Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  He gave me the stick loaded with a scrap and I put it in my mouth.

  “With your mouth?” he asked.

  Soon what I thought was a male, based on the size and demeanor, came toward us, slowly, warily, but without fanfare. I watched his eyes, which, up close, shone black in the reflected light. A white band of fur masked them. His blunt head was larger than mine, the jaws wide, cranium vaulted to protect the brain so it could be spared the impact of molars crushing bones. Spotted hyenas have been known to splinter an adult giraffe bone in their jaws. Their pelage is spotted perhaps to disaggregate their forms during predatory salvos and is highly varied across individuals. This one, I noticed, was deeply chromatic in the artificial light.

  Our mouths a few inches apart, he took the meat, and, with the stick in my mouth, I waited for the hyena man to reload me.

  “Again?” he asked, and the same hyena approached. I leaned forward for him to eat, bringing my shoulders up and tilting in my head so that our skulls nearly touched. More cameras flashed.

  “At least,” Michelle said later, as we walked back through the gate of the old city toward the storerooms of Rimbaud, “they got meat out of the deal.”

  The largest spotted hyenas are not males. Clans are matriarchal and females are selected for size, in part so they can defend their cubs from males who have no role in the raising of offspring and are interested in coition, and in part so they can reinforce status hierarchies vis-à-vis other females. Nonetheless, rank is based chiefly on lineage and resultant alliance factions rather than solely on physical prowess. Spotted hyenas, like other hyenas, have densely intricate social systems and may be more adept at collective problem-solving in some instances than chimpanzees. They are highly intelligent hunters and formidable physical specimens. At night, in moister air, they may be able to hear lions on a kill at distances up to ten kilometers, and their hearts are proportionately larger than those of these competitors so they can remain at speed for longer pursuit segments. Finally, while spotted hyenas are misconstrued as thieving scavengers, conservation biologists report that it is lions who more often steal prey carcasses from hunting hyenas than the reverse.

  It is hardly surprising then that encouraging these animals to haunt garbage mounds in high-density human settlements where some people sleep outside sets the stage for predation. The only way to understand the relative dearth of attacks on humans is as a result of adaptive pressures on hyenas to veer toward low-output, reprisal-free cleanup of cities and towns where uncleared refuse is abundant. Even so, on that night in Harar, it felt strange to share such tight space with young children and an animal who, more than other carnivores, has justified the zipping of our tent flap for years. There has been a thrill of excitement when hyenas have passed us in the night, but there has also been the rush of fear. Typically, spotted hyenas begin to feed on large prey at the haunches and move toward the heart and lungs in order to maximize blood intake. However, they’ve been alleged to eat off the faces of sleepers whose heads protrude from their bags and who have left their tent screens open, or even to drag people, sleeping bags and all, out into the night. I have never had reason to trust these accounts of bush maulings. Hyenas have paused at my tent in bushveld regions and dry savannas and even brushed the walls and sniffed at the turf-level seams. But nothing more. Nonetheless, I’ve stayed still on the ground and kept a knife.

  So now, when parents from one of the vehicles placed a young boy in my hands and I saw soon afterward a large female hyena come out of the dark, nipples trailing almost to the ground, much larger, more powerful, than any individuals we had seen thus far and deeply unconcerned, businesslike in her movements, the scene felt more like a crude distortion than a scenario poised to end well. So before the hyena man could place the stick in the boy’s mouth, I wrapped him up tightly, covering his chest and stomach with my arms, and leaned forward so I could pull him back sharply, positioning my neck and shoulders directly alongside his.

  None of this fazed the smaller hyena that came forward. There was a brief interchange in which the animal received the meat beside our faces, and then it was over. We were standing. I was holding the boy to my chest and delivering him to his parents. There was applause. The show was complete. The Harari men came up to congratulate me. One after another, we bumped shoulders and shook hands. Then Michelle rose from where she had been shooting and we paid and walked away.

  Later, we wandered through the stone streets of the Jugol in the darkness. Here and there, people were asleep beside the flowing sewers or in winding back alleys, half prone, half leaning against the narrow walls like storm wreckage. Several stirred to raise a hand for help, a donation, once they’d made us out in the dimness as foreigners. “Ferengi,” they would murmur, then raise their shoulders and eyes toward the sky. But most watched us from atop sacks of barley or potatoes, their hands lit occasionally by phones, their fingers often buried in plastic bags full of soft khat branches from which, one by one, they would pull off the narcotic leaves and roll them into their mouths.

  In the photos in the merchant’s house, we’d seen many street scenes like these, dully illuminated, the dark tones of the photographs by Rimbaud and others picking up light, shading out expressions, making everything into a half world where something elemental is left out or grows by omission. There had been a guest book open by the door that we did not sign, but from which Michelle had read several entries aloud. They were written by travelers, mostly from Europe, who cited mysteries in the life history of the poet. Now, more than ever, they wanted to know why he’d stopped writing. Why he’d turned to exporting coffee, to running munitions, to accompanying caravans. To photography. Why, they asked, had Rimbaud not written of Harar?

  We stayed quiet for a long time. Finally, Michelle asked how it was that I had ended up holding a child. She had been shooting. There were humans and nonhumans filtering around. Dust had come up from the alley, obscuring things, and car beams had flickered. People were moving, she said, between me and her camera, edging closer to the action.

  “I have no idea why that happened.”

  “Didn’t someone say something to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  She shook her head. “Well, anyway, it was quite a scene.”

  I thought then of the large female that had come out of the shadows as our small show closed out in the alley. Something about her way of looking sidelong at humans stayed with me. Judging by her form, she had had multiple litters. Some of her grown cubs, potentially, were those we had fed. But she’d made no move to take meat from me. If anything, she’d stayed farther from the crowd, walking the perimeter of the small clearing fed by the alley, her eyes at a distance glowing green in the car beams. Even in that setting, it was hard to believe that she would be fed by people. She was different from the hyenas I have seen in the bush. Her wariness and intelligence, to my eyes, looked to be of a distinct kind. I would not trust her any more than she would trust me.

  The sadness of Rimbaud’s final letters, his last journey down off the eastern escarpment to the Red Sea, Isabelle’s account of his deathbed desire to return to Africa, may haunt at least a Westerner’s vision of the old city. But as far as mysteries surrounding the poet, I would place them alongside those of that nocturnal denizen of the old city. That female was lean and experienced and close to 150 pounds. I believe she had cubs to feed in the mountains. Despite everything that was going on at the end, I was trying to keep an eye on her. She wasn’t a part of it. She was wraithing well on the outside. As the Oromo people would have it, a kind of spirit. Though I found only fleeting mention of hyenas in Rimbaud’s poetry, penned in France, I believe that strong, cautious predator who has survived with her clans across the millennia just beyond our haggling, and more than any human that night, was untarnished, clean, would have made an ample subject for the sick merchant of Harar.

  NOTE. This piece draws from work on spotted hyenas compiled by Gus
Mills and Heribert Hofer (“Hyaenas: IUCN Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan,” IUCN/SSC Hyaena Specialist Group, 1998) and Daniel W. Gade (“Hyenas and Humans in the Horn of Africa,” Geographical Review, Vol. 96, No. 4, October 2006).

  Anemochore

  Meredith Stricker

  Umwelt … the skein that every animal forms for itself by winding itself into the world according to its means, with its nervous system, its senses, its shape, its tools, its mobility.

  —Jean-Christophe Bailly

  are you a wind instrument are you breath

  gone wild, running are you once a tree now aswarm, aswim in the orchard of bees

  I am constantly made aware that words are teaching me

  that I am inside their mouth

  some of us would like our bodies to become a meadow

  whose order is wild where a word is its own translation (nature tries

  to love us but sometimes cannot / find a way / through

  *

  language is an animal it howls flees hides and waits watches us to see if we’ll come to our senses in red

  algae bloom fluorescence or flake flake flake of plucked pelt

  pelagic pleading calm then kneeling

  “wings stuck fast in the burning glue”

  can you guess the sap within the live oak not how swift but how fierce

  its movement the branch so dark against her skin

  pure distance given its rawness

  unlikeness

  *

  this time Hermes false rib fallow deer “yellowish coat spotted in summer”

  not quite overlapping as in imbricate pinecone scales or turtle shell in case of emergency

  you can build a cave in leaf-blowers irreparable

  reparation

  your interior my interior the wilderness’s interior inside a word

  the interior is vast each cloud erasing then forming ecstatic rainwater I’m breathing

  your oxygen you’re breathing my carbon dioxide green world blue world red world

  solar system my darling permeable “dark” “lunarative” membrane there is no

  greater love than this folded

  in involutes

  *

  language is an animal it howls in wind-tunnel blood vessels mute raw

  fractal fraternal no other habitat than our mouths meadowed

  in solitude and contrailed surveilled surplus populations

  o it listens and waits for the unbought logos of mothers standing in line with their flagrant

  tenderness

  “separation” “fence” or “security” “fence” with “seam zones” or “racial segregation” “wall”

  “apartheid wall” or “acceptable” “generic” “descriptions” such as “barrier” which the “International”

  “Court” of “Justice” refers to as “wall” since “other” “expressions” “sometimes employed” “are no more”

  “accurate” “if understood” “in the” “physical sense”

  immune system run amok in aquifers homeland

  no-fly zones

  in the physical sense

  *

  give me your hand rinse off your shoulders then rotate like a solar system like a heliotrope

  try to find some surface of your self that doesn’t touch marshlands war-heads starfish

  littoral living systems ceaselessly refuse to abandon us

  even when annihilation presents tense edge

  cellular lucidity

  heading out into the Open with ten words from John Cage as compass “method” “structure” “intention”

  “discipline” “notation” “interpenetration” “indeterminacy” “imitation” “devotion” “circumstance”

  forms of biomimicry as urban tide pools and structures we invent and breathe collapse then compost ourselves

  I am willing

  it is “just a mess” — beauty

  NOTE. “separation” “fence” … : “Israeli West Bank barrier,” Wikipedia entry; “wings stuck fast in the burning glue”: Dante, Inferno, canto 22; “ten words … ,” “it’s just a mess,” John Cage in Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage.

  Five Poems

  Jessica Reed

  ENTER: MATTER

  I believe in blue fields:

  one hundred thousand hectares of shrimp farms

  in Ecuador. Wetlands and salt flats

  along the Pacific coast have made room

  for cyan rectangles. You can see them

  from space. Convinced by brisk and cleaving

  order, its contours. And so the atom: idea, quarrel,

  and finally. Understand, it was one thing

  to sort elements by kind, another entirely

  to believe. Mendeleev did not doubt

  the solidity of stuff, yet, working with silver,

  sulfur, and sodium, could not regard

  a single silver atom as true. He believed in cold,

  crystalline order, but refrained: not Mendeleev—

  not anyone—had seen a solitary particular.

  But his century turned,

  the atom burst open, and inside: electrons, protons—

  stable constituents of matter. And it kept bursting,

  inside and further still and held together

  and immersed within. We threw

  circus particles at each other, bent

  their paths in charged fields. They collided,

  decayed, and we examined their debris. Unbound,

  their pieces flung. Photon, neutron, neutrino,

  gluon, muon, pion … Because we carve.

  Let us gather this fugitive matter, name the curious and unfamiliar.

  Darwin’s Galápagos made possible by naming (vampire finch,

  mangrove finch, green warbler finch) what divisions

  had already happened, island accidents whose names

  made the scattered specific. We must believe this:

  There are no old or new electrons. We can’t follow

  one around, pick it out in a crowd. And quarks,

  down indistinguishable from down, strange from …

  Hidden from sense, these silverfish dart (colorless color,

  spin without spin) when we approach. Believe in contours,

  in fields of blue, this carving made holy and specific.

  MATTER, RESISTANCE

  Matter is not what it appears to be. Its most obvious property—variously called resistance to motion, inertia, or mass—can be understood more deeply in completely different terms. The mass of ordinary matter is the embodied energy of more basic building blocks, themselves lacking mass.

  —Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces

  Pomegranate seed, avocado pit:

  positioned in space and occupying.

  Words about matter are honey,

  changing meaning as a mood is altered

  by the lighting. Honey, complicating.

  Has that thing the word pointed to

  changed? Matter, a not moving.

  Burlap sack of apples I tug. Molasses.

  Some thing is in it and making its

  resistance. What is that, making

  a clock or a hose? A stationary electron,

  a proton, a neutron—these have rest mass.

  One lemon on a countertop, its atoms

  teeming with trembling parts. But not

  a single photon, a light ray moving

  in one direction. Blocks, swimming

  and viscous. Study a still life and be still.

  We are inside. We swim in it. Life

  amasses. It is
assembly. Peer inside an object

  to its clearest skeleton, dripping

  waxy through unempty space. Your body

  is wax. You are empty. Your space is full.

  MEASURE

  The sky is the reason you can’t remember

  how language first fell on your small ears.

  The sky will turn white and (ellipses)

  constellation and cloud. The sky hangs

  its coat of silver on morning’s hook.

  The sky is indefinite, preceded by a definite

  article. It repeats itself and what you hold,

  hope to hold, remember holding, is vapor.

  Water at these several points, in this instant

  not dissipating. Cloud, constellation of drops,

  such accounting possible because we imagine

  we stop time, imagine infinitesimal

  points. Mind of God,

  mind over motion and matter

  and space between.

  The sky is vast—

  this transparent, infinitely long ruler

  with infinitely small divisions will measure.

  I DREAMT I SAW AN ATOM BARE

  An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

  —Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

  Branches on bare trees in winter. What’s left.

  No clouds of probable, only the bones of the possible—as if God refused to be mysterious,

  just once, at those speeds and those masses. Icicles. Water, held in place.