{"id":51172,"date":"2021-10-14T02:16:38","date_gmt":"2021-10-14T02:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stephaniekrzywonos.com\/staging\/6954\/?p=51172"},"modified":"2021-10-14T02:39:51","modified_gmt":"2021-10-14T02:39:51","slug":"the-prophet-ll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stephaniekrzywonos.com\/staging\/6954\/the-prophet-ll\/","title":{"rendered":"The Prophet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A version of this essay originally appeared in Requiem,<\/em> The Dark Mountain Project\u2019s nineteenth book<\/a> on April 16, 2021 <\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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I first met a penguin on a bright Sunday while standing on the frozen sea. My silent human companion pointed towards a figure emerging from the white desert like a prophet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By then, I\u2019d lived in Antarctica for two calendar months and the sun coiled above the horizon for six \u201cweeks\u201d; I existed in one very long day. Antarctica\u2019s nourishment seeped through my body, into my bones. Her glacial water fattened my cells. Her persistent wind fed my lungs and my blood. Her dryness altered my flesh for survival, morphing my skin into leather and my hair into a fossil record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On that Sunday, I realized that if I walked too far in any direction I would die. In the green world, one could meander for days or even months across whole continents and find enough food, shelter, water, and warmth to thrive. In this frozen world, life for humans is dire. I might only strive an hour in one direction, maybe ten minutes in another before surrendering to the snow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The penguin, a small Ad\u00e9lie, hastened towards us before we saw her. She orbited us, alternating between sliding on her belly and waddling, curious and unafraid, playing, tottering, tender, childlike. She squatted on webbed three-toed feet, the color of fallen leaves, next to the clunky blue moon boots entombing my numb feet. (How did her feet not<\/em> freeze? How was her existence, or any of this, even possible?) Behind us, a volcano, Mount Erebus\u2014namesake of the Greek god of darkness and shadows, and son of Chaos\u2014exhaled smoke into the sky and basked in the clean light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As the little prophet gazed at me, she spoke, squawking and flapping her wings in a language I didn\u2019t understand, and I\u2014unaware of how braced and vigilant I\u2019d become\u2014softened. She turned her stark black back towards me and departed for the volcano. Earlier, I\u2019d struggled to see her emerge directly in front of me. I realized why: she is camouflaged. We live in intersecting worlds, whose centers are nowhere and circumferences are everywhere, but I cannot go where she can go. I live only on the surface. She descends into profound waters: her darkness obscuring her in the shadows from predators above; her iridescent lightness blending and absorbing her into the ice, the sky, and the light to predators below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When penguins woo, they give each other pretty pebbles. Ad\u00e9lies also mate for life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A mountaineer I know accompanied researchers to an Ad\u00e9lie penguin rookery to witness the fertility rites. Under the shadow of the volcano, the mountaineer stood on the colony\u2019s threshold, observing the birds\u2019 nest amongst volcanic rubble, when she noticed one penguin observing her. Knowing about the rocks, the mountaineer selected one, held it up in her hand, and set it down on the ground. The penguin approached, picked up her volcanic gift, and tucked it into the architecture of its nest. The penguin then picked up a different rock in its beak, set it down next to the mountaineer, and then sat down next to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In Antarctica, we call that trans-species ritual \u201cgetting penguin married.\u201d The mountaineer is now one of two women I know who are married to Ad\u00e9lie penguins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Antarctica is a graveyard full of bones. Snow particles in Antarctic storms are tiny, like ash. As the Earth\u2019s largest desert, Antarctica receives barely any precipitation. Its wind-hurled snow is often old snow, ripped across the surface for years. The way scientists tell if snow is new or old is by particle size\u2014the smaller snow is, the older it is. Polar storms are often so harsh that before a snowflake can hit the ground the wind typically shatters it into pieces, dismembering its arms from its body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here, among the bones of snowflakes, penguins live, die, explore. Some wander inland, away from their huddles, but usually not too far from their home and only source of food: the edge of the sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here\u2019s a mystery: some penguins travel inland and die. Do they intend<\/em> to die? Do they simply explore too far? We don\u2019t know. Penguin researchers speculate that the likeliest reason isn\u2019t because the birds are sick, but because they are disoriented\u2014why else would they leave the sea they need for survival? This interpretation burrows in the assumption that the correct \u201corientation\u201d for penguins is to maximize their lives, to live as long as possible. If the \u201cresources\u201d are there\u2014take them!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Most of the evidence\u2014their feathery corpses, along with seals and humans\u2014are subsumed in the snow, but we know penguins travel inland and die because desiccated penguin mummies dot the snow-free Dry Valleys nearby, enormous open-air sarcophagi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We also know penguins do this because we watch them go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Penguins sometimes visit humans at Phoenix Airfield, an airport made of carefully compressed glacial ice. They pause on the runway, play, linger, and snooze. It\u2019s permitted unless a very expensive flight is unfolding. Sanctioned penguin herders gently shoo them off the runway for incoming airplanes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Humans are forbidden from \u201cinterfering\u201d in the lives or deaths of animals in Antarctica. If we affect their behavior at all, then we are \u201ctoo close.\u201d (Animals are, thankfully, allowed to approach us.) I can only helplessly witness a penguin waddle south towards the interior of the continent, towards death, even if I am married to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One afternoon, as I waited at Phoenix to pick up passengers, a quiet penguin\u2014another prophet\u2014arrived. It spoke simply by being alive. People came out of huts to take her picture, delighted by her irresistible cuteness. I felt that sweetness, too, but as I watched this young and healthy penguin walk south and inland into the ashy snow, I felt mostly grief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In the background, around me, under my feet, Antarctica is melting and families of creatures around the globe are being snuffed out. I funneled all my sadness onto that lone Antarctic creature. I knew nothing of this penguin\u2019s inner life nor what an \u201cinner life\u201d looks like for a penguin. Was she lost and disoriented? Did she know there wasn\u2019t food in that direction? Did she feel an urge towards death?\u2014I doubt it. All I knew is that she was walking south, towards her little light going out, and I felt the loss, again, of a cherished friend who chose self-extinction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I, too, know something of this death urge. It has surged in me during deep depressions. It rises inexplicably, mildly, when I am tired of being me, tired of trying, or haven\u2019t been sleeping well for a while. I want to crawl back into a womb, a cave, a crack, a crevasse, away from the sun\u2019s face, and sleep for a very long time. I\u2019ve learned not to be afraid of my death urge, which hides in the background, but to notice it, to be kind to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As I stood at Phoenix, a place named after the magical bird reborn from its own ashes, watching the penguin vanish on the horizon, I learned that what I want is not escape from pain, but transformation in its presence. I don\u2019t want my consciousness to cease, although I know one day it won\u2019t be as it is now; I want my consciousness to travel to new places\u2014deeper places, truer places\u2014that I didn\u2019t even know existed. I don\u2019t feel urged towards death, but rather what comes next: rebirth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Death as a passage is a seismic trans<\/em>\u2013form<\/em>ation: our form travels beyond, across. There is no birth, but only ever re<\/em>\u2013birth<\/em>: birth again<\/em>. Even though death, transformation, and rebirth are all colors from the same prism, I can\u2019t always embrace the whole spectrum when I descend, so I take shelter in one hue and in this hymn: I want to be reborn, I want to be reborn, I want to be reborn.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For many a befuddled early polar traveler, Fata Morgana<\/em>, \u201cMorgan the Fairy\u201d\u2014the legendary sorceress and sister of King Arthur\u2014made islands appear where there were none or showed safe passages where only obstacles existed. She still tricks us, creating mirages just above the horizon; you cannot always trust your eyes here. It\u2019s common to see a patch of the distant mountains looking jagged and off, but I\u2019ve also been only a few miles from four large, military airplanes, parked on completely flat ice under a clear bluebird sky, and not been able to see them. The sorceress obscures by inverting distinct layers of warm and cold air, creating a lens like an eye, so when light passes through images are distorted. What seems plain and straightforward is not always so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I take refuge in the idea of rebirth, yet the illusion of control still murmurs in my ear: maybe I could \u201csave\u201d the penguin if I herd it towards a path or pick it up and ferry it to the shore. Even if I could, the penguin would likely return to its southward trajectory. I cannot save the penguin from death any more than we can \u201csave the Earth\u201d or \u201cstop climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What many of us\u2014especially those who stand to profit financially or materially from the way things are\u2014actually mean when we say that we want to \u201csave the Earth\u201d is not that we want to care for the planet, but rather use it and preserve our way of life indefinitely and without consequences. There is a significant difference between wanting to preserve a rainforest, a river, or a species for human benefit versus working to preserve those entities because they are worthy unto themselves and to relate to them symbiotically (sym<\/em> meaning \u201ctogether, with\u201d and bio<\/em> meaning \u201clife\u201d\u2014life together).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Our disoriented civilization\u2019s activities are detrimentally affecting the climate. The generative forces at work in climate change have been playing, responding, destroying, creating, rebirthing long before the so-called Anthropocene\u2014there is no \u201cstopping\u201d these natural forces. The climate crisis is a crisis for humans and the multitudes of biodiverse forms that are being erased from existence. But what if, as Bayo Akomolafe suggests, the way we are responding to the crisis is part of the crisis?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It isn\u2019t that our actions and agency and individual animals don\u2019t matter\u2014they do<\/em>. But maybe my impulse to \u201crescue\u201d the penguin is part of the problem. Maybe the framework of problems-and-solutions isn\u2019t as helpful as we think it is. What many humans have been doing, the ways we are already<\/em> responding to environmental catastrophe, isn\u2019t working for us. I don\u2019t mean our efforts \u201caren\u2019t working to stop climate change\u201d (which they certainly aren\u2019t), but that the despairing game-over-we-can\u2019t-stop-climate-change-so-why-try? mindset isn\u2019t working as a way to live now, here, in the fog of our trouble. There are lands\u2014alchemical spaces, compost piles, sanctuaries\u2014to inhabit beyond the spectrum between hope and hopelessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A clue to these Fata Morgana<\/em>, these mirages\u2014\u201csaving the penguin\u201d or \u201csaving the Earth\u201d\u2014is buried in the word interfere<\/em>. The prefix inter<\/em> implies happenings between two different entities\u2014separation<\/em>. The origins of the word interfere<\/em> means, \u201cto strike against, to exchange blows, to strike each other.\u201d The language of interfere<\/em> is the language of violence, domination, and colonization. Interference <\/em>centers human agency and exaggerates our power. We could substitute interact<\/em>, but it still misses this core truth: in one way or another, our substance, the very stuff that you and I are made of\u2014our cells and the earthen elements coursing through them\u2014are inextricably woven in a tapestry with every other being. The prefix intra<\/em>, happenings within one group, describes our web much better. Intra <\/em>is imbued with intimacy. We do not simply \u201caffect\u201d each other. We do not inter-fere nor do we inter-act. We co-emerge from the loamy soil of becoming through \u201cintra-acting,\u201d to use the sage concept created by philosopher Karen Barad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Before I met the penguin, we had been in relationship with each other, intra-acting long before I\u2019d emerged from my mother and she\u2019d emerged from her egg. Homo sapiens<\/em> and Pygoscelis adeliae<\/em> have been in relationship, in intra-being, long before humans sailed to Antarctica. The human roots of our genocidal ecological crisis\u2014capitalism, colonialism, and other -isms\u2014arise from a taproot: relationship. The climate crisis is a crisis of relationship. The first question to ask isn\u2019t how we should relate, but how are we already relating? How do we experience our entangled bonds to others and terra<\/em>? To see differently, to live cooperatively with all beings and make, as Donna Haraway writes, \u201codd kin,\u201d one does not need to undergo an exotic, excruciating sojourn to Antarctica and wed a tuxedoed bird. We can begin now, where we are, with the beings around us. Hunt\u2014as polar mountaineers do\u2014for the cracks on the surface, the openings in the story, the subtle signs on the snow\u2019s crust that foretell ruptures. Avoid the crevasse, but not its invitation. Let yourself be swallowed whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After years of seeing penguins, I got to cradle one in my hands. Before flying to Antarctica last year, I wandered on the cliffs above Harris Bay, a small cove on the outskirts of Christchurch, New Zealand, looking for a penguin colony I heard was there. Just up the path, I saw an elderly man descending a long ladder to the rocks below. I had stumbled upon the longest studied group of penguins in New Zealand and the man who studied them. Dr. Chris Challies is a scientist who has been studying a colony of endangered white-flippered penguins, Eudyptula albosignata, <\/em>since 1976, visiting them here once a week. As we ate sandwiches together by the sea, he told me that he just had a paper accepted that detailed how the breeding habits of the penguins had been affected by climate change, and then he invited me to visit the penguins with him\u2014the babies were hatching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chris donned thick leather gloves, reached into human-made nesting boxes (which he said the penguins preferred), carefully removed adults, measured them, and temporarily put them in a bag to calm them while he tended to their young. As we worked our way through the neighborhood, I asked him about the mating habits of penguins. \u201cThey mate like humans mate,\u201d he said, \u201cgenerally for life, usually separated by death, sometimes by divorce,\u201d and then he chucked, \u201cbut usually after a year or two they get back together.\u201d Chris knows who mates with whom, how many chicks they\u2019ve begotten, whole genealogies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chris pulled out a parent and held it in his lap, inviting me to touch the penguin, which I never would have done on my own; I touched its back before he put it into a bag to calm it. He reached into the box and pulled out a living chick, only a few days old, and then pulled out a second chick that was dead and tossed its corpse onto the rocks below us. Chris motioned to me and I cupped my hands, as if for communion, and he set the living baby penguin into them. It rested its head on my fingertips; it wiggled its little bum as it nestled into my palms, and then lay totally still. The penguin was warm and soft, squishy and alive. I stroked its back, covered in tiny dark blue-sheened feathers, with my thumb. I felt a heart thumping in my hands and I couldn\u2019t tell if it was my own or the bird\u2019s. I couldn\u2019t forget about its sibling strewn on the rocks. Eventually, I set the living chick down and it waddled into the shelter of its nest. I turned around and watched the waves carry the dead penguin to a different home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Antarctica is transforming. In most places, her glaciers\u2014her rivers of ice\u2014are shrinking. But in some places, mysteriously, glaciers are growing. Millions of years ago, what we now call Antarctica was a swampy, temperate forest. Beneath our feet\u2014mine booted and the prophet\u2019s webbed\u2014beneath the ice, the land itself holds ancestors: 37-million-year-old penguins over six feet tall and the ferns, trees, dinosaurs, mystics, and monsters of supercontinent Gondwanaland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Antarctica is a cut, a slice in time. What is now Antarctica is metamorphosing. It might become a temperate forest again. Glaciers may vanish partially or entirely\u2014and they may return. We don\u2019t know. We do know that glaciers become water, which in turn becomes something else: habitat, drink, blood, piss, amniotic fluid, spit, clouds, seas, semen, rain, mud, puddles, rivers, lakes, slush, sweat, snow, ice, mist, fog, cerebral fluid, cider, tears, wine, dew. On and on. Nothing is truly gone, but loss is real, loss slices you open. That is the deliciousness and excruciation of living. Mourning embroiders scar tissue. Grief is one of the faces of love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2015, an Ad\u00e9lie colony of nearly 40,000 in East Antarctica suffered an enormous loss: every penguin chick died due to a record amount of sea ice and an unprecedented rainy episode. Next year, in the same colony, only two chicks survived due to an unusually large amount of sea ice. It had been forty years since a mass die-off like this occurred for a colony of this size. Ad\u00e9lies are not the only penguins that have recently suffered catastrophic breeding failures. The Halley Bay colony, the second largest group of Emperor penguins in the world (up to 50,000 penguins), lost their young due to sea ice breaking up early because of abnormally stormy weather in 2016. It happened again in 2017 and then again <\/em>in 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Glaciers occlude and glaciers unveil, like scrolls. In 2016, researchers at Cape Irizar stumbled upon what they thought was another penguin mass death\u2014strewn chick carcasses, bones, guano, and pebbles\u2014but penguins had not been known to live there for hundreds of years. Radiocarbon analysis of these Ad\u00e9lie mummies, eggshells, and bones revealed that the birds had been dead for hundreds if not thousands of years. Samples showed that the site had been occupied three times between c.<\/em> 3000 BCE and c. <\/em>1200 CE. The only reason these penguin ruins were discovered was because of increasingly rapid snowmelt. Penguins have died en masse<\/em> before the current climate crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bones reveal, unfold, prophesy. Researchers in the Chatham Islands in New Zealand recently exhumed the oldest known ancestor of penguins. Kupoupou stilwelli<\/em> lived during the Paleocene era, when there was no Antarctic ice cap. Remarkably, penguins originally dwelled in temperate lands and adapted to thrive in a polar place. What is more astonishing is that the diversity of Paleocene penguin bones lends more weight to this hypothesis: not only did penguins rapidly evolve following the last mass extinction\u2014which killed the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all plant and animal life on earth\u2014but Kupoupou stilwelli<\/em> may also have lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. In other words: penguins, our elders, may not only have survived the fifth mass extinction, but emerged because of it.<\/em> The penguin is an old, beautiful world reborn, again and again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Scientists label the flow and flux we are living in the sixth mass extinction, a death knell for human civilization and the current iteration of biodiversity. The Earth is always changing\u2014this is what it means to be of the Earth: to live, to die, to be reborn. There were five mass extinctions before now and there will be more extinction, more labour pains. Life, as astounding and precious as a penguin, is already emerging from this death-event and is offering us a rock, an invitation, odd-kinship, fealty, terra<\/em>, rubble, ruins, shelter, home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A version of this essay originally appeared in Requiem, The Dark Mountain Project\u2019s nineteenth book on April 16, 2021 I first met a penguin on a bright Sunday while standing on the frozen sea. My silent human companion pointed towards a figure emerging from the white desert like a prophet. 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