by Nina Burton
But something was missing in these halls and exhibits. It was the life that constantly reached ahead, to nourish itself, to mate, communicate, hunt or flee, all in close contact with earth, water and sky, and with one another. This was the eternal interplay that allowed everything to thrive, insatiable in its hunger for life, and for even more life. The walls people had erected between different species had two sides that belonged together. I knew now that the walls in the house where I would sleep were insulated with ants and bees, and the ceiling was a floor to birds even as the floor was a ceiling for foxes.
But one question remained. How was this living whole held together? I thought about how a myriad of dots can create figures in pointillistic art, just as the pixels on a screen do. The more dots, the sharper the picture, so each dot contributes to shades and details.
Gathering them into one narrative was impossible, and in a story everything takes place from one viewpoint. That’s not the case in the teeming masses of life. But in a painting class I had learned a method to deepen perspective by using the golden ratio that came out of the Renaissance. Remarkably enough, it seems to be mirrored in nature. Author Peter Nilson found the proportions of the golden ratio reflected in the structure of snails, pinecones and sunflowers, so perhaps nature and art obey similar laws.
As an astronomer, Nilson even found points of contact between the shape of the universe and that of music. The vibration-like movements of the first atoms continued through the cosmos and are the cause of so-called ‘flicker noise’ in computers. This was discovered not only in distant star systems, but also in the noise of Earth’s waterways and winds, in natural disasters and in the variations of stock markets.
There are related sound patterns even among living creatures. When a gibbon’s song is played at double speed it sounds like birdsong; when played slower it sounds like whale song. When the sound waves are written out they all have the same pattern, rather like the way a twig resembles a tree. The differences lie in scale and tempo.
And tempo compensates for some of our other differences as well. In a single second, a bee can comprehend movements a hundred times faster than what I can see. Smaller animals with faster metabolisms take in more of the world than bigger ones do. The hearts of songbirds and mice beat 600 times per minute, as if they were leaves fluttering in the breeze. The tempo of a whale’s heart is a hundred times slower, so lifetime heartbeats can number about the same in creatures large and small.
Could these be seen as time signatures? If insects move in sixteenths and mammals in fourths, the plodding gait of a badger would be a whole note. Every creature moving through a flowing piece of music with endless variations. Beneath them all runs a common chord in the magnetic field at the core of the Earth. It fluctuates between eight and sixteen times per second. The same rhythm, in my brain, formed a state of quiet. What a mind-boggling thought. Could we be tuned to the Earth?
Then I remembered NASA’s recording of the Earth’s electromagnetic vibrations. Transformed into sound, it was a roaring harmony with no beginning or end. Could all life on the planet be part of that roar? Biochemist Jesper Hoffmeyer called the Earth’s entire sphere of communication the semiosphere, and as a biological grammar it encompassed millions of modes of expression. It was scents, colours and shapes; chemical signals, touches and movements; waves of all sorts and electrical fields – in short, signs of life. It was the modulations of the blackbird, the fifth of the great tit, the buzz of insect wings. It was whale song and the various sounds of fish among the drumming of molluscs. It was the howls of mating calls, the burbling snorts of mother foxes, the grunting of badgers, the ultrasonic songs of field mice and the faint tones of earthworms.
At the core of every being, too, lay silent, vibrating chords of genes. They have been compared to music played on an instrument with four notes. One gene could contain a hundred chords, and in tandem with others could turn variations on an ancient theme into continual new tones. It never ceased, for life is an ever-unfinished symphony.
The air had that bright, gentle, late-summer feeling. It was getting to be time for the migratory birds to take off. They were surely storing their meagre provisions before watching the landscape change beneath them.
I no longer dreamed of following them. The saturated air they were borne by was here as well. It held thousands of scents, vibrations of wingbeats and millions of bygone breaths. There were even scattered parts of life in the air, for the molecules had traces of a hundred different algae, forty thousand fungi spores, and the pollen of ten thousand plants. Among them, too, hovered microscopic particles of salt, ash, mud and even topaz, as if the entire world wished to gather in the limitless air. I myself contributed to it, for each hour I shed a million tiny particles of skin, many with an invisible passenger or two.
My senses could capture none of this. Even the nerve cells that built a world in my brain were unknown to me. There were as many of them as there were stars in the Milky Way, so everything I perceived was encompassed in their immeasurable branches. In the same instant I had a thought it was re-created there, and when my attention was captured by something else it lived on in the background, just as everything on the property did when I looked away.
Yet I could only perceive a fraction of everything around me. In my mind I measured my own abilities against the keen senses of other creatures. Foxes can hear an earthworm’s bristles move against the grass, and plants’ roaming roots can perceive the faint chemistry of the soil. Eels can pick up a thimble’s worth of an essence that has been sprayed in a lake, while dolphins use echolocation to understand the nature of something a hundred metres away. Compasses, weather radar and GPS fit in the brains of migratory birds, and a male mosquito can smell a female at a distance of several kilometres. Ants, for their part, create the infrastructure of a whole society using scents.
And think of what bees can perceive! Their extensive internal maps contain an entry for each flower, plus the time it blossoms and the flight time to reach it. They can see ultraviolet shifts in flowers just as birds do in tree leaves, so they can fly in and out among them.
What if all of these specialised senses could be combined? What would they show? Are we in fact part of some image or music? It could be created in a stream that took its shape from what it filled, and perhaps this was how life had found a centre in the tiniest mite and blade.
Was I simply loving life through all the many shapes it came dressed in? The orpine was still blooming on the ground and I suddenly remembered that it was used for love magic. One stalk was bent, and I picked it to put among some twigs in a jug on the veranda table. Immediately a late-summer bumblebee came by to find some nectar. Wingbeats and rustling leaves swept me up in the sounds of life. Then a branch of the birch brushed the western wall, and I looked up to find a squirrel had just settled there. Judging by its skinny tail, it was one of a new generation who would soon take over the property. It regarded me sleepily, then closed its eyes for a moment. Then it opened them again to look me right in the eye. The Earth had a thousand species I had never seen and a thousand languages I had never mastered, but it also offered wordless encounters such as this one. I was happy.
Ratatosk, I thought. Please stay. We need to look after the tree.
Author’s Note
The world is teeming with information that often seems more like a fairy tale than any work of fiction could. In a book with thousands of facts from hundreds of sources, all are important. Had I cited them in the text it would have been an academic dissertation rather than a literary essay. Instead, the sources of all referred facts are gathered here, with many thanks to the countless researchers behind them.
Bibliography
Translator’s note: original titles have been added for those works the author read in translation.
Introduction – Into Nature
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Burton,
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1 – The Blue Roof
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——Naturen – livets oändliga mångfald, övers. Roland Adlerberth, Stockholm 1974 (Original title: Natur – Reich der tausend Wunder)
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——Supernature II, London 1986
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Burton, Nina, Den sagolika verklighetens genre, De Nios litterära kalender 2007
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2 – Wingbeats at the Door
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——Den stora humleresan, övers. Helena Sjöstrand Svenn & Gösta Svenn, Stockholm 2018 (Original title: Bee Quest)
Goulson, Dave, Galen i humlor. En berättelse om små men viktiga varelser, övers. Helena Sjöstrand Svenn & Gösta Svenn, Stockholm 2015 (Original title: A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees)
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Griffin, Donald R., Animal Minds, Chicago 1992
Hanson, Thor, Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees, N.Y. & London 2018
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——Från insekternas värld, Stockholm 1963
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Meijer, Eva, Djurens språk. Det hemliga samtalet i naturens värld, övers. Johanna Hedenberg, Stockholm 2019 (Original title: Dierentalen; English title: Animal Languages: The Secret Conversations of the Living World)