WINGS
OF DESIRE
Sydney
Sun Herald
26-07-1998
by
Paul McDermott
Paul
McDermott finds clues to human behaviour in the unlikeliest of
places.
"A
small figure flits back and forth across the rainforest floor. Between the sagging
branches a tiny thief works tirelessly. His keen eye pillages the
landscape for morsels that he can use. Discerning and tactful,
the wrong colour or shape and the item is immediately discarded.
An artisan of the highest order, he returns to his concealeed
castle and places his newly found twig in place. Filled with
pride, he pauses to survey the majesty before him, an
architectural tribute to nature. He possesses the mad desire of
Van Gogh, he is the Gaudi of the animal kingdom: the humble and
insane bowerbird"*
The bowerbird
goes to obscene lengths to attract a mate. It creates lavish
structures filled with bright objects, plants "lawns",
builds stages to perform on and, occasionally, will paint
interior walls with regurgitated charcoal and vegetable pulp.
There is one
reason and one reason only for the strange behaviour of the
bowerbird: it has too much time on its hands (and it doesn't even
have hands). Bored out of its tiny bird-brain, this evolutionary
freak was forced to come up with an inventive way to find a
meaningful existence. With surprisingly few predators inhabiting
its environment and a plentiful supply of food, the bowerbird has
filled up its time in a way that is anything but natural.
Like the
bowerbird, we are the most successful creature in our neck of the
woods, having nothing to fear from any other creature. The
consequence of this hard-won position at the top of the food
chain is that we spend less time fighting for our survival, which
leaves us with more lesirure time. We need something to distract,
entertain and occupy ourselves and, like the bowerbird, we have
found it feathering our nests. We crowd our homes with useless
trinkets, discarded toys and mountains of paper, defining
ourselves by what we possess. And from these citadels of crap we
coo to our prospective partners. Our major shopping malls are the
cluttered landscape where bright shiny objects lure the
"bowerbird within".
Overcome by
our instinct to shop, we spend hours dragged from cabinet to
change room to counter in search of the perfect ornament, the
exquisite artefact. The human bower can be found from Harrods to
the two dollar shop, picking up bargains. What we select
indicates our likes and dislikes, our strengths and weaknesses
and, like our feathered friend, our little chests puff out with
pride when our effort has been noticed.
The tragedy
is, although we have seen numerous documentaries about this
bizarre bird, we have failed to learn the valuable lesson it can
teach us. We have failed to see we follow the same imbecilic
pattern - we too have a surplus of time. Over the centuries we
have weakned ourselves physically and mentally. We have become
the knock-kneed, feather-brained, sparrow-chested cousins of the
bowerbird. At the moment, half this country is complaining about
working a measly 35-hour week and the other half is always
wanting something for nothing. Everyone wants more money for
doing less and, as a net result, all of us are plunged into
financial chaos. There is a devestatingly simple solution to this
circular trauma: work twice as long for half as much.
If we brought
back the 70-hour week (or the 90-hour week) then people wouldn't
have enough energy to complain. At least we'd stop being a nation
of whingers. A clear message is being sent to us from the
rainforest floor; its time to wake up and listen to the song of
evolution: for the bird of paradise, life is hell. We have always
been jealous of the bird, envying its ability to fly. From the
doomed Icarus, to Freudian floating dreams, to air travel, we
have yearned for the limitless freedom of the sky. The sad truth
is, if we were born with wings, they would be the wings of the
bowerbird and life would remain essentially the same.
*This
extract was taken from Tarquin Regent's The Secret Life of the
Bower' (1952)
Thanks to Lisa
(H) for this Article
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