For those of us investigating ways in which to survive the coming Trump presidency (and more specifically the daily, disgust-stoking news reporting of its serial atrocities) a new online essay Could Humans Hibernate? has the ears pricking up in hope.
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Yes, if only one could sleep, oblivious, through dark times, waking up when ghastliness is over and just as a new day of light and truth and love dawns.
In his Could Humans Hibernate? - How Animals Learned To Hibernate and why we can't do it yet ,Oxford University sleep neurologist Vladyslav Vyazovskiy sighs that "The possibility of hibernation in humans has always captivated us; we badly want it to be possible."
He reports that hibernation was first defined in an 1847 tract as "a natural, temporary, intermediate state, between life and death; into which some animals sink" to survive excesses of heat, cold or drought.
"And now we know," the professor presses on, "that from dormice and bears, to hedgehogs, ground squirrels, bats and even tropical primates, hibernation is a very common phenomenon, found among representatives of at least seven different orders of mammals."
If only we, humans, had a similarly hibernating way of responding to human social and political calamities.
I am finding myself dreading not only the Trump quadrennial but the next few malignant months of campaigning (already feverishly and toxically under way) towards the next Australian federal election. Oh, to have the talent of one of the hibernating mammal species, of the Syrian hamster, say, of the Arctic ground squirrel and especially of God's own hedgehog, and to be able to dissolve now into an intermediate state, waking up in June when next May's federal election is done and dusted.
How grotesque it is all going to........