Vol Avec les Oies, a long and winding road

Vol Avec les Oies, a long and winding road

I don't look at Swedish "public service" televison, it is an outright mob medium after the "Robinson" adventure. My environment is worried by this obvious ignorance of what is going on around me; sometimes it inserts a cassette in a video player and orders me: watch. Thus it happened that Vol avec les Oies, flight with the geese, came before my eyes. I will depart from les oies naines, the lesser white-fronted geese, in ornithological jargon: the LWFGs.
fjällgås

LWFG from Naumanns Naturgeschichte der Vögel Mitteleuropas. Once there may have been some 100,000 individuals in N. Scandinavia alone; in 1997 it was estimated that the global population amounted to 20 - 40,000 individuals, most of them in Siberia.

The Scandinavian and North Russian populations of LWFG migrate (migrated) towards south-east, heading for wintering-grounds in the Black Sea and Caspian Sea areas. Here they were practically exterminated not too long ago, the main cause being hunting pressure. (And they are still pursued, mainly because the white-fronted goose, a close relative, is still targeted; hunting is completely out of hands in the countries involved). Little by little we have acquired a sort of sturdy way of attacking this problem: a breeding stock is pulled out of the natural circulation, the artificial hatchers are heated, a caged population is built up, finally the threatened species is "re-introduced" into nature, preferably in combination with some improvement of the general environment. There is a small catch: unexpected events often line the road. If eagle owls start breeding on silos it's because we were reckless and put our fingerprints on them when reintroducing into "nature". Well, we have to live with that, we can live with that, all measures were necessitated by some degree of force majeur.

When science enters everyday life there is always some sort of supporting ideology in the background, or a hybrid between science and ideology: ideologized science. E.g.: in a conservancy project with scientific legitimacy! The motor force in the Swedish case, Court Forest Officer etc. Lambart von Essen had a large circle of "inspirators", ranging from Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, the father of animal psychology (etology), to Peter Scott, one of the initiators of World Wildlife Fund (the one with the panda): "We shan't save all we should like to, but we shall save a great deal more than if we had never tried." (I hear out the particular rhetorics of Churchill in these lines, but maybe also e.g. Robert Graves' concern in "I, Claudius": how can compromised man act positively in a corrupt world? In modern time he can "save", a very Anglo-Saxon breed of positivism). Both influences, etology and protection positivism, went into the melt, reinforced by the fact that Erik Fabricius, introducer of etology in Sweden, was among the original (1983) initiators of a project, taking action in favour of the collapsing LWFG populations of Scandinavia.

Konrad Lorenz imprints the birds of the Goddess on himself and conducts them into patriarchy.

Lorenz' and Fabricius' scientific contributions was about "imprinting", the discovery within the framework of etology that newly hatched geese have a life phase, where they attach themselves to forms, sounds, a Gestalt that is going to act as their scout and guide through the dangerous time of adolescence. By this discovery man has created a gateway for communication with the animals (or certain genera); the title of Konrad Lorenz' popular depiction of his own path of formation was very characteristic: Er redete mit den Tieren, he talked to the animals. So, the task was: putting lesser white-fronted geese right by talking to them.

There was no perspective in sending the new birds to the Caspian Sea to be slaughtered anew, most of the Swedish initiators of the LWFG project seem to have agreed on that from the outset. A Finnish project was content with just releasing birds in Finnish Lapland; hardly a single one has returned. Against this background the Swedes cooked up the following plan: newly hatched lesser white-fronted geese were given to foster parents: barnacle geese from Öster-Malma in Sörmland, after some time the whole family was released in some suitable lake in Lapland - and when autumn came the parents migrated with their foster children to wintering grounds in Holland. Two birds with one stone: fresh blood into the Lapland population and new wintering grounds established in a civilized part of the world (France wouldn't do). I am inclined to appoint this an "engineering solution", with certain gadgets; it is deeply rooted in Swedish character. But the sourpusses muttered in their palms: "fauna forgery". There is another, competing ideology in the wings, biology pays tribute to an already achieved perfection and incorruptibility of nature. A "scientific" stance as well, with roots in Darwinism.

Still, the Swedish project was no success, LWFG were imprinted on barnacle geese and preferred them as breeding partners. (Ducks and geese have been diversified relatively late in history and all have very similar chromosome sets, the fences between the species are surmountable). Out of 350 released LWFG 50 returned to Sweden, and only a handful of these reproduced in the way desired. From this point of view, the project was a flop for more than a decade.

Walter Lishmans microlight and Sandhill Cranes, Grus canadensis

The pressing task obviously was to imprint something else than a Gestalt from the close neighbourhood,

S., hero of the Goddess from Xanten, reincarnated.

maybe some sort of an Icarus, a sapient being who could both fly and talk to animals? The task was set, in 1993 it was accomplished by the Canadian Walter Lishman, who flew a microlight guiding imprinted canada geese from Ontario in Canada to wintering grounds in USA (The basic idea, the technique of imprinting and guiding is depicted, dressed in plot, in the film Flight of the Wild Geese). There is a mobilizing, inspiratory element in enterprises of this kind, on one hand they appeal to love of adventure, nature romanticism, a fancy for physical "expression", on the other hand to the widespread urge to take action, to correct, do something - ut aliquid fieri videatur. In France one Christian Moullec learnt how to fly a microlight and made an attempt to guide a flock of imprinted barnacle geese to an appointed goal area; how long would it last until the Swedish LWFG rescuers spotted this initiative and hitched it to their waggon? Not long; in the late summer of 1999 Moullec straddled his microlight in order to try to guide 30 LWFG from Öster-Malma to the nature reserve Bislicher Insel not far from Xanten at the Lower Rhine close to the Dutch-German border; 1600 km were covered in this way between September 1st and October 7th.

All physical expression of this kind, preferably in connection with some measure of biological "belles-lettres", has its fixed and loose expenses. Today an important part of the financing of such "entrepreneurial expression" comes from films, offered as tv entertainment. Climbings of Mount Everest, tours to North and South Pole, chats with chimpanzees and gorillas and orangutans and dolphins and killer whales, tickling of sharks under their chins, swimming with turtles; everything can be thrown into the melt. Optimal combinations are boar hunting with Magdalena Forsberg or watching when Jan Guillou slaughters his first ice-bear, there is always a bonus for killing two birds with one stone. In general this debauchery by the first world is destructive and consumist; spoiled children playing with Christmas gifts, but there are correctives: if the project continues the ultralight will sooner or later fly into some sort of a tsunami. Thus the flight with the geese became film; Vol avec les oies, one hour in mid-air and on ground while Paola Moullec honks and hoots and coaxes her adepts into the ranks; she is pregnant in her fourth month, afraid of flying but bound to enter the race; the geese have decided that they want to follow noone but her. (There is a deep moral in this commitment on part of the geese). A web-page tells the story of the flight over "pays de Nils Holgersson", visitors are invited to buy books, post-cards, t-shirts, all contributions are gratefully received, preparations are made to fly a hundred LWFG from Lapland with an armada of microlights from 2003 onwards. In the background thrush nightingales sing along Baltic shores on September 1st, the whole thing is as naturalistic as a detergent ad. I am struck lame and dumb: What is all this about? The whole thing is not entirely drawn from nature, i can feel the presence of some sort of jamming, disturbing transmitter.

Ultima Thule: pays de Nils Holgersson.
Seals! Seals! cried Akka. Illustration by Mary Hamilton Fryes to a US edition 1922.

NEXT COMES THE DEATHBLOW; there is some whispering about a meddling of white-fronted goose genes in the genome of bred LWFG, and when the wintering birds from Xanten pass by way of Öster-Malma in the spring of 2000 they are captured and caged anew. In the spring of 2001 the Finnish geneticist Minna Ruokonen publishes her dissertation "Phylogeography and conservation genetics of lesser white-fronted goose" at the University of Oulu, she has investigated geese from the major breeding centre of Hämeenkoski, once started with support from the World Wildlife Fund. Most of the LWFG released in Finland and Sweden come from this stock. I take it for granted that the slightly hysterical reaction is initiated at high level, departing from a notion of genome as some sort of reified "value" per se - the whole thing reminds me of the signal function of CO₂ levels for decision-makers on climate policy. Decisions are hitched on very concise catch phrases, comprehensible in and for media but not entirely rational; they lack foothold in some sort of running theory - practice relation. I was not amazed when a more balanced reaction came from Moscow one year later, when Marina Kholodova/Moscow, pointing to the close relationship of WFG and LWFG, established that there may occur spontaneous hybridization in nature: all genetical variation may be of value, nothing must be wasted. At that point the damage is already done: Öster-Malmas breeding has been unsuccessful because of the havoc worked by race-biological measures: the problems are due to eliminating some of the flock in order to improve the remaining genetically. There is an Anglo-Saxon invective, specifically designed for this kind of logic: Balderdash! And the élan, the enthusiasm invested by Paola and Christian into the project has been thrown into the sink: without knowing for certain i believe that they sit much like Iob among dust and ashes by the same time. Le pays de Nils Holgersson held certain unforeseeable complications beneath its prim and proper surface. (It is important that we realize; the intermediaries, the journalist cattle mediating nature film to a pacified and passive audience, are in themselves totally incapable of critical (re-)action to events like the one related above. Everything is allowed to pass by without comment, because it is - consumption).

triade

Christian Moullec is invited by the Goddess to understand at last what good and evil is.

Au pays de Nils Holgersson, the same winding road as before, and still we end up in quite another region

It is the proclaimed century of the child, still boys are brought up to be rascals, assaulters, thieves and deceivers, this year like last year, this year like last year. And all unpleasant, boozing and cigarr-smoking bullies of the opposite sex, worms crawling in their flesh... Selma Lagerlöf proposes to Sophie Elkan that they adopt a child together and bring it forth as their own; what prospect is she holding out? The Good Mother as an example and a social engineer? (You are too heavy, Selma, a black hole pulling everybody and everything into its gravitational kernel). She may have understood it herself, her unique possibility is to realize in lit(erature). Basic concept: a juvenile male specimen of Homo sapiens, already as an adolescent distinguished by a certain patriarchal arrogance. The counteracting power is represented by a matrilinear goose flock with Ellen Key, no, Akka (= "woman, female", the Earth goddess) from Kebnekaise at the head. The young male behaves badly against creatures and people, Nemesis strikes (and who is Nemesis, what the hell brings that woman here?) The alter ego of the culprit, a white male goose, carries him off, in the weeks and months to come both boy and white goose have to prove their fitness - not only physical, but metaphysical as well - in the face of the wise, hardened goose methren's scrutinizing and weighing gaze. In the end the white goose is crossed with the good female force, represented by Dunfin (Downfine), and the boy is repatriated to father, mother and farmstead. But we are still troubled by one question: did the white goose really have a genome, that would have been okayed by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency for this kind of doings?

Johann Jakob Bachofen, 1815 - 1887, author of "Maternal right", appearing in 1861. Little attention is paid to the work until Friedrich Engels' reception in "The origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" in 1884; in the United States this attention from the retired manufacturer is still adduced as some sort of total refutation of Bachofen's theses.

And there are a couple of other questions i would like to put to the school-teachress from Värmland. If i tested you with the statement: If God is male, then male is god - what would you answer to that? Geese, geese, why these geese? Johann Jakob Bachofen, does the name mean anything to you? Or is it just Värmlandian un-simultaneity, that steers you into this female majorate, where chevaliers get along like some sort of sacred kings, with their allotted time on earth lasting for fifty moonths, till the next Olympic Games? You are a cruel and dangerous woman, Selma Lagerlöf, a wise man avoids getting on the wrong side of you.

"The central transition from matriarchy to patriarchy is violent and cruel": Zeus and the nymph goddess Leda/Nemesis, Casa de Pilatos, Sevilla. Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? Geese and swans have an external penis, knowledge of this kind is essential for the constructors of myth. The date palm signifies fertility and marriage, here maybe as cynical irony. (The object is repulsive, the structure makes me think: this is sex).

Bachofen advocated the historicity of myth; mythic material is continuously revised or "contaminated" in reflection of our existence. His own surrounding time: colonialism, extensive collection of data, diligent translation, makes a great spread of material, and many are inspired, each one in his town, and each one in his direction. In the transformations of myth Bachofen discerns three stages: from a hetæran, over a matriarchal, where marriage is instituted, to a patriarchal, that includes his own time. The central transition from matriarchy to patriarchy is violent and cruel, it features a long run of convulsions: the Troyan War, the whole of Greek tragedy. Throughout his lifetime Robert Graves collects material elucidating the same theme (Greek Myths, The White Goddess), and from the mid-50's until her death in 1994 the Lithuanian-born archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (see this link as well) gradually evolves the hypothesis of a "Kurgan invasion", disrupting the organization of a matrilinear and matriarchal society during the Copper Age ('Old Europe'). Here we meet with a long sequence of rather speculative production, but we must not shut our eyes to the fact, that Bachofen and Graves and Gimbutas (who translated running metres of formerly unknown East European material for Harvard University) were immensely much more familiar with the transformations of myth than the postmodern sociologists, who today reject the notion that there somewhere in our past should have been a well-defined matriarchal society, explained by myth. In the end the whole thing may boil down to a question of the relevance of myth. Is it relevant in the analysis of sociological development, or should it be ignored? Was Ellen Key familiar with these theses? I can not believe that she was not, with her broad and deep education. Had she conveyed them to Selma Lagerlöf? Most likely, i believe that Selma would have offered her best cookies if Johann Jakob had payed her a visit. On the other hand i still believe that her "majorate" is rooted in Swedish soil.

Robert Graves translates the name Leda "lady" and gives the following particulars: The Nemesis whom Zeus chased, is not the philosophical concept of divine vengeance on overweening mortals, but the original Nymph-goddess, whose usual name was Leda. In pre-Hellenic myth, the goddess chases the sacred king and, although he goes through his seasonal transformations (hare, fish, bee and mouse; CP), counters each of them in turn with her own, and devours him at the summer solstice. In Hellenic myth the parts are reversed: the goddess flees, changing shape, but the king pursues and finally violates her. (...)Swans (and geese, CP) were sacred to the goddess, because of their white plumage, also because the V-formation of their flight was a female symbol, and because, at midsummer, they flew north to unknown breeding grounds, supposedly taking the dead king's soul with them. Much evil followed in the wake of this inversion, the progeny of Leda enters the world like a dragon's sowing: fair Helena is her daughter, so is Clytaemnestra, and Orestes her grandson. This genealogy most certainly wraps up some sort of Factum or an ocean of Facti.

In the early Iron Age and throughout the Roman Iron Age there are scores of vague, ill-defined tribes in North Europe, an anonymous "folk-crowd", which dissolves into the general migrations, but also through being Christianized and losing the original tribe identities. At the same time tribes merge into larger units. Sometimes there are indications of an older matrilinear organization in these units, a goddess mythology is dimly glimpsed in naming and on pictorial stones. The source of all this may be the "original", "European" tribes, conquered and absorbed by Celts, Germans etc. Parallel to this, patriarchal organization is already safely mounted in/on the centre of the world, and i think that it is safe to assume that the ideological pressure from this origo was overwhelming. Late in their history the Celts still worship a goddess triad, but the male gods are higher ranked, and the coveted Étain has to endure being sold and bought. (Medbh in Táin Bó Cuailnge has the same transitional character as Clytaemnestra, however, and she remembers what woman power meant). Fragments of ancient thinking and ancient organization could survive only by force of geographical isolation, a position somewhere in the outskirts of the world. Matriarchy, a hypothetical matrilinear organization, is province, a marginal phenomenon by the start of our present chronology, and by all likelihood much earlier than that.

From the Celtic area we have rich evidence of a goddess mythology, and there is evidence as well of how the process of Christianizing goes through periods of backlash, where the population flirts with the old religion. In spite of this, most missionizing monks belong to a patient, peaceable race, they wear their clients out, as if realizing that time is on their side. And: an important part of their strategy is about usurping the symbols of the "opponents". St Columba, who from Isle of Iona Christianized the "savage" Picts of Northern Scotland most certainly was a patriarch in the spirit of St Paul:

The courtesan manners of warlike goddesses could nurture the sexual phobia of monks: Inanna/Ishtar

St. Columba however, was not the shy retiring type and set about building Iona's original abbey from clay and wood. In this endeavour he displayed some strange idiosyncrasies, including banishing women and cows from the island, claiming that "where there is a cow there is a woman, and where there is a woman there is mischief". The abbey builders had to leave their wives, daughters, etc., on the nearby Eilean nam Ban (Woman's Island; we meet again with the same gynecophobia in St Kevin). Stranger still, Columba also banished frogs and snakes from Iona, how he accomplished this feat is not as well documented. (The ever-copulating frogs are connected with Heket, Inanna/Ishtar, Aphrodite, the snake with all goddesses with prophetic power as well, while most male gods appear as snake-killers, later on with secular stand-ins inflated to dragonkillers. In recently christianized Ireland the snake was probably heathendom in a wide sense, so St Patrick just settled accounts with heathen gods when he drove all reptiles into the Irish Sea, the standard set by St Paul, who had effected the same sort of zoo-ethnic cleansing on Crete - an island lacking poisonous snakes. The epoch-making, thought-out utopian regimes - and the dawning theocraties belong here - always start that way: on an island).

But the point is not about rejection: from this time onwards the Holy Spirit features as a wild goose, an geadh glas (Book of Kells may have been written on Iona); the monks simply took over a symbol of the goddess, that could be seen on heathen picture-stones. One millenium later tolerance with surviving relics of matriarchal tradition was coming to an end, and church/society tried to scorch all memory of Leda from the surface of the earth; Diana, an aspect of the Goddess was named "Queen of Witches" - while at the same time her symbol was incorporated into the Christian tradition. This is by no means so unique; the general symbol, the dove (Columba "adopted" its name; his church is the church of the dove, Columkille), has an older affiliation as well - and God should know that the Trinity has.

den helige ande

Modern version of the Holy Spirit in the chancel of a Scottish church.

FINAL PLEA: in the land of Nils Holgersson. Selma Lagerlöf, useful designer of a tourist symbol equal to the Dalecarlian horse, rest assured of the gratitude of legions of Scanian room renters...! No, i start anew.

In "Nils Holgersson" Selma Lagerlöf departs from the notion that some kind of very basic constitution of society acts as entrance gateway for forces destructive to both humans and other living creatures. She doesn't point out this inlet explicitly, but as a rule female gender - animal or human - is in possession of the holistic wisdom in her texts, and when it comes to power/hierarchic position she is inclined to place female one step up. Has she read "Maternal right" or did she just destill some remains of long forgotten Gothic, Vendic, Cimbric (and whatever they called themselves) memories of a goddess, speaking the language of birds? She bleeds a little extra for the birds of the Goddess, the swans and the mallard Jarro, in reclamation-threatened lake Tåkern. I will never know for sure, in order to be on the safe side i choose both alternatives: she has read and she has distilled, which gives her a unique position of insight.

windmill park

Are we on the safe side today - are we safely shod on our feet with Environmental Protection Agency, swelling statute books and a hysterical opinion in favour of all living - and goose saviours flying through the air like Superman...? Are we heading in the right direction? I suddenly notice how British Trust for Ornithology hoists a warning flag on behalf of dozens of West European bird species, that used to be quite common only ten or fifteen years ago, i note with pure, unadulterated terror how ideologically lionized wind-power is suddenly caught killing tens of thousands of birds, many of them raptors, at Altamont, California. This is a question of everyday practice: on top of it come the maniacs that consciously attack reserves: England and Australia, beach tourism wants 100 % of the surface available. And just look at the opposition to all public attempts at fencing in chemical industry within the framework of the European Union! Producers insist on a time-honoured right to sprinkle and spray - and the whole custom should be exterminated! Our societies are as destructive and degrading as ever, with double messages climbing over corpses - in order to power their televison sets.

selma

Selma and the white male goose: moral sense of Nils Holgersson? A provisional problematization of the polarity assault - harmony: Slavoj Zizek. How would Lacan have handled a "matriarchal" psychology, springing from a society where mothers are la signifiante? Gender is not an invariant, any discourse departing from such a condition will fall short of its objective.

Society changes first, myth reflects the change. Against this background there is something touching about Selma Lagerlöf's inversion: she reverses the myth clock an hour or two and presents the whole thing as a reader for elementary school. I do not believe that she converted one single potential rascal by this action. Such a reservation should make us read the book anew and ask ourselves: what should be done, how deep do we have to seize in order to really reverse the development? How far did Selma Lagerlöf envisage that we had to exert ourselves? It is difficult to put these thoughts into words, i could suggest: maybe the goose saviours have to be commissioned by the Goddess in order to succeed in their intent?

Christer Persson

I absorbed half of all background material for this text from Doris Norrgård. Bebhinn O'Meadhra gave me a shove in the right direction during the work, and when i asked Google for the meaning of her name, Google suddenly ejected links, that i had never found before, in a flash the text wrote itself. Robert Graves would have nodded with meaning at that. Finally thanks to Zeus, who allowed me to read a draft of his memoirs. There is an interesting, Blochian and "non-heathen" direction in which to expand the above: the books of Margaret Starbird. One source of devaluation of female gender is the self-demarcation of emerging Christianity relative to a Gnostic/Babylonian tradition with priestesses and female preachers. But everything swims like a little boat in the much larger surrounding "era"; Hesiod's scurrilous portrait of all-giving Pandora was slanted in much the same way as the Priest Editors' picture of mother Eve in Genesis, and there are predecessors to this in Sumeric and Indian myth. "The Kurgan Invasion" may have some reality - but where lies the area invaded: is it some internal province or an external? It could be an invasion of mind, language, subconscious; a historical "worm". The Internet unintentionally provides us with a tool for ideology critics; the admonitions from antivirus programs reveal in a metaphoric/metonymic way how the sender "I@me" is captured and "spoken" by powerful, anonymous structures. paradise