Consider the Tardigrade
Solstice! Christmas! New Year! Rough Trade Dionysos! Peruvian Jesus! Yin-Yang Piglets!
Note: if a post contains lots of photos, it quickly gets too big for email. Click through to read. Also, on the actual Substack, footnotes pop up when you hover on them. Sorry / not sorry about my footnote-peppering.
Liam Shaw, London Review of Books: “A good deal of the organic component of dust is made up of pollen and spores from plants and fungi, called ‘palynomorphs.’ Palynology is the field devoted to this botanical diversity… One of the applications of palynology is the reconstruction of past landscapes. Pollen is small but hardy, each grain an armoured vehicle for delivering a gametophyte from the stamen of one plant to the stigma of another, sometimes across large distances. Its outer layer, known as the exine, is made of sporopollenin, among the toughest of all organic materials. Archaeologists have found a 100-million-year-old fossilised bee with pollen still stuck to its legs. By classifying the palynomorphs they find in sediment and soil samples, palynologists can describe the phantom plants that shed them hundreds or thousands of years earlier…
Pollen is halfway in scale between its own atomic structure and the world we experience— a pollen grain is about 100, 000 times smaller than a person, atoms about 100, 000 times smaller again. Pollen grains are among the smallest specks of visible matter.”
(Shaw says that five grains of Clarkia pollen would fit across a single full stop, which— according to my rough reckoning— makes these particular palynomorphs just smaller than the largest cell in the human body, the ovum / egg, a Jupiter among cells at 0.1mm / 100µm: the only human cell visible to the naked eye.)
Summer Solstice fell on a Friday this year: the 22nd of December, at 4.27 p.m. I’d been exposed to Covid the weekend before, but, asymptomatic and testing negative,1 I decided to visit a friend in hospital. I had missed the 3.20-something bus, so I was waiting on the 4.20-something. Looked like I was due to be riding the loser cruiser at the year’s crest; or, more likely, waiting for it. Inauspicious— but likely apposite— omen-wise.
My theory about why New Year’s Eve reliably sucks is that energetically, Solstice is the actual New Year, so that by the time it’s Gregorian New Year a week and a half later the peach is already starting to rot, like in Caravaggio’s Bacchus; whereas Solstice never gets its fair dues because it gets sucked into the massive sucky backwash of Christmas. (Could be worse though: at least it’s not your birthday. If it is, commiserations.)
Most cursed New Year: the time I stepped out of the tent on New Year’s morning and the first thing I saw was a pair of shit-filled underpants lying on the grass. I’d had my earplugs in during the night, but Hadleigh said he had heard someone in the next tent over regressing, screaming and crying like a baby. Before dawn they had packed and fled, leaving only this souvenir of their ‘journey’. A very bad omen. I got a sick, sinking feeling about the year ahead. It was the first day of 2016, the year the wire-chewing weasel2 would short out the Large Hadron Collider and bump us all into the wrong trouser leg of Time.
Anyway, as a hater of clock-time and the imposed Gregorian calendar, and thus New Year, there are multiple other potential finish / start points in the year to choose from, dates on which one can stand and look back, surveying the trail of wreckage… Err… The year behind. For instance, I think of my birthday as my personal New Year. My birthday was the date I started— and finished— my daily drawing project.3 Or there is Matariki, in the deeps of Winter. The rebranding of Matariki as ‘Māori New Year’ is an excellent thing: humans need ritual, fire, and community when it’s dark and cold (obvs that’s what Christmas is, in the Northern Hemisphere). Matariki is a time to remember the dead. And it’s marked by stars, which are real, unlike clocks.4
Summer Solstice, though, is a strong contender, so I get superstitious about the Actual Moment. Thinking this way, thinking there IS a single moment, is a clock-time hoax: it’s more a phase than a point.5 Solstice is like the outer swing of a pendulum— the rate of change slows. The difference between the daylength of Solstice and the days either side of it is less than ten seconds. (Graph here: Sunrise, sunset, and daylength December 2023). The FEELING of high Midsummer is like that, too: melty, syrupy languidity.
Anyway, as I ran for the bus, as the minutes ticked closer to 4.27, I saw a box jammed into my letterbox, wedging the door open, crunched into the too-small space like a foot in a tight shoe, despite the written instructions FRAGILE and HANDLE WITH CARE.6 Solstice Wizardmail! Extremely auspicious. Cutting it so fine, I didn’t have time to take the package back to the house; nor did I want to leave it sticking out of the letterbox for the robbers who prowl around the suburbs at this time of year. So I took it with me. It was from England, from Eliza. The customs declaration said ‘Christmas ornament,’ but when I shook the box I could hear a rattling sound. I didn’t want to open it, in case bits fell out, and besides, I couldn’t, as it was bound on every edge with silver duct tape.
At the hospital we drank stealthy white wine out of paper cups and watched Eliza’s Christmas video (warning, it will make you cry, like it did us).
Afterwards, on my way to Solstice celebrations, I left the package on the table and ran out the door.
I then totally forgot about the Wizardmail until I came home sometime around 1.30 a.m. I sat down and cut the silver duct tape with the new knife I’d bought for pencil-sharpening. This was inside:
This song immediately began to play in my mind. “T-t-t-t-t-t-t-tardigrade, whoah-oh-oh,” (warning, it will get stuck in your head, possibly forever, like it did mine).
Earlier, I’d written a little Solstice sermon on the Platform of the Damned.
”What a year it's been, what times we are privileged to live in. Or are we cursed to live in them? Either way, we're alive now!
Here is what I have learnt this year:
In my work I speak of myself. I don't do that because I am unaware of or indifferent to what is going on in the world. I do it because my body is my instrument. My own lived experience is the place I speak from. I speak about myself because that is my authoritative voice. Truth is not narcissism, it is nakedness. Only by radical honesty can I hope to effect change in the world. Magic is imperfect because imperfection is the nature of being alive.
All of this is really unlearning. Last Summer Solstice I read Walt Whitman aloud on Island Bay beach: "It is time to explain myself— let us stand up.
What is known I strip away,
I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown."
Last Summer Solstice a dear friend died. This delicate flower blooms for a few days, releasing its perfume into the night. The bat it sings for is oceans away. Nevertheless! Here it seduces a Wizard instead, and by extension, all of you! Who can say what effect beauty and truth have on the world— that is not the flower's concern.
Nō reira,7 put your back into the true work, the work that only you can do. Let us labour in service! Let us speak clearly! I offer this blessing for the year ahead: MORE POWER TO YOUR ELBOW!”8
Sermonising— I mused afterwards, in the shower— is a matter of voice. As the kids say, preach! (Amene! Hareruia!) A matter of becoming a hollow vessel, an instrument the breath of the sacred blows through. Priestliness is a tricky tone to get right. Belief is the heart of magic, so don’t be half-arsed.9 Pull on that flowery robe! Get up on that soap-box!
Writing a sermon and writing a manifesto have a similar flavour. Both are attempts to say what one really means, thinks, feels: to convey true messages. By editing, by combing over and over again, ideas are refined, the irrelevant falls away, language is distilled to its bones. It’s difficult to be simple. Much like an ink drawing, or a children’s book, hopefully the done thing looks effortless: the mud-wrestling of creation is washed away. I kneel in the creek swilling the pan until the sediment clears, then pick out the tiny pieces of gold.
As the shat pants were the omen of 2016, then, let us take the tardigrade as the omen of 2024. The tardigrade, the moss piglet, the Kleiner Wasserbär / little water bear, phylum Tardigrada (‘slow stepper’), is a tiny beast less than a millimetre long, virtually unchanged in form since the Cretaceous, 145 million years ago. (O infinite tardigrade!) They live almost everywhere: in sand, sea, and fresh water, on plants, and as the name moss piglet suggests, on moss; they have been found in hot springs, on top of the Himalayas, in the deep sea, and under layers of solid ice.
Tardigrades have a superpower that makes them virtually unkillable. As Mr Roberelli says in the song, “When times get rough, I’m the hardiest of creatures, cause I just go to sleep for years and years…” Under unfavourable conditions (exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures ((both high and low)), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation, even being sent into outer space)10 tardigrades go into a ‘tun’11 state: their body dries out into an apparently lifeless ball, and their metabolism drops to as little as 0.01% of its normal rate. They can survive in this cryptobiotic tun state for decades, until conditions return to viability. The tardigrade is a tiny indefinite Jesus. Wikipedia: “Tardigrades have survived all five… mass extinctions due to their plethora of survival characteristics, including the ability to survive conditions that would be fatal to almost all other animals.”12
Unlike the living tardigrade, the ornament is fragile, made of blown glass: yet it survived its passage from downside-upland to upside-downland intact, due to sturdy packaging, clear instructions, and luck. The green glitter is a latent pollen. Once the tardigrade comes out of its box, the glitter will disseminate itself into nooks and crannies, becoming what the Burners call MOOP— matter out of place. (Glitter is also called ‘fairy herpes’: it recurs.) Zoom out, though. Such a thing as a glittery Christmas tardigrade wouldn’t exist if there weren’t already a cult tardigrade following, which is why image-searching will reveal many, many tardigrade tattoos, with slogans like LIVE TINY, DIE NEVER; I LIVE - I DIE - I LIVE AGAIN; and TARDI-GREAT. (A tattoo-motif subset: tardigrades in space-suits.) Zoom out: such a thing as a tardigrade-cult wouldn’t exist if the tardigrade didn’t pluck a chord of mythic resonance for our times. Who hasn’t wished to hibernate for a few years, just to get a break from the relentless unfavourability of the twenty-first century?
Speaking of tiny piglets, my Mum has become an accidental mini-pig farmer. She fell into the small-pet cycle where you get two; one dies; the remaining one needs a friend; the older one dies; the younger one— now the older one— needs a friend; etc. etc. Down to one guinea pig, she acquired two more, thinking them too small to be pregnant. But lo! A Christmas miracle! Not quite parthenogenesis like some tardigrades; more a mystery Dad, like Jesus.
Three adults plus five piglets makes eight guinea pigs altogether. The pigs are not merely ornamental: they process food scraps into manure. But they are not strictly farm animals, in that my Mum won’t countenance slaughtering and eating them, unlike Peruvian Jesus:13
Chronos started out as a baby-eater,14 but then Time-the-process transmogrified Time-the-personification into kind old Father Time, twinkling at the New Year’s baby.15 These days the year feels born old, prematurely exhausted. Solstice is done, Christmas is done, Hogmanay is yet to come. A drowsy numbness pains my senses, but I’ll bestir myself from the contagious torpor of the season, and publish this Summer ramble while it’s still one-third current. (Everyone’s away, so I’ll just leave it in your emailbox til you get back.)
The pumpkins are sprawling through the fence. Peacocks meow. It’s hotter than Satan’s arsehole.16 Even the rain is like bathwater. I ate so many cherries that the supermarket ran dry and I had to switch to honesty-box plums. The hen blackbird has laid four speckled turquoise eggs in her mud-cup nest in the apple tree. Down in the realm of palynomorphs and tardigrades, tiny mighty life steps its dance, supremely indifferent to our vertebrate folly. Merry whatever!
Thus I retain my elite Novid membership. Still a Covid virgin— or as Dr Sea calls it, ‘Covid unicorn’.
Hail Timelord Weasel!
(How do you tell the difference between a stoat and a weasel? Easy: a weasel is weaselly recognised, but a stoat’s stoatally different.)
An interesting side-effect of that decision was that for a decade, my birthday became an automatic back-pat, a marker of achievement: another full year of drawing under my belt. If you hate birthdays, you might consider a similar re-purposing.
I wrote about Matariki here: Star-Stories and Oral History
An ironic side-effect of my daily drawing project: I became hyper-attuned to clock-time, particularly the hour of midnight (my daily deadline). At New Year, as everyone counted down, I’d be like Welcome to my world.
Pity the postie at Christmastime!
Therefore
Tip of the Wizard hat to Caroline Ross
Etymonline says “late 12c., bileave, ‘confidence reposed in a person or thing; faith in a religion."
Etymologically, believed and beloved are the same word, from the Proto-Indo-European root *leubh: ‘to care, desire, love.’ See also: libido.
This list courtesy of Wikipedia
A North Sea Germanic word, meaning cask or barrel
Tardigrades are not strictly extremophiles because they endure, rather than exploit, extreme conditions.
Peruvian Jesus soundtrack: Missa Mexicana - Andrew Lawrence-King, The Harp Consort
Vide Goya:
From 1909 to 1943, the Evening Post ran a series of amazing New Year’s baby covers by J. C. Leyendecker, mentor of Norman Rockwell. (Father Time has a 1911 cameo.) I particularly like 1931: Unintentionally Communist baby; and 1936: Wizard baby.
My Christmas gift to myself is I’m going to write arsehole on my Substack. A more genteel version: It’s hotter than the Devil’s front porch. Or: Hot as the hinges on the gates of Hades.
tardigrades!!! I love them. I had not heard that song - thank you for bringing it into my life. Also, this quote of yours is phenomenal - " I speak about myself because that is my authoritative voice. Truth is not narcissism, it is nakedness. Only by radical honesty can I hope to effect change in the world. "
Maybe life is always one third current of your a tardigrade...