As you grow older your vision of the world, of people, places, of who you are, tends to calcify. It becomes rigid with years of categorisation. Of creating compartments in your mind into which all of your experiences and opinions go. Even the things we say lose their freshness. We are not present when we are saying them, not creating new strings of words and ideas to convey our thoughts and our feelings. We're just reaching into the nearest, most convenient box and pulling out the most-used thought or expression we find in there. Following neural loops that we've carved out over years of repetitious living. We consider ourselves thinking beings - that, after all, is what separates us from the animals - but can we be truly said to think?
Certainly we each have a mind. But are we its masters? Or its victims?
I've recently been watching the old BBC series, The Life of Birds by David Attenborough. This, as well as the birth of my now eight-week old son, has been the catalyst for a train of thought that I'll try to work through in the next few posts.
I've never really looked that closely at birds. Previously, whenever I looked at a bird, I never really saw it. I perceived it plainly enough, saw its defining characteristics (beak, wings, tail feathers), but never really experienced it. Didn't see the incredible power of life within it. When I saw something flying overhead, or perched in a tree, I would reach into the box marked 'Bird' and pulled out the closest available image, which I would then lay over the top of the real living bird in front of me.
This is probably true of most of my experience of animals. Four legs + pointy ears + tail + 'Meiow' = Cat. Four legs + pointy ears + tail + 'Meiow' + [other recognisable characteristics] = My cat.
There have been a couple of times in my life where I've seen through the automatic overlay of stored impressions to the true being beneath. Each time it's happened I've become aware of a sense of true communication - of completely experiencing the other, their essence. Not just animals - this has happened with people too. When I was a child I thought that everyone had two faces - the one they always wore and the one that appeared if you really looked at them. What I realise now is that this 'second' face is the true face. It is the face that is revealed when all the filters, all the projections, are turned off.
So, back to The Life of Birds. For me, watching this series was like a non-stop revelation - seeing not on the life, but the second face of birds. The biggest mindfuck has been to perceive birds as one experiment in the form of life (other experiments in form being insects, or mammals, or reptiles), with many thousands of permutations, each perfectly adapted to the geographic niche it has carved for itself. These adaptations do not always fit comfortably with my preconceived idea of what constitutes a bird. In fact, some of these birds do not fit into my box marked 'Bird' at all! Diving birds, for instance, like auks or guillemots have traded in their flying for prodigious underwater skills. They seem to have more in common with similarly adapted mammals - beavers for example, or otters. So what is it that makes it a bird?
I'm not looking for the zoological answer to this question. This train of thought is more to do with our (or, in this case, my) perceptions of animals and the world. How we relate to the world and the beings in it based on those perceptions - the name on the box and all the things we put inside.
Seeing how these huge families of beings (birds, mammals, reptiles, insects etc) have adapted to the needs of their environments, and the way in which those needs can give rise to comparable adaptations (adaptions which may even transcend or negate the characteristics that I had previously considered essential to their definition), gave me a vertiginous sense of the flow of evolving life. It was as though I was seeing simultaneously the second face of all the living beings of Earth. And in the second face I perceived more connections than distinctions. Beings surviving. Beings eating. Beings fucking. Beings making turds and falling in love and falling over dead. Beings killing other beings. Beings eating and being eaten by other beings. Beings unified in their desire to stay alive, to produce offspring, to feed and protect and educate their offspring. Beings acting out genetically inherited behaviours. Beings acting out learned behaviours...
Looking back then to our world, the (western) world of human beings - of TV, advertising, shopping malls, pornography, finance, high-speed communication - what lies beneath that, what props it up and sustains it, if it isn't those same beings. Beings not so very far removed from the birds, or the gorillas, or the lizards. The invention of the internet, or the stock-exchange doesn't lift us from that flow of life and blood and shit. So why do we think it does? What do we think makes us so special?
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