Читать книгу On the Animal Trail - Baptiste Morizot - Страница 12

‘Where are we going tomorrow?’

‘Into nature.’¹

Among our group of friends, for a long time the answer was obvious, with no risks and no problems, unquestioned. And then the anthropologist Philippe Descola came along with his book Beyond Nature and Culture,² and taught us that the idea of nature was a strange belief of Westerners, a fetish of the very same civilization which has a problematic, conflictual and destructive relation with the living world they call ‘nature’.

So we could no longer say to each other, when organizing our outings: ‘Tomorrow, we’re going into nature.’ We were speechless, mute, unable to formulate the simplest things. The banal problem of formulating ‘where are we going tomorrow?’ with other people has become a philosophical stutter: What formula can we use to express another way of going outside? How can we name where we are going, on the days when we head off with friends, family, or alone, ‘into nature’?

The word ‘nature’ is not innocent: it is the marker of a civilization devoted to exploiting territories on a massive scale as if they were just inert matter, and to sanctifying small spaces dedicated to recreation, sporting activities or spiritual replenishment – all more impoverished attitudes towards the living world than one would have liked. Naturalism, in Descola’s view, is our conception of the world: a Western cosmology which postulates that there are on the one side human beings living in a closed society, facing an objective nature made up of matter on the other side, a mere passive backdrop for human activities. This cosmology takes it for granted that nature ‘exists’; it’s everything that’s out there, it’s that place that we exploit or that we tramp through as hikers, but it’s not where we live, that’s for sure, because it only appears ‘out there’ in distinction with the human world inside.

With Descola, we realize that to speak of ‘nature’, to use the word, to activate the fetish, is already strangely a form of violence towards those living territories which are the basis of our subsistence, those thousands of forms of life which inhabit the Earth with us, and which we would like to treat as something other than just resources, pests, indifferent entities, or pretty specimens that we scrutinize with binoculars. It is quite telling that Descola refers to naturalism as the ‘least likeable’ cosmology.³ It is exhausting, in the long run, for an individual as for a civilization, to live in the least likeable cosmology.

In his book Histoire des coureurs de bois (The History of the Coureurs des Bois), Gilles Havard writes that the Amerindian Algonquin people spontaneously maintain ‘social relationships with the forest’.⁴ It’s a strange idea, one that might shock us, and yet this is the direction this book wants to take: it’s a matter of following this lead. In a roundabout way, it is through accounts of philosophical tracking, accounts of practices involving the adoption of other dispositions towards the living world, that we will seek to advance towards this idea. Why not try to piece together a more likeable cosmology, through practices: by weaving together practices, sensibilities and ideas (because ideas alone do not change life so easily)?

But before setting this course on our compass, we first need to find another word for expressing ‘where we are going tomorrow’, and where we are also going to live, for all those who want to move out of the cities.

For several years, among friends who shared the practices of ‘nature’, this question raised itself. To formulate our projects, we could no longer say: we are going ‘into nature’. Words had to be found that would help us break with language habits, words that would burst from within the seams of our cosmology – the cosmology that turns donor environments into reserves of resources or places of healing, and which sets at a distance, out there, the living territories which are in fact beneath our feet, comprising our foundation.

The first idea we came up with to describe the project of expressing ‘where we are going tomorrow’ in different terms was: ‘outside’. Tomorrow we are going outside – ‘to eat and sleep with the earth’, as Walt Whitman says.⁵ It was a stopgap solution, but at least the old habit was gone, and dissatisfaction with the new formula prompted us to look for others.

Then, the formula that imposed itself on our group of friends, due to the oddity of our practices, was: ‘into the bush’. Tomorrow we’re going into the bush. Where, precisely, there are no marked trails. Where, when there are marked trails, they do not force us to change our route. Because we are going out tracking (we are Sunday trackers). As a result, we walk through the undergrowth, passing from wild boar paths to deer tracks: human trails do not interest us, except when they attract the geopolitical desire of carnivores to mark their territory (foxes, wolves, lynx or martens, etc.). Carnivores are fond of human paths, and these paths are used by many animals, because their markings, those pennants and coats of arms, are more visible there.

To track, in this sense, is to decipher and interpret traces and pawprints so as to reconstruct animal perspectives: to investigate this world of clues that reveal the habits of wildlife, its way of living among us, intertwined with others. Our eyes, accustomed to breath-taking perspectives, to open horizons, initially find it difficult to get used to the way the landscape slips by: from being in front of us, it has now moved beneath our feet. The ground is the new panorama, rich in signs – the place which now calls for our attention. Tracking, in this new sense, also means investigating the art of dwelling of other living beings, the society of plants, the cosmopolitan microfauna which comprise the life of the soil, and their relations with each other and with us: their conflicts and alliances with the human uses of territory. It means focusing attention not on entities, but on relationships.

Going into the bush is not the same as going into nature: it means focusing on the landscape not as the peak for our performance, or as a pictorial panorama for our eyes, but as the crest which attracts the passing of the wolf, the river where we will certainly find the tracks of the deer, the fir forest where we will find the claws of the lynx on a trunk, the blueberry field where we will find the bear, the rocky ledge where the white droppings of the eagle betray the presence of its nest . . .

Before even going out, we try to locate on maps and on the Internet the forest track by which the lynx can reach those two massifs to which it is drawn, the cliff where the peregrine falcons can nest, the mountain road which is shared by humans and wolves at different times of the day or night.

We no longer look for walks to go on, or signs of hiking trails that we come across by chance, surprised that they exist, no longer really understanding their signage. We are slowed down: we no longer gobble up the miles, we go round in circles to find the traces, it sometimes takes an hour to cover two hundred metres, as on the tracks of that moose in Ontario which was going round and round a river: an hour of tracking, losing and then finding its trail again, speculating on where its next traces would be, finding ourselves right back where we had started, next to the fir forest where, as an animal with night vision, it was probably taking its daytime nap, if we are to judge from its very fresh droppings. We are going ‘into the bush’ – and that’s already another way of saying and doing things.

It’s not, of course, a question of finding a new word to impose on everyone as a replacement for ‘nature’: we just wanted to piece together multiple and complementary alternatives, to find different ways of expressing and practising our most everyday relationships to living things.

The third phrase that suggests an alternative to ‘getting a bit of nature’ occurred to me one morning while reading a poem. It’s the phrase ‘to get a breath of fresh air.’ Tomorrow we’ll get a breath of fresh air. What fascinates me about this formulation is how the constraints of language poetically suggest something quite different from what you mean – how the phrase almost makes you hear the element most opposite to, and most complementary to, air, namely the ‘earth’ which the ear can almost hear hidden in the word ‘breath’.

To ‘get a breath of fresh air’ is also to be back on earth, earthly, or ‘terrestrial’ as Bruno Latour puts it. The fresh air that we breathe and that surrounds us, by the ancient miracle of photosynthesis, is the product of the breathing forces of the meadows and forests that we walk through, and which are themselves the gift of the living soils that we tread upon: the breath of fresh air is the metabolic activity of the earth. The atmospheric environment is living in the literal sense: it is the effect of living things and the environment that living beings maintain for themselves, and for us.

To get a breath of fresh air: the earth is disguised in the word ‘breath’, but still perceptible – and once you are aware of it, you can’t ignore it. And the magic formula then invokes another world where there is no longer any separation between the celestial and the terrestrial, because the open air is the breath of the green earth. There’s no more opposition between the ethereal and the material, no more sky above us to ascend to, for we are already in the sky, which is none other than the earth inasmuch as it is alive – that is, built by the metabolic activity of living things, creating conditions that make our life possible.⁶ Getting a breath of fresh air is not about being in nature and far from civilization, because there is nature everywhere (apart from in shopping centres . . .). Nor does it mean being outside, but rather being everywhere at home on the living territories that are the basis of our subsistence and where each living thing inhabits the woven web of other living things.

To get a breath of fresh air, however, is a bit demanding: urban life as such, disconnected from the circuits that convey biomass to us, disconnected from the elements and other forms of life, makes it very difficult to access fresh air. In the heart of cities, this means tracking migrating birds or practising the geopolitics of permaculture vegetable gardens on a balcony. It means wondering where this tomato came from so that I can smell the sun and the portion of earth from which it was born, and see that earth with my own eyes. It means activating mutualist alliances with the worms of the worm composter to which we donate the leftovers from our kitchen and the shreds of our hair, so as to see and circulate solar energy in dynamic ecological processes rather than hiding them in lifeless rubbish bins. It’s more difficult, but even in the city you can get a breath of fresh air. With a little eco-sensitive vigilance, the living land reminds us of itself. It’s fascinating to feel how much we are connected to spring, how much it rises up in us, reaching into the very heart of the big cities, something we can see from a thousand little invigorating signs.

Being in the fresh air means simultaneously being enlarged by the living space around us when we take up room within it, and with our feet in the soil, lying on it as on a fantastic animal which bears us, a gigantic animal come back to life, rich in signs, in subtle relationships, a donor environment whose generosity is finally recognized, far removed from the myths that tell us we need to tyrannize the earth if it is to nourish us.

Being in the fresh air means being in the living atmosphere produced by the respiration of plants, since what they reject is what makes us. It means recognizing that the breath of fresh air and the earth are one and the same fabric, immersive, alive, made by living things in which we are caught up, mutually vulnerable – and thus forced into more diplomatic relations?

Being in the fresh air is, at one and the same time, an invigorating opening and a way of finding our way back to the earth.

The last word, the one which finally summed it all up, is a word we stumbled upon by chance. It’s a word from Old French that comes from the coureurs des bois of Quebec. It’s the way they expressed the idea of going off for a breath of fresh air, after each return to town to do their business. They would say: ‘Tomorrow I’m heading off, I’m going to enforest myself (‘je vais m’enforester’).

Enforesting oneself is a twofold movement, as the reflexive verb suggests: we go out into the forest and it moves into us. Enforesting oneself does not require a forest in the strict sense, but simply a different relationship to living territories: the twofold movement of walking across them differently, connecting with them through other forms of attention and other practices; and allowing ourselves be colonized by them, allowing them to enfold us and move into us – just as the pioneer forest fronts of the Cévennes pines advance towards the villages, covering the old pastures which are no longer maintained by pastoralism.

It was tracking, in a philosophically enriched sense, that set us on the path to this process of ‘enforesting ourselves’, which shifted our way of looking and living – a tracking associated with other practices, such as picking wild plants, which require a very fine sensitivity to the ecological relationships that weave us together into living territories. This ‘eco-sensitive’ tracking inaugurates another relationship with the living world, which simultaneously becomes more adventurous and more welcoming: adventurous because so many things happen – everything is active, everything is a little richer in strangeness, every relationship even with the bottom of the garden deserves to be explored; and more hospitable because it is no longer silent and inert nature in an absurd cosmos, but living creatures like us, vectorized by recognizable but always enigmatic vital logics, a mystery which can never be completely fathomed by investigation.

There is a Zen aphorism which to my mind suggests something of the trail that we are following here, this trail to enforest ourselves. There’s a monk standing in the pouring rain, his back turned to the door of the temple, gazing at the mountains. A young monk sticks his head through the door of the temple, bundled up in his robe, and says to the monk: ‘Come back in, you’ll catch your death!’ The monk answers, after a pause: ‘Come back in? I hadn’t realized I was outside.’

In a sense, in the old days, we were often bored when we found ourselves ‘outside’, in inanimate landscapes, seeking physical exertion and picturesque views. From now on everything is populated, calling out to us, and we must live together in a great shared geopolitics. Trying, as amateur trackers, to become diplomats towards forms of life that dwell among us, but in their own ways. We could undertake to become ‘intermediaries’ towards all these living beings. ‘Truchement’ is a nice word from Old French – it can mean translators or intermediaries, and is sometimes used to describe strange characters: it was the name of the young French coureurs des bois that the explorer Samuel de Champlain, when he landed on the Algonquin territory that was to become Canada, allowed to winter among the Amerindian tribes so that they could learn the language and customs of the so-called ‘savages’ and become diplomats between nations, now wearing frock coats and sporting feathers in their long hair.

We would need to become coureurs des bois of the same order, but this time dealing with different ‘savages’: to enforest ourselves is, as it were, an attempt to winter ‘over there’, to see things from inside the point of view of wild animals, of the trees that communicate, the living soils that labour, the plants that are akin to the permaculture vegetable garden. To enforest ourselves means to see through their eyes and become aware of their habits and customs, their irreducible perspectives on the cosmos, to invent better relationships with them. It is truly a question of diplomacy, since it involves a variegated people whose languages and customs are poorly understood, a people that is not necessarily inclined to communicate, although the conditions are there simply because we share a common ancestry (we descend from the same ancestor). To ‘enforest ourselves’, we will need an acrobatics of the intelligence and the imagination, and an indefinite, delicate suspense, as we try to translate what those plants and animals do, what they communicate and how they live.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argues in a famous passage that our inability to communicate with the other species with which we share the earth is a tragic situation and a curse. When asked what a myth is, he replied:

If you were to ask an American Indian, there would be a good chance that he would answer: a story of the time when men and animals were not yet distinct. This definition seems very profound to me. For, despite the clouds of ink projected by the Judeo-Christian tradition to mask it, no situation seems more tragic, more offensive to the heart and the spirit, than that of a humanity which coexists with other living species on a land which they enjoy in common, and with which humanity cannot communicate. We can understand why the myths refuse to view this defect of creation as original; they see in its appearance the inaugural event of the human condition and not of the latter’s infirmity.⁷

However, this ‘defect of creation’ is just one point of view: communication is possible, even if it is difficult, always subject to creative misunderstanding, always surrounded by mystery. It has never ceased to be so, except for a civilization that has disfigured other living beings and turned them into machines, forms of matter governed by instincts or an absolute otherness governed by relations of force.

If, however, Lévi-Strauss’s definition of myth is the correct one, then tracking appears, enigmatically, as one possible way among others of experiencing and accessing the time of myth itself.

This overlap between animal and human, this metamorphic experience between oneself and the other can be found everywhere in tracking. To understand the animal’s trajectory, you have to put yourself in its place, see through its eyes. You have to find the key points, the convergences between ways of being alive, by following the animal in its tracks. You have to find the (even more) vital problematics in yourself. In order to find the wolf, you have to probe the problematics you share with the wolf, inside of yourself: you have to try and move outside the merely human way of living so that you can coincide with something else. You have to move along a path, for example. Certain animal paths are places where the human and the animal are blurred, because it is not possible at first glance to decide who dug them. A path is often shared, drawn and carved out by several species, including humans, and it is with the same wary eyes, and for the same reasons, that they choose them. The deer’s trails are open paths; those of the wild boar become difficult to follow when the shrub cover becomes denser, because they are low down; those of the chamois are often too vertical, as this creature lives like a bird in three dimensions, and the verticals are just as natural as the horizontals; those of the wolf are optimal routes to investigate.

Large animals form a community with similar reasons for moving about, and an analogous way of changing place; they embark on the same search for the cleared path, the best possible passage, the stream where they can quench their thirst or just revel in the joy of the living water, the sunlight in which they can warm their skins after the cold valley, the coign of vantage over the valley which allows them to orient themselves a little and see what’s coming, the shade in which they can cool off at midday, the detour round the peak. A wolf’s trail always takes the path of least resistance. And that’s why a human being will naturally follow an animal path (if the animal has a certain corpulence), and that’s why, in it and through this path, there is something like a momentary blurring of the distinction between man and animal which proves how close they are, in the vital, lived experience of their pacing along the same trail. They see it with the same eyes; they are mammals that open up the path with the same aims and the same ways of thinking and deciding. Despite the differences, despite the unapproachable strangeness of other forms of life, there is at certain points something like a community of vital issues. This is what becomes evident in forest tracking when, for example, we discover a lost track because we have guessed that it was towards that babbling stream over there that the animal went when the temperature soared, or when we know in advance that, on this pass, the wolf, imbued by the sovereign desire to make its territory known to everyone, will have left a mark, which indeed we find right there. In passing, we unwittingly experience the time of myth: a time when human and non-human animals are no longer clearly distinguishable.

Like any good intermediary, it is to be hoped that a diplomat who has gone to enforest himself among other living things, even for a day or two, will comes back transformed, made serenely wild, far from the phantasmal wildness we attribute to Others. Whoever lets himself be enforested by them should, we hope, come back a little different from his werewolf trip, turned into a half-blood, straddling two worlds. Neither degraded nor purified, just other, and able to travel a little between worlds, and to make them communicate, so that he can work to bring about a common world.

The earth, that is sufficient,I do not want the constellations any nearer,I know they are very well where they are,I know they suffice for those who belong to them. ⁸