by Joshua Lobb
What wounds this woman, what haunts her mind, is what we do to animals. This, in all its horror, is there, in our world. How is it possible to live in the face of it? And in the face of the fact that, for nearly everyone, it is as nothing, as the mere background of life? … [Costello’s woundedness] lets us see one of the difficulties of reality, the difficulty of human life in its relation to that of animals, of the horror of blotting it out of consciousness.106
The stories I tell are about more than just one human’s mourning for another, but about grieving for humans’ violence towards nonhuman animals as well as towards our planet. To borrow a reflection from van Dooren: ‘mourning … is about more than any single species, or any number of individual species, but must instead be a process of relearning our place in a shared world’.107
Aves Admittant
The story ‘Aves Admittant’ continues the exploration of extinction, extending it to think about potential futures of the planet. It contains echoes of two texts: Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and John Beck’s ‘The Call of the Anthropocene’. Discussing Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ Beck quotes the narrator who reflects that even though there may be ‘little time’ left ‘to ponder upon my destiny’, there is ‘time enough to report the fact’.108 Our ‘report’ may be a cry of anguish and fear (as in ‘And No Birds Sing’), but it may also be a call of hope.
Most importantly, I am indebted to Nicholas Carlile, island ecologist, from the Office of Environment and Heritage, NSW, who showed some potential ways we might work towards the future in the present. His research and ideas are the foundation for this story.109 Of course, I am aware of the ethical concerns raised in the field of animal studies towards interventions like the ones attempted by the characters in this story and the ‘regimes of violent-care’ that use the name of conservation to value one species over another.110 It is important to note that the care of one animal can be paired with active hostility towards another, like the rabbits who become footnotes in the story of attempting to save the Gould’s petrel. As van Dooren shows, often conservation focuses not so much on biodiversity, but on ‘native biodiversity’: ‘the right kinds of diversity in the right places’.111 However, like van Dooren, I have chosen to include within my project ‘a descriptive and situated account’ of a particular human decision to work alongside a particular bird. The story offers one way to think through our complicity in the ecological crises we are faced with. I argue that humans are implicated in the depletion of biodiversity—on Cabbage Tree Island and in many other sites—and that we have a responsibility to take into account all potential ways of responding to the consequences of climate change.
In ‘Aves Admittant’ I play with these opposed views on the stylistic level. I place the events of the story in an explicitly imagined space: a temporal location which may or may not be ‘real’ within the narrative world. Central to the story’s stylistic strategy is its use of future tense. The story begins: ‘Years and years from now, I’ll be working as an island ecologist undertaking research on Cabbage Tree Island and my dad will come along as a volunteer assistant. It’ll be part of my postdoc.’ (emphasis added) Gerald Prince gives a seemingly straightforward definition of the future tense as the narration of events ‘that are yet to come or may never come’.112 However, the second clause in Prince’s description provokes a more complex way of thinking about its function. Future tense allows writers to play with what Nelson Rojas calls the ‘connotative value’ of stories.113 The story presented is not yet mapped: the protagonist’s daughter may or may not grow up to be an island ecologist and her father’s narrative may or may not resolve on the cliffs of Cabbage Tree Island. Similarly, the interventions made by ecologists may or may not lead to the protection of a species or may or may not lead to the death of other animals. Ecologists, like the father and his daughter, are considering a potential future which may also lead to a reflection on their present actions. As Rojas writes: ‘The use of the future [tense] serves to stress the importance of a “present” moment.’114 The stylistic strategy I employ in ‘Aves Admittant’, then, is another way we might draw upon a speculative approach to representing animals.
The Flight of Birds
The final story, ‘The Flight of Birds’ is a retelling—and a reconfiguration—of a story contained in Katharine Briggs’ British Folk-Tales and Legends.115 It reflects on the way nonhuman animals are used in fiction as symbols of human psyche, but, more importantly, posits whether it may be possible for animals in stories to move beyond symbolic value and be admitted as agents ungoverned by human interests. My starting point for the ‘speculative exercise’ here was to ask: Is it possible to move the fairy tale from a story ‘about’ birds to a story ‘with’ birds? What might the human story look like if it was reconfigured as a bird’s story?
These questions cannot be answered simply. In the original fairy tale the birds are clearly not agents, but even in the more ‘realist’ retelling of the story the birds function as extensions of the character’s emotional state. The human is still caught up in a vision of the birds as reflections of his own anxieties:
To the young man, the seagulls’ feathers look motheaten, tinged with dirty yellow. Their red beaks are faded, sun-bleached. One bird is missing an eye: the black jagged hole glares. Another is missing a foot: it’s been severed by a net, or hacked off by schoolkids, the young man imagines.
Later, the symbolic value of the gulls changes, so that they become the human’s salvation:
Then they all glide skywards. For a moment the young man isn’t certain if they levitated or if the rocks dropped from under him. They’re all in the air above him, sharp against the blue sky. They form a synchronised circle that wheels above the young man’s head. Even the one with the missing foot flies smoothly, turning this way and that, letting the sun catch his wings at different angles. Even the one with the gaping eyehole can drift and swoop through the air. In fact, it’s impossible to tell which bird is which: they are all perfect, all elegant, all miraculous.
Both sequences are held tightly by the character’s perspective: the descriptions are located always in relation to the young man’s vantage point. Moreover, the descriptions used in the text could only made by a human: later, the movement of the birds is compared to a ‘concertina’ and a ‘lung’; the feathers ‘glint’, like a mirror or glass. But despite this control there also are brief points in this description where individual birds are given access to the narration: the seagull with the missing foot is given agency to ‘let … the sun catch his wings’; the seagull with the gaping eyehole is given permission to ‘drift and swoop’. These are only fleeting moments—the birds are soon viewed from the human perspective so that it is ‘impossible to tell which bird is which’, and the birds will soon disappear into the horizon—but nevertheless these are the moments that offer a new way for the young man to perceive his world, one which may allow for birds to be accepted on their own terms. As Plumwood comments, ‘our willingness and ability to recognise the other as a potentially intentional being tells us whether we are open to potentially rich forms of interaction and relationship which have an ethical dimension’.116
The final line of the story is an attempt to take Plumwood’s ethical dimension further, to accede to ‘due respect for difference’.117 I had some difficulty with the last sentence. In an earlier version of the story I phrased the image of the flying birds in this way: ‘He will remember unfathomable shapes disappearing into an open blue sky.’ My use of the word ‘unfathomable’ was intended to indicate the depth of the seagulls’ actions, a richness that was complicated and multifaceted. I was building upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of da Vinci’s symbolic use of birds in which he proposes da Vinci’s birds are ‘riddles’ that may be impossible to decipher, but in the process of trying to comprehend we come closer to ‘the meaning of the flight of birds’.118 Of course, words have several meanings, and ‘unfathomable’ can be read as ‘incompreh
ensible’ which, as I have noted, might lead to connotations like ‘unworthy’ and ‘not worth noticing’. Consequently, the line becomes: ‘He will remember sparking strips of white against an open blue sky.’ There are two key focuses in the rewritten sentence. The first is ‘sparking’ which I use with the intention for the image to inspire new ways of thinking about birds in flight. The second is the use of ‘open blue sky’ in the final moment, which shifts the perspective away from a human life and emphasises the space around the character. It puts into action Plumwood’s call for what humans see as ‘background’ to become the foreground of our experience.119 What might a bird’s story look like? One which is not dependent on a human for its meaning.
Further Encounters
Nevertheless, as van Dooren notes: ‘It is not enough for two such beings to have lived alongside each other, in proximity to one another; rather, they must also in some way have become at stake in each other, bound up with what matters to each other.’120 One more thing needs to be said about my stories—and storytelling in general. Rowlands talks of a ‘shadow’ agenda that exists in all human writing, saying: ‘Each story has what we might call a dark side; it casts a shadow. That shadow is to be found behind what the story says; here you will find what the story shows.’ This is echoed by Garber’s response to The Lives of Animals: ‘What does the form of [a text] … displace, repress, or disavow?’121 What has animated me the most in the writing of The Flight of Birds is the ways my continued reading of critical engagements with nonhuman animals has divulged my own blindness to my asymmetrical power relations with animals and how this is made manifest in my writing. A telling point was brought to light in a correction made by one of the editors on an earlier version of the manuscript. In the story ‘Do You Speak My Language?’ I had written the sentence: ‘Of course, I’m not thinking about what the bacon was before it sizzled into the frying pan …’ (emphasis added) The editor, in pale pencil, had crossed out the ‘what’ and replaced it with ‘who’. Like many critics in the field, I’d tried to be careful with my pronouns.122 In fact, the story ‘What He Heard’ gains greater power when the personal pronoun is used to refer to nonhuman animals as well as humans: the ‘he’ of the title gives equal reference to all three beings in the story. But the pig who was killed for eating was overlooked by me. As McHugh says: ‘when language bites, it bites hard’.123 And there are other animals who are overlooked in the stories: I’ve already mentioned the rabbits of Cabbage Tree Island, but it is also worth noting the dog who lives with the human family. The dog wanders in and out of the stories, a background character. My treatment of these animals reveals my dependence on the categories that sanctions our culture’s endowment of some subjects as ‘humanised animals’ (animals permitted to have subjectivity) and others as ‘animalised animals’ (those denied any agency).124 In my stories the ‘humanised’ dog would never be neglected by the human: despite the fact that his food is kept in the vestibule alongside Charlotte the budgerigar, the dog ‘ambles in, hoping for a secret biscuit’ even as Charlotte flies through the doorway. In contrast, the ‘animalised’ rabbits are barely worth mentioning, their deaths are not worth mourning (or so the characters believe).
Despite these ‘shadows’ in my text, through the writing of the stories—and through the many discoveries I made in the field of animal studies—my relationships with the birds in my surroundings has certainly been transformed. As Marco Caracciolo states:
Acknowledging the limits of our imaginative and linguistic resources is, in itself, a moral gesture that may make humans more respectful of nonhuman life … [it] paves the way for an empathetic relationship with animals that does not aim at complete understanding (which in turn raises suspicions about anthropocentric reduction) but at a more intimate sharing.125
The stories I tell here are still told by a human and are about humans, but as I have noted, telling human stories and asking the question ‘What might a bird’s story look like?’ are not mutually exclusive activities. The human in the stories wants to have meaningful and conscientious encounters with the birds in his life: the budgerigar he keeps as a pet, the kookaburra who lives in his garden, the magpies outside his office window, the sparrows in his school quadrangle, the koel in the tree, the lyrebird singing in the ruined schoolhouse, the chickens pecking in the mud, the rosella in the bush, the seagulls soaring over the ocean. He wants to hold the Gould’s petrel ‘warm and alive’ in his hands. He wants to turn towards what Woodward describes as ‘a gaze, initiated by the animal, meditative in its quietness and stillness and which compels a response on the part of the human, as it contradicts any assumed superiority of the human over the nonhuman animal’.126 He does this only once. In ‘What He Heard’, at the moment of contact between the two animals, the human and lyrebird look each other in the eye: ‘The bird paused, a lidless eye staring at the intruder. He, the man, did not look away.’127 The human wants to feel—as I wanted to feel as I watched the three black cockatoos flying—what van Dooren and Rose call ‘attentive[ness] to another’s presence, to their way of being in a place’.128
Running through Rose’s writing is a call for an ‘ethical relationship’ between the human and the nonhuman animal: ‘The heart of ethics,’ she affirms, ‘is the call from the other.’129 Ethical relationships depend on a process of active reflection. Rose reminds us that ‘ethical relationships … hinge on taking responsibility for one’s actions, and considering ramifications in both short and long terms’.130 Writing fiction, I believe, is one of the strategies that will allow for ethical relationships to be rehearsed and represented, ‘to make room … in our activities in shared places’.131 In many of the experiences with birds in the book I expose the violence and damage we inflict on birds through our actions and through our stories. But by moving away from the question ‘How can I write about birds?’ to ‘What might a bird’s story look like?’, I also imagine processes through which we might be able to respect birds as agents of their own lives. Even in the contact zone there can be ‘exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation … and new wisdom’.132 The stories that form my novel are speculations, prompts to think through in an immersive way the questions of how human lives intersect with the lives of birds. They are glimpses into the worlds of birds and they embrace potential modes for telling bird stories: encounters that spark against an open blue sky.
1 Emerson, Fretz and Shaw 2001, 356.
2 Haas 2017, 23.
3 The Illawarra Birders group, in collaboration with Wollongong City Council, has complied a document that records the diverse avian life of the Illawarra. See https://bit.ly/2Dfwbsd
4 Hinchcliffe 2010, 34.
5 Arnold 1945, 457; Brower 2013, 60–61.
6 Some of these conversations are recorded in 100 Atmospheres, a multi-authored book by MECO [forthcoming] Open Humanities Press. See also the writing of the Illawarra author, Catherine McKinnon, whose work Storyland depicts a projected image of Wollongong transformed by extreme weather and sea-level rises.
7 Stengers 2015, 22–23.
8 Caballero and Ekeberg 2014, 498. See also Raghuram et al 2016; Vollstädt et al 2017.
9 Trexler 2015, np.
10 I acknowledge that some critics prefer other disciplinary markers, such as ‘human–animal studies’ and ‘critical animal studies’. I have chosen the broader ‘animal studies’ to highlight the field as a site for multiple questions springing from multiple discourses and disciplines: from animal rights and critical animal studies, to animal ethology and ethnography to literary, geographical or philosophical animal studies. For a more thorough survey of the multiple modes of animal studies, see McCance 2013, Marvin and McHugh 2014, and Herman 2014.
11 Armstrong 2008, 2.
12 McHugh 2006; McHugh 2009a; McHugh 2009b; McHugh 2017, 18.
13 Marvin and McHugh 2014; McHugh 2017, 17, 14.
14 For more detailed discussion, see Linda Alcoff’s ‘The Problem of Speaking for Others’. Alcoff 1991–1992.
&n
bsp; 15 Plumwood 2002, 130–134, 106–109, 99, 104.
16 Plumwood argues that our thinking about nonhumans may be said to ‘involve some form of enlargement of or going beyond our own location and interests, but it does not require us to eliminate either our own interest or our own locatedness’. Plumwood 2002, 132–133.
17 Woodward 2008, 2–4; 166. See also Derrida’s ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ 2002. Derrida’s encounter with his cat has been read in many different ways: it is, as Cary Wolfe puts it, ‘a moment either famous or notorious, depending on your point of view’. Wolfe 2008, 36.
18 I borrow the phrase ‘carbon hoofprint’ from McHugh 2010, 187.
19 Sorenson 2014, viii, xi; Plumwood 2002, 2–3.
20 Rose 2013, 1.
21 van Dooren 2014a, 10; McHugh 2010, 197. Probyn-Rapsey 2014, 4.
22 van Dooren and Rose 2012, 1.
