It Starts With…
It starts with a mole.
It starts with a mole on an island.
It starts with a mole whose remains exist in a drawer, on a shelf, in a closet, stored somewhere at a university and not on an island.
This is how my talk began, or how it should have. I was speaking at the Prelinger Library as part of the lecture series Place Talks. I remember the library was crowded. I remember the library was cast in red light.
I spoke nervously into my printed pages, this being my first sort of lecture. I tried my best to avoid eye contact, but occasionally found myself looking up to scan the room, to see if everyone was still there.
It starts with a mole, I said to the bodily shapes bunched together, sitting in chairs, on the floor, along the wall, all dressed in red.
A Mole Is a Place, Is Not a Place
Diaoyu Dao | Diaoyutai | Uotsuri-jima is a disputed place claimed by China, Taiwan, and Japan, part of the Diaoyu | Diaoyutai | Senkaku island chain.
You cannot go there, I told everyone in the library. But I am here to speak about the mole, not the island, not the dispute.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species is, according to its website, “the world’s most comprehensive information source on the global extinction risk status of animals.” A species on the list is classified as one of the following categories:
- Least Concern
- Near Threatened
- Vulnerable
- Endangered
- Critically Endangered
- Extinct in the Wild
- Extinct
Two classifications outside of extinction risk assessment are:
- Data Deficient
- Not Evaluated
The status of the Ryukyu mole species,1 according to IUCN,2 has changed over the years, from endangered (1996) to data deficient (2008) and currently, vulnerable (2015). Data deficient for a time because researchers were (and still are) unable to land on the island to search for what was/is there and to note what was/is not, their surveys limited to observations from boats, satellites, drones. But the mole is no longer data deficient, it is vulnerable. Isn’t this good news? To know for sure where something falls along the spectrum of existence, to at least no longer be deficient in data, if still deficient in moles?
I emailed the biologist responsible for this 2015 update to the mole’s classification. I asked them how they had reached their conclusion. Was there new information about the mole? Was the determination based purely on statistical modeling? I never received a response. I find it fitting. Biologists cannot reach the island. I cannot reach the biologist. All of us, arranged along a spectrum of restrictions. A series of silences.
What if, in all this time, the mole has gone extinct? No longer vulnerable. Merely gone, where nothing can threaten it.
Only one mole has ever been discovered on the island. And that mole was found in a field, beaten with a slipper until dead, and taken away. 3 In 1991, researchers found a tunnel, but no mole. Perhaps the moles had hidden, fearful of heavy steps, the sight of shoes, the prospect of being beaten to death.
While no one steps foot onto the uninhabited island, the mole (species) is both there and not. A sort of Schrödinger’s cat.
Welcome to my Place Talk, I said to the red crowd at the Prelinger Library.
Prelinger Library
The Prelinger is a “small appropriation-friendly library and communal space” in the SOMA district of San Francisco.4
To find books on any given subject you must first know how the collection is organized. Subjects are classified “spatially and conceptually beginning with the physical world, moving into representation and culture, and ending with abstractions of society and theory. It can be summarized as a walk through a landscape of ideas, from feet-on-the-ground to outer space.”5
For instance:
- Seaweed: Stack 1, Bank 7, Row 2
- Plastics: Stack 2, Bank 2, Rows 4-5
- Photography: Stack 3, Bank 7, Row 1
- Riot Grrrl: Stack 4, Bank 8, Rows 5-6
- Bigfoot: Stack 4, Bank 10 , Row 8
- Transcendentalism: Stack 5, Bank 10, Row 6
- Space Politics: Stack 5, Bank 12, Rows 7-8
Moles—common on, and in, the ground—can be found somewhere in Stack 1.
Reaching for a book usually requires ascending one of the massive ladders so you may face what you are looking for. It was after ascending the ladder, taking a seat at the top, shuffling through pages, drifting through passages on moles, goats, snails, ghosts, bubbles, sea levels, erosion, clouds, that I began to wonder about assemblages, about the totalness of a place, even if that place is a mole. What exists in a mole biome, that is to say, a biome that is a mole? As I sat on the top step of the ladder, the Prelingers greeted a patron entering the library. I gave a little wave to the newcomer from up on high like we were old friends.
I returned to a book. I wondered how much I would have to visit, stay in the Prelinger Library, before I was considered part of its totalness. Not part of the collection, but something closer to the ladder, the shelving, the scanner in the corner, if only temporarily, if only slightly.
Shape of a Mole, Name of Mole
Unlike the island’s ever-changing shape, I continued, the mole remains unaltered. In a frozen state. So long as there remains only one.
Its place no longer an island, but a classification. A genus and species, a name. But even that can change. The mole departs from one location and arrives in another.
The original classification: Nesoscaptor uchiadi; Nesoscaptor, meaning “nesos (island) + scaptor (digger)” and uchidai, a dedication to Professor Teru Aki Uchida at Kyushu University.6 Given its own name because the mole did not fit the shape of others in the region.
It is small in size, write the biologists who initially classified the mole, “with its nostrils directed outward;” with “dorsal fur close to Dark Grayish Brown or Dusky Drab;” and “general features as usual,” while remarking on several key distinctions, most notably the teeth.7
“The most outstanding characteristic is the number of teeth,” also says Professor Yasushi Yokohata at the University of Toyama.
Another article said the mole both resembled and diverged from a species known in Taiwan. 8
“[It] may have migrated…and then been isolated,” the article’s authors say. 9
“[N.] was synonymous with the genus [M.],” says another. 10
Outstanding…the number of teeth, I repeated throughout the talk. Everyone agrees on the number of teeth.
Mole Galleries (A Place Talk)
The mole is a singular creature from a singular place, I explained, as the doors of a dance studio down the hall opened suddenly and everything was momentarily overtaken with music and steps all guided by a microphoned voice signaling transitions—next movements in the choreography. I was pleasantly surprised by the disturbance, the dispute of tempos which upended my pace, setting me adrift, sending me tapping anew.
There is a problem on the island. Goats are eating everything up, threatening the mole population. Goats are the problem.
If no one did anything about the increasing goat population, I added, the goat number would grow, and the vegetation would decrease. The island would erode into the sea.
I actually have no idea about the degree of erosion on this island, only that less vegetation leads to more erosion and more goats means less vegetation.
Talking in the Library
In the public library where I work as a librarian, a patron walks up to me regularly to discuss this or that, some new bit of information he has just uncovered. He approaches and shares his amazement about a scientific discovery as if he had spotted a mole never before seen.
Once, he told me about an endangered species of butterfly. It lives just there, he says pointing in a direction, on the hill. It starts with a butterfly.
It starts with a butterfly on a hill.
It starts with a butterfly on a hill. This hill. Where we are, where we will go up, where we will be atop.
As we hiked up the slope, she pointed out all the plants and animals we came across, and then explained what we could expect to see in the coming seasons. She was patient, waiting for families to gather around, for everyone to finish their conversations, for stragglers to catch up before starting again. She didn’t want anyone to miss a thing as we reached the sign on the hill.
Did you know there used to be an electric one? Back in 1932, it was claimed to be the largest electric sign in the world. Though it would go dark in 1939 as war loomed, the illumination which could be seen from miles out, more a beacon inviting attack on the nearby airport than what it was made to do: advertise coffee, beer, soap. 11 But butterflies…
At the end of the hike, the Natural Resource Specialist told everyone how they could become park stewards to help restore the hill by planting native plants and removing invasive species.
You too can help maintain the critical habitat of this endangered butterfly by becoming a park steward, she said.
Everyone clapped.
Weeks after the event, the patron who talks to me regularly approached me to inquire about the outing.
I said I went but didn’t see the endangered blue butterfly. I saw another one. It was white.
It’s not quite the season for butterflies, he said, which is what the park steward had mentioned. You won’t regret going back, he insisted, and seeing them for yourself.
I never told the patron who approaches me regularly about the mole or the place it came from.
Name of a Place, Shape of a Place
I cannot see the mole’s island for myself, so instead I read poems; I review historical accounts and scientific articles; I look over maps, satellite images, photos, brochures, government websites from China, Taiwan, and Japan—all of which state that the islands of Diaoyu | Diaoyutai | Senkaku belong to their respective nations.
The land dispute continues, while everyone watches the island change shape.
Hundreds of goats reside, graze, and trample. Organizations and individuals have made appeals for immediate action. One of them, Professor Yokohata, suggests biologists should “land urgently on [Diaoyu Dao | Diaoyutai] Uotsuri-jima to assess the damage… to prevent the destruction of this island.”12
In one article, Professor Yokohata says, “Neither Kita-kojima nor Minami-kojima 13 (close to Uotsuri-jima) have experienced vegetation changes, and neither island has goats.” In another article, “if the supply of plants dwindles, the number of worms will decrease and exposed soil will be washed away, which is all bad for the moles.”14
Still, nothing has been done to address the goat problem, the resulting problems of vegetation loss.
I looked up from my pages to the crowd. The red bodily shapes looked extra red.
It Ends With…
How did my talk at the Prelinger Library end?
As we sit in this library surrounded by books, by stacks, by a library in red, where we huddle together, where we keep to ourselves, I have to stop, because there is nothing left to say, nothing left to add, except that Pliny once said:
Of all animals it is the mole that the magicians admire most! a creature that has been stamped with condemnation by Nature in so many ways; doomed as it is to perpetual blindness, and adding to this darkness a life of gloom in the depths of the earth, and a state more nearly resembling that of the dead and buried.15
I think Pliny is foolish, is completely unaware of moles, of their state of being, as am I, as we all seem to be, doubtful of moles and where they are and whether or not they are dead or only resembling death, and this unknowing a kind of perpetual blindness…
How does it really end?
It ended with a mole in my head.
A Mole in My Head
There is a mole in my head. It’s been there since long before the talk. I tried to expel it at the Prelinger Library, tried to wedge it between two books near an endcap, but the mole reemerged, refused to leave. Now it mostly lies about, getting fat on my mole-thoughts, on my persistence at putting a mole I’ve never seen into words.
Did I invite the mole or did it convince me to bring it along? Did I draw the mole to me, conjure it, imagine it? The doppelgänger, or perhaps an apparition of the first and only mole. Maybe it is something else entirely. Regardless, I feel it shifting, influencing me, telling me it is here and there is more for me to see, do, more to write. I fear the mole-in-my-head has grown beyond my control. It has become a houseguest who cannot get the hint that they have overstayed their welcome after a week, a month, a year, a decade.
I tell the mole-in-my-head I am loyal. They want proof. They want to know I am committed. So I write a piece, a letter of commitment, and send it off to countless journals whether or not it fits their guidelines, their requested genre, their submission period. I title the piece, An Island Imagined.
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1. Also known as the Senkaku mole.↩
2. IUCN, “Senkaku Mole,” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, accessed on April 26, 2023, https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/14563/22323327#. It’s important to note, Japan’s Red List (2007) still classifies the mole as Critically Endangered. See “conservation actions in detail” in the IUCN entry. ↩
3. Richard Llyod Perry, “The lesser spotted mole digs up a whole pile of trouble,” The Times, June 18 2012, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-lesser-spotted-mole-digs-up-a-whole-pile-of-trouble-cj0bprptdrq. ↩
4. Prelinger Library, “About,” accessed on April 26, 2023, https://prelingerlibrary.org/stacks/v1/about/. ↩
5. Prelinger Library, “The Library’s Organizational System,” accessed on April 26, 2023, https://prelingerlibrary.org/home/collection/. ↩
6. Hisashi Abe et al., “A New Mole from Uotsuri-jima, the Ryukyu Islands,” Journal of the Mammalogical Society of Japan (1991): 47-60. ↩
7. Abe, 53-54. ↩
8. Masaharu Motokawa et al., ”Taxonomic Status of the Senkaku Mole, Nesoscaptor uchidai, with Special Reference to Variation in Mogera insularis from Taiwan (Mammalia: Insectivora)” Zoological Science (2001): 733-740. ↩
9. Motokawa, 739. ↩
10. Motokawa, 734. “Nowak (1998) suggested that the genus Nesoscaptor was synonymous with the genus Mogera.” ↩
11. United States Department of the Interior, National Park Services, National Register of Historic Places, South San Francisco Hillside Sign. NRIS Reference Number: 96000761, 1997. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/96000761_text, accessed April 26, 2023. ↩
12. Yasushi Yokohata et al., “The Effects of Introduced Goats on the Ecosystem of Uotsuri-jima, Senkaku Islands, Japan, as Assessed by Remote Sensing Techniques,” Biosphere Conservation (2003): 39-46. ↩
13. Known also to the Taiwanese and Chinese as Beixiao | Beixiao Dao and Nanxiao | Nanxiao Dao, respectively. Both islands are part of the Diaoyu | Diaoyutai | Senkaku island chain. ↩
14. Richard Lloyd Perry, “The lesser spotted mole digs up a whole pile of trouble,” The Times, June 18 2012, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-lesser-spotted-mole-digs-up-a-whole-pile-of-trouble-cj0bprptdrq. ↩
15. Pliny, The Natural History of Pliny, trans. John Bostock and H.T. Riley (London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1856). Accessed on April 26, 2023, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/60688/60688-h/60688-h.htm#BOOK_XXX_CHAP_7.
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