“There’s no place like residence,” Dorothy sighs in The Wizard of Oz. However residence will not be a spot — it’s a locus of longing, at all times haunted by our existential homelessness. “Welcome residence!” a cheaply suited dealer as soon as exclaimed at me, swinging open the door to a tiny studio as my foot fell on the beige wall-to-wall carpet and my eyes on the 2 useless roaches embracing within the nook. Between the time I left my household residence in Bulgaria in my late teenagers and the time I settled in Brooklyn in my late twenties, I moved out and in of housing throughout continents and oceans, biking by way of dozens of dwellings. Irrespective of what number of books I shelved and what number of vegetation I potted, none ever felt like a house. That took one other decade — not due to something in the home, however as a result of I had lastly begun feeling at residence in myself.
Different animals don’t anguish with such existential troubles. “They’re so placid and self-contain’d,” Whitman wrote. “They don’t sweat and whine about their situation. They don’t lie awake at the hours of darkness and weep for his or her sins… Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of proudly owning issues.” From the second they’re born till the second they die, different animals are totally at residence of their being, for they don’t undergo the tyranny of a self, with all its stressed want for expression and actualization. The houses they construct — unusual and varied, baffling and delightful of their singularity — replicate that purity of being. No ego and no self-image govern the design — solely the beautiful genius of evolution, refining the blueprint over eons to make every residence an ideal temple for consecrating every creature’s organic future.
The surprise, perfection, and variety of animal dwellings come alive in artist Isabelle Simler’s e book Home (public library) — a vibrant catalogue of nature’s creativity: the miraculous courtship cathedral of the satin bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus), the “lace citadel” of the cross orbweaver spider (Araneus diadematus), the “silky residence” of the comet moth (Argema mittrei), the “mossy miniature residence” of the hummingbird (Trochilidae), the “cactus cabin” of the world’s smallest owl, the elf owl (Micrathene whitneyi), smaller than a sparrow.
There’s emergence incarnate within the termite cathedral, constructed by hundreds of thousands of blind bugs with no chief and no blueprint. There’s an affirmation of poet and potter M.C. Potter’s credo that “the creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present” within the case-making caddisfly, housing its larvae in cosy circumstances made from no matter is available: bits of wooden, grains of sand, shells and pebbles and marine particles stitched along with silk. There’s the sheer astonishment of the baya weaver’s nest, meticulously woven from recent grasses that change shade underneath the solar’s rays.
Practically a century after Rachel Carson pioneered the then-radical method of writing concerning the pure world from the residing perspective of every creature, Simler channels every animals’s method to its residence in a brief singsong first-person poem.
GRASSY LODGE
of the Eurasian harvest mouse
Micromys minutusMy tail is aware of every blade of grass
and tethers me safely
as I swing by way of the air,
a micro-acrobat
wearing tender pores and skin.
My tangled nest,
woven from grasses,
is formed like slightly ball.
Stem to stalk, stalk to stem,
a bounce or two,
and in between
I relaxation in my home.
PAPIER-MÂCHÉ HOTEL
of the widespread wasp
Vespula vulgarisI nibble the dry bark,
and with my saliva I mush the wooden fibers collectively.
That’s how I make the paper pulp
that I’ll use to construct my palace.
The shades of shade differ
relying on the tree
I’ve been chewing.
Inside, every part is nicely organized.
The hexagonal cells are
neatly unfold out,
organized in round tiers
held by cardboard pillars.
The light-weight nest
is shrouded
in layers of paper,
and so it stays
on the excellent
temperature.
HAUTE COUTURE BEDCHAMBER
of the widespread tailorbird
Orthotomus sutoriusWith three mango leaves
and the tip of my sharp beak,
I style my tailored home
on the fringe of the forest.
Carrying a blade of grass or thread from an internet,
I jab, I sew, I flit right here and there.
Stitching straight traces or zigzags,
I hem, I make knots, I chirp and cheep.
Lastly, I pad out my residence with woolly pink fibers,
animal hair, and one other chirrup or two.
What emerges is a stunning testomony to naturalist Sy Montgomery’s poetic remark that “our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom — and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.”
Complement Home with The Blue Hour — Simler’s breathtaking celebration of nature’s rarest shade — then revisit the sapiens counterpart to those creaturely dwellings in Carson Ellis’s tender illustrated catalogue of the many kinds of human homes.
