Hunting scenes

 

1.

In the Carnavalet, the Museum in Paris dedicated to Paris, there is a room full of old enseignes – painted signs of wood or sheet metal which were put outside of wine shops, taverns, bakeries, butchers, etc. These painted signs were not only simply pictures of wine or bread or meat, or simple cutouts of medal, to signify what was being sold, but combined the indexical with the emblematic, or  totemic or whimsical. The Hotel du Grand Cerf shows a metal cutout of a great buck deer, but also a reclining, draped woman at the deer’s feet,  whom the deer looks about to kiss. Or a wooden bas-relief of a cat,  hung over a café named the Black Cat.

In the spirit of the enseigne, I’d like to hang over this little essay (if that is what this melody is) a painting from 1565.  Let’s not name it – you know it, and you know the artist. Alistair Fowlie provides a good description of it: in the foreground, “three hunters and a dozen dogs” trudge through the snow downhill to a village. To the left, there is a junky inn of some sort with a broken sign, and what looks like a fire, over which a pig or a bore is being cooked.

Fowlie names the dogs – using curious hunterly lingo: “three smooth-haired grayhounds (fast gazehounds for hare or deer or fox); one shaggy greyhound or lurcher (for hare or rabbit); four brown limers or bloodhounds with pendulous ears (one of them defecating); and several smaller dogs.”

Fowlie notices that none of the hunters are in livery. They are, in other words, probably not members of some noble’s house, not servants, but villagers.  This is the Low Countries, not France or Spain, and hunting is not a privilege, by law, of the aristocracy. Ortega y Gasset, in his Meditations on Hunting, written in Lisbon in 1942, laments – with his conservative nostalgia, his distaste for the age of the masses – the decline of the privilege of hunting, which is “one of the characteristic privileges of the powerful”.  Ortega imagines that this privilege extends back to the Neolithic era. In modernity, the hunting privilege has aroused powerful envy: “ One of the causes of the French Revolution was the irritation the country people felt because they were not allowed to hunt, and consequently one of the first privileges which the nobles were obliged to abandon was this one. In all revolutions, the first thing that the “people” have done was to jump over the fences of the preserves or to tear them down…” Ortega may be on to something, at least as far as the painting we are looking at is concerned, since the hunters and the dogs only occupy the bottom third of the painting. Over the snowing hill and far away is a landscape with a frozen pond upon which people are skating, and houses with snow laden rooves within which one feels, instinctively, that people are gathered around the hearth. The world belongs to the season, and the season is not one for occupations. As Ortega points out, occupations, jobs, are painful, and the majority of mankind is immersed in them.

“So here is the human being suspended between two conflicting repertories of occupations: the laborious and the pleasing. It is moving and very sad to see how the two struggle in each individual. Work robs us of time to be happy, and pleasure gnaws away as much as possible at the time claimed by work. As soon as man discover a chink or crack in the mesh of his work he escapes through it to the exercise of more enjoyable activities.”

Though our hunters are burdened down with the prey they have caught, though the afternoon is falling and the snow is deep, one feels like they have had a happy expedition in the woods and fields. They have killed animals, and are taking them back to the village, while children play a form of hockey on the pond far below them.

2

A theory of hunting.

In the Celestial Hunter, Roberto Calasso considered hunting myths – starting with a close reading of  Jason and the Argonauts – to pull together the thematic structures in our ever increasing humanization (which, by dialectical cunning, pulls us ever closer to our total de-humanization), with at its center the idea and practice of sacrifice. Hunting is an essential moment in this continuum.

“For a long time, animals, perplexed, observed men. They perceived that something changed. Men were no longer animals among the numerous animals that predators took down and devoured, in the savanna and in the caves. Now, even men took down and devoured. But not with their naked hands. They always used an extra-human object : stones, spears, pikes. And they finished by using something even stranger : they struck at a distance, with obsidian points that penetrated the skin. They were the only animal that struck from afar. When men advanced, in the brush or in the forest, one sense a particular odor, something disagreeable and alarming. These were the hunters.”

For Calasso, this moment – the moment of killing from afar – was the crucial but unspoken event that transformed man the animal into man the human.  This was the pre-sacrificial moment in the background of all sacrificial moments.

“The detachment vis-avis the animal was the major event of history. Every other event refers to this. No story subsists of what took place. But the innumerable stories which have been transmitted presuppose this story which has not be transmitted down to us and which perhaps has never been told. Before even being a ritual, this was what preceded all rituals, and it is what all rituals allude to.”

Another Italian thinker, Carlo Ginzburg, has hypothesized that the hunter’s art preceded and influenced the art of writing. In his long, manifesto like essay, Clues, Ginzburg writes:

“Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces as trails of spittle. He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a' forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers. This rich storehouse of knowledge has been passed down by hunters over the generations. In the absence of verbal documentation to supplement rock paintings and artifacts, we can turn to folklore, which transmits an echo, though dim and distorted, of the knowledge accumulated by those remote hunters.

An oriental fable that circulated among Kirghiz, Tartars, Jews, Turks, and others relates the story of three brothers who meet a man who has lost a camel or, in variant versions, a horse.U They describe it for him without hesitation: it is white, blinded in one eye, and carries two goat-skins on its back, one full of wine, the other of oil. Then they have seen it? No, they have not. So they are accused of stealing and brought to trial. For the brothers, this is a moment of triumph: they demonstrate in a flash how, by means of myriad small clues, they could reconstruct the appearance of an animal on which they have never laid eyes.”

There’s a relationship between Calasso’s notion of the animal that attacks from afar and Ginzburg of the invisible animal that is tracked by its traces – a venatic semiotics.

Perhaps the actual idea of narration (as distinct from charms, exorcisms, or invocation) may have originated in a hunting society, relating the experience of deciphering tracks. This obviously undemonstrable hypothesis nevertheless seems to be reinforced by the fact that the rhetorical figures on which the language of venatic deduction still rests today - the part in relation to the whole, the effect in relation to the cause - are traceable to the narrative axis of metonymy, with the rigorous exclusion of metaphor.”

Ginzburg’s essay is an attempt to account for a change in historical and philosophical biases in modernity – or rather, in the post WWII period, with the decline into which the grand narrative has fallen – by pointing to the emergence of the clue not only in detective fiction and fact, but in the way historians have worked in excavating smaller scenes, micro-histories.

3.

A theory of the person

Sergio Dalla Bernardina, a professor of anthropology in France, has devoted his studies to the interface between the animal and the human. As an anthropologist, of course, he has to operate with angelic quotation marks invisibly dancing above his enabling categories, and I will too, endowing those two terms with a vague generality.

He is particularly interested in hunting, or in the way animals become subject to killing by humans. Mostly, these animals are four footed and give suck to their young – not for Dalla Bernadina the hecatombs of roaches that are the ordinary casualties on an exterminator’s daily work.

To that end, he’s done field work with hunters in Europe: hunters of chamois in the alps of Northern Italy, hunters of bore and foxes in Corsica and Spain. Etc.

There is a story about the interface between humans and animals. In the early modern era, the old kinship that was felt between man and beast gave way to the clockwork beast, the mere carrier of our goods and services. The cows in the factory, slaughtered on the assembly line, are the great image of the modern ethos.

However, dalla Bernardina has come to a curiously paradoxical conclusion about the interface between man and beast even in modern times, and even among modern hunters, which is that hunted animals are endowed by hunters (and some animals, dogs and cats for instance), with personhood by humans.

It would seem that personhood would endow animals with rights. However, that is a very theoretical point of view, a very liberal and cushioned point of view. In history up to this very moment, the personhood of persons has not ever prevented them from being killed by other humans. The wars, murders, execution and general mayhem which weaves a ghastly course through the human to human interface gives us, anthropologically, a different sense of personhood than this ghostly substance with a right to a lawyer and one call. The criminal, the traitor, the soldier enemy, or even the person in the way is violated by a symbolically rich interaction that founds personhood on responsibility and fault. We kill them, and in our eyes, to relieve, perhaps, our own guilt, we make them responsible for their own deaths. They did the wrong things, these killed: were born to the wrong people, fought on the wrong side, were in the wrong place, speeded and didn’t pull over and so on.

Responsibility is hung around your neck like the albatross around the Ancient Mariner’s.

God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!

 Why look'st thou so?'— 'With my crossbow

 I shot the Albatross.

In dalla Bernardina’s great essay, A person not altogether like the others: the animal and its status, Bernardina’s describes the mise-en-scene of the Ainu bear ceremony, taken from Arlette Leroi-Gourhan’s field work. Every year a small bear cub is captured. The whole village than treats this cub with extraordinary kindness and generosity, feeding it, petting it, pampering it like a child. The village “officially” treats it as a person, and even a privileged person.

Then comes the feast day. The bear is taken on a tour around the village, and everyone gently explains the festival, which is to be transmitted, spiritually, to the whole tribe of bears after his death. This is necessary so that the bears will be happy to come to the persons who have treated them so nicely, and not to be angry and destroy the huts of the village. So much the ethnologist Leroi-Gourhan understood. But then comes the puzzling part: “for a reason that we could not grasp, but which, perhaps, has the purpose, as in the corridas, to fatigue the animal, everyone begins to mistreat it, to anger it, pulling it on all sides, pricking it with branches and striking it with large leafy bamboo shoots. At last it is lead to the square of the village and attached to a stake. Everyone assembles. Then the chief of the ceremony takes his bow and shoots the first arrow. Officially, that is considered to kill it. Then all the men target it with their arrows. Nearby, they lay down two big logs on the ground. Then they lead the dying or dead bear to the logs and break its neck. A piece of wood is introduced into its mouth and the spoils are transported before the village’s palisade. The women clamor their indignation and hit the men for their cruelty, the older ones weep, but, soon, the young people begin to dance.”

Dalla Bernardina relates this ceremony to the testimony of contemporary hunters in Europe, who almost always eventually use “person” type words to describe the animals they hunt. The animals, it turns out, are “clever”, “malign”, “tricky” – they are, in the narratives of the hunters, responsible, in part, for their own killing. It is only when they are dead that they are wholly animal, wholly separate from the realm of beings to which they hunters themselves belong. There is, thus, an identification between the hunter and the prey that seems to be much different from what one would expect in a Cartesian culture, or a culture in which the animal was merely a machine, a clockwork extravagance, a rightless object.

Dalla Bernardina rightly contextualizes his theory with the class notion that the poor, the worker, the peasant are inherently cruel, and thus treat the animal cruelly. This notion traverses the entire Western discourse on cruelty to animals  - a discourse that has increased as the mechanization of slaughter has created a gap between the people who eat the meat of the killed animal and the people who raised the animal, shipped the animal to the abattoir, slaughtered the animal. From the perspective of those who, like me, get their bacon wrapped in plastic in a grocery store, the cruelty practiced on, say, pigs, which I know about from Charlotte’s Web and Wodehouse Blandings novels can be the subject both of my horror and of my indifference at the same time. Killing from afar is not only a structure, but a logic.

4.

The mice.

I was sitting on the sofa four months ago when my eye caught something. A certain shadow, a grayness. I look up and nothing is there, but I sensed something.

I remember years ago, before the apartment was remodeled, having the same feeling. Of something being there.

Of course, in a couple of days I saw it. The mouse. Rushing along the baseboard at a good clip. And always being able to escape almost magically by going through the crack between the floor and a storage drawer mounted just above the floor.

And so it began. The mouse droppings in the bathroom. Under the refrigerator. The sightings. Going to the bathroom at night and thinking, sleepily, of a mouse running over your toes.

At first I tried clove oil. Bought a sprayer with that dispensed a scent that was supposedly repulsive to rodents. And this would work for a day, or two, but then one of use would see it again.

Then the snap traps. Which I put under the sink, under the refrigerator. Which snapped on me as I set them up. Fuck!

And nothing. Never worked. I had the feeling that it wouldn’t work. I knew it wouldn’t work.

So the glue traps. The awful glue trap.

One evening, we were going out. To a dinner with some friends. We were talking, coordinating. I look over and where I set the glue trap, there it was. A mouse. Caught. On its side.

This was the first one. Now the glue traps folded over. When you opened them out, like a book, and spread them on the floor, the mouse would, theoretically, mostly be caught on one leaf or another. The reason for this was not just that you could close and store the traps without getting glue on yourself. The reason was what I now had to do. Because I was not going to leave the mouse, seemingly stunned, in the glue. So I put one leaf over the other and stomped, thus crushing the mouse.

A little mouse blood drop on the floor.

And so it happened. Three more times. I felt absolutely dirty the first time. I felt a little less the second. I still felt dirty, though. Fold over, stomp.

Poor mice. But I felt it was not my fault. I felt it was their fault. I felt that they were invading my space, and that I would have left them alone if we met “in nature”.

We closed up the egress from the outside, we tracked down where they were coming from. I think, at least. Have not seen one in a month. Nor felt one. Cause you begin to feel mice in a relatively small apartment.

It is not my fault.

 

Hunting scenes 2

Following

There’s a relationship between Calasso’s notion of the animal that attacks from afar and Carlo Ginzburg’s of the invisible animal that is tracked by its traces – a venatic semiotics.

So much depends upon that almost invisible concept of “following”. So much: metaphysics, history, writing…

Which  brings me to a familiar story. A man tells this tale in a poem: in a chariot balanced on bronze eight spoked wheels, with an iron axle, pulled by wise horses and led by celestial maidens, he comes to the portal of night and day and is there greeted by a goddess who cries out to him that he has left the beaten track of men.

The goddess then proceeds to tell him a cosmic secret. There are two ‘routes’ of inquiry: that of what is, and that of what is not.

Philosophers, enraptured by what is and what is not, have neglected the question that some more naïve inhabitant of roads, ways, trails, streets, pistes, sentiers, Wege, some vagabond, some pour lost soul, might ask – say a girl wearing a red hood, entering a forest and coming to two trails to her grandmother’s house. That question is – how is being, or non being, like a road? Or, if inquiry and being are so related as the chariot wheel is to the track – how is inquiry a road? Why this image?

Who leads the inquiry? I imagine this question coming from the girl, as she strips off the hood and throws it into the fire, and strips off her socks and throws them into the fire, and strips off her chemise and throws it into the fire, a magic fire that consumes instantly and ashlessly, and all the undergarments, strip he tells her, and her staring at the being on the bed of whom she has always had a presentiment. The being who wants to see all of her and never will, there will never be enough seeing, just as she has remarked on enough of him, seen him – his teeth, his ears, his hairiness. This couple, made of girl and wolf, sex and hunger. Both know trails, tracks, paths. One will return, one will not. Both know the pins and needles. One is the route of what is, one is the route of what is not and cannot be. Beware of the second route.

Not that this couple would have been in any position to read the fragments of Parmenides, which were first gathered together again – all the extant verses - in the West by G.G. Fuelleborn in 1795.

In Calasso’s telling of the event/non-event of the arrow, the thrown spear, the first killing at a distance, he contrasts metonomy – the event described – and metaphor – the event modelled, analogized. For the arrow is the first human transcendent, opening up a world of thrown things, from light to vision itself. The world as projection.

“There are two original sins for Homo : separation and imitation. Separation takes place when Homo decides to oppose itself to the zoological continuum, in taking certain animals into its service and considering others as a material potentially useful for it own ends. Imitation is when Homo approximates, in his behavior, the predators. Once the passage to predation is accomplished, Homo does not know how to treat this new part of its nature. It chooses to circumscribe it in its literal signification and extend it as a metaphor. It invents hunting as a non-indispensable activity, a gratuitous one. It was the first art for the sake of art.”

To follow – this is rooted in the animal world of tracks, flights, lines of attack and retreat. Yet, for something so fundamental, it is also so hidden. It is about hiding and seeking, it is the business of the child, the girl going into the forest and choosing the trail to follow to grandma’s house. Or Hercules at the crossroads, that swollen boy at his twelve appointed tasks.

2.

Rane Willerslev’s did his field work among the Yukaghirs, a small tribe in Siberia whose social system relies upon hunting – hence the name of his book, Soul Hunting. Willerslev was a participant-observer – he joined the hunting parties and, according to his own account, became pretty good at it, good enough to find sedentary life, life in the village, tedious:

“Like most other hunters, I found the monotony of life in the village almost intolerable. In addition, the young village women, with their elegant leather boots and Russian-style clothes, seemed alien to me. When I was not interviewing teachers, administrators, and retired people, I killed time by hitting the bottle with the other hunters. It was only when Akulina and Gregory Shalugin, an elderly Yukaghir couple with whom I had developed a particularly warm friendship, dragged me along to the forest that my condition improved. From that point on, however, I avoided village life as much as I could and spent the rest of my time in the field with Spiridon’s group and other groups of hunters in the forest.”

Willerslev frames his notion of the Yukaghir sense of the world in terms of the mimetic agent: to follow a track is, in some sense, to mimic the being that made the track. Following here is a common but unspoken skill of both the hunter and the prey, for the prey that makes the track is also following some mimetic goal: escape, food, sleep, sex, birth, play.

In this sense, the hunter’s spirit lies over all writing, all incisions or marks on surfaces. To write is to follow. And the time of following is a double time, divided between going forward in the future and knowing that going forward is what constitutes the past – that past inhabited by beings that are going forward on one’s track, that are tracking one.