Mariana mallard
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
a memoir/grimoire of falling together in time
and going forth by day
I was asked by a friend to seek you out, to practice being-with you. The friend has chosen a group of us, and we each are assigned to contact a different being.
I was told you are a being of unknown quantity or location and of debated status and existence in this present moment and dimension.
I begin with a common human strategy to invite into conversation the Unseen and Unheard, to summon the not-recently Seen nor Heard From, to call upon the absent, to honor the missing and the distant, to invoke the longed-for, the Invisible, possibly-Unseeable, and Inaudible
I begin by learning and then calling you by the names by which others call you, starting with my own mother tongue, English:
Mariana Mallard, Mariana here referring, in contemporary English, to the Mariana Islands, a place where some humans have observed you living, as recently as within the span of my own lifetime.
These islands, in the contemporary languages of humans whose peoples, it is commonly believed, have lived on them at least four thousand years, are called Manislan Mariånas in Chamorro, and in the Carolinian language, Téél Falúw kka Efáng llól Marianas
Mariana is a name applied by Europeans, who began to visit and then reify their conceptualizations about these islands in the year of their lord 1521, when the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan arrived with a Spanish fleet and declared the Islands to be the property of his sponsors, the empire of Spain. It is said that the Chamorro people rowed out to greet the Spanish ships anchored the usual distance from the shore, bringing with them refreshments; it is not recorded whether the Spanish reciprocated with any offerings or gifts. According to Chamorro society, it was not impolite to then borrow a small boat from the visitors in order to go fishing, as such property was only ever held communally by the peoples of the islands; however the Spanish responded by fighting the Chamorros until they recovered the small boat, and Magellan fled the islands three days after his arrival.
In 1668, a Jesuit missionary suggested that the islands' colloquial European name, coined by sailors, Islas de los Ladrones (Thieves' Islands), be henceforth supplanted by a name honoring his patron, Mariana of Austria, then regent of Spain. In the 19th century Spain sold one half of the archipelago to the German empire and the other to the United States, and after Germany's defeat in World War 1, their colony was declared by the League of Nations to be a property of the Japanese empire. After World War 2, all the islands were declared to be an unincorporated territory and commonwealth of the United States.
I'm tugged at hard by concern and care for Mariana Islands, Manislan Marianas, Téél Falúw kka Efáng llól Marianas, and all the beings who were displaced and disappeared, lived and died through all that is unsaid in this accounting of imperial cartography, but I hold steady and keep you, Mariana Mallard, my priority.
In Manislan Mariånas, Téél Falúw kka Efáng llól Marianas,
You are called ngånga’ in Chamorro, and ghereel’bwel in Carolinian.
Mariana Mallard ! Ngånga ! Ghereel'bwel !
I say these words out loud, guessing at the phoneticized pronunciation, despite the fact my voice doesn't carry very far,
and the fact that the Mariana Islands, Manislan Mariånas, Téél Falúw kka Efáng llól Marianas, are 12,268 kilometers away from my home, across multiple continents and oceans
and in any case
no human has gone on record reporting having seen you anywhere near there
since 1979.
But after considering that with varying degrees of efficacy humans call out to the divine by name all the time, and the divine usually being a hypothetical sentience or energy who/which has no uniformly detectable fixed spacetime position,
I investigate other names to call you by.
One common name in English, Oustaleti's Gray Duck,
and also the Latin binomial accorded you in the late 19th century by the scientific establishment,
Anas oustaleti
assign you a sort of paternity, or some other sort of alleged belonging to the French zoologist Émile Oustalet.
My heart beats faster when I learn that between 1875 and 1905, Oustalet was employed at the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris where even now, a body, one of your bodies, lies within, á cause d'Émile Oustalet
Paris is only three hours by train from my home-at-the-moment,
And as it so happens, a rare and wholly unprecedented personal dental emergency beckons me to Paris, no other dentists any closer to my house having had any appointments. Thus upon learning of your presence in Paris, I already have train tickets booked for the next day: the type of meaningful coincidence that, as Carl Jung posited, cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time.
Navigation for the mystic is so often a spontaneous running or stumbling headlong into wilderness, unprepared for the journey, carrying only intention and devotion, yet trail markers will soon appear to tell you that you're going the right way, that you already knew what direction to head to, or someone/something else made prior arrangements on your behalf. Pilgrimage is how a yearning heart embarks on a direct trajectory towards a haunting, along maps both documented and hypothetical, searching out holy abodes the beloved once frequented and often, the resting place of the very bones and teeth that the esteemed left behind.
The pilgrim finds, if not what they thought they might be looking for, some satisfaction in the movement itself, the arrival at each stop and station, the changes wrought upon them by visitation, ritual, and contemplation.
Often in leaving dedicated offerings, formulaic deposits, and by collecting fragments and souvenirs, by which the pilgrim hopes to maintain the connection they have gained through temporary proximity to the sacred: the principle of contagious magic.
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During the morning train ride into Paris, preparing for my visit to the capital of a country I've recently emigrated to, a city I take pleasure in still becoming familiar with, I mapped my way to the dentist and from thence on to the museum, and then continued to research what has been said about you. I find that your species is said to be an interesting example of speciation by hybridization, a process said to be very rare in birds and mammals,
your species apparently, possibly, derived from migrating individuals of the Common Mallard, or Canard colvert to most humans who encounter you here in Paris, or Anas platyrhynchos to Émile Oustalet; and the Australasian Black Duck, Anas rogersi, who settled down and became resident on the Marianas.
Though some scientists dispute this.
It is said that your range reduction and eventual presumed extinction have been attributed to habitat loss and hunting, especially during and immediately after World War II. Evolving without predators, you were said not to be wary of humans, and so were easily caught.
I learned that the speciation process has only started in comparatively recent time (thousands of years, maybe)
I learned that some scientists don't recognize the Mariana Mallard as a "proper distinct species," only perhaps an "incipient species,"
In the language I am still acquiring, I learned:
Anas oustaleti est une espèce hypothétique, très probablement éteinte, de canards.
To some, you are both hypothetical and at the same time, very probably extinct.
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It is a fine spring day in Paris when with a numb and wounded mouth I leave the dentist and head towards where your body is kept in the museum of natural history, intending to pay my respects.
I had stealthily pocketed the fragments of tooth freshly wrenched from my jaw, if only because the thought of leaving them behind to casual, impersonal, unconsidered disposal by persons who did not grow and house them in their own mouths felt disrespectful to my teeth, and to every last bit of the rest of my body that didn't form itself for the express purpose of being an excretion or waste product.
I amble from my dentist in a widdershins spiral, mapwise reversing the numbered coils of the escargot's shell of Paris' arrondissements: after the 3rd, then the 2nd, then the 1st. I catch sight of the Seine and find myself at the Pont-Neuf, the so-called New Bridge that is in fact the oldest of all the bridges in Paris. The new-old bridge seems the perfect crossing for today.
I have walked beside and over the Seine often before but today is perhaps the first time I have sufficient space in my day here to abruptly cut the motor of purposeful locomotion and drift awhile, to enter the state of purposeful-anti-purpose: the feral flânerie both foragers and oracles dip into, in which one's gaze and all the senses stop grasping hard at a distant point and the most efficient route through to it, instead savoring the territory, deep-listening, lingering with what isn't drawing immediate attention to itself.
Relaxing into being-with the body of water flowing underneath the bridge I'm perched on, it occurs to me that the tooth fragments in my pocket might function as a votive offering to this river.
If my teeth can no longer stay in my still-living body the next best place for them seems to be where they can dissolve back into inert impersonal minerals as one day the rest of me will also go. I will not jettison them like detritus but proffer them as tribute, elements returning to one another, blood and bone into water: river Seine, please accept this sacrifice as a token of my esteem, and this, my modest replenishment to your mineral realm, a tiny drop into your vast waters, a homeopathic-strength apology for my species' unceasing plunder and extraction. I would be grateful for any assistance and guidance you can provide me in your city.
Gazing over the edge of the bridge, upon losing sight of the ivory shards as they fall my focus sharpens to the surface of the water below. Like a response to my call, a gliding formation of Canard colvert emerges from under the shadow of the bridge, a cursor moving on the reflective sheen of the river.
I have never before this day seen any ducks on the Seine.
I hypothesize:
In contagious magic, things once a part of a larger whole, belonging to, associated with one another are able to affect one another, to communicate, even when separated, so that anything done to one (like a garment, or a tooth) will affect the other. That much spellwork operates apparently via a mechanism currently called quantum entanglement is why, when physicists first took to studying the puzzling behavior of multiple diverse particles none of which could be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles were separated, their name for it was spooky action at a distance.
In sympathetic magic, we apply ritual to that which resembles that which we seek connection to or influence over: an image, an effigy, a double, or a stand-in.
In transgenerational epigenetic inheritance theory, it is speculated that yet-to-be-understood, uncounted and underestimated effects of experiences can be inherited, that information can be transmitted across generations at the molecular level of body cells.
Ngånga ! Ghereel'bwel ! Mariana Mallard ! Anas oustaleti ! If your ancestor was the Common Mallard, Canard colvert, Anas platyrhynchos, could I be able to be-with you somehow, be-with some aspect of you past-present-future, by being in proximity to living descendents of your common ancestor ?
I read one scientist's opinion that your "voice can be assumed to have resembled the Mariana Mallard's parent species’; and possibly, the females’ quacking was hoarser than in the mallard." if your voice resembles that of Common Mallard, Canard colvert, Anas platyrhynchos, by listening to Common Mallard, Canard colvert, Anas platyrhynchos here and now, is it like hearing your voice? Can I have some understanding of you, can I make relationship with you, by learning the language of your relations?
My human teachers who have advised me best in this life counsel when conceptualization seems exhausted or obstructive to set my most burning and ineffable questions adrift into a sea of devotion and practice, as if they were floating candles, and trust the currents to guide them and illuminate along the way.
After crossing the Seine it doesn't take long to arrive at the Muséum Nationale d'Histoire Naturelle's entrance on rue Cuvier, named for Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, le Baron Cuvier, whose youthful paper Mémoires sur les espèces d'éléphants vivants et fossiles, based on his examinations of tooth and bone fragments of recently-deceased elephants and mastodon fossils, is generally credited with having established extinction to be a scientific fact.
In the museum, the public cannot look upon your body, although I know where it lies, and the public and I cannot not-see the carefully-preserved bodies of thousands of other beings on brightly-lit display. The museum is a cathedral of the systematic study of beings, with some notable saints' bones on view in glass reliquaries while many other bodies rest out of view under the flagstones, in the crypt, in the cemetery. I spend the afternoon paying my respects to one and all, being with you and them and all kinds of grief for captivity, violence, death, and extinction.
Taking my leave of so many expertly embalmed bodies all posed in imitation of life, I am reminded of what when I was younger was always titled in English The Egyptian Book of the Dead, now better translated as The Book of Going Forth by Day: a papyrus-inscribed collection of spells of protection, regeneration, and navigation to be affixed in the coffins of mummified humans and other animals, a technical manual for their journeys in through the underworld and out into the afterlife–per the designation on the papyri, praises and recitations which are to be spoken on the day of the burial and of going in and coming out. If only I had now a suitable prepared text to read to you today!
After leaving the museum, I walk a silent vigil to the train station to return home, past le Centre Pénitentiaire de Paris-La Santé, passing over les catacombes, and through la Cimetière Montparnasse.
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Having sought out that which was once a part of you, and a place directly associated with you, after the contagious, now the sympathetic magic: I next stay close to home and seek out your image, your sound, your double; and places like the places you are known to have frequented.
I learn that you were recorded in freshwater marshes, lakes, and rivers, and were also observed in mangrove lagoons.
Little was known about your foraging habitat, but you were observed foraging on green vegetation and seeds.
I set out most days to dabble at the edges of various bodies of freshwater near to my home, to be in the types of places you would call home: freshwaters abundant in green vegetation and seeds, especially what I grew up calling duckweed, which is here called lentilles d'eau. I think on and speak to you in the places I think you would like, I call out to you by the names I know, and devise simple rituals of invitation whose symbols and procedures I repeat at regular intervals.
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After a few weeks, I am called back to Paris by another dramatic tooth event, uncannily nearly identical to the previous episode, which for me had been an unprecedented experience, a novel horror I'd thought was a singular anomaly in a lifetime formerly completely untroubled by tooth decay. But for another sudden and unforeseen total implosion of a structure I had taken for granted would be durable to follow so soon on the heels of the first systems failure, I set about scrutinizing the coincidence for patterns: Saturn, the oft-harsh teacher and lord of limits, structures, and time itself, rules the teeth and bones: was this the beginning of a cycle of difficult tutelage, a rite of passage in my life cycle, or a metric of any biped's inexorable descent into disintegration unto Death? Or impersonally, are my teeth a type of transistor, a microcosm resonating with the frequency of the macrocosm, reflecting systemic structural rot, decay and decline, collapse?
The uncanny looping deja-vu, the impulsion to return to where I had just been to do what I had just done, the quality of being handed a do-over focused the range of my consideration. The previous trip to Paris, both upon leaving the riverside and on the train pulling out of the station, I had the sense I'd left some business unfinished: there was the suspicion of an etiquette gaffe, a minor faux-pas needing amending, and also a road left untaken, and now, there is the sense of a call-back or second chance.
As I make my way to the river after the second visit to the dentist, I consider that were my skull to go on display in the Natural History Museum, it would be notable for its perfectly matched set of extractions; some archaeologist might speculate I'd undergone a spiritual ritual or a cosmetic procedure common to my society.
This trip, I converse directly with the Seine, not briefly perched above atop a human-convenient bridge, but alongside its waters, walking its serpentine line until I align with the currents and dowse a propitious spot to stop. Another unknown 'You' whom I address,
May I give you something else besides teeth? I am very glad to visit you, but you need not beckon me only with pain and urgency and permanent losses!
I proffer copper and silver coins and flower petals over the riverbank, feeling into the whole length of the sinuous Seine, who arises some distance southeast to Paris, and from there surges northwest through France all the way to the cold La Manche, what the English claim as their Channel.
I think of other mighty rivers who regularly receive and bestow gifts, and who are also expected to ferry away what we deposit with them to enact our spells of removal and dissolution. I think of how, much further upstream from where I now stand, in 1431 in Rouen, the ashes of Jehanne la Pucelle, as she preferred to be called, after her execution were thrown into the Seine from the stone Mathilde Bridge. Much closer in time and space, in 1961, French policemen threw a crowd of Algerian liberationists demonstrating for their people's freedom into these waters, from the Pont St. Michel, to drown. I would like to believe that all those brought here by such atrocities, these who haunt the Seine, might now somehow be able to receive my respects. I have witnessed the customary ritual offering of the human body once dissipated into ash into the Bagmati river as it flows through Kathmandu's Pashupatinath temple, where there is a longtime sophisticated system in place for prayers to liberate the soul before the elemental composting of a person's body takes place, and despite the lack of similar established local ritual technology, I hope-wish that this river Seine might also have received saints and martyrs, suicides and victims with such efficacy, gentleness, and care.
I try to feel into the whatness of what is between the Seine and me, but without any naming; I deliberately avoided research before this encounter so as not to project onto the space of our conversation. Not to or at the river but with the river, I pay homage to the power of its essential unceasing motion. As if its currents can transport thoughts and wishes, I hope-pray for the protection of past-present-future Mariana mallard, Anas oustaleti,Ngånga, Ghereel'bwel, I hope-pray for the healing of all rivers of the Earth, and that the waters of the Earth might heal the beings of the Earth or at least soften our/their sorrow and pain and ease our/ their deaths.
I hope-pray until conceptual thought abates and my whole body/mind seems to melt into an overwhelming infusion, a menstruum of perhaps the same substance that bequeaths the beauty, intelligence, and charm to this ancient city that eternally renews itself springing up from its banks. I feel wholly suffused and awash in connection and a vast sentient presence. As tears come to my eyes, I'm aware I've been something that some might call blessed.
I am given to understand there is personal healing and regeneration that surpasses my human quantifications occurring for me here, and that it is always gushing forth, whether or not I happen to observe it. Before pulling away, I vow to visit again, and aloud, formally bid the Seine au revoir, à la prochaine, to which the response is a chorus of very loud quacking: a line of Canard colvert swims to where I've made my offerings, pauses to circle, and then gets back into formation to continue downriver.
On the train towards home, when I query the pre-Christian history of Paris and the Seine, I find that the Gauls knew their river patron as Sequana, and pictured her atop a living duck-boat hybrid, her familiar being integral to her cult of veneration and pilgrims' petitions for healing and divination. Pilgrims to the source of the Seine would deposit into the waters ex-votos shaped like that which they desired to be healed, as well as offerings of money, flowers, and fruits. I find a photograph of a bronze statue, circa the first century of the Common Era, which depicts Sequana's duck bearing in its mouth un fruit sphérique au centre duquel se voit gravée une etoilure radiée–what some botanists speculate could be the fruit of Ribes alpina, the Alpine redcurrant, while others dispute that it depicts any distinct living species.
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My thoughts return to when I first went to seek you out. I think of all the bodies of beings deposited in the museum of Natural History, and all the carnage, destruction, and misconceptions that arose out of a long-reigning belief that one could and should gain knowledge of a living being by capturing, killing, and either dissecting it or preserving one frozen moment of its external appearance in life.
I cannot see any understanding or merit to be had in dissembling or actively deconstructing the confluences that I have recently swum in: I will likely not find you by attempting to separate out some single husk, strand or imprint of you, there is not one individual, name, or place, or moment that is You.
Mariana mallard, Anas oustaleti,Ngånga, Ghereel'bwel, and all your relations whose voices and movements resonate the same tones and frequencies!
Following You has led me to wander fecund riversides stewarding growth and abundance and also receiving the rejected, discarded, and Dead to be washed away by the riverine potencies of generation, connection, transportation, regeneration; to La Seine, Sequana, and all who have made acquaintance with holy waters, tributes and tributaries, which is to say: you and we who have both a specificity and also a generality in kinship with others of your/our kind.
Disputed existences in this realm, the fact of extinction, all the decay and disintegration on the micro and macro levels of existence: when we problem-solve, it's often pragmatic to break it down into bits to resolve individually. But if we Stay with the Trouble as elder Haraway inveighs us, the Trouble is not one problem to be atomized in a divide-and-conquer strategy, it is all a sort of a hyperobject, that cannot be apprehended or understood by being forcibly separated into fragments or parts. It is an ecosystem to make respectful relationship with, to listen to, not to pry open and dissect and extract from.
It seems convincing from the evidence that a being can become unmoored from a biological existence on Earth and yet remain in relationship, and that the being-with and making-of such relations confers a transfiguration on all who tend, practice, and participate in this.
And so I set adrift my offerings and petitions, my questions and troubles, my greetings and farewells, my prayers and supplications for the benefit of all we sentient beings, I release them all on infinite rivers of devotion, until conceptual thought abates, and You and I and we go forth into the day, the hyperobject of your/our connected being, dying, and regeneration all falling together in time.