Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  I have been dancing around the question of consciousness. This, of course, is because, like everyone else, I have no idea how to dance with it. In just about every book on animal perception, there appears, as a handy epigraph, the line of the American philosopher Thomas Nagel: ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ It’s an ironic citation, since Nagel meant to point up the insuperable problems of writing books that purport to say anything about the consciousness of a non-human creature. First: we simply don’t know, in many cases, whether a particular species has consciousness (or whether particular members of particular species have consciousness – might one not have talking, self-reflective and non-talking animals, as in the Narnia Chronicles?). And second (and this was Nagel’s main point): consciousness cannot be said to be ‘like’ anything else, which makes exploration with simile impossible, and exploration with metaphor tricky.

  Consciousness is subjectivity: my sense that there is a Charles Foster who is distinct from other beings. And distinct, indeed, from my own body. The Charles Foster that I have a robust conviction that there is, is me in a way that my body is not. Lots of the cells that presently make up my body did not exist last week and will be dead next week, and yet I say today that Charles Foster walked up a hill in Somerset last week and will be in Athens next week. By saying this I really mean that there is some essential I that inhabits my body. It sounds suspiciously as if I’m talking about my soul.

  No one has the faintest idea about the origins of consciousness. The reductionists insist that it is an artefact of my neurological hardware – a sort of substance secreted by my brain. But no one has ever been able to suggest convincingly how it erupted in the first place, or why, when it did, it should have been favoured by natural selection.

  We can see the fingerprints of consciousness in the human historical record: it seems to have emerged sometime in the Upper Palaeolithic, as evidenced by an explosion of symbolism; by the proliferation of things that shout ‘I and not you’.

  It has been convincingly suggested that the induction of altered states of consciousness by ascetic practice, exhaustion, dehydration or the ingestion of hallucinogenic substances might have been the catalyst of a process of which consciousness was the end product. But that, while interesting, doesn’t begin to explain the nature of consciousness, or the reasons for its survival, or its location. T. H. Huxley observed that the emergence of consciousness from electronically irritated nervous tissue is just as mysterious as the genie emerging from the lamp when it was rubbed by Aladdin. Modern neuroscience has nothing to add to that observation.

  It’s a sickening problem for the reductionist, because no one has any idea what consciousness is for, and nor are there any suggestions of the useful quality of which consciousness might be an incidental by-product. You don’t need consciousness for anything on which natural selection can bite. You don’t need it to catch food or to mate. A sense of ‘I’ doesn’t increase the incentive to stop your body being chewed by a predator. Theory of Mind might well confer a selective advantage, but you don’t need consciousness for Theory of Mind. We even show visual discrimination without consciousness. Take, for instance, Lawrence Weiskrantz’s experiments on a patient who was cortically blind in the left visual field. His eye worked, but the connections to or in the visual cortex of his brain did not. He therefore said that he could not see objects in the left visual field. But when he was forced to say what was there, he was much more accurate than chance suggested. If a letter box was vertically aligned, he would tend strongly to orientate letters vertically. He was good at mimicking the expression of an ‘invisible’ person in the left visual field. He dealt quite well with a world with which he had no idea he had any relationship at all. The ‘he’ he described to himself didn’t impinge on the world of the left visual field. And yet his body did.

  Consciousness is certainly present in some animals. It has been convincingly demonstrated in, for instance, New Caledonian crows – often by experiments involving self-recognition. The better we get at looking for consciousness, the more we find it. The earth seems to be a garden good at growing it. But consciousness has not been shown, so far as I know, in any of the species described in this book. I’d be surprised if it were absent – at least in the fox and the badger – but I’ve not assumed that it is present (as almost all children’s and many adults’ storybooks about animals do). Even if consciousness had been demonstrated, it couldn’t make much difference to the book. Where consciousness is present, as in humans, its workings in even one individual can be explored only by novelists and poets. And the best of them will conclude that the individual is elusive. That’s even when, as fellow humans, we’ve got some limited idea of how consciousness might operate in another human. What might it mean to be a particular conscious fox? That’s an enterprise on the wild frontiers of poesy. And if an answer were possible, it might not tell us much about the world of foxes in general.

  It’s quite interesting enough, and certainly hard enough, to try to say what it’s like to be a generic, sensate fox.

  So much for physiology. I share a lot of physiology with my animals, and what I don’t share I can have a reasonable go at probing. The second point at which I meet them is landscape. I can go to where they are. The same rain falls on us; we’re pricked by the same gorse; we feel the same shudders through the ground as the juggernauts pass; we see the same farmer walk past carrying the same gun. They mean different things to us, of course. The gun is unlikely to mean death to me; the rain will mean earthworms on the surface, which will be more interesting to a badger than to me. But we still share something real and objective, the badger and I. Yes, our individual worlds are bespoke, tailored inside our heads by our unique neurological software; yes, it is truly hard to say how a rock on a moor appears to any other creature. But that doesn’t mean that the rock doesn’t objectively exist, or that the attempt to perceive it through the sense receptors of a non-human is doomed to meaninglessness or incoherence.

  The animals and I speak a shared language: the language of the buzzing of our neurones. Often they speak in a difficult – though never quite incomprehensible – dialect. When it is difficult to make out what is being said, context helps. The context is always the land.

  The animals are made out of the land. Almost every molecule of a typical badger came from somewhere in the area of 150 acres around its birth sett. After being squeezed through its mother’s birth canal, deep inside the earth, it enters the dusk of its wood through another tunnel, this time made of earth. It will go back through the same or a similar tunnel at the end. It is likely to die underground, surrounded by the same earth. Its body will be incorporated into the wall of the sett and will be food for worms, which in turn will become parts of the bodies of the next generation or two. You’d expect a deep, fecund resonance between land and animal. And that’s what you find. Few animals export well.

  I’m much less local. Despite my best efforts, many of my molecules come from China and Thailand. I have to work a lot harder to get any kind of resonance. Yet there are many things that can help: history books, the songs and tunes of dead farmers, the stories that cling to the land and to my mind like earth clings to the back of a badger. I can slowly learn the mythological language in which the land speaks both to me and to the badger, and it suffices for some sort of conversation, even if the badger and I falter in our neuronal dialects.

  For this, of course, it helps to be an unabashed hippy. Frank Fraser Darling insisted on going barefoot, year round, on his beloved island, on the basis that it was hard to feel the pulse of the universe through half an inch of Commando sole, and I’m sure that he was an even better zoologist as a result. So off with the kit and on with the instincts. Animals don’t wear clothes outside Beatrix Potter and Alison Uttley. Gore-Tex is just another layer standing between you and the way that the less heavily furred animals sense the world. Someone I knew walked naked for hundreds of miles across England.

  The English, being English, simply refu
sed to acknowledge that there was anything unusual when they met him, and wished him an uncomplicated ‘Good morning’.

  Wetsuits are condoms that prevent your imagination from being fertilised by mountain rivers.

  Learn old tunes; eat food that comes from where you are. Sit in the corner of a field, hearing. Put in wax earplugs, close your eyes and smell. Sniff everything, wherever you are: turn on those olfactory centres. Say, with St Francis, ‘Hello, brother ox’, and mean it.

  Evolutionary biology is a numinous statement of the interconnectedness of things – a sort of scientific advaita: feel it as well as know it. Feel it to know it properly.

  What’s an animal? It’s a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists. What’s a human? It’s a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists – but a more stilted, stuttering conversation than that of most wild animals. The conversations can become stories and acquire the shape and taste of personality. Then they become the sort of animals we celebrate, and the sort of people we want to sit next to at dinner.

  I want to have a more articulate talk with the land. It’s just another way of knowing myself better, and my self-obsession insists that that’s worthwhile. A good way to go about it is to have a more articulate talk with the furry, feathered, scaly, whooping, swooping, screaming, soaring, grunting, crushing, panting, flapping, farting, wrenching, waddling, dislocating, loping, ripping, springing, exulting lumps of the land that we call the animals.

  You get good at talking by talking. You get good relationships by relating, which takes time. You also need to know some facts about the other party. So I read books about photosynthesis and standing stones and schist and scat and scent. I pasted leaves into my notebooks and stroked them. I bought audio-books of bird calls and realised, on the Tube between Paddington and Farringdon, that I could tell a lot about the personality of a bird and the details of its life by hearing the noise it made. Without knowing what it was (since some of those audiobooks blessedly don’t ram the species name down your ears), I knew somehow that a blackthroat danced fearfully in deciduous summer shadows, looking for death from above, and picked insects with a beak like the finest surgical forceps, and fluffed and fussed and went south early.

  ‘Pretentious mystical claptrap’, boomed my farmer friend Burt, whom we’ll meet in the next chapter. Yet it was so. And on the Tube between Farringdon and Paddington I realised that this wasn’t at all surprising; that you could have a fair guess at the history and politics of Russia by listening to Russians talk in Russian about shopping and the weather – even if, and perhaps because, you didn’t understand a word.

  But most of all I hung around. I sat naked and shivering on a moorland, watching the clouds break. I swam into the dark holes of the East Lyn river, where the eels lie. I dug a hole in a Welsh hillside and lived in it. I lay by the side of a big road, outraged by the headlights, feeling the tarmac shudder beneath me as the lorries went past. And, like everyone else, I shuffled in an unnecessary coat through the park with the kids on a Sunday afternoon and fed the ducks. And slowly, slowly, I picked up a few words, and knew too that my words were heard.

  Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand a word it was saying, since the form of a lion’s world is so massively different from our own. He was wrong. I know he was wrong.

  Endnote

  * Although the first recorded words of Adam are in Genesis 2:23, Genesis 2:19–20 says, ‘Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field …’

  2

  EARTH 1

  Badger

  When you put a worm into your mouth, it senses the heat as something sinister. You’d have thought it might make a bid for freedom by going down, into the deeper darkness that usually means home and safety, and head for your oesophagus. But it doesn’t. It goes for the gaps between your teeth. There are plenty in mine. No one had braces in Sheffield in the 1970s. It narrows its body to a thread and urges itself through. If it is frustrated, as it would be by expensive bridgework, it goes into a frenzy: it thrashes, whirling one end like a centrifuge around the middle of its body; it lashes your gums. Eventually, frustrated, it curls up in the moist space next to the frenulum and considers its position. If you open your mouth again it’ll be off, pressing its tail against the floor of your mouth like a sprinter pushing off from the blocks.

  This is all disgusting. It is a good argument for cremation.

  When you bite into a worm for the first time, you expect the sort of performance that every angler knows and I hope every angler hates: twisting, questing against the hook. But it doesn’t happen. Even if, like me, you can’t bring yourself to mash the worm with your molars and instead nip it genteelly with your incisors, the main action is crushing, and that seems to be different. Crushed animals just lie. It doesn’t seem to hurt. When a large piece of Scotland fell off and landed on my arm, it didn’t hurt a bit. In my case there was the woozy, beatific opiate high as the endorphins pumped round, and the sheer diversion of seeing splintered bone and divided nerves. Perhaps annelid worms have some crude opiate-mediated system. But I doubt it: that would be absurd evolutionary extravagance. Anyway, both ends of the worm capitulate. And then I can move the worm back and chew it.

  Earthworms taste of slime and the land. They are the ultimate local food, and as the wine people would say, have a very distinct terroir. Worms from Chablis have a long, mineral finish. Worms from Picardy are musty; they taste of decay and splintered wood. Worms from the high Kent Weald are fresh and uncomplicated; they’d appear in the list recommended with a grilled sole. Worms from the Somerset Levels have a stolid, unfashionable taste of leather and stout. But the worms of the Welsh Black Mountains are hard to place: they would be a serious challenge on a blind tasting. I’m not quite pretentious enough to have a go at describing them.

  The taste of the body predominates. The slime is different from the body, and its taste is mysteriously variable. It doesn’t relate in any obvious way to the terroir of the body. You can suck off the slime, and you’ll find that Chablis slime, at least in the spring, is lemon grass and pig shit. The slime of the Weald is burning flex and halitosis.

  The tastes vary with the seasons, but not as much as you’d expect. The seasons bring out one element rather than another in the taste: they change the tone. You get more nappy liner than paraffin in Norfolk in August than in January, but they are both there all the time.

  About 85 per cent of an average badger’s diet is earthworms. This fact both drains badgers of some of their charisma and makes them excitingly inaccessible.

  Badgers are both the best and the worst place to start. The worst because we think we know them. Our childhood badger anthropomorphisms are among our most cherished, and even when we’re big and unsentimental, continue to seem plausible. A pipe of herb tobacco would sit comfortably in those massive, undislocatable jaws. Those hams, smoked and lauded by gypsies and designed to lumber thousands of nocturnal miles in search of worms and roots, really would look good in moleskin breeches. The front paws, which are powerful digging and slashing machines, look as if they could undo a brass waistcoat button after a big Sunday roast. Their citadels are often centuries old, implying solidity and wisdom. Their grave striped heads would shake authoritatively when disapproving of the plans of flightier animals.

  But they are the best place to start because iconoclasm’s easier with a badger than (say) a heron, in which I’ve invested much less. Going after badgers is the best way to scorch your sentiment. They are great tutors. In the darkening woods they look you shrewdly in the eye, finger their corduroy braces thoughtfully and then slash open your face.

  ✴ ✴

  For me, badgers
meant Burt and the Black Mountains. Not because badgers are obviously linked with Mid Wales: they’re not. Somerset, Gloucestershire or Devon would make more sense. But because Burt has a JCB.

  Burt and I go back a long way. We have bled, suffered, cursed and caroused together in some of the most unpleasant places on the planet. And now he farms, lisps and ambles on some of the steepest and least productive land in Britain. Stones and gradient stop money from sprouting in the open fields; ancient, dripping broadleaved woodland stops it in the valleys. Burt doesn’t care. You don’t need money for home-made cider, home-made sex or the view.

  He met us at Abergavenny station. I had my own cub with me: Tom, aged eight. Badgers are highly sociable, familial creatures. A lone badger is unthinkable. And Tom, who is profoundly dyslexic and therefore gifted with a dazzlingly holistic, intimately relational view of the world, is, I’d guess, far closer to being a badger than I am. He doesn’t have my disability: the tragic pathology of seeing something as meaningful only if and insofar as I can stuff it into a proposition.

  Badgers communicate effectively and copiously but, everyone supposes, without the burden of abstraction. For that you need the disaster of written language, which makes things something other than they are: turns a root into the word ‘root’ and smothers it with layers of nuance so thick that the thing itself suffocates. Tom still knows what a root is, and always will. So does a badger, which likes eating roots and dislikes eating abstractions. Tom defines ‘Tom’ ecologically, in terms of the nexus of relationships (with other humans and with the whole natural world) in which he exists and of which he consists. This is more accurate than my picture of myself, as well as being healthier, more interesting and more badgerlike. I doubt there’s a lot of morbid atomism in a badger sett. Also, Tom is four and half feet tall. I’m six foot three. His view is quite literally closer to that of a badger than mine. Ferns brush his face as they brush a badger’s; his nose is nearer the leaf mould of which he, I and all badgers will eventually be a part, and which is the staple of earthworms.