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OK! I was going to do it earlier but my connection was stuffed. Here it is... Sunday, 26-Jul-98 00:26:17
Wings Of Desire Paul McDermott finds clues to human behaviour in the unlikeliest of places. 'A small figure flits back and forth across the rainforest floor. Between the sagging branches a tiny thief works tirelessly. His keen eye pillages the landscape for morsels that he can use. Discerning and tactful, the wrong colour or shape and the item is immediately discarded. An artisan of the highest order, he returns to his concealeed castle and places his newly found twig in place. Filled with pride, he pauses to survey the majesty before him, an architectural tribute to nature. He possesses the mad desire of Van Gogh, he is the Gaudi of the animal kingdom: the humble and insane bowerbird'' * The bowerbird goes to obscene lengths to attract a mate. It creates lavish structures filled with bright objects, plants 'lawns', builds stages to perform on and, occasionally, will paint interior walls with regurgitated charcoal and vegetable pulp. There is one reason and one reason only fort he strange behaviour of the bowerbird: it has too much time on its hands (and it doesn't even have hands). Bored out of its tiny bird-brain, this evolutionary freak was forced to come up with an inventive way to find a meaningful existence. With surprisingly few predators inhabiting its environment and a plentiful supply of food, the bowerbird has filled up its time in a way that is anything but natural. Like the bowerbird, we are the most successful creature in our neck of the woods, having nothing to fear from any other creature. The consequence of this hard-won position at the top of the food chain is that we spend less time fighting for our survival, which leaves us with more lesirure time. We need something to distract, entertain and occupy ourselves and, like the bowerbird, we have found it feathering our nests. We crowd our homes with useless trinkets, discarded toys and mountains of paper, defining ourselves by what we possess. And from these citadels of crap we coo to our prospective partners. Our major shopping malls are the cluttered landscape where bright shiny objects lure the 'bowerbird within'. Overcome by our instinct to shop, we spend hours dragged from cabinet to change room to counter in search of the perfect ornament, the exquisite artefact. The human bower can be found from Harrods to the two dollar shop, picking up bargains. What we select indicates our likes and dislikes, our strengths and weaknesses and, like our feathered friend, our little chests puff out with pride when our effort has been noticed. The tragedy is, although we have seen numerous documentaries about this bizarre bird, we have failed to learn the valuable lesson it can teach us. We have failed to see we follow the same imbecilic pattern - we too have a surplus of time. Over the centuries we have weakned ourselves physically and metntally. We have become the knock-kneed, feather-brained, sparrow-chested cousins of the bowerbird. At the moment, half this country is complaining about working a measly 35-hour week and the other half is always wanting something for nothing. Everyone wants more money for doing less and, as a net result, all of us are plunged into financial chaos. There is a devestatingly simple solution to this circular trauma: work twice as long for half as much. If we brought back the 70-hour week (or the 90- hour week) then people would'nt have enough energy to complain. At least we'd stop being a nation of whingers. A clear message is being sent to us from the rainforest floor; its time to wake up and listen to the song of evolution: for the bird of paradise, life is hell. We have always been jealous of the bird, envying its ability to fly. From the doomed Icarus, to Freudian floating dreams, to air travel, we have yearned for the limitless freedom of the sky. The sad truth is, if we were born with wings, they would be the wings of the bowerbird and life would remain essentially the same. * This extract was taken from Tarquin Regent's The Secret Life of the Bower' (1952) **************************************************** Lisa(H) |
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