Dodos Imagined

January 29, 2007

The New Yorker last week (Jan. 22, 2007) carried an article entitled "Digging for Dodos" by Ian Parker. It is mostly a record of a recent fossil expedition to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.. the island that was the home of the now extinct Dodo bird. In one area of the island was a swamp, known as the Mare aux Songes.. which was later covered over with rock. This former swamp has provided a snapshot of the Dodo's world before humans showed up to stay in 1598.

This would have made simply an interesting article were it not for the mention of Julian Hume, a scientist and artist. Parker writes about him:

...in his spare time he makes careful, although approximate, paintings of dodos and other extinct bird species, working with acrylic on paper. Three of these have been published in the journal Nature. This dual approach to the subject might not seem fully respectable to some paleontological colleagues, but Hume argues that a study of extinct animals calls for an imaginative and extrapolatory frame of mind, of a kind not always valued in research science: a readiness to see what is not there. [64]

The "dual approach" I take to mean the combination of traditional science with artistic representation. This happens to be a theme of recurring interest here in this blog.. the re-vivification of past worlds by means of artistic representations.

What might be the alternative? That is easy enough to see; it can be glimpsed in every dry science article. The analysis of bones and pollen counts allows for elegant tables and data, but does not allow room for the imagination. If this information about the past world is ever going to come alive there needs to be another step.. the imagining of that world and representation of it in some artistic medium.

The painting shown at the top of this blog is one of these efforts by Julian Hume, and it gives a sense of the way his project includes not just a re-imagining of the Dodo bird, but also a complete re-imagining of the island of Mauritius.. which is now nothing like its former self. (Strangely, this is not my first blog on the tiny island of Mauritius, which is treated in an essay on V.S. Naipaul's description of the island.. a blog which gives a sense of how unpristine the island now is.)

The Dodo itself has acquired a complex imaginative history.. and I located a brief video except in which Hume talks about early images of the Dodo. Its biggest break came when it was included in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where it was pictured as below:

That kind of portrayal in a classic text would be enough to keep any creature alive in the cultural imagination. The Dodo also came to acquire an odd status as the quintessential example of extinction. It couldn't have happened to a nicer species.. but I don't know how the Dodo was settled upon as the sign for extinction and not one of the myriad other unfortunate species.

Perhaps with this artistic re-vivification of the Dodo and its early habitat, the lost bird will become a sign for something more positive: the ability of scholarship to make real the past. For those who know how to read the tables and charts of a scientific article it may well be possible to imaginatively enter into that lost world.. but the rest of us need an artist.

In a world where change is accelerating, this kind of imaginative re-vivification of the past is an imperative for scholars.. it is part of the great future scholarly task of preservation. The old model for scholarship is to think in terms of analysis and data.. a model driven by the reality that important articles will be accessible to a relatively small group. The new model.. so it seems to me.. will be imaginative projects that are built upon analysis and data. This is a task now made possible by the internet and its ability to facilitate unique scholarly projects.. since it provides the unlimited storage capacity to present a wealth of pictures, maps and anything else that will help the imagination of the viewer grasp something that is no longer there. It looks like Julian Hume will be publishing a book (which I will need to buy!).. but this kind of creative project will someday find its home on the internet.

Oh, and here is an odd slide show featuring models of the Dodo that the New Yorker put online.