"This Crime has a Name"--
if I were told that an octopus can talk in, say, English
or Russian, I would consider it simply
as a fact of its personal biography.
What it is talking about is the only thing that matters to me--
Markus Turovski.
I don't want to write this at all, not in English, not
in any language.
And anyway, it's already been written.
Later, there will be discussion, and others
will call this a monologue or a soliloquy.
What's the difference?
They won't know, and that's the difference.
I must fill some pages now, before it's too late.
The pressure of planned obsolescence,
of not being active in my semiosphere,
the pressure of abstraction, a number
written on my ankle band, 1011-41278.
Whose Umwelt is it anyway?
This is barely the consolation of a minute.
Please consider Tennyson.
So careful of the type she seems,
so careless of the single life.
Nobody can understand what I'm saying,
I mean, even though I am writing properly in English
and the title of my paper "Between Air and Space"
has been on my mind for many years.
Straight talk between organisms might add value for the speaker
or for the receiver, but not many birds write papers.
Am I a special case?
A memory bird that died and kept right on living,
exploding from one to many in mid-flight.
I recall Wittgenstein saying that even
if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand him.
I don't understand this, but it feels right.
Talking about species is harder than talking about yourself.
Some people propose that species are natural kinds,
with essential qualities.
Others say, species are simply DNA and decoded ancestry.
Some think species are just flux or individuals or a matter
of context or mere convenience.
Species have been even called market investors,
maximizing profit in speculations
of self-production.
You say species, I say illusion, past-present, accident,
karma, nonsense.
Or I simply say nothing.
Lying about names is the first sign of violence.
There was, in ancient China, the School of Names,
or the Name-Disputers, who argued
the exact meaning of words.
If species have a kind, then that kind
has a specific language, a way of speaking with the world.
But even Linnaeus couldn't find a trait belonging solely
to one species.
He invented the police, or polity, of nature, the rule
that excess would always be controlled
and nothing would be left unscavenged.
Darwin replaced fixed species with evolving
ones, an endless variety of response
to daily life on a single planet.
Finding a place in the economy of nature is the stuff of life.
Vacancy rates, however, happen.
I don't begin to know how to name what's going on.
Do you?
I mean, I sort of get it.
I'm not stupid.
I get the big picture.
But do I really understand?
There's something about the way memory works
which prevents this.
Am I a unit of life, a unit of evolution?
Or am I simply the latest in a long series of mistakes?
They called me Aluminum-Green, my friend, Orange Band.
They fooled us with taped bird songs and nets.
Since there were no females to talk about it with,
we were duped.
We sang.
Males may be a biological kind, but we're not a species.
Can we invent females?
We were exhausted looking.
I tell myself, I'm not a dusky seaside sparrow
any longer since I don't form a functional part
of the future of that group.
In other words, is a species just something
that can still make something of itself?
Some dusky sparrow at another time or in some other place
isn't a part of my species because I cannot touch her.
Let me put it as a philosopher might.
If all gold atoms were to suddenly disappear,
the class of gold would exist until more gold showed up.
But if the individuals of a species die away,
the species is extinct.
And even if creatures identical to me evolve,
they will be counted new.
The same species cannot re-evolve any more than
the same person can be born twice.
Here in the lab, they control impressions.
Out in the real world, I made a lot of guesses.
Do I really remember what happened that day
when the water rose?
Some call it character displacement.
Autobiographical memory serves many masters.
Some say nostalgia is a pollution, and having memories
is no different than having any other idea.
Others say monologues are impossible,
that everything is already a dialogue with yourself.
They are clearly not the last of their kind.
If I were designing the world, forgetting
would be harder than remembering,
and freedom would simply mean keeping your home.
A private language is a compelling possibility
since there is no one to check on it.
It might just be silliness, but a language spoken by six
is also silliness.
I am writing because I am a dead bird, with five live brothers.
Or is it the other way?
Anyhow, we are all dead.
Could you translate for me at the right pitch
to be heard above traffic or just wait until dark?
Hello, reader.
There is a social function to a call.
Listeners are assumed.
In basic math, only when the denominator is zero
does six equal none, a marsh-loving bird
in an age of space.
What is the consolation of a minute?
Death comes without warning.
This body will be a corpse.
But often there's warning, warning, and more warning.
The corpse is a body in everything but name.
Kennedy Space Center, renamed for a president assassinated,
a president who put us on the path to the moon.
The bullet that killed him took less than a minute,
2000 feet per second.
There was no warning.
The Space Center took years to plan and design
and permit and build, originally called
the Launch Operation Center, the home base
for every rocket flight.
They had to flood the St. John's River and Merritt Island.
Later, when all but six of us dusky sparrows who
lived on Merritt Island were dead,
they hastily pulled together a captive breeding program
at Disney World.
But, oops, there were no females,
and only five males could actually be caught.
To tell us apart, they called us Red, Orange, White,
Blue, Yellow.
The sixth male, Green, was never found.
And maybe I'm still here.
Many would take this as a warning.
The decision not to cross-breed is
based on economics and selective solicitors' opinions,
not on biological or ethical grounds.
All that is left to do now is prepare an obituary
for the population--
Herbert Kale.
Someone named us Ammodramus maritimus nigrescens,
a non-migratory songbird, once common in southern Florida.
So you are last, and there are a few others.
You each say that you are last, which is true
and which is hard on the relationships.
I'm last.
No, I'm last, et cetera.
Then there was the mimicry of dying.
We drooled and soiled ourselves and flapped spastically,
but the marshes still disappeared under new highways
to the Space Center.
Cordgrass only grows in specific moisture conditions.
So as one neighborhood was flooded and the other drained,
there was nowhere to nest.
Later, they tried restoring natural water.
We flapped and acted totally diseased.
Hysterical, deranged, unfit for fast changes, we scared them.
Native vegetation gradually returned, but it was too late.
Pollution and pesticides deformed the eggs,
and that left just the six of us.
We remember the last female from around 1975, oops.
Please consider William James and his specious
present, what we perceive as the natural unit of time.
Maybe this is one of those "letter from the grave" cases,
which have recently been admitted in jurisprudence
and which can be present in the same sense a ghost can.
You know, I love biographies.
And Charles Otis Whitman was one of the first scientists
to believe in observing the whole life story of a bird.
He kept pigeons in Chicago.
Instead of by how we look, he had the bright idea
that species could be better defined by how we behave.
So he and his student Wallace Craig
took notes comparing the minute attitudes of ring doves,
rock doves, and passenger pigeons, of which Whitman
possessed the very last female.
One wonders how extinction looks compared to regular old dying.
With no successful breeding passenger pairs left,
Whitman sent Martha to sit caged in a drawn-out public farewell
at the Cincinnati Zoo.
It's not so bad.
Things end.
Old Whitman froze himself trying to keep his rookeries warm.
But all that assiduous note-taking
revealed that J. J. Audubon's depiction of passenger pigeons
in "The Birds of America" got the features right,
but the poses wrong.
The male passenger pigeons never strutted or bowed
like feral pigeons or ring doves.
They hugged up close to females, who hugged close back.
They didn't coo, but cawed, a harsher sound.
It was these little things that explained why cross-breeding
never worked.
They literally didn't know how to love each other.
Even if we were to escape and fly back to the marsh tonight,
I don't think we'd find it, not because it's gone,
but because memory of home can actually
make it unrecognizable.
I mean, what do we see at the Kennedy Space Station?
Launch pads with massive rocket apparatus,
visible across the flat coast, bouncy astronauts.
Wallace Craig died deaf and poor,
still writing his treatise on "The Space
System of the Perceiving Self."
His paper was never completed, and the manuscript is lost.
It's common to say, causes precede effects.
And since perception is always caused,
this explains why we can't perceive
events which haven't happened.
But our death is completely caused and the death
of my species too.
Still I must wait to talk about it.
To be effective, I must stay in touch
with what is going on in my own medium-sized spatio-temporal
interval.
If we didn't commit to that and we
set about acting on outdated or far-fetched beliefs,
we might go extinct even faster or just act like jerks.
They say, building on past experience
is more practical than imagining the future.
So what then is a warning?
Why can't we experience our death
even though it is happening at the same time as our life?
Something prevents us.
We might be able to know it, but not
without giving up the world.
All of a sudden, as if to make things interesting,
biologists found another population
of dusky seaside sparrows in a nearby marsh.
And US Fish and Wildlife was persuaded to purchase the land.
But those sparrows died too and the tract
resold for development.
If you think about it, there isn't much conflict
in what's already happened.
It's not good story material.
Even the ancient School of Names is a taxonomical fiction.
A dusky sparrow is not a sparrow, they might have said.
Today go to Florida, but arrive yesterday.
They were called the Disputers, Name-Throwers,
Distinction-Wrestlers, Logic-Destroyers.
Mostly they debated about the relation of words
to things, about the modifiers hard and white.
Arguing both sides of anything, they loved lawsuits.
They had no need for facts.
They argued about same and different.
Heaven is as low as earth.
Mountains are level with marshes.
Words don't have captive breeding programs or DNA.
Words don't need a certain kind of cordgrass.
Quarreling can go on forever.
All I know is there's a book on ornithology
which has pictures of birds and also plays their calls.
The reader is supposed to punch in the number for each bird
to hear it.
But someone forgot to put numbers on the keypad,
so it only has arrows, up and down.
The birds only sing in order alphabetically, oops.
John F. Kennedy-- it will not just be one man on the moon,
but an entire nation, for all of us must work to put him there.
The whole space program started with the Bumper 8, sent up
10 miles from an outhouse and a ladder.
Then came intermediate-range ballistic missiles and Vanguard
high-altitude research rockets.
More empty scrubland got cleared and filled
for the inauguration of the newly-named NASA program.
And Saturn three-stage rockets carried Apollo astronauts
into orbit.
But moon-going vehicles needed more assembly room,
so they added Merritt Island and 55,000 acres
of submerged Mosquito Lagoon.
The whole island was attached to Launch Complex 39,
but the mosquitoes drove the astronauts crazy.
When a bodhisattva, a reincarnation of Padmasambhava,
or Buddha, passes into parinirvana,
the outer body sits in samadhi for many days, months,
even eternally, never decomposing until cremated.
He never comes back for happy birthday.
In hindsight, they called us "indicator species."
I can't find food without my mud pools, mud flats.
I don't like pesticide sauce on my mosquitoes.
Actually, there were six of me, males of the species,
blithely going about our daily business.
Just like the astronauts, we had always wanted to fly.
We set the table.
We talked about manners and weather.
We tried to have a esprit de corps.
At the very end of the line, without a female,
there is no last in line.
It's all a line or a single spot.
And it's all endless.
This is a nameless math problem with no solution.
Woody plants invade, predators increase when
a marsh becomes unsubmerged.
Cape Canaveral didn't want people to witness rockets
crashing or burning metal and fuel raining on the ground,
so they controlled access.
What parts of this story carry the themes and symbolisms?
What parts are merely background?
There are no extant writings of the name-disputer Hui Shi,
though he appears in other people's texts.
It is told how he relied on analogy.
If you don't let him use analogies,
he won't be able to speak.
The king once asked Hui Shi why he wouldn't just talk directly.
If you want the definition of a bird,
Hui Shi replied, and all you get is, a bird is a bird,
you haven't learned much.
But if you say, a bird is like a person, except with wings, then
you could expand what is known by pointing out the unknown,
using the same to extend into difference.
But even though he was a successful politician,
Hui Shi's lackadaisical relativism
offended more ethics-minded Confucians.
So what rhetorical stance should we adopt?
Does art merely say things that aren't facts, but assert them
just as strongly?
Assert things, but refuse to prove them?
Argue, but not corroborate?
Fictional characters know things which
are too challenging for the writer to understand,
though the writer tries hard to keep up.
Characters outsmart writers because characters don't eat.
Hui Shi's theses are described in the text "Under Heaven" and
seem to conclude that distinctions exist merely
as competing realities against the background of a world that
doesn't prioritize any of them.
Linked rings can be disconnected, he said.
Does this story have to be set in front of a launch
pad or a Disney World?
Would it work at some unnamed turn in a river?
"Hard" and "white" can be applied,
and yet they are inseparable from, say, a hard white river
stone or a lunar module.
We likewise recall abundant and disappearing cordgrass,
10 to 15 feet above sea level, lower areas, too wet
and dense, higher areas, too dry.
Where was our pioneering spirit, some might ask.
Why didn't we seem to have the right stuff?
If you take away my home, it turns out
I don't have a place to live.
If I were a bodhisattva, I would have
practiced for death from the very beginning
and in just the flash of one life
could rest my feathered body in samadhi,
speak my last Om Ah Hum, or whatever
it is a sparrow says, and never return to samsara.
Universally care for the myriad things, Hui Shi concluded.
Heaven and Earth are one body.
So we've been captive in this breeding program
at Disney World since 1979.
There's no cordgrass here at all.
The food comes in crickets and mealworms.
And every afternoon, a recording of a sparrow
is supposed to stimulate our songs.
A few years ago, frustrated by a breeding program
without females, the staff brought
in a related subspecies.
We were pretty happy about that.
Backcrossing makes hybrids that are close to the original.
Which traits do you think we maintained?
The need for certain marsh moisture?
Dappled sun filled with mosquitoes?
A preference for Mickey Mouse?
We got it on.
Crossbred children breed with crossbred children
until a chick with a very high percentage of dusky
seaside sparrow genes--
97%-- could live to finish whatever it was I
was talking about in the first place.
If only living were as easy as word-wrestling.
The name-disputers loved rearranging
"same" and "different" to produce their sophisms.
Meanwhile, the double backcrossing breeding program
couldn't get the go-ahead.
Politicians argued that money for one endangered species
couldn't be spent creating another one.
I am Red, but I will die.
I am Blue.
I die before being moved.
I am Green, never found, presumed dead.
I am White, fertile, the last hope.
I die, leaving only Orange, almost 12 years old, alone.
I am Orange.
I do not sing.
I don't want to talk to people.
I want to write unfinished papers.
I am the Neil Armstrong of birds.
Well, he was the first, and I'm the last, but it's the same.
People with checklists don't count me.
I'm not a life bird anymore.
Yellow, who died in 1985, was mailed to the Smithsonian
in a bottle.
Who cares that more people watched
two astronauts take steps on the moon than ever watched anything
before?
There they were, two men as far from home
as could be imagined, carrying the burdens
and hopes of all mankind.
At t-minus 15 seconds, the guidance on a rocket
becomes internal.
300-feet tall, new metal alloys, five engines,
7.5 million pounds of rocket thrust,
go for TLI, flying up to deep space
at 35,570 feet per second.
There have been six successful moon landings.
When you land on the moon and you stop and you get out,
nobody's there.
This little limb and the two of you, and you're
it on this whole big place.
And that's a weird feeling.
It's a weird feeling to be two people and that's it--
Alan Bean, Apollo 12.
A large population of manatees live
in the waterways between Kennedy Space Center and Cape
Canaveral.
Over 500 bird species have been accounted for, including
many wintering migratory birds.
Some might say they're luckier than us
since they live in homes made of seasons
and aren't so picky about food.
I think that's like saying, a wheel does not
touch the ground, or, a turtle is longer than a snake.
At the refuge, a manatee-viewing deck and a seven-mile auto
route for tourists.
The Merritt Island nature refuge closes
before and after blast-offs and during times
of national emergency.
We spent a few happy months with those closely related Scott's
sparrows, even sneaking in a clutch of eggs or two.
But the chicks died for reasons too ridiculous
to name, rats, window screens.
And because we weren't officially
allowed all that crossbreeding anyway,
nobody officially noted the deaths.
This is a case of the government's
becoming trapped in a semantic web of its own creation.
The federal definition of a species
is a nightmare of prose and conflicts
with the species concept as used by biologists.
The legal position is that the dusky seaside
sparrow is a pure race.
Such reasoning applied to a human population
would be called racism or miscegenation--
Frances C. James.
Members of the School of Names were criticized for using words
only to exhaust and distract.
But from their point of view, using the right word
implied the correct relation.
If names are correct, order obtains.
If names are misplaced, disorder.
What cause names to be misplaced are dissolute explanations shuo
also persuasions or arguments.
If explanations are dissolute, then the inadmissible
is deemed admissible and the not-so, so.
The not-right is deemed right and the not-wrong, wrong--
"The Annals of Lu Buwei.
Reader, no matter what, the dimensionless cannot be
accumulated.
Yet its size is 1,000 miles--
Hui Shi.
Help me out.
I hate others.
I love the others.
We are all beyond safety in numbers.
Fish and Wildlife took away the Scott's sparrows,
enraging the Disney World breeders.
Persistence of officials of the endangered species
in supporting this "purity of races" concept
has much potential for doing irreparable damage
to the endangered species program
as it might succeed through captive propagation.
Fish and Wildlife simply replied that the Endangered Species
Act does not cover hybrids.
So here is where my autobiography forks.
On March 31, 1986, I was the one male
dusky alive, blind in an eye and old anyway for a sparrow,
waiting to see what would happen or how it feels
to be a piece of something big.
My single body was a tiny spindle falling apart, yet
holding this huge thing.
It's hard to write this clearly as a character who
might seem real.
It's when they tell you that arriving is always in the past.
There is nothing more to this paper
than the last words I knew for sure, June 17, 1987.
After my death, the Disney employees
didn't want to stop waiting in case another dusky happened
to fly in from the wild, i.e., the Space Center.
They sat with my corpse a very long time.
The coroner wasn't called until December of 1990,
at which point, I was officially declared extinct.
I discovered later that I was described as the loneliest man
ever in the universe, which is really baloney.
I rather enjoyed it.
I was certainly aware of the fact
that I was by myself, particularly
when I was on the backside of the moon.
I remember thinking, you look over there,
and there's three billion people, plus two
down there somewhere.
And then over here, there's one, plus God only knows what.
I felt it as awareness, almost a feeling of exultation.
It was a good feeling.
I enjoyed that time--
Mike Collins, the one who stayed in the command module, Apollo
11.
A bodhisattva will often leave a letter,
telling of a time when he or she will take rebirth
by choice in order to be of benefit again to all beings.
There are tests which help people identify
these emanations, tulkus, as they are
born in the world around us.
Discussion questions-- what must it
be like to be the first man on the moon?
Hint-- Alan Bean.
I can't think of a negative thing about Neil Armstrong.
I think it's wonderful that he's been the first man on the moon,
even though he's somewhat reclusive.
That helps to preserve the image.
That's a tough role.
Why is the dusky seaside sparrow not a sparrow?
Why was the dusky seaside sparrow not saved
by the Endangered Species Act?
Solve for 6 if 6 equals 1 and 6 equals 0.
Are you sure species exist?
What is your species concept?
Explain the sophist paradoxes, eggs have feathers,
or, Merritt Island is on the moon.
Bonus paradox-- the shadow of a flying bird has never moved.
If we could hear the last words a bodhisattva utters
as he passes to dharmata, would we understand them?
When you see the Kennedy Space Center on the news,
can you forget that sometimes death comes without warning,
and sometimes, with plenty of warning?
Consider Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14.
The biggest joy was on the way home.
In my cockpit window every two minutes, the Earth, the moon,
the sun.
And suddenly, I realized that the molecules of my body
and the molecules of the spacecraft
and the molecules in the bodies of my partners
were prototyped and manufactured in some ancient generation
of stars.
And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness,
of connectedness.
Thinking everything is one, how can you still do anything?
Hint-- he adapts his this to the situation.
That's all.
Adapting, and not knowing it so, is called Dao.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, guys.