“Surely it is obvious to any thinking person that the old schools of religious thought (and their modern antecedents, for that matter) are failing us morally and practically. I have long proposed a new ontological framework that rejects the pointless worship of confected books and dusty shrines and instead focuses on something real; the animals, the plants, the microscopic organisms – in which you truly perceive the essence of divine creativity. And where do these elements shine their brightest? Where is this sense of a transcendent presence most intensely felt? The ocean, of course. It is time for us to embrace this, through a kind of Marine Theology, if you will.” – Felix Ookean, 1967.
Sunday, 28 September 2014
Thursday, 18 September 2014
Ever Since We Left The Water.
(Originally published in Pelagic Ontology Letters Spring, 1981)
Earlier this year I was standing on the Victorian coast enjoying a scene of breathtaking beauty. The site has no official name on the maps but is found near Cape Otway, a few miles from the wreck of the 19th century cargo ship, Eric The Red. It’s a rocky shoreline carved from a blue-grey sandstone conglomerate decorated with ribbons of anthracitic coal and studded with barnacles, shipworms and multicoloured starfish (Meridiastra calcar). As I gazed into a rock pool full of huge kelp blades undulating back and forth agreeably with the constant pull of the tide, a thought hit me. It was a sudden thought but one of such truth and simplicity that I have been unable to disavow it: Ever since we left the water, our problems started.
The vertebrate lineage began exploring the terrestrial realm in the late-Devonian (~370 million years ago) and humans, the most self-consciously conscious of tetrapods, have been filled with a sense of longing for the marine world ever since. Early in our family’s history, our ancestors the noble fishes, enjoyed the constant warmth and buoyancy of our maternal ocean. For millions of years, not a single vertebrate* deigned to drag themselves into the infernal terrestrial realm and deal with it’s painful temperature fluctuations, unforgiving gravity and constant barrage of deadly ultraviolet radiation. Until one day, an obscure, opportunistic amphibian ruined everything by hauling themselves out of the sea and wedding our destiny to dry land.
It’s evidently not just old scientists musing on obscure philosophical concepts who feel this existential yearning for our saltwater birthplace**: look at any beach, any point where the terrestrial world meets the ocean and you will find scores of people throwing themselves back in. Humanity has branched out into a multitude of highly varied cultures and societies, and yet almost every one of them has spent a considerable amount of time and energy to situate themselves as close to the ocean as was possible. The sea is only partially acquiescent with this - constantly sending us back - but we continue to embrace her as if acting out the communal regret we feel in leaving, begging to be taken back.
As I write this, I feel a familiar ache in my back - the inevitable curse of the middle-aged Homo sapiens. I am condemned to experience this dull agony due to having descended from quadrupedal forebears who’s own body plan was jerry-rigged via evolution with what they had inherited from the aquatically adapted fishes. The end result for me is that instead of being in the centre of the human torso, the load-bearing spinal column is positioned at the back; an architecture unacceptable to even the most amateur of home handymen. If the creator deity designed my patio, I would have had him fired. In reality, all land dwelling vertebrates are imperfect, modified fishes; just barely getting by with limbs that are merely refashioned fins, lungs that are inverted gills.
And the gravity! Without the support of the dense seawater, the gravity pulls on me like — but before this becomes a tedious list of pathological complaints from an old fart, we must acknowledge the spiritual loss due to our emigration from the ocean. Who doesn't feel that they are missing out on something terribly special when they gaze down into the kaleidoscopic world of the deep? The corals, the mollusks, in the oceanic world, even the algae*** are vibrant and beautiful. On land we are stuck with a dull, dichromatic palette of muddy browns and greens with only rare glimpses of real colour and its effect on the soul is draining. I am certainly an appreciator of all facets of the natural world, but nothing on the land can possibly compare to the sheer otherworldliness and majesty of the undersea realm.
Well, tides go out and tides come in again. Other members of our mammalian tribe such as the whales, dolphins, seals and sea lions, dugongs and manatees returned to sea; why not us? Perhaps the future direction of humanity’s ongoing evolution is a homecoming to the environment that we so unwisely spurned around 370 million years ago. The terrestrial experiment has been successful in many pragmatic ways, but we are metaphysically poorer for it.
* Although the invertebrates had us beat onto the land by over 50 million years! A hollow victory if ever there was one.
** I, in particular may be thought of as having a personal stake in this as my family name, you may have guessed, translates as ‘ocean’ in my father’s native Estonian tongue.
*** In fact, the colouration of our oceanic algae is so distinctive, that many major divisions within the group were originally elucidated on the basis of these characteristics. Every layman has heard of blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria), but it is worth exploring all the families in their variously hued glory; Chlorophyta (green algae), Rhodophyta (red algae), Phaeophyceae (brown algae), Chrysophyceae (golden-brown algae) and Xanthophyceae (yellow-green algae).
Earlier this year I was standing on the Victorian coast enjoying a scene of breathtaking beauty. The site has no official name on the maps but is found near Cape Otway, a few miles from the wreck of the 19th century cargo ship, Eric The Red. It’s a rocky shoreline carved from a blue-grey sandstone conglomerate decorated with ribbons of anthracitic coal and studded with barnacles, shipworms and multicoloured starfish (Meridiastra calcar). As I gazed into a rock pool full of huge kelp blades undulating back and forth agreeably with the constant pull of the tide, a thought hit me. It was a sudden thought but one of such truth and simplicity that I have been unable to disavow it: Ever since we left the water, our problems started.
The vertebrate lineage began exploring the terrestrial realm in the late-Devonian (~370 million years ago) and humans, the most self-consciously conscious of tetrapods, have been filled with a sense of longing for the marine world ever since. Early in our family’s history, our ancestors the noble fishes, enjoyed the constant warmth and buoyancy of our maternal ocean. For millions of years, not a single vertebrate* deigned to drag themselves into the infernal terrestrial realm and deal with it’s painful temperature fluctuations, unforgiving gravity and constant barrage of deadly ultraviolet radiation. Until one day, an obscure, opportunistic amphibian ruined everything by hauling themselves out of the sea and wedding our destiny to dry land.
It’s evidently not just old scientists musing on obscure philosophical concepts who feel this existential yearning for our saltwater birthplace**: look at any beach, any point where the terrestrial world meets the ocean and you will find scores of people throwing themselves back in. Humanity has branched out into a multitude of highly varied cultures and societies, and yet almost every one of them has spent a considerable amount of time and energy to situate themselves as close to the ocean as was possible. The sea is only partially acquiescent with this - constantly sending us back - but we continue to embrace her as if acting out the communal regret we feel in leaving, begging to be taken back.
As I write this, I feel a familiar ache in my back - the inevitable curse of the middle-aged Homo sapiens. I am condemned to experience this dull agony due to having descended from quadrupedal forebears who’s own body plan was jerry-rigged via evolution with what they had inherited from the aquatically adapted fishes. The end result for me is that instead of being in the centre of the human torso, the load-bearing spinal column is positioned at the back; an architecture unacceptable to even the most amateur of home handymen. If the creator deity designed my patio, I would have had him fired. In reality, all land dwelling vertebrates are imperfect, modified fishes; just barely getting by with limbs that are merely refashioned fins, lungs that are inverted gills.
And the gravity! Without the support of the dense seawater, the gravity pulls on me like — but before this becomes a tedious list of pathological complaints from an old fart, we must acknowledge the spiritual loss due to our emigration from the ocean. Who doesn't feel that they are missing out on something terribly special when they gaze down into the kaleidoscopic world of the deep? The corals, the mollusks, in the oceanic world, even the algae*** are vibrant and beautiful. On land we are stuck with a dull, dichromatic palette of muddy browns and greens with only rare glimpses of real colour and its effect on the soul is draining. I am certainly an appreciator of all facets of the natural world, but nothing on the land can possibly compare to the sheer otherworldliness and majesty of the undersea realm.
Well, tides go out and tides come in again. Other members of our mammalian tribe such as the whales, dolphins, seals and sea lions, dugongs and manatees returned to sea; why not us? Perhaps the future direction of humanity’s ongoing evolution is a homecoming to the environment that we so unwisely spurned around 370 million years ago. The terrestrial experiment has been successful in many pragmatic ways, but we are metaphysically poorer for it.
- Felix Ookean, Cairns, December 1981.
* Although the invertebrates had us beat onto the land by over 50 million years! A hollow victory if ever there was one.
** I, in particular may be thought of as having a personal stake in this as my family name, you may have guessed, translates as ‘ocean’ in my father’s native Estonian tongue.
*** In fact, the colouration of our oceanic algae is so distinctive, that many major divisions within the group were originally elucidated on the basis of these characteristics. Every layman has heard of blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria), but it is worth exploring all the families in their variously hued glory; Chlorophyta (green algae), Rhodophyta (red algae), Phaeophyceae (brown algae), Chrysophyceae (golden-brown algae) and Xanthophyceae (yellow-green algae).
Sunday, 22 June 2014
A letter to the Creation Science Foundation.
(A letter addressed to the Creation Science Foundation, June 1983. This transcription was taken from a carbon copy; it is unknown if the original was sent or published.)
Dear scoundrels of the Creation 'Science' Foundation,
I am writing in regards to the spurious material that you are currently disseminating and to set you straight on a few matters regarding the creation of the universe. I was made aware of your fatuous organisation by some of my younger associates who were passing around your pamphlets for a lark; giggling at your childish inaccuracies. I, on the other hand, find nothing even remotely funny about scientific illiteracy.
Your asinine claims of a 'young earth' are so readily dispelled, I am not going rebut them in a letter – do your own damned research! But if you want to persist with this vacuous notion, I challenge you to invest the bulk of your life savings in a mining venture which must be helmed by a 'young-earth' geologist, mapping the rocks using only the scriptures as his guide. Mining in Australia is a multi-billion dollar industry (and that’s just through the utility of geological assumptions which you claim are wrong by many orders of magnitude), one can only assume that your new creationist company will make more money than any geological enterprise in history! Any hesitance on your part to do exactly as I've just outlined will be interpreted as intellectual cowardice of the highest order.
I was almost unable to believe that your organisation is apparently unaware that the tale of old Noah and his boat is a trifle concocted for the amusement of children and not a serious biological text. As you are neither zoologist nor shipwright I can’t fathom as to how you feel qualified to have an opinion on the matter at all. And how are we even supposed to incorporate this hogwash into serious scientific research? Should we relocate the universities' zoology departments into the shipyards? A boat is merely a boat, and scrawling 'SCIENCE' on the hull does not transmute it into a coherent, logical hypothesis.You're jejune approximation of scholarship is embarrassing to the onlooker and you should be made aware of this in no uncertain terms.
You have been indulged by well-meaning, misguided peers for far too long. At the risk of shattering your clearly tenuous grasp on reality I nonetheless feel obliged to point out to you that Jack and the Beanstalk is not a treatise on botany and that Star Wars should not be consulted for matters astronomical.
I was vaguely aware that these anti-evolutionary ideas had become worryingly established amongst our American cousins, but I always thought that the Australian race were naturally selected (ha!) for a strain of common sense that inoculates us against this sort of nonsense.
Hang your head in shame sirs, your buffoonery is an affront to us all.
Yours in anger,
Felix Ookean
E. J. Banfield Marine Research Fellow
James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville
Dear scoundrels of the Creation 'Science' Foundation,
I am writing in regards to the spurious material that you are currently disseminating and to set you straight on a few matters regarding the creation of the universe. I was made aware of your fatuous organisation by some of my younger associates who were passing around your pamphlets for a lark; giggling at your childish inaccuracies. I, on the other hand, find nothing even remotely funny about scientific illiteracy.
Your asinine claims of a 'young earth' are so readily dispelled, I am not going rebut them in a letter – do your own damned research! But if you want to persist with this vacuous notion, I challenge you to invest the bulk of your life savings in a mining venture which must be helmed by a 'young-earth' geologist, mapping the rocks using only the scriptures as his guide. Mining in Australia is a multi-billion dollar industry (and that’s just through the utility of geological assumptions which you claim are wrong by many orders of magnitude), one can only assume that your new creationist company will make more money than any geological enterprise in history! Any hesitance on your part to do exactly as I've just outlined will be interpreted as intellectual cowardice of the highest order.
I was almost unable to believe that your organisation is apparently unaware that the tale of old Noah and his boat is a trifle concocted for the amusement of children and not a serious biological text. As you are neither zoologist nor shipwright I can’t fathom as to how you feel qualified to have an opinion on the matter at all. And how are we even supposed to incorporate this hogwash into serious scientific research? Should we relocate the universities' zoology departments into the shipyards? A boat is merely a boat, and scrawling 'SCIENCE' on the hull does not transmute it into a coherent, logical hypothesis.You're jejune approximation of scholarship is embarrassing to the onlooker and you should be made aware of this in no uncertain terms.
You have been indulged by well-meaning, misguided peers for far too long. At the risk of shattering your clearly tenuous grasp on reality I nonetheless feel obliged to point out to you that Jack and the Beanstalk is not a treatise on botany and that Star Wars should not be consulted for matters astronomical.
I was vaguely aware that these anti-evolutionary ideas had become worryingly established amongst our American cousins, but I always thought that the Australian race were naturally selected (ha!) for a strain of common sense that inoculates us against this sort of nonsense.
Hang your head in shame sirs, your buffoonery is an affront to us all.
Yours in anger,
Felix Ookean
E. J. Banfield Marine Research Fellow
James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville
Sunday, 18 May 2014
An interview with Felix Ookean about his documentaries from 1985.
(Originally published in Antipodean Geographic, 6th August 1985.)
Q: You’ve just aired Monoliths From The Heavens – a controversial documentary series that suggests that ancient Australians were visited by extra-terrestrials. What lead you to embark on such a project?
FO: Unfortunately I am unable to talk about Monoliths due to a pending court case. Next question.
Q: Really? Can you describe the nature of the case?
FO: The indigenous peoples of central Australia, for whom I have immense respect, may I say, are unhappy about the central thesis of my series and are hoping to redress this in a legal setting. That’s all I can really say at present.
Q: Can you tell us about your earlier projects then, what precisely were you trying to get across with your documentaries? They always seemed to be just a little left of centre.
FO: Well, if I may begin at the beginning, let’s talk about Southern Oceans, my first series. I wanted to show a side of the ocean that is so ever-present and yet so infrequently focused on. The invertebrates. This is the most significant portion of our marine fauna and yet everybody seems to want to focus on sharks or seals or that sort of nonsense. Anybody can film a dolphin and get a response from an audience. I wanted a challenge – I wanted to try and reveal the charm of the mollusk, the verve of the echinoderm. So we got the most high-tech close zoom cameras of the time and filmed around the Victorian coast and a couple of days in Tasmania. For the abalone footage.
Q: What was the highlight for you during these shoots?
FO: Probably the elephant snail shoot. Did you know that we were the first people to ever film mating elephant snails? Even today I meet malacologists who, once they find out who I am, are just overwhelmed with gratitude for what we did on that shoot. The amount of times I’ve been approached by marine biologists of a certain vintage saying ‘Oh, you’re the guy who filmed the mating elephant snails!’…you know, it still happens today.
Q: And how did you go about producing the soundtrack?
FO: That was my first soundtrack, so everything was a learning experience back then. I was just rather fortunate to have a lot of very talented people on board from the Melbourne jazz scene. I had written a lot of melodic themes but without very much structure and just sort of threw them to my players and we all worked it out in the studio through improvisation and modification. It evolved.
Q: There’s a great sound on that album.
FO: That was brought about more by coincidence and necessity than by design. I didn’t really have an overarching aesthetic for the sessions, it just kind of coalesced through the idiosyncrasies of the players and the equipment we had access to at the time. For example we had a very adventurous young guitarist by the name of ‘Savage’ James Bell who used an early precursor to the wah pedal – he had constructed the thing himself, as he had most of his effects gear – which lent the soundtrack a very distinctive watery sound. Also my old friend Rob Teal, who is strictly speaking a marimba player by training, found an old vibraphone, which he was eager to try out with us. It provided a great exotica sounding, beachy vibe to the whole thing. No pun intended.
Q: None taken. After Southern Oceans, you moved on to the birds of Australia.
FO: Yes, I had been doing bird surveys at the time and was struck by this country’s amazing birdlife and the connection that so many Australians feel with these animals. I wanted to delve deeper than the superficial portrayal of our native birds that was so common on TV in the late sixties. I wanted to show the public what it really meant to be a bird. What they felt, how they saw the world. What life is like on two wings – or flippers in the case of penguins. We had a wonderful time filming it and the public was kind enough to turn the series into a rousing success. It was a great experience. We were probably single-handedly responsible for raising the profile of the Ruddy Turnstone – everybody talks about them these days but before we made Feathered Lives they were really only known by ornithologists and hardcore twitchers. And the music was some of our best and was also really successful which is always gratifying.
Q: It’s definitely the album of yours most commonly seen around these days.
FO: Well it sold quite well. Very well for a documentary soundtrack. I had a much bigger budget allowed for the recording sessions but I didn’t actually change the process much because I was so happy with the sound of the Southern Oceans sessions. Many of the same players were involved and so it has a very similar sound but I was able to procure the services of a rather sterling string quartet, which gave it a soaring, orchestral quality. Particularly on Twelve Apostlebirds, I don’t think that tune would have worked without them. I think also we were being very obviously influenced by some of the more avant-garde musicians in the Melbourne music scene at the time. That looseness of structure that was being employed by some of the jazz players was actually perfect for soundtrack music because it flowed more naturally and organically and suited the non-standard movements of the animals. And then of course on Australis we got even looser and avant-garde. That double LP is considered by some as a fine example of early Australian ‘prog rock’! [Laughs].
Q: Well, the 24-part Antarctic Suite certainly springs to mind.
FO: Yes, I suppose that one is certainly befitting of such a description.
Q: Australis – The Other Half was probably your most ambitious undertaking, but it wasn’t as well received as your preceding series. Why do you think that was the case?
FO: I think the whole thing was just too ambitious. Basically we were trying to document the entire natural history of the Southern Hemisphere, which in retrospect is just crazy. It turned into this Behemoth of a juggernaut and I simply had to see it through because there was so much riding on it and so many people involved… It was probably just too big, really. Perhaps Australis just wasn’t quite ready for television. Maybe it was too big a series for just one hemisphere. The music was good though, and people appreciated it. I must say though, it was rather a perplexing response. People will speak to me today and tell me how much they respect the music and I feel like demanding, ‘Yes, but what about the series?’ – nobody approaches me and compliments the series itself. But a small dedicated clique of clandestine record collectors have put the soundtrack up on a pedestal and I suppose I can expect some sort of obscure accolade when I’m a half-dead octogenarian, honouring my contributions to music that no one listens to. Frankly, I’d rather have the money [laughs].
Q: Do you think perhaps that there is an inherent disconnect between music and nature? Is it possible that most people just find the combination incongruous?
FO: I couldn’t disagree more. Listen – music and the natural world are not mutually exclusive magisteria; they’re two sides of the same coin. What could be more in synch with nature than music? Birds were singing long before we ever did. All I’m trying to do is to illustrate the music that is already present in the natural world. To highlight it and bring it into the foreground. If I have managed to achieve that – if only for a moment – in any of my films, then I consider that to be both a scientific and musical triumph.
Q: You’ve just aired Monoliths From The Heavens – a controversial documentary series that suggests that ancient Australians were visited by extra-terrestrials. What lead you to embark on such a project?
FO: Unfortunately I am unable to talk about Monoliths due to a pending court case. Next question.
Q: Really? Can you describe the nature of the case?
FO: The indigenous peoples of central Australia, for whom I have immense respect, may I say, are unhappy about the central thesis of my series and are hoping to redress this in a legal setting. That’s all I can really say at present.
Q: Can you tell us about your earlier projects then, what precisely were you trying to get across with your documentaries? They always seemed to be just a little left of centre.
FO: Well, if I may begin at the beginning, let’s talk about Southern Oceans, my first series. I wanted to show a side of the ocean that is so ever-present and yet so infrequently focused on. The invertebrates. This is the most significant portion of our marine fauna and yet everybody seems to want to focus on sharks or seals or that sort of nonsense. Anybody can film a dolphin and get a response from an audience. I wanted a challenge – I wanted to try and reveal the charm of the mollusk, the verve of the echinoderm. So we got the most high-tech close zoom cameras of the time and filmed around the Victorian coast and a couple of days in Tasmania. For the abalone footage.
Q: What was the highlight for you during these shoots?
FO: Probably the elephant snail shoot. Did you know that we were the first people to ever film mating elephant snails? Even today I meet malacologists who, once they find out who I am, are just overwhelmed with gratitude for what we did on that shoot. The amount of times I’ve been approached by marine biologists of a certain vintage saying ‘Oh, you’re the guy who filmed the mating elephant snails!’…you know, it still happens today.
Q: And how did you go about producing the soundtrack?
FO: That was my first soundtrack, so everything was a learning experience back then. I was just rather fortunate to have a lot of very talented people on board from the Melbourne jazz scene. I had written a lot of melodic themes but without very much structure and just sort of threw them to my players and we all worked it out in the studio through improvisation and modification. It evolved.
Q: There’s a great sound on that album.
FO: That was brought about more by coincidence and necessity than by design. I didn’t really have an overarching aesthetic for the sessions, it just kind of coalesced through the idiosyncrasies of the players and the equipment we had access to at the time. For example we had a very adventurous young guitarist by the name of ‘Savage’ James Bell who used an early precursor to the wah pedal – he had constructed the thing himself, as he had most of his effects gear – which lent the soundtrack a very distinctive watery sound. Also my old friend Rob Teal, who is strictly speaking a marimba player by training, found an old vibraphone, which he was eager to try out with us. It provided a great exotica sounding, beachy vibe to the whole thing. No pun intended.
Q: None taken. After Southern Oceans, you moved on to the birds of Australia.
FO: Yes, I had been doing bird surveys at the time and was struck by this country’s amazing birdlife and the connection that so many Australians feel with these animals. I wanted to delve deeper than the superficial portrayal of our native birds that was so common on TV in the late sixties. I wanted to show the public what it really meant to be a bird. What they felt, how they saw the world. What life is like on two wings – or flippers in the case of penguins. We had a wonderful time filming it and the public was kind enough to turn the series into a rousing success. It was a great experience. We were probably single-handedly responsible for raising the profile of the Ruddy Turnstone – everybody talks about them these days but before we made Feathered Lives they were really only known by ornithologists and hardcore twitchers. And the music was some of our best and was also really successful which is always gratifying.
Q: It’s definitely the album of yours most commonly seen around these days.
FO: Well it sold quite well. Very well for a documentary soundtrack. I had a much bigger budget allowed for the recording sessions but I didn’t actually change the process much because I was so happy with the sound of the Southern Oceans sessions. Many of the same players were involved and so it has a very similar sound but I was able to procure the services of a rather sterling string quartet, which gave it a soaring, orchestral quality. Particularly on Twelve Apostlebirds, I don’t think that tune would have worked without them. I think also we were being very obviously influenced by some of the more avant-garde musicians in the Melbourne music scene at the time. That looseness of structure that was being employed by some of the jazz players was actually perfect for soundtrack music because it flowed more naturally and organically and suited the non-standard movements of the animals. And then of course on Australis we got even looser and avant-garde. That double LP is considered by some as a fine example of early Australian ‘prog rock’! [Laughs].
Q: Well, the 24-part Antarctic Suite certainly springs to mind.
FO: Yes, I suppose that one is certainly befitting of such a description.
Q: Australis – The Other Half was probably your most ambitious undertaking, but it wasn’t as well received as your preceding series. Why do you think that was the case?
FO: I think the whole thing was just too ambitious. Basically we were trying to document the entire natural history of the Southern Hemisphere, which in retrospect is just crazy. It turned into this Behemoth of a juggernaut and I simply had to see it through because there was so much riding on it and so many people involved… It was probably just too big, really. Perhaps Australis just wasn’t quite ready for television. Maybe it was too big a series for just one hemisphere. The music was good though, and people appreciated it. I must say though, it was rather a perplexing response. People will speak to me today and tell me how much they respect the music and I feel like demanding, ‘Yes, but what about the series?’ – nobody approaches me and compliments the series itself. But a small dedicated clique of clandestine record collectors have put the soundtrack up on a pedestal and I suppose I can expect some sort of obscure accolade when I’m a half-dead octogenarian, honouring my contributions to music that no one listens to. Frankly, I’d rather have the money [laughs].
Q: Do you think perhaps that there is an inherent disconnect between music and nature? Is it possible that most people just find the combination incongruous?
FO: I couldn’t disagree more. Listen – music and the natural world are not mutually exclusive magisteria; they’re two sides of the same coin. What could be more in synch with nature than music? Birds were singing long before we ever did. All I’m trying to do is to illustrate the music that is already present in the natural world. To highlight it and bring it into the foreground. If I have managed to achieve that – if only for a moment – in any of my films, then I consider that to be both a scientific and musical triumph.
Saturday, 17 May 2014
Seeking out the Crustaceous Stigmata.
(Originally published in Animus Animalium Volume 27, Number 3, 1977)
Jack Haldane apparently once quipped to a group of theologians that his study of biology had taught him that any creator thereof must have ‘an inordinate fondness for beetles’. The fact that Haldane may never have actually said this appears to have deterred no one, in favour or against. Nevertheless, I’ll go one better than the old Cantabrigian and say this: if there is any sort of spiritual overseer of this planet (and there may well be) he is not only fond of coleopterans, he is an arthropod.
Consider the godly effort put into the stocking of this planet with suitable denizens. Given that arthropods comprise by far the majority of described animals – doubtless even more undescribed – what other conclusion can we draw but that this was the model that most interested the creator? Let’s say you enter a craftsman’s workshop; a wood turner or a shoemaker, and after seeing that 80% of their output comprised endless variations of the one theme, would you then point to an aberrant, one-off novelty and declare that this was his favourite design, above all others? Of course not! The breathtaking arrogance with which an obscure species of bipedal primate has erroneously declared that they and they alone were created in the great invertebrate’s image should be considered as evolutionarily excessive and unnecessary as their much vaunted intelligence*.
And yet this is what the ‘good’ books would have us accept. If ever proof was needed to show that the bible was an entirely man-made creation, it is surely the cavalier way its author refers to the creation of the bulk of metazoan life on this planet. The almighty, in his/her eternal creativity, and over a space of millions of years, creates infinite iterations of insects, countless classes of crustaceans, millions of makes of molluscs, and myriad other species of delightfully obscure and fascinating invertebrate phyla and how does the author of Genesis convey this? By describing the vast majority of life’s diversity as ‘creeping things’ and cramming them in amongst the equally uninspired groupings of ‘cattle’ and ‘beasts’ that were also apparently whipped up on the sixth day. It’s hard to imagine the creator’s hard work and artistic flair being described in such a pathetically understated and dismissive way if the book truly had any kind of authoritative input. The notion that cattle is a taxonomic division on par with the endlessly diverse creeping things of the invertebrata is an idea so obviously borne of ignorance; so obviously the product of a first-century mind bound to the immediate, prosaic concerns of an agronomic existence that it is astonishing to me that anyone ever reads past the first chapter of this mystic text at all!
Despite the celestial architect’s incontrovertible obsession with chitinous invertebrates, all we see of this in scripture is the woeful introduction in Genesis and then arthropods are barely ever mentioned again. Certainly, we are told that old man Leviticus warned us against eating shellfish (perhaps the only glimmer of real understanding of the almighty in the book?) but if we examine this verse we see that this is based on an instruction to avoid eating anything from the seas that ‘has not fins and scales’ – that is, anything aquatic that is not a fish. This is taxonomically lazy and theologically absurd. The eastern philosophies fare marginally better, but one still can’t shake the ever-growing understanding that organised religion is at best a comfortable refuge for those who would rather ignore the real details of the prime mover’s works. Go to the ant, o sluggards, and consider her ways!
So, why are these bookish aldermen pouring over dusty middle-eastern texts instead of scouring the beaches** for crustaceous stigmata, as I do? Why is it not considered blasphemy to remain so profoundly ignorant of the handiwork of a creator you claim to worship? These poseurs, on being invited to a comprehensive gallery of a master's life works, available for unlimited study, respond; No thanks – we'd rather read and reread a heavily edited biography of the artist's son written by men who never met him. For every Saint Francis, there are a million dreary Augustinians trying to achieve martyrdom by boring themselves to death through drudging catechism. These poor wretches will meet their maker in time of course, and when they gaze into his compound eyes, then will they realise their folly.
Only the ancient Egyptians (derisively dismissed by the monotheists as ‘pagans’) seemed to really grasp the empyrean nature of the beetles in their midst, stoically undertaking their Sisyphean task day after day. Where the vapid minds of today’s literalists see an insect rolling a ball of dung, the ancients saw rebirth and resurrection; sanctity and wisdom. We would be wise to emulate the Egyptians in their veneration of this dignified coprophage and its various family members; the insects, crustaceans, chelicerates, myriapods and the late trilobites. It is in their exoskeletal forms that you will truly see the face of god.
- Felix Ookean, 1977
*And, by the way, see how much that helps you if the cephalopods were ever to develop a colonial mentality. A slight rise in sea level (my friends in the Earth Science department inform me that this is inevitable) and we will all learn that while intelligence is a lovely thing, when coupled with eight arms and the physical flexibility that only comes with a lack of an internal skeleton, it’s nigh unstoppable.
** Another favoured design feature of the deities (particularly the native dreamtime gods of my adopted homeland) unforgivably and bafflingly underappreciated by organised religion.
*And, by the way, see how much that helps you if the cephalopods were ever to develop a colonial mentality. A slight rise in sea level (my friends in the Earth Science department inform me that this is inevitable) and we will all learn that while intelligence is a lovely thing, when coupled with eight arms and the physical flexibility that only comes with a lack of an internal skeleton, it’s nigh unstoppable.
** Another favoured design feature of the deities (particularly the native dreamtime gods of my adopted homeland) unforgivably and bafflingly underappreciated by organised religion.
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