522
break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can
so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other,
without hating each other to death?”.
21
“What shall I do with this broken bird? The
dead sky has nothing to say,” wrote Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938).
22
The poet, who
died in a work camp, where he had been arrested more than once for his anti- Stalinist
versification, could rightly claim that in such dictatorships as the Soviet Union,
poetry was among the highest causes of mortality. But if one takes the theories of an
Ehrlich, Cioran, and Mandelstam together, it is clear that—with respect to humanity
and the natural world—all of human civilization, with the rarest of exceptions, is a
kind of lethal aesthetic. A poetry that sees straight, but cannot see straight.
To be this animal, human, hosts a foreknowledge: H. D. Thoreau building his
cabin near Concord, George Inness painting coming storms at Montclair, John
Muir’s final years at Martinez, Frank Cushing digging for ancestors under shopping
malls in Florida, Louis Bromfield planting organics at Malabar Farm in Ohio, John
Nieuh of mysteriously disappearing in Madagascar during one of his many
seventeenth- century natural history expeditions, Paulus Potter painting his
“Punishment of a Hunter” (1647, in the Hermitage), John Martin executing his
deeply immersive black/white mezzotints for John Milton’s Paradise Lost (London,
1827), and Edvard Munch painting his “Der Schrei der Natur” (The Scream of
Nature), the German title the Norwegian expressionist originally gave his—as it
would eventually be thought of—“Scream” of 1893 (Fig. 55.2).
Stray cats in Damascus or strife-ridden Beirut, thirsting; same in St. Petersburg,
where the poorest of the poor must vie with rescues in the one nearby animal shelter
for recycled sloppy joes; burros tied by their fetlocks for life on a scorching outcrop
in a gorge somewhere in Jordan, beside a stinking garbage dump across northern
India, a lost cluster of half-toppled Jewish gravestones deep in the swampy border
zones of the Bialowieza forest, between Belarus and Poland. Anonymous deaths in
fetid cages from Bamako to Jakarta. The dogs left behind on certain Greek islands,
after tourists have left mid-Octobers, when the unwanted mutts are not infrequently
and wantonly poisoned by the locals. Nineteen days without rain in Monteverdi
Rain Forest, in Costa Rica; excessive tourism to the rare Irish pyramid of endangered rookeries in the sea, Skellig Michael.
23
All of these onrushes of pain and
simultaneous efforts to make a difference have been our (the Authors’) quiet odyssey, to date.
There are no equations to solve these futilities, demonic lethargies, pejorative
dead-ends. This is the ecology of frightened insomniacs, souls that will never rest,
take no comfort in theories of impermanence espoused by Padmasambhava—the
21 See History And Utopia, by E. M. Cioran, Translated From The French By Richard Howard,
Seaver Books, New York. 1960, pp. 105, 80.
22 Osip Mandelstam, Stone, Translated and Introduced by Robert Tracy, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey, 1981, Poem #21, 1911, p. 85.
23 “Environmental groups raise alarm over plans for Skellig Michael,” Niall Sargent, Green News,
January 10, 2019, https://greennews.ie/environmental-ngos-concerned-rnew-plans-skelligmichael/, Accessed April 24, 2020.
55 No Equation for It: Numbers with No Attachment
break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can
so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other,
without hating each other to death?”.
21
“What shall I do with this broken bird? The
dead sky has nothing to say,” wrote Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938).
22
The poet, who
died in a work camp, where he had been arrested more than once for his anti- Stalinist
versification, could rightly claim that in such dictatorships as the Soviet Union,
poetry was among the highest causes of mortality. But if one takes the theories of an
Ehrlich, Cioran, and Mandelstam together, it is clear that—with respect to humanity
and the natural world—all of human civilization, with the rarest of exceptions, is a
kind of lethal aesthetic. A poetry that sees straight, but cannot see straight.
To be this animal, human, hosts a foreknowledge: H. D. Thoreau building his
cabin near Concord, George Inness painting coming storms at Montclair, John
Muir’s final years at Martinez, Frank Cushing digging for ancestors under shopping
malls in Florida, Louis Bromfield planting organics at Malabar Farm in Ohio, John
Nieuh of mysteriously disappearing in Madagascar during one of his many
seventeenth- century natural history expeditions, Paulus Potter painting his
“Punishment of a Hunter” (1647, in the Hermitage), John Martin executing his
deeply immersive black/white mezzotints for John Milton’s Paradise Lost (London,
1827), and Edvard Munch painting his “Der Schrei der Natur” (The Scream of
Nature), the German title the Norwegian expressionist originally gave his—as it
would eventually be thought of—“Scream” of 1893 (Fig. 55.2).
Stray cats in Damascus or strife-ridden Beirut, thirsting; same in St. Petersburg,
where the poorest of the poor must vie with rescues in the one nearby animal shelter
for recycled sloppy joes; burros tied by their fetlocks for life on a scorching outcrop
in a gorge somewhere in Jordan, beside a stinking garbage dump across northern
India, a lost cluster of half-toppled Jewish gravestones deep in the swampy border
zones of the Bialowieza forest, between Belarus and Poland. Anonymous deaths in
fetid cages from Bamako to Jakarta. The dogs left behind on certain Greek islands,
after tourists have left mid-Octobers, when the unwanted mutts are not infrequently
and wantonly poisoned by the locals. Nineteen days without rain in Monteverdi
Rain Forest, in Costa Rica; excessive tourism to the rare Irish pyramid of endangered rookeries in the sea, Skellig Michael.
23
All of these onrushes of pain and
simultaneous efforts to make a difference have been our (the Authors’) quiet odyssey, to date.
There are no equations to solve these futilities, demonic lethargies, pejorative
dead-ends. This is the ecology of frightened insomniacs, souls that will never rest,
take no comfort in theories of impermanence espoused by Padmasambhava—the
21 See History And Utopia, by E. M. Cioran, Translated From The French By Richard Howard,
Seaver Books, New York. 1960, pp. 105, 80.
22 Osip Mandelstam, Stone, Translated and Introduced by Robert Tracy, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey, 1981, Poem #21, 1911, p. 85.
23 “Environmental groups raise alarm over plans for Skellig Michael,” Niall Sargent, Green News,
January 10, 2019, https://greennews.ie/environmental-ngos-concerned-rnew-plans-skelligmichael/, Accessed April 24, 2020.
55 No Equation for It: Numbers with No Attachment