Francesc Candel
Looking for a Squonk in Zanda.
Zanda Earth Forest (or Zanda Tulin). Zanda County, Ngari Prefecture, Xizang Autonomous Region, China. March 2022.
Squonk - Genesis / A Trick of the Tail, 1976
Now listen here, listen to me, don't you run away now. I am a friend, I'd really like to play with you, making noises my little furry friend would make. I'll trick him, then I'll kick him into my sack. You better watch out, you better watch out. I've got you, I've got you, you'll never get away. Walking home that night, the sack across my back, the sound of sobbing on my shoulder, when suddenly it stopped. I opened up the sack, all that I had a pool of bubbles and tears, just a pool of tears. Just a pool of tears. All in all you are a very dying race, placing trust upon a cruel world. You never had the things you thought you should have had and you'll not get them now. And all the while in perfect time... your tears are falling on the ground.
.....
When I heard the Genesis album "A Trick of the Tail," I didn't understand the song "Squonk." I didn't understand what it was explaining exactly, or who the song was referring to. The neuron that fires in my brain to do something I enjoy, which is something like musical archaeology, disconnected for some reason. It stopped making synapses in my neural system, and I did nothing to find out what this song explained. A few years later, I became interested in a strange website called the Internet Archive, also known as archive.org for its internet address. This kind of digital internet library or website is established as a non-profit organization and is operated thanks to the efforts of people who volunteer their free time to make this website work. Explaining what the Internet Archive is isn't easy. It's an organization and a website that advocates for a free and open Internet, for the free flow of information, offering free access to collections of digitized materials, software applications, music, audiovisual materials, books, printed materials, and much more. It's especially important to websites that are closing and contain old digital material that would otherwise be lost. They try to preserve Internet content in this way, functioning as a "backup" of the Internet, making it possible to recover and view web pages that have disappeared or been deleted, thus eliminating the information they contained. It's a free, open library accessible to everyone. Its objective is to preserve human culture and knowledge. It's easy to get lost in it given the vast amount of information and materials available. You often search and get lost among so much material and find things you don't even know what they're for, or you find things that surprise you. You can even find software for your first Amstrad or Atari computer, which you bought in the 1990s. I highly recommend it. Here are the updated figures from Wikipedia about what you can find on the Internet Archive: 46 million printed materials, 15 million videos, 1.3 million software programs, 14 million audio files, 5.3 million images, 279,660 concerts, and more than 946 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine (a database containing copies of a huge number of Internet pages or sites). Does that seem like too little to you? Or do you think it's a place worth diving into to search and find the strangest things you can think of or look for? It's a kind of "grandmother's trunk" that holds everything. And it's the books section that I think is the best organized, where you can find books that no longer exist, that aren't published, or that you wouldn't even find in your local municipal library. There are millions of digitized books, where I've even found books that are impossible to find elsewhere. One day, while searching the book section, I accidentally found a book by Cox titled "Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts." The book is like a fantasy field guide written in 1910 by William Thomas Cox. It's a book about legendary and strange creatures that are part of the legends of the forests of the United States and Canada, and especially of Pennsylvania. As field guides do with their scientific names, Cox's book includes the Latin nomenclature of the strange being (I imagine invented by Cox), its habitat, morphology, customs, and behaviors. If you decide to read it, keep one important thing in mind. You won't find a literary gem, for the simple reason that Cox only wrote two or three books in his life. Cox wasn't a writer; he was a forester, a person who dedicated himself to the cultivation and care of forests. But that is precisely his great merit, as, not a writer, but a forester, he wrote a book of legends about strange beings that is so interesting to read. You can find the book for free on the Internet Archive. It was while reading this book that I came across a chapter where it talks about a strange being, a legend... the legend of the Squonk, and I remembered the Genesis song, the meaning of which I hadn't understood. Reading this chapter, I managed to understand the song. Rather than describing what a Squonk is, I'll give you an excerpt from Cox's book, so you can perhaps better understand the lyrics of Genesis's Squonk song.
Squonk (Lacrimacorpus dissolvens.)
[...] The squonk is very shy in nature and generally travels near dusk or dawn. Because of its maladjusted skin, which is covered with warts and moles, it is always sad; in fact, it is said, by those better qualified to judge, to be the most morbid of beasts. Hunters who are good at tracking are able to follow a squonk by its tear-stained trail, for the animal weeps constantly. When cornered and escape seems impossible, or when surprised and frightened, it may even dissolve itself in tears. Squonk hunters are most successful on very cold, moonlit nights, when tears fall slowly and the animal does not like to come out; it can be heard crying beneath the branches of the dark hemlock trees. Mr. J. P. Wentling, formerly of Pennsylvania, who moved to Minnesota, had a failed experience with a squonk near Monte Alto. He planned a clever capture by tricking a squonk into jumping into a satchel he was carrying home, when suddenly the load lightened and the tears stopped. Wentling opened the satchel and looked inside. There was nothing there except a pool of tears.
.....
In the Xizang Autonomous Region of China, there are so-called "tulins" or earth forests.. These are geological formations that resemble forests due to their shapes created by erosion. The best known is the Zanda Forest in Ngari Prefecture, where the largest Tertiary layer of earth forests or geologic forests in the world is found. These are important geological information for understanding the evolution of our planet. They are partly similar to the Yadan, but have a structure and formation more similar to the Badlands due to their sedimentary stratification and deep gullies and ravines. In any case, all these types of geological landscapes have in common: aridity and the absence of life. There are no plants or animals, or they are practically nonexistent except for the occasional "clueless" scorpion. They are inhospitable lands, barren lands with little life. Perhaps that's why there was no way to find a Squonk in Zanda. He must have felt too sad and scared, faced with so much loneliness, aridity, and the absence of life, walking alone at twilight in a strange and gloomy place. Possibly the sadness generated by such an inhospitable place made him start to cry, and as the legend of the Squonk says... he disappeared due to that ability that Squonks have to dissolve into their own tears when they are cornered, scared, or sad. We'll have to go somewhere else to find a Squonk, perhaps in... Los Endos. Los Endos sounds like a word reminiscent of a Mexican border town. A small Mexican town that is a refuge for an evil band of outlaws who have the entire population terrified and scared. There is no life or people in the streets; everyone is kept indoors, fearful. A place with a name typical of a spaghetti western film plot shot in Almería in the Tabernas Desert and with a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. Soon John Wayne will appear, who always fixes everything. The word and the song Los Endos by Génesis mean nothing; it has no translation. They simply tried to use the term "End" to title the last song on the album, "A Trick of the Tail." It could be something like Spanishifying the term "End." Surely Los Endos are somewhere where the world ends, where no one has gone, where our lost Squonk cries... at the end of the world. We'll have to go find our Squonk at... Los Endos.
....
PS: If you ever get lost in life, don't hesitate to visit archive.org/. There... you're sure to find yourself... and you'll surely be in your corresponding section... well classified and labeled...
PS: Los Endos - Chester Thompson & Phil Collins
Looking for a Squonk in Zanda.
Zanda Earth Forest (or Zanda Tulin). Zanda County, Ngari Prefecture, Xizang Autonomous Region, China. March 2022.
Squonk - Genesis / A Trick of the Tail, 1976
Now listen here, listen to me, don't you run away now. I am a friend, I'd really like to play with you, making noises my little furry friend would make. I'll trick him, then I'll kick him into my sack. You better watch out, you better watch out. I've got you, I've got you, you'll never get away. Walking home that night, the sack across my back, the sound of sobbing on my shoulder, when suddenly it stopped. I opened up the sack, all that I had a pool of bubbles and tears, just a pool of tears. Just a pool of tears. All in all you are a very dying race, placing trust upon a cruel world. You never had the things you thought you should have had and you'll not get them now. And all the while in perfect time... your tears are falling on the ground.
.....
When I heard the Genesis album "A Trick of the Tail," I didn't understand the song "Squonk." I didn't understand what it was explaining exactly, or who the song was referring to. The neuron that fires in my brain to do something I enjoy, which is something like musical archaeology, disconnected for some reason. It stopped making synapses in my neural system, and I did nothing to find out what this song explained. A few years later, I became interested in a strange website called the Internet Archive, also known as archive.org for its internet address. This kind of digital internet library or website is established as a non-profit organization and is operated thanks to the efforts of people who volunteer their free time to make this website work. Explaining what the Internet Archive is isn't easy. It's an organization and a website that advocates for a free and open Internet, for the free flow of information, offering free access to collections of digitized materials, software applications, music, audiovisual materials, books, printed materials, and much more. It's especially important to websites that are closing and contain old digital material that would otherwise be lost. They try to preserve Internet content in this way, functioning as a "backup" of the Internet, making it possible to recover and view web pages that have disappeared or been deleted, thus eliminating the information they contained. It's a free, open library accessible to everyone. Its objective is to preserve human culture and knowledge. It's easy to get lost in it given the vast amount of information and materials available. You often search and get lost among so much material and find things you don't even know what they're for, or you find things that surprise you. You can even find software for your first Amstrad or Atari computer, which you bought in the 1990s. I highly recommend it. Here are the updated figures from Wikipedia about what you can find on the Internet Archive: 46 million printed materials, 15 million videos, 1.3 million software programs, 14 million audio files, 5.3 million images, 279,660 concerts, and more than 946 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine (a database containing copies of a huge number of Internet pages or sites). Does that seem like too little to you? Or do you think it's a place worth diving into to search and find the strangest things you can think of or look for? It's a kind of "grandmother's trunk" that holds everything. And it's the books section that I think is the best organized, where you can find books that no longer exist, that aren't published, or that you wouldn't even find in your local municipal library. There are millions of digitized books, where I've even found books that are impossible to find elsewhere. One day, while searching the book section, I accidentally found a book by Cox titled "Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts." The book is like a fantasy field guide written in 1910 by William Thomas Cox. It's a book about legendary and strange creatures that are part of the legends of the forests of the United States and Canada, and especially of Pennsylvania. As field guides do with their scientific names, Cox's book includes the Latin nomenclature of the strange being (I imagine invented by Cox), its habitat, morphology, customs, and behaviors. If you decide to read it, keep one important thing in mind. You won't find a literary gem, for the simple reason that Cox only wrote two or three books in his life. Cox wasn't a writer; he was a forester, a person who dedicated himself to the cultivation and care of forests. But that is precisely his great merit, as, not a writer, but a forester, he wrote a book of legends about strange beings that is so interesting to read. You can find the book for free on the Internet Archive. It was while reading this book that I came across a chapter where it talks about a strange being, a legend... the legend of the Squonk, and I remembered the Genesis song, the meaning of which I hadn't understood. Reading this chapter, I managed to understand the song. Rather than describing what a Squonk is, I'll give you an excerpt from Cox's book, so you can perhaps better understand the lyrics of Genesis's Squonk song.
Squonk (Lacrimacorpus dissolvens.)
[...] The squonk is very shy in nature and generally travels near dusk or dawn. Because of its maladjusted skin, which is covered with warts and moles, it is always sad; in fact, it is said, by those better qualified to judge, to be the most morbid of beasts. Hunters who are good at tracking are able to follow a squonk by its tear-stained trail, for the animal weeps constantly. When cornered and escape seems impossible, or when surprised and frightened, it may even dissolve itself in tears. Squonk hunters are most successful on very cold, moonlit nights, when tears fall slowly and the animal does not like to come out; it can be heard crying beneath the branches of the dark hemlock trees. Mr. J. P. Wentling, formerly of Pennsylvania, who moved to Minnesota, had a failed experience with a squonk near Monte Alto. He planned a clever capture by tricking a squonk into jumping into a satchel he was carrying home, when suddenly the load lightened and the tears stopped. Wentling opened the satchel and looked inside. There was nothing there except a pool of tears.
.....
In the Xizang Autonomous Region of China, there are so-called "tulins" or earth forests.. These are geological formations that resemble forests due to their shapes created by erosion. The best known is the Zanda Forest in Ngari Prefecture, where the largest Tertiary layer of earth forests or geologic forests in the world is found. These are important geological information for understanding the evolution of our planet. They are partly similar to the Yadan, but have a structure and formation more similar to the Badlands due to their sedimentary stratification and deep gullies and ravines. In any case, all these types of geological landscapes have in common: aridity and the absence of life. There are no plants or animals, or they are practically nonexistent except for the occasional "clueless" scorpion. They are inhospitable lands, barren lands with little life. Perhaps that's why there was no way to find a Squonk in Zanda. He must have felt too sad and scared, faced with so much loneliness, aridity, and the absence of life, walking alone at twilight in a strange and gloomy place. Possibly the sadness generated by such an inhospitable place made him start to cry, and as the legend of the Squonk says... he disappeared due to that ability that Squonks have to dissolve into their own tears when they are cornered, scared, or sad. We'll have to go somewhere else to find a Squonk, perhaps in... Los Endos. Los Endos sounds like a word reminiscent of a Mexican border town. A small Mexican town that is a refuge for an evil band of outlaws who have the entire population terrified and scared. There is no life or people in the streets; everyone is kept indoors, fearful. A place with a name typical of a spaghetti western film plot shot in Almería in the Tabernas Desert and with a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. Soon John Wayne will appear, who always fixes everything. The word and the song Los Endos by Génesis mean nothing; it has no translation. They simply tried to use the term "End" to title the last song on the album, "A Trick of the Tail." It could be something like Spanishifying the term "End." Surely Los Endos are somewhere where the world ends, where no one has gone, where our lost Squonk cries... at the end of the world. We'll have to go find our Squonk at... Los Endos.
....
PS: If you ever get lost in life, don't hesitate to visit archive.org/. There... you're sure to find yourself... and you'll surely be in your corresponding section... well classified and labeled...
PS: Los Endos - Chester Thompson & Phil Collins