The Soul of the White Ant Chapter 1 & 2

1. The Beginning of a Termitary

SOME years ago an article about 'White Ants', as termites are commonly but incorrectly called, appeared in a South African journal. Almost everything that naturalists tell us about these insects is important and interesting, and Dr Hesse's article was exceptionally so. But the article also made another fact clear; how very little is done in our land to study the behaviour of animals, and how much has been done and is being done in other countries. Everything that Dr Hesse told us was the result of long and patient observation in America and Europe. None of his facts was exactly relevant to our South African termites.

The life-history of most of our South African ants and termites is in every respect just as wonderful and interesting as anything that has been discovered in South America. Over a period of ten years I studied the habits of termites in an investigation into animal psychology. I then realized that such observation reveals new wonders every day. To mention one instance, the functioning of the community or group psyche of the termitary is just as wonderful and mysterious to a human being, with a very different kind of psyche, as telepathy or other functions of the human mind which border on the supernatural.

When one wishes to write of all these wonders, one is bewildered by the embarras de richesses. It is hard to know where to begin.

I want to tell you about the commonest of our termites or 'white ants', and what I am going to relate may be observed by anyone who wishes; he may even discover new wonders. Most of these facts have not been published before; indeed, I do not think they have been discovered by scientists.

The common termite which is so destructive to wood of all kinds, and builds 'ant-hills' or termitaries on the open veld, is known throughout South Africa. I will tell you a little about the beginning of its community life.

The beginning of a termitary dates from the moment when the termites fly, after rain and usually at dusk, in order to escape their innumerable enemies. Even here we see a remarkable instance of the wonder of instinct. The termites beginning their thrilling flight know nothing about enemies. They have never been outside the nest before. The peril of existence is to them a closed book, and yet nine times out of ten they do not fly until the birds are safely in their nests.

These flying termites are at least twenty times as big as the others of the nest, and quite different in colour and form. You must consider a termitary as a single animal, whose organs have not yet been fused together as in a human being. Some of the termites form the mouth and digestive system; others take the place of weapons of defence like claws or horns; others form the generative organs. These flying termites are the generative organs of the colony. Every one of these winged insects is a potential king or queen. The four beautiful wings have taken months to develop and grow to perfection; months elapse -- or even years in very dry districts -- before an opportunity for flight occurs. They will never fly until there has been rain, and the reason is obvious. After the flight they must seek immediate shelter in the ground, and when the ground is hard and dry this is impossible.


Soldier and worker termites

Follow the flight of the termites carefully from the moment they emerge from the nest. They crawl out of a little opening, thousand upon thousand. There is obviously much excitement in the termitary. Sometimes the flyers are escorted to the opening by workers and soldiers. The first impulse of the flying insect as it emerges is to try its wings. It flutters and essays to lift itself into the air. If it fails, it climbs a grass stalk and takes off from this height. But fly it must, even if it is only for a few inches. You will understand presently why this is so essential, just as necessary as the preservation of its life, and therefore it takes just as much trouble to fly -- even more perhaps, for the urge is greater -- as to protect itself from enemies.

The watcher will soon become aware that the object of the flight seems to be to spread the insects over as large an area as possible, as some plants disseminate their seed. Some of the termites rise high into the air and travel for miles before they settle; others sink to the ground only a stride or two from the old nest. But far or near, fly they must, or the sole object of their existence is frustrated.

Let us watch one of the ants which has flown and settled in the grass near at hand. We will suppose it is female -- the two sexes cannot be distinguished with the naked eye. The first thing she does is to discard her wings. This she succeeds in doing by a lightning-like movement -- so fast that we cannot follow it with the eye. One moment we see her with her wings intact, the next moment she steps away, and her four wings are lying on the grass -- she is much, much quicker than a woman who discards her evening gown and hangs it over a chair. It took months for her wings to grow. For years perhaps she has lived in subterranean darkness, in preparation for this one moment. For a period of three seconds, for a distance of perhaps three yards, she enjoyed the exquisite thrill of flight and with that the object of a great preparation has been furfilled and the fairy-like wings are flung aside like a worn-out garment.

Immediately the wings are discarded she walks about rapidly for a few seconds. You become aware that she is seeking a suitable place for some further purpose -- but you do not know what the purpose can be, and her immediate behaviour does not clear things up for you. You must watch patiently if you wish to discover what she intends doing. When she has found a suitable spot, she does a very peculiar thing. She comes to rest on her fore-feet and lifts three-quarters of the hinder part of her body into the air, and she remains stationary in this position, as still as if she were merely the statue of a termite. If you become impatient and walk away the secret of the flying termite will remain a secret to you for ever. What is she doing? She is busy sending a wireless SOS into the air. Be patient a little longer -- there are only very few people who have witnessed this miracle. What does the signal consist of? I think I know, but I doubt if you will guess what it is. Only if you have made a study of the signals of insects will you find the clue. You think, of course, of some sound which cannot be heard by the human ear. You may know how our little South African toktokkie beetle (a beetle of the genus Psammodes) knocks in similar circumstances. No, the termite's signal is not a sound. One can prove that by experiment. We will content ourselves for the moment with the fact that the signal consists of something far and away beyond our own senses, and yet the male becomes aware of it over incredible distances! How does this happen? Well, it does happen, and our female is a very modern young woman, not too shy to make the first move in love-making. If you wait long enough you will presently see another termite come flying through the air, and you will notice that although his flight appears awkward and almost involuntary, yet he can steer a course and choose a direction even against the wind. The male sinks to the ground sometimes a yard or two from the place where the female is standing motionless in her curious posture. As soon as he lands he makes the same lightning-like movement which we have already seen in the female, and there on the ground lie his wings, too. His haste is terrible and irresistible. Over and through the grass he crawls, so fast that we can barely follow him with our eyes. He is looking for the originator of the signal which he received high up in the air. Within a few minutes he has found her. She has been motionless all the while, with her body hoisted aloft, but the instant the male touches her with his antennae, he infects her with his own excitement. She begins to run away as fast as her legs will carry her, and immediately behind her comes the male. They are now beginning the final search -- they are house-hunting, and this the male leaves to his wife. It must be a good house, for they will live in it for a long time. And with the finding of their home and the digging of the front door we will leave the happy pair for a while.

There are even stranger things connected with this little drama, of which the inexperienced observer will not become aware. I spoke of the urge to flight. Listen carefully. If those two termites had not flown, none of the events we have watched would have occurred. Instinct is something which only works step by step. If you destroy one step or omit it, then the whole thing collapses. Nature wishes the 'white ant' to spread. If the nests are too close together it would be bad for the communities, therefore they receive wings and must fly. But flight is only one step in their sexual life; if this step is omitted, their sexual life and their very existence ends there and then.

For as long as two years the two sexes may live in the same nest after they have grown wings. They are in constant touch with each other but there is not the least evidence of any sexual life. They must crawl out of the nest, they must fly, must settle and lose their wings, then and then only, and then immediately, sexual life begins. If you prevent them flying and break off the wings, both male and female die without any further attempt to become progenitors of the race. The length and distance of the flight is of no importance; it may last hours or only a second; it may cover miles or only an inch. But the force which we call instinct commands -- you must pass through every stage, you must take every step, or you are doomed. If you take a male and female just as they are emerging from the nest and place them beside each other, even in the closest contact, you notice that they take not the least interest in each other. They struggle to get away from each other. Let the female fly a few inches and the whole process which we described is carried out to a finish. Let the male circle round even once, then force him to land near the female, then and then alone, will events take their normal course. A second in time, three inches in space, one flutter of wings, are to the termite a gulf as wide as infinity dividing two kinds of existence. To us it may appear only a small dividing line, but the insect may not overstep it, not even with human assistance.

2. Unsolved Secrets

THERE is much to be told about the building of the termitary, but I wil1 confine myself to behaviour which is important for purposes of comparison. All behaviour is of importance to the psychologist. Behaviour is psychology -- at least it is all of the psyche we know or can study. For purposes of comparison, for comparative psychology -- especially if you begin at the top of the ladder with the apes -- the field at our disposal is not very large.

Upon the king and queen themselves falls the task of feeding and attending the first children. After the latter are fullgrown they take upon themselves all the work of the community. In the meantime the queen grows larger and fatter by the hour. Her small neat body vanishes in increasing layers of fat until at last it becomes an unsightly wormlike bag of adiposity. And to heighten the tragedy, her mate, in addition to having the blessing of almost the only dolce far niente existence known to nature, appears to have discovered the secret of eternal youth. He remains as beautiful and active and young as he was on his wedding flight. But if you look at her, an immovable disgusting worm, it seems impossible to believe that she ever fluttered in the air on fairy wings. We could hardly blame his majesty if he began casting an eye at some other female a little less repellent. If you fear this, however, you will be pleasantly surprised. His attachment to his queen seems to keep pace with her own growth. If you lay open the palace cavity, he rushes round in consternation, but always returns to her side. There is no question of saving his own life in flight. He clings to her gigantic body and tries to defend it, and if the ruthless attacker so wills, he dies at her side. What a wonderful example of married love and fidelity, which can survive this terrible change of his beloved to a loathsome mass of fat!

We often speak metaphorically of a queen as the mother of her people. This the termite queen is literally. She is the only mother of the millions which form the community; every individual is born out of her. Naturally she is absolved from all duty in the nursery. All she is expected to do is to keep on laying an endless stream of eggs, because the daily loss of workers and soldiers is enormous, notwithstanding their excellent methods of defence. Mother Nature is not perturbed about the death of a thousand individuals, when she has had the foresight to make certain of an unending supply.

I am now coming to a stage when in actuality every termitary differs in its growth, but for our purpose we will suppose that the environment of our nest has been such that development is entirely normal and not subjected to any disturbing outside influences. The first workers begin to build a palace for the queen. Deep below the surface of the earth, from three to six feet, they prepare a hollow chamber. As years go by this is gradually increased in size, and the earth which is excavated is taken to the surface and used to form the thick defensive crust. In this hollow chamber the queen is placed. It fits her so well that one is inclined to think that it has been built around her. I do not think this actually happens, but now I come to a stage when almost every conclusion is bound to be mere guesswork. No human eye has ever seen what actually takes place. No one has ever discovered a way in which to watch the termites at work in the queen's chamber, for they work in pitch darkness and to let light into the chamber is as great a handicap to the termites as the sudden destruction of the sun would be to us. We cannot see in complete darkness.


Winged adult termites

The queen continues growing until, compared with the ordinary termite, she reaches a gigantic size, and becomes an immobile mass, still as a log. The only part of her which gives any sign of life is the little head, which remains unchanged. If you dissect the skin and body carefully and examine it under a microscope, you will be convinced that during her later stages of growth the queen is unable to make any voluntary movement, except of course of the head. You make think she could move like some worms do, by contraction and expansion. But you will find that no part of the body behind the head can be controlled by what was once an intricate central nervous system. Nor do I think that there can be any question of her regaining the power of movement temporarily, as for instance by emptying the sac for a while. I certainly have seen no indication of this. Besides, the very nerves in the body have changed into fluid. Both these theories, therefore, that the queen is able to move by contraction and expansion, or that she gains a temporary power of movement, must be discarded.

To continue with the queen's life-history, her first palace is a cell made of termite earth which rapidly becomes as hard as cement. Usually she just neatly fits into it. She is always much too huge to use the door of the cell as entrance or exit. If you wish to remove her you must break down the cell. The king and the workers, however, can come and go quite easily. She is fed and the eggs which she never ceases laying are removed to the breeding grounds by workers appointed to this task. The king apparently does nothing. He appears to be a mere hanger-on in the palace. Still the queen goes on growing. Here in her first palace- she has not attained one-third of her eventual size. At last she very nearly fills all the available space in the cell. There is barely room for the tiny workers to carry the eggs away across the insensate bulk. A terrible tragedy appears to be imminent -- it reminds us of the question: what will happen if an irresistible force meets an immovable mass? The human observer is helpless at the threat of this terrible fate. In spite of all his knowledge and intelligence he is unable to help in any way. But actually termites have never worried about it at all. They had a solution ready -- a very simple one. Just before her majesty finally outgrows her cell they build a second one, half as big again as the first. It is parallel and adjacent to the first, just as hard and with just such a narrow door. The queen is then removed and placed in the second cell where there is space for her to grow for perhaps another year. So she gets transposed from cell to cell until there have been about six changes with the queen in the last and biggest. The chamber doors are always equally small much too small for the queen to come or go by.

We must clearly establish another fact which makes the whole matter even more complicated. One could easily prove by measurement that the queen's subjects could not possibly move her. The lifting power of one termite can be estimated fairly closely, and the area of the queen's body available for workers to grasp during lifting can be measured. During the later stages it would need thousands more termites to lift her than there is available grasping space for the body.

We present to you the following facts:

The queen is incapable of movement.
The doors of the cell are too small for her to come or go by.
The insects cannot lift her.
Yet she vanishes from one cell to appear in another.
The only explanation that seems feasible is that there are several queens and that it is not the same one each time. If the first gets too big for her cell, she is killed and eaten and then the workers carry a potential queen into the second cell where she develops into a queen. The only intelligent explanation, perhaps, and very simple, now we have thought of it.

The only pity is that it is not true. We have been deceived by the analogy of the bees, which make queens, kill, and move them. It is quite an easy matter to mark the termite queen and so prove that it is the same queen which gets moved. I have tested many theories brought forward by friends who have studied entomology, but have never found one which coincided with all the facts. Perhaps one day a future Fabre will discover the truth.

The Soul of the White Ant Preface and Introduction

The Soul
of the
White Ant

by

Eugène N. Marais



Translated by
Winifred de Kok
1937

First published in Afrikaans under the title
Die Siel van die Mier

Publisher's note

Eugène Marais was born in a farming community near Pretoria in 1872. Journalism was his first career, but he later studied law in London, and by 1910 was in Johannesburg trying to establish himself as an advocate. Increasing depression drove him to retreat to Waterberg, a mountain fastness in northern Transvaal. Settling near a large group of chacma baboons, he became the first man to conduct a prolonged study of primates in the wild. It was this period that produced My Friends the Baboons and provided the major inspiration for The Soul of the Ape. He returned to Pretoria to practise law, to resume his career as a journalist, to continue his animal studies and to write poetry in Afrikaans. In 1926, the year after he had published a definitive article on his original research and conclusions about the white ant, a world-famous European author took half Marais's life-work and published it as his own. This plagiarizing may well have been a major factor in Marais's final collapse. Plagued for many years by ill-health and an addiction to morphine, he took his own life in March 1936.


Contents

Translator's Preface
Introduction
1. The Beginning of a Termitary
2. Unsolved Secrets
3. Language in the Insect World
4. What is the Psyche?
5. Luminosity in the Animal Kingdom
6. The Composite Animal
7. Somatic Death
8. The Development of the Composite Animal
9. The Birth of the Termite Community
10. Pain and Travail in Nature
11. Uninherited Instincts
12. The Mysterious Power which Governs
13. The Water Supply
14. The First Architects
15. The Queen in her Cell

Translator's Preface

THE name of Eugène N. Marais is known to all Afrikaans-speaking South Africans as a writer of short stories and verse. He himself, however, would wish to be remembered for his lifelong study of termites and apes. He began life after leaving college as a journalist, then studied medicine for four years, but eventually took up law and was called to the bar by the Inner Temple. A scholar and a man of culture, he chose nevertheless to live for a period extending over many years in a 'rondhavel' or hut in the lonely Waterberg mountains, learning to know and make friends with a troop of wild baboons, whose behaviour he wished to study. He tamed them to such a degree that he could move among them and handle them with impunity. At the same time he busied himself with the other end of the chain and studied termite life, a study which often meant tremendous drudgery and needed endless patience.

During those years Eugène Marais was not concerned with publicity in any form, but a friend induced him to write an article for an Afrikaans periodical called Die Huisgenoot. This proved so popular that the author was besieged for more, and the articles continued for almost two years.

His years of unceasing work on the veld led Eugène Marais to formulate his theory that the individual nest of the termites is similar in every respect to the organism of an animal, workers and soldiers resembling red and white blood corpuscles, the fungus gardens the digestive organs, the queen functioning as the brain, and the sexual flight being in every aspect analogous to the escape of spermatozoa and ova.

About six years after these articles appeared, Maurice Maeterlinck published his book, The Life of the White Ant, in which he describes this organic unity of the termitary and compares it with the human body. This theory aroused great interest at the time and was generally accepted as an original one formulated by Maeterlinck. The fact that an unknown South African observer had developed the theory after many years of indefatigable labour was not generally known in Europe. Excerpts from Marais's articles had, however, appeared in both the Belgian and the French press at the time of their publication in South Africa. Indeed, the original Afrikaans articles would have been intelligible to any Fleming, for Afrikaans and Flemish are very similar.

No one who reads this book, based on the articles published so many years earlier than Maeterlinck's book, would hesitate to give its author the honour due to him.

Eugène Marais intended writing a fuller and more scientific volume, but this intention was frustrated by his untimely death a few months ago.

-- Winifred De Kok (London, 1937)


Introduction

by Keith Addison

EUGÈNE Marais was a South African poet, a story-teller, a journalist, a lawyer, a psychologist, a natural scientist, a drug-addict, and a great genius -- an abused and forgotten genius, and the world is the worse off for that.

He was master of a science that was only invented 50 years later (ethology); it was 60 years before anyone else attempted to study what he'd studied (ape societies in the wild); he described natural mechanisms and systems that were not identified by mainstream science until 40 years later (pheromones); and neither science nor society has yet caught up with many of his findings and conclusions.

As a boy growing up in Cape Town in the 1950s I knew of him as an Afrikaans poet, an early champion of the language of the Boers. We studied his poem Winternag (Winter's Night) in school, and duly thought nothing of it. He could have taught us so much more, if they'd let him.

Like many of us, I always had animals or birds or creatures of some kind around, or in my pocket or hanging off my clothes -- and so did Marais. His son wrote of him: "[He] was never without tame apes, snakes, scorpions, and the like."

At one time I became fascinated by ants, and spent ages lying on my stomach on the ground studying them. "What are you doing?" my mother asked once. "Counting ants," I told her. It became a family joke. If only I'd known what Marais had to say about ants!

It was only much later that I really discovered Marais, and I guess most of us still haven't. Which is rather typical of Marais, and that's a tragedy -- which is also typical of him.

As a scientist it was the mind of man, the human psyche, that preoccupied Marais, and to find the key to its nature it was to nature that he turned, rather than to humans. He followed two parallel paths, the study of the animals most like humans, the primates, and the study of creatures that could hardly be more alien to us, the social insects -- termites, known in his day as white ants. In both fields his findings were revolutionary.

In a way Marais was lucky. For entirely unrelated reasons he stumbled upon unique opportunities for his research. One reason for his success was that nobody else had had the chance to do that kind of work before, nor would have again for many years afterwards. But it was what he made of his opportunities that counted. And where Marais's luck led him was another matter.

Marais was born to a traditional Afrikaner family in the Boer Republic of the Transvaal in 1872. He had a rather strange schooling: the only teacher available was a Church of England missionary who could not or would not speak a word of Marais's native Afrikaans -- known as "kitchen Dutch" in the snooty British colony of the Cape, where it was the patois of the mixed-race Cape Coloured servant-class. So Marais learnt English.

In 1890, at the age of 18, he took his first job, as a journalist for the newspaper Land en Volk (Country and People) in Pretoria, the capital. A year later he was the editor, and by the time he was 20 he owned the newspaper.

His acrid comments as a parliamentary reporter at the Volksraad (People's Council) saw the entire Council vote to ban him from the press gallery. Later he was charged with high treason for opposing the president, Paul Kruger, but he was acquitted by the Supreme Court.

It was at this early stage of his career that his life-long struggle with drug-addiction began. Marais suffered severely from the acute pain of neuralgia, and someone suggested morphine, which was readily available then. He never shook off the habit. (His son and others referred obliquely to his bouts with the drug as his "ailing health".)

In 1894 came a severe blow that undoubtedly changed his life. Aged only 22, he married a young woman from Natal, but she died only a year later after their son was born. He never married again. Soon afterwards he gave up journalism, left Pretoria and went to London to study law. He qualified and was admitted to the bar at the Inner Temple. He studied medicine at the same time but in 1899, before he could qualify, the Boer War broke out, and Marais was put on parole as an enemy alien.

The British Redcoats were no match for the fast-moving Boer commandos -- 200 years of skirmishes and mutual cattle raiding with the Black tribes had made the tough farmers masters of guerrilla tactics. The British, lacking skill, tried sheer weight of numbers instead -- in the end 450,000 of Britain's cream were pitted against only 80,000 Boer fighters. That didn't work either.

Britain's Lord Kitchener finally "solved" the problem. The British cordoned off the land, burned the Boers' farms and herded their women, children and old people into concentration camps, where more than 20,000 died of disease and malnutrition.

In London, Marais was distraught. He escaped from Britain and was soon in Central Africa heading towards the Limpopo River with supplies of munitions and medicines to aid his countrymen. But before he got there the Boer generals surrendered and the war ended -- and Marais caught malaria and landed up in hospital in Delagoa Bay (Mozambique). As with the morphine, he never shook off the malaria, it recurred throughout his life.

The war left him shattered. He wrote later: "The most enduring result was that it made me far more bitter than men who took part in the war at a more advanced age and who had had less to do with the English before the war. It was for purely sentimental reasons that I refused to write in any language but Afrikaans, notwithstanding the fact that I am far more fluent and more at ease in English."

He did however write several learned papers in English, but for the most part he'd doomed himself and his work to the confines of an obscure language with no influence in the world of affairs, and it was to prove his undoing.

In 1904 Marais returned to Pretoria, but, shunning human society, he soon left for the Waterberg, an isolated range of mountains in the Northern Transvaal, where he and a friend lived for the next three years. This was part of the depopulated farming country Kitchener had cleared, nobody had lived there for years. Marais's only neighbours were a large troop of wild chacma baboons, which in the meantime had all but forgotten that man is something for a baboon to fear.

Years later he wrote in a letter: "No other worker in the field ever had the opportunities I had of studying primates under perfectly natural conditions. In other countries you are lucky if you catch a glimpse of the same troop twice in a day. I lived among a troop of wild baboons for three years. I followed them on their daily excursions; slept among them; fed them night and morning on mealies; learned to know each one individually; taught them to trust and to love me -- and also to hate me so vehemently that my life was several times in danger. So uncertain was their affection that I had always to go armed with a Mauser automatic under the left armpit like the American gangster!

"But I learned the innermost secrets of their lives. You will be surprised to learn of the dim and remote regions of the mind into which it led me. I think I discovered the real place in nature of the hypnotic condition in the lower animals and men. I have an entirely new explanation of the so-called subconscious mind and the reason for its survival in man. I think that I can prove that Freud's entire conception is based on a fabric of fallacy. No man can ever attain to anywhere near a true conception of the subconscious in man who does not know the primates under natural conditions."

But the Boer farmers began drifting back to the land and their ruined farms, and farmers and baboons have always been deadly enemies -- there is no raider of farm crops to equal a baboon. With the farmers came their guns, and an end to any trust the baboons had developed for Marais. His work now impossible, he moved back to Pretoria to work as an advocate and a journalist, and despite recurrent bouts of "bad health", he continued his scientific research at every opportunity.

His work on termites led him to a series of stunning discoveries. He developed a fresh and radically different view of how a termite colony works, and indeed of what a termite colony is. This was far in advance of any contemporary work. In 1923 he began writing a series of popular articles on termites for the Afrikaans press and in 1925 he published a major article summing up his work in the Afrikaans magazine Die Huisgenoot.

Few people spoke Afrikaans then, as now, but it's quite similar to the Dutch it stemmed from and any Dutchman or Fleming can read it without difficulty.

Maurice Maeterlinck was a leading literary figure of the time. In 1911 he won the Nobel Prize for literature following the success of his play The Bluebird. In 1901 he had written The Life of the Bee, a mixture of natural history and philosophy, but he was a dramatist and a poet, not a scientist. He was also a Fleming.

In 1926, one year after Die Huisgenoot published Marais's article, Maeterlinck stole Marais's work and published it under his own name, without acknowledgement, in a book titled The Life of the White Ant, first published in French and soon afterwards in English and several other languages.

Maeterlinck's book was met with outrage in South Africa. Later, in 1935, Marais wrote to Dr Winifred de Kok in London as she was beginning her English translation of The Soul of the White Ant:

"You must understand that it was a theory which was not only new to science but which no man born of woman could have arrived at without a knowledge of all the facts on which it was based; and these Maeterlinck quite obviously did not possess. He even committed the faux pas of taking certain Latin scientific words invented by me to be current and generally accepted Latin terms.

"The publishers in South Africa started crying to high heaven and endeavoured to induce me to take legal action in Europe, a step for which I possessed neither the means nor inclination. The press in South Africa, however, quite valorously waved the cudgels in my behalf. The Johannesburg Star [South Africa's biggest English-language daily newspaper] published plagiarized portions which left nothing to the imagination of readers. The Afrikaans publishers of the original articles communicated the facts to one of our ambassadorial representatives in Europe and suggested that Maeterlinck be approached. Whether or not this was done, I never ascertained. In any case, Maeterlinck, like other great ones on Olympus, maintained a mighty and dignified silence."

The 1927 files at The Star to which Marais referred were checked and confirmed 40 years later by American writer Robert Ardrey, author of African Genesis. "Maeterlinck's guilt is clear," Ardrey wrote. It is easily confirmed by a comparison of the two books. Marais's point is indisputable: his picture of the termitary is startlingly original, it could not possibly have been hypothesised or inferred without a great deal of original research, at the very least -- and yet there it is in Maeterlinck's book.

Though Marais made light of the issue in his letters of later years, he never regained the clear focus and command that marked his earlier scientific investigations before Maeterlinck committed his plagiarism. It was a bitter blow for Marais, the last of many.

"I find no record of scientific accomplishment after 1927," Ardrey wrote.

Life went on for Marais, after a fashion. He wasn't entirely embittered, still retaining his famed charm, especially with children, which tells much -- he spent much of his time with children, wreathing them in magic with his wonderful tales.

Robert Ardrey tells the story:

"A good many years ago Professor J. S. Weiner, Oxford's celebrated anatomist, told me a story about Marais that better than any other I have ever heard probed the hidden darkness. Weiner is a South African who grew up in a district of Pretoria called Sunnyside and many years later achieved world fame when with Kenneth P. Oakley of the British Museum, he proved that the Piltdown skull, then presumed to be the remains of man's earliest ancestor, was a hoax. I had never met Weiner when, in Rome for a conference, he came to our apartment to spend an evening. And he startled me, for he had no more than found a chair before he asked why I had dedicated African Genesis to Marais.

"There was little to explain. I said that I felt science had neglected Marais, and that, while I was not a scientist, it had seemed the least I could do. 'I'm glad you did it,' said Weiner. 'I know I've always felt guilty about him.' And he told his story.

"When Weiner was a boy in Sunnyside one of the most thrilling of events was the sight of Eugène Marais -- dignified, dressed always in immaculate white -- walking down towards the river in the evening. It was a signal to all the children along the street. They came piling out of yards and gardens and upstairs rooms to follow Marais to the river. There he'd find an old stump or a log to sit on, while they arranged themselves on the ground. And he would tell stories. All acquaintances recall him as one of the most consummate story-tellers of his time and place, but the mightiest of witnesses were the children at his feet, listening with long-held breath to his stories of bush and veld and dusty roads where mambas slink. The dark would come on. He would rise and go home, and the children, full of magic, would return to new worlds.

"Marais had a room in a house just a few doors down the street. Weiner's sister, friendly with several girls who lived in the house, had come to know him, and one day asked Weiner to return a book to Marais's room. Clutching the book, consumed by the excited possibility of meeting the magic-maker alone, he went to the house, found the room, knocked. There was no answer. He tried the door. It was unlocked. He entered cautiously. The room was dank with disorder. And there was a strange smell. He put down the book and fled.

"Many years later -- in 1940, years after Marais was dead -- Weiner was a medical student at St George's Hospital in London. In a pharmacological course the students were learning to identify a variety of pharmaceutical items. He was handed a sample of some drug with a very queer smell. Instantly he had a vivid recollection -- a total recall -- of a room somewhere. He struggled to identify the room, and knew it somewhere in South Africa. Then it came to him -- Marais's little room. The drug was morphine."

-- Robert Ardrey, 1969, Introduction, The Soul of the Ape

Between continuing bouts of "ailing health", whether due to morphine or malaria, Marais worked as an advocate, he wrote articles and stories. But what should have been written and bequeathed to the world wasn't done. The Soul of the White Ant was published in Afrikaans, and then later in English, but the more scientific work from his notes and studies that should have amplified it was not forthcoming.

The planned companion volume on the psyche of the baboon, The Soul of the Ape, was never finished. Several excerpts were published in Afrikaans, but the book itself didn't appear.

A further work summing up and integrating his findings and conclusions in the two branches of his investigations should have followed, but it didn't.

In 1936, Eugène Marais killed himself with a shotgun on a farm near Pretoria.


Soon afterwards Dr de Kok wrote to Marais's son asking about his father's papers, and especially about the manuscript of the unfinished and unpublished The Soul of the Ape, which Marais had discussed with her a few months before his death. The son responded: "There is no sign of a manuscript and no notes."

In 1968, 32 years later, without explanation, the son handed the unfinished manuscript of The Soul of the Ape to Marais's old publishers in Cape Town, handwritten in Marais's hand, in English, and, at last, it was published.

It is a flawed work, and Marais knew it, as his letters make clear. Maybe before his death he told his son that, or maybe the son decided it for himself.

One flaw is that it's definitely not finished -- suddenly it just stops. There's also an unevenness to it, and in the sense that informs it. The Marais of The Soul of the White Ant is a charming and engaging fellow, a thoroughly good companion, but in The Soul of the Ape another Marais seems occasionally to intrude, perhaps the "sombre side" his friends sometimes alluded to, the "hidden darkness" his children friends never saw in their Pied Piper.

The book is still highly readable nonetheless. Marais's work and his findings shine through -- and profound they are, as pertinent today as they were then, or more so. And the more welcome for having been thought lost forever.

But there should have been more, the work should have been finished, it could and should have been rounded off with so much more of the fruits of Marais's copious fieldwork and his extraordinarily clear insight. Maybe it had to be approached with a sense of joy in nature that Marais could no longer muster. If so, much of the blame for that is to be laid at the door of Maurice Maeterlinck, plagiarist, who left nothing remotely comparable in his own work by way of compensation.

Yet, the crushing note of a shotgun blast fails to set a judgment on the tortured life of Eugène Marais. That he could rise above his sufferings and misfortunes to leave us these two gems of his work says far more about the human spirit that he devoted his life to studying, and which is their true subject.

[Acknowledgements: To Robert Ardrey for his research on Marais and for reproducing some of Marais's letters to Dr de Kok; to Dr de Kok in her Translator's Preface to the English version of The Soul of the White Ant; and to Marais's son in his Biographical Note published in the original English edition. -- K.A., Osaka, Japan, April 2002.]

compostitioning

my lesson from this last everyday

An Archipelago of Local Responses Nicolas Bourriaud on the Altermodern

The Tate Triennial is opening in London this spring, put together this time by the French curator Nicolas Bourrioud who became renowned for conceiving the term 'relational aesthetics'. He has seized the exhibition as an opportunity to further explore his newest art historical concept: altermodernity.


Charles Avery, Untitled, (Traveller, 2008, (portret Nicolas Bourriaud)

Christophe Gallois:
The exhibition you are preparing for the Tate Triennial is articulated around a term you coined, the “altermodern.” You present this concept as a rereading of the notion of modernity through the specifics of the context we’re evolving in today. Could you elaborate on the characteristics of the contemporary world that led you to rethink the notion of modernity?

Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I think that the principal new element is the stage of cultural globalization to which we’ve come today, which entails two phenomena. The first is uniformity, under the aegis of mass production, a process of worldwide standardization dominated by the leisure industries, which treats local cultures as so many folklores to preserve. The second, in contrast to the first, is the cultural retreat into fundamentalism, into essentialist positions that are purely about identity. These two contradictory tendencies function like two ends of a vice that’s tightening upon us: on one side, the assertion of roots and idiosyncrasies as absolute values, and on the other, the tacit acceptance of a standardized culture that destroys every singularity.’

Christophe Gallois:
The zone that you explore with ‘altermodern’ then would position itself as an alternative to these two directions…

Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘Absolutely, there is a third path that avoids both of these obstacles. And, given this new element of globalization, it merges with the need to return to the modern gesture. In my opinion, the essence of modernity is exodus, the uprooting from any identifying definition of the individual. This exodus is furthermore encouraged today by the very thing it’s fighting: globalization. The “Altermodern” functions in culture in the way that alterglobalism, the term that inspired it, functions in the political sphere. In fact, alterglobalism isn’t the opposite of globalism; it proposes an alternative that isn’t singular and all-embracing, but rather is a set of responses to specific situations, an archipelago of local responses.’

Christophe Gallois:
The altermodernity you’re describing is characterized by a dimension that is at once spatial and temporal: you speak in particular of time as the last continent left to explore. One of the underlying questions in your project is that of contemporaneity. In your introductory text, you also ask, ‘What does modernity mean today?’

Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘What defines our era is that we live, for the first time in the history of humankind, on a planet that no longer has a terra incognita. A planet that is “Google-earthed,” covered by the satellite grid, in which even the remotest corner is known. For the first time we have an absolute totality. This revolution corresponds to economic globalization: “one world, one system.” Time, the past, history all become driving forces today because they correspond, as you just said, to the last continent left to explore. This dynamic corresponds to the idea that when traveling in space, one also travels in time. For contemporary artists, this particular situation produces a spatialized vision of time. Today, artists climb the steep slopes of history like so many geographical territories. In a certain way, time was reabsorbed by geography, and ever since, artists have been working on a map in four dimensions, which includes history. That’s why genealogy and archeology are significant in contemporary work: the more we can track the present, the less we need roots, because time is then composed of infinite strata without origin.’

Christophe Gallois:
On many levels, this idea of the altermodern seems to situate itself in the continuity of your previous work, notably crystallized around the terms relational aesthetics and postproduction. It seems that there are shared points between this earlier work and what you’re developing here—for example, around artistic practices that are conceived of as displacements or navigations in a universe of signs, practices of appropriation and usage—but also differences. Altermodern is characterized perhaps by an approach that is more directly tied to the social and political context. How do you locate the altermodern in relation to relational aesthetics and postproduction?

Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘You could say that it’s the same reality shot from different angles. The first point of view—which I group under the term of relational aesthetics—corresponded to the desire to define an imaginary collective horizon for a group of artist with whom I developed in the early 1990s. This horizon was the interhuman sphere, in the same way that the imaginary horizon of the Pop Art generation was the sphere of consumption. Postproduction detailed a theory of the production of works starting from a certain relationship to history, which I defined as a relationship to usage: art history as a toolbox. The ideas that I develop around the term “altermodern” do in fact illustrate more political, and geopolitical, concerns. It’s no longer about determining a formal horizion nor theorizing processes of production, but about establishing the emergence of a state of mind, which cannot be reduced to a particular style. This term conveys a particular relationship to the present, the here and now. It comes directly from the political sphere: what is our position? Does this position require or generate an affirmative response? Do we need modernity, and, if so, what are the characteristics of this modernity? This exhibition is, above all, a debate.’

Christophe Gallois:
In the introductory text to your project, you note a distinction between postmodernism, based on a linear vision of time, and altermodernism, whose model would be the labyrinth.

Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘This notion of the labyrinth echoes an anecdote from Claudio Magris’s Danube, which compares history to the idea of being in a train, riding the rails of time: a train comes toward us from the opposite direction, and for a few moments while runs along side us, we cannot tell if the train is going forward or backward. There are things that return; there are temporal loops. This notion is also very present in Borges, who describes time as a garden whose paths are forever forking. We’re not in the presence of a linear vision of time, but more of a sort of labyrinth. Postmodernism is the period where we didn’t know what to do with this labyrinth. I have the sense that today, wandering through the labyrinth has a positive value. This wandering seems to be the altermodern gesture par excellence: to finally find not what you’re looking for, but something else.’

Christophe Gallois:
The term ‘altermodern’ inscribes itself in the continuity of the notions of modernism and postmodernism that have defined the twentieth century, often to the greatest confusion. Recently, many have called into doubt the pertinence of these two notions. I’m thinking, for example, of Jacques Rancière, who questions the traditionally accepted trajectory of modernism to postmodernism. Modernism, according to him, was merely a way to simplify what he calls the ‘modern disorder’, while postmodernism failed by marking an artificial temporary rupture. Where do you situate yourself in this debate?

Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I would put myself more in the wake of Bruno Latour, when he says that we were never modern, at least in epistemological terms. We are still yet to arrive at a real relativism, which would no longer be indexed on a dominant culture, while ceasing to float in the postmodern “anything goes.” The relativism proposed by postmodernism is based on a sort of freezing of time. This was a period of resetting, equalizing and homogenizing different cultural hierarchies. How does one proceed, if not by re-ranking things through a new division, this time between altermodern and postmodern?’

Christophe Gallois:
An important aspect of your project is the reconsideration of multiculturalism. Taking a step back from the multiplication of cultural specificities and the accumulation of identities, you detect a more precise interest in contemporary practices for the formulation of what Edouard Glissant defined as processes of creolization, based on the association of different cultures, on the dynamics of translation, appropriation, and so on.

Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I think that we are arriving at a historical moment where artists no longer start with their specific culture, but with a culture that is already globalized. The work is more about starting from this globalized culture and arriving at the specifics than working from one’s identity or origins, which leads the artist to become the logo for his or her own culture. Many artists, whose work doesn’t interest me very much, are content to simply present their culture, their roots or their identity as content in itself. I think that the attitude that consists in presenting oneself as above all “different” no longer works. Difference is something that has to arise; it can’t declare itself.’


Christophe Gallois:
Could you say a bit about the curatorial directions that you took for the Tate Triennial? What, according to you, are the type of artistic practices and exhibition formats that correspond to the ideas you are developing?

Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘An exhibition is a question asked, never the answers that one brings to it. The exhibition Altermodern is the product of a series of meetings and discussions with artists and different art professionals. Since I’m currently based in London, I started with the uniqueness of London as a global city, a city where people from all over the world pass through for longer or shorter stays.The exhibition is also characterized by a certain generational homogeneity in the choice of artists, a little like Traffic, the exhibition I made around relational aesthetics in 1996 in Bordeaux. One exception is the participation of Gustav Metzger, who I wanted to include in the project as an epigraph, in the sense that, in the context of Modernism in the 60s, he is the great thinker of ecological catastrophe and sustainable development, two notions with very strong echoes in the new generation of artist. Finally, there are common inquiries that emerged in the relationships between the works, almost after the fact: there is, for instance, a propensity to manipulate signs coming from very different horizons, and a broad use of black and white.’

Christophe Gallois:
The exhibition will also coincide with the publication of your new book. Could you say a few words about it?

Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘The book is called The Radicant. It’s somewhat like the theoretical log of this exhibition. In most dictionaries, the term “radicant” comes right after “radical.” “Radicant” is the opposite of “radical,” meaning what belongs to the root; “radicant” means an organism that takes root as it moves along the ground. This image perfectly illustrates the modernity that I see emerging. We are no longer dealing with the concept of the tabula rasa. The modernity that is coming is based on this globalized state of the imagination, on the individual’s ability to exist not in a form of being but in permanent becoming, on the artist’s capacity to invent forms that aren’t indexed on an identity but on displacement, on the permanent rotation of signs and on the formation of paths within a quasi-infinite landscape of signs and available forms, on a planetary scale.’


Altermodern, Tate Triennial 2009
TATE Britain
3 februari t/m 26 april

Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, Sternberg Press, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-933128-42-9

An Archipelago of Local Responses Nicolas Bourriaud on the Altermodern

We were given this article to read for the upcoming workshop

Nicole is speaking

Sunday afternoon

Friday morning Noise
Relief, Anxiety Anticipation
Confrontation, Confrontation Stomach punch
Tone\/Intention, sourpuss
Frustration, Panic and the eventual meltdown
Lapis Lazuli, Throat Chakra, Speaking expensive
Listening, Hearing, Planning, Following through
Suspension, Out of context, Audience, Applause
Fragility, Fragility, Fragility, Ego - ego, ego
The Absurd, Letting go, Iron marks in linen
Unfinished, Run laps, Stop, Pause, Gap, continue
Harried, redirect Harried, exhausted
Relinquish

Friday Theoractical

Friday morning
Relief, Anxiety
Confrontation, Confrontation
Tone\/Intention
Frustration, Panic
Lapis Lazuli, Throat Chakra, Speaking
Listening, Hearing
Suspension, Out of context
Fragility, Fragility, Fragility, Ego
The Absurd, Letting go
Unfinished, Stop, Pause, Gap
Harried, redirect Harried

Friday morning

Relief
Confrontation
Tone/Intention
Frustration
Lapis Lazuli
Suspension
Fragility
The Absurd
Unfinished
Harried

"I really miss her"

from a film Ali is paraphrasing...

from the sadness of me being away...

from me missing her

24

space for us

collaborative postcard with Anitra Haendel (http://www.anitrahaendel.net/)

we may everyday

list in preparation of leaving Ali (particularities/specific care)- the everyday

hold her in the night while she pees (she sleeps on the shoulder)
carry her to bed
hold hand as we fall asleep
if she coughs in the night hold her close and position her body on the side

wipe morning pee
direct her to underwear and sleeping beauty dress
if dress needs cleaning she likes to clean it in the morning bubble bath
offer fruit, cereal, bread with cream cheese- in this order

dress for school, give some choices in wardrobe
prepare school bag with Arnold (stuffed pig toy) inside
give two vitamins before school
brush teeth
prepare carrot juice mixture with extra vitamin C

buckle in car seat- kiss, "have a good day, sunshine."
pick up, bring apple for the ride
in the car ride ask questions about school- what songs they sang, what snack they had, etc.
have cuddle time when you get in the door (involves kisses, tickles)

prepare various fruit, vegetables, soup and crackers for lunch
outdoor time (if weather permits)
reading time (naked time- skin to skin) read books cuddling in bed

hold child while she poops (supporting the back)
wipe, wash both sets of hands

dinner
put on pj's all together
cartoon
brush teeth
tuck into bed, kiss cheeks, forehead, nose, "good night, sunshine"

repeat

Thinking about the Everyday in Contemporary Art Practice workshop, and also what that means outside of a workshop context.

I'm not at all sure who I am right now.

reading these lines as I read your last message

"The soul is the seedbed of our actions. Everything that we conceptualize, create, or destroy has its beginnings there. What we see cultivated and thriving in the outer terrain is a manifestation of our inner creative or destructive impulses. There is a connectedness between what we see in the world and who we are, between who we are and what we do."

Estella Conwill Majozo, To Search for the Good and Make it Matter

Swine flu
WTF?

Scarlet Letter intervention (1)

Scarlet Letter Intervention
Paper and twine
Dimensions variable
2009

Another Day, 2

notice bird on a wire parrot next door
smell my sweat twine and dinner from last night
talk to mother talk to mother talk to mother
wash dishes listen for washer
blend breakfast shake remember vitamins
dress decide, same clothes for three years
fold laundry lint out of dryer
take project photos finish intervention
pick up daughter
run to post office stamps, deadlines, applications due
make lunch irritated
tidy up tidy up tidy up tidy up
write grocery list, to do list, mental list, art list
vacuum and sweep - everyone's allergic to spring
read to daughter read to myself - pick up the book, already
shop for groceries make sure enough money is in account
teach drawing lesson remember how to draw
cook dinner list list list
propose consider ponder
post follow through
read exhaustion stress
repeat

another everyday

notice bird on a wire
smell my sweat
talk to mother
wash dishes
blend breakfast shake
dress
fold laundry
take project photos
pick up daughter
run to post office
make lunch
tidy up
write grocery list
vacuum
read to daughter
shop for groceries
teach drawing lesson
cook dinner
propose
post
read

Done with One

The full slide show can be seen at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31808466@N06/sets/72157616648188594/show/

Preliminary Project Proposal

Project Proposal:

I propose a site-specific sculpture, a bronze easel, to be placed within the landscape of Redmond for the Redmond Outdoor Park Exhibition. The easel itself is to be part cast bronze as well as bronze piping, designed and welded by me with the help of Seattle welder, Jerry Sustek, and cast with help of Olympic Foundry.

The artwork is a sculpture and a performance as it will be fully adjustable by the viewer/participant. It is a space in which to engage as well as a tool to support the art community within Redmond. A plaque will accompany the sculpture inviting viewer participation stating; “Turn this easel to a desired location. Look. Create.” There is a possibility for landscape classes to accompany the piece over its two-year duration.

It is time for public sculpture to speak not just of the beauty within itself but and perhaps more importantly to the beauty surrounding it, our environment, out of which it is born.

ARTCamp 2009

Great proposal beginning.
I would recommend focusing on what you want to say, and worry about the technical details of fabrication a bit later.
If you would like me to proof read it for you, I'd be happy to.
It is a great start, now time for finessing it a bit.
Forza Tereza!
x

Bronze Easel

Directory of Images
Redmond Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition
Where the Beauty of the Art Reflects the Beauty of the Landscape, which is Redmond
Tereza Swanda

*Note that finished easel will be fabricated in bronze
1. Easel at Westside Park
2. Easel at Sammamish Trail
3. Easel at Sammamish Trail
4. Easel at Marymoore Park

Requirements and Directions for Installation

A plaque must accompany the piece explaining to all the function of the piece; to look at, and participate in appreciating the beauty of Redmond through painting, drawing and observing this landscape. (Instead of looking at the artwork I want to shift the viewer’s/participant’s perspective, to the beauty of this land.)
The easel will come with a concrete base as well as an axle in order to rotate the piece for the desired view.
A round circumference measuring the same, as the concrete base needs to be dug up in order for the base and ground to be at the same level. (view drawings)
All edges will be sanded for safety.
The easel will be functional and available to all in the community.
Periodic lubrication of parts might be required as the piece gets more wear over the years.

(Still need to work out details, call foundries, collaborate with plumbers, construction workers for the concrete base, etc.)

Friday

I've been withdrawn in the self- or more specifically self-pity. Received a poor evaluation on my last batch of writing. It's amazing how paralyzing a couple of words can be. Doubting everything-writing, the professor, dialogue, the program, the silly paper at the end of forty thousand dollars... myself.

Need to move, to dance

I feel like I need to begin anew.

My friend was laughing today!
And now so am I.

When in the world did Jamie Emerick arrive?
I feel I was part of your collaboration - I wish I was there.
x

Wednesday, Thursday

A day with Jamie Emerick,

letting your weight be supported

holding you up (with little help from me)

Bosco piece, "One who lay,"

reflection of the tree on the path

lying within

walking within

one who lay



It was fantastic to work side by side. I noticed the differences in working, in decision making, in thinking while keeping the other in mind/heart. We walked and sat still for at least half of the time noticing more about the little trail behind our house than I ever had. We noticed many organisms in the process of rebirth; a young tree growing out of a stump, a waterlily growing under the roots of a fallen tree; one still somehow protecting and cohabiting with the other.

Tuesday

10 Serviceberry trees are arriving tomorrow to be planted on our roof and in the backyard.
My friend had surgeries yesterday - not sure how they went.
I still have so much to do, I feel overwhelmed.
I think I want I want I want

Monday

She's going in for multiple surgeries today - to get stitched up, to become physically whole again.
We're sorting the schedule.
I've tried to sleep but my dreams are of my friend.
Keep on painting
I'm sorry I don't have time to discuss the public art application, let alone work on the application with you - perhaps at a better time, when there is less of an immediate need for my and your and everyone's attention. However, please include me in as a participant if we get it and install/perform later this year.

xx

thoughts with friend

Friend better, but still not out of woods.
Took 3 hour nap and dreamt of her -
She has a lot of angels around her, and is healing herself

slept 5 hours, but still feel exhausted.
Back to hospital later
I'm glad the sun is shining

Please send thoughts to my friend

Synchronicity

Today:

-9:00- 11:30: Studio.
Progressed with second Morse code piece. Three more strands


-1pm: Greek consulate with Dad.
Good progress; am officially in queue in Athens for dual citizenship

-3-4:30pm: Giro.
Walked from 79th street and Madison avenue to 24th street and 8th avenue, mostly along 5th avenue. Even with the overload of tourists, it's still my favorite passageway of New York.

-5-6pm: Worked on client.

-6-6:30: Ate falafel, thankfully alone.


-6:30 - 8pm: SoHo
Ilana's opening. It was lovely, met very interesting people.

-8-9pm - walked around SoHo with friends from the opening.

-9pm - 12am - With Turu's friends Dominic and Pat and Pat's baby Fenton.

researching place, land, home

The town of my birth: Jesenik , Czech Republic
http://www.zamky-hrady.cz/3/jesenik-e.htm
known for it's healing through water.
http://www.bohemianet.com/olomoucky_kraj/jesenik/jesenik_en.htm

to the town of my residence: Redmond, WA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redmond,_Washington
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Washington#Pre-history

I'm thinking of these places in relationship to Lucy Lippard's essay Looking Around: Where We Are, Where We Could Be. I'm thinking of colonial habits that devastate the ecosystem, my habits and my intrusion on this land. A thought from today; if you/I had very little water left, would we water the tree or drink? Which one is more important to the ecosystem?

Opening reception

Excited to see Ilana's show at Artists Space this Thursday

As Above, So Below

This phrase comes from the beginning of The Emerald Tablet and embraces the entire system of traditional and modern magic which was inscribed upon the tablet in cryptic wording by Hermes Trismegistus. The significance of this phrase is that it is believed to hold the key to all mysteries. All systems of magic are claimed to function by this formula. "'That which is above is the same as that which is below'...Macrocosmos is the same as microcosmos. The universe is the same as God, God is the same as man, man is the same as the cell, the cell is the same as the atom, the atom is the same as...and so on, ad infinitum."

This message theorizes that man is the counterpart of God on earth; as God is man's counterpart in heaven. Therefore, it is a statement of an ancient belief that man's actions on earth parallel the actions of God in heaven. This pivots on the belief that "all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation."

To the magician the magical act, that of causing a transformation in a thing or things without any physical contact, is accomplished by an imaginative act accompanied by the will that the wanted change will occur. The magical act and imaginative act becomes one and the same. The magician knows with certainty that for the change to occur he must will it to happen and firmly believe it will happen. Here it may be noted that magic and religion are akin: both require belief that a miracle will occur.

To bring about such a change the magician uses the conception of "dynamic interconnectedness to describe the physical world as the sort of thing that imagination and desire can effect. The magician's world is an independent whole, a web of which no strand is autonomous. Mind and body, galaxy and atom, sensation and stimulus, are intimately bound. Witchcraft strongly imbues the view that all things are independent and interrelated." These concepts pivot on the belief that all things come from the One Thing, or First Cause, and "Its power is integrating, if it be turned into earth."

The purpose of all rituals in ceremonial magic is to unite the microcosm with the macrocosm to join God, or gods when invoked, with the human consciousness. When such a supreme union is achieved the subject and object becomes one. This is because the magician feels that he is consciously in touch with all elements of the universe, therefore, he can control them. It may be said, the magician feels connected with the universe. This feeling intensifies the more the magician successfully practices his skills. Whenever he experiences a failure he knows that the ritual was not performed correctly.

When feeling unison with the universe the magician knows he has reached his Higher or True Self because he has attained mastery of himself and the universe. Thus he feels his "skillful work ascends from earth to heaven and descends to earth again, and receives the power of the superiors and of the inferiors." Therefore, he "hast the glory of the whole worldtherefore let all obscurity flee from thee." Now the miracles are possible.

Some magicians, including Aleister Crowley, claimed that when the magician reaches this ultimate peak of altered consciousness the miracles are no longer important, the extreme goal becomes the direct union with God. A.G.H.

Dad's hand surgery

My dad almost got his hand chopped off in a table saw yesterday.
He called my mom from the ER, and then she called me.
We went to the hospital while he was being operated on.

The surgeon came out and said the procedure was successful:
his pointer finger had to receive a skin graft from his hip
his thumb had to be sewn up very carefully as well.
Feeling may or may not be regained in the tip of his fingers.
Considering his age, he was doing very well.

We went to him in the recovery room, and he was very out of it.
Unexpectedly, I felt faint and nauseas and almost passed out, but I got over it.
He was awake, but not aware of what was going on; he wanted to know what time it was over and over and over.

When he looked in my eyes and knew who I was and why I was there, I realized I have a bond with him that I don't have with any other living being.
In that moment, I knew I wanted to be a parent.

Guest of Cindy Sherman

I went to see the movie Guest of Cindy Sherman. last night.
It was an interesting film, and I am glad I saw it- but rather than recount it here, I liked the review given by ArtFagCity blog.
Although it was a portrayal of what is was like to be Cindy Sherman's partner during her meteoric rise to fame during the 1990's, it seemed to me to portray an inner sadness and also highlight the lack of personal fortitude of the director/partner.

What concerned me most about the film was the reinforcement of gender stereotypes with regard to domestic partnership or marriage. Some thoughts:

When women are in the role of a "supporting wife", their marriage is more or less deemed successful by the larger community- a strong man, a good provider, a supporting wife, perfect life. In my experience as a wife and woman making art and living in New York City, there is not a lot of mention of a woman's own careers, a woman's own independence, a woman's own life separate from being wife, mother, negotiator, bill payer, laundry do-er, washer, mender, etc. (see previous posts about On Any Given Day poem).

I could just be projecting from my own domestic situation a little, but the movie did illicit that reaction...

So, when the supporting partner in a relationship is a man - and in this case, someone who seems to have remora tendencies from the beginning -feeling of emasculation, lack of self worth, and identity issues come to the forefront and discussed as though they are something new - they can't seem to deal with their more submissive role. But this hierarchic assumption of authority is still the fundamental thing that maintains inequality at home and in the community!

With women I know and have grown up with, I find it is still commonly accepted and even something to be proud of to be a "woman who doesn't work". New York City certainly is not easy to live in as a single person, let alone a wife and mother. To be a woman whose husband can afford to keep her at home, to raise a family, etc. is something that I see many women aspiring to, often at the expense of their own careers and own identities.

Sadly, movies continue to reinforce this inequality, which illustrates how we have not been able to move past this issue.

organ between

Being with my friend today we stumbled upon this beautiful image of the organ she and her daughter shared.

"The placenta or afterbirth is a highly vascularized ephemeral organ present in eutherian mammals that connects the developing fetal tissues to the uterine wall. The placenta supplies the fetus with maternal nutrients, and allows fetal waste to be disposed of via the maternal kidneys. The word placenta comes from the Latin for cake, from Greek plakóenta/plakoúnta, accusative of plakóeis/plakoús - πλακόεις, πλακούς, "flat, slab-like"[1][2], referring to its round, flat appearance in humans. Protherial (egg-laying) and metatherial (marsupial) mammals produce a choriovitelline placenta that, while connected to the uterine wall, provides nutrients mainly derived from the egg sac. The placenta develops from the same sperm and egg cells that form the fetus, and functions as a fetomaternal organ with two components, the fetal part (Chorion frondosum), and the maternal part (Decidua basalis)."

sketch

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31808466@N06/sets/72157616236562649/show/

thoughts that came up as I was sketching:
-corresponding to chakras in the body
-begin with beads on the floor
-beads as vibrations, as conversation, as dialogue (and then the physical movement of each string)
-a form of speaking with each other in silence
-women's work- sewing, decorating
-more importantly connecting
-sit as meditation with another- communication, commune

I want this performance to be a vision for what we can create between ourselves.
"In Almost Absolute Silence"
Here is my latest paper that will explain this further:

(Who knows- maybe we lose the necklace and just look at each other in silence)...




Tereza Swanda

Visual Culture Project
Semester 2 – Packet #1

Redefining Love through the Female Perspective

March 23, 2009
Sowon Kwon

What am I searching for within the texts written by or about feminists? Certainly, there is the underlying connection that since I have a female body/mind/spirit, there will be something within the lines of the previous writers that will reveal what is me; clarify what/who I am and reach me at the core; my beliefs, wants, anima. I am re-positioning, redirecting my education; not studying institutionalized (male) knowledge which I had throughout previous schooling, but the periphery which is continuously emerging as a parallel study (even as many of the writers are recognized as scholars in their own right). As Judith Butler has realized, so to have I. “I might not find my version of philosophy mirrored for me in any institutional form.”(240) Within feminist education lies a blueprint, a sketch of another possibility and through my reeducation there can be a deeper shift within the paradigm of my life. “For it is not a matter of changing this or that within a horizon already defined as human culture. It is a question of changing the horizon itself—of understanding that our interpretation of human identity is both theoretically and practically wrong.” (Irigaray, 20)

Let me/us consider one way we interact with one another, the monetary economy, which is a mediating structure between us all. Let us also consider the present moment as this structure is slowly and finally crumbling—or at least standing on shaky ground. How dynamite to think of breaking through this barrier to one another—to see, really see the other! I am not alone in my thinking:

It would entail, beyond the enslavement of property, beyond the subject’s submission to the object…, becoming capable of giving and receiving, of being active and passive, of having an intention that stays attuned to interactions, that is, of seeking a new economy of existence or being which is neither that of mastery nor that of slavery but rather of exchange with no preconstituted object—vital exchange, cultural exchange, of words, gestures, etc., an exchange thus able to communicate at times, to commune…, beyond any exchange of objects. (Irigaray, 45)

To quote from an interview with Millay: “Should the profit system be abolished?”

Yes, I blame the system…. I should like to live in a world where everybody has a job, leisure to study, leisure to become wiser, more perceptive…. I am willing to give up everything I possess, everything I will have…. I am willing to live in the simplest life … to live in a hut, on a loaf a day (Oh, I do know this sounds idiotic!) to achieve it. (Millay, 387)

They [women under a capitalist system after the fall of communism] had freedom to speak but no voice. They had freedom to buy essential services with money they did not have, freedom to indulge in the oldest form of private enterprise, prostitution, prostitution of body, mind and soul to consumerism, or else freedom to starve, freedom to beg. (Greer, 11)

…we discern some value in not being sure about the value of becoming a philosopher, unless a resistance to its institutionalization has another kind of value… (Butler, 234)

What do we truly value? What structure or system can we create between ourselves that upholds those values? What does that look like?

Another median between us is language. Unlike a physical exchange however, it has the potential to be much more. It is a much more nuanced exchange—with tones and pitches, pauses, rich subtleties, with many dimensions, not to mention the variety of languages.

If we are to regulate and cultivate energy between human beings, we need language. But not just denotative language, language that names, declares the reality or truth of things and transmits information; we also and especially need language that facilitates and maintains communication. And it is not just the lexicon we are talking about, but a syntax appropriate to intersubjectivity. This also calls into question why we speak—the very purpose of speech. (Irigaray, 100.)

How we speak to one another becomes of utmost importance. Luce Irigarauy’s answer,
“In Almost Absolute Silence,” is a chapter dedicated to this notion. “This silence is the condition for a possible respect for myself and for the other within our respective limits.” (Irigaray, 117) “But above all, it gives you a silent space in which to manifest yourself.” (118) Therefore, language is not just the speech we communicate with but also and more importantly that space of interaction, between action and stillness, between sound and silence.

One artist that embodied this play between silence and sound in language was Edna St.Vincent Millay. She wrote her poems in silence, completing them in their entirety before writing. In addition, however, many whom she reached knew her from her vibrato voice. (Milford, 383) Millay toured and gave readings continuously throughout her life as well as doing radio shows. It was her inner strength, her love, which she revealed as she sang each word. (http://static.salon.com/mp3s/millay_sonnet090601.mp3)

What do we know of love, loving, being with love, sharing love? I agree with Krishnamurti from his chapter, Freedom from the Know, in his text, On Nature and the Environment that we do not know much about the topic.

When I say, “Love has no tomorrow and no yesterday,” or “When there is no center, then there is love,” it has reality for me but not for you. You may quote it and make it into a formula, but that has no validity. You have to see it for yourself, but to do so there must be freedom to look, freedom from all condemnation, all judgment, all agreeing or disagreeing. (33)

We do glimpse it however, when we start talking about love between. Not love of one for another, a subject/object relationship. Not something, I alone create and then pass on to another to receive. But a vibration, energy between us in which I try to see you as clearly as possible and vice-a-versa. “Transcendence is thus no longer ecstasy, leaving the self behind toward an inaccessible total-other, beyond sensibility, beyond the earth. It is respect for the other whom I will never be, who is transcendent to me and to whom I am transcendent.” (Irigaray, 104) Luce Irigaray comes closest to Krishnamurti’s notion:

I am listening to you, as to another who transcends me, requires a transition to a new dimension. I am listening to you: I perceive what you are saying, I am attentive to it, I am attempting to understand and hear your intention. Which does not mean: I comprehend you, I know you, so I do not need to listen to you... (Irigaray, 116)

Another feminist that seems to know of this kind of love is bell hooks. Through her book, The Will to Change; Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks connects with many men and presents their perspective:

My vision for myself and for all men is that we reclaim every piece of our humanity that has been denied us by our conditioning. Obsession with sex can be healed when we reclaim all the essential aspects of the human experience that we have learned to manage without: our affinity for one another, caring connections with people of all ages and backgrounds and genders, sensual enjoyment of our bodies, passionate self-expression, exhilarating desire, tender love for ourselves and for another, vulnerability, help with our difficulties, gentle rest, getting and staying close with many people in many kinds of relationships. (Bearman, quoted by hooks, 182)

It is rare to read such honest self-expression from anyone but more so from a man.

Within feminist education lies a blueprint, a sketch of another possibility; to have a universe of two who not only coexist but also love. Love not only between lovers, but also between children and elderly, between men, between women, between friends (who are initially strangers), between father and son, between colleagues, between us. “The subject does not produce meaning alone, does not realize a task alone, nor accomplish an undertaking all alone.” (Irigaray, 126)

Work Cited
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008.
Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria Books, 2004.
Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Krishnamurti, J. On Nature and the Environment. San Francisco, Calif: HarperSan Francisco, 1991.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2001.