to move a destitute elephant out of less-than-ideal conditions in Pretoria Zoo. That environment minister Barbara Creecy seems slow to act, and the Zoo proprietors are recalcitrant, exemplifies the subordination of the animals’ well-being to commercial self-interest and legalistic obstructionism.  They haven’t absorbed the lesson and emotional burden of our Arja Salafranca’s sensitive poem, “The elephant is unhappy” – a sadness read, as with Rilke’s panther, in pure body language.

            I’m not presenting a fully-worked argument about the value of zoos here, but it seems significant that all the works cited seem to valorise the animals’ escape. (Maybe I unconsciously self-selected, of course.)  But given that humans have wiped out at least half of non-human animal life since 1970, it is clearly human incursion on the rest that needs to be caged.

Oh, but AI robots will take over from humans soon, and they’ll have no need for nature, animals, potable water, functioning ecosystems, or anything else! Or would they?

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No 138 - Last letter from Dunkirk, 1940

 

I was scratching through ancestral papers, as one does in one’s footloose retirement, and rediscovered a remarkable thing: a tightly folded letter tucked in a small envelope. The envelope bears an inscription: “Geoffrey’s letter to Pon from Dunkirk, May 1940.” Another hand, which must be my mother’s, had written above “Geoffrey” the word “uncle”, and above “Pon”, “aunt”. Now I knew that Geoffrey Hobson Matthews was my grandfather’s brother; “Pon” was the family nickname for Honor, their sister. I knew that Geoffrey had become a priest, and I remembered that he had been killed at Dunkirk, where some 300 000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force were being desperately evacuated ahead of the Nazi invasion of Belgium. I have a photographic print of him in military uniform. Yet somehow I hadn’t fully absorbed the drama of this letter.

Geoffrey Herbert Berrow was born to John and Alice Matthews on 12 December 1903 at Stanley Lodge, Monmouth, Wales. “From the start,” wrote a cousin and family chronicler David Pontifex, “he was a child of character and full of quaint remarks”. He began his education at St Benedict’s in Ealing, long a Matthews haunt. He remained there during the First World War, while his older brother Bernard was, ironically, dropping small bombs on the Germans in France from his Sopwith Camel.

Geoffrey seemed bent on becoming a priest from the earliest age: his father’s diary records a remarkable sermon on miracles he delivered at the age of 3. He joined the Benedictine community at Downside Abbey in 1922, spent a year of study at Sant Anselmo in Rome, and was ordained priest on 1 July 1928. Just a month later Bernard, who had gone to Kenya to try his hand at farming, died of blackwater fever (malaria), leaving his wife Mary pregnant with their second daughter – my mother.

Honor, Bernard, John, Geoffrey and
Monica Hobson Matthews, ca. 1910.

  Geoffrey – now Dom Gervase – taught at Downside and Ealing Priory Schools, in the holidays travelling with Honor as far as Poland. When the Second World War broke out, along with other Downside old boys, he joined the BEF, and was assigned to a Casualty Clearing Station (CCS). He wrote several letters during this time, which David Pontifex had, but I haven’t seen them – apart from this typewritten one to Pon. It was the last he ever wrote; somehow the letter, added to over several days, got away. Its last entry is 30 May 1940. He mentions having written to Pon. Within 48 hours he was dead, exactly how no one knows. On his body, folded into his psalter, was discovered the neatly handwritten diary he had kept throughout his time in the BEF, which found its way back to Downside Abbey. You can see a few extracts of it on their website, which lavishes praise on his self-sacrifice.

There are intriguing differences between the two accounts. Though he didn’t exactly sugar-coat it, his account to Pon lacks some of the diary’s details, omits to mention that he was actually on the beaches on the last couple of days, and adopts a slightly more offhand and upbeat tone. He doesn’t mention that a handful of chaplains drew lots to see who should leave or stay. The last line of the diary reads: “a priest certainly should stay”.

Here is the letter.

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                                                                                                            No. 2 C.S.S.

                                                                                                            B.E.F.

                                                                                    Friday, May 24, 1940

 I am typing this on my bed. I have no table. I sent a field card off to you this afternoon. No post is going from here, but we heard that there was one going from No.1 C.S.S. about ten miles away; so we all dashed off cards and despatched them by someone who was going there. It was the first chance since I have been back; but I hope you had my letter from Boulogne? I don’t know when this will get off. The only thing to do is to write, and to post when one can.

            My leave seems to have ended years and years ago. It is all so different out here now!

            After writing to you at the harbour station at Boulogne I had to decide what to do. I could get no news at all of the unit and all of us were told to stay put pending instructions – which might not be forthcoming. Two chaps (major O’Meara, who sent off my wire from Dover; and Lacey, the United Board, whose leave was over before mine), left by train (civvy train) for Arras. The line was so blocked by refugee trains and hospital trains that it took three hours to get as far as Etaples, and I didn’t arrive at Arras until after midnight. In the train I learned that Courcelette, the little village where I sang Mass on the Sunday before my leave, had been bombed and destroyed. There was a big petrol dump there.

            I can’t describe the tension in Arras. It was awful. The town was of course in complete darkness; cars were gliding about without lights and refugees were trying to sleep in the open streets. I crossed the square and wandered into a big hotel just opposite the station; it had been abandoned, but the side doors were open. Two French soldiers were standing nearby. One of them said, “Are you a priest? All right you can go in. You will find a bed in Room 19 on the third floor; but sleep lightly and be ready for grave news.” So I went up to room 9 on the third floor, washed and shaved in cold water, and slept on an unmade bed, without undressing, to the wail of air raid sirens. I was the only soul in the building, and it was about as weird an experience as you could wish!

            At 6 o’clock I knocked on the door of an Augustinian convent and asked if I might say Mass. The nuns got everything ready for me and attended in full force; and just after the Communion there was a hefty air raid that lasted until I left the altar. Lots of bombs were dropped and thirty people were killed in the streets by Boche machine-gun fire. The noise was appalling.

            The Rev. Mother gave me breakfast in the convent and I then collected my bag from the empty Moderne and repaired to the station, where I received a sharp but friendly rap on the knuckles, from the Military Authorities, for having come up from Boulogne on my own!

            I remained at the station from 7.30 until lunch-time, trying unsuccessfully to get news of 2 C.C.S. from the R.T.O. in his office. At 8.30 a Boche plane swept down on us, dropped several bombs (which fell wide, but not as wide as one would have wished) and then began to let loose a hail of machine-gun bullets on all present. The Boche bullets pinged uncomfortably loudly on the stone platform, within a yard or two of me, and I leapt with unwonted agility into the R.T.O.’s office. No sauntering, I mean!

            Shortly afterwards, the aviator (or it may have been another one) was brought down and taken prisoner. They brought him into the station under escort: a boy of 18: his left arm was broken and his right eye was cut and bruised. The French soldiers left him standing against a wall, while everyone ogled him. I felt unreasonably sorry for him and bunged some cigarettes at some French wounded, who were waiting for a hospital train, I am afraid for the sole purpose of giving him one too. He said “Thank you” in English; but his hand trembled so that he upset the packet. He tried to pick them up but I lit his and prevented him. After standing the whole thing exceedingly well for some time, his nerve gave and he began to moan and cry out; the bruises had spread all over his face and he was obviously in a bad way from shock. They took him into a waiting room and laid him down on a wooden bench; but they wouldn’t do anything else for him. When I went in to see him he cried in English “help me, help me!”, but quite quietly. I suggested that one of a number of pillows, lying nearby, might be put under his head; but I nearly got lynched for suggesting it! After a bit he recovered somewhat; and the last I saw of him was his being put on a hospital train with the French wounded.

            There were air raid alarms all through the morning. I spent the time helping to bundle the aged of the refugees into what trains were going, until at mid-day word came through that every British troop was to be out of Arras immediately. Most of them had already left.

            I had to decide then between returning to Boulogne or somehow getting forward to where our 3rd. Corps was, in the Bethune area. I was told that it was just possible that I might get some news there of the C.S.S.; but that if I didn’t somehow get out of Arras without delay the consequences would be very serious. In other words the Boche were about to enter.

After some hesitation (actually getting on to a Boulogne hospital train and getting off again!) I climbed with my suitcase on to a lorry laden with ammunition, feeling like half a dozen suicide squads whenever I thought of what would happen if the joint went up! I left thereon at 1.30; and exactly twenty minutes later the station was bombed to bits and more than 100 people were killed, mostly refugees. I find it hard to get the thought of them out of my mind: two or three trains packed with them; others huddled together on the platforms and  just inside the station doors. I heard about it later from the R.T.O. He congratulated me on getting away and told me that his office had got a direct hit just after he left it; that two trains had direct hits also; that there was practically nothing left of the station and that the sight was too awful for words. So maybe ‘twas your prayers that sent that ammunition lorry along in the nick of time!           

The lorry took me to 3ed. Corps H.Q. and I at once went to the R.T.O. there to ask of news of the unit; and there I had the most incredible luck, for seated in the office was Colonel Graham (C.O. of No.2 C.C.S,) and a few yards away was the whole outfit – with Master Maurice Summers and my own little car! They were actually on the move and called there en route to get instructions! I put my suitcase on to my car and there we were! Much tail-wagging on all sides!

As you see from my using my typewriter, I got hold of some of my kit that I left behind when I went on leave; but most of it, including my altar kit and my large suitcase, is still on a train somewhere and can’t yet be got at. An awful nuisance as I now want my altar kit badly. Fortunately I brought out a new supply of Oils with me this time. We are opening up in full tonight. Till now we have only had fairly light cases, owing to our being unable to stay for more than a few hours in one place.

We have been all over the shop and I have been sleeping in woods and under haystacks and on the top decks of ambulances. Now we are established in an evacuated school on the Belgian frontier and I suppose we shall stay here unless a move is indicated.

German planes fly overhead all day and all night and there has been a lot of bombing all around. A few moments ago 12 Boche planes went past, ‘mid a colossal shindy from A.A. guns. It is a bit uncomfortable (but no more than that) to hear and see them incessantly. No one bothers about them unless they are bang over us; then all have to get under cover.

 Saturday, May 25

 I saw St Omer bombed by about 30 planes on Tuesday, when we were three or four miles away. It was the most spectacular thing I have seen in that line. We were up on a hill and looked down on the whole show while it was on. We could hear the Germans machine-gunning people on the roads.

            The plight of the refugees (mostly Belgian) has been pitiful beyond words. The roads have been thronged with them, and things have been happening so quickly that it has been quite a common sight to see them making first in one direction and then all returning and trying to get away in another. I gave the Last Sacraments to one poor man who was dying by the roadside. They were all so patient and there has been no panic at all; just the most awful suffering.

            I was not able to say Mass from the day I left Arras until yesterday; but I went once to Holy Communion, seizing the moment, never giving a thought to the fact that I had broken my fast in the small hours of the morning while we were travelling. And that Thursday was the feast of Corpus Christi didn’t dawn on me until that afternoon when I went into a church on our road.

            On Wednesday it was decided to evacuate all the nursing Sisters to England, as things have been rather hot for them (this war is entirely unlike the last and there is no safety ‘behind the lines’) and the C.O. asked me to take them to Dunkirk. We set off in an ambulance at 8.00 a.m.’ the driver, nine sisters, and myself (I in front with the driver). When we arrived at a town just outside Dunkirk we were stopped. Dunkirk was being bombed. While we were waiting there I ran into Frs. Coghlan and McCreton, to my delight and theirs. I was the first of our chaplains they had made any kind of contact with since the flap began. Later we pushed on into Dunkirk; but the bombing had put the harbour temporarily out of action and the only thing to do was make for Calais – rather perilous in view of the German spearhead advance towards Boulogne. Also they have odd tanks dashing around all over the place!

            We got out of Dunkirk just in time to avoid a second raid on the town, during which I hoicked the sisters out of the ambulance and into a ditch for shelter. Then we tried to get onto the Calais road; as no one quite knew what was happening between there and the coast. We had to turn back and I found a farmhouse where I unloaded the sisters and got rooms for them. It seemed that we were stuck.

            After a few hours, however, we were allowed to push on again by a very round-about route; and the road was so congested with refugees that our progress was slow and very difficult. We reached Calais at last at 6 p.m., to find that it had been having a good old bombing just before. The harbour station had been hit and fires were blazing away all round the docks. A boat was expected to leave for England in the morning; so I parked the sisters on the Area Commandant, a Colonel Holland, and bade them a tender farewell – to my enormous relief!

The job then was to get back again. I had taken my leave kit with me as it was very doubtful whether one would succeed. I could have come to England for the asking: the pass was made out for myself and the sisters, in case there should be no getting back from the port. The driver and I set off at 7.30, hoping for the best, and did in fact get back here (the unit had come here during the day) at about midnight – driving without lights, past thousands of troops, guns, tanks and ammunition lorries being rushed up to the defence of Boulogne and Calais. The roads and bridges were all mined, ready to be blown up to stop the Boche, and we had to zig-zag our way between barrels of gunpowder. There were several huge fires at Dunkirk, which had evidently been bombed again since we came through, and the flames were shooting up ‘mid great columns of smoke. Later we passed through a town that had been bombed to pieces since our driving through it in the morning; a terrible sight now in the darkness, with great holes in the streets, houses yawning open from direct hits, and every window smashed for miles.

 Sunday May 26.

 I had to call this off yesterday because the Boche came over in fairly full force (eighteen planes) and dropped a shower of bombs on us, six hefty ones falling very close. I went down to the wounded (lying on stretchers on the floors of the school, because of course this isn’t a hospital but a clearing station). It was pretty awful. The whole place seemed about to fall and most of the windows crashed to pieces. It was so horrid listening to the whine of the bombs and the frightful explosions. The large and very beautiful parish church, just a hundred yards away, got a direct hit and was smashed up completely. I found the Tabernacle door blown open, the lid blown off the ciborium, the lid of the lunette also blown right off, and the Hosts covered with dust and plaster; I climbed over the debris (which was beginning to smoulder) and took the Blessed Sacrament to a house nearby – for which I was patted on the back by some French soldiers. It was terrible going into the wrecked houses to look for the people; but I got a great kick out of the fact that Dabbs the C. of E. was in a cellar – though he came out after a bit and was very kind to the populace. No civilians were killed but a good number were killed. I anointed the French soldier just before he died, and a few hours later I buried him; for which I received the official thanks from the C.O. of his regiment. I want never to have to go through the like again; but I suppose one will! It was comforting to find that the breeze was blowing inside the most hardened warriors just as much as it was inside me!

            Lots of love to all the family; and thumbs up! Jerry is gabling on a knock-out; but we’re not knocked out yet and our turn will come!

            Pray for the wounded. They are so good and patient. Some of the cases are very pathetic.

            I haven’t had any mail since I came back. No one has. I do hope you are out of London!

            Your very loving,

                                                Geoffrey.

30.5.40

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The folded, typewritten letter I possess looks rather authentic, but must itself be a copy: ‘copy’ is in fact written on the envelope, I guess by David Pontifex, who must have sent it to my grandmother. Or possibly after the war Honor (Pon) took it on her visit to Kenya, where Mary had married Alban Mitford-Barberton, and was raising Bernard’s two girls on their farm near Kitale. My mother, then a young girl, recalled meeting Pon, and perhaps did so again when she visited England later. Pon died in 1967.

 After 1945 everybody thought that Europe had finally exhausted its appetite for war. Not as far as Putin is concerned: the scenes of devastation, numbed refugees, the casualties buried where they died, described by Dom Gervase, are shockingly being exactly replicated in eastern Ukraine. Insane.

*****

No 137 - Wilma Stockenstrom and the New Animists

 

Are you a “New Animist”? Would you like to be? Is Wilma Stockenström one?

I recently re-read premier Afrikaans writer Wilma Stockenström’s best-known novel, The Journey to the Baobab Tree, in its celebrated translation into English by JM Coetzee. It’s a scintillating, timeless little piece – compact, rich, and poetic – and it reawakened my fringey interest in phenomena of belonging-in-the-world often lumped under the term animism.

Meaning what, exactly? “Animism” has become as complex a word as “nature”, subject to multiple nuances. It was classically defined by British anthropologist E B Tylor, in his Primitive Culture (1871), as, crudely, “belief in spirits”. That is, “primitive” or “precolonial” peoples, in his view, mistakenly invested rocks, rivers, animals, thunder and such-like with “spirits” which required prayer and appeasement. Such nonsense, according to Tylor, would be superseded by scientific rationalism. This condescending view remains very current, but Tylor and his ilk have been increasingly taken to task in recent decades for being in turn mistaken, or at the very least misleadingly superficial.

Let’s note for a start that some or other form of animism has characterised human relations with the non-human world for a good 100 000 years or more, and in many quarters continues to do so. By comparison, the now-dominant monotheistic religions are mere juvenile upstarts. Lynn White among others has argued that, in the West at least, Christianity, by insisting on a total division between the “higher” realm of “soul” or “spirit” and the forgettable dross of the material body, has enabled the current unfeeling and profligate exploitation of the natural world. Compared to Heaven the Earth doesn’t matter much. Scientific rationalism, for all its self-evident value, has further provided the technology that has made the exploitation as damaging as it is.

Human-caused planetary poisoning, habitat denudation, species extinction and climate disruption have given a new impetus to attempts to find ways to counter that self-destructive trajectory. One way is to revisit the ageless traditions of animism. Not to “go back” to some imaginary precolonial paradise (which did not exist), but to use what appears as valuable in various animist world-views to critique and reconsider our modern predicament – to forge a “New Animism”. So thinkers from sundry fields – philosophy, religious studies, animal ethology, anthropology, literature, even urban planning – refer regularly to human-nature relations as lived out among the Khoisan and the Ojibwe, the Australian Aboriginals and the Amazonian Yanamamo, the Congolese Pygmies and the West African Vodun.

Some are rightly cautious about romanticising such peoples’ lifeways – profoundly respectful of “nature”, to be sure, but also often vulnerable, conflictual, and predatory. But most New Animist thinkers seem agreed that they share one vital thing: the understanding that ultimately there is no human/non-human divide, no real gulf between “culture” and “nature”. There may be talk of “spirits” and “gods” and colourful propitiation rituals, but these are just surface manifestations. Fundamentally, animist cultures make no distinction between the spiritual and the material. Rather, energies of unseen provenance and pathways surge through everything, animate and non-animate alike. There isn’t the same kind of “belief” in a separable “God” figure or “Holy Spirit” as in mainstream Christianity. When I was delving into West African Mami Wata iconography and the cultures of Vodun (often caricatured as “voodoo”), though they seem seriously weird to the outsider, I was struck by how earthy these practices are. Vodun icons are constructed from multiple materials, integral to specific locales and each carrying specific energy-connotations: nothing is without significance, from rocks to nails, from goat-hair to river mud, palm-fibre to feathers. Here, matter matters. Sensuous and spiritual, indivisibly and simultaneously. By comparison, the major religions’ spiritual conceptions appeared vague, cerebral, even vacuous.

The New Animists try to recapture or refurbish this mode of living-integrally-in-the-world in various ways. Graham Harvey, long one of the central figures in the movement, puts it this way in a recent article, “Animism and Ecology” (accessible on ecologicalcitizen.com):

Primarily, [the New Animist] approach emphasizes relationality: the notion that personhood is not the possession of a certain sort of non-relational, interior property (e.g. being self-conscious, or having a spirit or mind), but is instead constituted by interactions between beings. That is, rather than think in terms of individuality or selfhood, animist ontologies view persons as constituted by the shifting interactions of continuously negotiable relational acts.

An extension of the notion of ubuntu, in a way. Harvey is also the editor of a landmark volume, The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (2013), containing chapters by numerous illustrious commentators, from biologists to theologians, though mostly anthropologists. Discussion of literature is notably sparse, apart from Harvey’s own contribution on animism’s role in some “indigenous” novels.

Which reminds me: The Journey to the Baobab Tree. What’s the connection? The novella is narrated by an unnamed slave-woman, living in (perhaps) the late 15^th century on Africa’s East Coast, where oceanic commerce flourishes, including the African-Arab slave trade. Having been snatched somewhere in the interior, the narrator has been bought and sold three or four times, ending up with a somewhat more appreciative aristocrat known only as the Stranger. This man decides to launch an expedition into the interior. The venture gradually unravels, everybody deserting or dying until the narrator is left alone, barely surviving in the bole of a baobab tree. This basic narrative has to be teased out of a rich but confusing presentation of mingled episodes and tangled memories that, doubtless deliberately, make a mockery of linear time.

To help make sense of it I returned to an excellent MA thesis I supervised back in 2011, by Eleanore (Ella) Johnson. Her chapter on The Journey explored the notion of reading the novella as “ecocentric”. She was onto the animist element, too, albeit briefly. She noted how the narrator becomes conscious of her interconnectedness with her environment, increasingly so as she is divested of the muffling protections of “civilisation”, divested almost of a sense of individual selfhood altogether. Certainly the story is critical of the self-serving commercialism of coastal civilisation, exploiting helpless humans and animals alike. In contrast, the narrator projects: “I am of a self-sufficient crystallinity, transmuted into pure bliss. I am one whole, and divided too and present in everything everywhere.” Crucially, however, this is contained in a fantasy of a utopia. Her actual life in the vicinity of the baobab is far more fraught. She is too civilised, ignorant, “ill-equipped” to survive even though she’s in the midst of  a rich ecosystem, virtually “paradisal luxuriance.” She comes to realise she is only one of many animals competing for fruits and seeds; baboons frighten her in their very resemblance to her. Part of the story’s purpose seems to be to dislodge the human’s sense of centrality to the universe (the West’s prevailing myth). Even the powerful Stranger succumbs, “Come to his end in the belly of a crocodile. … One is so used to regarding other inhabitants of the earth as food … that it seems terribly funny when other-consuming man is himself eaten.”

As it happens, one of the contributors to Harvey’s Handbook is my favourite environmental philosopher, the late Val Plumwood. She also got chewed up by a crocodile (an Australian saltie), though survived that to write a stunning essay entitled “On Being Prey”. At least some contemporary animists recognise that becoming more respectfully attuned to our ultimate (inter)dependence on the non-human world has its limits, might also entail exposure to predation – not least by innumerable bacterial and viral attackers. After all, not even our sterile and sterilised cities could shield all of us from Covid-19. The Journey to the Baobab Tree does seem in part to warn us against the more warm-and-fuzzy notions of some New Animists. The narrator is dependent on shadowy indigenous people – unnamed but recognisably “Bushmen” – who leave food as offerings, taking her to be some sort of tree-dwelling supernatural being. But she is left doubly destitute when they in turn are all but wiped out by another bunch of passing (human) marauders.

It's all a bubbly, attractive, complex arena of possibility. I’ve scarcely begun to think it all through. The question remains: How can we best interrelate with the non-human denizens of our hyper-integrated world? Can we (re)establish some sort of reverential symbiosis with the bases of all life? The ending of The Journey suggests that the greatest obstacle to expanding a mutually fruitful New Animism might be – human nature itself.

*****

No 136 - Oh no, not George Eliot!!

 

It’s 4 a.m. and Siberia the cat is poncing about on my head, asking to be let out. I turn on the lamp and release her into the starlight. Realising that I’m a tad peckish I wobble to the fridge, temporarily quell the Inner Beast with a cannabis tart and a flagon of mead. Wide awake now. While waiting for the Siberian Tiger to return from admiring the Milky Way, I open up my current bedside tome – George Eliot’s 1870s doorstop, Daniel Deronda.

I recently put my worn boot into an online conversation when someone bashfully confessed they were trying to read Middlemarch, the better-known doorstop by George Eliot (known to real people as Marian Evans). “That awful book,” belched one conversant. “Horrible colonial imposition on our African sensibilities,” griped an academic. “Why?” queried a third, “stodgy sleep-inducing Victorian irrelevance!” (I’m paraphrasing – but these are common responses.)

Woah, I encouraged, slow down. Shelve the stereotypes for a minute. Allow yourself to linger on those limber sentences, tease them out. You’ll find there a subtle worldliness, refined characterisation, and a wealth of resounding implication. Let the gifted phrase surface. 1870s England might seem distant from us all, but its portrayal offers both challenges to our own mores as well as startling commonalities.

At 4.10 I open Daniel Deronda about halfway through, at Chapter 35. At my current rate of reading and vulnerability to distraction it’ll take me until 2026 to finish it, but who cares? Time is just time. John Steinbeck wrote something interesting about big books, in relation to his equally monumental blockbuster, East of Eden. A short book was a bit like a stiletto blade going in and out, he said: quick, exciting, and soon healed over. A really big book, however, was like a wooden wedge being slowly hammered into the flesh, which is obliged to grow around it, and so will be changed forever. (I’m paraphrasing. Again.) Anyway, I’m enjoying Deronda, partly because Gwendolyn Harleth is such a bewitchingly complex, infuriating and beautiful character, also because I find myself quite identifying with Daniel Deronda himself. (I’m that vain I probably identify with anyone named Daniel.)

Chapter 35 opens with a sort of epigraph. Many of the book’s epigraphs are attributed to other writers, but this one isn’t: presumably it’s Eliot herself, despite sporting the odd “hath” and “whoso”, I suppose to lend it a sense of Biblical sonority. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but bear with me.

Were uneasiness of conscience measured by extent of crime, human history had been different, and one should look to see the contrivers of greedy wars and the mighty marauders of the money-market in one troop of self-lacerating penitents with the meaner robber and cut-purse and the murderer that doth his butchery in small with his own hand. No doubt wickedness hath its rewards to distribute: for whoso wins in this devil’s game must needs be baser, more cruel, more brutal than the order of the planet will allow for the multitude born of woman, the most of these carrying a form of conscience – a fear which is the shadow of justice, a pity which is the shadow of love – that hindereth from the prize of serene wickedness, itself difficult of maintenance in our composite flesh.

Pwoaar, that’s meaty, entangled stuff. But let’s take it bit by bit. The very least we can say is that Eliot, in this novel, has her sights not merely on a suffocatingly narrow botched marital choice – though there is that – but on the entire gamut of human history and behaviour. Here she’s homing in on the exercise of “wickedness”, from the grandest scale (“contrivers of greedy wars” – what a phrase to describe Bad Vlad Putin!) to the meanest pickpocket (“cut-purse”). But she’s not just bluntly condemning wickedness. The passage is probing a darker and more complex philosophical issue: the relationship between conscience and crime. Instantly we can see this is no easy matter: we probably all know of individuals who commit crimes with not the slightest “uneasiness of conscience”, while others are racked by remorse. Who feels, who doesn’t, and why? How is the conscience created in the first place? Addressing this, Eliot realises, lies at the very core of any system of justice and punishment – not to mention everyday social behaviour.

Notice that she begins this passage with a conditional: If there were some direct relation or ratio between conscience and extent of the crime, history would be different. The implication: actual history shows there is no such direct correlation. Miscreants are evidently not all joined in one troop “self-lacerating”, punishing themselves with the whips of their own consciences. (In effect, state systems are trying to do it for them, whether with fines or canes, jail-time or the threat of the gallows. The results, as we know, are mixed: some miscreants are incorrigible, others “see the light” and turn to good deeds. Distinguishing who is beyond reform and who isn’t, who has a conscience to address or develop and who doesn’t, remains to this day a fundamental problematic in any judicial system.)

Moreover, Eliot notes, wickedness has its attractions. It has its “rewards to distribute”. Think of gang bosses or warlords who do offer certain protections, stabilities and patronage in the absence of state efficacy. Think of the arms manufacturers profiting on the back of Putin’s war. Such rewards are perhaps most common, as well as subtly dispensed, by those Eliot calls the “marauders of the money-market”. (Relish that alliterative phrase – mmm!) We know of plenty of those, of course, from the Murdochs to the Musks: they arguably rule the world. Conscience-free wickedness can even be seen as a “prize”; today we have whole television series apparently exalting the unscrupulous corporate raider.

For there are, Eliot observes, at least some people who can be quite “serene” in their wickedness. It’s a “devil’s game” out there (invoking the devil, with all its Christian associations; and characterising it as a game, each carries an almost infinite burden of implication). Those who want to win in that game have to be “baser, more cruel, more brutal” than the next guy. Still, Eliot says a little hopefully, the “order of the planet” militates against such characters. Is there really such a metaphysical order? The stuff of utopias. Thankfully, pure evil is rare: the “multitude” retains some “form of conscience”.

Yet more subtlety emerges here: conscience isn’t just one thing. There are different forms of it, and not all of those forms are equally satisfactory, hints the parenthetical aside: “a fear which is the shadow of justice, a pity which is the shadow of love”. One form of conscience, then, is born not of some inherent or independent power, but of fear – fear of punishment or recrimination. This is only a “shadow” of justice. “Shadow” might bear a double meaning: as a secondary, weak manifestation; or as a dark underside. Both readings work. Another weak form of conscience arises from “pity”, which in Eliot’s view (as it was in William Blake’s) is only the “shadow” of selfless and committed love. Again, you could go on and on exploring the ramifications of those limpidly balanced phrases.

Is this just a political deviation from the domestic drama? Far from it: it sets a matrix for the private, daily operations of conscience. Deronda hovers between pity and deep love; Grandcourt, Gwendolyn’s husband, leans towards a detached lack of conscience; Gwendolyn herself oscillates between unthinking hurtfulness and a maturing considerateness. This is why Eliot writes at the end of the passage of our “composite flesh”: we are made of many parts, intertwined threads not infrequently at odds with each other.

Far from being over-wordy, as many shallowly assume of Eliot, this is astoundingly compact: highly complex issues broached and woven together, raising endless implications. I do not know of a novelist who is more intelligently probing.

It’s 4.35 a.m. I’ve read the passage several times, puzzling it out. Siberia has returned, purring, completely free of either wickedness or conscience. Sleep feels far away, my head buzzing with the first draft of an over-wordy blog …

*****

No 135 - George Monbiot, feral environmentalist

 

 

I read the British environmentalist George Monbiot’s book on global warming, Heat: How to stop the planet burning, when it came out in 2008. I was impressed then, and am impressed on re-reading it now. And I’m appalled – but not surprised – that the situation he addressed hasn’t changed much in the interim. Indeed, it is arguably considerably worse. I’ve also been absorbing some of his more recent work: his books Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life (2013), Out of the Wreckage: A new politics for an age of crisis (2018), and Regenesis: Feeding the world without devouring the planet (2022). I encounter his regular column for the Guardian newspaper, too. He has managed both to generate a considerable following, and to make himself persona non grata in many circles and in some whole countries. He must be touching a few raw nerves, which is often a telling sign and a useful thing. Of course his leftie politics annoys conservative Tories and the like intensely, and some respond with genuine viciousness to his being a vegan. Why they should care at all beats me, but you’d think he’d actually threatened to hang their pet poodle.

Without always agreeing with him, I’ve liked what he says, and liked the way he says it. I’ll not get embroiled in argument here, but I thought, like a proper Fair-Minded Person, I should look up some of the criticism he has attracted. So I Googled away. The first one I read – call them Critic No.1 – lambastes Monbiot at length for his arguments in Regenesis that the meat-eating industry is a massive factor in impoverishing soils and causing damaging climate change. They grudgingly liked the opening chapters, in which Monbiot, down on his knees in his local communal orchard, expounds on the astonishing multispecies conglomerate that healthy soil is. (It’s wondrous.)  But the critic then claims that Monbiot knows jack-rabbit about soil science, and accuses him of using only ‘activist’ papers to support his case. Neither is remotely true, and the critic’s argument, whatever valid points it might contain, is so badly written, patently self-contradictory, and tedious that I would have thrown it down in frustration could one do such a thing with an internet site. No surprise, somehow, that the critic declines to reveal their identity, but boasts that they founded a food-processing company. In other words, they are beholden to precisely the industry Monbiot worries about.

Critic No.2 claims that Monbiot a) is a deluded ‘Romantic’, b) sees everything in ‘black and white’, and c) is just a shallow rabble-rouser. All three assertions are patently wrong, not to mention egregiously ad hominem – and come from someone who works for the energy industry but can’t write for toffee. I gave up. No doubt there are cogent criticisms, but these weren’t them. Back to the books, then, and why I believe them worth reading.

There are several things that I like about Monbiot’s work. First, he does write well. He is fluent, crystal clear, at times even lyrical. To be attractive and persuasive apparently riles the hard-core polemicists of the energy industry no end. To actually love life, to think that natural health and biodiversity is important, is apparently what attracts the dreadful epithet ‘Romantic’. Critic No.2 seems to think Monbiot wants us all revert to some pristine and primitive state of Nature, whereas what Monbiot actually advocates is much more pragmatic and nuanced. In Feral he does propose ‘rewilding’ select environments in order to save ecosystems from total collapse (and thus help to save ourselves), and he recommends appropriate reintroduction of long-extirpated keystone species like wolves, salmon and beavers. But he explicitly recognises we cannot simplistically return environments to some arbitrary previous era. Rewilding is “not an attempt to restore them to any prior state, but to permit ecological processes to resume” (8). He adds: “While I would argue against mass rewilding of high-grade farmland because of the threat to global food supplies, we lose little by allowing nature to persist in small fallow corners” (124). Arguably, “corners” are not enough, but would be a start. The above critics wholly miss the subtleties and careful qualifications.

A second thing I like about Monbiot is that he founds his arguments not just on the scientific facts and figures, which are always somewhat tentative or partial, subject to change as new evidence emerges, but also on personal experiences. Unlike his critics, who evince no evident love for anything beyond their position behind a desk covered in spreadsheets, Monbiot has trained and worked as a biologist and travels widely – Kenya, the Americas, the Philippines, Wales – and talks to real people, about whom he writes with fondness and insight, but by no means uncritically. My favourite of his books, Feral, is replete with such hands-on experiences. It’s all but an autobiography. In short, in contrast to defensive industrialists, who tend to throw about empty business-speak backed up with a blinding plethora of figures, Monbiot is human and humane, implying that unless improvements are felt by and implemented by committed individuals, we’ll not get far. Perhaps contradictorily, he also suggests elsewhere that individual acts – cycling to work, installing a solar panel – are effectively pointless, since only (inter)nationally-implemented policies will have the massive impact required. I only half agree: we’re in this pickle because over time millions of people have made millions of micro-decisions (to buy an SUV, to eat meat every day, etc etc). Millions of individual counter-decisions will have to be made, whether forced to by legislation or not. Might as well start.

Monbiot is keenly aware that no solution is going to suit every person or situation. He is the very opposite of ‘black-and-white’. He is neither an outright back-to-nature romantic, though there is that element; nor a technology-will-fix everything fanatic, though he finds certain new inventions exciting. He has persistently advocated moves to green energy and to less mechanistic, poison-dependent farming, but he openly admits that there are down-sides to both. In Heat, he made reasoned calculations as to how much energy could in fact be supplied by wind and solar generation, and came up way short of humanity’s needs. Something more is required. Despite considerable advances in technology having since been made in some quarters, this remains largely true. Moreover – as a sobering Al Jazeera documentary, “The dark side of green energy”, confirms – the new technologies remain dependent on extractive industries, notably of rare metals, which are themselves environmentally damaging. Lithium mining is one notable culprit. Nor have we worked out how to store or recycle any of this new stuff, from battery acids to nuclear waste to windmill rotor blades, which don’t last long and now lie discarded in huge ‘cemeteries’ across Europe. Monbiot loves the idea of ‘going local’ in food production and consumption, loves the communal orchard he helps maintain – but suggests that in some situations the amount of energy expended and pollution generated in a localised economy can actually be worse than that spawned by multinational trade in food, because of the great efficiencies of scale the big businesses can get.

I like also that Monbiot is always on a learning curve. He’s full of revelations, many of them revelations to himself. Some discoveries are beautiful, like the richness of functional soil that he both formally researches and sensually experiences in the beginning of Regenesis. Other revelations are dismaying, like just how dysfunctional the United Kingdom’s environmental policies, safeguards and enforcement are. Monbiot – and his associate researchers, whose contribution he generously acknowledges – is a deep researcher. He’s very good at uncovering the layers of obfuscation and misinformation so much denialist literature draws on. Not that this is always hard to do, as I discovered when presented with one superficially persuasive article someone recommended. I simply looked up the author, and found the intelligent-sounding Institute he belonged to, which turned out to be a bunch of people partly funded by Exxon, not one of whom was a biologist or climatologist, several of whom were on the boards of oil companies, and whose self-published papers all drew on one another. The appearance of scientific cogency and breadth of reference was rather easily exposed as a sham. Monbiot can’t read everything, but he does seek out those regarded as the best in the fields concerned, and the most authoritative summaries available, and then draws reasonable inferences. He knows how science works, and its limits. What science overall is good at is weeding out the rubbish or the inaccuracies as better evidence becomes available. So Monbiot is very prepared to admit that he was once wrong about certain things, often amusingly at his own expense. In a recent Guardian column, for example, he self-deprecatingly relates how he once thought installing a wood-burning heating system in his house was so much more natural and organic and hip than fossil fuel-based systems – only to belatedly discover that burning wood is far more toxic and environmentally unsound than heating your house with gas. (This has been confirmed by numerous studies which find that wood-burning in London is a serious source of pollution and health hazards, and bans are looking likely – imagine Lahore and Lagos.) I’m sure many of us find ourselves caught in these kinds of paradoxes.

It appeals to this retired literature professor, of course, that Monbiot reads, and illuminates his texts with literary allusions. It’s a rare scientist and activist who will reference a nineteenth-century novel (gawd, even half our university literature students won’t!). Heat’s chapters are all headed by startlingly apt epigraphs drawn from Goethe’s epic poem Faust, or from its cousin, Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus – the implication being that humanity has made a ‘Faustian pact’ with the fossil-fuel industry. We have chosen to sup with what appeared to be a fantastic boon to mankind (and in many ways it has been) but that has emerged as more of a deceitful devil liable to drag us all down into an unanticipated hell. Feral likewise draws on apposite quotations from the poets. The critics wholly ignore this dimension, homing in on alleged misreadings of figures or statistics. But there’s a crucial point here: Monbiot knows that most humans operate fundamentally at the level of the visceral imagination, not of the abstract – and only imagination is going to help us now. I don’t always agree with his readings. In Regenesis he places a lot of blame for our current food crisis on the myth embedded in pastoral poetry – the image of a safe, friendly, bucolic countryside of pretty meadows and complaisant cows. This, he argues, has covered up the reality of lethal animal-food industries and their attendant pollutions. For some, perhaps – but historically the pastoral has also always been wielded as a critique of urbanisation and over-dependence on sophisticated technology. The underlying insight, though – that humans tend to behave in accordance with tropes, myths and stories, rather than empirical evidence or figures printed in newspapers – surely holds. I therefore like Monbiot’s point, which governs the structure of the more politically-orientated book, Out of the Wreckage, that we have habitually operated according to one set of stories – that we are the centre of the universe, we are technological masters, nature is there for the taking, and so on – but now need another kind of story and a different set of metaphors to live by, if we’re going to survive the mess we have landed up in.

Finally, then, I like the fact that – like other favourite activist-writers of mine such as Rebecca Solnit and Naomi Klein – Monbiot is always determinedly upbeat, and always looking for solutions. His critics somehow fail to see this. I saw him interviewed recently on BBC’s “Hard Talk” by Stephen Sackur, who accused Monbiot (or relayed the accusation) that he was “always focussing on the negative”. Monbiot answered testily, “Have you actually read the book [Regenesis]? Two thirds of it is about solutions!” He is full of ideas, few of them entirely his own: they are usually gleaned and developed from people who are actually already doing stuff, whether it’s getting high farm yields without fertilisers, or generating meat in laboratories, or rewilding a corner of devastated land, or building homes more efficiently. He is not alone in either his critiques or his enthusiasms. There is no pie-in-the-sky stuff here, unlike the more bizarre notions of ‘geoengineering’ tossed about by the technocrats, from artificial carbon storage to pumping more pollutants into the atmosphere (with heaven knows what unforeseen consequences) to wrapping the poles in tin foil or migrating to Mars. Not all Monbiot’s suggestions might work, and he doesn’t claim any one is a silver bullet. But many strategies in combination, as a patchwork of appropriate ventures tailored to local conditions, he shows how extensive and helpful changes might be made. At times I think he is way too sanguine about evoking the altruistic and cooperative sides of human behaviour on a sufficiently large scale – but that kind of hopefulness is infinitely preferable to his critics’ apparent insistence that the mess can somehow be sorted by doubling down on the very strategies that have caused the mess in the first place.

At the very least, Monbiot gets you thinking about creative responses that are already to hand, and is often quite fun to boot. Read him.

*****

No 134 - Garden stories

 

A friend recently admitted, slightly bashfully, that he “sometimes” reads my blog. He pinched his brow and added plaintively: “It gets – quite academic.” And he’s a scientist; I expected better of him. “Stories from your garden,” he recommended.

Okay, so I may have been getting a bit heavy of late. Garden? I am the world’s Number One Un-gardener: I barely keep control of some small patches of grass, which bear a distant and shaggy resemblance to the concept of “lawn”. The rest has just gone wild. I love it. I do derive the most intense pleasures from these environs, and it certainly is full of stories, most of them unfolding quite unseen.

For example: a few weeks ago, going down a familiar path just below my cottage, I noticed a flare of strange white stuff stop a prominent frond of vegetation. It definitely hadn’t been there the day before. Some thin plastic snagged in the wind? Some dense spider-web gleaming in the afternoon sun? I took a closer look: unexpectedly a white orb swivelled at me, the pinhead of a black pupil. I scampered for my camera. Only that week my neighbours and I had been lamenting that we hadn’t seen chameleons literally for years. This diminutive chap was very shy and kept putting the twig he was on between himself and the lens. The white stuff was in fact the skin he was shedding, sheets of it fleering away, translucent in the light. He was very little – a Dwarf chameleon, I’m guessing –  and seemed very vulnerable to marauding birds, so I transferred him respectfully to denser shrubbery. Never to be seen again. But it felt like a gift for the new year; I was on a high for a week. Maybe 2023 would turn out all right after all.

As for the birds! Being on the edge of a patch of indigenous forest entails rich bird-life, from the high cyclical cries of displaying Crowned eagles to the Yellow-bellied sunbird that attacks his reflection in my bakkie’s wing mirrors and spatters the doors with infuriated poop. (Birdbrain.) I converted an old TV dish into an Avian Restaurant (AR), positioned just so that I can view it from my favourite armchair. For a bit I had a small cement water-dish on it, but a fierce wind blew it right off, so I half-sunk it in earth a few metres away under the trees, where it’s regularly visited by forest denizens glad for a toot on a thirsty night.

The AR hasn’t proved immensely popular; maybe it’s too exposed for the little’uns, apart from some insouciant Yellow-vented bulbuls. But it is visited regularly by a pair of Crowned hornbills, who have become relatively tame and have an especial fondness for cat biscuits. If the table is bare, the male, who is bolder than his wife, will come and sit at the top of the concrete steps and stare fixedly at the glass sliding door until Someone comes out with some hors d’oeuvres.

At times they are shovelled out of the way by a pair of comparatively immense White-necked ravens. For all their burliness, the ravens are very cagey, and will make several close passes over the AR before feeling safe enough to land. Any slight movement, even inside the house, sends them lifting off and sailing down the scarp over the treetops. They are magnificent, gleaming as if carved from striated and polished anthracite. This male is missing a wing primary feather, so I know him from any others – though they are virtually the only pair left in this locale, where a decade ago a hundred or more would come in their season and play on the escarpment’s updrafts. What has happened to them all? These two also like cat food, but now and then their patrols are rewarded by chunks of roast chicken corpse. Once I left three fairly large bits on the AR. Mister Anthracite puttered about for ages, claws clattering on the metal, figuring out how he could get away with all three at once. He was very reluctant to leave any behind, in case someone else got it. He tried this way and that, picking chunks up and manoeuvring them, eating some fragments as he went. You could practically see the mental and geometric cogs turning, and eventually he worked out a configuration by which he could cram all three bits into his bill and fly off with them.

The glass sliding-door through which I view the AR can also be a hazard. The other day a White-eye came belting through the house from the kitchen and smacked into the sliding-door from the inside. At first I thought it was just stunned and would recover, but it died in my hands. I put it out on the AR – a kind of Sky Burial – and within twenty minutes Mister Anthracite had arrived to pluck it up and away.

And literally the following day, as I was parked on the aforementioned Favourite Armchair, there was a tremendous crack, loud as a gunshot, that set the neighbourhood dogs all a-barking. A Turtle dove had smacked into the glass with terrific force and fallen onto the concrete plinth just outside, the contents of its crop exploded across the door. With a lurch of dismay, I got up to see to it, though it was clear it had died on impact – at which point a Black sparrowhawk swooped down, wings elegantly outspread, to collect it. No doubt it had been chasing the dove in the first place. Unfortunately, the sparrowhawk saw my simultaneous movement through the glass and sheered away. So first I felt sorry for the dove, then sorry that the hawk had been deprived of his lunch. I laid the dead dove out on the AR, hoping the hawk would return, but it didn’t – but within the hour Mister Anthracite was there, plucking a few feathers off the body as if to lighten the load, then swooping away, only a little inconvenienced by so bulky a cargo.

More comfortingly: for the past three years a happily-married pair of Lesser striped swallows have been building a holiday house – or is it a maternity ward? – of laboriously regurgitated mud pellets under the eave of my kitchen porch. But they didn’t seem inclined to do anything more, and would leave as usual for more equatorial climes during our winter. But this year they added a fluted additional entrance, and I grew paternally hopeful. For weeks I’ve been putting up with avoiding this usual ingress to the cottage, and going the long way round, while they worked away at their adobe-abode, wobbling on my washing line and chatting in their inimitable chirpy-squeaky little warbles. They are just too adorable. It’s got so I can stand at the kitchen door a mere arm’s length away and converse without them startling. (Such sentimentality, I’m told, is a sign of impending senile dementia. I don’t care.) There was one alarming interlude when White-rumped swifts, whose summer arrival otherwise excites me, were harassing the swallows, even attacking at the nest’s entrance, and then for a week or more they all vanished. I thought it was tickets for the swallows for yet another season. But they came back, and became increasingly house-proud, laying in décor on hire-purchase from FurnCity and all. I thought the female must be sitting, and listened out daily for the avian equivalent of pattering feet. Not a peep.

Then suddenly one morning ten days ago there was a whole lot of chittering and chattering and excitable flapping, and all at once there were not two striped swallows, but FIVE. The three fledglings, hitherto totally undetected, were already as big as the parents, lacking only the two long tail-feathers of the adults, and still being fed, each in turn. I felt so illogically proud of them. Now they seem to have a proper nine-to-five sort of routine, leaving the porch shortly after dawn and generally only returning at last light to somehow cram themselves into the nest, with much flittering back and forth and quarrelsome chatter about who’s going to sleep next to whom.

I know that when they head north to wherever they hang out for our winter (I like to think, the vicinity of my eastern Zimbabwe home), I will miss them terribly. At least I won’t have to carry the shopping so far. Until next season.

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