Saying Yes: Deborah Bird Rose’s “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed”

 

Deborah Bird Rose was a leader in multidisciplinary ethnographic research through her work in Australian Aboriginal cultures. With care and open mind, she immersed herself in the Northern Territory Aboriginal communities of Yarralin and Lingarra to work on her Doctor of Philosophy and returned frequently to these communities throughout the span of her life. In her essay "Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed" (from the collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene), Rose explores the rich, pulsating beauty available throughout all symbiotic nature and specifically, how it can be seen in the joyful relationship between the great family of flowering trees known as Angiosperms and the flying foxes that pollinate them.

“Shimmer” refers to the radiance of interaction among what Rose calls the “matrix of power, desire, and lures” across the biosphere. The concept of shimmer was first taught to Rose by the Aboriginal people in the Victoria River region of Australia’s Northern Territory, where it is thought of as the ancestral power of life. Quoting Isabelle Stengers, Rose connects the concept of shimmer to “reciprocal capture” -- defined as “an event, the production of new, immanent modes of existence” in which neither entity transcends the other -- an expression of symbiotic interdependence. Rose proposes that shimmer may thus help us see the truth of our own symbiotic roles in nature and “care for those around us who are in peril.” Framing the extinction crisis in a conversation of symbiosis makes clear how and why extinction occurs observably in cascades: as interdependent species relations crumble, it ripples throughout ecosystems. 

Shimmer can first be explored through its human expressions. The Yolngu term bir’yun translated by Howard Morphy as brilliant or shimmering, refers to art, ritual, dance, and many other aspects of life. Yolngu painting involves blocking out shapes and color and then adding finely detailed cross-hatching, at which point it shifts to “brilliant” -- capturing the eye. In Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, the painter Lily Briscoe says that a picture was to be “a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.” The brilliance, or shimmer, arrives when the delicate butterfly’s wing emerges from the solidity of the cocoon. Rose describes shimmer as also having an active quality, grabbing you and bringing you into the “vibrant and vibrating world” -- reciprocally capturing, like the water capturing and reflecting the sun.

In the way that shimmer exceeds human action, Rose questions the philosophy of human exceptionalism. While on one hand human exceptionalist claims might seem already to have been thoroughly undermined by the wonderful and clever tendencies of plenty of other beings, Rose argues that in the Anthropocene we need to recognize the exceptional damage being enacted by our species. This is seen in the two sides of settler Australian intervention upon the flying fox population in Australia. In 2013, one community who viewed the animals as pests conducted an assault on the population with smoke, water cannons, and firecrackers among other shocking methods of torturous demise. However, Rose worked also with a group of flying fox carers who “opened their lives and homes” to the population in peril. Two of these species have been listed as vulnerable to extinction, and these human carers have taken it upon themselves to foster orphaned babies and protect their habitats. 

Through the shimmer of flying foxes that asks us to rectify the scales of human cruelty with compassion, care connects us to the symbiosis of flowers and flying foxes. Many different angiosperm trees rely on the flying foxes -- putting out bright, showy, perfumed flowers to attract the pollinators to their gift of nectar. I think humans can relate to the power of such “lures” -- I put colorful decorations on myself for the same purpose! Both species have delicately evolved to form a web of interconnecting symbiotic habits and needs -- the trees thriving better when pollen is transferred from greater distances, and the foxes developing foraging patterns that disperse them across wide areas. The trees produce their best nectar at night when the flying foxes reign supreme. As Rose writes, “both trees and flying foxes depend on this interaction.” The new-age spiritualists have always told us that love is an expansive vibration: in Rose’s words, the kiss of symbiosis is a Yes: “Yes! More! More Buds, more flowers, more color, more scent, more pollen, more nectar!” and so life is spread and expanded through the symbiosis. Rose asserts that our human “no”, our reductions, fears, and denial of our own symbiosis, invades the shimmer of life and closes our eyes to the truth and beauty of wholeness, concluding that “we are therefore called into gratitude for the fact that in the midst of terrible destruction, life finds a way to flourish, and that the shimmer of life does indeed include us.” 

(AR)

Picture credit: Craig Burrows UV photographs of flowers emulate how they might be seen through a bee’s eyes.