On National Animals

(image via http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/files/2013/11/Julie-Larsen-Maher-5816-American-Bison-in-wild-YELL-05-05-06.jpg)

Bison will wake up everyday from now on across the U.S., they will take the hard hits from sun, snow, wind, rain, they will duel with wolves and hunters, because finally, fine-al-lee, they’ve done that thing that they were born for, they were made for, their ancestors took knocks from tusks and spears and fangs for; they’re now the national mammal of the U.S. of A, my friends; they’re the proud hairy beasts of God’s own freedom country.

            But they won’t. They’ll snuffle mounds of each other’s faeces, they’ll bray strangely at slight sounds among the woods. If they saw a flag, maybe they’d try and eat it, but more likely it’d be an annoyance, a brightly coloured occurrence in a day’s plan of eating, crapping, roaming territories and, at some point, shagging.

            Glancing over the fine people’s at wikipedia’s list of ‘national animals’ I see a bit of a weird trend; migratory birds and sea creatures are ‘claimed’ as some nation or another’s animal. The animal’s feelings asides (sorry about that, Hawksbill Turtle through to peregrine falcon.) How can these animals represent a nation when they’re busy thinking of the next place they need to get to? Some countries have gone with safe bets; Australia’s national bird is the emu, which can’t fly, so it has no choice but to stay in Australia and be the Australian national bird for all the Australians.

            I’m choosing to look at this globally because Britain is a bit embarrassing. A lion. England’s national animal is a lion. Your friendly neighbourhood lion, spotted waiting for the bus on Lewes road, having a pint at the harbour in Falmouth, humming to itself on the Victoria line. Yes. Lions. The English kind. At least Wales and Scotland have got this thing right; the Welsh dragon and the Scottish Unicorn, both as equally real and palpable as a national identity should be.

            What I really want to talk about is what making an animal the representative of a nation means. What does it mean to the animal? This is obvious enough; nothing. An animal sees none of the borders or details of cartography that we have coded out over the centuries. They have no way of understanding or appreciating any facet of a nation’s unifying identities. The bison will join the bald eagle in having no feelings either way on the Iraq war, on George Washington, even on Donald Trump.

            The creation of a national animal reverberates with the same distraction that a zoo or mass conservation effort holds; some animals are allowed to live. People will congratulate the bison while fellow bovines are churned through the slaughterhouse. The bison, if killed, will join Cecil the lion in the list of animals that we’re going to get upset about, that we’re going to fight for. Chicken no.4587’s neck is broken, and the sound is unnoticed, while everyone screams at markets for dog meat for being inhumane.

            The national animal can be filed away; it is safe. Another corner of nature is made clean and shiny, part of the booming mirror we like to see; a world of humans, and symbols for humans to appreciate. The bison is no longer a bison; it is an aspect of human patriotic thought, feeling & national identity. Yet again, animal silence is not translated, not appreciated; it isn’t even interpreted, just conflated, painted over. The national animal now speaks, and its voice trills with the vibrant colours of the flag of the human nation it now symbolizes.

The Same Scene 6 Times

For some reason, I have many pictures of this one scene. These are just the few I managed to find on file; I used to see this field every day, any time I stepped outside my front door. Maybe I took the pictures forgetting I had already taken the predecessing ones, or maybe everytime I saw it from a different angle, under different weather conditions, the trees at a different stage of growth, it appeared a whole new setting.

Feeding the Buzz

most of this penned some other time, found it in a notebook of mine recently, some edits & mistakes made in typing up. Thought you were due another affectionate ramble. 

Where the hell did Buzzfeed spring up from? Which internet fad had to die for Buzzfeed to come screaming out of the ashes? Cheezburger cats? (or whatever the devil calls itself) Memebase? Not 4chan or reddit, no, those will continue long after humans have vaporized themselves off planet, I'm sure of it.

Something about the very name, the peppy, white-toothed smiling name that leaves me unhinged. People need their 'feed,' their news, celebrity gossip, treend rants and the rest, fast; in a buzz. People want an exhaustive condension, from events that unfolded over days, months, reduced through planning, editing and posting into hours of labour, to produce a light-hearted list that can be ingested in seconds.

Saying that, there is an extremely unexpected clash in Buzzfeed's publications; there are weighty, thoroughly researched, well-considered historical narratives with pleasingly placed & relevant historical imagery and artistic illustration throughout, and in a click you'll hurtle away to a drenching of gifs relevant to the emotions you remember going through as you watched Friends or Seinfeld or The Simpsons or ate a biscuit or a shoe or a vegan hot dog.

Buzzfeed 'community' is a strange invention within a strange invention. A few attempt to revel in contemporary and memorable pop culture, like the actual staff of Buzzfeed, importantly referencing as much Simpsons as possible and spoiling every major plot line in Game of Thrones. A large chunk of posts just appear to affirm scopes of different identitys, and in subtle ways affirm an us/them discourse. 'You'll only understand this list if you are a carnivore/ a head in a jar/ a hundred year old baby/ from Xville in Y county in the realm of Z. Now I've ranted that out, let me tell you that I am magnetically drawn to these posts. What nuances and everyday experiences do the American offspring of El Salvadorian immigrants go through? What's it like to be a Nuclear-submarine repairman? Worlds that would otherwise be far away from you are (perhaps unwillingly) bare to your gaze.

I am knackered and my feet hurt, so there's probably not much tone to reverberate here... I mean, there are definintely worse things on the internet (the poor editing and general aesthetic of this post probably one of them) but I thought it necesarry to cast a wide-eyed, bleary stare into what I think of Buzzfeed, as history will one day doubtlessly trudge on, from what was just becoming familiar to what is beyond current speculation.

Now, to sleep, unfed, unbuzzed.

The Last Fisherman

(click to see The real-life last fishermen)

Each knot of the net is another nobble in his history, swimming in his memory unwittingly; the moments where his father would come home, cold and wet, cracking the knuckles of his index fingers with his thumbs, standing in the threshold dripping & huffing while he warmed up to greet his family; those same beaten & burned fingers pointing out the carving at port, marked 1604, a crude picture of a boat, which the fisherman's own hands, a child's hands back then, traced out by the freezing beach. Unbeknownst to him, as he methodically counts knots, he counts the details of himself; the view he breathed in of the village from the slopes; walking past the huge Captain Mickey Morton to work on his boat, fresh-faced & wearing new boots; hauling his first catch, being coerced quickly to disentangle and release the young fish back into the ocean; the storm that overturned Morton's boat, sprawling the fisherman into the twilight depths while cruel waves swashed above. He tosses the net overboard.

The knots of the net scrape the deck as the net returns. Husks, shells, the odd wee fish, and a boatload of plastic. If only it were edible or useful... Ha! If only it were non-existent! He empties the net, folds it, ties it up, and puts it back in its place on deck, where it will never be touched again, save by the slime that will build up over time as neighbouring empires of microorganisms duel for the rich nutrients the net has captured from the sea.

When the ship comes ashore, it will sit upon the beach, giving way to splayed ribs, like all the other hundreds of boats already dwindling away; once, those ribs held together a vessel that clogged with barnacles and bumped with sharks. As the fisherman sees the dull glint of his village in the distance, he eases off the engine of the boat, allowing it to coast, and then finally be tugged dimly by the current. His mouth gaping with silence, he imagines his life from the moment he touches shore; his boat unfolding and rotting; the sea turning black, riddled with flotsam; his hobble-backed shuffles to pick up the dole; his face becoming blotchy and red as he wears out a seat in the pub, telling tales of storms, catches, fish and gulls, knots he once tied, an ocean that brought the village and himself into being.

Silently, amid the reel & writhe of the ocean, the great booming womb of the sea, robed with ice, carressed with sand while dancing with rocky cliffs, the last fisherman exhales, and falls over the side of the boat, leaving it to drift in fog at dusk, mooring itself alongside old fridges and washing machines on the rocks down the way.

Hurtling into the end times: How to do it properly, and maybe start again.

Everyone seems to have adopted a pretty nihilistic point of view towards the obvious collapse of the environment. We are falling deeper into the clutches of massive fetishistic disavowal, acknowledging & fearing the visible downfall of the world & all within, but blindly continuing to fuel that degradation; the phrase of the anthropocene era, a band of time revolving around the actions of humans, appears to be ‘oh dear. How sad. Never mind.’

            Several times a week I hear people claim that ‘it’s all fucked,’ that we’re living in the end times, that the future is layered in ancient plastic and bones. Our media and fiction reflects this rather well; countless films come out every couple of years portraying an Earth literally tearing itself apart; a vast swathe of fiction, in no way new, consistently portrays the times after some catastrophe as bleak, unavoidable, and entirely our creation. Commercial news reels off imagery of socio-economic collapse alongside freak weather and quirks of environment, (saying this, one of the largest environmental disasters of our time, the Indonesian forest fires, has gone largely unnoticed, despite its immeasurable effect on people, animals, trees and the land, not to mention it’s origins in the illegal clearing of land by global businesses) encapturing us in a nervous chatter of doom, gloom, doom.

            This is all in spite of the fact that it is human mechanisms, completely within the control and minds of humans, that allow this sort of thing to continue. This appears to be contributed a fair amount (read: a huge amount) to by the workings of capitalist, materialist culture. The pressure to earn just enough to afford to live invokes people to choose the rashest, most damaging option; driving everywhere. Clearing land with petrol. Killing animals that endanger crop. Using harmful pesticides to guarantee crop survival. As well as this, the desire for an aesthetic product ignores the uselessness of wrapping and landfill sites awash with greasy swathes of indigestible plastic, settling on the surface of the sea, at the bottom of the seabed. Education plays a large part as well; people who don’t think to recycle or compost probably aren’t fully aware of the implications of their everyday actions; or, they are: see phrase ‘oh dear. How sad. Never mind.’ This mindset appears to revolve around the idea that humans are big & clever.

            If that is the case, then why are we not saving ourselves? (saying this, we’ve caused enough problems among ourselves to start righteously declaring the environment ours to save.) The basic equations are thus: world ends. We are in world. No world = no us. A very reductive argument, but how do you convince someone that can’t be bothered to walk to the post office down the road or recycle small items that the planet, largely owned by bacteria and microorganisms, is worth saving?

            Whether or not everything is ‘fucked,’ we could at least give it a shot. Think of it this way; if the world is slowly ending then the best that we can do right now is alleviate universal suffering. We should take actions that solve environmental and human concerns; relieve the oceans of pollution and start fishing sustainably and the ocean recovers, and people will have access to fish for many more years to come, as well as an ocean environment that is not toxic. Solve issues of packaging & waste; people will be paying less for items, and the environment will not suffer more bulk waste. Encourage permaculture, organic farming & fair-trade; people will be working in healthier environments across the globe, they will be allowing natural habitats to flourish, avoiding the current cost from commercial farming, and the consumer will be healthier & better off. These are only a few examples that I, a mere literature final year student with a part time job and a broken pair of shoes have managed to fumble together. They’re probably not the best examples, but the technology for saving the planet is flourishing, the means and ideas are there, people just need kicking into gear. If we do solve universal suffering in the face of the end times, if the world is free from the burden of human stupidity, then there is a greater and greater chance that it will not simply be in preparation of entering the dark eras with a clean conscience, but that our actions will have a positive and rejuvenating impact on the planet at large. So the simple statement I’m driving at isn’t ‘why bother?’ but ‘why not?’