I forgot to wake up for the eclipse this morning. Well it was only a tiny sliver of an eclipse in Australia. The pictures from New Zealand are superb, it rose in an already eclipsed state—how great’s that! Most of the time it was over the southern ocean below NZ and Australia. The blood moon of two weeks ago i did get up for at about 4am but it was behind cloud. But it doesn’t matter if i saw them, i kind of felt them.
The last blood moon we had, i lost all my chickens to a fox and this seemed to signal the start of a great unravelling. Well. Yesterday, it happened again. All my pretty chickens and their dam. We found them, 13 of them, torn apart and huddled together in the dust on the floor of the chicken coop. We buried them in a deep grave and i planted wormwood on top. Now the chicken yard is deadly silent, forlorn. the cold wind blows their feathers around. I have set a fox trap but don’t hold much hope of catching it, it’s a clever one.
I feel like I am at the mercy of my own optimism. “It’ll be alright, the foxes can’t get in” but of course they eventually do get in, through some hole i hadn’t seen, or some new weakness that was never exploited before (this time the fox pulled off a loose weatherboard from the side of the chook house). Maybe the same thing is happening in America, as the new government takes root, it’s as if the democrats most of them are still in a sort of stunned state of incredulity and denial. “Do they really want to take us there?!!” Oh yes it’s clear they do, they are a disease that wants to destroy the host. And yet the country seems to be on immunosuppressants. Of course it’s still early days, things could yet unravel in a few different ways.
But just imagine—set aside our optimism for a minute—the new regime really does take hold, then its starts its aggressive wars and acts of unprecedented cruelty that make ww2 look like a trial run. What will be left of the west? It’s so easy to destroy, so hard to build up. Those chickens i hatched from eggs in the incubator, turning them twice a day for 21 days, monitoring the temperature and humidity, then keeping them fed and warm under a bulb through the early weeks, then moving outside to different safe hutches in the garden, bringing them in every night, finally moving them to the big yard, feeding every day, nice warm mash in the morning, seed in the evening, worming them, clipping their wings, filling nesting boxes with straw, finally the eggs start to come and had just picked up this spring to a good rate of a half dozen a day that i could eat or sell at work. All gone in one night to one wily fox. I’m back at the start again, the incubator is warming up.
Everything fizzles out eventually (yet that optimism keeps rising up, unbidden, i can’t force it down) and there will be a rebuilding out of the ruins. But it’s all so easy to undo. Maybe it has to happen, a great cleansing. Maybe things had gone on the way they were for long enough. Nature is tough. Sometimes we need to really feel this, to know it and recognise it and understand it. It is our predicament, hovering in space. The sun suddenly might disappear and we are alone, beginning to freeze in the cold. I used to think evil didn’t really exist—well if it does exist it looks like a person who is just cruel for fun—and there seem to be a lot of those folks about at the moment. It does surprise me that the regime doesn’t try to disguise its evil but leans into it, embracing cruelties that have been taboo in most civilised places for centuries. Inspired by game of thrones maybe, we are witnessing the rebirth of the medieval maniacal tyrant in modern times. But maybe it’s all just the playing out of what was and is always possible in human nature. Perhaps it was all just supressed for too long. The incredulity of the rest of us is the denial of our own nature, and it is part of the play too – imagine the worst possible thing that drumpf could do – he will do that.. and then worse.. and yet we still seem to want to believe otherwise.. because it doesn’t make any sense. Like chickens faced by a fox we enter a stunned state which makes us easy to destroy.
And yet to resist is to become that which they say you are—some kind of violent terrorist—and they’d be right. It’s the tolerance paradox, playing out. If everything we like is going to be destroyed anyway, does it make any difference if we resist? It seems almost a symbolic gesture. But then wars hinge on symbolic gestures. A lot of people seem to believe that we are still in the stage where the moral argument is being made. Resisting too soon makes the moral water murky. Who was really in the wrong? This is important for the people in the middle, when they finally are forced to pick sides. So we wait until the moral case is absolutely rock solid, then we resist, if there’s anyone left. Meanwhile the regime seems to be keeping their own separately curated moral universe, which drifts further and further away…
The eclipse touched on Antarctica, that huge place down there we tend to forget about. I have been thinking about Antarctica tho and the early explorers like Mawson who was a bit of a local geologist done good. He did a lot of early interesting work up in the Flinders Ranges. He was on Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition, which was not the one where he got stuck in the ice floe but the one before it, where they nearly made it to the S pole but had to turn back agonisingly close to it. Mawson led a group which was the first to the magnetic pole and was in the first group to climb Mt Erebus. Needless to say it was all insanely difficult during that first “heroic era” of Antarctic exploration, everyone getting frostbitten and being at the mercy of their own mental states and a kind of wild crazy luck that would break up ice floes or reform them overnight. Not to mention the financial difficulties—Mawson like Shackleton was perpetually fund-raising and had to be bailed out even after his most successful Australasian Antarctic Expedition. The government was very stingy in funding his efforts, which is ironic cause they stuck his head on the $100 note later on to celebrate them.
That stretch of ocean between Australia and Antarctica is so wild as well, it entices and terrifies me. I have a couple of blocks from one of David Lewis boats, he was the first person to sail solo to Antarctica and he wrote a fantastic account of it, “Ice bird” which you should read. He barely made it, his boat was completely smashed up by waves the size of mountains. Before he left he worked at ANU for a while and my grandfather knew him and ended up with some of his stuff. Sometimes when i look in the southern sky, I catch a whiff of the icy breezes and Antarctica seems nearby somehow… well 30 million years ago when it was still joined to Australia you could walk there from my house so maybe that’s why. I have a friend Alan who skied to the south pole and he made it sound like it wasn’t too difficult. Apparently the Americans don’t let you into their base there when you arrive, unless you’re nearly dead, but they’ll stamp your passport. I’d also really like to sail to the South Georgia islands and explore those old whaling stations. There’s even a museum there you can visit, and nearby is Shackleton’s grave. I think it might be tapping into my feeling of wanting to get away from the madness of humanity for a bit. Replace it with the madness of the ocean. Hang out with some walrus seals. Who doesn’t want to do that.