Of the plant photos above, only one was taken in the original evolutionary place of the subject, two others feature ruins of long-gone industries , and just one of them embodies both; yet they all caught my eye – if only for their melancholic beauty. So clockwise from top left is a recently arrived alien called Wireplant (Muhlenbeckia complexa) which is an overseas plant that’s set up home in the extreme South West, in this case on the ruined chimney of an abandoned serpentine works. Next to it are some fine South African lilies called Zantedeschia aethiopia in a Cornish stream; a hybrid geranium called Geranium x oxonianum ssp Lace Time; another South African invasive invader called (rather unwokeishly) Kaffir fig; the flower of a bird-cherry and an abandoned water mill. Only the Bird Cherry is in exactly the place it started out, whilst the rest are either aliens or ruins. Notwithstanding the valiant efforts of the National Trust it seems that in the real world, the one in which kicking a stone is thought to hurt your toe; permanence, stability and reliability are in very short supply. And finally, ‘though far from exhaustively, here’s a proper villain, up there with Himalayan balsam and drug dealers; the very beautiful Giant Rhubarb AKA Gunnera tinctoria, the mere thought of which could land you up being deported to Rwanda. The only possible conclusion is that the natural world is incorrigibly promiscuous, creative, inventive and given to long holidays in distant places.
Madame and I have been grounded for weeks by the absence of the campervan, whose engine blew up after a disastrous service and a defective (brand new) water pump. If you know anything about car engines, the mention of a broken cambelt; (timing belt – if you’d rather), will strike fear into your heart; and so these thoughts about the nature of nature were on ice for a while – rather like Madame’s replacement knee joint which was also the subject of a much more successful service replacement six weeks ago. Both challenges are slowly resolving after six weeks of painkilling drugs for Madame and awkward conversations with the garage owner which were all mine! We managed at last to get away to the Bannau brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) for a couple of days in glorious sunshine where – aside from several other new warning lights and faults in the campervan – we were able to go for short walks up the Monmouth and Brecon canal.
Finally, on Tuesday, I sat for an hour and a half sharing the garage office with a bored receptionist struggling with the accounts and a television loudly running an endless loop of musical anthems from the 70’s and 80’s on a screen that was so low resolution you could barely read the titles. Meanwhile the boss was continually on the phone, hustling here and there and greeting his dodgy mates, one of whom was wearing a red MAGA cap, as they trailed through the door . By the look of them, irony would have been way above their pay-grade. Eventually they handed back the campervan keys and I thanked them with a forked tongue, glad to escape with my life and credit card intact.
Nothing is what it seems, the philosopher said; talking as usual – out of his head.
I’ve searched for the source of this quotation but it seems likely that its source is my old French teacher, Whacker Allan, who had spent time in France during/after the war and might have picked up some robust continental philosophy while he was there. Even as a teenager I realized that there was more to his witty poem than met the eye. Anyway, I forgive him for wielding his cane on me, back in the day, and I hope he forgave me for creeping into his room one lunchtime and smashing the cane into pieces.
So why this odd little quotation? Well it perfectly expresses the way things feel at the moment to many of us. I even discovered today that it has a name – “Hypernormalisation”– which describes a concept articulated first in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak – and I’m quoting from today’s Guardian newspaper – to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia ……… in a society where people are living with dissociation caused when institutions are broken; there is no effective leadership and systematic dysfunction creates fear, dread and denial. Most particularly because we somehow manage to struggle on, as if nothing has changed. Yep – I think that about sums it up!
Or to put it in in more familiar language, everything’s going to shit and it seems there’s nothing we can do about it. Even as I write this, the suspicion the Keir Starmer or one of his goons will read this, lick their indelible pencil and mark my name in a notebook for expulsion from the Party, flutters past my mind – but just to save time, it’s too late Pal – we both resigned when your addiction to betraying promises became apparent.
So we’re left with the unappetising fear that nature is not, if it ever was, natural– so to speak – in the sense that, like the sunrise and the seasons it never changes. To glimpse nature is to glimpse eternity they say, except it isn’t. Nature is more like a sixth form prom party; there are rules but we feel free to ignore them when we care to. While nature endlessly reinvents herself to respond to constant change; we, at the summit of creation stumble around as if we’ve lost the keys. We cling to the synthetic memory of the endless summers of the past without troubling ourselves with the science that tells us that shit happens, it really does.
Talking and thinking about nature is being overtaken by a kind of wistful sentimentality directed towards the past, as if by emulating it we might return to it. However if I dare be a bit controversial; when I visit National Trust Dyrham Park for example I don’t for the tiniest moment wish myself into a silk waistcoat because I know that all the evidence points to the inevitable truth that I’d be somewhere down in the latrines shovelling out the brown stuff. The earth is a mind bogglingly complex and inter-related system. Nothing, for instance, in the concept of Gaia suggests simplicity – as if reintroducing the Lynx in Scotland could return the earth to a previous setting. It may well be that re-introducing the Lynx will have a desirable positive impact on, for instance, deer numbers but it won’t do anything for the Dartmoor Atlantic Rain Forest.
So my argument is that if we are going successfully to manage the triple but related crises of climate change, financial collapse and species extinction then we must stop looking backwards. The reason we can’t sing our songs by the rivers of Babylon is because we’re not in Babylon (which no longer exists except as a pile of ruins and some rather exciting artifacts and stories; we no longer have the words to the songs and the rich natural history such as we still have would be unrecognizable to the Babylonians. The past, with its customs habits and regulations has utterly failed us and any proposed solution – (I’m looking at you MAGA hat!) – any proposed solution that looks just like the past without the problems is a palpable fraud. The future will be, must be different.
I’ve just written about the extraordinary adaptability of nature but we also have its sheer, unnecessarily and promiscuous beauty to lean on and more importantly to learn from. Nature is able to adapt so quickly because it’s local. The question “what’s happening to the earth” is so general as to be impossible to answer without another generalization. “What’s happening here?” is the better question and, capable of being interrogated, quantified and scaled up in many cases. Outside our front door the River Avon runs past stinking of detergent and human sewage; occasionally flooding with terrifying speed. We can walk the length of the problem, test the water and measure its flow, its inputs and the likely causes of any problems and then solve them. I don’t regard lack of will, lack of finance or lack of organisational capacity as excuses for doing nothing. In my imagined new world, truth and beauty walk hand in hand. Too much so-called political wisdom is based on doing nothing because anything else is too hard. Tree hugging nonsense I hear above the roar of the traffic but I don’t talk to the trees, they talk to me! they talk to us all! Far from being the summit and perfection of creation the human race feels more like a friday afternoon shift on the neoliberal production line. Why can’t we sing our songs? Because we are wasted in every sense of the word.
