Let me start with something that has some rhythm and pulse:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
——William Butler Yeats from Sailing to Byzantium
Over time, I have committed to memory a few lines of poetry here and there. These lines from Yeats were the first. But anything can start to feel like a well travelled road after while, even something exquisite. I am again reminded of the constancy of change and the tatters that are inevitable over time. Now fires are burning all over the West and things feel very tattered and torn, sometimes beyond recognition. What is possible in the midst of such damage?
I am drawn to the clapping and the singing and Yeats’ call to turn it up…… to louder sing, to bring back to the foreground the power pulsing through life. It seems like a magic act: Now it’s gone and with a loud clap it’s back: but I was the one who left the dazzling world of magic.
Poetry reminds me that the whole world is organized around the aesthetics of rhythm. Some sciences talk about that as well, and are emerging from their silos to engage in cross talk to turn up the volume on the cascade of rhythms in the natural world. ( Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet).
Landscapes shimmer when they gather rhythms shared across varied forms of life. Shimmer describes a coming in and out of focus of how species interconnect and their cascading effects. The liveliness of landscapes enact rhythms and pulses of ancestral power from dull to brilliant. This is life riding a wave that is always coming.
This is a love story: angiosperms and flying foxes in Australia.
Shimmer or Bir’yun is a gift of the Yolngu people of Australia, that Deborah Bird Rose * learned by living and studying there for 30 years. But really she says she learned it by “dancing all through the night”. It shows us unexpected coordinations of multispecies worlds. It is a seasonal kiss of mutually thrilling encounters among flying foxes, flowering eucalyptus trees and rain all happening in increasingly fragmented Australian landscapes.
Bird gives us a more detailed look: “Flowers and flying foxes come together every year with beautiful timing and exquisite generosity, giving each other great kisses that bring forth new generations. Blossoming takes place sequentially and flying foxes somehow know when trees start to bloom hundreds of kilometers away…The tongue meets the flower and the flower meets the tongue in a kiss of symbiotic mutualism. Trees call out to flying foxes of color and scent , and flying foxes respond with gusto.”
“One of the great utterances of other species is this beautiful assent to life. ……It is a great expressive, demonstrative ‘yes’. Let us consider the lush, extravagant beauty, flamboyance, and dazzling seductiveness with which Eucalypts say yes. They burst open sequentially, and when they burst, every branch and twig says, ‘Yes! More! More buds, more flowers, more color, more scent, more pollen, more nectar!’ More and more, and all that can be conjured from within the tree to reach out into the world with this great, vidid, mutisensorial call ‘yes!'”. (Deborah Bird Rose, from Shimmer in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet).
Rose writes that for shimmer to capture our eye there must be an absence of it. This happens naturally in seasonal changes but is grasped more starkly in disasters where we are struck by the reality of extinction cascades. Potentials arise and erode.
In a world of connectivity, we live to celebrate another day and to experience life’s shimmer as it comes forth in our lives with all manner of tears, happiness, grief, committment, love, exuberance, and celebration.
The kiss of life is an ancestral blessing, alive, brilliant, and pulsating in the world around us and within us. This brilliance is a lure, that draws me, grabs me. Much like the sun on water or like when a painting catches my eye. Rose writes, ” We are called to live within faith that there are patterns beyond our known patterns and that, in the midst of all that we do not know, we also gain knowledge. We are called to acknowledge that in the midst of what we cannot choose, we also make choices. And we are called into recognition: of the shimmer of life’s pulses and the great patterns within which the power of life expressed itself.”
Something for the dance—–
Nick Cave on piano performing Cosmic Dancer
Aretha Franklin singing Mary, Don’t You Weep with James Cleveland and choir.
Aretha Franklin singing, How I Got Over, with James Cleveland and choir.
Be well,
Marlene
*Shimmer is an Aboriginal aesthetic discussed by Deborah Bird Rose, Anthropologist and professor in Environmental Humanities . Her writing in the areas of extinction, ethics and Aboriginal ecological philosophy have made her a key figure in the environmental humanities.
*Photograph of my garden
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