As a Fluminist, I continue to challenge human chauvinism underpinning the Anthropocene; reductionism and homogeneity continue to catalyze schisms and death rather than unity and life.
I call for a purposeful expansion of the human moral imagination and creativity to help close the transilience gap, and my own work is a particular inquiry on love and language as agents of, and for, nurturing education and change inseparable from that richer imagination.
The word creative stems from proto-indo-european ker meaning to arise, to grow. I contend it must be part of the Great Turning (Macy), more the decay of economic growth and the rise of ecological growth. With an ecofeminist eye, and using my own body of work as “narrative scholarship,” I hope to actualize Deleuzian aims of creativity and practicality, opening a new opportunity of rhetorical ‘doing.’ (Miller)
All offers to help define the potential of a new era of life in natural accord, a life of organicism; the Symbiocene (Albrecht).
The word ecosystem itself is a human construct, an abstraction. In reality, there are no absolute boundaries within our one biosphere. The biosphere is the ecosystem (Margulis, Lovelock). The idea conveyed by ecosystem is that there are particular types of unities where different types of organisms persist in time and space. What is inside an ecosystem is internally related to all other things within that system (the holistic, ecocentric view of Naess ~ Deep ecology). Beyond Deep Ecology is an emergent symbiotic view of life (Haraway, Morton) that talks about “tentacles” and “entanglements”. Organisms have boundaries that are more distinct at macro level than ecosystems, yet are nested and entwined.
Post-microbiome discoveries, I conclude we should have a much more porous view of the organism than ever before. The human body (like all others) is a holobiont as it shares a common life with trillions of other organisms in the same time/space. Beyond “entanglement” this view needs to capture the essence of a shared life. We need more than “entangled” or “enmeshed” to overcome the residual Cartesian mechanism and atomism.
I contend flow is unequivocally shared and proliferated by and between all species towards life-love and flourishing. We exist and, with true understanding and demonstrable love as care, we may live a good life to the best of our ability. We do this in symbiosis, both internally and externally, with many other beings, as do they. If the opposite occurs, flow of life-love is stemmed and, therefore, diversity, resilience and vivacity of life is lost, and we are all depleted.
Since I is really we, all being connected in our one, shared biosphere, the concept of Phronesis must evolve to incorporate traits in all life systems; a love-wisdom. This in the spirit of continuing a stream of non-anthropocentric thought via the discipline of Environmental Ethics since the 1970s. To progress, I also propose we now develop a discipline of Symbioethics, as there really is no such thing as an external ‘environment’.
I think the need for neologisms is justified when present conceptualizations fail to give adequate expression to critical features of life in symbiosis revealed through new and exponential scientific study. Ancient and indigenous cultures may already possess this kind of ‘knowing’. Fluminism and many other of my neologisms are an ecolinguistic response to a mass gap in understanding here in industrialized and community-fractured Britain. As Reuther almost put it: New Earth New Humans. As I put it: New Humans Healing Earth.
There must be a radical new assimilation of our complex relationships on the basis of these scientific discoveries, and critically, new and diverse responses embraced across the arts and humanities. Language and literature are an extension of 21st Century humans, though not exclusively. By naming a new or emerging genre, A Literature of Symbiosis (Sym-lit), however, I hope to focus minds.
Cancer. Pandemic shielding. And now post-op recovery. I have spent a great deal of time this last two years trapped behind glass. Sometimes, unable to use all my senses to the fullest, especially in relating to my kin (human or not).
Windows, laptop, TV and phone screens shield me in my vulnerable state, at the same time frustrating me from my usual state of being out and in nature. But at least they offer a thread of attachment to the natural world. Sometimes, it is watching my pigeons on the balcony, through double-glazed patio doors. Sometimes, it is simply staring at a photo of a clear blue sky on my iPhone. Or, through my bedroom window, observing a vast cloudy dome full of circling swifts readying for adventures south.
At times in life, it can feel bizarre and extreme; looking at a mountain through plate glass whilst sipping coffee in a cafe, high up on a cable car run in the Alps; peering out at a vast desert through a jet plane window.
Sometimes, it is simply watching nature programmes on TV, cupilustria present as an ache throughout my whole being.
There is no obvious noun in English for this state of being. So I have come up with something new.
Glas ~ Welsh for colours in nature (green, blue, silver, grey); also English glass from PIE root g̑hel and g̑hlō; old English glæs, glass and glǣm, to shine.
Cella ~ Latin for small chamber, inner temple. Somewhere enclosed, a form of captivity.
Glascella ~ Noun. A state of being. Trapped behind glass or screen, unable to access directly the wonders of nature that can be seen or heard on the other side. Seeing nature with an extra sheen.
Examples:
That night, on Skype, I was in a state of glascella, wondering if I’d ever touch your face again.
Looking at the birds through the rooflight, glascella overwhelmed me, and I decided to plan an escape to the hills.
I felt a deep sense of glascella as I watched the programme.
Nurturing love and symbioethics during the Sixth Extinction through language and neologisms (Sym-lit).
Sym ~ assimilated from Greek form of syn- word element meaning “together with, jointly; alike; at the same time;” from PIE (proto-indo-european) ksun or sm meaning “together”.
Lit ~ from Latin litera, of alphabetic letters; later litteratura, of words and books.
Aims and Objectives.
As a Fluminist, I am offering a new genre with a symbioethical rhetorical perspective, and hope to research and learn how it may fit into the wider genre of ecocriticism, creative non-fiction, and the effect/affect on human agency during our hugely disconcerting Sixth Extinction. Miller’s genre as social action, therefore, transforms into an inquiry on genre as symbioethical action.
My own work on Fluminism, with ecofeminist influences, befits a new theory of love to a new scientific systems theory of life, aligning with many indigenous communities’ understanding of the world in which we all exist (Rose Bird, Kimmerer, et al). Sym-lit may have positive potential in throwing light into the deepest shadows of the particular human/nature detachments developed during the Enlightenment period. Anthropocentrism and binary thinking prevails, and at great biospheric and social cost.
By adopting a combination of ecopoetical lyricism, personal nature-experience and ecophilosophy, including crafted neologisms, my intent is to nurture an intimate view of nature as symbiotic process in the reader, especially in the emotions of relationships, and in the moral imagination required, to perceive many of the flows of which we are all a part. From here, change has a chance.
My wish is to produce a substantial body of work, including both academic critical thought and narrative scholarship by example. I’ll investigate the process of this kind of writing, itself, as an extension of Fluminism, bringing participatory thoughts of life-love flow into the realm of culture as agency, and in shaping new norms.
A New Genre.
“Upon which shelf would bookshops place it?” I am often asked. From personal experience, I know it is a new genre; evidence it has been hugely difficult to persuade conservative publishers here in the UK to publish my work as a book due market fears and constraints. Yet I do recognize elements of it in other writers, mainly fictional writers such as Powers and VanderMeer. So I offer a whole new one. Symlit is founded in resistance to that capitalist reluctance.
Key Questions.
Could symbioethical writing during the age of the Sixth Extinction (The Anthropocene), ignite human love in symbiosis with all other beings, in proliferation of diversity and abundance in nature? Will it contribute to a movement essential and egalitarian to Literature and, therefore, to British cultural and ecological change?
Fluminism, creativity, and neologisms.
As a Fluminist, I continue to challenge the anthropocentric ethic. Its reductionism and homogeneity continues to catalyze schisms and death, rather than unity and life. Expansion of the human moral imagination, and with particular inquiry on love and language as agents of, and for, nurturing change as a result of that imagination.
The word creative stems from proto-indo-european ker meaning to arise, to grow. I contend it is part of the Great Turning (Macy), more the decay of economic growth and the rise of ecological growth. Albrecht has begun to define the potential of a new era of life in natural accord, a life of organicism, which he has called the Symbiocene. He also creates neologisms in what he calls the Pyschoterratica, Earth Emotions, and his influential work on ‘Solastalgia’ proves merit in this process (Goldfarb).
The word ecosystem itself is a human construct, an abstraction. In reality, there are no absolute boundaries within our one biosphere. The biosphere is the ecosystem (Margulis, Lovelock). The idea conveyed by ecosystem is that there are particular types of unities where different types of organisms persist in time and space. What is inside an ecosystem is internally related to all other things within that system (the holistic, ecocentric view of environmental philosophy of Naess). Beyond Deep Ecology is an emergent symbiotic view of life (Haraway, Morton) that talks about “tentacles” and “entanglements”.
Organisms have boundaries that are more distinct at macro level than ecosystems. Yet, post-microbiome discoveries, ‘we’ have a much more porous view of the organism than ever before. The human body (like all others) is a holobiont as it shares a common life with trillions of other organisms in the same time/space. Beyond “entanglement” this view needs to capture the essence of a shared life. Indeed, words stronger than “entangled” or “enmeshed” are now needed to overcome the residual Cartesian mechanism and atomism.
The essence of my work is that flow is unequivocally shared and proliferated by and between all species. This is life-love. We exist, and with true understanding, demonstrable love as care, live a good life to the best of our ability. We do this in symbiosis, both internally and externally, with many other beings. And so do they. I is really we. All is connected.
The word ‘phronesis’ (a practical virtue), may evolve to incorporate traits in all other life systems; a love-wisdom. This would be in the spirit of non-anthropocentric thought, cultivated via Environmental Ethics as a discipline, though I propose we now develop the discipline of Symbioethics as there really is no such thing as external environment.
I think the need for neologisms is justified when all past and present conceptualizations fail to give adequate expression to a feature of life now being revealed. Fluminism and many other of my neologisms are an ecolinguistic response to this gap in knowledge, this failure to be able to communicate a new world view. As Reuther almost put it: New Earth New Humans.
There must be a radical revision of interconnection and relationship on the basis of these discoveries, and critically, bringing new and diverse voices into a new genre of creative non-fiction ecologism to focus minds. My next phase of research must now look at how language and literature may contribute to this process, and establishing a new genre: A Literature of Symbiosis (Sym-lit).
With Deleuzian aims of creativity and practicality, opening a new opportunity of rhetorical ‘doing.’ (Miller)
“With the pace of smartphone evolution moving so fast, there’s always something waiting in the wings. No sooner have you spied the latest handset, there’s anticipation for the next big thing.” Chris Hall, Pocket Lint. Jul 2020.
I want us to be able to think like this when it comes to our own bodies.
“With the pace of the science of biological sex moving so fast, there’s always something waiting in the wings. No sooner have you spied the latest paper on biological sex, there’s anticipation for the next big thing.” Ginny Battson, Seasonalight. Jul 2020.
Bombarded with new reports and adverts year round, we have largely absolved technical revolutions as part of our modern culture. I think advertising has tricked us into accepting them as the norm. Lust for profit/neoliberal survival has created precision marketing campaigns, playing on primitive desires and a sense of empowerment, however real or fake. In they roll like tides, these technologies. Keep up, keep up. And we part with our cash.
I have been pondering on new evidence on things like biological sex, and the microbiome, and then biological sex effected by the microbiome. Sexual diversity! It’s mind blowing!
Yet, sadly, so unnerving for many.
Why? We seem happy to trust engineers and marketeers, but not scientific research, meta analysis, trials, and peer review of human biology, endocrinology, neurology.
Science is a search for definition in a very uncertain world, but uncertainty is foundational to these pursuits, because the margins of ambiguity are the constant fuel for new questions and answers. Redundant technologies we easily reject, acknowledging they have been integral to the timeline of progress. So why can’t we reject redundant biological science in the same way in building a clearer picture of existential life?
It’s also understandable that people feel disoriented, as if all we thought we knew firm beneath our feet has suddenly turned to jelly.
I observe a similar reaction when people discover that other living beings, microbes, inside our bodies and on our skin, survive to support us all in symbiosis. Or when I point out that species distinctions are more porous than once thought, and that we ourselves are porous and less defined as one species, being a genetic mix of other human species that were thought to have become extinct (they themselves were probably a mix).
I see that almost vacant look of incongruity. I also see disgust. When I describe how porous we really are, swimming around in water, soils and air that is filled with the essences of the living and the dead flowing in and out of us, I see your eyes swivel. Boundaries are few, if existent at all, and things are a hell of a lot more fuzzy, from cosmos to quantum.
“I’ is really “we”. Ancient Eastern religions were really on to something.
All I can ask is that it’s critical to open one’s mind. Open the mind to new understanding, which may well be ancient too, about the world around us. We are learning new/ancient things every day.
Openness is a form of compassion, because we are humbled in engaging our listening powers. There’s no humility in being closed, in shutting our eyes and ears, repeating absolute certainty, or so-called facts. Some fixed thinkers can find this very hard, because they are nurtured in The Great Scientism of definition, of fixed truths, and of defending against fakery and varying human power structures.
I ask, as good scientists also ask of me ~ look to uncertainty as a motivation for new discovery. Look, and feel it.
Remember, for instance, those (who probably identified as men) dissecting bodies for eons, who made a decision based on the evidence before them that there were certain organs within living beings, particularly mammals, which dictated their entire role in life, in respect of reproduction only. They were dissecting animals, and dead humans. Animals that are unable to communicate their full lives to us directly; cultures, kinship, memories, thoughts and feelings. Incidentally, neither can dead humans.
So when we are thinking about the cultural and social constructs of gender and sex, I know people have been trained to divide them, like the Cartesian separation of mind from body, but the news is, from some scientists themselves, they are interlinked and inseparable. The idea that you could have any other kind of alternative understanding seems to be beyond so many people. Part of this is that particularly women who have fought for recognition of rights certainly in recent memory, and it’s still ongoing, and raw, and in areas such as politics, medicine, law, design… and the menarche, and sexual assault, and miscarriage, childbirth, and Grade 3 carcinosarcoma of the uterus, and in the menopause…
I return to Hilary Lawson, and his influential idea of closure. When we have an idea of something closed, as in dealt with, and processed, and in the past, it becomes the past. Signed, sealed and delivered in a box to a shelf. When new information comes into the fold, it’s hard to find that box, open it, rummage through, and review all.
Instead of having something closed, even though it might be a word, a feeling, or even an event, if one can train the mind into being much more open, open is often associated with something artistic, creative pursuits, and I think we need to consider that, especially in the face of the Johnsonian shackling of the arts and humanities right now.
Yes, sometimes, rather like we look at maps, male and female can tell us an awful lot of information. They are like keys, and we can navigate our way, if we know how to imagine symbols as reality, if we are able to relate to maps in three dimensional time and space, and that getting from A to B is a process. But essentially maps are just guides. As are male and female. Our brains do most of the ‘open’ work. It’s a gift. Let’s celebrate it.
What we need to imagine is that instead of trying to close down everything, the binary in all, the taxa, the finite, and that male is this and female is that, we need to keep things open, but recognize the need for empathy, love and understanding in that comet tail of adjustment. There will always be comet tails in time and space, adjustment to new norms. Sometimes, there’s a great deal to take on board, for the ones who are re-identifying, and the ones who love them. Time is osmosis. Meanwhile, compassion and kindness on all sides is a must.
One day, sexual fluidity and gender fluidity will be accepted along with all our other beautiful spectrums, and perhaps some we have not even articulated yet. Sex and gender do not remain fixed at birth. As we are discovering with genetics and epigenetics, neurological developments in relation to endocrinal events in life, the amount of love we receive, or the traumas we suffer, and effects of the constant exchange between ourselves and the nagorasphere. Or even that the microbiome may have direct effects on reproductive activity, it might well have effects on our psychological understanding of where we are in relation to others around us. They have been evolved features in living beings for a billion years.
I guess the exponential culture shock of high-tech has been ‘treated’ in some ways by a relentless exposure therapy by mass media. Our Western culture of individual identity, Rights and entitlement are coupled with many of the markers and markets of the Anthropocene. The supposed prophylactic (hypnotism) of consumerism has been driven by all manner of symbolic campaigns, in glossy magazines, on TV, and multiple, repetitive London Underground posters. Maybe we could apply this expertise for something far more compassionate and useful ~ spreading the news on biological sex diversity.
I think it’s time we looked at time scales in terms of ‘doing’. The reality is the need for immediate change. Today. That everyone is not participating today is complex, but there’s real truth in urgency.
The use of the word ’emergency’ has been severely compromised. I have read on Twitter a defense of using the phrase ‘long emergency.’ A long emergency is about as useful as a flying brick, a nonviable dialectic – AN OXYMORON. People need to understand the urgency, in mitigation and adaptation.
Western techno-industrial values, competition, fear, consequential life-styles and the general global devaluation of life for markets, that lead to habitat loss, emissions, poverty, racism, failing democracy, dictatorship, xenophobia, North-South divides, nationalism ~ please feel free to add more ~ are failing all living beings.
What we have are emerging urgencies, and we’d do well to articulate and address them.
One such Emergent Urgent is to spread the news that the globalized financial sector is not going to save lives. We must create a local, bioregional flow of support for one another and all life. We have to stop giving up our power, and giving Power excuses to wait or knock back decisions into the laps of our children and grandchildren.
Compassionate and immediate transitions are possible. COVID19 shows that immediacy is necessary, and can happen street to street. Successful countries have acted immediately and, in good part, compassionately. The same it is now on action to slow the Climate Bomb.
This is not apart from the moral imagination required in creating new/ancient world orders based on the ethics of care (in the natural sense), though we do need more. Lots more.
We already have a pool of understanding between us on some of the key changes forquired in all aspects of society, enough to begin (it’s already begun). But too many are holding on to the natural capitalist ethic, the ‘ecomodern’, and new billionaire colonialism; perpetuation of capitalist failure ~ dominantly white, eurocentric and male. It’s harmful.
The response to the climate, ecological and human empathy/imagination crises (Earth Crisis), is The Emergent Urgent.
The nature of nature, is where blooms transform to seed. It’s not an ugly process, far from it. It’s life-process. Does it begin with the egg of the solitary bee who pollinated this flower?
It’s not a catastrophe, but a sacred process. Look further to ecological death, and life. It’s love. We may look at our own bodies in the same way. Don’t fret about flowers ‘going over’. They are beautiful.
~~~~~~
Anxiety grips me again, during just a handful of days this time. Matter builds as crystals from the process of evaporation, and all the little thoughts become sharp and transparent.
I have been observing my balcony flowers going ‘over,’ their delicate petals beginning to wither and curl, as if kissed by poison. As the draw of their shapes and colours fade, it would be easy to cut them off to keep things in check. The beauty, or love, is ever more enduring than the colour or scent of the blooming flower. The work of the bee or the fly has set in motion deep changes within ancient organs that sustain life. Nothing is going over, moreover, everything is beginning.
The fertilized seeds are beginning to swell, the baha sucked back through the veins of each petal, and up from the roots, to grow new seeds. This flow, this transfer of love in the form of metabolites from flower to ovary, is for-newal.
When a flower is cut dead for the sake of what we humans deem tidy, or aesthetic, or out of place, what worth are we assigning to the plant and seed? Or the bee and her egg? Life is growing inside, at first shy, but then erupting to ripe moments of genetic and evolutionary potential.
Black Lives Matter. Three black women founded this now global movement. Two identify as queer, and one has worked for a long time in the field of domestic abuse. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi. Remember their names.
Like bees, all three have set in motion a beautiful but painful blooming, of instilling the will of justice and love inside so many more. Ripe seeds of empathy are broadcast widely. With sunlight, good soils and pure water, these efforts are growing into powerful new relationships in the face of many wrongs.
Every black life matters. The oppression endured over this last 400 years has forged survivors like diamonds. Their lives materially and spiritually matter to us all. George Floyd and hundreds, thousands, millions, of black lives have been cut dead, stolen from their loved ones and buried deep. Millions have lived in fear, incarcerated, and disenfranchised.
I want to acknowledge that pain, and my white British ancestral role in its coming. It must now leave, as it should never have been. It’s a personal and public struggle in which we all need to be willing and able to participate, from bee to seed.
I’ll end with Professor Cornel West’s words said in public discussion this last few days, still raw from the death of Breonna Taylor, a medical carer herself, who was shot to death by a militant police force, in what was supposed to be safe sanctuary ~ home.
“We can’t bring her back, but the memory will empower all to keep fighting.”
There are more than 48,000 species of them around the globe, some yet undiscovered by humans, and all of them, bar one that we know of, are predators. They are hugely diverse, reflect all spectrums of light, and are individually character-full.
I am being lured into their web of life.
Araneae are air-breathing invertebrates, with eight legs, fangs to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. Silk is a protein fibre, and used to create food traps, nests, egg coverings, and air transport systems. Imagine if we, through our own bodily secretions, could produce all these things: fishing lines, bed linen, baby blankets, and parachutes. There are at least 7 types of silk-making glands, and all spiders have at least three. Some silks are stronger than steel for their weight. Spiders are an essential group of living beings (predators are essential), who may live deep in caves we humans will never visit, and float as high as the clouds when ballooning across continents. They have their own microbial symbioses, most of which we still have little idea. Some spiders are crucial for distributing fungal spores. In rainforests all around Earth, some larger spiders rely on narrow-mouthed frog species for survival, and in utter reciprocity.
They can fish, fly, cave and row. The largest family jump. Some can sing, dance, and vibrate.
The diving bell spiders live in bubbles underwater for most of their lives.
My booted foot was once challenged, briefly, by a female Sydney funnel-web spider, the males being the most venomous in the world, and, in my view, both most fearfully angry. And unforgettable.
But the vast majority of spiders are harmless to humans. Most are solitary, though some are social. Some females cannibalize their male mates. Some males offer gifts in the hope of sparing their own lives. Some even fake them. Some mothers offer up their own dead bodies as food for their offspring.
Spiders have been evolving for some 300 million years, and are powerful, intricate and exquisitely adapted. Their relevant-stimuli (emotional responses to you and I) are basic, understudied, yet apparent. And they do feel pain.
I want to credit these rainbow warriors with a special kind of wisdom. Spider Wisdom, more spider than Spiderman. To have such wisdom is to be fiercely beautiful amongst all other life ~ to be spennowan.
I have to be honest with you, friends. I’m not feeling particularly optimistic. An utterly inept and dangerous government is one thing, but that anyone might still support it is now utterly beyond me. Couple this with a lack of British publisher support for ecophilosophy, as it is deemed not to be saleable on the market, and I have fallen into a hole.
We are into the realms of a new kind of popular, selfish ineptitude, and disregard for the value of life. Let’s see how these so-called ‘leaders’ and their ilk fare, when idolatry capitalism eventually crashes into dust, leaving a trail of loss, bloodshed and heartache never seen before in the history of mankind.
Climate and nature loss, including rapid soil depletion and ocean harm, and subsequent human migration/refugees, will travel through us all in ‘shocks.’ This immoral government, and ones to follow, are just about the worst you could pick to deal with any of it, fanning the flame of ‘self’.
But the following just happened, and I feel even more pessimistic. Sorry.
I posted to my local mutual aid facebook group, set up in hopeful generosity to help others due to COVID19. I asked, on behalf of the nesting birds all around us right now, could people think twice about setting off fireworks. A full display had taken place right next to my neighbours’ home late the other night ~ my neighbours being lesser black backed gulls among the chimney pots. Along with many other birds at this time of year, they have been devoted to incubating eggs and keeping chicks warm. It has been a privilege to observe their utter devotion. During the recent high and chilling winds, any abandonment would be fatal.
But my post has been deleted after a row broke out between locals, when some asserted the ‘right’ for humans to enjoy fireworks to mark life events, verses many more who find all kinds of reasons to be unsettled and frightened, of loud, abrupt, un-notifiable, explosions in the community. Some think it’s a trivial matter to risk and kill birds ~ abject cruelty. They even appealed to the emotion of empathy to justify this ‘right’, suggesting it was a demonstration of grief!
They have completely detached from biological reality. Covid19 itself came from an utter disregard for nature!
When wild lives are disturbed or terrorized, their relatively benign co-evolved viruses begin to shed, jumping species and reproducing in our poorly adapted immune systems. Avian bird flu is yet another virus easily flushed out of birds, and into us. The answer is never to destroy wildlife, but to live in peace and symbiosis, and therefore in strength.
Biological reality is that all are connected. Our life-on-Earth system is like a complex circulatory system. Cut it deep, and we will all bleed out. Everyone deserves to understand this, and develop a new outlook.
We need to think beyond ourselves, and value all life for its own sake. If we do not find a way of teaching everyone the importance of this fact, and publishing ideas and ideals to reach this end, the suffering will be unspeakable. There may or may not be a lag between events and suffering, depending on how wealthy ‘we’ are ~ equity and justice are so pivotal to outcomes.
But more events will come.
~~~~~~
Audio, including a more optimistic introduction – a chick has been born! I was also distracted by, as usual, all the activity on my roof terrace. I thought it would be fun to post, regardless. x
From my rooftop terrace on a hill in the city of Cardiff, in a vague state of suspended covi-disbelief you’ll recognize, I face due South into the eye of the midday sun. A man-jumble of roof, balustrade and wall contains what would otherwise be a 180 degree arc-view from East to West. The sky is none-the-less enormous, and I love it. Each day, I observe the clouds as if they are hastily evolving species, manifesting the effects of water and sky-physics, and stealing creature-ly shapes, every once in a while, stored deep in my imagination
Everything seems in tension, between closed and open, the constraints of the streets, confinement and grief within homes, yet pinned down by the freedoms of the sky. Stitching it all together, between roofs and clouds like needles and silk threads, are the city birds. They occupy their own levels, sometimes overlapping, and to see them interact has been, so much, my corona-consolation.
It is their intrinsic worth that sings the sweetest. Our deadly human pandemic** has liberated their song by silencing most of the dirty noise of vans and cars. They are bright and loud and confident. Right now, Bard Blackbird, perched on the end of our roof ridge, belts out beauty as if he is making up for a century of submission.
“My birds”, I call them. Forgive me. I feel to have almost become one of them. I relate to them all in my own state of birdetal being.*
The regulars who stop by most up here on my balcony are the adaptable and the generalists. Pigeons, with their glittering necks, have made this their day-time home, pairing and caressing with utter devotion before returning for the night somewhere safe where they roost. There are also the maggies (magpies) and the jack jacks (jackdaws), who are the real dancers, and the preening gulls who are dedicated, with true equality, in raising their young and to the mastery of flight. There is a satin crow I call Jet, who talks to me sometimes, and a pair of collared, cooing doves who are building their nest three chimney pots down. I’ve even had a little grey wagtail visit in winter, but she is very special ~ my beautiful, elegant river bird, completely out of place.
Below, in our neighbouring terrace gardens, there are year-round sparrows who cheep and chime nearly all of the time. And there are robins, one I call Rufus Ragnar, who rises from pruned shrub islands to sing whenever Bard takes a break. There are more garden birds I can’t see from up here, but I hear them. And they all fall silent when the sparrow hawk strikes.
High above, there are the ones who never pause. Highfalutin herring gulls, the Jonathans, cast the best shadows over me on a sunny day. Victoria Park jack jacks who flock like a clock to lime trees by the Taff a quarter to sunset every evening. There are the starlings who dash about, shining in splinters of luminescence, and the herons who flap in lazy zigzags, high up and unexpected. Few are the mallards, who cannot fly without telling us all well in advance they are coming. There are new and curious red kites circling; and the peregrines, supreme and terror-flying. We all stand stock still when they are about.
Life. It’s all here among the rooftops and chimneys. No compromise. The main events, have no doubt, are love and loss, youth and aging. And we are all joy, bitterness and reflection. Sometimes, my pigeons sit quietly next to me, on top of the poorly whitewashed roof terrace wall, three floors up, taking in the same, wide view with thoughts of matters much, much further away than we can ever truly reach.
The Goldfinches ~ Carduelis carduelis
Goldfinch by me
The birds I least expect to see in number over a city, especially in Summer when more return from Spanish migration, are the goldfinches.
In the ‘wild’, their long finch beaks are so perfect for the delicate extraction of difficult seeds to forage; the Senecio family (groundsels and ragworts), thickset thistles, and the Dipsacus fullonum (the teasels). Yet they thrive here mainly because of the fine, beautiful black niger seed sold in garden centres and pet shops, poured into feeders and dangled around small terrace gardens and on patios for them to enjoy. As they fly over the rooftops from one feeder to another, they remind me of nursery school children released into playgrounds at break time, chirping with the unfettered emotions of liberation. Their sounds and sight lift me up too, especially since I am currently ‘shielded’ and confined to my flat.
The collective noun for goldfinches, as The Lost Words elegantly reminds, is a charm. Collective nouns arose from the feathers (quills) and inks of early medieval French and English hunters, mostly by the ruling classes, or those that documented their elite colloquialisms in celebration of their elite pursuits. Our Eurasian relationship with goldfinches is as historically complex. Not only were they hunted, but captured, traded and kept confined as pets, at least since Pliny the Elder wrote about this strange human obsession, just after the death of Jesus Christ.
“The smallest of birds, the goldfinches, perform their leader’s orders, not only with their song, but by using their feet and beak instead of hands.” Pliny the Elder, Natural History.***
Deep inside our pre-frontal cortexes combined with cultural memory and emotional response, we are somehow wired in what constitutes beauty. These birds are certainly a dash of colour with their blood red faces, black and white stripes and yellow brushstrokes painted along their wings. But this doesn’t explain the cultural need to covet and possess. Perhaps we may look to their celebration in aesthetics, as many iconic artists have tethered goldfinch imagery, in paint, to wood and canvas.
Many of these images are rooted in Christian religious symbolism. One of the greatest artistic masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance is, it is said, Raphael’s Madonna Del Cardellino, The Madonna of the Goldfinch painted 1505-6. The bird is cradled by the child, John The Baptist, and in the presence of Mary and her child Jesus. It is the depiction of the boy’s crucifixion as a prophecy that came to pass, as was John’s life and death. Legend has it, as Jesus died on the cross at Golgotha, a goldfinch flew down to his Crown of Thorns to remove them from his injured scalp, and was splashed with a drop of His blood. The idea of any goldfinch bearing witness of the crucifixion is utterly within reason, as they were once numerous in and around the City of Jerusalem. Not so much now in 2020, as they have been hunted, trapped and sold as pets continuously for over 2000 years, and their habitat smashed for human development.
Sixteen to seventeen centuries on, during the Golden Age of Dutch painting, goldfinches appeared once more in images such as Gerrit Dou, Young Girl at the Window, 1662. Fabritius’s painting, completed just a couple of years later, is surely one of the most famous, even more since Donna Tartt wrote her novel ‘The Goldfinch’ and won 2014’s Pulitzer Prize. The book was never about goldfinches. This is a sophisticated story of a boy who rescued (stole) Fabritius’s painting from a gallery in New York, after surviving a terrorist explosion. The burden of this secret is carried through the trials and tribulations of his life.
“Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.”
Theo, the boy, hid and prized the painting, perhaps in a symbolic processing of his mother’s death. She had died from the bomb blast, just like the real and violent end that came to the painter himself. Fabritius was caught in the explosion of the Delft gunpowder magazine in1654, which killed at least 100 people and destroyed a large part of the city, including his studio and many of his paintings. The Goldfinch survived all, and is perceived as something of a resurrection.
Art historian, Linda Stone-Ferrier contends that, in the Netherlands, both real goldfinches and painted ones were found commonly in and near windows, as a symbol of neighbourly social exchange. For its time, Fabritius’s Goldfinch must have been hugely novel in its life-size and three dimensionality; a trompe l’oeil, fooling the eye into believing it reality ~ perhaps, installed near a window as a trick to lure the good will of passers-by.
But with my Fluminescent sensibilities, I see the photos of the painting and feel pain. The golden chain glints hard and sharp, tethering a tragic bird, otherwise born to fly free, to its wall-mounted, closed, tin box of seed. This is yet another disembodiment, that the bird cannot ever forage for him/herself, the whole scene being fixed for hundreds more years in some nightmare painterly incarceration.
In his Guardian article 2014, Caspar Henderson writes of the modern painter ATM, and the mythical murals he painted around London ~ the birds of his childhood ~ one being a goldfinch.
“Typically between two and three metres high, and depicted with their subtle natural markings, they seem like giant projections from the collective memory of places now hidden beneath the roar of the city.”
Again, I feel an intense isolation, the bird painted away from his/her ecological flows. It’s a giant ghost, out of scale, captive to the wall, street, and city, waiting upon the spell of the human gaze for a life they cannot ever truly live. The mural reminds me of when I see wildflowers named with chalk on a pavement. I crave for so much more, for the flowers themselves, and for human passers- by; arrows to show the species that sustain them, and those they sustain. The real beauty of nature, I contend, is in the direction and dynamism of all the arrows.
ATM has said he was inspired by the early prints of John Gould, tending to show, at least, a favourite flower or perch in composition. But once again, these are aesthetically appealing to the human eye, and in danger of being only extrinsically valued by us and, therefore, the only lives worth saving. Nature is so much more. Species in isolation are trompe l’oeil tethered by golden chains.
My goldfinches live seemingly vibrant and free lives, with their flights of excitement, overheard and overhead, several times each day. But really they are here only at our behest. Niger seeds, native to Ethiopia and Malawi, are commercially grown in huge quantities in India and Africa, and traded to Europe in the bird seed markets. They resemble sunflower seeds in shape, but are smaller in size. They are encased in a thick, seed coat, and can be stored for up to a year. Before they are exported, they are sterilized by intense heat to prevent germination, and to kill off any other seeds in the mix.
Do we want our birds simply as trompe l’oeils, feeding on seeds blasted by heat in India and shipped here for distribution and profit, while the goldfinch’s true seeds of delight are languishing brown under the damp spray of pesticides or the latest Weed-Burner-Killer-Wand-Butane-Gas-Blowtorch, marketed for the sake of what is deemed beautifully tidy by Dekton or GoSystem on Ebay or Amazon (sometimes the same places you’ll find niger seeds for sale).
So much energy, capital, and dependence upon markets is nurtured, whereas our own groundsels, thistles and teasels are classed as ‘weeds,’ and purged for the sake of a false idea of what beauty truly is ~ clipped, manicured and tidy. How compulsive are we, as a species, to want to force and possess beauty, regardless. These beings are part of the flows of all life (Fluminism), the interconnections (the arrows), being the most worthy of protection.
I want goldfinches to be all the things we Eurasians have historically not allowed them to be. Heedless of religious symbolism and childhood myth, I want them to sound their excitement released from 2000 years of chains. They may be a mirror to the image of ourselves, in that we too need to feel those infinite connections impressing within and without us. Neither do they need our trickery, our trompe l’oeils.
They want to be real, foraging for their natural, local seeds pollinated in resilient ecological flows with plenty of cover against predation. Fluminism is the love that provides it all.
~~~~~~~
*In deference to the wonderful work by Irigaray and Marder “Through Vegetal Being” published by Columbia, 2016.
** Latin pan- “all” + dēmos “people”.
*** Rackham, Jones, & Eichholz, Book 10 translated 1938.
I have to be honest with you, friends. I’m not feeling particularly optimistic. An utterly inept and dangerous government is one thing, but that anyone might still support it is now utterly beyond me. Couple this with a lack of British publisher support for ecophilosophy, as it is deemed not to be saleable on the market, and I have fallen into a hole.
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