Connect the Christmas Dots (fa-la-la-la): Menageries, Mangers, Revelation, Land’s End

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The other night we watched (for the first time in like 20 years) the Pee Wee’s Playhouse Christmas special—this time with the kids. PW’s is such a wonderfully bizarre, fearlessly absurd, and (of course) infinitely playful world. From that first intro scene of claymation forest (beaver, monkeys, rabbits, squirrels, birdsong, pterodactyl, etc.), to whatever final gag and maniacal group laugh a given episode ends with, this is a place abounding with the most varied and boisterous life: marionettes and other puppets, robots and other machines, cartoons, human beings (incl. the King of Cartoons!), animate furniture, toys, ants, plants, the food in Pee Wee’s fridge, his taking floor, and a menagerie of visiting monsters, animals, aliens, and neighbors.

If the silencing of the animate world through alphabetic literacy and its accompanying Western acculturation has happened to our species over thousands of years, it must also take place anew with each generation of children, as they first come to us as wild little animists, before being taught otherwise. These ersatz playhouse worlds try to reclaim us—momentarily—from this awful silence. And, like the Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make-Believe (and even David Attenborough shows) we grew up with, PW’s world reassures and promises us that this immense loss, loneliness, alienation from the world, our neighbors, and other kin might be overcome. 

This time around, I also learned/was reminded: that the claymation dinosaur family is Jewish, that Magic Screen’s preferred pronouns are she/her, that Magic Johnson is her cousin, and that Pee Wee, although he once married Fruit Salad, does not care for fruit cake. (Who knew?!)

Anyway, in the spirit of Pee Wee’s Playhouse—and of Christmas—I thought this would be a fine time to try to (re)connect some dots (fa-la-la-la):

[Nativity/Nacimiento - St. Jude’s Catholic Center, Ephraim, UT]

“And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.

“And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.”
—   Revelation 4:6-8; 5:13

“My daughter’s world, like the world of most American four-year-olds, has overflowed with wild animals since it first came into focus: lionesses, puffins, hippos, bison, sparrows, rabbits, narwhals, and wolves. They are plush and whittled. Knitted, batik, and bean-stuffed. Appliquéd on onesies and embroidered into the ankles of her socks.

“I don’t remember buying most of them. It feels as if they just appeared Ark had docked outside our apartment and this wave of gaudy, grinning tourists came ashore. Before long, they were foraging on the pages of every bedtime story, and my daughter was sleeping in polar bear pajamas under a butterfly mobile with a downy snow owl clutched to her chin. Her comb handle was a fish. Her toothbrush handle was a whale. She cut her first tooth on a rubber giraffe.

“Our world is different, zoologically speaking—less straightforward and more grisly. We are living in the eye of a great storm of extinction, on a planet hemorrhaging living things so fast that half of its nine million species could be gone by the end of the century. At my place, the teddy bears and giggling penguins kept coming.

…

“But leaving your kids a world without wild animals feels like a special tragedy, even if it’s hard to rationalize why it should. The truth is that most of us will never experience the Earth’s endangered animals as anything more than beautiful ideas. They are figments of our shared imagination, recognizable from TV, but stalking places — places out there.

…

“It also occurred to me early on that [these endangered species] could be gone by the time Isla is my age. It’s possible that, thirty years from now, they’ll have receded into the realm of dinosaurs, or the realm of Pokémon, for that matter — fantastical creatures whose names and diets little kids memorize from books. And it’s possible, too, I realized, that it might not even make a difference, that there would still be polar bears on footsy pajamas and sea turtle-shaped gummy vitamins — that there could be so much actual destruction without ever meaningfully upsetting the ecosystems in our minds.

“That was the most disturbing part somehow—the disconnection.”

— Jon Mooalem, Wild Ones (2014)

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(infographics from the Guardian: “Humans just 0.01%of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study”)

“It is pretty staggering. In wildlife films, we see flocks of birds, of every kind, in vast amounts, and then when we did the analysis we found there are far more domesticated birds. It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth. When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken.”

—   Ron Milo, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel (2018)

In addition to the 50% loss of wildlife we’ve seen globally in the past 40 years, earlier this year IPBES reported that extinction rates are currently accelerating to a thousand times higher than prehuman (“background”) levels, and that we’re now poised to lose a million more species in the coming decades. (In other words, we’re eliminating our fellow creatures, literally driving them out, over the threshold of creation.)

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For example, in North America, we’ve lost around three billion birds since 1970; that’s more than one out of every four, gone. The coauthors of this recent study describe this as “a staggering loss that suggests the very fabric of North America’s ecosystem is unraveling.”

“Steep declines among birds that people regularly see at bird feeders can be insidious. The flocks of birds are still there, so most people don’t detect a loss of abundance. ‘There’s a shifting baseline phenomenon,’ said Adam Smith, the study coauthor and biostatistician.

‘Because the declines are gradual, we lose track of just how abundant these birds used to be.’ But the research findings in this analysis are clear: Some of America’s most familiar and beloved backyard birds are rapidly disappearing.”

—   Gustave Axelson (September 2019)

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“When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here—the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country... Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature I am conversing with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all its warriors... I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.”

—   from the journals of Henry David Thoreau (March 23, 1856)

“As we grow more removed from personal contact with nature, awareness and appreciation retreat…. So it goes, on and on, the extinction of experience sucking the life from the land, the intimacy from our connections… People who don’t know don’t care. What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known a wren?”                 

—   Robert Michael Pyle (1975)

“The best argument is undoubtedly the one that impresses the fewest people and convinces hardly anyone at all: Species are worth saving because a world with less life is less of a world. The mosquito, Yaqui topminnow, great white shark, bedbug, and prickly pear cactus are all worth having around.

“Life is not about industrial economies at the end of the second millennium…. Imagine that the destiny of the planet is not increasing the Gross National Product or making life nicer for human beings or easier for Yaqui topminnows. Imagine that it is a mystery. Think of how puzzled the tens of millions of vanished species must feel about the purpose of life.

“The endangered and often useless species are messengers and what they report to us it that the world is not especially designed for people or progress or machines or civilization. That is why these organisms and plants are resented… They are hated because they suggest by their very existence that the planet is not solely a habitat put together to benefit human beings.

“Every time a great white shark glides past, people have to wonder just what in the hell life is really all about. A world empty of useless species will be a world with fewer tough questions. And so the planet is becoming a better place for people who hurt their heads when they think.”

—   Charles Bowden, Blue Desert (1986)

OK, last dot for this one. Fred Tomaselli’s collages mediate our relationship with nature through the color palettes of polar fleece and other synthetic outerwear (mostly made from petrochemicals) of Lands’ End, J. Crew, Patagonia, LL Bean, and Eddie Bauer mail order catalogs. (Notice: there are Peewees here too.)

related:
Christmas Freud I, II, III
ciphers in the snow
imagine the new world
eating and being animals
into the mystic
mineral spirits
witness
nochebuena
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