Life on the Edge

It is generally assumed that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions, but a study published this week in “Current Biology” provides proof that chimpanzees are better than humans at basic numeric memory. In a simple mathematical test devised by Kyoto University cognitive scientist Tetsuro Matsuzawa, “Ayumu” (the most prodigious of the six chimps who trained for the “exam") consistently beat three of the nine college students even after the students were themselves trained for half a year. This doesn’t prove that chimpanzees are better at all maths, but it does offer compelling, scientific proof that the human “animal” and all the other animals found on the great web of life are not all that different. Basically, we are all one. There is no human—animal divide.

Let’s take the test one step further and see if “Nature” is better at mathematics that humans.

The test is to see whether or not a human can build—quickly, easily and with no fuss—a three dimensional spiral phyllotaxis pattern that demonstrates the “golden proportion” and the Fibonacci sequence.

Just outside my kitchen window grows a “saw tooth” Banksia and it is producing—quickly, easily and with no fuss—several winning examples of the above test question. It seems to me that even plants can beat humans in the mathematics game. Proof that the notion of a human—nature divide is as fallacious as the human—animal divide.

Boy, do we humans have to learn to eat humble pie.

I find it amazing that no matter how certain we are of things, not only are things susceptible to change, they can change in an instant. We can be looking right into the eyes of an issue, convinced of its reality. Then, with the subtlest shift of thinking or of events, it appears in a new light.

Graphically, this was demonstrated this week as I was photographing the bracken ferns that grow low to the ground in the area next to the storm deck known as “the windgrove”, the property’s namesake. In a matter of seconds, as a brief sun shower swept through and even as the tree’s shadows remained discernible, the light from the setting sun bouncing off the ferns shifted from golden to silvery. A whole new world appeared in a flash, as beautiful and as enchanting as what came before it. Who would have thought these two worlds existed so close to each other?

When things are going well, we might fear that the shit will soon enough hit the fan. True enough. But the situation is just as often the reverse: when things are at their darkest, something or someone can appear to give us hope. This happened in Australia last week when the federal minister for the environment (actually, minister against the environment) gave his approval for the southern hemisphere’s largest pulp mill to be built in Tasmania. It was a dark hour indeed and many of us felt understandably depressed. Yet within the day, the major newspapers and some highly influential CEO’s and other individuals came from behind their self imposed walls of silence and began speaking out against the political hypocrisy and economic stupidity of this project. Daily now, the ranks of opposition are swelling and, where last week I must admit to feeling the debate had been lost, today hope is showering down in a mixture of golden and silvery light.

For a year I lived on a farm in Korea that was run by an in-house Catholic priest and frequented regularly by other priests from throughout the country. They were wonderfully warm hearted men doing what they thought best for those in their charge. On the surface their public persona was exemplary. Behind closed doors, however, I learned of their being all too human, all to susceptible to the complexities of being human and all to susceptible to the many human frailties including sexual misconduct. I was saddened and appalled and left Korea with a hugh dislike for those in power who not only abused their power, but couldn’t walk the talk they were so ardently preaching.

That was nearly 40 years ago. Today I only have to look at myself and my own long shadow to see that being human—that being part of the animal kingdom—is to be set up for disappointment, if total perfection is what one aims for. Wearing the robes of goodliness is never sufficient enough to disguise the earthly animal donning them.

Late on Sunday, when most churches were having evening services, I planted the last of this year’s seedling trees. I held it up to the setting sun, much like a priest holding aloft a chalice or holy book, and with a prayer that honoured the miracle of its young life, placed it into the ground.

When I first started planting trees on this land 16 years ago, I strove for a 100% success rate ardently wishing, more or less expecting, that with enough understanding and technical expertise, this could happen.

The intervening years have taught me, however, that nothing can guarantee protection against the vicissitudes of life. We can water, we can fence, we can pile branches waist high, we can lay down mulch mats, we can increase the size of the the U.V. bags and we can use ever taller and thicker bamboo stakes, but in the end, just like the good priest in Korea, being of this world means being caught up in the wheel of chance where justice and injustice, righteousness and immorality, life and death are interchangeable.

On Wednesday, I spent the day in gale force winds re-bagging and re-staking trees that had been planted two to three years ago and were still surviving; trees next to, but outside of the new protective fencing. I hammered over two hundred stakes into the ground and did my best to protect these struggling young trees from the wind and wallabies. Maybe all this work will be for naught. It could happen that this particular section of the cliff will remain barren despite all the many years of attention, discipline and dedication given to it.

Being human, though, it is in my/your nature to strive for perfection and to live in hope that growth—whether physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual—is an ever-present possibility.

I thought the day was going to be fairly straight forward, easy and relatively light-hearted. Just use the Subaru to carry fencing material out near the cliff where Glenn, Sally and I would build a protective barrier against the wallabies. The sun was shining, the wind non existent. Perfect. I hadn’t, however, accounted for the soft earth to sink the vehicle down to its axles. Especially a four wheel drive vehicle. Frustrating? Yes. Tiring? Yes. Time consuming? Yes. Ultimately defeating? No.

Every farmer or person who works the land has days like this. Unexpected floods, droughts, mechanical breakdowns or other events that plague the agenda of any day. The struggle is always there.

When struggle comes, as struggle does to every life, it’s never easy to go on. It often seems that not going on at all would be the better thing. The easier thing. The only possible thing. Pressures from outside us, pressures from within, hang heavy on our shoulders, weigh us down, and dampen our hearts. Then the spirit is taxed beyond belief. Then all the pious little nosegays we’ve ever learned turn to sand. Then we begin to question: What is the use of all this pain? What is the purpose of all this struggle?.....  And yet we sense that the way we deal with struggle has something to do with the very measure of the self, with the whole issue of what it is to be a spiritual person.

I could go on and talk about the bigger struggles I have with the world or of Tasmanian politics or with my own dark demons. But I also face a form of struggle with every tree planted at Windgrove and how I deal with this struggle is also a lesson in dealing with life’s other struggles.

For the past 17 years an effort is made every August to reforest those areas of land that were stripped clear of vegetation during the time Windgrove’s land was used for sheep grazing. It has never been as easy as in “plant a tree and watch it grow”. It’s been more like: “Let’s put in 500 trees, see how they do and then try to do better”. Well, this year “doing better” is bringing in 300 metres of chicken wire and 60 two metre long steel “star pickets”. About $1,000 worth. Since 1992 I have been trying to plant out this cliff face with the hope that it would create a windbreak for other trees on its leeward side. The trees planted—boobyalla and she-oaks—do grow, but the ever hungry wallabies have always outwitted any previous attempt to curtail their access to the young seedlings’ succulent leaves.

Well, with patience and the collective effort of six hands, three brains and four hearts, the car made it out of the mud and the fence got built. My fingers are crossed that this latest defensive effort will work. If not, I figure I still have a few more plans up my sleeve. 

The great secret of life is how to survive struggle without succumbing to it, how to bear struggle without being defeated by it, how to come out of great struggle better than when we found ourselves in the midst of it.

The essence of struggle is neither endurance nor denial. The essence of struggle is the decision to become new rather than simply to become older. It is the opportunity to grow either smaller or larger in the process.

All quotes from Joan D. Chittister’s book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope

Today marks another equinoctial day on the year’s calendar where night and day are equal throughout the world. Equal, perhaps, between the amount of hours given to either light or darkness, but not so much a blending of the two. Reminds me of the old, discriminatory, “Separate, but Equal” apartheid laws of America. 

Maybe we should abolish the separateness of light from dark and make the whole of the day a fusion of half light, half dark. What would it be like to walk through a noon landscape that looked more moon lit than sun lit? Colors red, blue and yellow would bleed off into soft greys. The grey hairs on my head would be indistinguishable from the dark hairs of my lover. (Hey, I’m beginning to like this, this dimming of contrasts to a soft, muted togetherness.)

Usually, the color grey connotes ageing and death or the slightly sinister. Ghosts, fog, a grey day, battleship grey, men in grey suits. Not exactly cheerful. But, when I sit down to keep company with grey weathered logs nestled among grey weathered stones, I am moved by their sleepy, slow dissolve into each other. This might be the grey of decay and death, but is there not beauty in this final release of differences and the coming together in balanced rest? My eyes tell me there is.

Maybe heaven is but one joyful mass of grey where beauty lies in the greys of the beholder.

Apologies for not putting up a blog last week. It’s just that I couldn’t find the motivation.

In his book, The Devil in Tim, author Tim Bowden has written: If there is a piece of paradise on this earth, Peter Adams has come close to finding it with his coastal property Windgrove…

No, my motivation did not fall asleep in a gently swaying hammock whilst drinking rum. Living in paradise can be exhilarating, but it is not always a shield from depression, or more exactly, depressing news.

A couple of months ago, the environmental movement had a terrific day when Australia’s Green Senator, Bob Brown, won a landmark court case against Forestry Tasmania. The federal court decision found that logging of the Wielangta Forest in Tasmania’s east coast was illegal because the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act was not being adhered to. By implication, this could be applied to the present logging practices in all of the old growth forests of Tasmania including the Upper Florentine.

Last week, however, the state Labor government joined forces with the federal Liberal government to change the existing laws governing threatened species thereby making any and all logging operations “legal”.

At the same time, the brave protesters trying to stop the destructive logging practices in the Upper Florentine continued to be harassed and arrested. Their actions were deemed “illegal” and they were hauled off to jail.

So much for the workings of democracy.

Climate change and the environment are certainly off the back burner in political and corporate circles around the globe, but Tasmania and Australia are still ruled by people who wouldn’t have a clue in understanding Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the preservation of the world.

And so I lost a bit of steam last week as I got caught up in my own and other’s despair over the blatant unethical behaviour of the two major political parties to “legally” find a way to circumvent the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

An ear of corn, however, showed me a way back into thinking positively. 

For several months I watched as five seedlings grew into tall green stalks with each bearing one bulging ear of corn. Whether by myself or others, they were daily watered and nurtured. Everyday, that is, except last week when I lost interest and a bit of motivation.

Today, when I peeled back the leaves of one of the ears of corn expecting to find a nice juicy golden explosion of kernels ready to steam and butter, I found an inedible ear of corn, dry and starchy; the result of not being watered. I dropped my guard for just three days and all the good work gone into the cultivation and growing of the corn came undone.

Looking at the ear with its deflated kernels could have been depressing. Instead, I saw it as a lesson that when taking on a project, any project, to see it through to fruition, the garden, so to speak, must be diligently guarded. Nurturing becomes a constant responsibility.

We all want a more peaceful, sustainable world. To achieve such an end requires a sustained effort. Let’s not let the bastards diminish our resolve to make such a world a reality.

(Forest photo: Matthew Newton)

Slight-of-hand magician, David Abram, said this about the photo below after I sent an email copy of it to him earlier in the week.

What a great shot. Indicating that what speaks to us, ultimately, secretly,
through all the books we read, are the living trees from which they are
made…

On Sunday past, I was practising the Five Element Qi Gong with eyes half closed; mind half focused, half in trance.

Gazing out the window I saw a hand floating in the air, pointing towards a row of books girdled around the massive eucalypt tree in the back yard. There, as though painted with the poet’s brush of magical realism, the tree and books hovered silently, yet poignantly. Oddly enough, I didn’t bat an eyelash as it all made “sense”, appeared logical, even ordinary.

I was witness to the quintessential Tree of Knowledge.

All knowledge, as the hand pointed out and the books made reference to, emanates from tree. What has been written in and on books, came first from tree. (Shakespeare wrote about “tongues in trees, sermons in stones, books in babbling brooks”. Susceptible to alliteration, he misplaced books and tongues.)

Ultimately, Tree speaks for us (secretly, even, as David Abram writes). Tree works for us.  Tree is us.

A magician works a spell to make something “impossible” happen.  A magician works ....to create an impossible experience, an experience that is so shot through with mystery that it startles people out of all of their preconceptions. When a magician is successful making a stone vanish, and then plucking it back into thin air, or making a coin float from one hand to the other hand, it leaves us without any framework of explanation. We are suddenly floating in that open space of direct sensory experience, actually encountering the world without preconceptions, even if just for a moment. The magician is one who frees the senses from the static holding patterns that are held in by assumptions, by outmoded ways of thinking, and by the styles of speech and discourse. (David Abram)

For a moment, my preconceptions of what was reality were lifted to a different dimension. In this temporary space the physical union of hand, book and tree were presented as fact and I had no doubt that what I was seeing and comprehending was true. 

Yes, the trance broke within seconds and I catapulted back into a western, scientific paradigm where what I had ?really? seen was Sally’s hand and a row of books from the bookshelf reflected in the window. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Maybe no longer magical, but the magic of that brief moment definitely stayed with me.

And still does, even today, four days later.  One reason is knowing that the etymology of the word “book” comes from boka—Germanic for beech tree; the wood of such tree being the material of the tablets on which runes were inscribed with marks having mysterious or magical powers attributed to them.

No matter how fleeting, there is always something within each day to bring wonder back into our lives.  Cast any runes lately?

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PostScript: At 4:25PM Australian Eastern Standard Time, Thursday, 3rd of August, this blog registered its 200,000 “page visit”. The count started 15 months ago; there are 1.6 pages visited per person coming on line. This translates to approximately 2,000 people per week reading “Life at the Edge”. Fantastic, I say.  Tonight, the world seems rather close and friendly.  My thanks to all who enjoy reading what gets written about.

In a recent interview, David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, said this about the alphabet:

...I’m not trying to demonize the alphabet at all. I don’t think the alphabet is bad. What I’m trying to get people to realize is that it’s a very intense form of magic. ...I mean, it’s not by coincidence that the word “spell” has this double meaning—to arrange the letters in the right order to form a word, or to cast a magic. To spell a word, or to cast a magic spell. These two meanings were originally one and the same. In order to use this new technology, this new play of written shapes on the page, to learn to write and to read with the alphabet, was actually to learn a new form of magic, to excercise a new form of power in the world.

It’s outrageous: as soon as we look at these printed letters on the page we see what they say. They speak to us. That is not so different from a Hopi elder stepping out of her pueblo and focusing her eyes on a stone and hearing the stone speak. Or a Lakota man stepping out and seeing a spider crawling up a tree and focusing his eyes on that spider and hearing himself addressed by that spider. We do just the same thing, but we do it with our own written marks on the page. We look at them, and they speak to us. It’s an intensely concentrated form of animism. But it’s animism nonetheless, as outrageous as a talking stone.

Understanding our animistic past has always been of interest to me. Reading David’s description that our animistic connection can still be accessed via the alphabet is fascinating.

Ten years ago I wrote in a monograph about my work: Earth Link benches serve as a kind of Rosetta stone deciphering the forgotten past and reforging old links between culture and Nature; between its diverse peoples and the world they exist in. ...With a sculptor’s alphabet of sticks and stones, I hope to give shape to this felt connection.

Ever since moving to Windgrove I have endeavoured to see and hear the language of the trees and stones, birds and sky. Perhaps, by listening long enough, I might someday sculpt something worthy of its subject matter. Whether or not a boy from Detroit can become proficient in this in the way a Hopi or Lakota elder is proficient, remains to be seen. But, it’s been great fun trying.

Now, a new twist has been added to this quest. Knowing that I will be going to China later in the year (finances permitting), I have been seriously studying the Chinese language. The dining table is strewn with learning materials and my head is swimming with new sounds and enigmatic swirls of pictographic symbols.

When I look through the trees to the sea beyond, the abstract markings of the darkened branches seem not unlike the cursive markings of the Chinese characters I am studying. 

Should the branches start spelling out fu, shung, qu, guo, jiao, xiang or xian and truly begin speaking to me, I’ll celebrate quietly with a bottle of champagne (before checking myself into the nearest hospital).