“Mental-Rental”™ – a Device to Destabilize Capitalism

by Liam Heneghan I hastily submitted this patent last week to provide an effective tool to further our revolutionary aims. This simple invention provides a novel mechanism to assist the Occupy Wall Street movement in bringing the system to its knees. Those who cannot march in the streets with Occupy Wall Street and yet who…

As Plain as the Nose on Your Face

by Liam Heneghan I learned through a mutual acquaintance that O’Cinnéide, that great embryologist, had died, so I attended his funeral mass at St. Vincent DePaul’s in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. He had recently turned sixty, and had died according to the note I got from O’Neill “in distressing circumstances.” O’Neill added that he would…

The Existential Equation – The Irish Pre-famine Population and the Dilemmas of a 7 billion person world

by Liam Heneghan The Irish Famine of 1846 killed more the 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. —Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (1867) Behold the potato chip! It’s the perfect substrate for immersing in delicious oils, an adroit vehicle for conveying toothsome flavors to the mouth. If one eschews the oils and the…

Brain, liquefaction of

by Liam Heneghan The following is an excerpt from my unpublished manuscript “A Shorter History of Bodily Fluids” B. Brain, liquefaction of: also known as encephalomalacia (from the Greek, μαλακία softening), necrencephalus (from Greek, νεκρο + κεϕαλή deadhead), ramollissement cérébral (from the French ramollissement cérébral), cerebromalacia (from the Greek, μαλακία a colloquial onanist, esp a…

Life on a pillar: environmental thought and the odor of sanctity

by Liam Heneghan The saint on the pillar stands,/The pillar is alone,/He has stood so long/That he himself is stone. Louis MacNeice, Stylite, 1940 [i] In Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Melville’s anachronistically recognized ecological masterpiece, a calculation is presented that on a three or four year voyage a seaman manning one of the mast-heads of…

The Heart and the Beard: a surgical story told mainly in aphorisms (of 140 characters or less)

By Liam Heneghan To Vassia, best friend and partner in matters of the heart! Context: The young doctors who had been prodding me a day or so after an appendectomy ran alarmed from my hospital bedside to call in a senior consultant. As a consequence of the high temperature I was running, a heart murmur,…

An Ascetic Encounter: Oisín the bard and Saint Patrick at the source of the Dodder

By Liam Heneghan For Oisín Heneghan, an exemplary contemporary Oisín. The River Dodder, a significant stretch of water that arises at Kippure in the valley of Glenasmole, Co. Wicklow, travels twenty-six kilometers through the Dublin suburbs before joining its more significant cousin, the River Liffey, at Ringsend. Together these rivers, along with other lesser streams…

The Great Urination Event and other tales of the Nitrogen Cycle (with a note on why Earth Needs More Mulch)

by Liam Heneghan Several years into my first large-scale field experiment, I noticed one of the technicians urinating on my experimental plot. It was a significantly worse event than when a cow inserted a hoof into one of my mesocosms in an adjacent part of the Co Kilkenny spruce plantation where I was working. The…

This is not a poem – learning by heart in a rote world

By Liam Heneghan For Patricia Monaghan, poet and friend “I am cold and alone on my tree root, sitting as still as stone.” I recited this forlornly, lost in E. J. Scovell’s poem. I was ten years old and competitively reciting at the Father Matthew Feis, an annual all-Ireland poetry festival. The year was 1974.…

A City for Human-clams: a Plea for Environmental Immobility

A young man of my acquaintance, adequately nourished, and provided with a room and a gaming console appears to be sustainable, quite extraordinarily so, in the environmental sense. He has a small physical footprint. A few square feet of a pleasantly upholstered couch in an ill-lit room is all that is needed to sustain him. From this perch he can command vast legions of hobgoblins, medieval warlocks, sport heroes, and assorted heavily-armed movie characters. He can distract himself for days at a time, emerging from his room very occasionally, like a three-toed sloth, to pad to the latrine. An army of youth so employed needs little in the way of a great outdoors. Slightly soiled pajamas, or underpants, it seems, can suffice for clothing. The nutritional requirements of this battalion extend little beyond sodas and pop-tarts. In light of this, might it not be wise for us to reverse course, and rather than advocating strenuously, as many of us have, for urban kids to get out of doors to cultivate responsibBytheriverle environmental stewardship, might we not instead council the cultivation of obsessive gameplay, reclassifying it as environmentally laudable behavior?

If we take this pragmatic tack, setting aside our pious feelings about the “old environment” and the worthy pleasures to be found there, it is apparent that there are several tendencies in contemporary life that we might encourage rather than scorn. We have for too long decried our sedentary natures and the accompanying tendencies towards corpulence of body and spirit. Bloat a little, rest a little more; you are doing your bit for the environment. Applaud your small adventures in the great indoors – a peregrination from fridge to sofa will never have felt so good, and the lazy-boy is a fine environmental destination. Think of the gas saved compared with a trip to Yosemite – no planes, no trains, no automobiles. Even if your kids might like to romp in the corn fields of some distant rural hinterland, spare yourself the self-laceration. Quite simply a family ensconced in a moderately appointed metropolitan apartment may well have a smaller environmental cost than a family whizzing around in their so-called mini-van in some suburban Eden.

A back of the envelop calculation shows that the environmental footprint of the immobile is smaller that of one in constant auto-motion. Whole earths can be saved by merely standing still[1]. 

To add just another small suggestion: if we could just promote a little selective devolution – a stepping back in evolutionary time – this could be amply rewarding in terms of a greatly reduced human impact. Many successful organisms are rooted in one place! Rather than conveying themselves to their messy foodstuffs, (often, it should be noted, by means of a tedious and energetic bumbling, swinging, galloping or walking), their food comes to them. But let us not be guilty of absurdity in our aspirations: advocating a return to plant life would be foolishness and any half-meditative evolutionist would remind us that plants are exquisitely evolved organisms in their own right – there is no “going back” to plants. No, rather we should devolve to the condition of the sessile organisms: something like a sea anemone or a coral or a barnacle. In fact, any animal that fixes itself to a substrate and waits for food to come its way can serve as a model. Lest this seem implausible, it should be noted that the evolutionary mechanism to achieve this is available to us already. There is nothing new under the sun, we have been told. And indeed if we follow the simple edict of switching our sexual fancies to those of our species that are already sluggish, this should start paying evolutionary dividends fairly rapidly. The children of a union between a gamer, for instance, and let’s say a knitter, or a pursuer of any of the meticulously slow-paced crafts (other excellent choices for biddable partners: scrapbookers, quilters, origami enthusiasts), should have sessile tendencies, on the basis of meticulous calculations ratified by the most rigorous of the sciences. It is hard to see why love-matches between pursuits that require nimble fingers rather than active legs should not provide an excellent evolutionary fresh start for the “new species” of human-kind.

As generation surpasses generation, human progeny should put down roots, so to speak; not, of course, as actual roots. No, plant roots are energetically expensive, diverting valuable resources from above to below. Rather, I advocate, indeed I predict, a simple anchoring of flesh to rock. We shall extrude byssal strands like our distant cousins amongst the mollusks. Imagine therefore entire villages or cities of human-clams, adhering firmly to bare rock, content to stay in one place, perhaps busily knitting, viewing television, or at play in sundry and sedentary ways.

Now you may object that this solution to our environmental prMonkey3oblems, despite its initial attractiveness, is flawed in one crucial respect. Human need for nutriment may not be easily satisfied in this otherwise plausible scenario. One obvious solution is to train the lesser species, which otherwise do nothing particularly useful, to provision us with some necessary morsels. Would it really be difficult for a well-trained bonnet monkey to bake small treats (how difficult can it be to make a pop-tart?) and to brew calorific beverages and serve them to their quiescent masters and mistresses? In India this species are already pesters us; can we not harness their antrophilia for good? Adding to the charm of this solution, considers this: since monkeys are part of nature, their “environmental impacts”, by definition, do not count as “environmental damage” (like earthquakes, volcanoes and marauding elephants, some seemingly enormous damage does not count at all!).

Remember finally that in current models of climate change sea levels are predicted to rise. Most of our coastal areas will be flooded. Where formerly this would have been an enormous human tragedy, under our new evolutionary regime it now, of course, seems like the final piece falling into place. Cities of pedunculate humans, heads bobbing freely like the smiling calyxes of large aquatic plants can then dispense with monkeys, and can wait for good and tasty sea-things to waft on by. 

Forthcoming in Chris Green and Liam Heneghan (Eds); Brute Neighbors: Poems, Essays, and Photographs on the Urban Environment. Photos by Randall Honold.

[1] 5.25 Earth equivalents for a typical Midwestern who moves versus 4.25 Earth equivalents for the immobile. http://myfootprint.org/en/your_carbon_footprint/