Actions

Object – Discussion – Action
Human skull

There were interesting comments around reburial. This will be considered later as part of the wider ongoing consultation over ancient British human remains. Part of wider consultation.

Mosquito

This specimen was seen as symbolic of the need to understand malaria. As such it is important to retain the specimen in the Museum. Retain.

Objects in the Africa ‘unlocated’ cupboard

Discussions around the meaning of the label were of more interest than those around the contents of the cupboard. However, the label is inaccurate as the cupboard now contains objects of known origin. The online discussion demonstrates how we should publicise the collection, and the digitisation work, more widely. There are objects in the store for which we have no known origin, but there are frequent visitors to the store, many of whom help in identifications. Replace the label with a correct one and dispose of the old label. ACTION: SW
Diatoms
One contributor suggested making them into jewellery for seahorses! There are possible uses once digitized, such as projections within a gallery, using copies to create jewellery. But do we need the whole collection to do this, there are a lot of them and generally they are rarely used. Audit and review the collection prior to exploring alternative uses. ACTION: DG
Black Poplar seeds

It had been suggested that they be scattered to the wind, although they are unlikely to germinate. It was pointed out that discussion around these seeds started in the summer when there was a lot of ‘f’luff’ flying around. There was research potential with these specimens. Retain.
Victorian newspaper

These are an example of the arbitrary nature of some forms of collecting. Their retention had never been a conscious decision. If someone was researching this period, there are many archives of complete newspapers to consult rather than random individual pages. Julie Marie Strange expressed interest in receiving them. Pass on to Julie Marie Strange. ACTION: LW
Hyena skull
While it had been suggested that we lend the specimen to Creswell Crags it was pointed out that we have recently lent a number of specimens to Creswell for their new visitor centre. Retain.

Leftover dinner shellfish
These had been collected by Bill Pettitt, former Keeper of Invertebrate Zoology, as part of research into cultural aspects of molluscs. There are examples where natural history discoveries were made from specimens shot for the table, including Darwin discovering something in the carcass of an animal whilst on the Beagle. Might be interesting to have an example with which to compare these more famous discoveries. Retain.

Darwin’s Moss

This was only found in the collection recently. There was an interesting proposal from Anne Kelleher to bury the moss on Dartmoor or to return it to Argentina; this inspired a number of other comments around burial and the journey. Another proposal was to burn the specimen as an expression of frustration with the enormity of the problems of survival. However, this specimen will be on display in the Charles Darwin exhibition opening in October. Retain as will be displayed in Charles Darwin: evolution of a scientist from October
Eoliths
These brought many whimsical responses around memories and experiences, they acted as touchstones. The most interesting thing about this group of objects was the label and packaging, which relate to BH or Benjamin Harrison of Ightham in Kent, who was an enthusiastic exponent of eoliths or ‘dawn stones’. Although the eoliths are natural stones and not of interest in themselves they do shed light on a little known episode in the study of prehistoric archaeology. There are lots of eoliths in the collection because the Manchester curators and local enthusiasts were involved in the debate. Suggested that we audit eoliths, keep a representative sample and dispose of the rest, taking up some of offers made on the blog. Audit and review the collection prior to exploring alternative uses. ACTION: BS
Hand Axe
It was suggested we dispose of the hand axe as it was unprovenanced and had been broken in the past and glued back together. There are other better examples in the collection. However, it was felt better to use the hand axe in outreach perhaps as a model for a flint knapping activity. Several people had expressed interest in flint knapping on the Blog. John Lord was a popular demonstrator. Retain and organise a flint-knapping workshop. ACTION: BS
British West African penny

This object has negligible research value, and is kept in a so-called ‘dip and keep’ box. Jonathan Jarrett at the Fitzwilliam Museum offered to give it a home. Transfer to Fitzwilliam Museum if they are still interested. ACTION: KEITH
Dowry bow There was little discussion on blog. It was seen as least valuable item in the archery collection, although it is more relevant to anthropology. Retain and reconsider how curated within the Museum.
Seabed fossil

On the blog a volunteer expressed an attachment to this specimen as ‘her’ rock, used in handling sessions. The documentation for the specimen could be amended to include this connection to an individual. Retain and update catalogue information.

Statue of Buddha
There were a number of comments relating to ‘folk engagement’ with museum collections, touching the Buddha, leaving offerings or protective charms. The Buddha will shortly be going back on display in the Museum entrance. Retain. Consider display of offerings and provision of offering box. ACTION: SW
Orphaned labels
There is a student coming to work on these in September, they will be put into order (like with like) and where possible matched to the original object. A number of similar labels are currently used in Mark Dion’s Bureau. Some probably belong in the Museum archive. There were a number of comments that we should do something active with these, and some interesting ideas on the blog. Retain and reorder. Katy should then be invited to produce a response to the Hermit. ACTION: MC
Fig

There was little discussion around the specimens themselves, but much on the relationship between the plant and the wasp. No reason was expressed to dispose of the specimen. While the hymenoptera collection of Museum isn’t particularly strong, it was suggested that we actively seek a fig wasp for the collection. Retain and acquire a fig wasp. ACTION: Dmitri
Carpet beetle

There was no online discussion around this specimen and no reason to dispose of it was expressed. However, it was noted that the species itself is closely monitored throughout the Museum. Retain and continue to monitor the live specimens. ACTION: AS
Photograph of Trucanini

There was an interesting response from a possible relative of a colonial civil servant, but this did not develop into dialogue. Ansuman contacted a representative of the Potameio people in Tasmania who was happy to talk privately but not publicly. There was also contact on Facebook with an owner of a tobacco pouch supposedly made from human skin. The categorization of human cultures by museums was still apparent in the discussions, in Australia this is a live and sensitive issue. Discussion about the contemporary prejudice against half-blooded indigenous Tasmanians. Retain, but scan images and send to Aboriginal group and National Museum of Australia if both are interested. ACTION: SW
Honey Bee

There was very little focus on the bee itself, but it did stimulate discussion around what it stood for. This is relevant to the Museum’s work on sustainability and the environment, as well as the bee being the symbol of Manchester. The Museum used to have an apiary and it would be desirable to have it again, if possible (the Museum shop used to sell the honey). Due to the decrease in green areas around the Museum a lot of wildflowers have been lost, there may not be sufficient to support a colony. Retain the specimen and investigate the possibility of re-establishing the bee-hive (if not at the Museum then possibly at botanical gardens in Fallowfields). ACTION Dmitri
Kiwi feather cloak and kiwi

Main responses were around the suggestion to display them together as a way of discussing the decline of animals and animal resources. The Museum entrance would not be possible as the light levels are too great for this type of material. Retain and explore potential to display in Sustainable Planet? Gallery. ACTION: HMCG
Sphalerite

There was no clear discussion over this specimen. Many people were unaware of how it fits into discussions on depletion and loss, although it made the point that minerals are a finite resource. There were also reminiscences around how this particular specimen was collected. Retain as the Museum is a good home for this.
Niedzwetzky Apple

Blog contributors suggested we use it to grow an orchard of apples (pollinated by the re-introduced Museum bees?). Retain and investigate the planting of apple trees in the Living Plants display (or local environment). ACTION: LW
on-marine bivalves

There was not much discussion online for these specimens. It was suggested give one to each schoolchild visiting the Museum. Collection needs rationalization and possibly sharing with others. Retain for now while an audit and assessment of the collection is carried out. Non-traditional methods of disposal should be explored. ACTION: DG
Frog skin cells

Ansuman liked the suggestion we offer cells to a logging company in Madagascar, but no-one else picked up on this. The sample is old and no longer poisonous. Retain and re-examine the relationship between the live animal collection and the rest of the collection. ACTION: NM (as part of Vivarium review)
Duho

There was good debate for this object. One contributor was particularly distressed about link with genocide of the Taino people. ‘Another suggested we use it in learning programmes about human interaction and imperialism. It may even be of interest for the Sustainable Planet? Gallery. The Portuguese and Spanish established plantation system of intensive farming in Caribbean with result that indigenous people were displaced and destroyed by disease and war. Only 10 Taino were left in 1610, although half-blooded descendants survived and today campaign to establish their cultural rights. We could offer Duho to a Caribbean museum, although there has been no call for repatriation. These are very rare objects. It has been suggested that duhos were used by women as much as men. Retain and research how it ended up in Salford.Hold a Collective Conversation and publish on YouTube. If no clearer use can be made then investigate potential repatriation. ACTION: SW
Fossil Cockroach

There was not much debate about disposal of this holotype specimen. Retain

Great Wall of China Brick

No-one who responded to blog seemed to care that much! Lack of interest echoes attitude to wall as a whole. Previous offer to Confucius Institute went nowhere. No response/reaction from Chinese visitors either. Possibilities for ‘corporate’ loan to Chinese Consulate. Through work on forthcoming China exhibition we are making stronger links with Manchester’s Chinese communities. Possibilities for display in Ancient Worlds gallery around misguided souvenir collecting, an example of looting of material from ancient monuments. Offer to Chinese Consulate. ACTION: SW/AW
Lady’s Slipper Orchid Collected by Grindon

Paul Baxendale expressed interest in it for the national Museum of Hospital and Pharmaceutical History, but no-one came out to support his proposal. Currently the site of living orchids on North York Moors has to be protected by security. Retain as public interest best served by use in museum.

Clay Lamp

Of the four comments received, three were in favour of retention. There was one suggestion that we could go back to using clay lamps for lighting. During consultation over Ancient Worlds gallery there was strong interest in the use and display of lamps; in particular members of the Sudanese community suggested there was interest in seeing how the lamps change over time. There are over 1200 in the Museum including some duplicates and many different designs. As they tend to come from different sites it would be difficult to propose disposing of some and only keeping a representative selection. Retain and consider use in new galleries. ACTION: BS
Giant earwig

This seemed to frighten people, although it is a rare and precious thing. It is almost definitely extinct because of human activity. Retain as public interest best served by use in museum.
Fossil leaf

There was not much online discussion. It can be used to explain past environments. Retain through lack of other interest.
Sparrow

What factors are causing the population decline? Is it decking in gardens? In the past there was always food available in towns and cities, including through horse feed/manure. This is a similar issue to that of bees and orchids. We already make nesting boxes as part of our public programmes. Perhaps the nesting boxes should be put up as communal nesting boxes but not near the Museum because of insect pests! Museum can promote helpful activity. Retain as they are a challenge for us to do something about the environment. Investigate possibility of establishing nesting boxes. ACTION: HMCG
Coca leaves

This had a similar proposal to the orchid, and a similar response. This is made more difficult by being covered by the Museum’s drugs license so we cannot simply dispose of them. Retain as public interest best served by use in museum.
Carved elephant tusk

Only two responses, including one about the iconography of the tusk. Acquisition method is not clear other than from cotton traders /rubber merchants (slavers?). This is used quite a lot already in public programmes and activities. While the carving is by an anonymous artist, their style and events in their life are evident through the carving. One of the tusks in the collection may date to as early as 1750 and was used as gunpowder container, evidence of the trade with Europeans. A visiting Congolese group last year was particularly pleased to see this in the collection as it places their culture within the Museum. It is further evidence of the links between the journeys to Manchester made by both objects and people. The group is planning a cultural centre in the city, this material may be of further interest to them. Retain and contact the Congolese community group with a view to lending material for their cultural centre. ACTION: AW
Human teeth

As human remains these will be considered later as part of the wider ongoing consultation over ancient British human remains. Part of wider consultation.
Kahun Fire Stick Martin Prothero offered his services in running a fire-making programme; this could be part of a Big Saturday, perhaps together with the flint-knapping. There are also possibilities of filming a Collective Conversation. Retain, continue display of original and organise a fire-making programme. ACTION: AB Hold a Collective Conversation and publish on YouTube. ACTION: BS

Slender Billed Curlew egg

The Radio 4 Today programme recently reported an appeal for sightings of a number of rare species that in some cases have not been seen since the early 20th century – including the slender-billed curlew, which is believed to be extinct. This specimen would be of interest in the Sustainable Planet? Gallery which will deal with extinction. This is one of the most prized specimens in the collection. Retain and consider display in Sustainable Planet? Gallery: ACTION: HMCG
Egyptian reed pen

There was no discussion on the blog. The irony is that you would have to destroy it to use it. One person initially wanted to claim it then backtracked. Retain as ‘being in the Museum is the greatest honour for it’ (blog comment).
Glass of water

Collected by Ansuman whilst a hermit. Ansuman wanted to offer this to the Museum but unfortunately the glass was knocked over during the project and the act of collecting cannot be repeated. Lost.

Which do you want first?

The good news or the bad news?

Well, I suppose it’s hardly news any more, but then again, what’s new in a museum?
What I’m trying to say is that I had a very constructive meeting with the Collections Development Panel back in September 2009. It seems like ancient history now. At that meeting all contributions to this blog were thoroughly assessed. And based on this assessment a number of recommendations were made for the next steps. I’m quite excited about some of the initiatives that may come to fruition (and I do mean fruition). I will get round to following through on these initiatives with the museum, and writing about them here.

That’s the good news.

Unfortunately I was slightly thrown just as I was going in to that Collections Development Panel meeting because I found out that all video documentation of my hermitage had been unwittingly destroyed. It was an administrative error. Misplaced enthusiasm and unusual efficiency. But there you have it. Or don’t. A documentary archive erased. For a live artist it’s a big deal to lose all your video documentation. And in a museum, where so much of my negotiation over the past many months had been focussed on saving and cherishing, storing and restoring. The irony was not lost on me.

I was put off my stride a little but then the headlong rush of my life resumed and I was swept away. Many of you will be keen to hear what has happened, or will happen to the objects I presented on this blog. Be patient a little longer and their continuing stories will unfold. There is no simple story of destruction or preservation, but a complex of conversations and activities in which many people are participating.

In the meantime you may be curious as to what became of me. You may even miss me…

Well, to complete this bad news sandwich here is some more good news. You can watch me on a webcam again! Hurray!

During the Manchester Hermit project I wrote a lot about acquisitions, about our deep volitions, and about the nature of ownership. This thinking led me onto a new piece of work which deals even more directly with the process of giving. I would like to invite all of you to come and be involved in the new project. It is called ‘Present’.

I am living for a week with nothing but what you give me. You can find out more at www.ansuman.com/news.html

Home and Away

Well, I’m back in my tower for one final night and I have to say I was completely unprepared for the depth of emotion I feel.
In the last few weeks I’ve been camping and playing at music festivals, walking and fishing in the Highlands of Scotland, relaxing in the bosom of my family, stimulated by the hustle and bait of London… but only now, back in my familiar tower, do I really feel at home. I feel my soul can expand.

Is it simple nostalgia or familiarity? Or do I detect a vibration in the space itself, in the floors, the walls, the way the light falls, the shape of the sounds, the rhythm of the stairwell? I feel so comfortable here, though there is hardly anything here but an empty room. The intensity of what I experienced here still reverberates.

I almost don’t dare to, but I can’t help thinking of the Fritzl children. Are they really glad to be rescued? Do they long for the routines of their old home?
Yesterday, in London, I started rehearsals on an upcoming project. A play called ‘Life is a Dream’ which will be on at the Donmar Warehouse. Its central character Segismundo is locked in a tower all his life apart from one day when he wakes in a sumptuous palace. The following day he finds himself back in chains. Suddenly, now, I think he must have been a little relieved to have been locked back up again.
Then there are those sad stories in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ of the old prisoners who do not know what to do with their freedom.
I wonder if, in my time as a hermit, I have closed myself down or opened myself up. Who can judge?

I feel much freer here than in any of the places I have been in the last few weeks. I have time and space to think and feel. But should I be the only judge? What about my giving away of myself? My promise to serve?
Am I chained to the world? Are you to judge me? Or some higher power? What duty might I escape?
Now there is no camera unblinking at me. My movements feel different. I wonder who I am talking to.

Many of the feelings that have been hanging over me like a fog over the last few weeks have begun to clarify themselves in the last few hours, as I drink a cup of water alone, go to the toilet, lie on a mat, sit in a corner. It is as though these spaces hold the work I have done previously. I can feel my body settling beneath me, into the foundations of thoughts that have accreted over the many previous times I have done exactly the same actions in the same surroundings. Here I am sedimentary.

The spirits of this place conspire with me. Our rhythms align so that this time I can carry on, build on what has gone before. Now I understand the purpose of the past. Although those spirits too have changed themselves, they continue to grow. There are new piles of dust in the old corners, filled no doubt with new families of microscopic creatures I cannot see or hear. There are two daddy-long-legs in the toilet. They bring autumn. The air, unwarmed by my body, feels slightly cooler, though all of Manchester is bathed in the same rain. But all the spirits remember me and have held my place. Like infinitely solicitous servants they invite me to carry on where I left off.

So, suddenly, I realize the deep root of my sadness. I am mourning the loss of my self. I have so many aspirations. They may even be considered noble, but ultimately they are just mine. Things I want for myself, tasks I want to achieve, understandings I strive for, learnings I want to hold. Books, instruments, knowledge, all my work for enlightenment is a collection for my use. I may temper this truth by saying that I want to share what I collect, it is for wider benefit. But ultimately it remains a collection of myself. A heap of me.

What I undertook to do at the end of my forty days was to serve. This is the hardest thing of all. The monastic vow of obedience is terribly unfashionable in a society of self improvement, self realization.

Paradoxically, to fully walk the hermit’s path it is necessary to leave the hermitage.
Marriage and fatherhood teaches me how self-centred I really am. No relationship is perfect because I can never have all that I want, can never be free to do exactly what I please. To devote oneself to the welfare of others means to give up my own aspirations.

My own selfishness consists of dreams glamourized by my own nostalgia. I want to work on my own body, to make it stronger, healthier, more beautiful, I want to capitalise on my own talents and have the world gaze in admiration of what I have achieved.

Anyone who finds themselves in a situation in which they have companionship without ever having to compromise on their personal aspirations and ethical choices is very lucky. They never need to experience the sadness of this particular realization. There are many blissfull couples. Or at least there seem to be. Perhaps people from more conventional backgrounds, or the same unconventional backgrounds, can find close fits with one another. I know I am a misfit however, an immigrant torn between cultures, continents, languages, disciplines. I pity the person who is just as driven by all the same obsessions as me. I’ve never found them.

Since leaving the Tower, as I have tried to test my arty conceit against the real world, I have been overcome by a despondency it has been difficult to grasp. Only now, returning to this place, which feels like home, can I see it. I am mourning the person who must die.

Bereavement is the most difficult enemy, tainting everything, impossible to escape. To give up what is familiar, what I relied on, what I based myself on, to let it all be washed away and to be swept up into the ongoing world is very, very frightening. What if I don’t like it? What if I am never happy again?

I’m not really sure I can do it. I feel such rage and resentment at the obstacles between me and my muse. In this artwork of my life I have vowed to devote myself to that very obstacle. To kill myself trying. This is such a difficult thing to do. And yet I am also laughing at myself, my earnest conflation of art and life. Why not just relax, stop being so up myself?

Anyway, now it is time to stop. I have to clear up this Tower, remove all trace that I have been here, and then attend the meeting of the Museum Collections Development Panel to finally draw a line under this project.

Hermit-at-large

Hello. It’s only me. Back online after some time out in the wilds of the world. I have to say it’s a relief to be back with you all. My forty days in the Tower seems all the more precious and fleeting in hindsight. The great challenge for me now is to cultivate the same sense of concentration and communion I luxuriated in then. Out here the world screams, seduces, ignores, judges, rushes by. I feel much lonelier and shallower.
Of course the world also throws up gifts. Here’s a poem that I found washed up amongst the flotsam on my doormat when I finally arrived home yesterday. Courtesy of my friend Sax Impey who has himself returned from a long voyage with some beautiful paintings of the sea.

‘Solitude’
by Lord Byron

To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene,
Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, ’tis but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unrolled.

But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!

———

Let me remind you now that my hermitage, in seclusion and at large, is coming to an end and this discussion will soon close. On September 3rd a public meeting will be held at the Manchester Museum. The Collections Development Panel of the Museum will be there, along with the Museum Director and myself. Anyone else who is interested is welcome to attend.

At this meeting all the discussions on this blog will be assessed. I have opened up a space for us to collectively consider the value of museums and also things in the world. Anyone with strong views on how we should treat our common heritage still has a few days to make their ideas known. Remember that a single solitary voice with an idea about a particular object is unlikely to be successful. I would urge you to gather support from others if you are serious about your proposal. You will have to work to inspire others with your vision. You could urge your friends and family to give their support if other interest groups are not forthcoming. Any community will be more convincing than none.

Just as important is to support the proposals of others which you feel are worthy. Otherwise the status quo is likely to continue.

Consensus

Well, it’s midnight and we seem to have reached an elegant outcome without recourse to the crude, mechanical device of a ballot. All those who have expressed a view seem to think that I should be removed from the museum collection, repatriated, and rendered into the safe keeping of Barley Rose. If anyone has a different idea please come forward. As I have said, you will need to be supported by at least two others.

Otherwise, perhaps we can move on to consider the disposal of the rest of the objects.
Although I will be leaving the Tower, there is no need for tearful goodbyes. By the magic of cyberspace I will still be here! This debate should continue until the final face-to-face meeting which is scheduled for 3rd September. I will also be continuing to post my thoughts until then, as a hermit out in the wild.

One decision has been arrived at quite easily. So please let us now focus in more detail on the 40 remaining objects. If you feel strongly about an object you will have to attract the support of at least two other people. And if you agree with someone else’s claim please say so. As Gunter Grass said, ‘The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.’

I imagine we will be able to arrive quite easily at a consensus on each object. It is in the absence of an explicit consensus that the Earth is raped, pillaged and slaughtered.
Many of the objects are simply markers for much larger collective thinking that needs to happen. For example, should the museum keep a beehive? Or make more space for sparrows in its grounds? And more importantly, how will you personally follow that thinking through into action?
Many of the objects might reveal themselves through comparison. How exactly is that first skull I showed different from this last one on which my face is arranged? Do we feel the same way about a tooth as a skull? What’s the difference? And why is it so different if it belonged to a human or another animal? Will we one day look back on our treatment of earwig families in the same way as we now look back on our treatment of Aboriginal Tasmanian families? This is an invitation to examine opinions that we may imagine to be beyond question, or which we’ve never bothered to examine.

This is also an invitation to think collaboratively and transparently. If a mutual agreement on any object is not forthcoming and opinion is sufficiently polarized, then there will be a vote, and the matter will be finally discussed in person on 3rd September.

Of course, if no one speaks up or is willing to care for an object then it will disappear or turn into something else. This was happening before I turned up and it will go on afterwards.
Please bear in mind that my purpose from the beginning has been to reveal and explain our personal implication in the value of some of the things kept here.
All memory must be exercised. If we do not remember what we know then we may as well not know it. We then act in ignorance.

If a museum is a collective memory it must be exercised collectively. Every collection has to be occasionally recollected.
I hope that by my provocation I have reminded us of some common knowledge, and perhaps even stirred up some uncommon knowledge.
This effort will be wasted, however, unless it leads to action. Only in making an active choice is something really valued, made sacred. I have dedicated my whole self.
What will you sacrifice?

Breaking News

As the solitary phase of this project comes to a close I’m thinking about the flicker and chatter of the news media making the world’s head spin.

I was asked to write some short pieces during my time here which would be displayed on the BBC Big Screen here in Manchester. It’s a big outdoor screen in Exchange Square that shows a constantly changing programme for shoppers and passers-by, so that no one has to miss anything. Of course I never got to see it myself. I think my contribution was for the ticker-tape news summary that runs along the bottom of the screen. There was a thirteen word limit but they said they could probably put a couple of messages together to be shown every now and then. So I took it as a nice structural constraint. Here are some thirteen word lines, in couplets, for the BBC news.

I am no more a hermit than these words you read are real.

These marks remind us how to speak. I present the joy of listening.

World news spins on like a wheel. Does it stop at my axle?

In silence I hear the cries of history bearing down, hope flying up.

I am the opposite of the news. I watch what is fading away.

And wait without searching for that which is yet to come into being.

As I delve into the body, it cracks open, cools, disintegrates, dissolves, evaporates.

Puffs of thought are released. One drifts by saying ‘I’m not a metaphor’.

My own feelings are most pressing until on TV I see others feel.

But who’s on? My dog? A bird flying past a cloud? The cloud?

Axes of sense intersect. On my approach the invisible stridulation of crickets stops.

Do they sing of gods, as I might do when I am interrupted?

Sharing this body of an ape with creatures too small to be seen

And this moment with a time too long to remember, I stop fighting.

I’m no roving reporter. There is no Outside Broadcast van. Everything seeps in.

Beside still water, I ride through galaxies and all the stars come round.

My thoughts float on the surface of this body like a glistening slick

From a ship of fools on the Pacific. Whale song ruffles the light.

Votary

At midnight tonight (GMT+1) the polls will open and you will have twenty-four hours to choose my fate.

Here is an example of the voting form. This is not the actual form, just an example.
In order to be entered on this form at least two people will have to support you. You can put yourself forward but you will have to have at least two other people support your claim.
If no one claims me then, like any of the other objects, I will just sink back into the obscurity I came from.

Love is…

…not the fulfillment of all one’s desires,
but the desire to fulfill another’s.

Alone, Together

I am the book of every thought I ever had. I am the record of my every move in ticks and tiny blots and florid flashes of illumination like gold leaf moving with the sun through the cavernous vaults of my body. Every page I read burns away and drowns and is stripped by the relentless wind. My body disperses through every part of space. My body condenses to a retinal cell, a finger tip fold, a bud, an ossicle.

I am a packet of information sucking at my skin clinging to and separating every hoarding. Chords, horns, bells announce desires I did not know I felt. Sirens entice me into their delirium.

I think the ring is you. The call is to say a text is here. I open an envelope while reading an email exhorting me to open my window and wander enchanted through it, always forgetting where I’ve been and where I am in the deafening glory of the promised world.

Each bit in this quicksound is shaped to suck its neighbours in while slipping away on a fluid film. From this terrain the cold emptiness of the sky seems like a liberation. The falcon sees only one thing.

I string a snare of words to catch every charged pulse but love and hate and play feints through the clauses. Word falls through word. And sense swims in the air between us thinking like an animal, its body changing. Our pages drift and trawl over every liquid surface searching for the fugitive lover. But the breath can never be caught.

The stacked towers of my conversations are archived in folders. I can cross-check the blocks of my history like a city. Misunderstandings, corralled and hobbled, cower in sheepish bars. The wilderness is penned. Busily I flag and mark and cipher space while the sky gets bigger and bigger. And a falcon rests on its arms outstretched.

So I’m not a hermit because I’m on the internet?
It’s true I miss the quietness of a more unplugged retreat but here I’ve wanted to ask how alone any of us is, and how together?

There is a screaming arrogance in our assertion that to be away from humans is to be alone. It’s the arrogance that allows us to close our fist around a frog, brush away the earwig’s quiet story, snatch the seat from under the Taino, uproot the sparrow’s home. ‘Only people like me count’, it says. With that kind of attitude it really is a lonely world. And it gets lonelier and lonelier. In the middle of a city, surrounded by a million single-minded trajectories and averted gazes, on the internet where there are no consequences, that’s where you’re alone. But in a forest every creature is part of a millions of years old dance. In a desert even the clouds and the dunes tell you stories. There is a sense of belonging from which human arrogance has held itself aloof.

A great shift happened when humans invented writing. I’ve spoken elsewhere on this blog about tools and agriculture but surely one of the most significant technologies in human evolution must be writing. The moment when an object in the world became represented by something other than itself, by a sign, it began to lose its own particular voice and began to be relegated to a category for a human purpose.

Writing began as a means of asserting ownership, of counting possessions and trading in them. It was an assertion of control over objects. Writing conveyed a magical power. Spoken language already does this to some extent but it is still tied in to a memory which is housed in a body with its particular sound and breath. Speech still has a music which cannot be captured and tamed.
But writing grew far away from this breath. It progressed by leaps and jumps from pictures to rebus to phonetics to a full alphabet to the printing press and now to the computer. In that process of evolution humans have become gradually unmoored from the particular moment of connection. The life of the thing itself has diminished as human power has increased.
Maybe the key difference between an oral and a literate culture is its attitude of dominion over the world.

Here is a bundle of reed pens from a 13th Dynasty Egyptian tomb. They are an example of just one step in the long journey between smeared pigments on cave walls and the push email and cloud storage of my iPhone. Maybe you’re right, I can’t be a proper hermit with a computer. In the interests of the silence that leads to greater communion, perhaps I should do away with these and all the writing that has trapped the world in a net.

But the hermit has always been a function of highly sophisticated urban societies, and hermits have always kept some vestiges of connection with that society, a Bible, an alms round, medicines, at the very least the language of thought. Perhaps for a post-urban, hyper-connected society a laptop is the new Bible and begging bowl and skull. You don’t need to go the Himalayas any more to find a teacher. After all the work of silence is about attitude not altitude.

And indeed where can we go now to find wilderness? Hermits have traditionally sought wilderness as an antidote to the hall of mirrors that is a human city, in which we see nothing but reflections of human concerns. Whether they go to listen to Nature or God, self or the more-than-human, hermits have always had an inkling that there are other voices to be heard if we can get away from the whine of our own obsessions.

Where is that wilderness now? The hermit goes there not to be alone but to find a greater communion. The vision quest, the walkabout is not for solitude but to meet with the people we normally shout down.
Buddha, sitting alone under his fig tree, was visited by apsaras, demons and gods, ultimately by Mara himself. Jesus too hung out with the devil in the desert.
Now all the avatars are on the other side of that screen you are looking at as you sit there. Alone.
Well. At least we’re alone together.

Angel of Destruction II

What you’ve done is good, oh merciless one.

By making a conflagration of my heart

You have done well.

My incense, if it lies unburnt, pours no perfume.

My lamp unlit gives no light.

What you’ve done is good, oh merciless one.

When my mind is mired in unmindfulness

Your touch is a shock, that is your blessing.

Timid and confused in the shadows, my eyes cannot see you.

Strike me with your lightning and make a bonfire of my darkness

Ei korechho bhalo, nithuro hey, nithuro hey, ei korechho bhalo

Emni kore hridoye mor teevro dohon jalo,

nithuro hey, nithuro hey, ei korechho bhalo

Amar e dhoop na purale gondho kichhui nahi dhale

Amar e deep na jalale dayena kichhui alo

Ei korechho bhalo, nithuro hey, nithuro hey, ei korechho bhalo

Jokhon thake ochetone e chitto amar

Aghat she je porosh tobo, shei to puroshkar

Ondhokare mohe laje, chokhe tomaye dekhi naje

Bojre tolo agun kore amar joto kalo

Ei korechho bhalo, nithuro hey, nithuro hey, ei korechho bhalo

– Rabindranath Tagore

The most precious thing in the world cannot be kept in any museum. It cannot be stored anywhere.
What doesn’t remind us of that fact distracts us from it.
Once our most beautiful and valuable things would have been displayed in a cathedral or a temple or a sacred spot in the landscape. The central purpose of this place would have been not to conserve or venerate the object but to support the activity of prayer.
Whether performed in a temple, mosque, church, forest, desert, mountain or river, prayer is the act of relinquishing the small mindedness one can get stuck in. It is the letting go of self-centredness to appreciate the flow of a larger pattern within which one is only a tiny part.

Selfless observation should not be confused with the idea of some sort of God. Over the last few hundred years objectivity and faith have found themselves head-to-head. But this is a futile battle of ideologies. Without the inner experience of selflessness, only the outer dogmas remain. Now Scientism has taken over from Religion to become a new orthodoxy. Its miracles dazzling us on every side. Museums are its cathedrals. But science leaves out an important part of the world.

What if the knowledge that the scientific method uncovers could be not just intellectually understood but consciously, physically experienced? Would we then act wisely, in practice rather than in theory? If we could actually feel all the costs of our actions personally, would it still be possible to dominate, manipulate and inflict pain on the world around us.

Unfortunately science is still incomplete because it holds compassion outside its field of enquiry. Our rationality cannot encompass the experience of anything, least of all pain. It can study it from the outside, experimenting on others, mapping their suffering, inflicting it here, alleviating it there. Science can chart change at every level of the universe from the atomic to the cosmic. Its abstract patterns can be displayed in the glass cases of museums to inspire our awe. But the most important fact can never be kept in any museum. The experience of change is something that can only be felt in oneself, with one’s whole self, heart and mind. Without this conscious, personal experience even the most beautiful museum is an empty shell, an unlit lamp, an unburnt stick of incense.

One could keep someone else’s experience in a museum, as a live exhibit. Just as one could keep a recording of a song. But this would simply be someone else’s performance. Unless it inspires the conscious experience of change in oneself it is simply a spectacle to gawp at, a commodity to consume, a dangerous distraction.

The museum, the temple, the sacred spot, even the lab, can be a place to remind and inspire, but surely the point of that reminder, that inspiration, is to cultivate the practice in oneself, to actually personally pray. When one is practiced enough it is no longer necessary to come to a special place to be reminded. The world becomes a constant reminder. We find ourselves already living in a temple.

There is a natural cycle throughout history whereby, from time to time, moribund trappings are destroyed to make way for a fresh living practice – the fall of Rome, the English Reformation, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, forest fires, asteroid impacts, ice ages, supernovae…

Perhaps we are in a time of great change now, or perhaps it has always felt like that. When you are drifting off, even a gentle touch on the shoulder can seem like a violent shock. But we should be thankful for that violence. The invisible damage we inflict in our sleep is much more terrible. We are asleep at the wheel of a vast armoured machine with our foot on the accelerator. We’ve already razed villages, forests, swamps, and glaciers. Now we’re coming up to a cliff edge.
Something has to go. It’s either the the whole tank with us in it, or the dreams we are so enjoying. Now that we are at last half awake we can choose which is more valuable.

There are many beautiful and inspiring objects in this museum and it would be a shame to lose them, but there is one thing more important than all the others and it cannot be stored anywhere. If a museum could become a place of prayer I would come and live in it.

Self Destruct

Nirvana is the final extinguishing of the last vestiges of any notion of ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘mine’. It is the final destruction. The end of the conditions for new life.

We are now approaching the culmination of my forty days in this Tower and while I am still a long way from destroying myself completely, that is my ultimate aim.

So, in this spirit of self renunciation, I am now offering myself.

I believe it would be inconsistent of me to consider my person as having a special status in this collection of objects. So I now offer myself to you as the final object.

On August 5th, at the end of the 40 days, anyone who cares to may take me.

I promise to do my best to give myself fully. I undertake to do whatever I am asked by this new curator. They may treat me me exactly as they wish. My fate will be in their hands.

The kind of relationship this person wants to create will be up to them. They may use me purely for their own purposes, or they may choose to consider whatever fears and desires I may still have. The choice will be theirs.

For my part I will offer myself as a gift and attempt to observe the surrender of what I have normally considered to be mine.

Because you may have to make travel arrangements to come and collect me, I am giving you a few days to come forward with your proposals. Once all proposals have been gathered you will have 24 hours, from midnight to midnight (GMT+1) on Wednesday 5th August, to vote for one amongst these proposals. The recipient of this final item is then free to come and collect it at any time thereafter.

In the event that no one comes forward I will continue to work alone towards my own extinction.

Over to you

You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone

Joni Mitchell

If our ideas are not reflected in our actions, we do not really think them.

Thomas Merton

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

Gunter Grass

 

What is happening?

We are coming to the end of my time in the Tower.

The objects arrayed before you in this blog represent that which will be forgotten, lost or deliberately destroyed unless it is cared for. Please take a look around at the exhibits and contribute to the discussions.

I want to make a few things very clear. The most important point is that I am not asking for suggestions as to what I or anyone else should do. This is not a space for moralizing. Nor is it some abstract game. It is simply a space in which you are free to examine your feelings and, if you wish, act on them. Do you care enough to do something?

Just as being a hermit is very different from the idea of being a hermit, so doing something is very different from thinking that something should be done. To actually care is not an imaginary or intellectual exercise. It is an activity that can be felt with your actual body.
To re-member something is to make it part of yourself. To appreciate something is to make it increase in value.

But also, in real life, choices have to be made. You can’t have your cake and eat it. You can’t do everything. To hold on to something you have to let go of something else. To remember something is to forget something else. To appreciate something is to ignore another thing.

What can you do?

Everything is degenerating and decaying, transforming and recombining even if you do nothing.
Some things may be best forgotten. Some things may be necessarily discarded.
You are free to forget about them and do nothing.
You may also leave it to others to act.
But then please don’t complain if things turn out in a way you do not like.
If you want something done it is your responsibility to do it.
Or you may collaborate with others in some way to get it done.
This is democracy.

But there is no one to represent you. Please do not tell me or anyone else what to do.
If you want to acquire an object or think it should go somewhere in particular you will have to use your own time and energy to come and get it or arrange for its transportation.
There is little point in simple acquisitiveness, however, because that is unlikely to be supported by others. People will want to perceive some genuine need. Your reason for having something or putting it to good use must be clearly apparent not only to you but to everyone else. It will be necessary for others to support you in your proposal.
Or you may choose to support others in what they have freely volunteered.

You do not need to come up with some terribly clever idea. Simply noticing a particular thing about an object from your own perspective and expressing it in any way that can be shared – that is enough.

Who’s in charge?

Let me emphasize that there is no point at all in appealing to me. Only your own inaction can cause something to be destroyed. If a choice needs to be made it will be discussed and agreed between all of us. The responsibility is not mine but ours.

By ‘us’ I also include the staff of the museum. I see little value in a distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’. The museum is staffed by public servants who are also human beings with ideas, opinions and powers. Every member of the public is also an expert in his or her unique viewpoint. All arguments should be made transparently.

The Museum is here as a public body precisely to hold in trust many of these objects. This public institution becomes an empty shell however, and may even become harmful, unless its purpose and strategy is publicly examined and renewed.
Its existence might also become an excuse for us, the public, to ignore our personal responsibilities. It’s very easy to think ‘someone else will take care of it’. In fact individuals have a duty to act.

None of us is an automaton. The museum too is made up of active individuals, many of whom have become experts because of a longstanding interest in a particular subject. This expert knowledge should live, not just through authoritative pronouncements but in active dialogue.
Museum curators have an obligation to explain why an object may be best held in their custody  – in order to be made most widely accessible, for instance, or because it only makes sense within a certain context. No object has only one single interpretation, so all of us must contribute to this discussion.

What happens next?

At the conclusion of this exercise the Museum’s Collections Development Panel will meet. At this face-to-face discussion all the arguments put forward in this blog will be finally considered. This blog therefore constitutes a collaborative, transparent document.

The final meeting will be a formal signing-off of any actions, destinations, and recommendations for the various objects. Any relevant considerations will already have been put forward on this blog so this panel will simply formalise any decisions.

The conversation is open. Please get involved, however small or large and in whatever form your contribution may be.
If there is no interest in it then of course things will just carry on as they are.
Museum will continue to expand their collections indefinitely as more and more things disappear from the rest of the world.

The Curate’s Egg

But before it became the curate’s egg it belonged to a mother giving birth to her baby.

Before it belonged to Biology it belonged to a particular curlew.

The original curate, faced with a rotten egg at breakfast, was too polite to point out the failings in the Bishop’s hospitality. Are contemporary curators in a similar position with regard to the Scientific establishment?

Naturally there are hierarchies of power. Scientific orthodoxy is vast and unassailable. So vast that no single scientist can understand even a tiny part of his or her own field.

Science is so ‘good in parts’, that the whole has become indigestible. It has become so efficient at producing knowledge that it has smothered wisdom.

There’s a time for humility of course but I must say I like the 1992 version of the curate.

The point about the curate’s egg, like the fly in the ointment, is that it cannot be good in parts. For something to be truthful it must contain no trace of untruth. To observe the world as it is we must either deceive ourselves that we are completely separate from it, exempt from its laws in some god-like way, or we must examine our own actions as an integral part of the system.

Science can never arrive at the whole truth as long as our personal motivations are not acknowledged. But in order to observe our own actions and motivations it is necessary to step back from them and observe them, rather than be swept along by them.
A practice which deliberately manipulates the world around it is not Science but Engineering. It does not lead to Wisdom, just Results.
Wisdom is difficult though. It requires the mind, heart and body. How much more challenging would our science be if we tried to examine exactly what was in front of us without any deliberate interference at all? What new skills would we have to learn?

It is necessary to refrain as much as possible from changing things in the world in order to observe the fine details of our actions.
This is the main reason for becoming a hermit. It’s like shutting the door to the lab. Or sitting quietly out in the field. Or studying in the library. It’s an opportunity to closely observe things without trying to re-arrange them.
Change does not stop of course. It is going on everywhere at every moment, with astonishing complexity. But its dynamics can best be observed by just letting them be.
Stay close, do nothing.

Oology was once up there with philately and numismatics. But it has gradually rolled down the ledge from serious science to respectable hobby to shady obsession to jailable offence.
The red-backed shrike went extinct in the 1980’s because its pretty, speckled eggs were so prized by collectors.
But egg collections have also provided valuable data. Samples going back many years have shown that recent human pesticide use has thinned peregrine falcon eggs to the extent that they crack before they can hatch. But perhaps that evidence would have been unnecessary if we hadn’t waded in with pesticides in the first place.

This particular egg once belonged to a Slender Billed Curlew, an extremely rare bird on the verge of extinction. There are perhaps only fifty left in the world.
‘British Birds’ magazine recently published a report of sightings in the Danube delta. ‘Four birds were present from 25th July to 21st August 2003, six were seen on 11th August 2004, and another on 12th August 2004’.

Nowadays it is much more socially acceptable to shoot and print than to shoot and stuff. As part of the same trend no one today would countenance the theft of a Slender Billed Curlew’s egg. I wonder if one day we might think the same way about collecting anything at all?
In that future what might the true union of humility and curiosity look like?
Hearing the curlew’s call, would a future scientist stop to listen to the music of Mother Nature rather than run to weigh and measure her egg?

Firestick

The remains of a fire-making kit found in an abandoned village,  Kahun, Egypt.

From left to right a bow drill, bearing block, hearth board, and spindle.

Last used in about 2000 BC.

Like an unfixed photograph that fades in the light, disappearing as it is looked at,

Of where brief heat was rubbed from darkness,

I am the match that burns away its gift.

Losing Teeth

Coca Leaves

Here’s something which is far from from extinct, but which many people work hard to eradicate.

A tremendous amount of time, energy, and money is spent waging a war on drugs that can never be won.

Should we lighten up or crack down?

Prohibition, extermination and control seem to be ineffective on the object of aversion.

Instead we stoke what we would quell and deplete what we would conserve.

Between Two Corridors

A Ubiquity of Sparrows by Craig Arnold A certain traveler who knew many continents was asked what he found most remarkable of all. He replied: the ubiquity of sparrows. —Adam Zagejewski Sparrow who drags a footlong crust of bread behind him Sparrow whose head is pecked bald from so many quarrels Sparrow who cocks her head to one side     as if doubtful Sparrow who follows every flick of your hands moving Sparrow who spies from far off the flag of a shaken tablecloth Sparrows dashing to any spot where sparrows are gathered Sparrow beating her wings to haul off a strawberry Sparrow bandito with black mask and bandanna who robs her Sparrow the poet’s lover keeps close in her lap to make him jealous     nipping her finger hard     harder Sparrow chasing a papery butterfly     flapping and snapping the butterfly each time impossibly escaping the sparrow savage     the sparrow persistent     is there no mercy Sparrow chick pinfeathered     hunched on the window ledge Sparrow roasted over a piece of bread to catch the entrails Sparrow whose feet barely sway the twig of a willow who leaps into the air with the smallest of leaf-shivers Sparrow the color of dust and mud and dry grass-stems Sparrows kept on the wing by farmers banging saucepans kept flying until they drop     a soft heap of bodies Sparrow who says cheap sparrow who says Philip Philip Sparrow who keeps the secrets of wistful men and women Sparrow shot with a pellet gun     sparrow who crackles under a boy’s bootsole     like brown October leaves Sparrow whose fall from the sky is noticed by what god Sparrow who squats in the bluebird’s nest     in the martin houses who moves in with a gang of thugs and there goes the neighborhood Sparrow who shot Cock Robin and later was hanged like a thief Sparrow astray in the airport     tracked by the one-eyed guns Sparrow said to have brought the English unto belief Sparrow who came to the king’s hall in the midst of a snowstorm fluttering in through one window and out of another Sparrow do you imagine more than a little warm rambunctious life between two corridors of nothing the one forever before     the one forever after

Fossilized Tree

 

Well, we burn coal don’t we?

 

Listen

The St. Helena Giant Earwig is from a tiny patch of land on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The island was first discovered by humans in 1502. Until then the Giant Earwig had lived  on the desert plains for millions of years, hiding under scattered rocks by day and emerging at night to forage. Humans came and took the rocks to build things.

The earwig was last seen alive in 1967. Special expeditions have searched for it since then, but it is now believed to be extinct. There are many other animals on this isolated island ecosystem still unknown to science whose survival is threatened by a proposal to build St.Helena’s first human landing strip.

I wonder how many families I break up every time I kick a stone

How many quiet voices I never hear

In whose home I make myself comfortable

What dies with my breath

Who is it, after all, that I kill in in my sleep, and fiercely protect when I wake?

Clay Lamps

Mass produced and discarded 2000 years ago by Romans who were interested in looking around them.

Hoarded en masse now by we who are nostalgic for what we already have.

Khīṇaṃ purāṇaṃ nava

natthi sambhavaṃ,

virattacittāyatike bhavasmiṃ.

Te khīṇabījā, avirūḷhichandā.

Nibbanti dhīrā yathāyaṃ padīpo.
Audio

When the past is gone

And nothing more arises

The mind no longer becomes.

When the seed is used up, craving ends.

The wise go out like the flame of this lamp

Lady’s Slipper

There are many ways to destroy things.
This orchid became extinct in Britain because of its beauty, which caused orchidilerium in humans.

It grows only in very specific circumstances, and then only with the ministrations of a particular fungal consort, so the obsession with collecting it gradually wiped it out.

In the last few years attempts have been made to reintroduce it in the wild. Apparently there are one or two on a secret hill in Yorkshire, protected from the criminal or the clumsy by a twenty four hour guard.

Let me count the ways I leave you

1
Caught by a bright flash in the corner

I toddle as you drop through the coarse net of me

In which every light winks

And every one is cut

Chasing a flutter of of colour

I run on a carpet of chrysalides

2
Restless at the inconvenience

I remake Truth

Mattress by mattress

And place your pea on a pedestal

To elucidate my nightmares

3
Coveting the beauty of what you have

I simply take it

And when it wanes before my eyes

Scrabble in your cold grave

For the secrets of your husbandry

Brick

This is from the Great Wall of China. It was collected by someone called James Lowe in 1876.

Many people over the last two and a half thousand years have attempted to dismantle the wall. I’ve no idea how Mr. Lowe succeeded in pocketing this souvenir. He probably wouldn’t get it through customs these days. But then very few of the objects in any museum would get through customs these days.

Any great empire is built by crushing and excluding what it cannot control, but even the greatest of all empires cannot survive forever without itself being destroyed. China has done pretty well so far, but one day even this great wonder of a wall will be gone. Having withstood Mongol hordes for millenia, parts of the wall in Gansu, gateway to the Silk Route, may be reduced to mounds of dirt in another 20 years. They are being swept away by sandstorms, a result of desertification caused by human agriculture. Other parts of the wall are being washed away by flash floods caused by extensive deforestation by humans.

The wall has also been dismantled to make pigsties, coalmines and factories, blasted to make way for roads, and torn down to make tourist villas. In China the driving force of economic development has often overwhelmed any other consideration. Indeed Chinese idealogues have often even actively striven to eradicate the past.

Add to these forces the enthusiasm of tourists like Mr.Lowe, and the Great Wall now stands reduced to approximately a third of its former glory. As China develops it won’t be long before the remaining third is gone. Who cares?

It seems ignorance and neglect may be even greater forces than war. The real barbarians can never be kept out by fortifications. They are already here.

Cockroach

I was talking to an antique dealer in Kolkata a few months ago about restoring a grand old four poster bed made of finest Burma teak. It had probably been the resting place of British Officers recuperating after long hard days of governing my country in the way you might stir a nest of insects. The bed had been clumsily painted at some point so he said he would sand it back down to the wood and stain it. Presenting various options to me over the phone, the one he could highly recommended as the most rich and lustrous he described as the colour of a cockroach. So that ‘s what I got.

ST. ROACH
by Muriel Rukeyser
(from The Gates, 1976)

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
water on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.
Not like me.
For that I did not know your poems
And that I do not know any of your sayings
And that I cannot speak or read your language
And that I do not sing your songs
And that I do not teach our children
to eat your food
or know your poems
or sing your songs
But that we say you are filthing our food
But that we know you not at all.

Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.
You were lighter than the others in color, that was
neither good nor bad.

I was really looking for the first time.
You seemed troubled and witty.

Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were startled, you ran, you fled away
Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.

Here is the perfect organism. It attained perfection 300 million years ago. Since then almost nothing about it has needed to change for it fit into its environment here on earth. It is an example of beauty. An ideal marriage of form and function.
This particular fossil also happens to be a holotype. That is to say it is stored here at the museum as a reference for researchers. It is the three dimensional dictionary definition of ‘cockroach’.

Duho

A duho is a ceremonial stool made by the Taino people of the Bahamas and Antilles.
It is about all that remains of their material culture, although we hear echoes of their voices whenever we use their words ‘barbecue’, ‘hammock’, ‘canoe’ and ‘hurricane’.

Christopher Columbus, on first meeting them in October 1492 said of them:

They traded with us and gave us everything they had, with good will..they took great delight in pleasing us..They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal..Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people ..They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing

Noting that they had no metal weapons, Columbus also remarked “I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased.” Which is exactly what he did on his second expedition in 1493. The independent eyewitness Bartolomé de las Casas tells of how the Spaniards

made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mothers breast by their feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks…they spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords….and by thirteens, in honor and reverence for our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and, with fire, they burned the Indians alive.

It took only a few years to completely exterminate the Taino.
Now here’s a stool with no one to sit on it.

But of course we should keep it because it has helped us to prevent that kind of callous and deliberate extinction from ever happening again, hasn’t it?

Hermit the Frog

The Golden Mantella is found only in a 10 square kilometre patch of forest between Beferona and Maramanga in Eastern Madascar. This is partly because its habitat has been reduced, but also because that is where it evolved and it likes it there. It cannot simply be relocated.

Madagascar also happens to be the discovery site of the earliest known frog-like creature, a 250 million year old fossil. Frogs had developed into the form in which we would now recognize them by the Jurassic period. Since then families of these creatures have been looking out at the same view as it has changed around them. Through shifts of the earth’s axis, beneath circling stars, through countless full moons and high noons, they have tasted the changing atmosphere through their skin.

Frogs need their mouths only for eating. All their drinking and most of their breathing is done through their skin. Over millions of years this thin membrane between self and other has become an incredibly sensitive organ of communion, through which a frog drinks, breathes, feels, kills, communicates and marks its particular place in the world. Frogs very literally absorb the atmosphere of a particular place. They are natural spirits of place. Some species are found only around a particular pond or tree.

Smell and taste, the ‘wet’ senses, are the most primal elements of consciousness. Each spot on the planet has its own unique flavour, which is in a dynamic relationship with the entire biosphere through currents of air. A frog tastes the complex chemistry of its location not simply with its tongue, which is more an organ of action, but through its whole body. Just as water soaks in and wets, so a frog dissolves the world and propogates itself by bringing the magical power of water onto the land and into the air. A frog is fully immersed in the body of Earth’s ocean of air, as surely as it might be in any body of water. A species of frog has recently been discovered that even does away with lungs completely. All its breath is soaked through its skin.

Being extraordinarily sensitive to atmosphere through their entire bodies, when I say that frogs are spirits of place I mean it very precisely. Our idea of soul or spirit has deep roots in the Latin spiritus and the ancient Greek psychein, both of which have to do with air, breath, wind. A frog, sitting still in its place is absorbing the spirit of that place.

It is just this sensitivity, however, which is the frog’s tragic flaw. Tasting and absorbing every tiny change, frogs are the first parts of the biosphere to be affected by toxicity. One of the deadliest toxins the planet has so far produced has proved to be Man. Frogs can surely taste our arrogance. Having lasted for around 250 million years, now in just a few short decades, the merest flick of a tongue, half of all frog species have either disappeared already or are in danger of extinction.

Those of us who are alarmed by this statistic have the choice to act. We can go on polishing and re-arranging our personal knick-knacks, muttering indignations, or we can mobilize wisdom and compassion in the service of a wider goal. This tiny creature is held in the palm of our hand. It is a simple matter to absent-mindedly crush it.

The Golden Mantella is one of the so-called poison dart frogs. It processes alkaloids from ants to make into a poison in its skin. Perhaps some of this skin could be offered to the organized gangs of criminals who are destroying its forest by poaching ebony and rosewood to sell on the global market.

Next

I wanted to respond to Dougald’s comment on an earlier post.

Here’s his contribution followed by my response:

Your “streams of DNA” reminded me of this, one of the texts I hold closest to my heart, from John Berger’s ‘And our faces, my heart, brief as photos’:

When I open my wallet
to show my papers
pay money
or check the time of a train
I look at your face.

The flower’s pollen
is older than the mountains
Aravis is young
as mountains go.

The flower’s ovules
will be seeding still
when Aravis then aged
is no more than a hill.

The flower in the heart’s
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain.

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

Tim Healey read that for us in Oxford, last Friday night, at the launch of the Dark Mountain Project. Thinking about our project and your post, I wonder – is it hubris to talk about our generation, after 10,000 years, as being capable of a “global revolution”, a turning-over of the relationships of domination into something more like the wasp and the fig tree? Why should we be able to change a direction set for hundreds of lifetimes? (Chris TT, one of our other performers, warned us of the example of the artilleryman in ‘The War of the Worlds’, who claims to be building a new civilisation underground, but has only dug a twelve-foot hole to hide in.)

I am dying

I made my bed

Now it’s me or the wallpaper

I’m digging my own grave

Tunneling out of this prison

Like the scarab

In a pyramid of dung

Waiting for the coming

I live in the cist

Under the tumulus

I’m digging a womb to lie in

I’m kissing the soft soil

I’m eating hair and nails

I’m making a space in moist flesh

To lay my children

Who will emerge with gossamer wings

In the upper air I brush

with an iridescent scale

Two molecules of chaos

And in a new world

A storm is gathering

From the cumulus

Of slow black tons

Comes the flood

And my first spark

Fossil Bivalves

There are thousands and thousands of these, sitting in rooms full of drawers.
No one has found any use for them in decades. Can you think of something? Or should they stay here because someone might? Just in case.

Apple Blossom

In the ancient fruit and nut forests of Kyrgyzstan just 111 Malus niedzwetzkyana trees are left. These wild ancestors of our Stepford apples are now reduced to a few wizened and twisted veterans who, in the past 50 years, have watched 90% of the forests around them disappear forever.

The tastes and textures we now know as apple, pear, plum, cherry, walnut, almond and pistachio all evolved in these mountain orchards. From here they spread across the world.

But evolution doesn’t just stop and take a break when it’s finished. It’s an endless, dynamic process, a constant flow of insect, fungus, fruit, bird, bear, weather and geology. That is, until humans come along and take over.

We hold in stasis the desirable attributes of the things we want, and therefore fight harder and harder against the things we don’t. Pests and disease continue to evolve, so fertilizers, pesticides and genetic technologies of ever greater potency are required to keep things just exactly how we like them. Once you start interfering, you have to keep interfering. And the thing we’re tinkering with is finely balanced. So far we’ve been clever enough. Perhaps our vision is that one day we’ll be able command the whole of nature under our baton.

Unfortunately we’re making a bit of a hash of it. As we degrade the habitats in which diverse gene pools flourish, we blindly squander our own resources. As we lose ancient species of tree from the forests of Central Asia, genes that have developed over millions of years drop out of the picture and become unavailable. The genetic diversity of the plants we rely on to survive becomes narrower and narrower. As diversity reduces, our capacity to adapt to catastrophic events diminishes.

Dazzled by the cleverness of our blade, we are sawing away at the very branch we are sitting on.

Just 10% to go. No one seems to care much. And the rest of the branch is going to crack under the strain anyway.

So, goodbye apples.

Theory and Practice

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Sphalerite

The fundamental problem is that desire is infinite and the universe is not.

We’re used to the idea of habitats being destroyed and living things being hunted to extinction, but here’s a mineral, sphalerite, our main source of zinc.

We have plenty of time. Current reserves will last us another 30 or 40 years.

Of course it’s not going to just disappear. It’ll become more and more difficult to get.

Everything has a cost.

Our choice is whether to manage consumption by gentle wisdom or market force.

Dialogue

Here is a conversation between two objects. A stuffed kiwi and a kahu-kiwi ceremonial cloak.

Just a reminder that between 6 and 8pm today (Monday 20th July) you will have a chance to engage in a live debate about this project at the Manchester Museum.
If you are too far away to come to the Museum you can participate on the blog. Please write your comments after this post.
From 6-7pm I will be meditating silently on bodily sensations. You are welcome to join me on the webcam.
After that I will be meditating on sound – which is so difficult to hold in a museum, disappearing as soon as it has appeared, but which is our main mode of communication and the sea which bathes us all.
I will then try to respond verbally to some of the comments made here.

Sex Trafficking

Our relationship with bees goes back a long way. Even before we were homo sapiens we lived together. And as we learned to exert more and more control over our environment we maintained a companionship with bees which has been marked by respect, love and even reverence. The marriage between humans and bees is perhaps closer than that between humans and any other creature on the planet.

But that relationship has become one we have gradually taken for granted. In the past hundred years or so, it has become actively abusive. Now they are just walking out on us.

A lot has been written, now that business is suffering, about the plight of the poor honey bee. Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD, is one of those important sounding, pseudo-scientific terms that doesn’t actually mean very much. We might just as well use the term heartbreak.

Why are bees mysteriously abandoning their hives? Why are they just giving up? Scientists and agriculturalists are scratching their heads and wondering about mite epidemics, chemical pollution, artificial feed, urbanization, mobile phone interference, and anything else, but there seems to be no common cause. In the last three years up to 50% of honey bees in the US and huge numbers in Europe have basically just lost the will to live. They’ve gone out and never come home. Their hives stand empty, like the Mary Celeste. Bees are a highly developed civilization, sensitive to the multiple stresses placed upon them. Perhaps this self-sacrificing of individual bees by flying away to die, is meant to protect the hive from the impact of their own sorrow.

Rudolf Steiner predicted in 1923 that the newly introduced technique of breeding Queen Bees using the larvae of Worker Bees would mean that ‘a century later all breeding of Bees would cease.’ Others have predicted that once bees go, human will follow soon after.

The artificial breeding of Queen Bees is only one of the many ways in which we have interfered with the complex social life of honey bees. In our industrialization of agriculture we have inflicted a long list of indignities upon them. We have been able to do this because we do not see them as partners to be honoured and cared for, but as commodities to service our desires.

Steiner makes the connection very clearly, ‘That which we experience within ourselves only at a time when our hearts develop love is actually the very same thing that is present as a substance in the entire beehive. The whole beehive is permeated with life based on love. In many ways the bees renounce love, and thereby this love develops within the entire beehive.’

‘The bee is more honored than other animals’, he said, ‘not because she labors, but because she labors for others. Indeed, the bee works unceasingly for the common good of the hive, and obeys without question what sometimes appears to be an inequitable hierarchy.’

Our abuse consists of the exploitation of this loving gift for purely selfish pleasure. But no abuse can last forever without ultimately damaging the abuser. Unlike other parts of the ecosystem, the bees do not, lash, sting or burn us. They simply withdraw.

The bee is at the heart of the reproductive cycle, distilling and transmuting the sexual energy of plants. Without bees there would be no garden of paradise. Before pollinators there were no flowers on earth and no fruit or nuts or vegetables.

From small time pimps, hustling our way into the long-term relationship between flowers and their pollinators, we have turned into an organized racket, breeding honey bees as sex workers, transporting them thousands of miles across country in trucks, and renting them out to farmers to pollinate their factories.

Have we industrialized and mechanized and commoditized the soul out of love? What was once about, beauty, sweetness, sensuality is now about the bottom line. In looking for the answer to the problem of CCD perhaps we should be looking not to scientists and businessmen, but to lovers.

End of the Line

The woman seated in the centre of this photograph was an object of study for the the ethnologist Henry Ling Roth. Her name is written here as Trucanini but there are a number of different spellings around. There was some debate in the clubs and learned societies of England as to whether she or the half-blood Mrs Fanny Cochrane Smith could claim the title of ‘last living Aboriginal of Tasmania’.

Trucanini was a pure Black but after her death, F. C. Cochrane was the only living person who could sing in Tasmanian, the last gasps of which were recorded for future museums. It’s a small quibble. A civilization was forced into extinction. Whichever we choose as the moment of extinction, it came to the same thing. One small death for a woman, one giant heap for mankind.

This photograph, and the book in which it appeared in 1890, was part of a paean to a primitive race. Her story, as told by Ling Roth, fitted perfectly with an idea of progress we may still be in thrall to. Homo Sapiens is striving onwards and upwards, developing technologies and sensibilities of ever greater refinement. Our theories of evolution tell us that only the cleverest, strongest and most beautiful can possibly survive. And so it is with great regret that we must wave a fond farewell to these noble savages, the failed experiments over whom we are compelled to tread, as humanity strides to its perfection.

H. Ling Roth himself was a curator at the Bankfield Museum in Halifax. He never went to Tasmania, although he may have seen samples of Trucanini’s skin or hair when they were sent for examination to The Royal College of Surgeons in London after her death.

At the Manchester Museum is a filing cabinet full of photographs. The last remnants of a very effective ethnic cleansing. They are the field records of scientific men dutifully following behind the invaders who have prepared the ground. As such they are part of a grand project of conservation. The academic wing of the colonial drive. These men of science were apologists, justifiers, theorizers, documenters, barrow-boys and compères for our general entertainment and edification. Surely, it is indicative of the refinement of our civilization that we take time to delicately preserve and enjoy the exquisite savour of the rare objects we are wiping out.

These prints display the characteristics of some indigenous Tasmanian fauna. The specimens are of course not running wild. Very difficult to get a clear photograph that way. This picture shows four of the last hundred or so who were left after foreign viruses, bounty hunters, and general persecution had seen off the rest. These have been captured and relocated to a concentration camp in Wybalena, Flinders Island. Presumably in order to study them more closely, and so that they don’t get under our feet while we are getting on with the important work of civilization building.

I don’t think those are thylacines with them, those were virtually extinct too by the time that picture was taken, but I could probably find a stuffed one in here somewhere if you’re interested. Thank god for museums.

Anthrenus verbasci

Apropos the discussion on labelling. Here’s an object that directly suffers as a result of a labelling scheme on which it has never been consulted. It is a valuable part of nature’s waste recycling system without whom we would be surrounded by millions of years old mountains of keratin. In some areas of this building this helpful worker is carefully cared for, labelled, mounted and conserved. And yet in other areas it is ruthlessly hunted down and exterminated. Must seem Kafka-esque to it.

Space and Time

I feel like an animal. Yesterday I was suddenly quite scared when someone rattled my doorknob. A doorknob that no one has touched while I’ve been here. It was a University Security patrol demanding to know who I was. Then I felt angry. That movement from fear to anger seemed very animal. Territorial. As if my space had been invaded while I was alone in the woods grubbing through the leaf litter or something. I was shocked out of my reverie. Apparently the security guard heard me singing. He was just doing his job I suppose. I said I was the hermit and he said ‘oh’. I was relieved I didn’t have to open the door. Don’t know how I would have coped with the scent of another creature. Wonder if I’m turning into a werewolf.

I’m annoyed with myself for oversleeping this morning. Disrupts the rhythm and makes it much harder to get everything done through the day. Here’s my routine, in case you’re interested. The structure is really important for sanity I think. I’ve taken as my template the form of a vipassana meditation course. You can see the full rules here.

I’m following the basic code of discipline in the way that a helper on a course would follow it, rather than as a student. On a vipassana course the student has no other job than to meditate. In fact eating, washing, walking and sitting are about the only activities really allowed. But as a server there are all sorts of other jobs to do in support of the students. Cooking, cleaning and organizing things primarily, but also, for long-term servers who may live on-site, there are various necessary interactions with the outside world. So for instance I’m not observing the vow of silence. Obviously. look at me chattering away. But one of the things I’ve never understood is the injunction against luxurious beds. I think I’m getting it now. When there are very few luxuries the bed becomes very important. And getting up in the morning really is one of the most difficult things. For me anyway. It’s so tempting to stretch and snuggle in the warmth. So I’ve decided to abandon my mattress and sleep on a mat on the floor.

Here is my basic timetable. The core of it consists of three fixed meditation sittings of an hour at a time, morning afternoon and evening. Anyone who would like to join me at those times on the webcam for a moment of peace and quiet is more than welcome. The spaces in this timetable are more flexible and divided between more sitting meditation, vocal work, physical exercise and writing. All times are GMT+1

4:00 am               wake-up
4:30-7:00 am      yoga
7:00-8:00 am     breakfast
8:00-9:00 am     meditation
9:00-11:00 am
11:00-12:00         main meal
12 -2:30 pm
2:30-3:30 pm      meditation
3:30-6:00 pm
6:00-7:00 pm     meditation
7:00-9:00 pm
9.30                       sleep

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

The fig tree is the gateway of man’s expulsion from Eden. It has been identified from early neolithic sites as the first deliberately cultivated plant. About 10,000 years ago, before even wheat and rye were tamed,  the fig initiated hunter-gatherers into a world of agriculture. And with agriculture came the architecture of permanent settlements and new social structures. It was one of the first great technical innovations of our species and one of the key shifts in the balance of our relationship with the rest of nature.

Since then we have been moving gently, almost imperceptibly, generation by generation, decision by decision, over thousands of years, from a participatory relationship to a domineering one. Perhaps this generation will be the one to wake up and realize that it’s a foolish fight, because it’s a fight we can never win. Perhaps, after 10,000 years, it’s time for a new global revolution.

So far a willingness to share has not been our greatest quality as a species. One aspect of our harnessing of the fig for our own use was to make the fig wasp redundant. Until Adam and Eve came along the fig tree and the fig wasp were one organism. One could not survive without the other. Is it even accurate to call them separate organisms? When life weaves and interpenetrates and shapeshifts before us with such dazzling complexity where can we draw the line between beings?  Over millions of years streams of DNA have branched and diverged and flowed together again and, in this case, wasp and tree, separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution have, in the last 60 million years or so, again converged.

Not content with covering them only with its leaves, the fig tree turns its sexual organs modestly inwards, away from public gaze. They grow on the inside of a sac on the stem of the tree. These baskets of flowers are what we think of as the fig fruit. Only the fig’s associated wasp is permitted entry to this boudoir and there’s nowhere else it wants to be. There are at least 750 species of fig tree and particular wasps are associated with particular figs in an incredibly intricate dance that we still do not fully understand.

We do know the general principles, however, whereby a wasp squeezes through a special passage in the flower cluster to lay her eggs, pollinate the fig, and then die. The eggs hatch and once the males have fertilized the females they chivalrously chew a way out before dying themselves. The fertilized females then exit through the hole made for them and fly off to find the right species of fig at the right stage of development in which to lay their eggs. They only have a few days of life in which to do this. The trees meanwhile call their wasps by perfumes released just when they are aching to be pollinated.

You can watch the whole process here. It’s a perfect example of poise and timing and complexity in the music of nature. Little wonder that this is Eden’s Tree of Knowledge and the sacred Bodhi Tree under which Buddha became enlightened.

But Man has cultivated self-pollinating varieties of fig, and thus made the fly redundant. Perhaps he didn’t like the crunchy bits.

Why not follow through the logic of efficiency and utility in our exploitation of nature? We don’t need the wasps. Why not get rid of the whole messy business and do away with the fig altogether? After all surely as the lords of nature we now have the prowess to engineer far more efficient sources of nutrients. Maybe, since we’ve almost used up all the soil anyway, it’s time agriculture grew up. Perhaps we should cultivate algal blooms in the oceans, package them like tofu, and flavour them by electrical stimulation of appropriate centres in the brain. Why stop there? Once we’ve finished off all the resources of this limited planet we’ll need to invent nano-agriculture to synthesize the intravenous nutrient drips that will keep our brood growing while we swarm beyond this solar system in our search for new Paradises on which to feed.

Discussion – July 20th

It’s all very well sitting at your computer but if you want to get stuck in there’s nothing like a real conversation.

If you are in Manchester on Monday 20th July come to the Museum  between 6 and 8pm and you can discuss some of the issues I’m raising with Phil Manning and Matthew Cobb  from the University of Manchester, and Nick Merriman, the Director of the Museum.

I won’t be there myself, obviously, because I’m a hermit, but you can post comments or tweet in the usual way from there or anywhere else in the world and I’ll be on the webcam.

Orphaned Labels

We’ve already had a cupboard of things no one knows the names of. Here’s a box of labels that have got separated from their objects.

I wonder what it is that has been lost exactly? And what has been gained?

What would it be like if we could take the labels off everything in the world?

Leave Icon Live Idea

Statue of Buddha, from Burma

Today, 14th July, is the Saffron Premiere of Burma VJ

Dead Sea

One of my favourite activities in the world is scuba diving. It’s wonderful even when there’s nothing to see – night diving can be like being lost in a gravity-free space of pure colour. But flying through to a coral garden teeming with life is like entering another dimension of reality, a dream world.

One of the most awe-inspiring aspects of it is how completely superfluous I myself become. I’m clearly an alien interloper in this realm. I can barely survive, and it has absolutely no need of me. It goes about its own business whether I’m there or not. In fact, it’s still there right now going about its business, while I sit here perched in my Tower high above sea level. And it’s been doing it for millions of years.

Here’s some old rock. It looks like a lump of pebbly concrete at first, but then you realize you’re looking at the bodies of hundreds of creatures. Shells, sponges, corals and trilobites all jumbled up in a heap. This is a small piece of the sea floor from 430 million years ago. It’s just some of what happened to sink to the bottom near a coral reef and was hard enough to leave an impression.

Imagine the colour and movement of the sea above it. Imagine the purposeful lives full of desire, fear, hunger, pleasure. Many of us thought the human skull I first showed deserved reverence and ceremony. We were less sure about the hyaena skull. I guess the skeletons here then are just dirt and sand? Is that arrogant speciesism, science, or common sense?

The oldest and largest living creature on planet earth lives in the ocean off north-eastern Australia. Or perhaps it’s a city rather than a creature. Or a nation. For the last 25 million years tiny coral polyps have been building it grain by grain. It has fallen and risen again many times as seas and continents have shifted around it. And all sorts of peoples of many species have been drawn to it from land, sea and air. It would be the first living thing seen by any visiting alien flying in from outer space.

For the last 40,000 years of its life this nation has co-existed with the oldest human civilization on the planet, the Aboriginal Australians. But suddenly, in just the last couple of hundred years, it is facing an unprecedented challenge as it is choked by the runoff from human farmlands, bleached by warming seas, and de-stabilized by over-fishing.

Seems to me a little hypocritical that we should devote so much time, space and money to an old fossil, put armed guards and proximity sensors and great citadels of learning around it, and yet stand by and watch while the Great Barrier Reef, a living, feeling ecosystem, dies at our feet.

Which one do you care about?

An Apology

Since I am a specimen under scrutiny here and I have promised that this blog will reveal some of what is invisible via the webcam, let me tell you about my emotions.

Looking back over the last few days I think I went through a slightly dark phase. Grappling with all kinds of practical issues in the Tower, the strangeness of the situation and the kind of tone to take in this blog, perhaps I slipped into hermit crab mode. One of the aspects of the hermit in the popular imagination is of the crusty old misanthrope, snappy and impatient with the ways of the world. His retreat is a kind of rejection of society.

I’ve deliberately played on that image to some extent in putting forward this idea of destruction. It’s a challenging, wrathful kind of energy. I think I may have got carried away by it myself. Now I realize I may have been a bit rude to people who have been kind enough to post comments on this blog. In particular I think I should apologize to Henry McGhie, Curator of Zoology here at the Museum who I roundly berated last week, and who I haven’t heard from since. Henry, and indeed anyone else at the museum, if you’re reading this, which I doubt, I’d just like to say that your views and knowledge are extremely important.

We have moved some way beyond the priest-scribes of ancient Egypt, or the high caste Brahmins of India or shamans with access to hidden knowledge, but nevertheless experts are still important. In the age of Google and Wikipedia and the hyper-fragmentation of specialized knowledge, experts have a new function to play. And in an information democracy they have a new kind of accountability. This means that the role of the Museum and the Academy is also changing. Manchester University Museum is clearly aware of this change, which is why it’s willing to lay itself open in the way that this project does. My job as an artist is to put some challenging questions but I’d like to put them without being abusive. Forgive me if I sometimes wobble over the mark.

I felt a deep regret while meditating this morning so I thought I should say something. I take it as a sign of progress. It’s a funny thing, meditation. Very difficult to know if you’re doing it right. It’s very simple but also extremely difficult. The job is to try and stay with the truth, but I’m so beset by delusions and confusions that it’s often difficult to know if I’ve taken a wrong turn. The only way to really measure oneself is by an increase in loving feelings. This is a sign that my habitual self-centredness must be dissolving slightly and I can start to see things from other points of view.

It’s not something you can create or fake either. If you get on with the main work of patient observation diligently, it just seems to happen by itself that a spring of generous thoughts begins to seep through the ground. It’s very easy to be sitting there daydreaming, or circling round and round selfish or delusional ideas – and I’ve done that. The only way to know if you’re on the right path is if spontaneous kindness starts to break through. Makes you feel happy. Which in my experience makes it quite likely that crabby and irritable is just round the corner…

The Point

What’s the point? It’s what’s left when you take everything else away. that’s the point.

Yesterday I wrote about appreciation. Today I want to add a counterbalance.

There’s a big problem with everything being interesting. I suffer from it a lot. A lack of discrimination. My big problem is being too interested in everything. There simply isn’t enough time. I hoard everything and I end up scattered. How to decide what to focus on?

The art of knapping is knowing what to throw away and what to keep. Done just right it creates something useful, something meaningful, something with a point.

Discarding things is neither profligate or neglectful. In order to know what to take away it’s important to study the grain of the material, understand its structure, the lines of shearing, the balance of the stresses. You have to love something to know where to strike it.

Then, when you know where the point is, you can use it to do something useful. A knife can cut, a pencil can draw, an arrow, once perfectly whittled by the fletcher, can itself be thrown away in order to pierce the target.

That great slinger ‘David’ stood trapped by the weight of an eroding block of marble in a cathedral yard for many years, before Michelangelo came along and dared to release him. Who misses what was lost?

A stone might crack the wrong way and become useless. How much more delicate is one’s own life.

Some people think becoming a hermit is extraordinary and remarkable. For me it’s not misanthropic nor cowardly nor brave. It’s simply the necessary removal of distraction. I’m an ill disciplined person compared to most. I can’t keep New Year’s resolutions. I can’t concentrate in an office. I have many friends who are much more focused and effective than I am. They would have no need for something like this. But I need all the help I can get.

The Buddha tells a story of a man who has been wounded by a poison arrow. Doctors are called but the man says he will not have the arrow removed until he learns whether it was shot by a nobleman or a warrior or a farmer, whether he was tall or short or medium, fair or dark, from near or far, whether the bow was a longbow or a crossbow, the kind of bowstring, the kind of shaft, the kind of tip… the feathers… the composition of the poison, etc., etc.

That man would die, says the Buddha, without ever having learned all these things.

The fact is there is suffering now. It must be addressed immediately.

As T.S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets, ‘Time is no healer: the patient is no longer here’.
Are we not distracted if we go round carefully collecting all the slings and arrows to prove the outrageousness of Fortune?

In Buddhist cosmology heaven is a very unfortunate place to arrive. Where there is no immediate perception of suffering there is no urgency, no impetus to action. Only when faced with dire necessity – like an arrow in the ribs – will we act. And even then we may be distracted and die before we help ourselves.

Looking around now at the degradation of all living systems, it seems to me that perhaps it’s time to act. Is there any doubt that humanity needs to be knapped? We could think of the whittling away of cars, packaging, food miles, unnecessary consumption and so on. But austerity can be unattractive. Let’s rather think of what may be revealed. The point.

Here’s a bow without an arrow. It might have been presented once somewhere in the Congo basin along with a quivering bride as a dowry. You could probably find half a dozen of them now gathering dust in some half-stocked central African airport souvenir shop.

There are a matter of days left now before the end of a four week stay of execution that has temporarily protected a few surviving families of gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills and elephants in that Congo basin. The Cameroonian government, in desperate need of money, will sell off another few hundred thousand hectares of rainforest to a logging company unless a competitive alternative scheme can be proposed. Whose is that forest to destroy?

Thirty days. The clock started ticking on June 18th. Bulldozers and chainsaws are standing by, idling. Does that focus the mind?

Perhaps a letter could be fired off. It’s only one tiny little thing. But that’s the point.

Common Wealth

I have asked that people offer some kind of appreciation of the objects I am presenting. But what do I mean by appreciation? Well, I mean simply noticing some real quality of the object.

This has nothing to do with liking or disliking it, but simply observing it.

Observing something without trying to change it in any way will cause its real qualities to unfold.

By contrast, the way to make something fade away is to give it no attention. Every accountant knows that depreciation happens automatically.

When we actively pay attention to something it will give a return on the investment. It will pay us back with its nature.

This interest can be ploughed back in. The more attention you pay to something, the more full of interest it will become.

The great thing is that the returns can also be used elsewhere. The capacity to pay attention grows as things become interesting.

As attention appreciates you become more richly conscious.

Consciousness is a universal currency, but like any current it has to flow. It’s only value is in exchange.

In accumulating wealth the difficult bit is in the beginning, when you’re just a young start-up. You have to be prepared to invest some capital in paying attention to something that seems utterly worthless.

A useful initial object is the breath, because no one can complain that they haven’t got any. It’s instantly available to even the most poverty stricken person. But the object can be anything, A piece of moss, a drop of water, a fly, a bone, a stone, it doesn’t really matter. It’s the attention that’s important, the appreciation of the object.

People start with different amounts of attention. A very weak or impatient or angry person will not be able to appreciate what is right under their nose. But gradually, with some initial effort, it is possible to find interesting qualities in even the most mundane thing.

Then it becomes important  to not obsessively fixate on it. It’s the business that is important, not the widget.

Gradually you build up capital which you can use to pay attention elsewhere. The more attention you pay, the more interest you receive and the richer you become.

Eventually everything is interesting and you find yourself in a palace of priceless beauty. A treasury.

All this starts from just paying attention. It starts from appreciating the qualities of the most mundane object.

So what happens to all this treasure? It’s everywhere in the world, all around, not just held in some special ‘sacred’ place.

But if you want to save it to use later where can you put it? In the memory bank of course!

The memory bank is not some dusty vault or a secret archive or a building. It is an activity, a muscle that must be used.

Do you remember your multiplication tables? Or a line of poetry? Or a scene from your childhood? Or your own name?

We remember anything by consciously noticing it. Every time something is repeated it comes into the forefront of the mind. Its details are noticed. Whichever details are clearly noted will remain distinct for some time. And whatever is repeatedly brought to mind will live longer in memory.

So it is with the objects I am bringing to mind during my time in the Tower of this great treasury. We are free to neglect the objects and let them disappear forever. After all it’s simply not possible to hold onto everything.

In fact, it’s not possible to hold onto anything. Each of us will disappear. Even carefully cultivated memories will one day fail. We will forget how to tie our shoelaces. Mothers will forget the names of their children. Cities and empires will crumble away and be buried. Languages will be lost. The species Homo Sapiens will die out.

But while we are here, we can make the choice to value awareness, to remember the totality of ourselves, to appreciate the web of phenomena that gives rise to this present moment.

As an individual I may or may not appreciate what is before me. That is a private matter. But as a society, as a collection of individual awarenesses, we weave a powerful web.

By sharing our individual experiences of appreciation we can build a valuable society. And how do we share our individual experiences? Through language, music, visual representations, mathematics, social acts.

My purpose in this blog is simply to present a chance for us to express our appreciation of forty objects. This is a chance to build value, to stop for a moment the slide into oblivion, to simply notice a real thing about each object and share it. In doing this we we make it beautiful and we enrich ourselves.

No jewel is more precious then the one slipping away from you right now.

The process of forgetting, of neglect, obscurity, absent-mindedness, decay, destruction, entropy, all this is going on automatically. It’s natural depreciation. To halt it takes just one person to contribute their point of view. This contribution is a gift, the unique product of a particular viewpoint that cannot be matched by anyone else.

Once given as a gift the object is rescued. It is valued. If we do this with one object after another we create a culture. And as a community we can join together to decide just what kind of culture to create.

Here’s today’s object.

Hand Sandwich

Here’s my hand, sandwiched between two marvels of engineering.

The hand axe is around 200,000 years old and is made of flint. I could heft it in my hand for hours. It fits perfectly in the palm, not just in one way, but offering varying surfaces for the fingers, multiple points of balance and arcs of trajectory. I don’t know who made it.

The Herbert bone screw is about 6 years old and is made of titanium. You can’t see it in this picture, only its wake, because it fits perfectly inside my scaphoid bone, deep inside my wrist, holding it together so I can continue to use my hand. It was screwed in by a Mr. McCullough.

There’s a story about loss and destruction here. One theory has it that these flint tools were made to be used and then thrown away. You don’t want loads of heavy stuff weighing you down when the main asset is in your head. It’s about the technique not the technology.

But skill is a process, much more delicate and fragile than an object, and now the artefact is all we have left. But as Mark Keleher was saying yesterday, there are twenty-first century experts in stone knapping. They’ve reconstructed the knowledge largely by reverse engineering ancient tools. So flints like this are now a kind of document. A kind of writing perhaps. A teaching, handed down over aeons.

It takes some effort to re-imagine what a stone age craftsperson’s attitude to objects might be. The degree of attachment to them. If I made a tool every time I needed one wouldn’t I gradually get better and faster at it, and walk lighter in between? On the other hand if I produced a particularly nice one would I want to hang on to it, learn its idiosyncracies, hand it on when arthritis took me over?

Driving too fast through a Welsh mountain blizzard listening to Tito Puente at full whack, I hit a patch of ice and found myself in a somersaulting car. I was lucky the car landed on its roof just yards before a lake, allowing me to escape with my life. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized there was something wrong with my wrist.

At that time I was earning my living mainly as a percussionist. Work which traditionally requires at least two hands. Over the next few years, while undergoing all sorts of diagnostic exams and osteo-carpentry, I had an opportunity to fully realize my dependency on my right hand.

There may be all sorts of tender feelings for treasures in a museum, or even in the world, but no object anywhere is more precious than one’s own body. It is nonetheless just that. An object. And no object lasts for ever. The real resourcefulness, it seems to me, is to enjoy what is here without depending on it.

I wonder if that stone age artisan happily discarded the product of his labour, recognizing that the sharpest thing he had, the one most perfectly fitted to his body and his environment, was not the thing he’d just let go of.

Every Rock is a River

Ever had a rock collection? Lots of people have pet rocks. There was a craze for them in the 1970’s. Now apparently you can get a USB version.

Any walk along a shingle beach is bound to result in heavy pockets. There’s something primevally satisfying about a rock that fits, just so, in your hand. But what’s the longest you’ve kept one? And what’s the most elaborate story you’ve ever woven around one?

The Victorians elevated rock collecting, as they did many things, to the level of an art. In fact they went even further than that. They made it into a science. Here’s a collection of ‘Eoliths’. Nothing like a classical sounding word to give something a ring of authority. It’s all Greek for ‘dawn stones’. Supposedly these were used as tools in the earliest glimmers of time. Actually it’s just a nice collection of stones.

But behind the wishful thinking and florid creativity of the Victorian imagination was a less becoming trait. Science is, after all, done by people. And all people, to a greater or lesser extent, are like Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection. The Victorians took collective Narcissism to a new pitch. The desire to find evidence of early humans in England was a matter of national pride. To Victorian gentlemen of science it seemed proper that the seat of the Empire should be the fount of all wisdom and the ultimate root of all culture. Such pride led to gullibility, and the search for the beginnings of Man eventually ended shamefully in Sussex with the great Piltdown Man hoax.

This box of eoliths is not deliberately misleading, just caught up in its own fairy tale. Perhaps this collection is interesting because of what it reveals about the collector. Are we enlightened moderns so different from the collector of these stones? How do we realize what we are really like? Is it necessary to loosen our grip on some of the possessions we so eagerly hoard around us? Perhaps if we stopped focusing so much on our stuff we might get some insight into our desire for it.

Perhaps these stones should go back to their friends. Or perhaps you can share some stories or pictures of stones you’ve collected to show that they’re worth keeping…

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The title of this post is from here. Many thanks to Shane for the link.

Have you ever had that experience of being unable to carry on reading because your eyes are wet?
This is one of the most inspirational pieces of writing I’ve read in a long time. But perhaps that’s because I have some experience of anicca. If you don’t it may just seem like guff.

Moss

So there doesn’t seem to be much interest in keeping the leftover shells. Can no one explain why they were deemed important in the first place?

Well here’s something else that’s been buried and forgotten amongst the clutter for years. Some old moss. It was found in the herbarium a month or two ago. No one appears to have missed it before, and there are other specimens of this plant, so it will be returning to oblivion unless someone is interested enough to want to rescue it.

Leaving the shell

I hope the objects and my responses have begun to emphasize that I am not asking some abstract question like ‘what do you think ought to be done with this?’ On the contrary, I’m asking a very specific question: ‘What are you prepared to do?’

Anyone willing to answer in some positive way, and in such a way as to inspire others to support them, will have succeeded in saving the object.

It is very easy to make moral pronouncements or have vague opinions. I am asking, however, for a thorough examination of what one actually does. Our real priorities reveal themselves in our actions. I’m not asking if one should care about something but whether you actually care about something. How far out of your way are you prepared to go for something you believe in?

I’m merely a sideshow in this, and my pathetic threat to destroy museum objects is a rather paltry act in the face of the actual destruction of reefs, oceans, forests, and peoples in which we are all complicit. What are we going to do to stop it?

Everyone, or almost everyone, believes museums are a ‘good thing’. So if we believe in looking after things how come we’re destroying them left right and centre? Are museums just a salve to our conscience? Like the medieval indulgences that would buy off your sins, do we as a society use the museum to corral a sense of sacredness we are not prepared to bestow on the material of our everyday lives?

I have no doubt at all that an intellectual case can be made for or against every object in the museum. What my action is intent on flushing out is who actually cares enough to carry out what they say? I have specified individual responses precisely because only individuals can carry anything out. Each of the objects in the museum was collected by an individual and is now looked after by individuals. Collections start and continue because of the ideas and enthusiasms of individuals. Often these motivations have been terribly misguided but I would rather suffer from the mistakes of an individual than the crushing anonymity of an institution. Individuals feel things. They are accountable. There can be a dialogue between individuals. The irrefutable momentum of corporations, on the other hand, is unstoppable by anyone. Our desecration of the planet is largely a result of the logic of corporations. Surely it is about time we wrested back personal responsibility?

I take it as read that of course all the people who work at the Museum already care about the objects in it. They have made it their life’s work. They are also explicitly working to share their enthusiasm with others. This game I have set up can be another opportunity for them to inspire new insights.

But then there is the institution of the museum. The method of disposal of objects I am proposing is of course highly irregular, but I see no ethical reason for advertising objects only in the Museums Journal, for instance. The Manchester Museum is part of a worldwide network of institutions which controls the movement of  the world’s most valuable objects. In the age of the internet and of parliamentary democracy why shouldn’t the museum’s dealings also be open? What ethical guidelines forbid all of us from having a say in what happens to our heritage?

But the real issue I want to address is much larger than just that of museums. In taking a personal interest in our public institutions, perhaps we might develop a different kind of relationship with the world. One which does not rely on numbed compliance, or resigned powerlessness, or dumbstruck subservience to a priestly elite. But one which, on the other hand, recognizes that each of us has a vital role to play in the creation and conservation of beauty in our everyday lives.

OK, that’s enough light-hearted banter. Now on to the serious business of today’s object. In case any of you thought it was absurd of me to collect rainwater from the roof, or question the sanctity of the ‘Africa – unlocated’ cupboard, here is an example of an object currently in the museum stores. Apparently it was donated by an ex-Curator of Zoology, after lunch. I have seen a whole boxful of similar such delicacies. I’m sure someone will come up with a very good reason for it to be here. I thought I’d give them the opportunity.

Memento Mori II

Here’s another skull. We know exactly where this one was found. Creswell Crags, near the present day human colony known as Nottingham, England.

This belonged to a Hyaena. Should it be treated in the same way as the first skull I showed? Why?
What right do we have to remove it from its grave?

This hyaena, ate and slept, watched sunsets and made decisions just as the humans do who now live there.

It is now extinct, just as humans will be.

It suits us quite well to forget that it was ever here. After all everything has led up to human civilization. The pinnacle, the perfection of creation. And we will always be here, just getting better and better.

An understanding of our shared space, humility in the light of kinship, these are not active qualities in us, so what is the purpose of keeping this relic?

Unless someone can actively show that they care for it, I propose to return this skull to where it came from.

Old News

Since it’s Sunday. I’m bringing the paper’s for you. Or rather I’m taking them away. Unless you want them. They’re quite old and they’re a bit of a fire hazard. Just a load of recycling really, left behind from remounted plant specimens. A flower ‘press’ you might say.

The herbarium’s so full of things you can hardly move. The staff are issued with machetes. Anyway the plants are safely mounted much more efficiently now. So I’m offering to chuck these out. Honestly, I wish people would stop using so much packaging.

Butt

Here is today’s object.

Those of you who were watching the webcam yesterday afternoon will have seen me collecting drips of rainwater from the leaky roof of my tower.

I am now proposing to dispose of this water.

I know that many of you will be shocked and horrified. Others will scoff and accuse me of calling your bluff.

‘What about the beautiful  jewel-like Art Deco diatoms you’ll be destroying!’, you’ll say.

Well, as far as I know there are unlikely to be any diatoms in there. Diatoms occur mainly in bodies of water, oceans, rivers, streams, puddles, wet soil, damp patches here and there. No-one’s ever told me that they come from raindrops.

No I don’t know where they do come from.

‘Ok even if there are no diatoms,’ you clamour, ‘surely there’ll be millions of other little animalcules and microscopic beasties. And the rainwater will have passed through the material of the roof and leached out certain molecules from the various strata and will therefore have unique properties unlike any other drop of rainwater anywhere else on this or any other planet. How can you possibly think of destroying it?’

I will counter that I have no microscope, and no means of doing a chemical analysis. Except by tasting it, and I’m not that desperate. Anyway I’m busy.

‘But even if you do not have the means to analyse it and draw out its secrets, someone somewhere will. You’re in a museum for pete’s sake! You’re surrounded by experts. And, and… even if no one can or wants to now, who knows what instrumentation and what methods of interrogation future researchers will develop. The place and time of its collection is unique. It should be tagged and stored in a sealed bottle in a climate controlled room

And you sat by it and were speaking –  Masaru Emoto the great Japanese researcher says water crystals can absorb psychic vibrations. They’re imprinted with your unique energy.

And some even more exotic cultures, with natives and spears and everything, think water is a sacred substance, bringer of life, cleanser of the spirit. How dare you even think of such blasphemy!

And… er… water is becoming an increasingly precious commodity. We should all be collecting rainwater. Especially if we’re in for a long hot summer.

OK, OK, look, you’re an artist, this is a work of art. That glass of water is a work of art. Or at least it’s documentation. You could sell it! I’ll be your agent. We could be rich! Please don’t destroy it!’

With cavalier disregard for all those arguments – unless the public outcry is unequivocal – I will destroy this sample by flushing it down the plughole.

Angel of Destruction

I am the personification of your ignorance. The devil incarnate.

Greed, stupidity and hatred are normally invisible forces. Always somewhere else. Now I have made them solidify out of the thin air. Here they are, Gothic, in this Tower, in this body, in this now.

You need not fight me. Continue as you are and I will go about my work. You are free to do nothing. Suits me.

The feeble staff of this Grand University Museum can do nothing against the massed power I represent. Decay, destruction, degradation, extinction will continue until everything has disappeared from under your nose.

If you have a nose left, that is. It’s highly unlikely that your nose will be the last to go.

Empty threats? Let’s take today’s exhibit: the seed of the Black Poplar, Populus nigra ssp. betulifolia.

Why are there only a few thousand of them left in the whole of Britain? And most of these genetically identical, so they are extremely vulnerable to any chance trauma?  Most of us will only ever have seen one in John Constable’s painting The Hay Wain. Why are they now on the way to extinction? Because we didn’t like the mess the females made in our streets? In America Poplars are called Cottonwood trees because of these distinctive seeds. We got rid of those messy females, and now the boys stand alone and our streets are pure.

Our streets? Who was here first? The streets, or the Poplars? And for which city of creatures is the Poplar itself the High Street?

But those are awkward questions. Speaking as a human, I like my streets free of everything else so I can go fast to my next important appointment.

Did we even know that there was a male and a female Poplar tree? Did we guess at the delicate mating ritual it has, in which the two sexes must stand close together without hybrid onlookers, and their fertilized seed must fall just so, on a bare patch of soil, free of competitors, with just the right wetness, at just the right time of year?

But perhaps there is no room for such a delicate flower in a rough and tough world. Survival of the fittest and all that. Humans have made it to the top by being the best, not by stopping for stragglers. We don’t have time to look after every filthy little runt of nature.

In destroying this seed I am merely personifying our society’s customary attitude. No one seems to have a problem with it as long as it’s invisible.

So, unless anyone has a different plan, let’s say goodbye to the Black Poplars. It’s been nice knowing you.

Anyway, we still have the Hay Wain.

(hmm…wonder which museum that’s in…)

Black Poplar

Specimen number five is Black Poplar seed

To be or not to be

If I label a thing solely in terms of its usefulness or convenience to me then I am bounded by my current opinion. I make myself pinched and narrow. I become poverty stricken. There is no horizon, only a wall. And I feed alone on my own history, recycling what I have lived on before. I am trapped in a museum. It’s all about me.

But if I allow a thing to have its own life and trajectory, to live on its own terms, terms which I may not be able to fathom, then I leave a gap of unknowing. Then my label is flimsy and contingent, loosely knotted to a mysterious space of wonder in the present world, and its unraveling leads to unpredictable future riches.

Olivia Judson’s arguments are persuasive and the biology she describes is virtuosic. Molecular engineering is clearly a high art. But forget the blinding cleverness. Of course, unquestionably, the lives of human babies are the top priority. All human life is of course worth more than anything else. But forget sentimentality too. After all, as she says,

there’s nothing sinister about extinction; species go extinct all the time. The disappearance of a few species, while a pity, does not bring a whole ecosystem crashing down: we’re not left with a wasteland every time a species vanishes.

She’s right. Now that we have entered the Anthropocene era, when human activities sculpt the entire planet, why should we not make ourselves comfortable and engineer a few little extinctions here and there?

If a mosquito is defined solely by its murderousness then it is easy for me to think of wiping it out. Anyway, we’re only talking about Anopheles, oh and possibly Aedes, the Dengue spreader. There’ll be plenty of other mosquito species left for you if you like them so much. We’re not going to quibble about little differences are we? I mean they all look alike don’t they?

But if I remove every mosquito from the face of the earth, another creature will rise up to bite me. The creatures are all around us. And they have the faces of monsters. Monsters from beyond our imagination. Countless monsters. And oh! have we tried to count them. We spent most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries trying to count them. Thank God we’re nearing the end of our task – now that they’re dying out before we can find them. But still, if I kill one, another comes in its place.

Not so long ago, and still today in some circles, it wasn’t so uncommon to talk about other humans in the same way we talk about mosquitoes. Ernst Haeckl the great champion of Darwin and inventor of the idea of the missing link used science to show that the intellectual ability of Papuans, “Hottentots” and Aboriginal Australians was slightly less than that of horses. Our modern outrage at that notion does a disservice to horses.

Perhaps I could lock myself in a sterile room alone, free from irritations. Screened against monsters. Hermetically sealed. Be a hermit. But then the itches and scratches will come from inside my skin. And eventually, inevitable they will kill me. Death and disease will win.

But perhaps there’s an alternative to that fight. What if I simply let things be? Pay attention to things as they are? Not as I would like them to be. What if I just pay attention? Could I be like the mosquito enthusiasts who publish in the Dipterist’s Digest? Who can tell the difference between the Anopheles atroparvus mounted and boxed next to me as I write, and the Anopheles messeae? Who know the kind of water each prefers, and the kind of resting place, who know which likes to sleep in a cool place and which likes to be warm, who have precisely counted the hairs on their heads, the patterns on their eggs, the spots on their wings, who know their moods. Who know their joys and sorrows.

Would I then, like them, alone in my lab, offer my own skin to feed the friends I so minutely study?

Diatom

The objects in that cupboard have lain forgotten for decades by everyone except the generations of curators we appoint to carefully label our ignorance. Now let’s read the labels. Or who will miss them if they disappear? Who took them in the first place? And from whom? Are they the residues of raped villages or diplomatic banquets? No one knows. Who cares?

The ordinary paraphernalia, the tools and toys of people going about their lives, have been taken away from their context and preserved in an alien one. Perhaps stolen, perhaps given as gifts. To what end? Who do they belong to now? Have we made them into sacred objects by accident? What spirits do they represent for us? Or are we completely blind to the ideologies they embody? Do we really believe we are completely objective, driven by truth and pure knowledge, as was the Imperial machine that collected these things and then forgot about them? Is our memory so weak? Are we the senile dotage of Imperial might?

Let’s give away our swag and make a clean start.

These questions might seem impudent in relation to roomfuls of lost property. But do they seem absurd when applied to a handful of scum in a ditch…?
Here are some diatoms I will burn. Plenty more where they came from.

Poppy’s letter

Genocide

I remember going on joyful killing sprees with my brother on our visits to Calcutta in the seventies. The nightly ritual of eradicating mosquitoes from inside the net was an exotic adventure to us. Clapping mosquitoes to death was just challenging enough to be a exciting. The simple goal was to get every last one. Stalking them within the cube of the net required poise, patience, keen eyes and quick reflexes. The sense of achievement was clearly painted on our palms in our own blood. And it required lots of leaping about on pillows and mattresses.

Olivia Judson wouldn’t waste so much energy. She coolly describes her idea for the ultimate swat.

Why not? Human beings have rendered the smallpox virus pretty much extinct. And look how much happier we are than we have ever been. Why shouldn’t we conquer the next great hindrance to our untrammelled multiplication across the face of the earth?

Anyway, here’s my next object. A cupboard full of stuff that no-one’s had the time or resources to do much with in the last hundred odd years…

Because they are living things

Received this by email from Leander Wolsthenhome:

Hi Ansuman,

My daughter (Matilida, aged 5) has done a drawing of two mosquitoes.  One is biting a person.  She’s put a comment on the blog but when I tried to paste the picture in as well as the text it didn’t work.  So, I’ve decided to send you the image by attachment.

When she drew the mosquito biting the person and the blood I said “Are you sure you like mosquitoes Matilda?” she replied “Yes, because they are living things”.

I hope it’s going well in there.

Best wishes,

Leander

Anopheles Mosquito

Next object…

Memento Mori

The skull, along with the candle and the hour glass was once a de-rigeur accoutrement of every fully provisioned hermit – in Mediaeval Christianity anyway.

The Brotherhood of Death, followers of St.Paul the Hermit, even went so far as to sleep and eat with a skull always beside them. Their friendly greeting to one another was ‘memento mori’ – remember your death.

In Theravada Buddhism contemplation of bones is prescribed as an initial stage for those types of minds which are intractably addicted to bodily pleasures. A little exercise of the imagination is required but not so much. After all, I can feel my own skull to be just like the one in front of me. Only a thin layer of life between us.

Mexicans throw a huge party every year for grinning sleletons.

So, this skull is certainly valuable as a reminder of destruction. As a souvenir.  But how could it be destroyed itself?  It will turn to dust anyway if I do nothing. The active process is to to conserve it, to protect it in plastic, or mummify it in bandages, to handle it with gloves or bathe it in incense. All the activity, all the expense, is to delay or deny the process of decay. Was this person so cared-for when she could actually feel anything?

And what about those skulls we have pushed past today, padded with flesh? Should we cradle them all, and sing to them? Should we honour them? Or do they have to die first?

To leave a dead body to just rot in the street, to disregard its decay, is clearly callous. But to observe and appreciate the inevitable process of destruction?

What if we could watch the mechanisms by which this skull is broken down and reconstituted as wind and rain and soil and sky? Would we be aware of all those millions who have lived already before us? Would we more keenly feel the ancestors who embrace us in their mingled bodies, who enter into us and constitute our own bones and our children’s bones? Would we feel the qualities they embodied reverberate through us?

How should I honour the deaths that give me life? Where are the muscles of this person, the fleeting expressions of laughter and disgust, the breath? Where are the words that must have once sounded out in some language? Right here perhaps, in what is now moving. Should I let these parts join together again in the swirl? Release this pious stagnation into an ocean of matter? It’s destruction will be a nesting place for mice, a mask for moles, a cup and a drum for the beating rain. Call lichens to prize apart its filaments and open its memories. Carnivorous snails, make space for water to leach through its crystalline matrix and free its cavernous thoughts to think wild blackberries.

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

Over the last few months I have been exploring the museum stores and collecting my own little cabinet of curiosities. Each day over the next forty days I will choose an object from my collection and offer it up in a spirit of sacrifice. The object will be announced through a variety of media, including this blog.

I will then destroy it.

This destruction will inevitably take place unless someone cares for the object. Anyone who cares may show that they do in whatever way they choose. Recognized experts and potentially interested parties will be specifically invited to contribute their views. Manchester Museum curators and staff are also welcome to share their expertise, but all responses will compete in a transparent public forum.

In the absence of some positive appreciation of the object – a poem, a video, a child’s drawing, a scientific assessment, etc., etc. – I will assume that it is of no value to anyone and should no longer take up space in the archive.

Although objects will be revealed one by one, the fate of each object will remain open until a clear consensus is reached. The most beautiful appreciation or cogent argument will be chosen by general agreement. Stewardship of the object will then be transferred to the respondent who may decide to return it to the Manchester Museum or some other place.

—————-

Here is the first object: a human skull.

Disposal

Have spent the last few hours wiping away, de-cluttering and destroying what I do not want. The bodies of insects, dead skin cells, droppings, mould, minerals deposited by passing traffic, city grime, dust. Cleaning is also a way to get to know the corners of this space. Now I can make something fresh.

Not that that takes much effort. Even as I clear away the past I’m aware of what new things I am bringing. My own stuff. Bedding, clothes, computer for blogging and webcam. Some alfalfa and wheat grains soaking in water. And at the very least I bring my own body. I am food for so many things. My body itself is a colony. And the food I have brought with me is also attractive to others. I want to put up some barriers of hygiene in order to defend what is mine.

Arriving here in the evening I noticed I was crashing a party. I have some very loud neighbours. As I opened my eyes this morning I saw one of them. It was a jerking shadow crossing the floor by the wall, invisible except as motion. But that motion was distinctively cricket. It seems Andrew Gray’s frog food is pretty difficult to contain. He’s the museum herpetologist. Families of crickets, brought here to be sacrificed, have clearly established themselves in the many crannies and crevices of this Gothic pile. Bloody immigrants.

Until I moved in there have not been many people in the tower. Just hundreds of boxes of plant specimens. Certainly no one has lived here. But that’s not to say there is no life. Some of the impressive fungal growths are like citadels. But I sense that with my warm breath and wetness and fruit and vegetables a new era of life is about to begin. I’m glad it’s not totally sterile. Love for each other requires a tough assertion of boundaries. So I’ve been scrubbing and cleaning my hermitage.

It’s also important for me to have everything in the right place. Perhaps I’m a bit obsessive about this. I can sit and ponder for hours just where a chair should go. To make it more respectable I’ll call it Feng Shui, or Vaastu, or Permaculture. Carlos Castaneda talks about rolling around on a verandah in New Mexico for hours looking for his Power Spot.

(Now I’m remembering my place in this city. Finding Jon Hassel’s beautiful album ‘Power Spot’ in a record shop in Piccadilly. I bought it for the cover. It was a musical revelation. That was over twenty years ago. Piccadilly’s transformed, so have I. The album is exactly the same.)

So I’ve spent hours to-ing and fro-ing in this space, rearranging things, finding views, angles, turning round and round like a dog. It’s important because insofar as I can design my environment it reflects my thoughts. How I arrange things in this space is a reflection of what I think, allows me to think. Indeed as Thomas Merton says ‘if our ideas are not reflected in our actions, we do not really think them’.

Once the physical space is organized, my next task is to organize my time…

Hello

Thank you for visiting.

Welcome to this blog in which I hope to share some of my thoughts.

I am presenting my self as a living exhibition in this museum and I hope that this blog will give some impression of what is happening inside me, in conjunction with what might be visible on the outside.

It’s amazing how much effort it takes to make your life simple! I’m exhausted. But finally I’ve managed to tie up most of the loose ends, wrap up my affairs in the world and tear myself away. I’ve offered explanations, discharged obligations and said goodbyes. There has been very little time to sleep in the last few days so I’m hoping the first bit of this hermitage will be a chance to rest and decompress.

I will be following a fairly strict timetable while I’m here and I intend to carry out various actions, so there is a lot to do. But right now I just wanted to say hello and to let you know that I am now installed in the Tower .

I don’t have the energy to write much more now, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I just recycle some of my old notes. I wrote these a few months ago, when I was first imagining this project. I hope they serve to give some context for those of you who may be stumbling upon this from far afield.

Background

I feel a deep dismay at the ecological crisis facing humanity, which I experience as a loss of beauty. And I feel challenged to respond using the full weight of my training as a contemplative and an artist. But, along with this strong agenda, I am also interested in an art which is abstract or open-ended.

This tension between purpose and play is also an essential condition of the hermit, who is introverted but has a social role. I am interested in exploring precisely this ambiguity.

The hermit is conventionally a benign and pious figure, but I also want to invoke his destructive aspect. Artistic precedents for this approach are in the auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger and John Latham. Eremetic forerunners include the great Hindu ascetic Shiva, who is celebrated as the destroyer of the world, and the Christian anchorite, Anthony the Great who burned away his wilfulness in order to surrender himself to the will of God. My own hermetic training is in the Theravada Buddhist technique of vipassana.

Vipassana is essentially an exhaustive cataloguing of every aspect of experience, up to and including the cessation of everything. The vipassana yogi, like the Victorian collector, is engaged in taxonomy – a taxonomy of things which are disappearing. Someone practicing vipassana trains his or her awareness on every minute detail of experience, and observes it while it burns away. At the completion of this enlightenment nothing is left. The literal meaning of the Sanskrit word nirvana is ‘extinguishing’, referring to the going out of a light.

Extinction

This idea of extinction will be the main organizing principle for me. By my action I hope to sensitize us to the sorrow of loss. My aim is to engage emotionally with the fact of the massive loss of memes, genes and habitats which we ourselves are precipitating on a planetary scale.

I can begin to approach the real enormity of this sorrow if I deliberately  engineer a temporary loss of part of my life. An aspect of the hermit’s work is to physically perform loss, actively embodying death by incarcerating himself and becoming dead to the world.

I will forego the richness and diversity of my life, renouncing it while entombed with the riches of the world’s civilisation, in the heart of a vibrant, living world city.

The museum itself is a library of Babel, a seed bank and an ark. It is Gaia’s memory. At the apex of this body of knowledge, perched in a tower as a brain is perched on a spine, the hermit might symbolise conscious agency. The hermit dramatises the dialectic between deliberate, mindful knowledge and the hidden, or forgotten unconscious. I will use his presence to focus questions of stewardship, storage, and conservation, of profligacy, amnesia, and extinction.

Self destruction

The hermit’s work is to become humble, to erode arrogance to the point that the self itself becomes extinct. This is done by determinedly relinquishing control and clearly cataloguing every aspect of the embodied self. The hermit sees right through himself by fully appreciating the immense variety of phenomena, without either coveting or rejecting any of those phenomena. The hermit examines himself as a specimen. He treats the body as a museum. The sort of museum that should be in museums.

Any hermit reduces the noise of society and treats himself as an archive. The artist makes this act public.

The hermit’s act of recollecting, of remembering himself, places personal experience at the heart of the collection. The artist’s works radiate and interact with the world.

By sampling, mounting and encasing myself in a vivarium, I want to publicly present the ultimate exhibit. But while offering myself up I want to make clear that the real exhibition is not of me ‘Ansuman Biswas’, but the self each of us thinks we have.

As with a well-prepared laboratory specimen, isolation and framing allows fine detail to be examined. In the case of the Manchester Hermit examination is welcomed by anyone with access to the internet.

By stepping outside it for a moment, I want to expose, and interrogate the notion of the network. I am not pretending that it’s possible to cut myself off completely, but neither do I want to be lost in an incessant babble. The hermit hovers in a space between total solitude and unbridled communication, neither rejecting everything, nor being completely dependent.  I hope, by physical isolation, to throw into relief global commerce and connectivity and the fecundity of the metaphysical or virtual environment.

The House of Memory

Museums represent a kind of species memory. The Museum functions in human culture as memory functions within the individual human body, or as the human species functions within the biosphere. Human culture is the planet’s self-consciousness. But now this global sentience is at a critical juncture, being at the dawn of the realization that it is gnawing away at the very branch it is sitting on.

A virulent strain of human culture has irrationally placed itself above nature, collecting, cataloguing and controlling the world out there. Now this culture is being forced to see itself as part of the nature it manipulates. The illusion of a separate self is becoming unsustainable.

In the Victorian ideal of the museum the riches of the Empire were gathered together to be studied. The one thing missing from the collection was the collector himself…

Hermit cam

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The Manchester Hermit

Artist Ansuman Biswas will become the Manchester Hermit, living in the Museum’s Gothic tower for forty days and forty nights

The Manchester Museum at The University of Manchester holds a collection of over 4 million specimens and objects.

Like many museums, only a small proportion of the collection is on public display.

Artist Ansuman Biswas will ask you, the public, to reassess the value of the Museum’s hidden collections, casting light on a different object from the stores for each day of his residency.

Through this Blog, he hopes to engage you in debate about why museums collect and preserve objects, whilst  species and cultures become forgotten and extinct.

He will also question the relationship of human beings to the natural world, hinting at the inevitable extinction of the human race itself.

Follow Manchester Hermit on Twitter to keep up with what’s going on.