Identifying the Intricate (and Two Stories!)

I would rather like to air some of my wonderings regarding catastrophe:

In this post, I don't want to question that catastrophe has endless meanings. I don't want to question anything at all, in fact. This thought shouldn't subvert anything; it's exploratory. Having been bombarded by images and theories surrounding Hiroshima (whose name has become synonymous with an attack, interestingly), suicide, earthquake, et cetera, I feel the need to become a little more sensitised to the intricacies of catastrophe and this post is only about one intricacy. It's difficult to position it, as I see it, but it's something to do with infamy, impact, and experience. I will try to explain more specifically in two sections below (Poles of Infamy, and Silence and Near Silence). Please remember that these sections are just mechanisms in order to identify what I want to discuss. It's not very easy to contribute to something intricate without going through where I think the intricacy is in the first place. Due to the personal and non-academic nature of those sections, it might seem unnecessary to some but, please, humour me!

Poles of Infamy

I see that Catastrophe can be dramatic and examples of such catastrophes are manifold: when I think 'catastrophe', 'disaster', 'cataclysm', or any other terms a thesaurus would recommend, I link it with 'bombs!', 'earthquakes!', 'death!'. The word does imply 'big things are happening and it's bloody obvious!'. Earthquakes, nukes, volcanic eruptions, if reported and in some way felt, roughly form one pole (for me, at least). Marko gave a great example of the other pole, when he mentioned the earthquake where all the witnesses died and it took days for news to filter of the destruction, by which point no one cared to report the quake internationally. This shows that a massively destructive quake needn't be infamous. Both poles don't have an ultimate: that is there isn't a 'most' infamous or a 'least' infamous, rather the poles are incredibly fuzzy but I want to focus in on some of the less infamous fuzz; something between the overt and reported and the unknown and unreported: perhaps something not quite silent but something extremely quiet, yet its impact may be far-reaching; the gravitational pull of such a disaster could be felt and not even known about! We might not even know that something had happened, however 'big' it was; it would just silently direct the flow of our existence. And I'm sure things like that do happen and do direct the flow of our existence and colour our experience of it, and we haven't the foggiest idea about it.

Silence and Near Silence

Now, I think I've identified what the Americans would call a 'ball park' and would like to draw an analogy. I want to think about an oft-cited lesson of John Cage and countless of his disciples: that there was no such thing as absolute silence. Even when you reach total sonic isolation in an anechoic chamber, you still hear the high buzz of your nervous system and low pumping of the blood around your body. With that in mind, I once produced a CD meant to relax me during one of my episodes of insomnia. I played recordings of incidental noises and gradually, and almost imperceptibly, faded them out over 40 minutes or so. That way, there would come a point, towards the end of the track, where the incidental noises on the CD would be a similar volume to the incidental noises in the room. I found that the noises nearer to the end of the track gave me heightened awareness of the 'silence'. I was consciously aware of silence, and the gaps in between almost inconceivable sound, half-imagining what true silence might be. At any rate, it got me to sleep!

I want to look at two micro-narratives from the same source in a similar way in order to approach things that might have massive affects but not be infamous (though, obviously, they are known about or I couldn't cite them). While we can't know the unknown, I think that we can approach its limits and half imagine it.

The Micro-Narratives

A few years ago, I saw a book that I wouldn't usually buy. The topic of animal extinction is of only minimal interest to me but this book, 'A Gap in Nature' (2001) by Flannery and Schouten was so remarkable in its presentation that I simply had to buy it. It profiles quite a few recently extinct animals and I want to reproduce two of those profiles as micro narratives in this blog. If I can get my scanner to work, I'll follow with beautiful pictures of those creatures!

Now, I've always liked micro-narratives and how fragments of information can work together to almost map out the contours of a much larger, inexpressible phenomenon. I see these two micro-narratives as contributing to an enormous pool of unidentified fragments, never to be united.

At last! Finally! I offer the Catastrophe Committee profiles of two extinctions that I find remarkable!

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Name: Huppe (Fregilupus varius)

Last Record: between 1835 and 1840.

Distribution: Reunion Island, Mascarenes.

'Starlings are great colonisers, and many islands once had their own distinct species, evolved from ancestors that arrived in the remote past. None was so peculiar as the hippe of Reunion Island, whose most distinctive feature was described by one ornithologist as a 'crest of pale, decomposed feathers'. Like man island birds, the hippe appears to have been remarkably unafraid of humans, and could even be knocked down with sticks. One resident wrote:

"their song was a clear note [and they were] very tame and, being young, I killed dozens of them. When I returned to the island after ten years in Paris, I found no further trace of them. I used to keep them in a cage without any trouble. They eat bananas, potatoes, cabbage etc."

The story is almost a parable of human interaction with vanished species, in which a carefree youth kills thoughtlessly, only to repent in maturity the loss of such magnificent creatures. The final cause of the huppe's demise may have been the introduction of rats and, given the above, their decline to extinction may have been swift. Given their adaptability to life with humans, it was a great pity that a captive population was not established.' (pp31)

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Name: Stephens Island Wren (Xenicus Iyalli)

Last Record: 1894.

Distribution: Prehistorically, North and South Islands, New Zealand; Historically, Stephens Island, New Zealand.

'Very few species have been exterminated by a single individual of another species, but such seems to have been the fate of this wren. Its last redoubt was Stephens Island in Cook Strait, between North and South Islands, where it survived until the New Zeealand government built a lighthouse there in 1894. The lonely lighthouse-keeper, David Lyall, decided that he must have a cat, and other a year or so that solitary feline exterminated the entire species. It brought them, one by one, to the lighthouse-keeper's door and, thinking them strange birds, Lyall sent seventeen little bodies for identification to a museum.

This, however, is not the entire story of this curious little wren, the only known perching bird ever to lose the power of flight. Fossils reveal that before the arrival of the Pacific rat of kiore (Rattus exulans) in New Zealand around 1000 years ago Stephens Island wren was common throughout the archipelago. Predation by the rat eliminated it from over 99 per cent of its habitat before the arrival of Europeans. A single cat was then enough to push this precariously balanced species into oblivion.

Lyall was the only European ever to see the birds alive, and even he observed them just twice. He reported that they ran about like mice among the rocks of their island home. Twelve of Lyall's specimens are still hed in museum collections.' pp83

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It's fairly obvious that other issues, or fragments of issues, are touched upon and beg further exploration, such as folly of youth and its' contribution to unforeseen consequences in the first micro-narrative, for example. And how, if the lighthouse keeper in the second story opted for a dog (which you'd think would be an obvious choice for a lonely man in a lighthouse, wouldn't you?) instead of a cat, the most extreme catastrophe of extinction would have been avoided - or at least deferred until the rats took over. I find these small details fascinating!

There we go!

It's unlikely that you've heard those stories before but what could be more catastrophic than to become extinct?

And, come to think of that, what about our own extinction? Will it be as uneventful? Would it, too, merit a little entry in a esoteric book? It will come at some point, surely but is it a catastrophe if we can't think about it, can't write about it?

Also, you can see that each story has an interesting and intricate web of reasons surrounding the extinction. For me, this highlights how deeply imbedded catastrophes are within the fabric of existence (if such a phrase is at all useful!).

I know this was a little long for a blog post, but I imagine this might be the place for such discussion!