How to make trees dance...

The sun was closing on the horizon when we got back to Waitangi, the village that’s the main centre and de facto “capital” of the Chatham Islands, nearly 900 kilometres east of New Zealand.

A staff photographer, Ross White, and I had been sent for a week to the “Chats” by our employer, the New Zealand Herald. It was less a chase after hard news than it was a biennial ritual of cultural sovereignty, and a recognition that the Chathams were New Zealand too: the first part, in fact, to catch the dawn, if not the opportunities, of each new day. 

We’d spent the day in rugged bush up the Tuku river valley where a dedicated ornithologist called David Crockett and a team of volunteers were anchoring the survival of the endangered Taiko Petrol — Pterodroma magentae — a far-ranging seabird that had long been thought extinct.

Hungry and tired we went looking for a meal. But Waitangi was not only scarce of restaurants. It was devoid of them. All of the island’s imported supplies were due to arrive the next day on the Holmdale: the islands’ supply ship from Christchurch back on the “mainland”… even the general store had closed its till until its shelves were re-stocked.

But the pub was open and we asked the barman about food. Along with a sad look, he gave us each a big, brown quart bottle of beer and a crackly little package of crisps.

Ross and I had scarcely poured our beers when a shadow moved behind us and a quiet voice barely whispered in our ears: “’na koe, bros. You hungry?” Behind us stood a muscular Maori in a stained woollen shirt with a smell that announced his profession. “You eat kina?”

I said “sure”… Ross, I think, was more warily taking in the implications. “Kina” is a delicacy to many; a gag-inducing nightmare to some. You take a big, spiny sea urchin (Evechinus chloroticus), crack it open, tip out the slimy entrails and, if the season’s right (summer), you’re left with five, plump yellow roes, like orange segments, adhering to the inside of the shell. You scoop them off with your finger and pop them into your mouth. They are salty, sweet and splendidly pungent with the savour of the sea. They are — I am ready to swear to it — one of nature’s purest and most healthy forms of delectable protein. And they are best raw, fresh from the shell.

“Come with me,” said our benefactor. “Bring your beers.”

He led us outside to a battered flatbed truck and pulled sacks off the pile of crates. He set one of the crates in from of us. It was full of grapefruit-sized, premium-grade spiny sea-eggs… and he began splitting them open.

We set our glasses on the deck and ate. Before us, the sun was setting over the sea and a long, slow Southern Ocean swell was hauling long, scarlet and orange seams of fading sunlight towards the shore. Behind us was the light and buzz of voices from the pub, the puttering of generators — there being no power grid on the island — and the towering darkness of night-time cloud. The air was cool and sea-sweet.

Unexpecting, we had toppled headlong into one of those timeless experiences, when every sensation connects in a way that leaves nothing to be said… a perfect completeness of being you can recall in detail just by closing your eyes and letting your thoughts wander away into whatever silence they can find.

The smells, the sounds, the flavours, the sight, the sensations, the significance of it all slid into the ocean of our consciousness like a magical island: uncharted, distant, but — once you have been there — forever accessible and with far more to explore than could ever occur to you at the time.

I have others.

Sometimes I stand a night watch in my memories on one of the old “harbour defence launches” that the New Zealand Naval Reserve used for training and fishery protection patrols: the stars blaze above and phosphorescent trails mark, not only the little ship’s wake, but also the trajectories of porpoises and fish… so I am riding a moving platform of diesel-grunting shadow that rises through and is surrounded ahead, behind, to left and to right, above and below, by a shifting, multi-dimensional display of light.

And there is the first time I leapt from a yacht into one of those phosphorescent night seas and, looking up, saw the luminous path of my plunge and the glow of the hull… and, looking down, the light-trails of fleeing fish and startled squid, speeding into the darkness.

There is crawling through a never-before visited passage deep underground, then standing mud-caked in the stream-bed and looking around: the glittering, delicate, complicated and startling perfection of undisturbed limestone cave formations.

As well, I have somehow stored away a constellation of daylight moments: seeing my wife for the very first time and continuing to see her in ways that startle me with new, dazzling facets of that moment; the lift of a wave under a surfboard and the kick of a sail filling with wind; the rushing sound of being airborne in a glider after the towline’s let go; watching, then feeling a very rare giant weta* crawl onto my hand from a broken, rotting piece of log and being amazed by its weight, beauty and deliberation; watching clouds part beneath me from a windswept mountain-top; holding my baby daughter; the very particular way my first pet dog, Robin, would look at me…

There are many other moments I repeatedly continue to enjoy this same way — my first meal in Isernia, Italy, is one — people and places, performances, conversations, smells, moments, sights, emotions and sounds… even a few dreams. Some are very recent. Some were kindled when I was a child. All have the quality of visions.

And, it seems, the more that these islands of magic dot themselves around my inner ocean, the more eager I am to welcome more.

It is as though these memories, for that’s what they are, excite an appetite for more and more new experience, new visions, and open me more and more to the unexpected, the fortuitous, the wonderful… and the everyday (and there IS such a thing as an “everyday” vision). You can’t plan them; you just have to be open to them.

They work like demolition charges… they bring the bullshit down. They turn the dull opacity of routine to rubble. They snap the bonds of schedules and crack the niceties of conceit like bubbles. The trivia all explode into blown puffs of dust so that…

… yesterday, I saw a tree dance: the wind resistance of the leaves, the relative flexes of stem, twig and branch, the anchoring solidity of trunk, they all joined in and conspired with the gale then, with the emphatic intensity of a symphony orchestra, the leaping fluidity of a mountain stream, the hoof-beat thrill of a wildly galloping horse and the grace of a wheeling bird… the tree, a soft maple, danced.

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*giant weta (Deinacrida heteracantha): this gentle, anciently-evolved Antipodean relative of grasshoppers survives only on Hauturu (Little Barrier Island), a wildlife sanctuary in the Auckland Gulf, New Zealand. The “giant weta” weighs in at 20-30 grams and can have a body four inches long. It’s one of the world’s heaviest insects.

Small stuff

Despite the “overpopulation” some people fret about — which really has more to do with the disproportionate damage a very few of us wreak — all of us, people altogether everywhere, add up to just a tiny fraction of Earth’s total living matter.

Scientists reckon that the total biomass of shrimp-like Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, weighs in at something over 500 million tonnes. That’s about twice the estimated entire tonnage of the whole of humanity.

The total weight of Earth’s living organisms has been estimated at about 75 billion tonnes, and we’re just one third of one per cent of that: as biomass, we are all of us just a speck. Bacteria — creatures too small to see without microscopes — and plants account for most of the world’s tonnage of living matter.

And, when we weigh all of what we deem “living” matter against what we know of the “non-living” components of our planet, the amount is infinitesimally tiny. Guesstimates are that living stuff adds up to maybe 0.00000000126 per cent of the Earth’s total mass. Not a lot, in other words.

While we can talk about all of these “living” things and the ecosystems they form and the ways they sustain each other, it’s a lot harder for us to talk about the nature of life, and its meaning.

And, when we come to consciousness, we are pretty much stumped. It’s not being alive that gives us such a buzz, it’s being conscious of it. But we don’t really know quite what consciousness is, how it comes to be, or even the proportion of our own Earth’s biomass that possesses it.

Some scientists say consciousness is unique to people; more and more are coming to see it churning away in other species. Some say consciousness is just an odd coincidence of the nervous system’s real work, a kind of neural noise of no biological significance at all, a bit like gas pain in the digestive tract.

Some scientists share Francis Crick’s view that “…‘you’, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and freewill, are no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.

One current theory is that consciousness happens when enough parts of the cortex light up simultaneously. On the other hand, a British biologist, Brian Ford, has written about apparent consciousness at the level of the single cell. After translating the signals of individual nerve cells into sound clips, he heard, not the clicking of a switch, but sounds “with the hypnotic quality of seabirds calling”… “there is a sense that each (signal) spike is modulated subtly within itself, and it sounds as if there are discrete signals in which one neuron in some sense ‘addresses’ another,” he wrote in a 2010 New Scientist article. “For me, the brain is not a supercomputer in which the neurons are transistors; rather it is as if each individual neuron is itself a computer… if I am right, the human brain may be a trillion times more capable than we imagine, and ‘artificial intelligence’ a grandiose misnomer.”

This is a variety of the array of attitudes and notions that most clearly draw attention to the boundaries beyond which the wheels of scientific empiricism begin to spin and determinisms wander off to the fun park.

But, as René Descartes pointed out with his oft-quoted premise “I think therefore I am (cogito ergo sum)”,  consciousness — a reflective sense of ‘self’ — is the only reality of which we can be absolutely sure.

It may not seem like a lot to cling to, but it’s all we have. And human consciousness is the medium through which every detail of anything that any of us might say about the “real world” is transmitted from one person to another — whether we speak it, write it, paint it, webpage it, enact it, mathematise it or gesture it with a loaded gun. Human communication is between one discrete consciousness and another. We haven’t yet drawn other species too deeply into our conversations, so we don’t engage much with whatever their views of things may be.

Beyond human consciousness, everything is conjecture and conjecture exists only in consciousness.

And conjecture, the play of ideas, can make life a whole lot of fun.

Breaking Free: Further... (more backgrounding)

Breaking Free: Further... (more backgrounding)

AUTUMN in ONTARIO

Corn’s still standing
… chilled
to a flaxen rustle
And where once were woods:
a light and leafless
transparency
prevails.

A Flashback!

I have a memory from primary school of the death of a frog.

A glass aquarium sat on a bare pine shelf at the back of the room, where it caught the late afternoon sun. It was quarter-filled with water that cast a lengthening, algae-tinged glow over a part of the wall behind and onto the map of the World, reaching deep into Brazil before the end-of-day bell rang and, in receding pandemonium, we tore off home.

In it, to teach us about nature, I suppose, our teacher had installed a stone, some oxygen weed and a large green frog. He must have got it somehow from the thickly-reeded pond we knew well as a place for mud-fights. On top of the tank he placed a sawn rectangle of plywood, to stop the frog jumping out. A “frog monitor” was appointed to catch flies and other small insects to drop into the tank every morning.

Then one morning, the frog wasn’t there. The plywood cover was ajar and the green water was unusually inert. A few dead insects lay motionless on its iridescent surface. Some blame was directed at the “frog monitor”. But the frog monitor that week was Dave and he was too good at rugby to shoulder blame for long.

During lunch break, one of those girls-who-see-everything caught a glimpse of green and gold behind the cast iron radiator that circulated hot water in winter. She told the teacher who lay on the floor and began poking away back there with the blackboard pointer.

From that moment, the frog came to be seen with growing group enmity as a “bad” thing that had somehow broken a social contract with us by leaving its tank to run wild behind the radiator, in a cramped niche it wriggled ever more tightly into as, at every opportunity, it was hunted and poked at. The radiator was battered with the duster until  paint flakes flew to “scare it out”. At one point, under our teacher’s supervision, water was poured down the back of the radiator in an fruitless attempt to flush it out. Out of its place, the frog was getting unprecedented attention… and it became a perceived as an enemy. Who could guess what consequences might follow? I think it was actually hated.

Then came the gagging smell. Our teacher pinned a note for the janitor to the door and the next morning our room smelled of disinfectant and the aquarium was gone. The late afternoon sun shone unobstructed on the map of the World that day. Brazil was no longer green.

Further... (more backgrounding)

As our early human forebears wandered ever further from Africa and began making new homes in new environments, learning new ways from the places they settled and raising children, they developed entire cultures and new languages. Their bodies may have dissolved into the soil but their heritage still whispers to us through the languages we use to talk to each other today.

 At the start of the 21st century, about 6,900 languages were known to exist in the world, though linguists were expecting that as many as half of them could die out by the century’s end. With them, will be sliced away whole dimensions of human experience and portions of humanity’s collective history and wisdom. Culturally, we’re losing diversity. And “we” is a word to remember.

Each of us has two biological parents. So we each have four grandparents, and eight great grandparents. Every generation, the number of our ancestors doubles: after eight generations, we are looking at more than 1,000 ancestors. After 20 generations, we hit a million. By the time we get back 30 generations, a mere 600-700 years or so, we enter periods in which we have more than 500 million potential ancestors: and that’s more than the world’s estimated total human population. (The United States Census Bureau’s published estimates of the world population in the 14th century range around 350-450 million. The United Nations’ estimate for 1250 is 400 million people worldwide.)

 What this means, of course, is that lines of descent have repeated themselves, frequently, within cultural groups — “we” are all related and “we” are all in-bred — but, despite the inbreeding and the genetic boundaries that have affected us at different times in human history, and the explosion of the human population over the past few hundred years, no two people are identical. Each of the planet’s nearly seven billion people is unique.

As a child, I loved poring over the family Atlas. Friday nights were family “library nights”. So, I’d pick a place I’d never heard named or imagined before and then, on library night, while my parents browsed the fiction shelves for week’s reading, I’d go to the reference section and bother the librarians to try to find out about the place I’d chosen… and the little dot in the Atlas would turn into, say, busy industrial Barysaw in Belarus with a population of around 150,000 people, home to the widely unheard-of world record-breaking weightlifter called Anatoly Chubais. And there was Machala in south-west Ecuador, the self-styled “Banana Capital of the World” — I really liked bananas — with more than quarter of a million people: families and individuals with joys and worries, hopes and satisfactions, who were getting up every morning and going about their day in ways I’d couldn’t visualise. And not one of them would have heard of me, or even of my ‘dad’. But I could imagine the smell of all of those bananas. Oddly, I can’t remember an impatient or unhelpful librarian but they must have trembled to see me turn up on Friday evenings. Nowadays, the Internet makes it all a lot easier.

Then I heard about the fascinating notion of “six degrees of separation”: the idea that between you and any other person in any place on Earth lie only six people, each of whose acquaintances include someone who can direct you on to the next contact in the chain. The kaleidoscopic diversity that’s waiting to be explored and experienced within this one species we call humanity is not only wonderful and fascinating, it’s also interconnected with awe-inspiring intimacy in ways that we can begin to explore on nothing more than a whim …and a little more than our own curiosity.

Curiosity! Now THERE’s an emotion to give rein to, and cram a lifetime with delight.