PS: This 'Poem for an Orang-utan' makes use only of calls produced by orang-utans in the wild and it is meant to be performed by humans for an audience of orang-utans. By giving back these wise men of the forest our rendering of their own sounds this poem hopes to kindle in the orang-utan a new appreciation for, and an awareness of, its own language. All this as part of the PrimatePoetic project to bring the languages of the great and lesser apes closer together. The transcription of each call is my own, to allow verification with field recordings the scientific nomenclature for each call is given between brackets.

"So in a single drop of water the microscope discovers, what motions, what tumult, what wars, what pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle-dance of Death & Life, Death hunting Life & Life renewed and invigorated by Death … a many meaning cypher."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“It was as if Botany should reason from the leaf-patterns woven into our table-cloths ... Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches things move under its microscope”
- Ernest Fenollosa

We do not see things as they are,
we see them as we are.
- Anais Nin

Bacteria are cults of interpretation not endless reprints of a few domesticated strands as if they were best-selling paperbacks. In the wild only a fraction of bacterial species can be cultured and the smallest working unit is the individual only in artificial situations of abundance. The biofilm, animalcule phalanxes immersed in self-brewed Bella Donna, is what the naturalist catalogues as the keystone organizational form of bacterial survival. The BacterioSphere is the microbial equivalent of the weather, a provisional collection of recognized formations to name by analogy what is mostly beyond direct observation. Shotgun sequencing reveals the diverse make-up of the biofilm, hints at its existence as an assortment of adaptive feedback loops but it leaves to the imagination the fierness of their independence and the intelligence of their strategies. When the bacteria are united they can never be divided: in their fight against death, bactericide by antibiotics or otherwise, the collective sculpts the bodies and programmes the behaviour of its constituent by direct excitation. Souls are rewritten by accepting and ejecting genetic shrapnel, this happens with such speed and with such variety of means and mechanisms that they change faster than our notion of a specie can accommodate for.



A bacterium is a system within a system, a wheel within a wheel. Hindu mythology in its effort to set a deity against every essential quality of the universe is a minor work in comparison to the pandemonium of niches inhabited by bacteria, from deep-sea thermal vents to magnetic fields to human probes orbiting outer space. Mutations are the background radiation of biology, a slow invisible random hand pushing species apart. This is in the textbooks and it means to say that an organism can only learn what it already knows, that the thinker/seer/hearer has no direct control over what it thinks/sees/hears. The bacteria jaywalk their way out of this fatalist dilemma by working magic. "They even..." are the bacteriologists most frequently overheard colloquial prefix. Yes: the applause thunders from the benches when 1) a colony under attack makes a heroic comeback by stealing the right bit of DNA from the poisonous other to synthesize the antidote 2) a bacterium targets specific regions of its structure to mutate with accelerated pace to provide creative solutions when they are needed most. 3) dished-in bacteria generate electricity, oil and insulin 4) a biofilm solves chess problems, performs logical operations and predicts future states of its environment. By holding on to its open-ended relationship with the world, by remaining a process instead of becoming a finished beast, by resisting purity, bacteria are able to create their own relevance by colonizing esoteric realities.

The savage simplicity of the bacteria is not a sign of its stupidity but a token of its long term commitment to survival. When looking at the tree of life in terms of creative ability it is clear that it is not the bacteria that are primitive; it are the branches 'above' them that are caged in an ancient, conservative, over-elaborate and fragile textual heritage. The lichen, that many-coloured plant-like coat of nothingness, that centrifugal furry Mandelbrot cloak spreading-out in search for a minimal splash of sunlight across otherwise lifeless mineral surfaces underscores the point that the vortex may be the ideal but that the bacterial condition is above strict obedience to even its own principles.



The chattering classes are fond of quoting big bacterial numbers like the following on their blogs: 500 different species of bacteria are to be found in any single human body, 100 trillion cells in all equalling 10% of our dry bodyweight, one kilogram of bacterial matter is in our gut alone, etc. etc. The numbers reiterate a position defended by one prominent student of the bug: "They are Us". Without the unacknowledged legislation of the bacteria, inside and outside us, there is no us. The animal kingdom, is a pareidoliac catastrophe, a by-product of the BacterioSphere. Let it be noted.

With the bacteria life has put its foot down: what the life force has woven into the bacteria, with the finest threads of gold it could find, is a complete disregard for superfluous possessions. Bacteria are an anarchic reticulating bulk of slime. They are composed out of bits of everything, as if the most talented Jura watchmaker found himself scratching an itch on an intergalactic nanotech scrapyard. They are as self-reliant as a mob of freshly ashore Russian sailors looking for a drink: they will get what they want in one way or another. Bacteria have past nor future. They are always brand new and forever close to their roots. As a superorganism they are obedient to the metaphor of the magic carpet only, and of course the starry-eyed have proposed sentience, speculating on the possibility of human-bacteria communication through an interface of chemico-poetic matrices. Cherish these thoughts with agnostic sympathy. Like Chinese is its own classic language, bacteria are their own ur-species. But while Chinese caved in to the flaky concessions of Pinyin and the foreign logic of the Qwerty-keyboard, the bacteria have remained high-spirited literati, loyal to the allusive rococo of Classic Mandarin. By taking life as it comes, by making sense of what is available, bacteria are able to arrive at bewildering solutions to the ever pressing problem of how to make the best of a hopeless situation on a beggars budget: every white coat has at least one story of bacteria thriving under conditions meant to kill them.



Bacterial ingenuity has written a new chapter to the book of the death: even on the brink of whispering last words the final call does not always come. The rock-hand-scissors motive stands as a parallel for those self-mummifying bacteria who outmanoeuvre death by transforming themselves into a metabolically suspended quasi-crystal: the endospore is the downward spiral that goes upwards, a tautological emergency exit into blissful oblivion or oblivious bliss or blissful obliviousness, an paradoxical ark that only prolonged boiling can sink. The formation of an endospore is the most monumental coup of evolution, a transformation of life into non-life. According to any meaningful definition or theory of life the endospore is death, but, of course, it is death with the snag of resurrection. Once environmental conditions favour normal living again the endospore return to life as if the last 6000 years never happened. Religions have been founded on less.

In short. Bacteria are vivid shorthand pictures of nature, the psychedelic spectrum analysis of what life can be, the Gordian knot that ties everything together, the near-immortal ideograms through which life creates its floating record of extreme imagination. Bacteria are a jubilant never-ending free verse without punch line.

The Penan inhabits the western and northern parts of Borneo, primarily the Malaysian state of Sarawak. Until quite recently they were able to sustain themselves in the same way as their forefathers, as nomads living in the vast rain forests. There are three reasons why their traditional way of life is coming to an end:

Firstly, the forest is simply disappearing due to ruthless exploitation. Tropical hardwood makes a tremendous profit on the Chinese and Japanese markets, which has lead to an immense ecological disaster.

Secondly, but linked to the problem of deforestation, the Malaysian government wants the Penan out of the forest in order to reach the national goal of becoming a modern, industrialised nation in the nearer future. In the “modern world” people cannot live in the jungle!

Thirdly, the Penan are subjected to Christian missionaries that systematically aim at deconstructing their religious and intellectual heritage. Malaysia is predominantly Islamic, but the Christians are allowed to roam freely among the Penan, as long as their efforts help the government clear the forest from the nomads. The goal of the missionaries is to make the Penan leave their usual habitat, because "true Christians live in houses and wear clothes", as one missionary explained to me.

Lana: Chow in machine?
Trainer (lying): Yes.
Lana: No chow in machine.
Trainer: What in machine?
Lana: Cabbage in machine.
Trainer (confessing): Yes, cabbage in machine.
Lana (exasperated): You move cabbage out of machine.

Consider the reception of his [chimp Ally] first efforts with oil paints on canvas. One of the assistants collected several of his canvasses and showed them to an art-historian., not telling him that the works had been executed by a chimpanzee. The critic himself was beside enthusiasm. "I knew Pollack was coming back!" he told the graduate assistent.

His [chimp Booee] parents are unknown, but it is known before he came to the institute that his brain was split in a laboratory. Splitting the brain by severing the corpus callosum is an operation performed on humans in severe cases of epilepsy and on chimps in experiments to determine the properties of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The operation took place when Booee was quite young, and so far there has been little manifest evidence of its effects on his behaviour except in his paintings, which invariably consist of two distinct scribblings in opposite corners of the canvas.

The ape quickly learned to associate the drawing with the reward but as soon as this condition had been established the animal took less interest in the lines it was drawing. Any old scribble would do and then it would immediately hold out its hand for the reward. The careful attention the animal had paid previously to design, rhythm, balance and composition would be gone and the worst kind of commercial art was born!