Moscow, Idaho oscillates between ice and slop this time of year, but we had a glorious weekend. Two days of brilliant sun- outstanding opportunity of crawl into my dank shack and get acquainted with the wheel.

Being as it was my first time since... well... November, I cranked out three crock pots, ten bowls, two vases, and three humongoid plates.

The bowls are a commission for a graduate student friend of mine. She's graduating soon, after having chased pygmy rabbits about the Idaho sage country. Pygmy rabbits, incidentally, are certainly the most obscenely cute little bunyips on the face of the planet.

(Unfortunately, 'cute' doesn't equate to robust, in an evolutionary sense- there are fewer than 100 pygmys left, most in captivity). 

The great Bernard Leach- basically the father of modern studio pottery- was a rabbit fanatic, often slip-trailing the same design onto vessel after vessel until the images had the grace and inevitability of light on water. The design on the plate to the right is a famous example.

I've never delved into slip-trailing, but etching in leather-hard pottery yields a similar effect- or at least I like to kid myself that it does. I sketched a couple rabbit designs and have been translating them to the raw pots. So far, so good.

I also have taken a first crack at a Hue Puruhau. This vessel is the first in my 'Last Chance to See' project. To recap- this is a series of indigenous musical instruments realized in clay, representing countries that host endangered species from Douglas Adams' awesome book.

The Hue Puruhau is a gourd-like vessel- and thus fat bellied, with a narrow little neck. As a consequence, the two versions that I crafted today were thrown in two sections and joined on the wheel.  The process is quite fun- I love throwing bottles and other narrow-necked objects.

Translating a 2D conceptual design to a 3D surface always offers a challenge or two, and I'm not sure that I really nailed it this time. Still, the raku process has its own whimsy, and I've seen lovely outcomes develop from tentative beginnings.

Anyhow, it's 11:20, and I teach comparative vertebrate anatomy at mid-morning tomorrow. I'd better stop obsessing about earthy things and go wallop my way to my pillow.

Each week, I challenge students in my 'Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy' class to identify an unlabeled photo of some critter with a spine. To datet, I’ve hit them with an urea-sucking Amazonian catfish, a batch of monacled cobras (70 dollars each by mail order! Fun for the kids!***), and the inevitable kakapo, among other odds and ends. A glorious bestiary of backbones.

***Note- the original advertisement I was gaping at here has been taken down. Still- $600 will buy you a nice breeding specimen... and there are no restrictions on 'pet' ownership in Idaho. Remind me to get my letter to Santa in the mail!

Today, I talked about one of my all time favorites, the New Caledonian Crow, Corvus moneduloides.

Many people are aware that humans (or ‘man’, to use the barbaric vernacular) were once defined as tool using animals. This dates back to Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Restarus. Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

I can just imagine Carlyle’s nervous gyrations somewhere beneath his tombstone when a young English girl with an open mind and a piercing observational wit observed a chimpanzee named David Graybeard modifying a twig and using it to spear termites.

The great anthropologist Louis Leakey, upon receiving this news, responded ““Now we have to redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.” One can assume that he then poured out a libation to Carlyle over the preserved skull of Lucy the protohominid.

With one flick of his twig, David Graybeard had gate-crashed a very exclusive club.  Before long, gorillas were ushered past the velvet rope as well.  Nonetheless, humans, from their lofty, Husqvarna-happy heights, were still able to assume that the club was a primates-only affair. Opposable thumbs were the evolutionary equivalent of the dinner jacket and Harvard tie. Until New Caledonian Crows came along, that is.

New Caledonia is a small island off the east side of Australia. The local ‘murder’ (to use the official name for a mob of Corvus spp.), is not noteworthy for refined manners or unusual good looks (even from a crow’s standpoint).

However, through some Darwinian quirk that we don’t yet understand, New Caledonia Crows are the MacGyvers of the animal kingdom. They’re not only tool users, but tool modifiers, tearing at leaves and twigs with their beaks to make insect fishhooks.

In an experimental enclosure, one crow named ‘Betty’ bent a wire into a fishhook and used it to extract a food reward from a tube.  Other members of her tribe were presented with a complex puzzle that mandated the sequential use of three different tools- one crow took only 110 seconds to examine the scenario and connect the dots.

So- there’s now a squawking, feathery cacophony in the tool-user's club.  Corvid rascals on the prowl. The management better tie down anything shiny, not to mention change the tablecloths on a regular basis.  It makes you wonder how many other creatures have talents that blur the definition of ‘human’.

Ignoring the baffling fact that a primate level of cognition has somehow been wedged into a braincase that can barely hold a walnut, an equally interesting question involves our response to Leakey’s ultimatum (Now we have to redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human).

The knee jerk response is to latch onto option number one. Petitio Principii.  We data-dredge for some key character that separates humans from the pack, some way to cordon off the club again. Most recently, in light of the 96-98.5% similarity between the chimp and human genomes, this search has taken on a certain urgency.

Cognitive awareness, or a ‘sense of self’, seemed promising at one stage. Unfortunately, it’s now abundantly clear that other creatures share this capacity.  Again, we’re not just talking about chimps (and elephants, and dolphins)- magpies (close kin to Corvus moneduloides) can pass a classic cognitive test called the mark test.

The reality is that- barring a few cosmetic differences like male pattern baldness and a menacing affinity for 80’s hair bands- Homo sapiens truly possesses nothing that differentiates us from the wonderful tapestry of beasts that crawl, glide, swim… and also make war, form family bonds, weep and love.  I’m not saying this from a detached Darwinian standpoint either. I believe in the soul… and I believe that  Homo sapiens is not alone in possessing it.

Certainly there’s a question of degree- humans possess many traits that are developed beyond the baseline observed in our cousins. It’s still just a matter of degree, however… little different than the demarcation between the wise and the foolish, the infantile and the adult even among H. sapiens.

There are plenty of indigenous cultures that fail to see a hard line between ‘human’ and non-human.  Saint Francis of Assisi probably would have related.

However, one of the most dynamic recent riffs off this basic idea unfolds in David Brin’s ‘Earthclan’ trilogy. Brin is an amazingly playful writer- rare, but not unheard of, in someone who huffs quantum physics and evolutionary biology like nitrous oxide.

‘Earthclan’ envisions a time in the wake of first contact with a sprawling, amazingly diverse galactic civilization. In Brin’s universe, galactic accolades are predicated on finding emergent life and 'uplifting' it to sentience.

In the book, humans have already (prior to first contact) 'uplifted' two species, Pan troglodytes (chimps) and Tursiops (dolphins). This has given Homo sapiens a leg up at the galactic level (gate-crashing yet another club) but also garnered them significant envy and malice from a range of alien races. A starship with a mixed Homo/Tursiops crew make a major find with deep theological implications while scouting in deep space. Galactic war erupts, with Earth caught in the middle.

The entire 'Uplift' trilogy (which include Sundiver and Startide Rising) is- at its essence- an excuse for Brin to explore the moral status of non-human creatures. The idea of 'potentiality' (the chance that some animals may have the capacity for sentience) has long been a key fulcrum in this debate.

I love this notion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once stated that the true test of the morality of a society (or culture, or government) is what it does for its children. In this sense, if there’s really no hard line between human and non-human, it may be that Corvus moneduloides (and who knows- maybe a throng of other creatures) are- in a very real, moral sense- our kin.

I, for one, would be happy to welcome a 'murder' of New Caledonian Crows to the family.

I’ll close with Brin’s quote from the intro to ‘The Uplift War’ (book two of ‘Earthclan’).

"There is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure.

Some day we may be judged by just how well we served, when alone we were Earth’s caretakers."

Moscow, Idaho, is currently captive to the most frustrating kind of transitional snow-slush-slop. An inch of tantalizing powder kisses the drive overnight, and then whimpers and melts into the general goulash of pre-spring excreta. Essence of dog, road-salt, old burger wrappers, and ‘Times-square eggnog’ (in the immortal words of David Letterman).

This is not optimal weather for cross-country skiers. To make things worse, the temperatures keep dropping into the teens at night, and so it’s still not a favorable set of conditions for making pots. So- the kakapo project (and other plans) will have to wait for another weekend, while I muse about skin-changing pinnipeds and music.

‘Great Silence’ is a song from my 2010 CD ‘Skies full of Seas’.

The title (‘Great Silence’) is drawn from possibly my favorite documentary ever, Into the Great Solitude. This video was shot by a solo canoeist- mostly on handheld camera- as he descended one of the wildest and most unforgiving free-running rivers in North America- the Back River.

I’ve yearned for a Back River trip for years… but the song ‘Great Silence’ is drawn most closely from a trip down the Seal River in Manitoba that I took with some friends in the early 90s.  I'm playing guitar and bouzouki. My friends Paul Smith and Lisa O'Leary are on the violin and bodhran drum, respectively. The video I’ve spliced together for ‘Great Silence’ draws from this trip- photos and imagery.

I’ve already been upfront about my obsession with harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) and with Selkie mythology.  (Note- the link is from Orkney, but the legend is pan-Celtic). I won't belabor the point here, as I plan to revisit it for a discussion on wild creatures as 'totems' (a concept that I'm ambivalent about).

The ‘Seal River’ is an eponymously named- harbor seals prowl the waterway from its confluence with Hudson Bay to Shethanai Lake, about 200 miles inland.  On our trip, we encountered our first seal twisting through a rapid while we were still about 12 days out from the salt water.

I’d seen The Secret of Roan Inish shortly before we hopped in a Vanagon and backfired our way north. Seals have the most limpid, expressive eyes in the mammalian ranks, and it’s easy to understand the roots of the mythology. There were a couple of encounters that were particularly evocative.

• Slipping into the river at dusk while a seal patrolled near our campsite*, and treading water while the beast slipped beneath the waves. The seal re-emerged repeatedly, only feet away, chuffing softly.
  
  *I wouldn’t do this now- seals are notorious for sporting a bit of a toe fetish. Thanks to the great Kawika Chetron for the photo.

It’s all too easy to anthropomorphize incidents like these- but that’s a topic for another session. Certainly, Selkie mythology was the initial fuel for ‘Great Silence’, a song that I wrote a couple years after the Seal River trip.

On it’s surface, it’s a narrative about a canoeist’s encounter with a Selkie.  At the time that I wrote this song, however, I was dealing with the transition from working as a canoe guide in Northern Minnesota to gearing up for graduate school. It was an uneasy transition- I was missing the lake country desperately.

In the end, I think that the song- more than anything- is about being seduced by ‘otherness’.

The darkest tendency in the human soul is the willful inward retreat- taking one’s identity (insofar as we grasp it) and turning it into a god. There’s a malign portion of our character that rebels against anything that resist our pet assumptions, our metaphysical constructs. We want to take these things and bend them to our image. C.S. Lewis said it beautifully in The Screwtape Letters.

(By the way, how cool is it that Andy Serkis- AKA Gollum- has generated an audio adaptation of Screwtape? I don’t even care that it’s sponsored by Focus on the Family... the more they produce theater, the less they’ll dabble in politics).

So- as a corollary- I believe that one of the highest callings for the human soul is to grapple with ‘otherness’- with intellects, powers, creatures, places, and experiences that wrench us past the borders of our self-worship. In fact- as a Christian- I believe that a person’s walk with God should exemplify this. God is the ultimate ‘otherness’- and I can guarantee that we’re all woefully deluded about critical aspects of the divine.

I'd even hazard a guess that Jesus' tendencies to slip away into the desert stem from this. (Actually, Bill Mason hazarded that guess in his film WaterWalker a long time ago. Another extended ode to canoeing- gotta love the symmetry). Wild places and wild creatures will inevitably shatter our hoarded assumptions about reality, about our own souls.

Perhaps this is a prime reason for our uneasy relationship and often antagonistic relationship with nature. 

Part of the reason that I’m obsessed with the Selkie myth is that stories throb with a sense of peril. Selkies are fey creatures. They’re may be beautiful, but they’ll drown the unwary without a second thought.  I’ve always seen this as a metaphor for wild places. Anyone who’s faced the gaze of a polar bear or tried to outrun a summer thunderstorm over open water can probably relate.

But then- human beings are fey. There’s no one who’s entered into a marriage or friendship who hasn’t been confounded by a sense of Terra incognito. There’s a point where you have to give up your pretensions of godhood.

It would be so easy to retreat and ossify. But for me- I’ll choose the seals, the Selkies, and the Seal River every time.

To close out- there’s a rich body of published music that explores the same terrain as ‘Great Silence’ (albeit a heck of a lot better). An initial example is a song by the incomparable Mike Scott (from The Waterboys) as interpreted by Luka Bloom.

Altan, a band that was really my portal into traditional Irish music (I saw them live in Wales in 1991) provided the following clip. Note- Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh’s voice doesn’t translate well to vinyl, plastic, or binary code.  Heard on youtube, she sounds a bit waifish, a bit thin. Heard live, she sounds like something from the Hall of Fire at Rivendell or from Sirenum scopuli, if you follow the geekish references.