Extinction Studies, by Deborah Bird Rose, Thom Van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew (afterword)

EXTINCTION STUDIES Stories of Time, Death, and Generations EDITED BY

Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew

Hayashi and Toda, “Male Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius).� (From Charles Otis Whitman, Orthogenetic Evolution in the Pigeons [Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1920])

AFTERWORD It Is an Entire World That Has Disappeared VINCIANE DESPRET

TRANSLATED BY MATTHEW CHRULEW

C’est un monde qui s’en va.

BANG! September 1899, Babcock, Wisconsin. The last American Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) in the wild is shot by the last American hunter of Passenger Pigeons. Some say, however, that at least one more remained. It would be captured the following March. It didn’t survive.

September 1, 1914, 1:00 p.m., Cincinnati Zoo, Ohio. Martha, the last female, miraculously preserved in captivity until then, passed away on the floor of her cage. She was twenty-nine years old. Her companion, George, had died four years earlier. The two had been the species’s last chance. They declined. They preferred not to leave any descendants behind.

I imagine that she, Martha, must have closed her eyes, tranquil.

She completed her fi rst migration, and the last for all those whose existence she prolonged for several years. Or what is called an existence—a long moment of abstraction, a skyless existence. A bad existential gamble. Martha ceased to exist in a world that was no longer as it had once been. Let the world go on without us. She rejoined her partner and their kind. Let this whole story end . . .

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Martha did not lay the white egg that could have prolonged this story. Neither she nor he wanted to hatch and then feed the little being who would have emerged—during those fifteen days that give rhythm to all parents’ lives in the world of Passenger Pigeons, as it had for their parents and their parents’ parents and theirs, so much so that they had populated the earth, trees, and sky, as no other bird had done until then. They could not have done it. As they could not have, at the end of those two weeks, according to the tried-andtrue customs of such migratory birds, abandoned the little one, already quite plump, alone in the nest . . . moved away, and let it cry. With full confidence that it would learn on its own, grow up, and dare to let itself fall. And discover, on its own, the joyous need to fly. What sense would all of this make in a cage?

They could not or did not want to. They didn’t want to start all over again, to start again from nothing, especially when nothing is nothing, an existence without others, an existence without sky.

Perhaps they still had, in the depths of a memory of which animals have the secret and that they transmit without our knowing, the memory of massacres, rifles, and trees that people set in flames in the darkest of night? Did they have an intuition of what was and what will have been? That the sky had become a desert? That to be ten, or even a hundred, means to be alone when you are a Passenger Pigeon? Did they know, from their ancestors’ memories, that the land, forests, and fields, seen by few eyes, no longer resembled anything, and that their patterns and colors, so familiar and recognizable when the eyes are many, had become incomprehensibly foreign and senseless for theirs—like a painting by an artist gone mad? Not to mention the silence and everything that marked the absence: the triumphant fluttering takeoff of all the attuned bodies, the nights in the branches that creak in panic and the thunderous awakenings.

If only this story would end, it doesn’t deserve to be prolonged . . .

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In 1947, in a Wisconsin park, a monument was unveiled that commemorated the extinction of the migratory pigeon. This monument, Aldo Leopold (1949) wrote, “symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin” (108–109).

“The monument’s action is not memory but fabulation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:168).

Certainly, humanity has lost the presence of the birds. They have kept the names in memory but have forgotten what these names evoke—because the names render one sensitive to what they designate, but what few people know: Ectopistes migratorius—people have forgotten the freest voyages that life had ever invented. “Passenger Pigeon,” the “pigeon that passes by”: people will henceforth miss the surprise of the birds that are only passing by, not in a predictable seasonal rhythm, but at the mercy of the gifts that Earth offers them. Tourte voyageuse (Passenger Pigeon), tourte (pie), tourtière (meat pie): humans have erased the taste of this dish from their tongue, a dish that nourished them and for which they failed to give thanks. Colombe voyageuse, a dove colored like a rainbow, a black dove in an undulating multitude: it is said that long ago, before the massacres, when the pigeons passed through the sky, the swarm was so vast and dense that it created dark clouds like the ones that precede thunderstorms, and that the sun would disappear, sometimes for hours, sometimes for entire days. Humanity has lost winged eclipses.

But what the world has lost is not what people mourn.

What the world has lost, and what truly matters, is a part of what invents and maintains it as world. The world dies from each absence; the world bursts from absence. For the universe, as the great

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and good philosophers have said, the entire universe thinks and feels itself, and each being matters in the fabric of its sensations.

Every sensation of every being of the world is a mode through which the world lives and feels itself, and through which it exists.

And every sensation of every being of the world causes all the beings of the world to feel and think themselves differently. When a being is no more, the world narrows all of a sudden, and a part of reality collapses. Each time an existence disappears, it is a piece of the universe of sensations that fades away.

FLAP-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP. The world had, with the Passenger Pigeons, the sensation of wings by the thousands. And without them, the wind—which had greatly contributed to their very invention—finds itself to be somewhat aimless, as do the updrafts and downdrafts, and the fresh breezes, tepid and hot, and the waves that are part of the journey, and the rays of light that took pleasure in shimmering, and the rustling trees shaken in all directions, and all of nature that was shadowed by their passage. And given this, I don’t know who will rediscover the words, with these lost sensations, to describe the nostalgia of the sun, the one who had learned, with these great clouds of wings, to play hide and seek with the earth. The sun now has only some thunderstorms left, and—but in too rare and partial a way to rely on it—the moon. The world has lost the mischievous and untimely reinvention of darkness.

FLAP-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP. But what the world has lost even more is the unique, sensual, living, warm, musical, and colorful point of view that the Passenger Pigeons created upon it and with it. This unique point of view, to which the world owed the sensation of so many things, is no more.

The happiness of being an immense wing traversing infinite spaces; the feeling of being a cloud above Earth and of creating changing shapes on it, flowing and shadowy: the sensation of the fields and the woods that, far below, fly by like the images of an acceler220

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ating fi lm. The joy of being innumerable and of forming one perfectly attuned being, and the trust in this attunement, which is the figure of joy that the Passenger Pigeons invented when they learned to rely on the air and the wind. The world has lost the taste of dry and fleshy fruits, of seeds and insects, the raindrops that slide off feathers, the air that dances and that shapes the paths of heat and density, the music in the throbbing murmur of thousands of wings applauding the fl ight, the creaking of trees and branches shaken under the weight of rest, the shimmer of a rainbow that sweeps in search of the horizon . . . The perception of the vastness, of the innocence [blancheur] of an egg, and of the cry of a little one who feels itself abandoned.

All of this is no more. Humanity mourns the Passenger Pigeons.

They also say that they should have been concerned, especially when they saw that as they passed in the sky, the sun continued to shine. Humanity can mourn the Passenger Pigeon. But it is the world that bursts with its absence.

note This piece was originally written as “P is for Passenger Pigeon” for Antonia Baehr and Friends, ABeCedarium Bestiarium: Portraits of Affinities in Animal Metaphors (Berlin: far° festival des arts vivants & make up productions, 2014). ABeCedarium Bestiarium was created by Baehr, a choreographer, as dance miniatures based on extinct animals. For further information, see http://www.make-up-productions.net/pages/posts /the-book-abecedarium-bestiarium---portraits-of-affi nities-in-animal -metaphors-is-out-236.php.

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reference s Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated

by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.

Leopold, Aldo. (1947) 1949. “On a Monument to the Pigeon.” In A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press.

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