In Which the Magpie Sees Wild Boars as Lost Children

Fukushima’s radioactive boars . . . Ovidian transformations . . . Amy Sillman’s “After Metamorphoses”

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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Like many of you, the Magpie was fascinated recently by the story of the wild radioactive boars roaming Fukushima, where a nuclear plant melted down after an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The government says it has cleaned things up and is eager for residents to return, but the radioactive boars are living there now, with their radioactive kids. For instance, this dweller, who gazes with a certain forthright curiosity at the photographer:

Meanwhile, the Magpie was also fascinated by a photo, which appeared on the front page of The New York Times, of the backpacks abandoned by children on a schoolroom floor when they fled the Fukushima disaster. The discarded backpacks looked like traces of an instantaneous transformation, and the Magpie couldn’t help but wonder if some of the children had, in fact, turned into the boars. Or perhaps I should say, found themselves turning into boars. The actual Fukushima children have been subject to bullying when their families relocated after the disaster; other children treat them as if they’re toxic, calling them “germs” and “radiation.” And, in fact, many of those children have already been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the gods often intervene in situations like these, transforming humans who are suffering unfairly into trees or rivers or birds. Why wouldn’t the gods help out the Fukushima children, sending them back to their hometown, strong with fur and hooves? By all reports, the boars are quite comfortable there, with plenty to eat and no rules. It’s their town, and they are free.

Transformation occurs in Ovid’s work when the pressure on mortals is too great to bear. By Ovidian calculations, given this overwhelming political moment, we’re due for a collective transformation right about now. It’s already happening many times a day in the basement of The Drawing Center in New York, where Amy Sillman’s five-minute video installation “After Metamorphoses” is playing in a loop. The hand-drawn images morph and remorph at a rapid rate: rocks into people, tree into scarab, peacock into bull, woman into bird, bird into horse, cat into bat, woman into spider, flower into dolphin into pig, two men into two trees, woman cuddling dog who turns into lion into bird into snake, male and female figures who embrace and become an androgyne, cat into owl, a woman with foxes coming out of her mouth, a man and woman on a mountain who turn into birds in flight. Other things flicker past: phallus-y shapes, a child’s face, a female figure with a spear (Diana?). The changes happen so quickly that they border on the subliminal, which may be part of Sillman’s idea about how we experience fundamental change: We’re halfway through it before we’re even entirely aware of what’s happening.

In her video, it’s as if we’re seeing thought enacted, a mind beneath the images making associations and decisions, shaping and reshaping the matter of matter into other matter, fast and fluid as fingerpainting. I watched the video four times and still couldn’t catch it all. In the issue of Sillman’s zine The OG that accompanies the exhibition, she writes, “Our desires is conflicting and ill-fitting . . .” I like to think that the “is” isn’t a typo. Our desires is conflicting, and our minds change continually. Or are changed, by forces we can’t control. The boars didn’t ask to be radioactive; it just happened to them one day. Rats whose brains were changed in the ways that radiation changes the brain could no longer distinguish between familiar places and new places. In other words, they didn’t know anymore what was home and what wasn’t. They were living in a state of perpetual uncanniness. Is that how the boars feel? Isn’t that how we feel, here, now?

Actually, the Japanese government is killing the boars. People who might already be a little ambivalent about moving back to the site of a nuclear meltdown are apparently put off by the prospect of radioactive wild boars roaming around what’s left of their living rooms and, possibly, attacking them. It’s odd to think of the face-off between people whose town may no longer be recognizable, or inhabitable, and animals who don’t know if they’re in their home territory or new territory. If Sillman were drawing a video of this moment, the humans and the boars would shift into one another and back again, over and over. Given that they’re both poisoned by the same element, wouldn’t that be a truer representation of their states? There’s a certain irony in the fact that the animals and the people have been united by a shared toxicity. A Geiger counter would tick at the same rate near creatures whose hearts never beat in time before.

Moreover, in an Ovidian sense, the boars are the children of the people, because people made them as they are today. In a fable, it would be the task of the exiled townspeople to recognize their estranged children, claim them, and break the spell. To date, that hasn’t happened. In the towns near Fukushima, dishes are still in sinks and the children’s backpacks still lay where they were left. The clock seems to have stopped at one particular moment on a previously ordinary day, as at Pompeii.

But not for the boars. For them, time still went tick, tick, tick, as usual. After the disaster, they came down from the mountains; they ate; they settled in. In my cartoonish fantasy, they’re glowing, but that isn’t really what radiation exposure does. It changes living things from the insides, unpredictably. It moves the DNA around. It induces, it seems, a perpetual feeling of uncanniness. Everything looks different, and you’re not who you thought you were, but you’re not exactly sure how or what it means. You just know that you’re walking down streets that seem like your streets and not your streets at the same time. Something has changed. When people look at you, they have different expressions in their eyes. You look back at them, trying to understand.