Coal-Mine Canary

The collaged leporello poem called Syrinx Spring and the transcontinental puppet play that materialized from its folds under pandemic lockdown were conceived as fragments of a mystery play for the Anthropocene, taking the canary as sacrificial hero. Both poem and Zoom-play present the coal-mine canary as a modernist martyr, rendering polychoral the labyrinth undermining human progress.

The Canary Resuscitator, which would be better coined The Canary Trapper Then Resuscitator, was a portable cage equipped with display window and oxygen cylinder invented by physician and physiologist John-Scott Haldane—father of the respirator—at the turn of the twentieth century. The device emerged from Haldane’s investigation of a Gilded-Age explosion at Tylorstown Colliery, followed by intrepid research on his own person in sealed chambers with gas cocktails found in mines such as blackdamp, whitedamp, and afterdamp—the exposition of which became the 1922 textbook Respiration. Seeking a means of detecting odourless carbon monoxide underground before it could poison humans, he landed on the small warm-blooded animal dependent upon a more rapid oxygen exchange; by 1911, industry selected the popular Macaronesian finch first domesticated in seventeenth-century Europe and bred for colour, shape, and song. Canaries were a more effective sentinel species than mice, concluded modern science—a more effective indicator of asphyxiant gases, as they showed more visible signs of distress.¹ The canary became a seeming pet for the laborers in the mining bureau photo-ops—both props pertly sacrificed as collateral damage toward the extractive enterprise at the heart of capitalist refinement. The Resuscitator typifies the cynicism of corporate paternalism, masquerading as benevolence while maximizing profit and minimizing both loss of the labor force and the need to purchase more birds. Replaced by the electronic nose in 1986, the Canary Resuscitator now stands as a prized artifact in collections—such as that of Chicago’s Field Museum—which consecrate what John Ruskin would have named “the confused pillage of the continents of the world.” Syrinx Spring makes a transspecies broken chorus, or coro spezzato, of that Babelic pillage.