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 and it is a chimera, 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 lizard and whip snake or Barabási’s population of artists, of whom few survive and far fewer thrive. After all, even Marilyn Monroe recognises she is a mere doppelganger in other people’s dreams of themselves. In her final interview, she avers: ‘I like to state here and now [that] fame is fickle. It stirs up envy. “Well, who the [fuck] is she? Who 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 language and art and much else besides a measure of things they are not and never have been 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 alphabetic characters to create tumbling daisy chains—to faltering avail.[v] And, to top off this hyper-representativity, the five vowels are seen to appear in excess in an oligarchic profligacy.[vi] It’s the reverse of evolution: a squandering of squandering. To illustrate, Richard Freyman states: ‘trees do not grow from the ground’. He cites the experiment of seventeenth century pneumatic chemist Jan Baptist Van Helmont with a five-pound willow plant which over five years grows into a 169-pound monster, deriving its main sustenance not from the earth but from CO2 in the air. Carbon dioxide contains all the vowels except ‘u’—two ‘I’s, two ‘o’s. Numbers and letters in the end don’t much matter. They expand into their expanding atmosphere, 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 throat 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 a tree that every year drop and are replaced. But let’s get back to the Balearic lizard–our specimen prey—and the nonvenomous whip snake—our specimen predator—who together comprise our rich little chase story. Back in their heyday ‘each of the dozens of islands and islets that make up the Pityusic Islands [had] a different [lizard] population whose distinct colourations include green, blue, black, brown, grey and orange’. A lush postmodernist gallery of choice. The snake whips-a-way, so to speak, from the island of Ibiza to Sanata Eulària islet, 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. The snake’s journey may not exactly align with the Barabási narrative, but you get the picture. Ironically, it turns out that the real villain in the story is not the snake but the unwitting Ibiza landholders, whose penchant is to adorn their properties with decorative olive trees that extend safe harbour to hibernating snakes and their eggs in their clefts and foliage. Commonsense chases round-and-round after this one. I must go literary to get balance and a proper perspective. Maybe it’s 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’. We learn from the Guardian article that Ibiza inhabitants had always prized the tame lizard for its colourful aesthetic appeal and homeliness, while it was also noted that the creature helps regulate the island’s broader ecosystem.[vii] The snake, for its part, arrived at the island little more than a puny shortish creature, originating on the Spanish mainland, only to flourish over time, growing longer and larger, some eventually ‘as thick as a man’s wrist’. Its flourishing has proven the lizard’s downfall. Now ‘endangered’, the poor lizard, in another postmodernist irony, is increasingly marginalised on the island due to another penchant of locals and tourists alike: a growing craze to accumulate stand-in ‘kitsch lizard merchandise’, figures as tame and appealing as the lizards they displace, though bereft of actual life. This links us back to Barabási and the life that is in art. Life courts the heterodox. In Santa Eulària, the lizard count tumbles to three in 2023, from 72 seven years earlier. Nowadays the number across all 10 islets is exactly zero, extinct. I’m talking ‘extirpation’. Yet remember, back in the days of our lofty epics, salvation was extended to and beckoned all. A movement back in that direction is taking place on the mainland at Barcelona Zoo, where an innovative purpose-built ‘Noah’s ark captive [protected] breeding programme’ is established to support a regeneration of the lizard population. In another twist of fate, in several urban areas of Ibiza, a more recent revival of the lizard population is fostered by locals who take these delightful creatures into their homes, while also—and 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 humans to instantiate an official fall, inadvertently 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] The living world seems to lean forward away from what it was, always unbalanced. See: ‘”This is a tragedy”: swimming snakes open new front in battle with Balearic lizards’, Guardian, 31 May 2026.