Boria Sax's Blog: Told Me by a Butterfly, page 8

The End of Humankind

Sooner of later, one way or another, humankind will become extinct, and that's okay. But, just as there are good deaths, so, I think, there are good extinctions. I would like us to obtain more wisdom before we go.

Why Study History?

I wonder, at times, if my fascination with history is perverse. Edward Gibbon called history "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind," though that did not stop him from devoting his life to it. James Joyce wrote that, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," but he read, and cited, it obsessively. Henry Ford was more consistent. He said that, "History is more or less bunk," and treated it accordingly.

"Lessons of history"? There aren't any, or at least not the sort of pithy morals that we were taught to expect in school. The most historians can ascertain with confidence is what happened in a given era. To draw highly practical lessons, you would need to know what might have happened, should have happened, or could have happened. When it comes to these things, we can do little more than make educated guesses. But history is full of surprises, and our best guesses are not very good.

"Let history judge"? Final judgments must wait until the end of history, and there will be nobody to make them then. With time, we lose our ability to judge historical figures or events. Who were the good guys when the Egyptians fought the Hittites? It's dumb to even ask.

But we don't, or at least shouldn't, study history primarily to learn what we should do, so much as to learn where we come from and what (or who) we are. There are probably quite a few people today who lack any sense of the past, at least before the last few decades. They may function quite well in the social and professional worlds, but their lives, in my opinion, are incomplete. We study history not so much to predict the future as to enrich the present. Though it remains one historical moment, it encompasses thousands of years at least, both past and yet to come.

Why We Need Art

Art and literature provide a space in which the human imagination is relatively free to explore beyond the confines of our culture, embracing possibilities that have little or no sanction in current philosophy, religion, science, commerce, or politics. It is often conservative, since it preserves cultural styles that are elsewhere abandoned, for example the hermeticism of the Renaissance. It can, however, also anticipate developments that we still hardly even have words to describe, such as the end of anthropocentrism. We need art and literature, and foreseeably always will, because no culture can encompass all of our dreams, hopes, fears and aspirations. Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human

Endorsement for Imaginary Animals

“Speaking as someone fascinated by all animals from earliest childhood, I found Imaginary Animals by Boria Sax to be an intriguing and thought-provoking discovery. Scholarly and well-researched, without being either ponderous or condescending, it is written with real wit, and with a contagious delight in its subject rare in such a study. I would recommend it enthusiastically to anyone interested in the astonishing range of folkloric, religious, cultural, philosophic and political symbolism with which human beings have regarded and ceaselessly recreated real animals in our time together on this planet.”
Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn
Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human

Forever Falling (poem)

FOREVER FALLING

The leaves are tumbling.

Like asteroids, rebel angels, volcanic ash . . . .

In winter, they will become snow.

When the crystals melt, they will be water in the air.

When the trees are cut, and a town appears,

The leaves will be men and women.

Then, when human beings have moved away or died,

They will, once again, be leaves.

Boria Sax

Copyright (c) 2013

Esther Woolfson, Field Notes of a Hidden City

Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary. Esther Woolfson by Esther Woolfson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In order to write his nature diary, Thoreau lived as a hermit in the woods. Esther Woolson has written hers, while living with her family in the Scottish city of Aberdeen. This contrast shows how our perspective on nature has changed over the last two centuries or so. We no longer think of nature as a place but, rather, as a dimension of experience, usually present yet very easy to ignore. For this reason Woolfson's Field Notes of a Hidden City is even more profoundly introspective than Thoreau's Walden. Woolfson looks at manifestations of the natural world in an urban setting such as squirrels, mice, pigeons, crows, and granite in terms of personal experience, science, and history. Like Walden, Field Notes is organized according to the seasons, which, like the rest of nature, must now be rediscovered. The rhythms of the year seem to be present, in the wonderfully steady cadences of her prose.

Full disclosure. I am a friend of Esther Woolfson. Does that make me biased? Maybe, but I would have written much the same thing if that were not the case.



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Robot Warriors

At least since the Greek phalanx, there has been something very machine-like about the way people lined up and entered the battlefield. This increased with the Industrial revolution, as soldiers lined up in columns, wore absolutely identical uniforms, and marched in perfect step. In so many ways, they seemed to be imitating machines. We should not, therefore, be too surprised if they now decide that machines can do it better.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21...

Stirring at Christmas Time

Why do they call it "the big bang"? The birth of the cosmos sounds to me less like a firing gun than like an opening flower. And now is when the seed, still deep within the earth, begins to stir. A magical Christmas to all!

Second Selves

The animal can be real, like a dog, or imaginary, like a unicorn. It can be a pet, a totem, or just a heron spotted in the sky. But animals provide us with "second selves," which can explore places we cannot enter, see what our sense cannot grasp, and have adventures that are denied to human beings.

Consider what it is like to be a bat, and navigate by echolocation, i.e., by sonar. I imagine that it must be like entering a sort of spirit world, where things have precise locations but lack solidity. What is it like to be a dog, with a sense of smell 500 times as strong as a human being? I imagine that the scents must be rather like intense intuitions, precise and yet intangible. What is it like to be a shark, and hunt prey by their electromagnetic fields? That might be the hardest question so far, but I imagine their world must seem very rhythmic. Maybe it is a sort of musical world, where everything is best expressed in notes.

I study anthrozoology, or human animal relations, and I write scholarly articles about these matters, but my language is far more "academic" than what you have just read. People, in many areas, are focusing more on the way animals show us how to be "human," by providing models, contrasts, and exemplary stories. They also help us to consider, for example, what it means to be an American, a New Yorker, a man, a woman, or almost anything else. Animals are usually present in symbols of identity, from the American eagle and the Thanksgiving turkey to the logos of products and the names of sports teams. The Tower of London help people define what is British, and may be an important myth of the twentieth century. And do we in America have anything to compare?

How about the stories of Bigfoot?

The Siberian Tiger

During the afternoon of September 21, 2012, David Villalobos jumped from the Wild Asia monorail, used by visitors at the New York Zoological Society, straight into the tiger enclosure. The sole feline present at the time, a 4000 pound male Siberian Tiger named Bachuta, then mauled him and dragged him by the foot, but did not bit him, as tigers often do with prey, by the neck or head. Later, after being rescued, Villalobos said that he had jumped in order to “be one with the tiger.” Suffering from many broken bones and a collapsed lung, he expressed no regret but only satisfaction that, at the end, he had been able to “pet the tiger.”


His was one more fantasy in a garden of illusions, for the landscape below him when he made the leap had been neither Asian nor wild. Neither, in all probability, was the tiger, which had been raised in zoos. It was all a carefully constructed fantasy, put together by zoologists, publicists, and keepers. This was our temple to the goddess of nature. Villalobos thought that she was calling him to martyrdom.


What happened was far, far too sad for laughter, yet too crazy to be tragedy. It seems unspeakably strange, yet, at the same time, ordinary and almost bland. Is there a moral? Yes—don’t throw your life away!


And that is a moral that we can use. We have drifted so far from the natural world that we can mistake it for a slightly unkempt garden with exotic plants. We drifted so far from spirituality, that we can mistake it for bright stripes and enormous teeth.