#also voyagers skin is so whimsical

[godofthestupid]

I get distracted very easily

point in case: I wanted to follow a simple tutorial and try and see if I can combine some techniques,so I looked for a character to draw and my eyes fell on Voyager and her incredibly cute skin and the pen moved on its own...

[patricksilverrose]

My Top 10 Favorite Albums of 2019

It's that time of year again! I'm gonna use the same introduction on this post like I will on the other for the most part, so don't get scared about reading the same post twice. Today we're gonna be looking at my Top 10 Favorite Albums of 2019! I did a video on my music channel where I just talk about the favorites, but here you will see them AND ALL the honorable mentions! I want to give a few disclaimers: 1) I am a metalhead, so most of the releases you will see are metal releases; 2) this is all based on my personal tastes and opinions as to what I found to be the best.

Before we get into the countdown, let's see the honorable mentions! How I rank them is if the release has ** following it then it means that I enjoyed the release, but if it has *** it means that it had the potential to make it into the rankings. So here they are!

Valcata - Valcata** (symphonic power metal / metal opera) The End of Melancholy - Paradox Intention** (alternative metal) Autumn - Stacking Smoke** (atmospheric gothic metal) Shokran - Ethereal** (djent / progressive metal / ambient) My Propane - Antidote** (djent / alternative metal) Celestivl - TenTimesTwo** (symphonic metal) Diabolical - Eclipse** (black metal) Degrees of Truth - Time Travel Artifact** (progressive metal) Ardours - Last Place on Earth** (gothic metal) Devin Townsend - Empath** (progressive metal) The Agonist - Orphans** (progressive death metal) Battle Beast - No More Hollywood Endings** (heavy metal) Verite - New Skin** (indie pop) Porselain - Duende** (avant-garde) Vetrar Draugurinn - Hinterlands** (gothic metal) Scarlet Stories - Necrologies** (dark metal) Port Noir - The New Routine** (alternative / prog rock) We are the Catalyst - Ephemeral** (alternative metal) Tarja - In the Raw** (symphonic metal) Kobra and the Lotus - Evolution** (hard rock) Rage of Light - Imploder** (trance death metal) FKA Twigs - Magdalene** (trip hop) Cellar Darling - The Spell** (progressive metal) The Dark Element - Songs the Night Sings** (power metal) Voyager - Colours in the Sun** (djent / progressive metal) Arcane Ritual - Witch-Heart** (gothic metal) Metalite - Biomechanicals** (power metal) Gone in April - Shards of Light** (melodic symphonic death metal) Pencey Sloe - Don't Believe, Watch Out** (shoegaze) The Murder of My Sweet - Brave Tin World** (symphonic metal) Symfobia - The Smog of Tomorrow** (symphonic metal) Ianwill - One Credit Left** (metalcore) Visions of Atlantis - Wanderers** (symphonic power metal)

Sharks in Your Mouth - Sacrilegious*** (symphonic deathcore) Glasya - Heaven's Demise*** (symphonic metal) Lacuna Coil - Black Anima*** (gothic metal) Lighthouse in Darkness - The Melancholy Movies*** (trip hop / sad Hollywood music) Banks - III*** (r&b) Saor - Forgotten Paths*** (folk death metal) Plague of Stars - Daedalus*** (gothic metal) Hecate Enthroned - Embrace of the Godless Aeon*** (symphonic black metal) Dorian Electra - Flamboyant*** (experimental / queer pop) Beast in Black - From Hell with Love*** (power metal) Shadow of Intent - Melancholy*** (symphonic deathcore) Leprous - Pitfalls*** (prog rock) Cathubodua - Continuum*** (symphonic metal) Reism - Dysthymia*** (gothic metal) Starset - Divisions*** (cinematic rock) The Lust - Lustration*** (gothic metal) Neverlight - The Quiet Room*** (progressive gothic metal)

And now let's look at the big boys!

10. The Offering - Home [progressive metal]

I would like to label these guys as "progressive power death metal", but prog is good enough since it rounds it out perfectly. Amazing production and very interesting riffs and song-writing. A bit chaotic, but there's structure to the chaos. The singer's voice is absolutely insane and he has an incredible vocal range.

Favorite songs: 1. Failure (S.O.S.) 2. Lovesick 3. Glory

9. Infected Rain - Endorphin [modern metal]

I wasn't expecting to love this as much as I do. Epic production and full of epic songs. They really have evolved a lot over the years, but this album is still very much true to who they are. It's a very diverse album that experiments with different directions, but keeps its direction.

Favorite songs: 1. Black Gold 2. Earth Mantra 3. Passerby

8. Lindsay Schoolcraft - Martyr [symphonic gothic metal]

I've said this once and I'll continue to say it: this album is like a love child between Within Temptation and Evanescence. It's very dreamy and absolutely beautiful. This album was definitely worth the wait. And if you got the storybook edition (like I did), then you know the exclusive bonus tracks are absolutely wonderful.

Favorite songs: 1. Stranger 2. Into the Night 3. Remember

7. Muna - Saves the World [indie pop / queer pop]

This album is so much fun, but also very sad. These queens really know how to make good sad music, but then turn around and make it upbeat and fun. This album I feel isn't as dramatic as About U (which I LOVE), but instead is more from the heart and personal. It's a very touching album.

Favorite songs: 1. Stayaway 2. Who 3. Pink Light

6. Swallow the Sun - When a Shadow is Forced into the Light [gothic doom metal]

When I first heard Upon the Water, I knew right when they mentioned "nightingale" that it was about Aleah Stanbridge and had a strong feeeling that the whole album would be dedicated to her, and it very much is. It's definitely a very deep and hard album to listen to if you're someone, like myself, was very fond of Aleah. It's full of so much beauty, raw emotion, and heartbreak.

Favorite songs: 1. Firelights 2. Upon the Water 3. Never Left

5. Imperia - Flames of Eternity [symphonic metal]

I feel this album is very different from what they've done in the past, but still very much an Imperia album. Helena dove deep into her heart for this album just like the previous album, but it's not as heartbreaking which makes it easier to take in. I love the unique directions they went in with the song-writing to really make this album different.

1. Fear is an Illusion 2. The Scarred Soul 3. Book of Love

4. Fleshgod Apocalypse - Veleno [symphonic technical death metal]

This album is both very chaotic and well structured. It's pretty whimsical at times which helps it stand out compared to previous releases; not to mention they experimented with their sound a bit in general with this album. I really love the orchestrations and choirs on this album in particular since they don't sound like they have on previous releases.

Favorite songs: 1. The Day We'll be Gone 2. Fury 3. Monnalisa

3. Within Temptation - Resist [symphonic modern metal]

This is how you rebrand yourself. It's still very much true to who they are, but a very solid and different evolution. It really reminds me a lot of their older stuff, but with a modern twist to it. The production on it is absolutely amazing and the storytelling is done so beautifully. This is my new favorite album from them, and I haven't had one since The Heart of Everything.

Favorite songs: 1. Raise Your Banner 2. Trophy Hunter 3. Firelight

2. Starkill - Gravity [symphonic power death metal]

They really stepped their pussies up with this album. It's absolutely amazing. The production is light years ahead of that of Shadow Sleep (which was my biggest gripe with that album). I love the sci-fi feel to a lot of the songs off the album and just how dramatic and intense it gets.

Favorite songs: 1. The Real Enemy 2. Until We Fall 3. Castaway

1. Ex Libris - ANN (A Progressive Metal Trilogy) [progressive symphonic metal]

If you want to learn the stories of three Ann's throughout history and love super dramatic, powerful, gut-wrenching music, then this is the release for you. I know chapter 1 made it on my favorite EPs last year (and placed number 1 at that), but since the last two chapters were released this year, it makes since to just include the whole album here since that's what all three chapters make. Dianne and the guys really went above and beyond for this album and Joost did such an incredible job at helping them make this album as perfect as it is. I especially love how much Dianne emulated all three of them and how she channeled them perfectly.

Favorite songs (in no particular order): 1. Chapter 1 - Anne Boleyn: The Beheading 2. Chapter 2 - Anastasia Romanova: The Exile 3. Chapter 3 - Anne Frank: The Raid

And that's it for the albums! I highly recommend these EPs for those of you whom are interested. Follow this link to see the post all about my favorite EPs of the year!

[topmixtrends]

JOURNEY INTO the Mind’s Eye by Lesley Blanch (1904–2007) was first published 50 years ago. It begins with “the Traveller,” an unnamed family friend dressed in a fur-lined overcoat, who repeatedly breezes into young Blanch’s nursery, proffering gifts: a silver cigarette case from the Caucasus, a chunk of malachite, then, another time, a Kazakh fox-skin cap, all the while recounting legendary Russian tales of Ilya Mourametz, the heroic bogatyr (a kind of Slavic knight), and Konyiok Gorbunok, the little humpbacked horse.

It is a curious, rambling travel book. Within its pages we go to Paris and Siberia, but really it is a love story and, as the title suggests, an internal voyage into the imagination. The Traveller ignites in Blanch a deep and lifelong love for Russia, especially the early 19th-century Russia of Alexander Pushkin, which becomes a giant metaphor for her adult appetites, all pursued with a “drug addict’s intensity.”

Blanch begins writing love letters to the Traveller as a schoolgirl. Then, aged 17, she is seduced by him on the Dijon Express (although in her mind she pretends it is the Trans-Siberian). Later he disappears, and she searches for him frantically.

On publication in 1968, one reviewer dismissed this glamorous, oddball tale as “pomegranate prose.” But given Blanch’s fondness for the jewel-like fruit — and for the “moon-faced and wasp-waisted” dancing girls who juggled them in harems — I like to think she didn’t take offense at this kiss-off. After all, the Traveller had told her that within every pomegranate is “one seed from Eden.”

Romantic and whimsical, yes, but Blanch was no starry-eyed daydreamer. Running just below the surface of her glossy writing is a good deal of common sense and a brazen appetite. Despite working as features editor at British Vogue, she had a strong dislike of killjoy dieticians and freely indulged her “faiblesse” for suet puddings. Aged 99, she claimed that she was still capable of devouring “a Christmas pudding at midnight.”

Journey into the Mind’s Eye, which casually melds fact and fiction, was the first Lesley Blanch book I read, and it left me craving more of everything she had to offer — unabashed exoticism, humor, and lively, pomegranate-laden prose. It was to her food writing, her sketchbooks of culinary adventuring, that I turned to next. These books travel paths equally luscious to the one covered in Journey into the Mind’s Eye, because just as Blanch was a superior traveler, she was also a superior eater. “Travelling widely and eating wildly” was her motto.

Whether in Mexico or Egypt, the Balkans or Yemen, mealtimes were the lifeblood — and often the goals — of her adventures: food was first culture, then code, and, finally, trophy. Moveable feasts. The ultimate mementos.

Her first culinary travelogue, Round the World in Eighty Dishes, was published in 1956, coming out two years after the end of Britain’s postwar rationing. It was the era of Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation and the Suez Crisis. Blanch’s exuberant journeying to such faraway shores, rendered in verbal Technicolor, would have seemed impossible to most. She describes this book, seductively and wonderfully, as her “kitchen-window peepshow.” Like two other great female writer-cooks of the same epoch, Patience Gray (1917–2005) and M. F. K. Fisher (1908–1992), Blanch had an instantly recognizable voice. She was also refreshingly funny and frank, caring less for accurate recipes. “Timidity and prejudice should have no space in the kitchen,” she wrote. How good to hear. How Lesley.

A third of the way into Round the World in Eighty Dishes, Blanch unleashes some particularly honeyed prose for paska, a Russian Easter bread that is, she assures us, “delicious at any time.” In the lengthy introduction above the method, we are taken to Russian Easter services in Nice, Copenhagen, and “even Los Angeles,” but the memory most vividly recounted is in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, at the Russian church on the Rue Daru (that is, the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral). There, she recalls, she was:

[S]o carried away that I set fire to myself with the candle I was carrying, and was rescued by a dashing-looking stranger who beat out the flames, and later, taught me my Russian alphabet in icing sugar letters, for he was an émigré who said he’d been a head pastry-cook at the Winter Palace.

Even the most prolific collector of cookbooks would be hard-pressed to find a recipe introduction that could compete with the exoticism of that anecdote.

The opener of From Wilder Shores: The Tables of my Travels (1989), her second food book, begins with a dedication “to my Digestion which has nobly supported so many surprises, trials and unwise indulgences throughout our long years of travel together.”

In Arabia, coffee is drunk from egg-cup-sized finjans, sugared heavily during festivities but unsweetened during mourning periods, “bitter as grief.” In the Balkans, she notes how pure water collected from certain sources and wells is coveted as if it were vintage wine. In Bavaria, driving back from a Wagner festival, drunk on sound and revelry, she considers the diet of mad old King Ludwig, who would eat breakfast at sunset. She also discovers a dish as “rich as Wagner’s music.” It is “Cheese Muff,” and she provides the reader with a recipe — little more than 100 grams of cheddar, butter, breadcrumbs, and eggs — as well as with the suggestion to serve it with dry biscuits and coffee, as “the Muff is on the heavy side.”

In the chapter “Meals on Wheels,” we find Blanch focusing not on “trolleys carrying hot food to the needy” (heaven forbid) but rather on the “whirring and clash of steel on steel — the wheels of express trains hurtling powerfully across limitless tracks.” To read her descriptions of restaurant cars belonging to bygone eras is to weep into your concourse-bought sandwich and Styrofoam cup of coffee. Here, naturally, Blanch recalls her Trans-Siberian train journey, where five days on-board meant “round the clock relays” of stews, fish soup, caviar, black bread, vodka, and Caucasian champagne, kept going, of course, by endless cups of tea from the gurgling samovar. When I undertook that same journey, two years ago, there was vodka, and, of course, tea, but mainly there was greasy, thin solyanka served in a somewhat glum on-board cafe with red faux-leather chairs.

Blanch remembers that when the “satiny expanses” of Lake Baikal came into view, the dining car collectively sprung to their feet to toast the “Holy Sea.” I too paused there, in the depths of winter, to walk across the lake’s frozen surface — but my abiding memory is of that evening, back in the overheated carriage, when the air hummed with the pungent fishy smell of smoked omul carried on-board by almost all of my fellow passengers. Blanch tackles omul in a later chapter of From Wilder Shores, entitled “Russian Traditional”: “Omul is so good that it requires no fancy treatment.” I beg to differ, but that is the situation affecting taste and memory — of course omul is good served differently. As to alcohol, only Armenian brandy seems capable of slaying her. “My hang-over lasted two days and left me in a state of Dostoievskian repentance,” she wrote of it.

I like the fact that even today, in Odessa, at its spectacularly baroque opera house on the Black Sea, one can obtain the same snack between acts that Blanch purchased in Moscow in the early 1960s, namely, “a thick square of white bread with a dollop of caviar on top.” As she rightly says: “Those theatre snacks […] were easy to handle, sustaining, and added a festive touch.”

Back home, or “en poste” with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary, Blanch travels in her kitchen. “Sometimes I make manti/pilmeny and munch lovingly, recalling both the Afghan wastes, and my journey across Siberia.” Although the more sensitive reader might want to forgo the kicker at the end of the recipe: “In Turkestan the sauce was a rather rank goat cheese, thinned down.” But then, Blanch’s were “cookbooks” unrestricted by their recipes. She could write about mealtimes, food, and eating in a manner so luxurious that the reader need not attempt the recipes at all.

Blanch understood the values attached to cuisine as national identity, knew that behind each dish lay “centuries of history, travel, exploration and adventure.” She also understood that where tourism heavily treads it eclipses culture in its path. For her, it was in the kitchen, and at the family table, where traditions were cherished and fiercely protected.

In re-creating Afghan, Uzbek, and Moroccan dishes — national cuisines so à la mode in the West today — in her books and in her kitchen, Blanch unintentionally proved that she was ahead of the curve. And she offers fitting substitutes for our most faddish of food trends, too. Rather than “smashed avocado toast,” try Blanch’s “Avocado Summer Soup,” mashed with lemon (rather than lime), whipped with yoghurt, stirred through with a “breakfast cup” (no idea) of water, and then chilled over night. Delicious.

This summer, NYRB Classics has rereleased Journey into the Mind’s Eye in paperback, with an introduction by the author’s goddaughter, Georgia de Chamberet. If only a publisher would refresh Blanch’s culinary books and kickstart a revival of her food writing. Her culinary prose is so enjoyable and so unique that it cries out to be introduced to new generations of readers. Blanch believed, absolutely, in the power of an open mind and a good appetite. How well she applied this adage to all aspects of her long, globetrotting life, and what useful advice it still is to us today, wherever we choose to travel.

¤

Caroline Eden is a UK-based writer contributing to the Guardian, BBC Radio 4, and The Telegraph. She is the author of Samarkand: Recipes and Stories from Central Asia and the Caucasus and the forthcoming Black Sea.

¤

Banner image by Michael Himbeault.

The post A Kitchen Window Peepshow: Eating Wildly and Traveling Widely with Lesley Blanch appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2AFisJN

[sure-yeah-art-blog]

Tortoises, Mosses, Birds, Trees: The Rhizome, as seen form the Rock

Herman Melville’s sketches of the Galapagos Island, known as The Encantadas, while satirizing Darwin’s droll classification of the island’s inhabitants, also serve to subvert colonialist practices that use rationality as justification of the unfair domination of more “primitive” worlds. These two criticisms are, of course, linked. Darwin’s taxonomical approach to classification of the island’s inhabitants is itself a constricting form of domination that the Western world utilizes to conquer and dominate these islands, supplanting its natural, nonhuman beauty with the ugly and restrictive language of humanity. Rather than conforming to this paradigm, Melville’s parody subverts such a hierarchical power structure that justifies humanity’s Machiavellian appropriation of the environment, in favor of a way of thinking that values all organisms as individuals, each with traits that mingle and play with classically imposed structures of identification. This mingling puts these organisms on a horizontal (or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, rhizomatic) playing field, which promotes a more just treatment of these organisms and of the environment that humanity is, at most, an equal part of. The elimination of hierarchical, “vertical” boundaries between organisms of different classification is used by Melville to promote a worldview that is reflected in many contemporary philosophical discourses. This paradigm is known by many names, and while each incarnation has its variations, they all can find a root (or several!) in Melville’s record of the Galapagos. The theory, paradigm, worldview (whatever it should be called) used for the purposes of this essay is the aforementioned “rhizome” of Deleuze and Guattari, from their daunting A Thousand Plateaus. Disregard for the value of every organism’s individuality, and appropriation of the environment for the needs of humanity that we see in Charles Darwin’s account of the same islands, could be deemed an historical contribution to what is known today as the Anthropocene: the current geological age of the planet in which humanity has become the most dominate force over the environment.

Before delving into meticulous textual analysis of The Encantadas, I believe it important to supply the standard that Darwin sets for Melville in his The Voyage of the Beagle, so that Melville’s subversion will become absolutely clear. While Melville’s interpretation of the organisms and the islands themselves takes on a certain whimsical tone (examples of which will be supplied later on), Darwin adheres to staunch, rigid calculation of the environment, and speaks of the unique organisms in terms of their relation to mankind and the already-standing classifications that have been imposed on the organisms of the island. He describes the craters of the island as “[giving] to the country an artificial appearance, which vividly reminded me of those parts of Staffordshire, where the great iron-foundries are most numerous” (Darwin 2), and, using colonialist rhetoric, as opposed to Melville’s all-encompassing geographic detail, describes the archipelago as “a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists” (Darwin 4). Melville, in his attempt to describe the location of the islands, names points of geographic reference in all lateral directions, not just to the north-east (Melville 32). The difference in the way both explorers discuss the tortoises of the island is perhaps the most worthy of note. While these tortoises have a hauntingly profound effect on the narrator of The Encantadas, Darwin describes them with a sterile, emotionless tone: “the young tortoises make excellent soup; but otherwise the meat to my taste is indifferent” (Darwin 3), and later:

I was always amused when overtaking one of these great monsters, as it was quietly pacing along… The flesh of this animal is largely employed, both fresh and salted; and abeautifully clear oil is prepared from the fat. When a tortoise is caught, the man makes a slit in the skin near its tail, so as to see inside its body, whether the fat under the dorsal plate is thick. Darwin 8

Darwin goes on to classify the birds of the islands by what he believes their origins are, mostly deriving from American species. When comparing a bird from the archipelago to a bird from elsewhere in the world, he will often call them “analogous” (Darwin 6). By comparing these birds in such a way, Darwin denies them their uniqueness and individuality; he taxonomically categorizes the birds, and all species of the islands, into neat, suffocating boxes. He does this figuratively and literally; there is a large and detailed chart included in the text that catalogues the different species in a variety of ways (Darwin 14 - 15). While this may not appear malevolent, and actually quite a convenient means of classification, these methods serve as an example of human domination over an environment that is everything but human.

I find it appropriate now to begin my analysis of The Encantadas with the tortoises, as both Darwin and Melville describe them as “antediluvian” (Darwin 2, Melville 26), or, before (Noah’s) flood. The Encantadas is divided into ten sketches, and the introductory sketch concludes with a chilling account of the narrator’s life after spending some time on the archipelago, and having returned home to America; he finds that “far from the influences of towns, and proportionally nigh to the mysterious ones of nature”, he is overcome by visions of “my other and far-distant rovings in the baked heart of the charmed isles” (Melville 24). Melville at once distinguishes between towns (cities, industry) and nature, as opposed to Darwin’s aforementioned comparison between the two, while simultaneously expressing that his time spent within the archipelago has had a significant and profound impact on his psyche. Indeed, he goes on to say that, while at a party of some sort, in a mansion described as “old-fashioned-*+-”, he

“seem[s] to see, slowly emerging from those imagined solitudes, and heavily crawling along the floor, the ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with ‘Memento*****’ burning in live letters upon his back” (Melville 24 - 25). This hallucination of the narrator’s casts the remaining nine sketches in an ominous light. It implies that the “enchanted islands” have left their mark on the narrator, imploring him to “remember” the tortoises he has seen, and perhaps the ones he has killed. At the same time, this passage suggests the opposite of what Darwin’s text sought to accomplish; rather than make his mark on the islands, the narrator of The Encantadas is impressed upon by the nonhuman environment of the archipelago. This ultimately is a suggestion made by Melville that humanity does not dominate this chain of islands, as Darwin’s desensitized account of the islands might suggest, and that it is rather quite the opposite; it is Melville’s narrator that is dominated by the island and its inhabitants.

We are far from finished with our reptilian friends, as I believe Melville’s devoted analysis of these creatures contains some of the most significant metaphors in the text. In fact, the entire second sketch is devoted to the further mystification (and thus, denial of them as a part of the scientific realm) of these creatures, as well as providing an image of these tortoises that transcends the many realms of classification imposed upon organisms (both plant and animal life) by scientific jargon. He devotes a great amount of prose to detailing the shells of the tortoises: “Even the tortoise, dark and melancholy as it is upon the back, still possesses a bright side… if you but put them on their backs you thereby expose their bright sides… because you have done this, you should not swear that the tortoise has no dark side. Enjoy the bright… but be honest, and don’t deny the black” (Melville 25). This passage supposes that the tortoises are able to be two things at once (a notion that will be expanded upon momentarily), both delightful to human interpretation (the bright side), while also possessing darkness (perhaps, what is unknown) and aspects of the melancholic. That Melville’s narrator implores the reader to not “deny the black”, seems subtle enough, but is a very provocative, loaded metaphor. The real suggestion here is to not flail before the unknown; that is, to not only value the aspect of something natural that might be pleasing to the eye, or seen as of a certain use, but to celebrate and admire all the unique aspects of an organism that coalesce to form our interpretation of it.

This metaphor is extended as Melville’s narrator continues his grand account of these tortoises’ shells:

Behold these really wondrous tortoises - none of your schoolboy mud-turtles… shaggy, too, here and there, with dark green moss, and slimy with the spray of the sea… scars strangely widened, swollen, half obliterate, and yet distorted like those sometimes found in the bark of very hoary trees, I seemed an antiquary of a geologist, studying the bird-tracks and ciphers upon the exhumed slates trod by incredible creatures whose very ghosts are now defunct. Melville 26 - 27

From this loaded passage, with all of its flowery poetics, we can extrapolate many ideas. Firstly, there is a critique, or perhaps a parody, of the world of academia, a world that is naturally associated with taxonomies and strict classification: “schoolboy mud-turtles”, while seemingly a nod at the impressive, mature nature of these specific tortoises, may also be referencing the inclination of academics to classify a creature, to reduce it to its title alone. The most significant part of the passage, however, is the description of the tortoise’s shell: this singular creature is, at once, layered with moss, compared to the bark of a tree, impressed upon by the feet of birds, and imbued with the spray of the sea. This is not just a tortoise, this is a living compilation of many aspects of the environment it inhabits; it is a hybrid. Branka Arsić, in her Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau, details historically the modes of classification utilized by various scientists.

She criticizes John James Audubon for his Cartesian appropriation of an organism’s life for the means of scientific analysis (such as we have seen in Darwin’s account of the islands), and promotes the methods of Thomas Nuttall, whose theorization of the classification of life she summarizes here:

We carp at the anomalous - at the unclassifiable - only so long as the taxonomical fiction of fixed and separated identities, which standardizes beings, is understood to mirror their truth. But everything changes once we assume that, far from being rigorously separated, beings are rather changeable sites traversed by life’s mobility; they become processural, moving toward other beings so that “all the arrogance of solitary individuals,” as Nuttall puts it, is eluded. Arsić 147

Melville’s composite tortoise-bird-moss-tree hybrid is indeed a “changeable site traversed by life’s mobility”; its current form is at once the product of itself, avian-life, plant-life, and, indeed, human-life. Darwin, on the other hand, would be a supporter of the “taxonomical fiction of fixed and separated identities”; his tortoises are analyzed in such a way that they are only tortoises, and tortoises only in such a way that is useful to humanity: they make excellent soup, they are to be sliced near the tail, their fat produces beautiful oil, etc. This hybrid is also exemplary of Guattari’s and Deleuze’s “rhizome”, which we will now turn to.

We must bid a fond farewell to our supernatural and beloved tortoises, and set our sights on The Rock Rodondo and its various sea-fowl. I have thus far made brief references to the contrast between the vertical and the horizontal, a notion that will be expanded upon herein. The Rock Rodondo of Melville’s account is a large, tiered tower that serves as a “noble point of observation” (Melville 28) over the Galapagos archipelago. What is particularly interesting to thenarrator of The Encantadas is the structure of the tower, and the numerous sea-birds that find respite from their sea-flight upon the various tiers of the tower:

The tower rose in entablatures of strata to a shaven summit. These uniform layers, which compose the mass, form its most peculiar feature. For at their lines of junction they project flatly into encircling shelves, from top to bottom, rising one above another in graduated series. And so the eaves of any old barn or abbey are alive with swallows, so were all these rocky ledges with unnumbered sea-fowl… Not only were the eaves rustling with them, but they flew densely overhead, spreading themselves into a winged and continually shifting canopy. Melville 29

The tower is vertical, protruding straight out of the ocean, and tiered in structure. This vertical structure is contrasted by both the chain of islands, which could all be said to be part of the same horizontal stratum, and the “continually shifting canopy” of birds in flight that exists in another stratum, above the tower. This lengthy description of the inhabitants of the tower will allow me to complete this lengthy metaphor:

Let us first glance low down to the lowermost shelf of all… What outlandish beings are these? Erect as men, but hardly as symmetrical… Their bodies are grotesquely misshapen, their bills short; their feet seemingly legless; while the members at their side are neither fin, wing, nor arm. And truly neither fish, flesh, nor fowl is the penguin… Though dabbling in all three elements, and indeed possessing some rudimental claims to all, the penguin is at home in none… As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the tower serially disposed in order of their magnitude… thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in senatorial array. Melville 29 - 30

First, we must note a reminiscence of my previous point, made with the support of Arsić; the various facets of the penguin’s body makes it impossible to classify with the terms given to us by scientific taxonomies. They are also described as “erect as men”, which places humanity within such a realm that its body is comparable to an avian body. The latter part of this passage describes hierarchies of power among the birds, each level “dominating” the level beneath it. This allows me to come to my ultimate claim about The Rock Rodondo: the contrast between both horizontal structures (the archipelago itself, beneath the tower, and the canopy of birds above the tower) and the vertical structure of the tower itself, which is inhabited by creatures who find themselves displaced by dominating taxonomies, serves to subvert the very structure given to the tower by the narrator (its tiers, its thrones, its princedoms). Both horizontal strata, and the suggested amorphousness of the birds that inhabit the vertical structure, find themselves reflected in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus. I must ask here for the reader’s forgiveness of my incessant use of block quotes; I find it more useful (especially for such a difficult text as this one) to lay all my cards (flat!) on the table, and then to unpack their various meaning and applications to the primary text. I do not believe Guattari or Deleuze would argue against this structure of analysis, as they themselves “have been criticized for overquoting literary authors” (Deleuze & Guattari 4):

The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree… Nature doesn’t work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one… A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes… Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes… The rhizome itself assumes diverse forms, from ramified surface extensions in all directions to concretion in bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other… any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines… These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. Deleuze & Guattari 5 - 9

The “world-tree” here, would, then, be the Rock Rodondo; vertical, structured, fixing an order (the tiers, the “senatorial array”). The tower has its own means of classification and hierarchy, a structure that is subverted by the inhabitants of the tower themselves, as well as the aforementioned lateral strata, above and below. Animals can be rhizomes, as we see in the rats, the penguins, and our very old friends, the tortoises. They are not fixed into the classification imposed upon them by cold science; they have not Nuttall’s “‘arrogance of solitary individuals’” (Arsić 147). Rather, their features extend laterally throughout the animal kingdom, amongst themselves (rats, birds, fish), and into the realm of plant-life (the moss and the tree of the tortoise’s shell). Darwin, in his crude calculations, would seek to plot points, fix order and impose the dualisms and dichotomies among the natural order of things, which is not order itself, but chaos, and transcendence. The “extensions in all directions” of the rhizome might remind the reader of Melville’s and Darwin’s respective geographic explanation of the archipelago, which I have already mentioned. While Darwin describes the chain of islands as merely a “satellite attached to America” (Darwin 4), Melville extends in all directions to find points of reference:

Look edgeways… permit me to point out the direction… of certain interesting objects in the vast sea, which, kissing this tower’s base, we behold unscrolling itself towards the Antarctic Pole. We stand now ten miles from the Equator. Yonder, to the east… lies the continent, this Rock being just about on the parallel of Quito… We are at one of the three uninhabited clusters, which… sentinel, at long intervals from each other, the entire coast of South America. In a peculiar manner, also, they terminate the South American character of country. Of the unnumbered Polynesian chains to the westward, not one partakes of the qualities of the Encantadas. Melville 4

Darwin’s “satellite” is an example of his colonial rhetoric, implying that the archipelago belongs to America, in some way. Melville suggests just the opposite, that the islands belong not to South America, nor to the other archipelagos throughout the Pacific Ocean, and certainly not to America (where, when he returns, the narrator is haunted by visions of the island), but are of a character unique to themselves. That he extends in all lateral direction, on a flat map that we might imagine while reading, is reflective of the rhizome, where “there are no points or positions”. There is no locus of power or reference in a rhizome, but rather every point, or perhaps no point can be called the center. Thus, Melville subverts the colonial rhetoric of Darwin, both in his refusal to properly classify the animal- and plant-life of the islands, but also in his refusal to claim the islands in the name of any one country.

To conclude this essay, I will make a brief detour away from such abstract, and yet apt, philosophy into the field of eco-criticism. I mentioned in my introduction the current temporal classification of our atmosphere and environment, known as the Anthropocene. I argue that what Darwin promotes in his classification, and what Melville subverts in his prose, are precursors; foreboding, ominous images that foreshadow a world in which our appropriation of the environment becomes a perverse domination. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, in his essay “Posthuman Environs”, summarizes this idea in a way that is applicable to both accounts of the Galapagos:

We have crafted the word ‘Anthropocene’ to name this lithic record of our domination over time and matter, to demarcate an era immutably altered through our bustle. But the term also conveys the human love of making things with rocks and words. We imbue stone and language with meaning, both thereby becoming signifiers in the grandiloquent stories we tell about ourselves. Cohen 25

This “human love of making things with rocks and words” is reflective of Darwin’s taxonomies. It could be said that Darwin, through his incessant naming, reference and cataloguing, wished to become a signifier in the story that he is really telling about himself, about mankind’s domination over such natural beauty as is found in the Galapagos. Melville, conversely, wishes to celebrate this beauty, to make it mysterious and to give it a character all its own. His classifications are anomalous and sometimes quite silly, but his mission is profound. Melville, while promoting the uniqueness of all forms of life, and decrying mankind’s influence upon such “satellites” as the Galapagos Islands, subverts colonial and imperialist attitudes shared by his contemporaries towards a world that could exist without being impressed upon by the calculating, greedy nature that belongs to mankind, alone.

works cited:

Arsić, Branka. Bird relics: grief and vitalism in Thoreau. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 2016. Print.

Darwin, Charles, and Charles William Eliot. The voyage of the Beagle. Whitefish, MT:Kessinger Pub., 2005. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 1987. Print.

Melville, Herman. The encantadas and other stories. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Print.

Oppermann, Serpil, Serenella Iovino, and Jeffrey J. Cohen. Environmental humanities: voices from the anthropocene. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. Print.