Unsetting the Chemical Mind
With a natural barometer and gauge of personality.
‘The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.’ -Marcus Aurelius
Wes ðu hāl dear reader! Welcome to this late Autumn newsletter. I hope it finds you with good stocks of garlic and fire water. This edition hopes to be the first of a series looking at character through the lens of The Rooky Wood.
Recently I have been given opportunities to make a few waves in various camps I would describe as having concrete-level chemical mind-sets. Plaster or jelly would be easier to crumble or wobble, but concrete is very tough. I believe buried deep inside such a mind-set is someone who: A. hasn’t thought it all through but can’t admit this, B. is nursing some sort of trauma, C. simply doesn’t care, or D. is thoroughly corrupt.
It is comforting to build our fortresses sky high. Some get their towers, Babel-like, to stagger beneath the Firmament like swaying umbrellas of stone, with which they hope to keep out God. Some build ring-forts with the bones of all their failures and things never attempted. The longer the concrete is allowed to set, the colder it gets within.
I had a great triumph the other day. I have searched the world’s bookshops online for an obscure title for months. I finally located The Soul of an Animal by T.S. Hawkins ; Original cloth, 0000; Allen & Unwin; n.d. (ca. 1910).; Condition: Binding partly browned; endpapers missing, therefore inner hinges open; 1st and last page brownish-shaded. Description: ("I hope, my work will awaken an interest in the psychic side of birds and animals."). ///// Contents: The slaughter of the innocent; On Souls; Suffering and Sin; Instinct and Reason; Language and Religion.
The wait for my tattered old book to arrive, from Germany via the current fuel-starved postal system, will be agony! Yes Germany!
I have one other of his books: My Friend the Rook (ca. 1937) and what a joy it is to read.
I was the fortunate beneficiary of Siobhan’s (The Little Red Bookshop, Hastings) suggestion to look in Papers Past (New Zealand National Archives) where was found an advertisement announcing the publication of this book. Interesting that such a book should have been of interest in this country. No concrete here, but a gentle heart and keen eye. What delight it is to find a fellow Rook friend, albeit one from 90 years ago. And, among all Rooks’ other talents Mr Hawkins has recorded a gem:
To-morrow a tempest sent from the east shall strew the grove with many leaves, and the shore with useless sea-weed, unless that old prophetess of rain, the raven, deceives me. Odes of Horace (Ode 17, Book 3)
My wave-making of late entailed, as mentioned in the previous newsletter: hogging the guest speaker’s mic at a local meeting of Forest & Bird on 9th April, warmly monopolising Jessie Mulligan’s 6-minutes on RNZ- extolling the virtues of this one of the nation’s pariahs (come to think of it, we have created way too many pariahs- another newsletter) on Tuesday, 21st April. Another opportunity was given me on the 16th April: to spend an hour showing how the Rook is the solution to agricultural woes- NOT the cause- my audience: the very biosecurity men at Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, paid to exterminate them.
At that meeting I seemed to perceive (or was it wishful thinking?) the thinnest of cracks creeping across the concrete of HBRC- we would get so far as to hear an occasional wondering comment, as of a man in a dream state (humouring me?), actually considering out loud what I was telling them about the Rooks… then shaking himself as if he’d been talking, listening to, engaging with, madness: but we’ve already spent all this money, time and effort…
One of the oddest things about Rooks is the contradictory nature of the studies that have been made about them. If you were to add up all the things said about Rooks right around the world, you would be reminded of a set of old fashioned scales, with the pros tipping this way, then the cons that way, a gently see-sawing scales almost perfectly balanced on the pivot according to their usefulness to man, if viewed only in terms of numbers- ultimately cancelling out all practical observations from either camp, and leaving the philosopher free to contemplate their neutral idiosyncrasies.
The strange thing is, the Rooks are a litmus test of character. Those who find in favour of our beautiful Corvus frugilegus, invariably have a softness, an eccentricity even, to their conclusions and a wholistic gaze- taking in the entire year, symbiotic relationships, the integrated natural realm and the part the Rook plays in its health, physically, emotionally and spiritually- seeing them as the learned rubbish collectors, the canny ploughmen, the comic relief, the society that demonstrates an unworldliness necessary to the pedestrian day. This position is ecologically sound and if applied becomes the foundation for sustainable farming, healthy soil and therefore a healthy nation.
Those who find against the Rook tend to be impatient, mechanical, numerical and, as with the scientist who has lost his peripheral vision spending years peering one-eyed through a microscope, those who find against the Rook seem blind to the massive amount of good they do for the 50 weeks of the year that they are not eyeing up germinating crop seeds. This view would be the correct one for ensuring the financial stability of the agrichemical industry as the outcome (New Zealand’s tailspin into a $2 billion grass grub problem aligning with the eradication of the Rooks and 100 years of chemical reliance) is infinite (or until their poisons reach saturation point in the soil and the water), profitable, toxic war.
No one seems to study Rooks just for Rooks’ sake. There are many animals in New Zealand that are not useful to man yet are affectionately tolerated because they fall on the right side of the current ideology. Lucky them.
I sat in my car in Havelock North outside a cafe last month, waiting for my hot chocolate to be made. Outside an old woman sat at table waiting for her friend to return. They had finished their lunch. They’d left a lot of crumbs on their plates. Three sparrows waited hopefully on the back of the empty chair opposite her, and occasionally would venture closer. But she casually shooed them away with a fluttering hand.
A litmus test of character.
So how to wobble the set jelly, crumble the plaster, crack the concrete? As the meme says: The only way out is through. In my family, stubbornness is called tenacity. An appropriate beast on our heraldry would have been a mongoose. In my experience the cracks, wobbles and crumbling come from relentless staying power. The rocks are inexorably reduced by the water, the cobra eventually capitulates to the mongoose.
Next event on the wave-making list is Organic Week NZ's Soil and Health interview where the wonderful Asha Jade allows the Rooks to tell their side of the story. Hopefully the Organics industry and “conventional” chemically reliant farmers will have a listen and hopefully the jelly will wobble, the plaster will crumble and a few cracks in the concrete might begin to show.
Only the closed mind is certain. Paraphrased from Lord Dunsany.
Until next time.
Farað nu gesunde and gesælige becumað (Go now healthy and arrive fortunate)
