Blog

When I finished my degree at the University of Edinburgh, I kept a promise to myself and travelled to Crete. My dream was to see the excavated palaces and artworks of the Ancient Minoans, the remnants of a culture thought to be matriarchal and peace-loving. I had studied the images of the sculpted wasp-waisted goddess who holds a serpent in either hand; the androgynous Prince of the Lilies; and the murals of the blue dolphins, and of the young female and male gymnasts vaulting over horned bulls. All these, and more, I saw at the palace of Knossos in Heraklion and in the city’s museum.
What I had not expected to see, and equally captivated me, were the round-eyed enigmatic octopi, arms a-swirl, featured on many of the Ancient Minoan vases. They seemed to constitute their own floating world on the ceramic surface, and their eyes, which gaze at us so directly, are full of astonished wonder. It is as if they are privy to some secret of existence that has left them amazed, and which they would impart to us if they could.
The Ancient Minoans may well have been enthralled by the octopus’ transformative powers: its ability to change shape and colour at will. Through a revealing and often poignant essay by Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books, I recently learned that even the largest octopi, weighing 100 pounds, can shape-shift their boneless mass of soft tissue to pass through an inch-wide opening. Octopi can not only change colour for protective camouflage, but also put on flamboyant displays of flashing rings, rippling hues and stripes. They are exceptionally strong; the Giant Pacific octopus can pick up 30 pounds with each of its 1,600 suckers.
The Ancient Minoans who immortalized the octopus perhaps intuited how intelligent these animals are. Octopi are readily able to navigate mazes, and repurpose objects in their environment for use as tools. In laboratory situations, scientists have observed them opening child-proof jars and evolving all kinds of ways to escape. They make these attempts often, flooding laboratories by plugging up the valves in their tanks with their arms, for example. Srinivasan tells of an octopus at the University of Otago that shot jets of water at the aquarium’s light-bulbs, short-circuiting the entire electrical system so often that the scientists released it back to the sea. One wants to cheer this animal for the ingenuity and persistence that enabled it to reclaim its freedom.
In heartbreaking contrast to the plight of captive octopi is Srinivasan’s description of how those in their natural habitat will greet deep-sea divers they encounter with a probing arm and sometimes lead them on a tour of their environment. Octopi most certainly feel pain. she tells us, and nurse wounded body parts. Thankfully, in 2010 the European Union issued a directive classifying cephalopods with vertebrates because of their “ability to experience pain, distress and lasting harm.”
The revelation in her essay that most shook me is the sheer brevity of the octopus’ lifespan. Most species live only a year or two, and the longest-living, the Giant Pacific, dies after four years at most. After the male and female mate, which occurs only once in their lifetimes, they go into a swift and sudden decline, losing interest in food and becoming disoriented. The females die of starvation while tending their eggs, and the males fall victim to predators as they meander in a daze.
Srinivasan tells us that early in its evolutionary history, the octopus gave up its protective shell “in order to embrace a life of unboundaried potential.” With its excellent eyesight, acute senses of taste and smell, and the half a billion neurons distributed in its arms, as well as in its brain, the free octopus leads a life of richly varied experience. This comes at the cost of extreme vulnerability to sharp-toothed predators. In making itself deliberately vulnerable so as to be wide-open to experience, the octopus brings to mind the all-consuming dedication and risk-taking of certain great artists. Perhaps this is why the Ancient Minoans depicted the octopi with such wide-open eyes and the swirling arms that speak of infinite transformative possibilities, albeit inside a lifespan of stark brevity.

September 6, 2017

I have been reading John Berger’s Portraits, a gathering of his insightful readings on artistic creation spanning the breadth of Western civilization, from the prehistoric animal portraits in the Chauvet Caves to artists of our time. In his tribute to the work of British painter, Yvonne Barlow, who died in 2017 mere months after Berger’s own passing, I found them staring in wonder at a painting I love which plays a major part in my novel, Hunting Piero. This artwork, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, is Piero di Cosimo’s Satyr Mourning a Dead Nymph. In my novel my principal female character, Agnes Vane, experiences a personal salvation through this painting, both literally and figuratively.

One of this artwork’s remarkable aspects is the affecting tenderness and grief in the faces of the two mourners flanking the dead nymph: a handsome young satyr, and a dark brown hound. The painting’s world seems eternally present, in part because of its pure luminosity emanating from the sheen upon the blue-white river. This flows behind the water meadow, with its delicate wildflowers, where the dead nymph lies.

For Yvonne Barlow and John Berger, who were art students when they viewed this painting together in 1942, it became their “private ikon, our secret logo.” This was a time of fear and turmoil for them, for although the London Blitz was over, the city continued to be bombarded by the pilotless drones known as Doodle Bugs. The world di Cosimo’s painting opened for the two young students in war-torn London was one of rare promise and a covenant of eternal renewal. Like Agnes in my novel, John Berger sees the painting as making possible a catharsis and healing. He conjectures that in Satyr Mourning a Dead Nymph Yvonne Barlow found the source of the imagery that inspired the “eloquent, diverse and mysterious works” she was to create over the next 60 years. Again and again in her paintings, Barlow returned to the image of “the animal as independent witness,” for example, and scenes that posed “the aerial everlasting question ‘What exactly has happened?’”

For my character Agnes, Satyr Mourning a Dead Nymph conveys a poignant mystery, a holy secret she believes the painter won through the agonized yet transporting practice of his craft, and “a belief in something fine and transcendent that lifted all life high above the abyss of bloody deeds and coiling tragic circumstance. Every detail intensified her conviction: the care he lavished on the tiny wildflowers of the meadow; a great heron silhouetted against the misty water, its supple gaunt frame looking so like a keyhole.” She feels the dog and satyr’s shared tender bond reach out to embrace her. And so the spell of di Cosimo’s painting continues through the centuries.

 

 

 

Marianne Moore’s praise-poem to the pangolin (“impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear”) is a work I often revisit for its luminous vision of a world where humans’ relations with animals are grounded in respect and wonder. This exquisite poem was also my first introduction to the Asian and African anteater whose covering of super-hard, delicately overlapping scales makes it unique among the world’s mammals.

Tragically, the huge demand for these scales in Asian traditional medicine has made the pangolin the most hunted animal on Earth, the victim of illegal poaching and a thriving black market trade. This terrible fate would have made Moore heartsick, for it is a genuine love of this remarkable creature that animates her poem. As readers, we absorb her delight in the pangolin’s artichoke-like shape; its patient nocturnal hunting skills, solitary, peaceable, persistent character and the armature of sting-proof scales so resistant not even a lion can bite through them. We feel her wonder at this “night miniature artist engineer,” “this near artichoke with head and legs/and grit-equipped gizzard.” (Because the pangolin has no teeth, it swallows stones to grind up the ants that are its main sustenance.)

Moore’s degree in biology and histology allows her to bring a scientist’s eye, as well as an artist’s empathy, to her meticulous description of the pangolin’s movement and behaviour. We see him “stepping in the moonlight/peculiarly, that the outside edges of his/hands may bear the weight and save the claws for digging.” “Serpentined about the tree, he draws/away from/danger unpugnaciously, with no sound but a harmless hiss.” She celebrates the pangolin’s non-combative nature, as well as his “fragile grace” which she likens to a wrought-iron vine she once saw in Westminster Abbey. Almost magically, the pangolin can roll “himself into a ball, that has/power to defy all efforts to unroll it.”

Midway through the poem, Moore transports us to a medieval cathedral, where monks rest on stone seats beneath spires and roof supports embellished with carvings of animals. Through many readings of this poem, I assumed it was the emblematic animal sculptures that powered the transition from pangolin to monk. But recently I saw photos of pangolins walking as Moore describes, “on hind feet plantigrade,/with certain postures of a man.” With its front legs folded in front and head slightly bowed, the grey-hued pangolin does indeed resemble a monk, circumambulating a cloister in contemplation. I this stanza, she reveals humankind and animals as cohabitants of a world imbued by spiritual grace. The poem concludes with the image of the rising sun, an affirmation of continual renewal in an ordered cosmos. Although, like the pangolin, we are “the prey of fear…curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work/partly done,” we can still exclaim: “Again the sun!/anew each day; and new and new and new,/that comes into and steadies my soul.”

When Marianne Moore wrote this wondrous poem in 1936, she had no way no knowing the wrenching fate in store for the pangolin of the 21st century: “man and beast/each with a splendor/which man in all his vileness cannot set aside,” she writes. Today, however, “man in all his vileness” has in fact managed to set the pangolin aside — to the verge of extermination. Because of the demand for its scales and its flesh (considered a delicacy in Asian restaurants), this gentle mammal accounts for up to 20 percent of the entire wildlife black market.

Yesterday, I read an article in The Guardian (July 20, 2017) focusing on the millions of pangolins that have been hunted and killed in Africa, putting that continent’s four species as much at risk as the four decimated species of Asia. In September 2016, the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species passed a total ban on the international trade in any pangolin species. This ban can be effective only with the enforcement of international and national laws regulating illegal poaching and trafficking.

‘I am optimistic something can be done,” The Guardian quotes Daniel Ingram, leader of the University of Sussex research team investigating the decimation of the African pangolins, which found that up to 2.7 million are killed annually. Marianne Moore would, I am sure, have cheered him on in his dedication to save this rare creature, “who endures exhausting solitary trips through unfamiliar ground at night…stepping on the moonlight.”

My first reaction on reading a review of Charles Foster’s Being a Beast: Adventures across the Species Divide was amazed laughter. The idea of a middle-aged man attempting to live like a badger, sleeping all day in a tunnel underground, crawling through the woods on all fours at night in search of sustenance; or haunting the river’s depths, trying to catch fish in his teeth like an otter, struck me as courageous, yet absurd.

When I actually read Foster’s book, what I found was a deeply moral work: a frank and often funny account of the demanding physical and emotional attempts he made to enter the day-to-day reality of four other species: badger, otter, urban fox and red deer. His adventures, he explains, reflect the principle of “theory of mind” — the ability to think oneself into another person’s position; in his case, not just putting himself in someone else’s shoes, but into another creature’s hooves, pads or fins.

His expeditions involve definite discomfort, if not danger. He and his eight-year-old son Tom sneeze constantly as they dig their badger-like tunnel deep into a hillside in the Welsh Black Mountains, and Tom coughs up silica for several weeks thereafter. Badgers, Foster explains, have a sphincter-like muscle in front of their nostrils that prevents them from inhaling dirt as they dig. But he and Tom grow used to a diet of earthworms, which make up 85 percent of a badger’s diet, and come to feel at home in the enclosing, humming dark of their burrow. Crawling through the night-time wood, letting bluebells and bracken brush his face rather his boots, becomes Foster’s norm. Tom is far more successful than his father at following the badger’s scent landscape, even though it is Foster senior who did preparatory work, sniffing his children’s T-shirts to identify which was whose. “My versions of the senses – scent and hearing – were dismal compared with the badger’s,” he says. “I was handling the badger’s world with thick mittens.”

In his venture into otter-hood, Foster is badly bitten by an eel, but still manages to give sensuously precise attention to the river in which he is immersed: “Below a magpie’s nest, there is a column of absolute still. Move sideways an instant, and you’ll be spun sideways and down, faster than a magpie’s flight.”

Living like an urban fox in London’s Bow district, he dresses in dirty rags so that he can forage in garbage bins unnoticed. A police officer rebukes him, upon finding him asleep under a rhododendron on private property: “Get off home, sir, and get a life.” Foster’s response, “That’s exactly what I’m trying to get,” sums up the fraught nature of his mission. Of course, he will always fail to go as far into the animals’ worlds as he would wish. Nevertheless, his venturing brings him closer to their respective lives, and he shares much that he learns with his readers, such as the keen empathy foxes feel for one another’s suffering, their experience of bereavement, and the sounds of mourning they make.

Of the four animals whose worlds he tries to inhabit, Foster feels it is with the red deer he falls most grievously short; and this, despite his painstaking preparations: coating his long hair with mud; not cutting his toenails for several months so as to know what overgrown hooves feel like. He keeps a notebook of adjectives to describe the tastes of the bracken, nettles, sorrel and different moorland grasses he chews. Most tellingly, to better comprehend what it is to be prey, he has a friend’s bloodhound hunt him over many miles, recreating the terror of running for one’s life.

On Scotland’s Rannoch Moor, he wanders amongst the red deer and only just escapes freezing to death after a blizzard strikes, the whiteout obliterating the road that would lead him to shelter. He is fortunate to have with him a survival bag into which he crawls for protection and passes the night flexing his fingers and toes to keep the blood flowing. When dawn comes, he sees that he has been lying against a stone wall, with red deer asleep on his either side. Despite this closeness, he writes that he cannot conceive of the red deer as other than “victims,” and it is this characterization that prevents his imaginative entry into their species, with its “perpetual defining vulnerability.” I wonder if his attribution of victim-hood to the deer is rooted in the fact he once hunted these animals for sport on Rannoch Moor. Although Foster has given up hunting, it is possible the stain of the killing has stayed with him, infecting his vision of the red deer and their habitat.

Whatever the successes or failures of his cross-species expeditions, Foster’s book draws us seamlessly into the process of “theory of mind” and its related ability to appreciate the “interconnectedness of things.” “Shamanic transformation is the natural corollary of highly developed theory of mind,” Foster writes. In my novel, Hunting Piero, Agnes Vane speculates that her beloved Renaissance painter, Piero di Cosimo, may have been an instinctual shaman. Certainly, Piero’s portraits of a wild boar and a deer with human faces are evidence that he too, imaginatively and emotionally, crossed the species divide.

 

 

 

June 17, 2017

On Thursday, I had the good fortune to be approaching Carleton Place’s tiny Gillies Bridge just as a woman was coming towards me, pushing a huge cage on wheels. As she came closer, I saw a flash of intense aquamarine. Closer still, and I realized she was transporting a magnificent parrot, perhaps two feet high. I asked if I might look at him and she kindly stopped so I could do so. She told me his name was Cooper and that he lived at the parrot sanctuary on Industrial Avenue. She was taking him out for the fresh air and his daily dose of Vitamin D. Because Cooper was staring straight ahead, I was able to admire the strong curve of his gleaming dark-brown beak and round white eyes. He appeared very content to be out on his tour of the bridge across the turbulent river and around town.

Walking home, I found his image stayed with me: his proud bearing, his startling azure plumage, his incomparable selfhood; what Gerard Manley Hopkins would call his haecitas. “My heart in hiding/ Stirred for a bird — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.” In The Windhover, Hopkins is spellbound by the flight of a falcon. Even though I had not seen Cooper in flight, my heart was likewise stirred by his presence.

Since that encounter, I have found out more about Cooper, who is a blue and yellow macaw, and about Parrot Partner, the sanctuary where he stays. Parrot Partner is a registered charity dedicated to caring for rescued and relinquished parrots, and educating people who would like to adopt one. As the organization’s website explains, parrots can be hard to place because they are not domesticated. To develop a good relationship with  wild birds like large parrots, people need proper training in their handling and care. Without this education, our attempts to train a parrot will fail dismally, with the bird going into either a fight or flight response, biting aggressively or plucking out its own feathers in self-harm.

At Cooper’s sanctuary, people are taught how to be a partner with the bird they wish to adopt, which means resisting all urges to dominate the parrot. “We are indoctrinated in coercion and force in our society,” Parrot Partner’s executive director Judy Tennant says in one of the illuminating videos on the organization’s website. “A good relationship with a parrot requires thoughtfulness and sensitivity, as well as training. It forces us to be a better person.”

This is a precept the young animal rights activists in my latest novel would embrace wholeheartedly, just as I do. On Saturday, I was lucky to see Judy Tennant again, this time at the corner of Bridge and Bell Streets, where she was wheeling a scarlet and yellow macaw. Because she was talking with a friend, I did not learn this parrot’s name; only that he could speak two words: “up” and “down.” While I admired him, he said “up, up, up.” “Don’t put your finger in the cage,” Judy warned me. Of course, I wouldn’t dream of it, particularly after having read so recently Charles Foster’s marvelous Being a Beast: Adventures across the Species Divide, of which more anon.

Recently, I have been reading John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook: How does the impulse to draw something begin? A little treasure box of his own drawings, ruminations and gentle stories about his neighbours and encounters, this wise, humane book was inspired by the 17^th-century philosopher, Benedict (Bento) Spinoza, who apparently always carried a sketchbook with him. Although Spinoza’s sketchbook has never been found, John Berger’s tribute, with its many revelations on the arts of drawing and storytelling, human perception and interconnection, is a wonderful artifact in itself. Throughout the text, he weaves in resonant quotations from Spinoza’s Ethics.

One story opens with Berger’s drawing of a bicycle that is 60 years old. He then tells us about its owner, his Parisian neighbour, Luca, who still rides the bike to visit friends and go to play petanque. At age nine, Luca was selling newspapers outside the metro and then digging for gypsum to help his family survive. When he got work in a car mechanic’s shop at age 14, he gave his entire first wages to his amazed mother, who the next week, went out and bought him the bicycle John Berger has drawn. Luca was taken on as a riveter at an airplane factory at Orly, and when Air France was created, he applied for work there, attending its technical school and ultimately becoming a very well-paid engineer controller. He was able to buy the house he now lives in, and continue helping his parents.

When Luca retired at age 60, his plan was to travel widely with his beloved wife Odille. But Odille had begun her own peculiar wandering, unable to find her way home because she was in the grip of Alzheimer’s. Luca looked after her until her needs far outstripped his capabilities. He decided to dedicate all his life’s savings to her care, and found a good residence with a room that made her smile. At the end of Luca’s story, John Berger appends this quote from Spinoza: “The more an image is joined with many other things, the more it flourishes.” In just this way, he has used the image of the bicycle to take us, point by point, through the life of a hard-working, generous-spirited man who has embraced his destiny with fortitude and grace.

This ideal of the flourishing image, “joined with many other things,” is also the animating principle behind John Berger’s reflective, compassionate novels, like To the Wedding, Here Is Where We Meet, and Pig Earth, his consummate short story collection about peasant life in rural France. I was saddened to learn of his death in January, age 90, but am immensely grateful for the body of work he has left us, full of his rare insights and his unfailing passion for social justice and desire to create a better world for the dispossessed.