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Biology

Purging the Passions

Walk with me. A slow, short amble through a park modeled after old English country estates. Weather in tune, soft rains alternating with violent deluges, making me clutch the camera under my raincoat, seeking shelter under old fir trees, since the paths are too slippery to run back to the car. Or what goes for running these days.

Signs of early spring everywhere, snowdrops dotted with rain,

scilla peaking out among them,

aconite trying to pretend sun(s) still exist.

Camelias bringing some red to the palette

Crocci abundant, some hiding from the rain.

A fragrant edgeworthia paper-bush attracts the very first bee.

Center of my attention, though, were the hellebores, pummeled by the rain, bitten by earlier frost, struggling this year to develop their full glory. I had just learned some fascinating new facts about them (you might remember that I write about them almost every spring, so partial to them.) More importantly, these facts connect to something that modern science is beginning to explore: the relationship between our guts (literally, stomach and intestines) and that of our mental health. (I am going to summarize sources from here and here, and also a recent essay in the Atlantic discussing our preoccupation with gut health.)

Hellebores were linked to madness already in Greek mythology, not as a cause but as a cure, quieting the unruly, “hysteric” young daughters of a king. We find evidence for medicinal use in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as earlier writers, and the practice of using it to “heal” hysteria, epilepsy, mania and depression, lasted for centuries, documented across Europe, from early Romans to 18th century England. Paracelsus sang its praises. Wondrous cures were reported over and over again.

The plant contains helleborine and its derivatives are cardio-toxic glukosides, similar to digitalis. Ingestion even of only the seeds can prove to be fatal. The toxic compound protoanemonin, once swallowed by humans, causes “vomiting, inflammation of the mouth and throat, [and] abdominal pain and diarrhea that can be followed by severe ulcerations of the mouth and damage to the digestive and urinary systems.” The one saving grace might be that it induces vomiting so fast that not enough of the substance remains to kill you.

The roots were pulverized and put in a concoction that led to violent purging with excrements taking on a black color, interpreted to be the evil humors that left your body, the later now ready to heal, mind included. If dosage was mistaken, it led to death. The line between panacea and poison, miracle dram and murderous draught, was a thin one. But the psychological assumptions of emotions being lodged in the belly, and needing to be driven out, if maladaptive, were anything but thin: the perceived violence of Hellebore’s laxative action were seen as the necessary equivalent of the violence and perceived grossness of mental illness, to be forcefully exiled.

In the 17th century, doctors started to discuss the problems with something so potentially lethal, advocating for its use only in the most stubborn cases, and purging with less dangerous substances, like Senna, instead. The symbol of Hellebore was however also taken up by religious crusaders, talking about the need for sinners and “spiritually diseased” people to take the hellebore cure, thus intertwining moral with medical issues, with deranged emotions being at the core of both. Cleansing was necessary both to maintain health, but also to achieve pure spiritual interiors, free from demonic possession.

“Viewed in this light, a prescription of hellebore becomes about much more than just the removal of corrupted physical matter. The black substance voided from the bowels was the embodiment of the evil cast out, with the site of spiritual transformation being neither the soul nor the mind but the gut. Taking hellebore presented many of the same dangers as the condition it purported to cure: loss of control, internal corruption, and the very real possibility of death. By forcibly confronting sufferers with their own embodiment, it offered a temporary reprieve from the existential anguish of madness and melancholy. In doing so, it confirmed what many godly individuals already believed: that their bodies were vile and filthy vessels and that their best hope for deliverance lay in abasement before God.”

If we leave G-d and evil out of the discussion (although certain parts of our political establishment seem to bend over backwards to get them back in again…) what do we know scientifically about the gut-brain connection?

Gut and brain communicate through a number of pathways. There is the Vagus nerve, that sends info to the brain with neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine as messengers. Over 90 percent of the body’s serotonin—the neurochemical targeted by the class of commonly prescribed antidepressant medications that includes Prozac, Zoloft, and Lexapro—resides in the small intestine, facilitating multidirectional communication between the digestive tract and the central nervous system. If our gut’s fragile microbial balance is upended, it sends a message to the immune system, which may trigger gastrointestinal inflammation.

There is also an association (not a determined causal relationship) between gastrointestinal disorders and some psychiatric conditions, including bipolar disorder and depression. People who live with schizophrenia have higher rates of GI inflammation than the population as a whole. People who struggle with IBS [irritable bowel syndrome] are often also diagnosed with anxiety disorders.

This explains why we have an emerging field of nutritional psychiatry that teaches patients about the appropriate foods that might reduce inflammation — namely grains and plants rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber and pre- and probiotics. No need to buy expensive probiotic supplements that have sprung up like mushrooms provided by an industry ready to cash in; yoghurt, kimchi and sauerkraut all do the job just fine. Hellebore smoothies, however, will likely not be recommended!

Music today offers a bit of madness – demons and all, Faust riding with Mephistopheles, having sold his soul….

Full Opera (Berlioz’ The Damnation of Faust) here, with Solti conducting.

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Of Wolves and Goats

Science today, not fairy tales. Although the Brothers’ Grimm The Wolf and the seven young Goats was a favorite of mine due to clever trickery and happy ending. Oh, do I like happy endings. Not always true for German fairy tales, or German anything, but I digress.

Goats first: European scientists have observed Alpine ibex, a species of mountain goat, across the last many years. They found that with increasingly hotter temperatures, the goats are shifting their diurnal habits to more nocturnal explorations, to avoid the heat.

Maybe the best move available to them, and one could celebrate their adaptability. But the shift involves numerous problems. If your visual system is set up to function in the day time, it is difficult to see at night. This matters for finding your footing in the craggy, mountainous landscapes where these mammals live, leading to slower movement and more potential accidents in this treacherous environment. More importantly, it is difficult to spot the vegetation that is your food source, signaled by color, washed out in the dark; less food leading to malnutrition is going to affect population density. Finding mates also becomes more difficult, again resulting in shrinking population numbers.

Pica and Marmots in action

Another complication is the exposure to nocturnal predators, wolves in particular, who the goats can avoid if grazing during the day. The impact of heat seems to be threatening enough at this point in time that goats are shifting their habits despite the looming dangers. One wonders what that will imply for the years to come.

Plenty of wild goats visible on a hike I took a decade ago in the North Cascades’ Mount Baker region. Goat Mountain is an 8.2 miles round trip with a steep elevation gain of 3.100 ft to a summit of 5.600 ft. We camped overnight (kids carried the gear, I was spoiled with carrying only a small backpack, water and camera) before hiking to the top, and then down to a glacial lake. It is the most beautiful hike through hemlock and pine forests, remnants of lava of the 1980 explosion of Mt. St. Helens, wildflower meadows and eventually phenomenal vistas of the surrounding mountains.

It was August, with snow banks on the summit and the lake still covered with remnants of ice. Reports from last year (2023) showed no snow and a completely ice-free lake already by the end of June.

Wolves were spotted in the Mount Baker wilderness area for the first time since the 1930s in 2014. I did not see any, ever, in the wild. But I have recently read about research with wolves that posits some fascinating questions.

Princeton University evolutionary biologists and toxicologists have tracked and examined wolves in and around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) and compared them to wolf populations in neighboring wildlife areas. Chernobyl was the site of the catastrophic nuclear accident in 1986 in Ukraine, with one of its 4 reactors blowing, releasing huge amount of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Over 300.000 people had to be relocated, with countless health issues caused by radiation exposure emerging over the years. The area around the explosion is now an exclusion zone and the reactor itself encased in concrete sarcophagus, improved in 2016 to a structure supposed to contain the radioactive remnants for at least a century.

If you look closely, the goats are little white dots to the left of the snow field and also in the island within.

It turns out that the CEZ wolves have flourished – their population is seven fold compared to those in neighboring regions, despite the chronic, low-dose, multigenerational exposure to ionizing radiation they have been exposed to for the last 4 decades. The researchers speculate that two factors play a role in this advantage: natural selection of cancer-resistant or cancer-resilient genes in the animals and not having to deal with the stressors of human activity, in particular hunting. The removal of human threat alone is considered a huge survival benefit.

Wolves are at the top of the food pyramid, which means all of the radioactivity accumulated by those lower in the food chain ends up in their diet. It could be the case that those who have cancer resistant or resilient genes have survived more frequently than those who don’t and have transferred these genes to their offspring, creating a selective gene pool. If they are resilient, they might get cancer at the same rate as other wolves, but survive longer with a stronger immune system response. If they are resistant, they won’t get cancer as much in the first place. The burning question is, of course, if looking at their blood cell composition reveals some clues to where immunity is lodged. The researchers also looked at the genomes of the exclusion zone wolves compared to other populations and found “that the fastest evolving [genome] regions within Chernobyl are in and around genes that we know have some role in cancer immune response or the antitumor immune response in mammals.”

The implication for human health are huge – oncological research might benefit from these findings if genetic information can be isolated and translated into the human genome. Of course, just when you think you are on to something massively important, it all grinds to a halt: the research was impacted first by the pandemic, and for the last two years by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, making it impossible to continue data collection. War’s ripple effects.

Music today is neither goat nor wolf, but named after the properties of another great beast: Elephantine. The album by Egyptian Jazz musician Maurice Louca and his many northern European colleagues (he spends his time between Berlin and Cairo) is intense and requires close listening. You’ll be rewarded by an amazing mix of musical cultures and styles. Not easy listening, though.

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Schwanengesang

· (Biological) Swansong ·

The silver Swan, who living had no Note,
when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:
“Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!
“More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.””

– Orlando Gibbons The Silver Swan Madrigals & Motets 1612

Walk with me. In the wetlands, before the intense cold, predicted for the days to come, is settling in. The air is damp, a grayish blue that intensifies all the yellows and oranges around, the bark of the willow bushes, the buds of the hazelnut trees. (And also makes it very difficult to photograph birds in flight as you will see below.)

A dreamy landscape, with occasional glimpses of the sun trying to break through the cloud cover

Herons and egrets drying off and combing for morsels, respectively.

Bald eagle on the look-out.

Some geese,

lots of duck action, ducks unknown to me,

some happily (?) planning for future ducklings…

The silence, only occasionally interrupted by their flapping wings, or splashing water, is shattered when a wedge of swans appears overhead in flight, calling loudly.

A sight to behold! These are Tundra swans (Cygnus columbianus sometimes called Whistling swans)), recognizable by their black beaks and slight yellow streak around their eye (I could only see that with the single one I caught close on camera, while swimming.) They are native to North America and we can see them in winter when they fly over Oregon, foraging here in our wetlands.

These swans are monogamous and mate for life (they can live for more than 20 years), breeding once a year in the tundras of Canada and the Alaskan arctic. Come autumn, they merge in groups of up to 100 birds to fly south. The journey covers 4000 miles, flown at an altitude as high as 26.000 feet and with speeds up to 60 mph! Their biology is all about making this flight possible: bones are hollow and there are fewer of them compared to mammals; their breathing systems is adjusted in multiple ways – (during flight birds need to breathe up to 10 times faster to enable sufficient oxygen to be delivered to the muscles. All of these details, btw, I found here.)

The lungs have far more tissue density so that more blood can flow through them for oxygen exchange. Their breath flows in one direction only, entering on one path, exiting on another, enabling lots of volume to flow through in a steady stream. Their windpipe, the trachea, is different from ours’ as well – as you can see in the picture, it has coiled loops at the end, rather than going straight into the lungs.

“Why is she blasting me with all these details?” you might wonder. “Do I really need to know tundra swan anatomy?” Well, you might want to if you are interested in the genesis of the phrase “Swansong,” a phrase commonly used to describe the last output of someone before their stage exit or death, often heard in the context of famous artists showering us with brilliant work at the end of their life. (In fact, music today is Schubert’s collection of songs titled Swansong, published posthumously.)

OK, maybe Swansong is not on the forefront of your thoughts either, but it really is an interesting bit of lore – or, as it turns out, a biological fact.

Throughout history, swans have held a special place in mankind’s imagination. Tons of confabulation revolves around them, from the Greek fables to Norse mythology to the European fairy tales of the 19th century. (Details can be found in this essay, which was also the source of today’s entry citation.) One of the lasting assumptions across cultures was the claim that swans are pretty much silent or mute throughout their life time, and only sing beautifully at the point of their death. Some smart cookies, like Pliny the Elder, were already critical of that observation in CE 77, but the belief would not die. Da Vinci noted it, as did Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Coleridge, to mention just a few.

Here is the deal: swans are not mute during their lifetime. But it is also true, that due to the nature of their coiled trachea, they emit a series of long, plaintive tones when their lungs collapse during death and the air gets pushed through the windpipe, probably the base observation that started the legend.

Now where the other piece of persistent lore originates – swans are maidens, who shed their feather coats at night to bathe in the lakes and can be trapped if you steal the plumage – remains a mystery not yet solved by naturalists…

For those less inclined towards biology and more interested in art: Here is a truly terrific collection of 44 art works centered on the myth of Leda and the Swan. The author did an amazing tour de force from Michelangelo to modern photography and everyone in between, with helpful description and discussion of each piece. Really worth a read!

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Possible Worlds.

Last week I came across a short interview with some notable writers all focused on the climate crisis. Rebecca Solnit, Thelma Young Lutunatabua, James Miller and Jay Griffiths were asked multiple questions concerning their own relationship to the crisis, their levels of engagement, their hopes and fears. When asked about the efficacy of the written word for a fight against the climate crisis, their responses ranged from hope and enthusiasm to doubt. One answer lingered with me: “I embrace all forms of storytelling, and I think all are necessary in this struggle. We have to tap into people’s imaginations and show them that another world is possible.”

That is of course one of the many functions of art, showing possible worlds, next to creating beauty, communicating ideas, raising consciousness, being the canary in the coal mine. I want to focus today on how photography can serve as a window into a different, private world that allows us to see people who are perhaps different from ourselves and yet utterly familiar in their mundane settings, poses, and demeanors. With that it creates the possibility of empathy if not bonding, in a way that writing about the subject never would (at least not immediately), words relying on facts and persuasion, rather than the direct emotional involvement created by the narrative of imagery.

The photographs, a century apart, depict queer folk, and I want to stress that today’s musings are not about the issue of transgender origins, medical procedures for transitioning, or transphobia, although all warrant close examination in an era that has made the topic into a tribal rallying cry for exclusion and worse. The intensity of the debate echos other preoccupations with the “order” of things, the retention of existing hierarchies or the need for simple binary truths in this world, an either/or thinking that avoids engagement with choice and uncertainties. (And of course a backlash against the enormous progress made in the area of sexual orientation, including the right to marry a same-sex partner.)

That said, here are the biological facts. Biological categories do exist – have some objective reality in the sense that if, for example, your genetics have an xy pattern, it is enormously likely that you have an anatomy associated with males and a biochemistry associated with males, and if you are biologically xx, the same applies for women. But that reality sits alongside of the undeniable fact that there is a substantial number of people who don’t fit this pattern. Biologically some have traits that are strongly associated with male and female. And in still other cases they have biological traits that are neither typically male nor typically female, and so for example their genetic pattern is entirely different, having xo or xxy chromosomes. One more step: if this is undeniably true at the level of biology, it would be astonishing if it wasn’t reflected in people’s psychology, with one example of many, some people feeling they were born into the wrong body, and often having these feelings from a very young age.

But again, what I am after today, is how photography, in the depiction of something or someone who is different, can create a sense of familiarity nonetheless, and can convey a shared humanity. It does so by offering a narrative that invites the viewer into daily routine, anything other than the exotic fantasies contained in the stereotypes held by those feeling disgusted, alienated or threatened by queerness.

The first selection is the work of two Scandinavian women photographers, Marie Høeg (1866 – 1949) and Bolette Berg (1872 -1944), who met in Finland and lived in Norway, as business partners and as a couple. They were suffragettes and quite engaged in feminist politics on the local level, while making a living by conventional photography, studio portraits and the like. Høeg founded the Horten Branch of the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, the Horten Women’s Council and the Horten Tuberculosis Association. Berg worked more behind the camera. The photographs were part of some 400 glass plates found in a barn of their farm decades after they had died. Marked “private,” they contained images that played with gender roles, cross dressing, mimicking behavior reserved for men (arctic explorers in fur coats,) showing the androgynous protagonist as well as a number of their friends joyously defying gender norms.

The work has a home at Norway’s national photography museum, the Preus Museum in Horten. It is currently shown at the ongoing Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, PHotoEspaña, in Madrid until September. 

As you can see, the couple poses like a traditional heterosexual couple at home, going out in the boat (or sitting for a photographer in these studio props that were known to anyone at the time,) interacting with their pet, and having fun at drinking, smoking and playing cards with friends (behavior reserved for men at the time) independent of gender.

A few of the photographs show a male friend not averse to cross-dressing.

Fast forward to 120 years later, and a different part of the world. Camila Falcão has been photographing Brazilian trans women (women born into male bodies), encouraging them to pose as they wish, in their own environments. (All photographs are from her website.) Brazil’s 2019 law that considers transphobia a crime has done nothing to lower the murder rate of Brazilian queer people: it is the highest in the world, for the 13th consecutive year, with a 30% rate of 4000 killings in that span of time.

The title of Falcão’s series, “Abaixa que é tiro” refers to the reactions of the portrayed and their friends, who started commenting  ‘Abaixa que é tiro!’, celebrating being shown to the world. “The expression is used widely among the Brazilian LGBT community to address that something really awesome/fabulous is about to hit you. More in general, however, it could be said that “Abaixa que é tiro” signals a paradoxical relationship between fear and empowerment.” (Ref.)

Again, notice how an attachment to pets immediately confers familiarity.

Women are tired, women break arms, women have friends.

Women are barely out of childhood,

could be on a winning gymnastics team,

a first grade teacher,

or the smart, uncompromising sister who sets you right.

Work like this can help to deconstruct stereotypes, although it will be a long road until increased visibility leads to a decrease in violence against this population. The photography world is noticing. We have now venerable institutions calling for work to show what unites us in times of division, like, for example, the British Journal of Photography, having judged exhibitions of Portraits of Humanity. Every single image that manages to shift our consciousness and beliefs is worth it, even if not all of us can have Falcão’s talent, access or courage as an ally to a demonized minority.

Music today is sung in Portuguese by Joao de Sousa, but created by a Polish collective, Bastarda, that has the most amazing modern Jewish music in their repertoire. Check them out. I have been listening to Fado non stop for weeks.

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Of Bees, Drones and Clams.

Walk with me. This time there’ll be the bonus of learning some choice German curse words, if you listen closely enough. Muttered under my breath when I realized after a 40 minute drive to the wetlands that I had brought the camera but forgotten the memory card. My iPhone had to suffice, so you’ll get some December landscape impressions, but no close up of the birds I had come to see: the first mergansers of the season.

Less preoccupation with photography meant more time for contemplating the good news I had come across in various sources this week while thinking about the World Biodiversity Summit in Montreal. The UN’s COP 15 conference is trying to set worldwide new goals to halt and reverse nature’s diversity loss. A lot has been written in this context about the potentially catastrophic outlook for nature and humans alike, given climate change and human destruction of natural habitats. I thought I’ll pick something positive to demonstrate there’s stuff we can do. And certainly reason to stick with hope, our daily exercise, remember? (More positive examples can also be found down on the UN’s website.)

1. What I learned about bees:

European Honeybees have taken over much of the American landscapes at the expensive of native species (there used to be 1500 to 1700 native species in California alone.) Biotic homogenization, as ecologists call it, is happening across the world. Variety disappears and the same dominant species are found everywhere. This is a problem, among other things, because vulnerabilities to disease or temperature change might be tolerated differently by a more diverse population. If something threatens the honeybees and they happen to be the only pollinators around, we’re screwed. (I guess you learn some English curse words as well…) Invasive species like honeybees (now found everywhere in the world other than arctic regions) outcompete local species for food and share their own parasites they actively contribute to the demise of native pollinators.

It is also an economic question. Honeybee hives are trucked around the agricultural industry to pollinate crops ($15 billion of them!) that blossom at different times. The pollination industry itself scores about $250 million annually, with weekly rent costs for hives reaching stratospheric heights. All not so much needed if you had your native pollinators who live in your region and do the work for free. The solution: plant pollinator habitats, also know as “hedgerows!” There are now Bee-Better Certification programs that “lure investors away from extractive industries like fossil fuels and towards regenerative approaches to farming—practices that rebuild soil, store carbon, and support biodiversity—can be good for the planet while also healthy for the bottom line.”(Ref.) It will take a long time for these programs to work, but it is a start. Building corridors of mixed plants among the monocultures of blueberries or almonds or grapes might give native bee species a shot at survival.

2. And here come the drones:

Scientists have developed drones that spy nearly extinct plants in hard-to reach places like mountain sides and cliffs. Many local plants that have no defensive mechanisms like bitter taste, or thorns or the like against grazing by imported animals, now exist entirely in nooks and crannies that protect them up high, in Hawaii, for example. The drones can spot them and they have scissor equipped arms that allow them to snip small clippings of the plants. Biologist use those to propagate and thus enlarge the population of the endangered species.

3. What about clams?

Some parts of the scientific community have woken up to the fact that much indigenous wisdom can be used to protect species that are vulnerable to certain environmental conditions. Clams, for example, do not well when conditions become too acidic, a problem that is steadily growing with the increasing acidification of our oceans due to our burning of fossil fuels. Their shells become less resilient and that fragility opens clams up to predation and disease. Researchers have looked at Indigenous Sea-Gardening practices across the Pacific Northwest, where Native tribes cultivated clam beds for millennia. Caretakers crushed the shells of harvested clams and strew the fragments back into the sand. Apparently these crushed shells release carbonate into the water, neutralizing some of the acidity. Lab experiments are now done to concern and expand the possibilities of lowering pH levels this way.

The scientists are also looking at another Indigenous practices: regularly tilling of clam beds, which loosens the sediment and mixing in shell fragments. “This repeated digging could bring oxygen to burrowed clams, open more space in the sediments, and alter seawater chemistry.” (Ref.)

***

Much diversity where I walked, due to bird migration. Besides mergansers there were swans, tons of varieties of ducks unknown to me, hawks, herons and egrets. The rain paused just long enough to get a good hour of walking in, useless camera heavy in the backpack, soul light in my chest, geese above me. What privilege to be by their side, as described in today’s music.

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Hybridizing Thoughts

1. Stop here and now with the fall clean-up of your garden, should you be lucky to have one. Leaf blankets, flower stalks, withering vines all provide much needed survival help to pollinators and birds, many of whom have not had the easiest of times. (One exception: clean vegetable patches IF they had some serious pest issue. You don’t want to give those critters a chance to overwinter in place.) If you don’t trust me you can read more professional explanations here and here. “Wild” gardens provide many more food sources and places for shelter to the birds in winter. Drop the rake until February…

2. Besides the avian beneficiaries of inaction we humans benefit as well. Here is a neat study showing that the exposure to the sight and sound of birds improves our wellbeing. In case you need scientific evidence for that.

Bird and Their Songs Boost Our Mental Health, Study Finds

3. All this came to mind when listening to a podcast about birds. A special bird, in this case who turned out to be a hybrid between two different bird species, a truly rare event. Hybrids occasionally happen between close cousins (1 in 10 000,) but the two parents of the bird under consideration hadn’t shared a common ancestor in over 10 million years. The specimen was a mix between a rose-breasted grosbeak and a scarlet tanager (whose song he sang, while the looks were more like the grosbeak mom.)

The scientific assumption is that these “evolutionary experiments” confer a survival advantage to the hybrid, which in turn might shore up an avian lineage that is endangered. (Contrary to popular belief, hybrids can breed – if the hybrid mates with another hybrid, or with the same species as one of its parents.)

“It allows… independently evolved groups to share, that they’re, you know, sort of trading information back and forth on solving problems that the environment presents to them. So this might actually be important for adaptation to climate change, for example.”

4. Which brings us – you must have been waiting for it already if only as proof that my brain is back in action – to hybridization as a religious and political issue. As any number of nationalist Christian websites will tell you (and no, I am not linking to them) G-d does not want animal species to mix, or human bloodlines to merge in ways of racial intermarriage. This Divine command is found, they claim, in verse after verse in the bible – all conveniently and selectively cited – and originated as a punishment for transgression against Noah by one of his sons, the dark Ham, who in perpetuity is condemned to be inferior and whose descendants are to live in slavery. Japheth, the second son, is an idealized and blessed form of humanity superior to Ham in every conceivable way, representing Whiteness, and Shem is an archetype in between. In one foul swoop you have: an established hierarchy between White and Black, the former superior, prohibition of intermarriage, and a justification of slavery on divine authority. (In fairness many other Christian websites point out that this is false biblical interpretation.)

Note, these are not considerations of the American Antebellum South, when they were prominent. Or occurrences of the 1950s and 60s, like Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia citing the Bible in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or Reverend Jerry Falwell attributing the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision to Chief Justice Warren’s failure to know and follow God’s word, or Mississippi Senator Theodore G. Bilbo explaining that “miscegenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance with the will of God.” Ref.)

Race separation as a Divine decree and the dominion of Whiteness are making a comeback in ever louder public voices and votes here and now in 2022. Consider the issues of the constitutional right to intermarriage: some weeks ago, 157 House Republicans voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which would enshrine marriage equality in federal law. Senator Mike Braun of Indiana explicitly stated that not banning interracial marriage was a mistake. Regulating racial boundaries has been a main topic for international right wing forces, as heard in Hungarian PM’s Victor Orban’s speeches against mixing races, which were loudly welcomed by right wing audiences in the U.S. As the conservative legal movement grows more emboldened, are there any protections that we can unquestioningly rely on?

5. I am writing this on the day this Supreme Court is hearing arguments about Affirmative Action at a Public University. You can figure out for yourself why that came to mind in my hybridizing thoughts.

Better go watch the birds on my leaf-strewn lawn.

Ham, Shem and Japheth’s story in music here.

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Unintended Consequences

My German readers currently have the opportunity to visit an exhibition called Macht! Licht! at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. The title is ambiguous – it could mean “Turn on the Light!” or “Power!Light!” The latter English translation is also ambiguous: power can refer to electricity per se, or to the uses of electric light in the context of surveillance, monitoring, torture or even destruction. (Ab)using power in the political sense.

You figure out how I took these photos of my shadow….

A description of the exhibitions contents:

Based on selected works from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, a fascinating spectrum of works of light art is presented in the darkened hall of the museum, the conceptual levels of reflection of which focus on the following (socio-)political areas: utopia/dystopia; ecology/biology; economics; violence/power; control/monitoring; advertising/manipulation; enlightenment/obfuscation; border/exclusion; public space etc.

I have obviously not seen the exhibition, but was made curious by one of the projects that is mentioned in the write-ups of the show. A collaborative team of artist Nana Petzet and biologist(s) explore the unintended consequences of artificial light used in cultural contexts – light shows during outside concerts, public nighttime events, festivals of light, etc.

Old Elbtunnel,Hamburg

Portland Airport

Parking Lot Boston, MA

The project, stretched across some years, was called Lichtfalle Hamburg (Light Trap – the link can be read in English.) It mimicked (in greatly reduced fashion with a single boat) the conditions of blue light that the City of Hamburg uses during Harbor festivals that illuminate the public landscape and night sky.

Photocredit: Helge Mundt

(“Cruise Days” they are called. It is one of those festivals, where 12,000 light sources – mostly blue fluorescent tubes – are strung in the port area and the HafenCity. Over a period of five weeks, with the aid of 40 km of cables and a team of 40 assistants, they were mounted onto buildings, quay sections, cranes, jetties, pontoons, launches, ferries, tugboats, docks, operational vehicles, trees, bridges etc.)

Photocredit: Hamburger Hafen Marketing

What would the light do to insect populations? The team counted and observed the behavior of about 16 orders of insects, moths among them but also large swarms of dayflies that usually hover above the river. Surprise, the results were of great concern. Insects are attracted to these light sources and fly around them to the point of such exhaustion that they don’t find their way home, basically dying in situ – something called the “vacuum cleaner effect. The land on surfaces and dry out, when exhausted, unable to reproduce before their death.

Hamburg Elbphilharmonie

This matters tremendously for pollination in times when we already see a huge reduction in numbers of insects due to destroyed habitats and shifts in temperatures that many species cannot adapt to. In other words, those lovely evenings celebrated with light, lifting our spirits, have truly bad consequences for agricultural environments

Old Elbtunnel, Hamburg – San Francisco Airport

Light pollution is often mentioned in terms of disrupting sleep patterns in humans and flight patterns for migratory birds, leading to huge losses there as well. We now have to add insect to the list. Here is a short intro to light pollution by National Geographic, Light Pollution 101. It discusses the problem of waste of energy as well.

Hamburg Elbphilharmonie – Hamburg Harbor Water Recycling Plant

Here in Portland, OR we have the annual Winter Light Festival that brings light art to the river for a short period of time, and the Willamette Light Brigade, who, in their words, harness the power of artful lighting to transform the cityscape by lighing bridges and advocating for the importance of night-time identity and place-making. There is WinterFest with light art in Central Oregon, and there are numerous night markets around the year that add extra lighting to city scapes that have already a high dose of light pollution through street lighting and shops windows etc.

Staircase in Ljubljana, Slovenia

For those interested what daily excessive use of light in a regular manner does to our environment, here is a relatively recent article in Nature that shows ho much research is going on in the environmental and ecological sciences. Truly interesting. And here are pictures of Portland’s light pollution and a link to the International Dark Sky Week 2022 (April 22 -30) that gives tips about how to reduce light pollution in our own households.

Photographs today are of instances where my eyes got caught by light patterns, inside as well as outside. Some of these are from Hamburg, where the Light Trap project took place.

Staircase in Paula Modersohn Becker Musem in Bremen – Stage scenery in Portland Armory

We have for the longest associated light with something positive. It offers protection, carves out social spaces, secures movement at night. Light art certainly has an enthusiastic following. It looks like we need to ask some serious questions about what the consequences are and was we are willing or should sacrifice in order to pay environmental protection more than lip service.

Advert in San Francisco – Art in Montreal – Lit Sign at RISD in Providence, Rhode Island

Here is a video that shows some of the work shown in Macht!Licht! and some other European light art. The language is German, but the images speak for themselves, Guantanomo reconstruction of a white torture chamber included.

Frei Hafen Hamburg

And here is Hamburg’s son, Brahms, played at the Elbphilharmonie – the building in some of the photos above. Pink lights and all….

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Oh, evolution, you botched this!

Don the down-coat. Pack the parka. Meet the early morning mist.

If you are lucky – and I was early Monday morning – you’ll see some wispy clouds evaporate over the water, hear the different birdcalls and have the wetlands practically to yourself.

Well, the birds were naturally on location. Pretty active, too, fighting the lingering cold and scoring on breakfast. Red-tailed hawk preening…

The diffuse light blocked out the harshness of the world and gave rise to thoughts about peace against the backdrop of war.

And talking about war and peace, have you ever considered why so few birds are equipped with weapons? I mean, snakes have fangs, tigers have teeth, elephants, narwhales and walruses have tusks, deer have antlers, bees have stingers – a whole arsenal of martial gear can be found in nature. The occasional evening spent in front of PBS’s NOVA programs about animal warfare confirms this.

Scientists have devoted their lives to figuring out the evolutionary pressure behind this all, notably Douglas Emlen, who wrote one of the best overviews in the field, Animal Weapons, the Evolution of Battle. Here is a short review of the book which includes this:

“Throughout the book, Emlen’s demonstrations of the many parallels between human and animal weapons are fascinating, even when the possibilities are frightening. “I stand awed and shaken,” he writes, “thrilled by the parallels and, at the same time, terrified by the prospects.”

Back to birds, though, who have not participated in the arms race. The reason? They practically get all they want or need by flashing colors, elaborate dancing, song competition and only occasional claws, pecking or spores. (I’m summarizing what I read here.)

The REAL reason? Flight. Anything that flies has to worry about weight. Flying consumes much more energy than movement on the ground or in water, and energy need increases with added weight, even tiny bits. We have indeed mathematical models of flight that spell out in detail how leg or wing spurs, no matter how small, increase fuel cost in untenable ways (given that fuel acquisition itself – searching for food – costs energy as well,) particularly for smaller birds.

(A funky comparison from the article: United Airlines started printing its inflight magazine on lighter paper to reduce the weight of a typical flight by about 11 pounds, or 0.01% of an airplane’s empty weight. Through this tiny decrease, the company cut its annual fuel use by 170,000 gallons, saving US$290,000 yearly. Think through this with today’s news about gas prices….)

Spurs, then, are primarily found on land fowl and in fewer than 2% of all avian species. And beaks used for fighting are rare as well, given that any injury to them might compromise the ability to feed – a direct threat to survival. Yes, some raptors fight with their talons, but overall, we are seeing a peaceable kingdom, if interrupted by screaming matches over territorial rights..

Evolution, you botched this. Should have provided mankind with wings!!

Swallows already returned, harbingers of renewal.

Killdeer twittered.

Hummingbird glowed.

The morning softness continued, sun broke through clouds.

Later the rain set in. What better reminder of “teaching our troubled souls… to heal.”

To the Rain

BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

Mother rain, manifold, measureless,
falling on fallow, on field and forest,
on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,
downwelling waters all-washing, wider
than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster
than countrysides, calming, recalling:
return to us, teaching our troubled
souls in your ceaseless descent
to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,
to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.



“To the Rain” copyright © 2018 by Ursula K. Le Guin.  First appeared in So Far So Good: Poems 2014-2018, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2018. Reprinted in Poetry Foundation by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. 

Brahm’s Rain Sonata is today’s musical joy.

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Playing Possum

Dia de los Muertos ended yesterday, and you, dear reader, might have detected that issues related to death was the theme of the last two blogs. I had originally thought I might round this up into a trio with a discussion of the Cotard Delusion, a rare neuropsychiatric condition where people believe they are actually dead. Commonly referred to as The Walking Dead Syndrome, patients often starve themselves because they assume a dead body needs no food. Given yesterday’s election outcomes such state might hold its own temptations…

But then I thought we need something more cheerful. Therefore let’s focus on the fact that for some species there is an innate behavior that allows them to escape death, at least temporarily, if they are lucky.

The fancy word for it is thanatosis, or death-feigning, colloquially people call it playing possum. Scientists currently researching this behavior most often refer to it as tonic immobility (TI.) What are we talking about? A large number of species exhibit multiple signs of “being dead” late in the sequence of predation, when they have no other way out, flight obstructed, and contact with their predator already in process. It is a behavior that evolved, not something learned along the way, and it can be found in vertebrates like mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, as well as in invertebrates like crustaceans, insects, spiders, butterflies, beetles, ants, bees and wasps.

Prey displays not just a state of stillness (a defense mechanism that is also widespread usually to avoid detection by predators in the first place,) but multiple other signs that are usually associated with death or dying: reduced breathing rates, lowered heart rate, tongue protrusion, urinating and defecating, and setting the eyes wide open. If this state, often held up for hours on end, results in the predator leaving its prey alone, the animal, absent of injuries, can return to its normal existence. In addition, some animals, frogs for example, make themselves extra small so that they are swallowed whole by snakes, and will be regurgitated intact when they secret substances that have the predator throw up. Others, like grasshoppers, make themselves extra large, with their spines exposed, which make them much harder or impossible to be swallowed by frogs who have a limited range for mouth openings.

So how is self-preservation achieved? One possible answer – and there is really not that much knowledge around given that research has only recently started to tackle these questions – is predators’ aversion to long-dead animals, since they might be associated with bacterial pathogens that are best avoided. Recognizing the signs of death might lead to that reaction (suggesting not much else is going on cognitively, since a minute ago that same animal was still very much alive. As an aside: some philosophers are arguing that predators have a concept of death, loosely defined as knowledge of non-functionality and irreversibility. That’s like saying the thermostat on your wall has a concept of temperature, when all it does is recognize a particular state – above or below a certain degree – to kick heat on or off.)

Others suggests that death-feigning interrupts a set sequence in predatory behavior (the usual steps being detection, pursuit, subjugation, kill.) If the subjugation step is interrupted because something is immobile in front of you, the next step might not be executable.

It is also possible that predator animals are highly sensitive to moving targets. If there are salient alternatives all around (a bunch of prey trying to escape) the death-feigning animal might no longer capture the predator’s attention. If there are many fleeing prey to choose from there might also be an opportunity cost to spending time to figure out if the immobilized prey is really dead and ready to be lunch. There is evidence for all of these mechanisms, and they are likely working in a complimentary fashion.

Like all biologically driven behavior, there are costs and benefits attached. For some species, playing dead is the best attempt to survive when they are young and vulnerable. At later stages in development, they might switch to fight and flight mechanisms when they have gained sufficient strength to take the predator on. Death-feigning behavior can be bred into or out of species (for example birds held over centuries in captivity, where they encounter many fewer natural enemies, eventually loose TI behavior, compared to their cousins living in the wild.)

Look at the size of those leaves….

I find all this endlessly fascinating, particularly with an eye on whether humans should imitate that behavior when under attack in nature. Shall we say, it depends. If you are attacked by a bear in the wild, you have to first figure out what kind of bear it is. Playing possum seems to work with Grizzly bears, but with black bears one should fight back.(Ref.)

“To effectively play dead, you should wait until the bear has actually touched you. Bears are smart enough to know that you are faking it if they haven’t touched you and you suddenly collapse.

When trying to play dead, fall onto your stomach and use your arms to cover your head, using the ground to protect your face and stomach. Keep your legs spread wide apart to make yourself more difficult for the bear to move. 

It is likely that the bear will try to flip you over or play with your body. If this happens, you should allow the bear to flip you, but roll all the way over so you end up face-down again.”

Okayyyyyyyy. One slight upside to the sad fact that my canoeing days are over: I don’t have to memorize the rules. Never mind experiencing the attack.

Here’s to escaping all kinds of predation so we can enjoy the good stuff a bit longer. Then again, today’s music reminds us that there is peace on the other side.

Photographs today are the opposite of playing dead – dying maple leaves are playing alive, with one last hurrah of color, pattern, and throwing themselves onto the wind, flying and fluttering in the air around us until they, too, come to rest.

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The Fate of Rebels

I could not believe my eyes. I had stumbled upon a pod of pelicans in Forest Grove, not just in the air on their southwards migration, but actually resting among the unperturbed egrets.

Here they were preening, snoozing, fishing as a fleet. Their large beaks can be adjusted in size not to hold food, as is erroneously presumed, but to serve as a kind of fishing net, which is not exclusively used for fish, by the way. Pelicans do eat smaller birds as well, including pigeons…

Pelicans have played a role in Christian iconography ever since the 3rd century. Some strange story, in a tractate called Physiologus, started to make the rounds: pelican mothers were claimed to kill their rebellious offspring, and then pecking their own breasts to revive them with their blood after three days. Comparisons to salvation history ensued, human kind being punished by G-d for its disobedience, but then the Son redeeming folks with his blood.

Detail from the Salimbenis’ Crucifixion: The Pelican

The punitive part of the story was eventually dropped, and the redeeming part enhanced. The narrative influenced art throughout the Middle ages, with images of pelicans feeding their chicks as a symbol of G-d’s sacrifice for his flock. The paintings could be found on tabernacles and the top of crosses, as well as frescos of Crucifixion scenes.

“These legends may have arisen because the pelican used to suffer from a disease that left a red mark on its chest. Alternatively it may be that pelicans look as if they are stabbing themselves as they often press their bill into their chest to fully empty their pouch. Yet other possibilities are that they often rest their bills on their breasts, and that the Dalmatian pelican has a blood-red pouch in the early breeding season .” (Ref.)

The point, though, is that rebellion was flagged, punished, and resolved with the pointer to salvation through religious adherence.

The Pelican Symbol

Christianity was not the first religion to imbue pelicans with symbolic meaning. In Egypt the birds were thought to be divinity and guide the passage of lost souls through the underworld. However much they were worshipped in those ways, their treatment on earth was not exactly preferential. Pelican populations in this country have been endangered in a variety of ways since the 1880s in competition for fish. “They were clubbed and shot, their eggs and young were deliberately destroyed, and their feeding and nesting sites were degraded by water management schemes and wetland drainage. Even in the 21st century, an increase in the population of American white pelicans in southeastern Idaho in the US was seen to threaten the recreational cutthroat trout fishery there, leading to official attempts to reduce pelican numbers through systematic harassment and culling(Ref.)” Pesticides and oil spills affect them as well, as do hooks of discarded fishing lines.

I hung out with the birds for a while, watching how comfortable they are with each other and how quiet (it is only chicks who vocalize during nesting seasons.) Pelicans are quite social, they have communal courtship rituals, they nest in colonies, they hunt together and they often fish as a fleet.

They eventually took off, single birds rising, then forming groups, circling in formation trying to find the thermals that would lift them to traveling height.

The circles reminded me of another iconography of rebellion, one probably approved by pelicans prone to comradeship. I learned about these solidarity circles which somewhat protected rebels from persecution from comments by Nick Kapur, a Professor of History at Rutgers with a focus on Japan and East Asia.

“In Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868), when impoverished peasants finally couldn’t take it anymore and decided to revolt, they would sign their list of demands with all their names in a big circle. They had specific reasons for doing this: First, this format expressed their solidarity and commitment to each other, like an endless ring that cannot not be broken.

But perhaps more importantly, the usual way daimyo lords dealt with peasant revolts was torturing and executing the ringleaders but letting everyone else live. After all, they needed peasants to till the fields! By signing in a circle, nobody could tell who the leaders were.”

Apparently, these kinds of circular documents – now known as Round Robins – could also be found in 17th century French petitions to the Crown, in the British Royal Navy when sailors petitioned officers, and in the Spanish American War with demands that embarrassed then President McKinley.

Here’s to pelicans’ unity, robins’ evasiveness, to solidarity and rebels of all kinds! And nature’s endless ability to lift my spirits with surprises.

Music today by an adventurous young artist who is performing Edward Lear’s poem about pelicans (Pelican Chorus) in a Hungarian bath house.

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