*
When I get back, a few hours later, I immediately go out into the garden, praying that the bird will not be there any more. Of course it is. In exactly the same position, the beak resting against the china rim of the saucer. But dead now, the eyes only half open. I carry the body to the back of the garden, find a place behind the wood stack, put the bird down with a gentleness that has no real meaning, and cover it with leaves. I go back inside and release Tarka from his front-room prison, trying to make sense of the rankings in nature – Human. Cat. Bird. Worm.
The utter fragility of the world. What does it mean to live with this? Is it even possible? If we started to consider the million things that can go wrong inside us at any moment? If we began to see the universe in a mangrove tree, or an entire galaxy in a river, how would we move through the world? To consider the multiple ramifications of every human action. This goes beyond changing our political system – it would need a kind of rewiring of our minds and the way that we think. Not just to care about cats and dogs, but to consider worms, insects, ants as worthy of our respect, worthy of life. Not just to love trees and flowers, but all things that grow, down to the smallest fern, the least noticeable grass. And I’m suddenly thinking of something that Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote about the rapaciousness of the Western oil companies, at the beginning of the fight of his life for his people and the Delta:
Oil exploration has turned Ogoni into a wasteland: lands, streams and creeks are totally and continually polluted; the atmosphere has been poisoned, charged as it is with hydrocarbon vapours, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and soot emitted by gas which has flared twenty-four hours a day for thirty-three years in very close proximity to human habitation.1 Acid rain, oil spillage and oil blow-outs have devastated Ogoni territory …
The result of such unchecked environmental pollution and degradation include the complete destruction of the ecosystem. Mangrove forests have fallen to the toxicity of oil and are being replaced by noxious nypa palms; the rainforest has fallen to the axe of multinational oil companies, all wildlife is dead, marine life is gone, the farmlands have been rendered infertile by acid rain and the once beautiful Ogoni countryside is no longer a source of fresh air and green vegetation. All one sees and feels around is death.
And an anger comes now, realising that this is what I despise more than I can express – capitalism, at least in its current form, denies absolutely the fragility of the world. It’s not even a question. The only language is financial, the only criterion is growth. Everything else is a distraction. From the perspective of the FTSE 100 or the Dow Jones or Moody’s or the IMF, the world of lichens and ants and forests can be exterminated. They are just not necessary. They are not productive. When the oilmen arrive in the Nigerian estuaries or in the Siberian tundra, what are they actually seeing? I suspect that everything that exists above ground in these places – whether it’s a matter of the communities affected or the forests that lie in the way – are in their minds only potential obstacles to getting the oil out of there. The black gold which must be extracted at any cost I think of Blake’s words – ‘To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun … the tree which moves some to tears of joy in the eyes of others is only a green thing which stands in the way.’2
What connects? It all connects. If you do it to the smallest of these, you do it to me.
Worm. Bird. Cat. Human.
15
A Painting in The Hague; A Farmhouse in Suffolk; A Stadium in Somalia
How to explain the power of this painting?
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, painted in 1632, was the work which really consolidated the reputation of this young artist who had recently arrived in Amsterdam from Leiden.
The twenty-six-year-old Rembrandt was understandably proud of his creation – it is the first painting which he signed, prominently at the top of the canvas, with just his Christian name, Rembrandt f.[ecit] 1632 (announcing to its viewers ‘Rembrandt made it’). Today The Anatomy Lesson can be seen in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, although it has been so widely reproduced that it is probably already familiar to you. I thought I knew the painting too; if you’d asked me what it was about, I would have said it was a representation of the move towards the Enlightenment – no, perhaps more than that – an embodiment in paint of the concept of ‘Scientific Progress’, and specifically the development of the discipline of anatomy, crucial to the growth in the study of medicine in the seventeenth century. Dr Tulp must have been a prominent surgeon of the time, and the other figures were no doubt colleagues of his, perhaps including men who commissioned this work from Rembrandt.
Yet I’d never really examined it closely until it appeared before me in The Rings of Saturn some years ago. At the beginning of his interpretation of this picture, Sebald, characteristically identifying with the marginalised and forgotten, draws our attention away from the famous surgeon to the figure of the dead man at the centre. This was Adriaan Adriaanszoon, also known as Aris Kindt, a thief from Amsterdam who had been executed only an hour before the anatomy lesson. In a daring visual ploy, in the whiteness of his body and its position, Rembrandt echoes the form of the pietà – the executed man becoming the dead Christ. In Sebald’s simple action of naming the man, a deconstruction of power takes place – what has been an object (the body) only a few moments before, becomes a human being again, and in this moment we want to know more about Adriaan – more than Sebald, or anyone else for that matter, can tell us.
Was he really, as Sebald suggests, ‘a petty thief’? Was he really hanged for stealing only a coat? Or had he been convicted of assault or armed robbery, as others believe? And then many other questions form in my mind: if ‘Kindt’ means ‘kid’, then how old was he? Was there some affection behind this nickname? Could it even have been ironic, because if you look closely at the face, this is not a young man. Was he married? Did he have children? Were the family told that his body was going to be used to further the course of scientific progress? Did they consent to this? Were they there, in the theatre of the Waaggebouw, on that January day in 1632 when he was dissected before a paying audience? After the anatomy lesson, how was Adriaan’s body returned to the family? Where was he buried?
But looking at the picture again, wider questions arise. About the relationship between ourselves and this subject, specifically in terms of power and responsibility. What is the other side of the ‘Enlightenment’? What does our civilisation require to move forward? Who benefits from ‘Progress’? Who are the casualties? Is this what Walter Benjamin meant when he wrote, ‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’? And where do we stand in relation to the different classes represented in this painting? The gazes are multiple and disturbing – Dr Tulp is focussed on the paying audience, two of his colleagues in the guild of surgeons are looking at him, two others at the arm of the executed man, and the remaining three seem to be looking at us, challenging our position as the viewer. Do we align ourselves with Tulp, with Adriaan or with the other watching surgeons? Who do we most identify with? Rembrandt has placed us all as witnesses in the audience of the Waaggebouw, the temple to progress, so we might feel a certain high-minded engagement. Which would almost certainly be misplaced – after all, tickets for such events were the sell-out gig of the day. People would queue for hours to gain admission, fights would break out. So, more accurately, we’re cast here simply as voyeurs, observing the whole spectacle as a kind of entertainment, a ghoulish seventeenth-century equivalent of reality TV.