fruit trees and ants and a penguin

 

abundant sloe (blackthorn) harvest this year, will soon become liqueur

Today, I got the shakes, which is what I call a day with no get-up-and-go, no energy, when every task has to be reduced to its minimum. These days come and go. I've picked a handful of blueberries and a bowl of mirabelle plums before it got too hot to rummage in the garden. R bravely trimmed the hedge. My mood is lousy, I am prone to angry arguments and have been sulking a bit. Cannot remember what caused it but at least I have a good excuse to withdraw and do nothing, not even thinking.

 

almost too many pears

 

and plums

and the vegetables

Here are some thoughts and stuff that came my way recently. I listened to a lecture by Nigerian philosopher/psychologist Bayo Akomolafe:

In a death spiral (otherwise called ant milling), ants seemingly become fixated in a lethal cycle of sorts. Entomologists believe that some kind of pheromonic accident occurs when the cartographical chemical loops on itself, compelling the ants to keep going round and round, probably intensifying their pacing in the hopes of arriving home.

But they rarely do. If you were an ant, it would be very difficult to shake yourself free from the trance of a death spiral. On the other hand, it would be dangerously easy – it seems – to believe that the next unrelenting step would bring you closer home. In most death spirals observed, the ants march in their crazed continuity, sometimes for days, come rain or sunshine, and then die out of exhaustion, the hopes for a safe arrival lingering over their little bodies like pheromonic ghosts unsure of where to go.

The ant’s death spiral is a multi-species phenomenon, involving human onlookers and their speculations about ant society. Who knows how it comes to be that ants seemingly march in a circle – sometimes as large as a football stadium or as small as could fit on an office table – and then die afterwards? It’s impossible to say for sure what is happening. And yet, we would be remiss if we didn’t heed the ancient warning to learn from ants.

What do death spirals tell us about the constancy of the modern quest for solutions to critical civilization-baring problems and the subsequent realizations that these applications often retain the logic of the problem, perhaps even fortifying the conditions that led to the issue in the first place? Perhaps we can begin to speak about ‘anthro-milling’, not just ant milling: the enlistment of expertise and human agency in territorial patterns of repetition. A trance that whispers we’ll be home – if only we persist in what we already know…

Because one theoretical way an ant can break out of its trance is if it became infected by a fungus, like ophiocordyceps unilateralis – the zombie-ant fungus. Once infected, an ant breaks away from holding patterns and strays, getting lost in the forest, far away from incarcerating concepts of arrival and the anxieties about identity. Somewhere mandible-deep in the underside of a leaf, the zombie-ant becomes an art-form for fungal sporulation – no longer ant nor fungus, but now a curious living-dying betweenness that produces new kinds of worlds.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for us – citizens gestating in modern demise – to think along with the monstrous, to think along with the edges, to map out new realities.

Bayo Akomolafe

And I listened to a conversation between Werner Herzog and the physicist Lawrence Krauss. I could listen to Werner Herzog's voice forever, his Bavarian-English accent is a thing of beauty. It's a long conversation and I listened to it in instalments while I knitted the grandchild's cardigan. There are of course many anecdotes, stories from his childhood and weird stuff that happened when directing his movies and documentaries and writing opera scripts and books and so on. Here's one story about his grandfather:

". . . my grandfather . . . (in) the last years of his life, he was demented or insane. And he did not recognise his wife anymore and he would sit at dinner table and address her as madam . . .  and one night he folded his napkin, put his cutlery cleanly on the table, stood up and bowed to her. And he said to her: Madam, if I were not married, I would ask for your hand."

In this conversation, there's no mention of the existential penguin from the documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" (2007), which in my humble opinion is essential viewing. (Full video is available on youtube, click here.) So here's the penguin, he/she has been part of my imagination for years, Werner Herzog's accent, by the way, is nothing like my English accent despite the fact that I also come from Bavaria - but learned to speak English in Ireland.