...(and what we can do about them). Although these posts are primarily sketches for a book project on environmental critique I will also post from several other ongoing projects.
1. On 16 June 1904 before leaving his home at 78 Eccles Street, Dublin, Leopold Bloom sat and took one of most momentous and leisurely shits in literature. Joyce reported: “Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper.” Bloom browsed a while, then “midway, his last resistance, yielding he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly, as he read.” A significant portion of those people from whom I recently solicited information on their favorite sitting places side with Bloom on this one. They confide this seated pleasure as if it was their secret alone. My father, in contrast, claims his favorite place to sit was beside the Minister for Education in the Irish Dail (parliament) during question time. My mother’s sitting drinking coffee in front of The Colosseum. Mine is on the Old Kenmare Road, near Killarney, my back against a rock, facing the mountains, bog cotton fidgeting,a stream murmuring in the middle distance.
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8. In a 2004 study six aesthetic plastic surgeons impartially examined 1320 photographs of nude women in “different postures and actions” and examined the buttocks of 132 female patients to assess for “signs” of buttock beauty. They reported four independent characteristics in the gluteal region that indicated excellently attractive buttocks: a lateral depression, infragluteal fold, supragluteal fossettes, and a V-shaped crease. The results, reported in the journal Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (28:340-347), were published with a helpful photograph illustrating the consistent features of the perfect ass. The role of the buttocks in sitting is neglected in this otherwise comprehensive work, but helpfully surgeons are recommended to mark where the buttocks rest while sitting to avoid injury to vessels and nerves.
Before Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sanymount Green Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower. Ulysses, James Joyce.
Only thoughts reached by walking have value.Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche
In 1987 I saw him for the first time. I was crossing Central Park in the back seat of a Hyundai being driven by my wife, V. The traffic stalled a moment and I looked across to the oncoming traffic, also stalled, and saw my doppelgänger in the back seat of the opposite car. Our jaws — both of which had a rufous-coloured carpeting of beard — dropped simultaneously, and simultaneously we were whisked away a few moments later by the renewed flow of traffic to live out our lives in opposite directions. Those paths crossed again yesterday, a quarter century later. I saw him strolling down Rathmines Road Lower in Dublin carrying his bags of shopping. We were both alone, both on foot, both now with long white hair, and both gray bearded. We performed a furtive mutual inspection, then, though it was barely perceptible, shuddered, before taking off once again to complete our lives elsewhere. There are directions beyond sensible reckoning in which a person may fly or drive or walk, so it is unlikely, even if we both were to live another hundred years, that we will encounter each other again.
I set out recently to walk towards Dublin city center with a destination but no especial route in mind. The point of departure was my childhood home in Templeogue Village — until the 1950s fairly discrete from Dublin city — and the destination was the city center where I was to meet some friends at the Market Bar later in the evening. En route I wanted to inspect the “country home” of the Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865 – 1953) in Rathgar. In fact, I am back in Dublin for a couple of weeks to sift through the Praeger archives at the Royal Irish Academy in Dawson St. In the course of my previous investigations on Praeger — an author of over 800 papers and 20 books on Irish natural history — I had learned that he had maintained a rock garden in his Rathgar home. I wanted to see if this rockery persisted in some form. Three points: Templeogue, Zion Road in Rathgar, and the Market Bar triangulated the route, though the passage was determined by the limits of my endurance (I am, after all, a man of 49 years), and my vague interest in punctuality (though friends in a Dublin pub tend to find things to do whilst waiting on an errant party member). As is the tradition among Irish naturalists, I sustained myself with a bar of chocolate.
Though you might forgivably mistake a man for a tree at the level of gross morphology, nevertheless, a tree undeniably dwells in place whereas a person’s home is born in motion. Agnes Arber, the Cambridge plant anatomist and philosopher, remarked in her 1950 classic The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form that “among plants, form may be held to include something corresponding to behaviour in the zoological field.” If by behavior we refer to the sum of all the activities of an organism, then the manner in which a plant grows – marshalling its leaves to best secure light, disposing its roots to obtain nutrients and to harness it to the earth – is comparable to the more rambunctious activities that animals deploy for analogous purpose. The behavior of plants – the punctuated rhythms of their growth – is founded on the quite simple laws of cell division and extension. This was Arber’s lesson. And this, at eighteen, was the first conceptual framework that preoccupied me. If simplicity rules the world of plants, why not also true for animals, for people, for me?
Thirty years ago I took several wintery trips out to North Bull Island, a five-mile stretch of sand in Dublin Bay which formed in response to 18th Century engineering projects at the mouth of the River Liffey. Now a site of considerable conservation interest, I went along with fellow biology student Liam Dolan to observe the curious behavior of Armeria maritima roots. The plant, commonly known as sea pink, grew profusely on the dunes. The two Liams were at that time under the thrall of Jim White from the Botany Department at University College, Dublin and were both taking his course on the architecture of trees. To those of us who studied with White in the 1980s, he seemed like a visitor from another planet, one who pointed out the strangeness of his new home to the gaping residents, most of whom had never noticed the oddness of the world surrounding them. Jim’s lectures were marvels of erudition, scientific concision, and anecdote. Many years later when I worked in a Costa Rica, a well-known tropical forest researcher told me that he had only written one “fan letter” in his life and this was to James White. Anyway, we returned to White with our sketches and observations on the architectural patterns formed by sea pink roots. He was little incredulous at first – surely we were out looking at birds? In those days it was not uncommon for hale teens to spend their days traipsing out with binoculars to Bull Island to observe birds. It was unimaginable, apparently, that the youth would be looking at plant roots. Perhaps it’s best for a teacher not to sense the full measure of his impact, as it may constrain the random suggestions with which he peppers his lectures.
I hastily submitted this patent last week to provide an effective
tool to further our revolutionary aims. This simple invention provides a
novel mechanism to assist the Occupy Wall Street movement in bringing the system to its knees. Those who cannot march in the streets with Occupy Wall Street and yet who also inarguably Hate the Man™ and want to Destabilize the Status Quo™ can foment radical change from the comfort of home by deploying Mental-Rental™.
O’Cinnéide’s
descent at the end was rapid and it dominated the last few years of his life. This apparition had, after all, been the
observation of a lifetime, one that he now imagined he had foolishly
overlooked. He had captured an event, as
improbable and perhaps as significance as the Higgs boson, using that most
primitive and complex of apparatuses: the human eye. Not a direct view, but a sidelong glance, an
eye modified like a microscope with phase contrast. He was now determined to investigate
with the vigor the situation demanded.
He retired and went to Florida; not to rest but to replicate. Florida ranch houses became his cyclotron.
I'll link this up to the piece on 3quarksdaily tomorrow, if you care to read it.
If asceticism was simply a matter of self-mortification then we could claim that we have never lived in more ascetic times. We diet to shed those dozens and dozens of unsightly pounds; some voluntarily submit to a surgical ablating of the flesh for the purposes of fabricating the perfect nose; our star athletes allegedly undergo a period of sexual continence before the big game; some of you may even gallop on scorching days for distances in excess of twenty-six miles, for no better reason than to replicate the achievement of the first person to die from that feat. And in general terms the definition of the ascetic as a person who practices “rigorous self-discipline, severe abstinence, austerity”, might tempt us to smuggle the more excessive of these modern deprivations under the definitional bar. However, the OED qualifies the definition by pointing out that asceticism aims are achieved “by seclusion or by abstinence from creature comforts”. Furthermore, the term derives etymologically from the Greek asketikos, meaning monk or hermit and more generally the root term is ascesis – the practice of self discipline, or exercise. If, in the final analysis, the contemporary mortifications listed above seem to fall short of being ascetic, why might we, in contrast, regard environmentalism as fundamentally so?
To use the life of Simeon Stylites as a point of comparison with environmental thought and practice may be a challenging place to start to make a case that environmentalism is foundationally ascetic. Certainly there are more temperate ascetics, ones who like St Antony of Egypt (231-356 AD) traveled to the wilds there to meditatively dally, but after decades alone returned to society, at least in the sense of taking many disciples under his care. In other words, there are ascetics whose practice might be more appropriately compared to Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond. Perhaps one might compare tree-stylites like John Muir perched in a storm-tossed Douglas Fir or Julia Butterfly Hill residing in her California Redwood to the ascetic sadhus of India, who, practicing what is called urdhamukhi, dangle out of trees. In the case of Hill, she lasted two years; as for the Muir and the sadhus, the latter who dangle upside-down, their tree dwelling lasted a matter of hours. And so on; one might look for a milder ascetic counterpart for Robinson Jeffers dyspepsia concerning his fellows, preferring you’ll recall, to “sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk”; one for Ed Abbey’s hilarious but curmudgeonly defense of inaccessibility for Arches National Monument in Desert Solitaire; one for Paul Ehrlich’s discomfort in an ancient Indian taxi (“People visiting, arguing and screaming…. defecating and urinating”) prompting his writing of The Population Bomb; counterparts even for the simple-living needed for ecological footprint reduction, for the belt-tightening required by sustainability, and for the meat-eschewing dicta of environmental vegetarianism. In all of these examples there is a whiff of asceticism but none requires the foot ulcerating commitment of standing on a pillar for decades. So why Simeon?
