The Second Body
On dualism, individuality, and our global presence ....
I just published the following essay (read it online here):
We woke up one morning last week to the sound of cow elk chirping. We were surrounded. We drink coffee in bed in the mornings, looking up at the mountain, seeing what the day looks like.
“Look,” Chuck said. “That ear, just above the windowsill. That’s what the thumping was.” An elk was pawing the snow away from the foundation to get at the grass below. Her head was thumping too, against the sill.
I’ve been re-reading Daisy Hildyard’s 2017 book, The Second Body, a book I’ve been thinking about for the past year or so. It’s a remarkable little book, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions a publisher out of the UK who have built a fascinating list of contemporary thinkers. I go to their site during their semi-annual sales and just order whatever is new. It’s always something you want to read. I first read The Second Body three years ago, during that terrible summer of wildfire smoke. It follows Hildyard on a quest that plays out over four essays where she tries to puzzle out the relationships between humans and animals, humans and life itself, and humans and the global catastrophe we’re all embedded in.
But there’s been something nagging at me me about this book. There’s a moment, in the first of the four essays, where she’s rescued a pigeon fledgling, a bird she keeps in the shed for a few weeks, feeding it until it’s strong enough to fly away on it’s own. Holding the blinking bird in her hand, she says “I could see it’s mind inside it’s body.”
It’s such an odd observation. As though it’s mind and its body are separate. As though being able to “see” it’s “mind” makes it a living being instead of what? a stone? As though having a “mind” is some kind of categorical quality.
As though we all still believe in Descartes? In that kind of dualism? In that kind of anthropocentrism?
The elk whose ear we’d seen above the windowsill lifted it’s head, looked in at us with a mouth full of brown grass. They like Chuck’s yard. When he and his ex bought the property in the early 90s, it had been grazed bare by horses. Since then, the only animals who have grazed here are the native ungulates, elk and deer — and the occasional cow from our neighbor’s herd when they’ve broken through a fence. Last week they broke through the willow thicket that served as part of the fenceline, and Chuck spent a fairly aggravating afternoon repairing barbed wire fencing that had become embedded in the willows over the decades. But fencing out the cattle, and not keeping horses (or even the donkeys I keep lobbying for, to no avail) means the native grasses have come back, in large part because they’ve been grazed by native animals. I haven’t done an official grid survey of the plant species, but there are so many different grasses and wildflowers and lichens. They’re all very small, and unspectacular, and require you to really look at them, but when you do, it’s amazing.
The elk’s eyeball came up over the windowsill and she looked at us while she chewed. Hank the dog, stuck his head further under the bed. He’s afraid of them.
Did I feel I could see the elk’s mind? inside it’s body? As though they were separate? …