Endling

a bittersweet vocab word.

I was smacked in the face a while back by this word, as I found it in my weekly Marginalian cornucopia. There’s a sorrow to the term that I’d not thought about before, though I’m sure I must have heard the word in some school science reading or other in my youth. But its appearance in this passage above, after mentioning the closing of a familiar grocery store, was in a way I’d not considered the term or the concept before, and I had to save this and percolate a Musing about it:

The poem that’s centered in this entry mentions a spooky term, ‘unbidden finalities.’ Unbidden. A finality that you bid is a planned ending, one that you can get used to before it happens. But unbidden? It’s discombobulating. And that feeling you get when you realize only after the fact that it’s over. I’m thinking about this in particular when considering beautiful safe space DV8 Distillery, how suddenly it shut, and how none of us knew that last show where was really going to be the last.

‘Only hindsight ever knows each last.’ I was hit by this line from the poem, it making me remember vividly the time at the end of my marriage when I would idly look at Zillow for local studio apartment prices. I’d been doing that before the idea of divorce was ever breached, let alone agreed upon. Was I predicting the end of that marriage? Or was that activity merely an endling, an indication that it was about to be over? But predictions are actually impossible, aren't they–we piece them together after a fact because we are pattern recognition animals. Only in hindsight: at the time, there was really no way to know. This is what I was chatting about with my friend, the one that had commented on the event from Chapter 7 of my memoir. He’d expressed a wish he’d done more about my plight at the time. But I told him true: there’d have been no way to do anything more, at the time. It’s only in hindsight we can see the signs, see what was to come. Whilst in the middle of it, impossible.

Begin at the Endling

The basic definition of endling is: The last member of a species, before extinction. It’s a sad word, isn’t it? (Sidebar: I just found this fact: the last passenger pigeon was named Martha. Why does that knowledge of that name make that extinction so much sadder to me?) 

Extinction was shown to us Gen Xers as kids in Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and in other shows like Nature as a panic-inducer, a deep guilt trip meant to force us to care for our environment more. Have we listened? Some of us have, though there is always the argument that extinctions and new species discoveries have always happened in natural cycles. Which is true, but there’s no denying that the climate is indeed truly fucked, and by human hands—maybe I feel this most closely because I live in one of those US states that is either on fire or flooding constantly these days, neither of which at a normal pace.

In an eco-poetry class in my MFA program, I was working on a project centered on corvids (ravens in particular), because those birds are some of my favorites. Tricksters, so clever they’re almost at a human level… and a professor admonished me that they were bottom-feeders in a way—that they feed off of human waste and that was bad. That corvids, being scavengers in that manner, were a lower form of animal, not worth my poetry and my attention. That felt elitist to a ridiculous degree, and unfair. How can you be classist about a species of bird? What, you think fish eagles are somehow a higher level being than a carrion crow? I heartily disagreed with him but didn’t know exactly how to argue; I couldn’t put my finger on why his admonishment felt so wrong. It felt almost personal, like he was calling my spirit animal dirty. A few days later, another professor, more knowledgeable in the eco- part of eco-poetry than that other one was, upon hearing my lament about the above exchange, vindicated me by calling bullshit. That it’s a good thing corvids (and other intelligent, adaptable creatures) feed off human discards. Humans make a lot of trash and it’s a very good thing these smart beings are around and can flourish off it while cleaning up after us. That being scavengers and rogue-like scrapers of streets, unlike the high-level killers that predators are, make for a much more intelligent animal, able to problem solve and therefore survive much better than the killer with a one-track mind and a uni-tasking set of talons.

Can’t we all just get along? Despite our difference in intellect? (Thanks, dreamstime, for the free snap.)

The Marginalian mentions a shuttered corner store as the intro to the poem about this term endling. Which I find fascinating too, in my Musings on and around Third Places: where they are, where they aren’t, and especially how they closed and then opened surrounding the pandemic. And still do. I do get a similar melancholic sorrow when I find a favorite watering hole is shut. Or even seeing a closed post-Popination, trying to remember the last time I sat there with a sip and snack not knowing it would be my last visit. But, like my surprise and surprised sadness about wine bar Dionysus, is that necessarily bad? Did I really go there enough for it to be sad that it’s closed? I kind of didn’t. Maybe in that case, it’s less of an extinction than a culling. Pruning, after all, is a healthy process. Ask any gardener.