An Illustrated Book about Birds
By: Stella Atrewu
Tags: Flowers, Creative Non Fiction, Music, History, Essay

Geogaddi, by Boards of Canada

Poppy illustration from Plant Families, by Bayton and Maughan

It was maybe 10 years ago that I first heard the song Plateau. Like most people, I first heard it performed by Nirvana, along with members of the band Meat Puppets, in a famous MTV concert in which Kurt Cobain was said to be undergoing a painful substance withdrawal. The song, originally written and performed by the Meat Puppets, describes a plateau, which I imagine as a red outcrop surrounded by hills and a desert, which has “nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop and an illustrated book about birds.” I sometimes imagine walking around this plateau, having climbed it already, and watching the purple clouds hovering just above the horizon, leaving visible a band of sky colored in the tones of a recently set sun. I imagine sitting down on a flat rock and picking up the illustrated bird book, and staring at the front cover. Illustrated on the front cover in colored pencil is a crane, and, possibly, a barn owl, but maybe because the light is low I cannot well make out what is on the cover. At first I think I see birds, but then perhaps I see a window or a doorknob. When I open the book, I imagine, I have opened it to a list of names, all in alphabetical order. I read through the list, occasionally coming upon the name of someone I know, but always wondering whether it is simply a coincidence and that the name refers to a stranger. I open the book to another page at random and see minutely detailed plant sketches, along with their botanical names. I imagine that if I sit here long enough I’ll come upon everything which has ever existed, and possibly everything that at some point in time will exist. Far below me the shadows the shrubs leave on the desert sand are faint, like shadows of shadows. Even as I think longer about the lyrics of Plateau, I can’t tell if the Meat Puppets intended to describe a place that signifies nothing but itself, or if the plateau is simply an allegory; and I feel as if the plateau is something I had dreamed and as if I were sitting upright in bed and puzzling over whether it symbolized something from my unconscious mind — maybe the last day’s events — or whether it was simply an irreducible image. On the lyric website Genius are suggestions which favor the allegorical interpretation, but because I am somewhat invested in seeing the plateau as simply a beautiful image, I haven’t spent much time searching for the opinions of others. I simply let myself be mesmerized by the solitary objects which are lying there on stone hundreds of feet in the air. I have a deep conviction that the illustrated book lying on top of the plateau is not only about birds but about many things. Maybe it is an atlas of the modern world, containing maps of our cities, but also of our virtual connections with each other, sketching out in color the abstract paths which lead to and from our phones. Once, looking up from the book on birds, I imagined that the plateau was towering far into the sky, so that I could see the cities and people of the earth; and that the roofs were stripped from the buildings and cars so that I could see the heads of all the people on the planet; and that the people looking down at their hands or into a screen far outnumbered those people which were physically on their way somewhere; and though there was a contrast between these two kinds of people, it wasn’t true that those looking at their phones or computers didn’t feel as if they were on their way somewhere, perhaps wandering through a field of images or otherwise walking resolutely through a path towards a determined end. I can’t vouch for the truth of this vision, put into further doubt by the fact that billions of people aren’t regularly, if at all, connected to the internet. But perhaps in the future, at any given time of the day, internet users will far outnumber people moving to a new location in space. So would predict a narrow vision of societal progress, I thought to myself as I sat at my desk and browsed through different statistics on phone usage. I was reminded then of a Mexican politician a friend told me about whose election platform, running to be president of Mexico if I’m not mistaken, in large part consisted of bringing tablets and Wi-Fi to rural areas of Mexico. The vision of a thoroughly technological future, I thought as I sat there at my desk, seems inevitable only if our eyes rest on the charts and tables — almost always in our field of vision, or else just outside, waiting on the periphery — which detail the rising use of technology throughout the last few decades, the expanding scope of wireless data coverage, the rising appetite of developing countries for consumer electronics, and so forth. The charts and tables are often elegant and practical, sometimes even beautiful in their simplicity, like religious symbols. Like images they proliferate and insinuate themselves into our private thoughts, somehow diverting our gaze, I thought while sitting at my desk, from the endless and deafening flow of raw materials which at this very moment was coursing through the machinery of our world, burning and being transformed into pure light; I imagined the people of the world as a small tribe of cave-dwelling creatures, chained to the ground, watching the shadows cast on the wall as puppets played overhead in front a gasoline fire; I wondered if life would ever be anything more than a series of unsubstantial and incomprehensible images. What would happen, I asked myself, once this material flow was interrupted? Like cans of food stocked at a grocery store, these images of progress would be placed on the shelf, next to all the other ideas that we’ve silently abandoned yet never managed to get rid of. The past is continuously insinuating itself into the present, forcefully, as if it wants to overtake us and erase us, even as our flesh and our buildings slowly disintegrate into the past. This has always been true, I thought while sitting at my desk, but it will be especially true this time around, as the material basis of our progress evaporates into smoke. Time and again, like in Mesopotamia or the Yucatan, we have turned our earth into salt and our forests into waste; and now we turn the Amazon into grazing land for cattle. At that moment I was listening to a Boards of Canada album. The cover of the album, which is completely in shades of red and yellow, depicts human figures, alternating with trees, standing spread-eagle on a hexagon shape. This image gives me the impression of a world totally devoid of depth, a world whose most profound basis is two-dimensional and delirious from continuous exposure to the sun. For me, the sonic equivalent of this impression is the sound of a shallow speaker playing into a wooden box; I imagine listening to this album to attain some deeper truth but hearing nothing but the flat and tinny sounds of music being played in a box, the box itself lying in the heat somewhere in the sparse California woods; the disappointment of which develops into a sort of quiet terror that life does not go past the material realm. But in fact, the album is full of lushness and sonic profundity. Partly responsible for the fullness of the sound is the nostalgia it evokes, sometimes even for things you have never experienced firsthand. The music mimics the warbling sounds of older nature documentaries, even simulating the warping pitch of an old videotape. “A new contraption to capture the dandelion in one piece has been put together by the crew,” I heard at that very moment, sitting at my desk and listening to the music. I hardly have memories of watching nature documentaries as a child, yet listening to this music brings me back to watching TV on a chilly day on my childhood couch, which from a distance appears gray but up close is made up of white, shiny pink, yellow and green fibers, almost like a rainbow shimmering in its weave. The Boards of Canada made this music in a musical scene that had nearly unlimited amounts of enthusiasm for the futuristic; their contemporaries were creating music with unheard-of rhythms and timbres; yet the music of this album is thoroughly nostalgic and, when not sounding sinister, warm. In another one of its songs we hear the lyrics “the past inside the present,” bluntly summing up the sound of the album. Everything we make, even when we are consciously trying to push into something new, is only different from the past by degrees; the vast majority of everything we create is an echo of the past; and even the small inroads we make into the future are not enough to stop the massive and opposite movements, like the tide receding after the moon disappears, into a previous state of affairs, forever mixing contemporary peculiarities with the eternally recurring themes of history. A while ago I came upon a list on Wikipedia of all the different genres of songs composed by the 11th-century troubadours, and the lyrical tradition flourishing in their wake, ending around the time of the Black Plague. These genres include songs renouncing love; songs apologizing to a lover; songs about escaping from a rendezvous under the nose of a jealous partner; boasting songs which include challenges; songs of a lover’s apology; love songs addressed to someone not one’s lover; songs of lovers waiting impatiently for the evening to come, to consummate their love; songs complaining about a lady’s behavior; songs expressing indignation and feelings of insult; in short, topics which make up most of popular music today. Asking whether the troubadours and their heirs were elaborating on ancient human sentiments or developing a new way of understanding love, arising from their situation as court entertainers, which we now mistakenly take to be timeless seems to be beside the point. I remembered, sitting there at my desk, that in its first few sentences the Zhuangzi, now around two and a half thousand years old, quotes from a made-up book to make fun of people that quote from books: a reminder that jokes about books are as old as books; that mocking entails making use of not only the content but the form of that which is being mocked; that the post-moderns did not invent self-reflexive jokes about books, nor Borges, nor Carlyle, nor Sir Thomas Browne; and in general we see that under the sun the race is not to the swift, neither bread to the wise, but time and chance happens to them all. As I listened to the lyrics about trapping a daisy I looked out my window at a few red poppies rustling in a gentle breeze. These poppies don’t do well here in Boston, I thought sitting at my desk: the seeds tend to die in winter. But my neighbor keeps up her garden, diligently collecting the poppy seeds in the fall and planting them in the spring. Red poppies, Papaver rhoeas, a mixture of Latin and Greek which means “red food,” are also known as common poppies, and are distinct from opium poppies, Papaver somniferum, which must mean “sleep food,” I thought sitting at my desk, and which would have questionable legal status if it were growing in my neighbor’s yard. De Quincey once wrote “happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket”; he was talking about laudanum, a tincture containing opium poppy powder that, I read on Wikipedia, contains both morphine and codeine and other opium alkaloids; this thought of his anticipated a trend, seen in many people my age, to understand drugs like MDMA, ketamine, adderall, and even psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin, as moods and mental states they can keep in their pocket and freely take to enhance their daily experience. The purest states of fear I have experienced occurred in delirious dreams caused by cough medicine containing codeine. In one dream I was in the pit of a coliseum, full of people, and I knew that a beam of light was about to shine on me and annihilate me forever; I felt the absolute heaviness of my impending annihilation weigh on my being. In another dream I was a block in a wall of multi-colored blocks, and, in some sort of competition, the blocks were being eliminated in groups, in a manner not unlike Tetris or Candy Crush; I knew I was on the edge of being eliminated forever. In another dream I was, inexplicably, terrified that my sister had become a NASCAR driver. In each of these dreams, the sense of fear was unadulterated by any of the sensations with which fear presents itself in daily life: there was no adrenal thrill, and there was no hope of escape; in an inversion of quotidian fear, the fear became the primary fact and the situation was merely decoration; and the sense of fear had a palpable physical weight, and that weight was nearly infinite. All this from a powdered flower. There is a gorgeously designed book named Plant Families, I remembered sitting at my desk, with color illustrations resembling classic botany drawings. In combination with its tan pages, the soft and artful illustrations of flowers, foliage, and dissected plant parts evoke antique manuscripts by celebrated naturalists preserved in British museums. Its illustrations for the poppy family include the long-headed poppy, Papaver dubium, which does not look unlike the red poppies outside my window swaying in the breeze, I thought to myself. Like many other recent botany books, Plant Families is peppered with ominous warnings that the classifications of plants it describes are incomplete; that while normally so-and-so plant is included in this family, in this book it will be included in such-and-such family; that the classification for many flowers is currently undergoing several contentious revisions; that ferns will altogether be excluded because their classification is at this very moment up in the air, so to speak. And in fact, we are living in a time of at least two distinct plant classifications. One of them, under development for hundreds of years and by now thoroughly standard, used, I have read, by such references as The Jepsen Manual, is based on close observation of a plants shape and biology; the other, newer classification is based on methods, still young, of reading the vast sequences of nucleotides which make up specific plant genes. The newer classification, which might instead be called a constellation of separate, clashing, and developing classifications, is a vast, contentious, and interpretive undertaking, nearly hermetic in its obscurity. What made the newer classifications possible, I mused at my desk, was the existence of an objective historical record: DNA; and so after centuries of plant knowledge had congealed under the western sky, history reasserted herself over her domain, which was quiet and green; and that the new priests were at this moment claiming authority to speak aloud the notes she had scattered widely. The interpreting of plant DNA has already rearranged the flowers, which make up most of all plant life; but still, the older classification must be learned to identify flowers in the field: the old methods of identification has become so systematized that, although it is vast, one may pick up a field guide and with little training identify the family and even species of a plant they come across while out walking: no need to lug around a DNA sequencer. And yet, once the dust has settled, the field guides will simply be printed with the new classifications; and so on forever, as we revise and re-revise our knowledge to deal with each new wave of history breaking over us.