Terminal decline: an epic
Pity the poor Balearic lizard,[i] whose number has been taken by the horseshoe whip snake.[ii] And take note of art critic Albert-László Barabási, purveyor of the path to pre-eminence in the world of modern art.[iii] Renown means being owned by others in the national consciousness: it is a chimaera, a form of life and death struggle, delineated by Darwin. This is not a failure of intention: rather a case of needs must, akin to the wall lizard and whip snake or Barabási’s population of artists, of whom few survive and fewer thrive. After all, even Marilyn Monroe recognised she is no more than a doppelganger in other people’s dreams of themselves. In her final interview, she confesses: ‘I like to state here and now [that] fame is fickle. It stirs up envy. “Well, […] who the [fuck] does she think she is… Marilyn Monroe?”’[iv] The story of survival tends to take those who oppose it down with it, not quite a virtuous cycle, hence the whip snake. I consider the creative arts and much else besides to be a measure of things they are not and never have or will be. It’s like the faculty of reason that heedlessly orbits this or that terrestrial body, this or that galaxy, this godhead or that, instead of simply plonking right down onto a solid surface and saying: here we are, we’ve landed. Words and ideas spring out of this padlocked casket of 26 characters to create tumbling daisy chains—to faltering or no avail.[v] And, to top off this hyper-production, the five vowels appear as our redoubtable oligarchs of saying.[vi] It’s the reverse of evolution: a squandering of squandering. ‘Trees do not grow from the ground’, declares Richard Freyman, citing seventeenth-century pneumatic chemist Jan Baptist Van Helmont’s willow experiment, in which the five-pound tree grows over five years into a 169-pound monster, living largely on air. You see, the carbon dioxide that nourished it contains all the vowels except ‘u’—including a double pair of ‘i’s and ‘o’s. Numbers and letters in the end don’t matter much. They extend into their own expanding atmospheres, like carbon dioxide, like galaxies, like renown for Marilyn Monroe, found deceased two days after the interview. And don’t take my word for meaning, as if it’s a scraping of tissue that surprises and reveals an underlying disorder designed to bring the best out of us as a species. To the brilliant Heidegger the term dasein is such a tissue scrape. Meaning leaves every year drop and are replaced. But let’s get back to our specimen prey, the Balearic lizard, and our specimen predator, the nonvenomous whip snake, who together comprise our cunning little chase story. The snake whips-a-way, so to speak, from the island of Ibiza to the islet of Sanata Eulària, a mere 450 metres away—a terse but necessary watery migration, given the need for fresh food and the devastation it has wrought on the population of wall lizards on the island. Ironically, it turns out that the truer villain in the story is not the whip snake but the wealthy Ibiza landholders, whose penchant for adorning their properties with decorative olive trees inadvertently provides safe harbour in their clefts and foliage for hibernating snakes and their eggs. Common sense chases round and round after this; I must go literary to get a proper perspective. Maybe that balance is to be found in Milton’s heartfelt determination in Paradise Lost, in medias res, ‘to justify the ways of God to mankind’; or the encounter with ‘middle of life’ refugee Dante, discovering himself in Canto 1 of his Divine Comedy, ‘within a dark forest, / For the straightforward path was lost’. Or take our own teller of tall tales, enigmatic Kendrick Smithyman, who informs us in his prototypical ‘Parable of Two Talents’ that ‘Man and a Brute lie proper in one pit’ The whip snake, for its part, arrived at Ibiza little more than a puny shortish creature, originating on the Spanish mainland, only to flourish over time, growing longer and larger, some now two metres in length and ‘as thick as a man’s wrist’.[vii] The snake’s flourishing proves the lizard’s demise. Now ‘endangered’, the poor lizard, in another postmodernist irony, is increasingly marginalised on the island due to another penchant shared by locals and tourists alike: a growing craze to accumulate stand-in ‘kitsch lizard merchandise’, figures as appealing as the actual ones they displace, though bereft of life. This links us back to Barabási and the life that is in art. Art courts the heterodox. In Santa Eulària, the lizard count collapses from 72 in 2016 to just three seven years later. Nowadays the number across all 10 islets is exactly zero, extinct. I’m talking ‘extirpation’.[viii] Yet remember, back in the days of our lofty epics, salvation was extended to and beckoned all. A movement back in that direction takes place on the mainland at Barcelona Zoo, where an innovative purpose-built ‘Noah’s ark captive breeding programme’ is established to help redeem the failing population. In another twist of fate, in several urban areas of Ibiza, locals further boost the lizard’s regeneration by taking some of these delightful creatures into their homes, while also—often quite deliberately—killing or running over snakes on the road in their cars and trucks. It’s like this in the Book of Genesis, where the pre-eminent demented serpent, bringing humankind to instantiate an official fall, unwittingly opens the prospect of their thriving imaginatively to compose stories and paint paintings of greater or lesser renown, including this little nameless one: ‘like a fire in an old church’.
notes
[i] Podarcis pityusensis.
[ii] Hemorrhois hippocrepis.
[iii] ‘Why do some artists become famous?’, Albert-László Barabási. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgZ1X4Dok3Y
[iv] ‘Marilyn Monroe: The Last Interview’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWm7bre-lLw
[v] When I was a child my mother prepared alphabet soup for the family dinner. The pasta letters were entirely upper-case and I never knew better than that they were equally represented in number, a distribution curve of 1:1. What had they to do with meaning beyond my appetite at dinner time?
[vi] In contemporary novels, the frequency of vowel-use, in descending order, is something like: e=12.7%, a=8.2%, o=7.5%, i=7%, u=2.8% (Wikipedia).
[vii] We learn from the article that Ibiza inhabitants had always prized the tame lizard for its colourful aesthetic and homely appeal, while it was also noted that the creature helps regulate the island’s broader ecosystem. See: ‘”This is a tragedy”: swimming snakes open new front in battle with Balearic lizards’, Guardian, 31 May 2026.
[viii] Back in their heyday, the columnist informs us, ‘each of the dozens of islands and islets that make up the Pityusic Islands [sic] [had] a different [lizard] population whose distinct colourations include green, blue, black, brown, grey and orange’. Indeed, a lush palette of choice.