Читать книгу On the Animal Trail - Baptiste Morizot - Страница 10

I have just referred, as does Morizot, to the worm composter and its worms as a site for social exchange. A site that also requires a detailed knowledge of habits, attention, alliances and compromises. This example is important because it tells us that becoming a ‘tracker’, ‘becoming a diplomat’ with animals, actually involves a transformation in ways of thinking, of reading signs and of attuning (recognizing and creating harmony between) habits and intentions. Tracking may involve travelling great distances or through forests, but it doesn’t always require it.

After all, as Morizot says, tracking is above all ‘an art of finding our way back home’. Or rather, he implies, it is an art of finding ourselves at home: but this ‘at home’ is not the same as before, just as the ‘self’ which finally finds itself at home has itself become different.

Tracking means learning to rediscover a habitable and more hospitable world where feeling ‘at home’ no longer makes us stingy and jealous little proprietors (the ‘masters and possessors of nature’, as seemed so obvious to Descartes), but cohabitants marvelling at the quality of life in the presence of other beings.

Tracking means enriching our habits. It is a form of becoming, of self-metamorphosis: ‘activating in oneself the powers of a different body’, as the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes. It means finding in ourselves the crow’s leaping curiosity, the worm’s way of being alive – perhaps even, like the worm, feeling ourselves breathing through our skins – the bear’s desiring patience, or the panther’s replete patience, or the very different patience of the wolf parents of a turbulent pup. It means gaining access, as Morizot says, ‘to the prompts specific to another body’.

But ‘all this,’ he adds, ‘is very difficult to formulate, we have to circle round it.’

In the wonderful book in which he recounts his long friendship with a bitch called Mélodie, the Japanese writer Akira Mizubayashi discusses the difficulties that his adopted language imposes on his way of describing the relationship between him and his animal companion. He writes:

The French language, which I have embraced and made my own over a long apprenticeship, stems from the age of Descartes. It carries with it, in one sense, the trace of this fundamental break that means it becomes possible to classify non-human living beings as machines to be exploited. It is sad to note that the language of the time since Descartes somewhat obscures my sight when I contemplate the animal world, so abundant, so generous, so benevolent, described by Montaigne.⁶

We inherit, then, a language which in certain respects accentuates the tendency to de-animate the world around us – as evidenced by the simple fact (to take just one example as highlighted by Bruno Latour) that we only have at our disposal the grammatical categories of passivity and activity.

To narrate the activity of tracking, as Morizot does, to narrate the effects of this ‘finding our way back home’, involved learning to get rid of certain words, playing tricks with syntax so as to account for presences or, more precisely, effects of presence, so as to evoke affects that flood through the body (joy, desire, surprise, uncertainty, patience, fear sometimes), to use the writing of the investigation in order to touch on what goes beyond this writing, as Morizot himself was touched while writing. He had to twist the language of philosophy, to defamiliarize himself from it, to poetically force the grammar, sometimes forge terms or divert their meaning (what he has elsewhere called a semantic wilding),⁷ because none of the terms we have inherited could express the event of the encounter or the grace of awaiting it. To create, in other words, a poetics of inhabiting, an experimental poetics, out in the open air, with plural bodies.

Beyond all that this book teaches us about what animals can do, as well as the humans who go out to encounter them, beyond the concrete and highly innovative political proposals for another way of inhabiting the earth with others, Morizot invites us to explore not only the close confines of our world, but the very limits of our language. To express the event of life.

Where are you going tomorrow? Actually, from the very first words, you will already be on your way.

Vinciane Despret