When the cardinal outside my back window screams—which is pretty much a daily occurrence—I wonder whether the other birds notice his desperation. From my perspective, his screams are mostly ignored, with each panicky, anxious chirp just one part of the environment, lost in the cacophony that announces the morning, even though those screams certainly express an overwhelming sensation for him. I watch from my chair, my coffee fresh, the news on the table before me, aware of the chasm that seems to exist between my comfortable seat and the cardinal’s frantic perch. He hops from branch to branch and occasionally even lands on the railing of my back terrace while peering into the trees, desperately searching for his girlfriend, spitting feverish, punchy chirps without once hearing a reply. There’s an urgency, even a fearful quality, to his jerky movements, with the incoming winter and its difficulty the trigger, I believe, to his instincts.
To view the natural world as peaceful has always seemed a tad confused to my eye. Perhaps the natural world is calming, perhaps a gentle breeze or some vibrant colors or even a few small animals provide a relaxed, tranquil feeling, but the word peaceful is, at best, mistaken. Because if you dilate your eye, there’s nothing but horror, pain, and destruction for you to see, in how all the radiant birds have anxious heartbeats and are either starving or fighting for food, in how the roots of the most exquisite trees are soaking up water from other trees, in how nearly every spec of dirt in the calmest forest contains an uncountable number of microscopic wars.
Neither birds nor rabbits have retirement plans. There’s no graceful decline that ends in a painless death surrounded by family. Even the cutest of animals has a fate that’s foretold, involving some combination of starvation and terror, just as the most vibrant flowers are soon to fade, wither, and decompose. So as I watch the cardinal from my chair, his movements full of alarm, agitation, the separation between his harsh world and my comfortable space seems immense. Yes, there’s a symmetry and balance to this cycle, and perhaps there’s even beauty in the destruction, in how its the fuel for renewal, or even rejuvenation—with plants nourishing the animals, with decaying animals nourishing the plants. This balance just might give the endless and inevitable terror outside my window its potential beauty, an explanation for the ecological equilibrium between predator and prey, an explanation for why we perceive nature, when we don’t look too hard, as peaceful.
Although our perception also includes a belief that we’ve escaped our own crude origins. I write these words from a heated home, a fresh coffee within reach, our most atavistic impulses left in the past, the contemporary world having separated long ago from a life that’s feral, savage, brutish. In today’s world cruelty and terror are typically rather abstract concepts. Present, of course, but typically dismissed, overlooked, not discussed over cocktails and in polite company, deemed aberrations rather than innate. We prefer to look away, to change the subject, to discuss other topics, to leave the subject of brutality to the birds, to those animals still trapped in a primitive environment.
Which means that the cosmopolitan response to atrocity is to close both eyes: one eye when nature is described as peaceful, and the other when we pretend that we’ve escaped our origins. I do appreciate this desire, and the search for a more uplifting, more transcendent, purpose to describe our behavior can be noble—there must be, surely, something beyond the bodily, beyond the mere visceral, beyond the animalistic? Can you describe the actual separation between what we consider primitive and our world? Or is that separation simply a consoling illusion? Are our modern clothes and advanced shelters and shiny screens that far away from the primitive tools found around ancient campfires? Answering that question might be a laudable goal, though on some days the answer doesn’t seem relevant.
Those news reports remain scattered atop the table before me. News that isn’t easily summarized or explained or even remotely fathomable. Reading these stories has its influence: it is partly numbing, it is partly blood boiling, and it partly compels questions about nature. Because these are medieval tales. Barbaric tales. Horrific tales. Nothing about burnings or dismemberings or beheadings is the least bit surprising if you read just a bit of history, though you still want, or need, to locate a point underneath the bloodlust, some larger objective, some purpose to the carnage. The ruthlessness outside my window is easily understood—the point is survival, the point is hunger—and it comes with a coldness that is also blameless. What’s disorienting about recent news, however, is that you don’t usually expect such cruelty to arrive in the contemporary world with such jubilation, where the people who are the most cruel also have the largest smiles. Nor do you expect to read grotesque and surreal debates about whether infants were beheaded or merely murdered—as if this distinction proves a point. But once you hear the worldwide cheers, by all the useful and well-fed sadists, from all the salivating stooges, you eventually reach the awful conclusion that you’ve already witnessed the point—with the horrific implication that the means are in fact the ends.
I am reminded this week of a Primo Levi quote that I’ve wrestled with for a number of years. When asked about the viciousness of the Holocaust, Levi responded, “No, I don’t understand it nor should you understand it,” with the admonition that “it’s a sacred duty not to understand.” On some days, I’m in agreement; to understand the sadistic glee of the Holocaust is to subsume that bloodlust into your mind. It is to require your own madness as an act of empathy. On most days, however, I’m more inclined to view his words as a negation of the decades of life that Levi lived after Auschwitz, and also a complete negation of his literary project. Perhaps there’s always a midpoint to be found, which highlights the necessity of facing:
We cannot understand it, but we can and must understand from where it springs, and must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.
How peculiar his use of could rather than will looks in this moment. Especially because will also has the consequence of clarifying the mind, which seems like a necessity during our most catalytic moments, because certain times in life appear more inevitable than contingent, more like the predictability of a season than the unexpectedness of a storm. And the coming days do feel portentous, or even inevitable, which must be the expected result whenever the sadists take control, whenever barbarism is justified. Which makes this October particularly ominous, though also particularly poignant, with every decent mind feeling an overwhelming sense of numbness, with every decent mind feeling an overwhelming sense of clarity about what comes next.
Adam and Eve were sent out of the Garden due to knowledge of good and evil. Was the Garden ever a Paradise if it had the potentiality of evil or digression from good? Is Nature peaceful and calming when there is so much cold ruthlessness in it? We make up stories for self protection. We make an effort to 'understand' in order to retain a modicum of sanity. But should we? Is trying to understand evil an immoral act?
A great post. There's a song which I can't find but which I think is by Mos Def which has the line 'I refuse to understand.'