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Aurochs and Auks: Essays on Mortality and Extinction
Aurochs and Auks is a deeply moving and intelligent meditation on the natural processes of death and extinction, renewal and continuity. Prompted by his own near-death in a time of pandemic, John Burnside explores the history of the auroch (Bos primigenius), the wild cattle that has become the source of so much sacred and cultural imagery across Europe, from the Minotaur and the Cretan bull dances to Spanish corrida traditions. He then tells the story of the puffin-like Great Auk, a curious bird whose extinction in the mid-nineteenth century was caused by human persecution. In the final essay Burnside proposes an alternative way of being – a richer, pagan deep-ecological narrative where we could abandon notions of human exceptionalism and accept our rightful place among the family of species.
128 pages, Hardcover
Published October 18, 2021
3 people are currently reading
119 people want to read
About the author
John Burnside
96 books278 followersJohn Burnside was a Scottish writer. He was the author of nine collections of poetry and five works of fiction. Burnside achieved wide critical acclaim, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2000 for The Asylum Dance which was also shortlisted for the Forward and T.S. Eliot prizes. He left Scotland in 1965, returning to settle there in 1995. In the intervening period he worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener and, for ten years, as a computer systems designer. Laterly, he lived in Fife with his wife and children and taught Creative Writing, Literature and Ecology courses at the University of St. Andrews.
[Author photo © Norman McBeath]
[Author photo © Norman McBeath]
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 5, 2021
If you look back over the history of the earth, you would find that life ebbs and flows in cycles, life blooms and crashes depending on so many different factors that sometimes we can only see with the benefit of hindsight. In the Anthropocene though, we are the ones causing the most recent spate of extinction and it is not getting any better at the moment.
What prompted John Burnside to write about these morbid and depressing extinctions was his near-death experience of Covid. It was a severe case and he ended up in hospital. His wife was told to prepare for the worst. This very act of reaching the abyss and peering over the edge will remain with him forever, as will the taste of that tomato sandwich as his health improved. As he recovered it gave him time to think about the natural processes of death and extinction, renewal and continuity.
When a species becomes extinct, that form is gone: no echoes, no shadow, no living memory. More: it is gone, not only as itself, but as the part it played in the Overall
It is quite a disturbing book at times, he ventures back into history to discuss the Nazi attempts to regenerate the aurochs as they tried to recreate the history of the Song of the Nibelungs. This pursuit of recreating a creature for ideological purposes was doomed to failure, the original animals were driven to extinction in the late seventeenth century. One positive that came from it though is that the land that Goring had is now part of the Schorfheide-Chorin Biosphere Reserve which is now home to lots of endangered animals.
Similar ideologies are driving the elite billionaire class that we have in the world today. Their pursuit of money and power is pushing the planet to the ragged edge and it feels like when they have exhausted and polluted it completely, retired to their Bond-style lairs, we won’t have many pieces to pick up. He like many others are starting to do now looks at the politics and powers behind land ownership and how we need to start to reclaim it for all not the few.
Land that belongs to someone is no longer land where anyone can meaningfully belong
Six days after he was supposed to have died, he was collected from the hospital by his wife, he looked out the car windows on the way home realising that in the short time he was very ill, summer had arrived and his outlook on life had changed forever. It took me a little while to get into this collection of four essays. The subject matter is pretty heavy after all. But the book grew on me as I read through it. Burnside is equally concerned about why we are doing what we are, as much as what we are doing to our planet and he proposes ideas that could make a difference to our survival on this small blue dot.
What prompted John Burnside to write about these morbid and depressing extinctions was his near-death experience of Covid. It was a severe case and he ended up in hospital. His wife was told to prepare for the worst. This very act of reaching the abyss and peering over the edge will remain with him forever, as will the taste of that tomato sandwich as his health improved. As he recovered it gave him time to think about the natural processes of death and extinction, renewal and continuity.
When a species becomes extinct, that form is gone: no echoes, no shadow, no living memory. More: it is gone, not only as itself, but as the part it played in the Overall
It is quite a disturbing book at times, he ventures back into history to discuss the Nazi attempts to regenerate the aurochs as they tried to recreate the history of the Song of the Nibelungs. This pursuit of recreating a creature for ideological purposes was doomed to failure, the original animals were driven to extinction in the late seventeenth century. One positive that came from it though is that the land that Goring had is now part of the Schorfheide-Chorin Biosphere Reserve which is now home to lots of endangered animals.
Similar ideologies are driving the elite billionaire class that we have in the world today. Their pursuit of money and power is pushing the planet to the ragged edge and it feels like when they have exhausted and polluted it completely, retired to their Bond-style lairs, we won’t have many pieces to pick up. He like many others are starting to do now looks at the politics and powers behind land ownership and how we need to start to reclaim it for all not the few.
Land that belongs to someone is no longer land where anyone can meaningfully belong
Six days after he was supposed to have died, he was collected from the hospital by his wife, he looked out the car windows on the way home realising that in the short time he was very ill, summer had arrived and his outlook on life had changed forever. It took me a little while to get into this collection of four essays. The subject matter is pretty heavy after all. But the book grew on me as I read through it. Burnside is equally concerned about why we are doing what we are, as much as what we are doing to our planet and he proposes ideas that could make a difference to our survival on this small blue dot.
November 7, 2021
Full disclosure…a lot of this book went way over my head so what you are about to read is my interpretation of where my thoughts went whilst reading this book. There are four essays here, the first is about the mighty Aurochs, it once roamed Europe but as farming became more popular it gradually ran out of space and was gone. The Aurochs is an animal that not everybody may have heard of, probably because it hasn’t featured in an animated movie yet, unlike the popular Dodo. I was quite surprised to find out just how much it has been immortalised in literature, Burnside shares quite a few excerpts, that have now been added to my reading list. And with it being such an amazing looking animal I’m not that surprised the Nazi’s tried to bring it back.
Next up is an essay on what extinction actually is. To me it seems like the word is often misused, the dodo and the Great Auk did not go extinct, we exterminated them! This essay took me a while to read, the old brain kept going off on a tangent, some very interesting ideas and well worth getting the book for this essay.
The third essay is about our “extermination” of the Great Auk, I’ve read about this bird’s ending many times and it always hits me hard, the bird sounded amazing and we’ll never get to see it because of how callous humans can be.
Finally in the fourth essay Burnside shares with us his near death experience with COVID, this was such a good piece of writing, the other essay’s had been rather dry and very dark whereas this one was full of passion, he even show’s that he has a wicked sense of humour. I’ve been lucky enough to escape COVID but it sounded terrifying but it was lovely to see his love of the NHS and tomato sandwiches and the good work they do.
The cover and artwork inside is rather spectacular, the images are so ghostly it is like we are glimpsing what was, I especially liked the Auk on the back cover, turn the book slightly and it seems to start to disappear…almost as if it was never there.
I have really enjoyed this book and will be re-reading in the future, it was thought provoking and had me nodding my head at a fair amount of what Burnside had to say. Highly recommended.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2021...
Next up is an essay on what extinction actually is. To me it seems like the word is often misused, the dodo and the Great Auk did not go extinct, we exterminated them! This essay took me a while to read, the old brain kept going off on a tangent, some very interesting ideas and well worth getting the book for this essay.
The third essay is about our “extermination” of the Great Auk, I’ve read about this bird’s ending many times and it always hits me hard, the bird sounded amazing and we’ll never get to see it because of how callous humans can be.
Finally in the fourth essay Burnside shares with us his near death experience with COVID, this was such a good piece of writing, the other essay’s had been rather dry and very dark whereas this one was full of passion, he even show’s that he has a wicked sense of humour. I’ve been lucky enough to escape COVID but it sounded terrifying but it was lovely to see his love of the NHS and tomato sandwiches and the good work they do.
The cover and artwork inside is rather spectacular, the images are so ghostly it is like we are glimpsing what was, I especially liked the Auk on the back cover, turn the book slightly and it seems to start to disappear…almost as if it was never there.
I have really enjoyed this book and will be re-reading in the future, it was thought provoking and had me nodding my head at a fair amount of what Burnside had to say. Highly recommended.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2021...
November 10, 2021
(3.5) I’ve read a novel, a memoir, and several poetry collections by Burnside. He’s a multitalented author who’s written in many different genres. These four essays are rich with allusions and chewy with philosophical questions. “Aurochs” traces ancient bulls from the classical world onward and notes the impossibility of entering others’ subjectivity – true for other humans, so how much more so for extinct animals. Imagination and empathy are required. Burnside recounts an incident from when he went to visit his former partner’s family cattle farm in Gloucestershire and a poorly cow fell against his legs. Sad as he felt for her, he couldn’t help.
“Auks” tells the story of how we drove the Great Auk to extinction and likens it to whaling, two tragic cases of exploiting species for our own ends. The second and fourth essays stood out most to me. “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood” links literal species extinction with the loss of a sense of place. The notion of ‘property’ means that land becomes a space to be filled. Contrast this with places devoid of time and ownership, like Chernobyl. Although I appreciated the discussion of solastalgia and ecological grief, much of the material here felt a rehashing of my other reading, such as Footprints, Islands of Abandonment, Irreplaceable, Losing Eden and Notes from an Apocalypse. Some Covid references date this one in an unfortunate way, while the final essay, “Blossom Ruins,” has a good reason for mentioning Covid-19: Burnside was hospitalized for it in April 2020, his near-death experience a further spur to contemplate extinction and false hope.
The academic register and frequent long quotations from other thinkers may give other readers pause. Those less familiar with current environmental nonfiction will probably get more out of these essays than I did, though overall I found them worth engaging with.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
“Auks” tells the story of how we drove the Great Auk to extinction and likens it to whaling, two tragic cases of exploiting species for our own ends. The second and fourth essays stood out most to me. “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood” links literal species extinction with the loss of a sense of place. The notion of ‘property’ means that land becomes a space to be filled. Contrast this with places devoid of time and ownership, like Chernobyl. Although I appreciated the discussion of solastalgia and ecological grief, much of the material here felt a rehashing of my other reading, such as Footprints, Islands of Abandonment, Irreplaceable, Losing Eden and Notes from an Apocalypse. Some Covid references date this one in an unfortunate way, while the final essay, “Blossom Ruins,” has a good reason for mentioning Covid-19: Burnside was hospitalized for it in April 2020, his near-death experience a further spur to contemplate extinction and false hope.
The academic register and frequent long quotations from other thinkers may give other readers pause. Those less familiar with current environmental nonfiction will probably get more out of these essays than I did, though overall I found them worth engaging with.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
November 16, 2024
Truly thought provoking, touching, disquieting, motivating.
October 7, 2024
In a moment of fleeting encounter [at Ami Robb's degree show at the Pier Store at the Shetland Museum and Archives], this book -- an image of disappearance -- caught my imagination.
It took a few false-starts to fall into Burnside's prose. What caught me was the simple - yet radical - affirmation of the importance of poetry and improvisation in the time of ecological breakdown: all connection, all fellow feeling, is an exercise in imagination.
In this time of extinctions, in this time of collective mourning, when the fabric of life [is] more and more threadbare - Burnside reminds us that the usual orthodoxies do not hold sway - rather, we must depend on intuition, empathy.
After an excerpt from The Wind in the Willows --
It took a few false-starts to fall into Burnside's prose. What caught me was the simple - yet radical - affirmation of the importance of poetry and improvisation in the time of ecological breakdown: all connection, all fellow feeling, is an exercise in imagination.
In this time of extinctions, in this time of collective mourning, when the fabric of life [is] more and more threadbare - Burnside reminds us that the usual orthodoxies do not hold sway - rather, we must depend on intuition, empathy.
After an excerpt from The Wind in the Willows --
Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror - indeed, he felt wonderfully at peacea moment of touching the Sublime, the Overall -- Burnside summises what it is to mortal, to accept that these glimpses of the continuum slip away: hints half guessed, and gifts half understood.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews