Lola is standing by the window looking at a big book when I come into the room, with the Old Church in the background behind a layer of lace, and the low winter sun illuminating her from behind. There’s a line of gold light tracing the outline of her head and the heavy folds of the dress she’s wearing is falling off into shadows. It’s like looking at a painting by Vermeer – as soft and delicate as that. Her refracted mood of earlier on has gone, but when she sees me she pulls the heavy book towards her body as if she’s closing a door. Then she recants and holds it out, open, and shows me an old Dutch painting of the Madonna and child, painted in fourteen eighty something. No one knows exactly when. It’s called The Holy Kinship. The two of them are surrounded by the child’s aunts and cousins, and are all sitting in a richly decorated church with wide open walls that show the landscape beyond, with trees and other buildings; men of various stations in life, baskets of fruit, flowers, tasselled bows. There is a tiled floor that looks like a map. And on the altar of the church there is a statue of an execution, with the victim blindfolded and kneeling and the executioner swinging a heavy scimitar. The detail is astounding. What a find. It looks like the painter was trying to paint everything.
I tell her that I want her to come and meet Katrina. She is not so sure. But when I tell her we are going to the Cuckoo’s Nest and will also meet the great Bamba, Sufi and helper of women, and that we’re going in his car with one of those women, then she says okay. And soon there we all are, Jackie and I lolling in the back like two gangsters and Lola and Serine getting on like sisters in the front, our molls.
The cuckoo’s nest is a shack out on the polder that Katrina and Fronk use for summer weekends. The name is a joke because the cuckoo doesn’t have a nest of its own, but uses the nests of other birds. It loiters nearby until the nest is full of eggs and then, opportunistic evolved-in as surely as the colour of its feathers, darts in and lays one egg in the nest, in fifteen seconds flat, and then flies off to Africa to recover. It is not the most extraordinary story in nature’s collection but it is such un-familial behaviour that it alone makes the Earth seem like a distant planet full of aliens. At least that’s how it seems on this strange night.
In order to fool the foster birds, cuckoos specialize in laying eggs similar to only one species of bird. The eggs of the cuckoos that lay in warbler’s nests look different to the eggs of the cuckoos that lay in wagtail’s nests. It is suggested that this is a sort of infantile behaviour, in which the host species is imprinted on the female cuckoo, like an adolescent human mother turning her baby over to its grandmother – is that an actual world soap opera? Also, she doesn’t fly off to Africa immediately, but hangs around to see the egg hatch out. If the hosts rumble her and cast out her egg, she might destroy the nest – which sounds like another soap episode, and maybe a reminder that the actual world is the same for the cuckoo as it is for you and me – because the universality of ‘everything’ means that your actual is the same for everything – and that it is not in the actual world but in the real that these cuckoo egg dramas take place. The birds and bees have their real worlds too.
THE CABIN IS WAY OUT OF TOWN on the edge of a moonlit mere fringed with reeds. We slip off the highway onto a country road that runs alongside a forest below the dike and goes as straight as forever until the headlights show a gated junction, where we turn into the trees. Serine works the big black car down a track lined both sides with thorn bushes until we break out into a small clearing and there is the cabin, just a wooden hut, standing darkly in the centre. Serine stops the car and turns the key and the engine dies and she breathes out into the stillness as though she’s been holding her breath all the way.
“There it is,” she says. “The Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“Where is everybody?”
“They’ll be here. Relax,” she says. And on cue, enter from the left Katrina and Bamba, laughing, carrying bundles of firewood like a pair of peasants. Darkness, stillness, laughter, the dancing flames of a wood fire: anxiety could not survive this environment. Katrina and Lola came together immediately in warm diplomacy. I was expecting frost and I got thaw.
“Hey, lucky man,” said Bamba. “The man who prays on the ocean is himself an ocean of peace.” He goes over to Lola and takes her hand and the charm flows like he’s thrown a switch. He leads her into the cabin whispering things I can’t hear and Katrina slides up close to me and starts to slowly rub my back.
We are on the edge of a shallow lake called the Oostvaardersplassen. It means ‘Fishermen’s Lake’. When the polders were drained fifty years ago this piece was left as it was, in a very early piece of nature conservation. The polders are strange pieces of land to think about because they are human made – as flat as the seabed they once were, surrounded by dikes and lying below sea level – and you can feel the strangeness just standing in them. Unnatural would be one word for it. The process was to build a ring dike around an area of maybe seven hundred square kilometres, then pump out all the seawater – a task that on its own takes ten years – then seed the salty ground with reeds using aeroplanes, then another ten year wait while the reeds leech the salt out of the soil, then plough the whole thing back into the ground and at last start planting crops. The strangeness of the process is masked by the cheerful colonization by the biomass in all its forms that turns these sheets of engineered graph paper into ordinary nature – but still, the mind is taxed, what is this new land? And to put it in the terms of this book, is it everything or nothing?
The Oostvaardersplassen is one answer. The area was set aside from the reclamation project as a nature reserve behind a high fence and then left as it was to evolve. Literally left untouched. Humans are not allowed in there, not even wardens. Anything could be happening behind the fence. It is a human made wilderness, which adds another dimension of strangeness to an already strange place: it intimates how doubly unnatural the idea of conservation is.
The six of us sit by Katrina’s new fire and I tell them my favourite conservation folly story, the story of the Ruddy Duck. It’s a story about hating change, and the violence that springs from that. A story about the force of stasis. It is not an ugly duckling story, but a beautiful duck story. The Ruddy Ducks, Oxyura jamaicensis, have russet feathers and beaks as blue as the sky and their tails are pointed like spears. The males are famously horny in the world of ducks and in courtship display they stick their tails straight up in the air and hammer the water with their beaks so that it foams up over their chests and seems to make them look twice as big. They are duck studs. So much so that even the females of other species will mate with them!
A clutch of these ducks were imported into an ornamental duck pond in England, but escaped and went feral, and now, maybe because of their fecundity, they are thriving wild. But that is not the end of it. The Ruddy Ducks are not a native species, say the conservationists from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Their very horniness suggests that they will interbreed with – and eclipse – the native stiff tail species, which are already on the danger of extinction list. They are over sexed and over here! They must be exterminated! And this is why, every winter, they go out with guns to try and shoot every Ruddy Duck in the country dead. What kind of protection racket is that?
The lights of a car arriving outside wash the inside of the cabin and Fronk and Jacob and Willow come through the door bringing boxes of food and wine and the party gets going. Jacob and Jackie sit together on the floor playing a wordless game, Serine and Willow and Lola and Katrina sit in a circle like the women in that Holy Kinship painting and Bamba and Fronk and I stand in the background chewing the fat like the three wise men. Outside the moon glimmers over a landscape humming with emergence. Is this a happy ending? Or is there no such a thing as an ending if we live in the present?
The cuckoo chick hatches out before the other eggs and the fledgling sets about heaving them out of the nest until it is the only one left. Then, while its hoodwinked parent-carers – and parent-carer, by the way, is what they call you if you’re the father of a disabled child – fill their every minute with foraging for food and stuffing it into its ever open mouth, it grows and grows and grows and grows. Until there is the comical and violent sight of the tiny bird feeding a chick three times as big as itself.
“Look at the size of my chick, man,” screeches the little bird proudly. “Isn’t he the best thing you ever saw?!”
What do you do with the tyranny of the present? Fill it with action: feed that thing! Pursue truth, find beauty, do goodness. Thank you, little bird.
“BAMBA’S SO HANDSOME,” Lola says on the way home. Oh yes? “But he’s crazy!” What did he say to her? “About how Sufis train themselves to watch the world coming into being. That’s how they pray.” What’s crazy about that? The Sufi understands his place in the present instant. The creation for him is the continuous emergence of everything. “He said they live so completely in the present that they have no hope of heaven or fear of hell. And he had a message for you, too.”
“What kind of a message?”
“Your kind of message,” she says. “He said your ‘Everything’ is a replacement for ‘Unity’. There’s no absolute truth, but there is absolutely everything.”
He knows where I live. The speculative philosophers drive towards a dissolute present to keep possibilities open while the forces of stasis attempt to shut them down – but look at us. Living fragments. Committed and emergent at the very same time. And time is the duration of your commitment, otherwise known as your life.
Do you remember the problem of the duration of the present? The present is so short, it carries no information, and therefore it’s unperceivable. The instant of the present is invisible. But this message from Bamba is that the duration of your life is only one solution. In that moment of the present, there is absolutely everything, because of the only possible world – otherwise known as the actual world – and this could be the location of the truth. We can’t see it, because the instant of the present has no information. So we see the world refracted through the lens of our real world, which is nothing but information. Pigeons, crows, seagulls, cuckoos – they all have their real worlds too. They can’t see the actual either. But there it is.
“He’s a crank,” she says, my featherweight Nietzsche. My glamorous spy. But I think the only cranky part is that the Sufis think it’s all caused by a supreme being, and not by the rotations of the universe. By Spacetime. “Oh yes, Atheist,” she says. “And you know what? That sounds cranky too!”