Future Perfect
Streaks of white flight press up against my oiled eyes, magnified a tenfold and weighty with existence. Gustborn, northbound, near-homeless migrants. I toggle the binoculars and they loom even larger, imprint on my vision. Almost as if I could touch them, though of course, I can’t, and shouldn’t.
For two weeks we have been following their routes via landbound detours, tracking their travel from a primate’s-eye-view. The Latinate name and behavioural idiosyncrasies of this admittedly nondescript subspecies of goose are really only known to the scruffy unit of activist-scientists I’ve attached myself to. For years, like their colleagues for decades before them, they have set themselves to documenting these birds, their fragmented habitat, interrupted migrations and declining numbers from the shores of Siberia to Aegean isles to the Finnmark coast. Orange-beaked, grey-chested, white-tipped, somewhat clumsy and uncharismatic, they wheel behind curling cumulus and are lost to my sight.
Sprawled beside me, Gyorg grunts. “Get a count?” They are notoriously difficult to track and, untrained amateur though I am, the party seems glad of an extra pair of eyes.
“Five, I think.” He grunts again. I never know if I have offered useful confirmation.
The group pick themselves up from the muddy paddock and creakily return to the roadside. I delay a moment, scan the skies one last time, augmented at first with the binocs, then just with my black-framed prescription sunglasses. I have come to recognise them by fleeting wingtip or half-glimpsed underbelly. But there’s nothing more. The flock is gone, from here, maybe for the last time, and I guess I wonder, what does it matter now if we know where the last few are or they die on their own?
* * *
I drift in the back seat of Markus’s old Toyota ute as we take the highway north across these Scandinavian flats. Gyorg rolls a cigarette next to me but will wait until we stop to light up. This is not the least of their endearingly gruff concessions to my presence. In return I try to make myself as light a piece of unwanted baggage as possible. Unnoticeable in the ideal. Sometimes I forget that’s not quite what they want. Peter’s lined, yet childlike face turned back from the front passenger’s seat tells me I ought to be paying more attention. I shake myself awake.
“You’re going to have to repeat that, sorry.”
He is neither perturbed nor embarrassed. “I was asking about your work. Your exhibition, intervention, project, performance. Your provocation! Does it take shape yet? Any ideas? Are you inspired?” His lip twitches in anticipation of my response.
I don’t feel mocked, or even misunderstood. So far on our driving and camping he has been curious and perceptive, not territorial over radio stations but opinionated on whatever emerges, whether pop or classical, a reader of Ballard and Freud as evidenced by the dog-eared paperbacks he not-too-inconspicuously carries, and capable of finely-calibrated jibes that are both slightly flirty and blackly humourous. I squint a little.
“It’s hard to be too inspired by extinction,” I say.
He weighs my words and seems like he wants to rejoin, but just swallows, nods, and turns back to the incoming grey tunnel of road and sky.
* * *
My last project was a ritual of mourning for the elephant. I coordinated a number of simultaneous flash mobs, public performances and intimate ceremonies recreating its calls and ways and celebrating its life and death. A singalong in Selous National Park in Tanzania. A prayer circle in the Bronx Zoo. A contemplation session in the Met, standing before paintings by incarcerated Thai elephants, meditating on their disappearance, feeling the grief of their mahouts. I’d paid someone to manage the social media but ended up tripling her fee as we trended and viraled our way into feeds and eyeballs.
I myself had been at an ivory bonfire in Botswana, a terrible, ghoulish sight, throwing hurt shrieks onto the flames.
I still remember the first call from The New York Times: “Why are you mourning a creature that still exists?” I had mulled for weeks what to say when I got that inevitable query. Not, Not for long, or Look at this data.
I simply said, “The elephant will have been an amazing triumph of nature.”
Prior to that I had done a lot of mourning installations and interventions and, yes, provocations: the passenger pigeon’s Empty Skies; the robber frog’s Use Value; the cave spider’s Unknown Unknown; the deboosterist TED-talk Re-Extinct and the ecosystemic Being-Towards-Death. I led a processional of robed children down Wall Street, joined poetry readings on the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, spent a freezing night in Hobart Zoo as the thylacine in Endling Alone. I had washed and buried numerous specimens, performed last rites and sung and tolled. I had cried and keened, wailed and wept, made my body and soul a vehicle for Earth’s lamentations. My hair still hadn’t grown back in parts. I had crawled the disrupted migration route of the bison for 31 hours in a skin retrieved from the American Museum of Natural History before an encounter with a translocated wolf gave my exhaustion its relief. I had planned to fly similarly with storks but the hospital bills meant I had to sell my glider. It was on that bed, dehydrated and depressed, and resenting even the drip and its pathetic intrusions, that I felt the need to mourn not only what was gone, like the dodo, or even what was right on the cusp, like the northern white rhino, with that awful last male surrounded by armed guards in Kenya, but what was effectively guaranteed to pass away in my lifetime, despite any efforts at conservation or protection.
It could equally have been the giraffe or the orangutan or the Western Pacific grey whale or any number of less charismatic but no less worthy unloved others. But elephants remember and need to be remembered and help us to remember. Their despairing, commanding trumps demanded a pre-emptive memorial.
That was what fired up Twitter, what “captured attention”, what got reviewers thinkpiecing, what provoked a flurry of letters to editors and donations to causes and other, more despairing flourishes and flailings. It was the evocation of that future perfect disappearance that meant I was barely questioned when I proposed, to the grants board of the National Council for the Arts, to disappear into the Arctic along with these anonymous numbered geese.
* * *
“You know they’re fucking done for, right?” Peter corners me as we set up camp for the night. His neck blotches red and the hollows beneath his eyes are sunk and dark. I had thought his quizzing playful, thought I’d passed the test, but he’s clearly been chewing on something rough and raw these last fifty potholed miles.
“I know and I hate it.”
He spits. “There is basically no remotely possible outcome in which these birds recover from the destruction of their lifeways. No fucking chance to escape the homo sapiens homogenisation of the earth.” He strains as he pronounces the bitterly ironic home in both words. “And nothing we do is going to help. Our tracking, the latest uncanny Silicon Valley tech, all the data we might collect, isn’t going to help one iota. Making fucking art about it is certainly not going to do shit.”
Gyorg looks up from the tent peg he was hammering, and intones “Peter . . . ” through his cigarette, but I wave him off. I had to learn how to cope with my own manias and depressions; the least I could do is not aggravate his.
“I know, art is—”
“What are we even doing here? Wasting resources charting the already functionally extinct? Even if fucking capital S itself came in here with its big kahunas full of gold and jizzed that funding all over the birds so they sparkled with glittery Scientific American spunk, all it would fucking mean is we get to watch their deaths in full visibility. Probably accelerate them while we’re at it.” He drops the filter he has been scrunching. “Maybe the cryptomaniacs are right, and our best hope is birds unknown, untagged, untracked, thriving outside our vision.”
“I know, Peter. It tears me up just like you.”
“Don’t worry, all our grief is useless too.” He laughs. “But look at us. We . . . we just can’t let go. We are basically palliative care workers. Avian psychopomps.”
There is nothing I can say, nothing I can do. I take the tobacco from his shaking, calloused hands to roll him a cigarette. “They don’t get a good death,” I say. “But they shouldn’t have to die alone.”
* * *
We intercept them again at the edge of the marshland between mountains and plains. The skies are clear and the obdurate cold of a spouse’s sharp glare. This is our last best chance to count who remains of the once large flock that takes this route north from the warmer south after winter to roost. Some have already passed overhead, are beating and gliding into the distance, a last trio comes not far behind. They are almost gone.
I gaze out over the receding birds, wavering at the cliff’s edge. I may have had to give up my hang glider with its arcane powers, but I read those manuals, took my lessons, practised those gut-pounding jumps and falls and arcs into soaring, for so long that I think I know flight, extreme body-artist that I am, think I could do it, go with them, sprout wings and leave my too-human self behind and drift off into the horizon.
But as my new colleagues well know from hard experimental lessons, these birds, whether captured or handled or even just escorted, however gently, whether with gloves or tags or drones or satellites, are harmed, transformed, doomed to a humanised life. Their cortisol spikes, their egg layers thin, their resilience declines. Maybe even when described in a journal, when known conceptually, when simply thought about, who knows, their ears burn red with scientific groping . . .
Whatever. On our planet, as it is now, they fucking die.
And here I am. What is this strange desire in me? This creaturely love that cannot be reciprocated? And what shapes its opaque exigencies?
To be with them, near them, to be among them as they drift off towards death, I would have to be invisible. Unsmellable. Imperceptible. To be nothing.
That too, I think I can do.
But who am I that I should get to disappear, and leave behind this unravelling anthropocene?
I am the artist, of course. They may never receive my report, but I won’t be asking for money again from that or any other institution. In justifying this project’s significance, I proposed not to mourn, ceremonialise, memorialise, certainly not to publicise. I proposed to accompany them to the other side.
“I want to come with you.”
It is Peter, behind me, his voice gravel.
I had expected him to find me, to try to talk me down, to set the undeniability of his reason against my perceived artistic caprice. He just stands behind me for endless beats, endless glides, and says, “I want to go with them.”
How could he know? But what else have I been scheming this entire impassioned trip? I have my one line, now a mantra. “If science is harmful and art is useless, it will have to be magic,” I tell him. “Know any?” But of course he does, as do I, as do all our colleagues and comrades. His head fizzes with avian rites, his hands twitch with interspecies knacks. And I realise—how could I ever have thought to achieve it without such specialised spells? It would indeed have been a whimsical suicide, a hysterical, skull-cracking flop. But with his telemetric trickery, alongside my virtuoso virtues, we might just make it.
We fly with.
* * ** * ** * *
For Hugo