The Second Body
We woke up one morning last week to the sound of cow elk chirping. We were surrounded. We drink coffee in bed in the mornings, looking up at the mountain, seeing what the day looks like.
“Look,” Chuck said. “That ear, just above the windowsill. That’s what the thumping was.” An elk was pawing the snow away from the foundation to get at the grass below. Her head was thumping too, against the sill.
I’ve been re-reading Daisy Hildyard’s 2017 book, The Second Body, a book I’ve been thinking about for the past year or so. It’s a remarkable little book, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions a publisher out of the UK who have built a fascinating list of contemporary thinkers. I go to their site during their semi-annual sales and just order whatever is new. It’s always something you want to read. I first read The Second Body three years ago, during that terrible summer of wildfire smoke. It follows Hildyard on a quest that plays out over four essays where she tries to puzzle out the relationships between humans and animals, humans and life itself, and humans and the global catastrophe we’re all embedded in.
But there’s been something nagging at me me about this book. There’s a moment, in the first of the four essays, where she’s rescued a pigeon fledgling, a bird she keeps in the shed for a few weeks, feeding it until it’s strong enough to fly away on it’s own. Holding the blinking bird in her hand, she says “I could see it’s mind inside it’s body.”
It’s such an odd observation. As though it’s mind and its body are separate. As though being able to “see” it’s “mind” makes it a living being instead of what? a stone? As though having a “mind” is some kind of categorical quality.
As though we all still believe in Descartes? In that kind of dualism? In that kind of anthropocentrism?
The elk whose ear we’d seen above the windowsill lifted it’s head, looked in at us with a mouth full of brown grass. They like Chuck’s yard. When he and his ex bought the property in the early 90s, it had been grazed bare by horses. Since then, the only animals who have grazed here are the native ungulates, elk and deer — and the occasional cow from our neighbor’s herd when they’ve broken through a fence. Last week they broke through the willow thicket that served as part of the fenceline, and Chuck spent a fairly aggravating afternoon repairing barbed wire fencing that had become embedded in the willows over the decades. But fencing out the cattle, and not keeping horses (or even the donkeys I keep lobbying for, to no avail) means the native grasses have come back, in large part because they’ve been grazed by native animals. I haven’t done an official grid survey of the plant species, but there are so many different grasses and wildflowers and lichens. They’re all very small, and unspectacular, and require you to really look at them, but when you do, it’s amazing.
The elk’s eyeball came up over the windowsill and she looked at us while she chewed. Hank the dog, stuck his head further under the bed. He’s afraid of them.
Did I feel I could see the elk’s mind? inside it’s body? As though they were separate?
Not really. I saw a large wild animal, part of a herd that varies from about 35 core animals to a larger group of 200 or so. During cold spells, as many as 1000 animals will come through the property on their way to the grassy bench uphill from us, on their way to the coniferous forest on Emigrant peak where they’ll bed down for the day. Most winter mornings, we’ll wake up with “our” core group of 25-50 elk pawing through the snow to get at the long grasses, or bedded down in the yard. Sometimes you’ll go to pour coffee and there’s an elk just on the other side of the window, grazing by the ash tree. Or you’ll spook one when you flush the toilet.
Hildyard’s thesis, the one the book is named after, is that we all have two bodies:
Every living thing has two bodies these days — you are flying into the atmosphere and back down to the ground right now, but you can’t feel it. You breathe something in, and what you breathe out is something else … This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence — it is a version of you. It is not a concept, it is your own body. The language we have at the moment is weak … And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another. The concept of a global impact is not working for us, and in the meantime, your body has already eaten the distance. … It is understandably difficult to remember that you have anything to do with this second body — your first body is the body you inhabit in your daily life. However, you are alive in both. You have two bodies.
I first read this book during that summer of smoke, when the atmospheric second body was making itself very much known. It’s a vibrant and appealing metaphor, and one that’s been cited by writers as diverse as Lauren Groff and Naomi Klein. Hildyard seems to get this idea from a lecture by Timothy Clark on the Derangements of Scale. Clark argues that the conceptual gap between the immensity of impact humans have on global existence and the smallness of our own private everyday lives causes a kind of derangement, a sense of confusion. It’s too much for people.
For instance, it’s why the people driving RVs, towing SUVs as they come through Yellowstone get so defensive when I ask them what kind of gas mileage they’re getting, when I ask if it’s worth it? the damage to the beauty they’ve come here to see. They literally can’t see the damage. It’s too big, too conceptual. They just want a vacation. They just want to take the kids to see Yellowstone.
So they get mad at me for asking. And I remain baffled at them for not being able to see it. Neither position does anyone much good. They get defensive and I remain a furious older lady in a straw hat, shaking my fist at the monstrosities going by as I walk the dog.
The second body appears to pose a threat to the first body the real one, the one you live in. Any body which is global cannot accommodate an individual, who moves in her own individual way, who makes individual choices and has individual thoughts – this global body, which, is entirely without boundaries, doesn’t understand that individuals exist at all.
The pleasure of this book is watching Hildyard explore her sense that the second body is real while also describing how difficult she finds it to believe in this theory, to believe in climate change at all, because “it doesn’t feel real” to her. In search of “the reality” of this second body theory, she talks to a butcher, and a couple of scientists. She runs these ideas through literary texts including Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Trilogy and Shakespeare’s Othello, The Tempest, and King Lear. Her search for a reality she can feel keeps butting up against her horror at the notion that the individual is not inviolable, that the individual is embedded physically and socially in the larger organisim that is the earth.
To see the body as physical is to notice its inbuilt mortality. I was left with a feeling that the only way to truly experience the truth about your body is with pathological horror. The truth is that it does not have sealed boundaries and that objects pose a direct threat to your body … Your body is not inviolable. Your body is infecting the world — you leak. This is why l am speaking of second body rather than of global connections or impacts.
Frankly, I found this thread baffling, and it runs through the whole book. She is horrified over and over again by the idea that the individual is often subsumed into the collective, as though there must be a binary choice, as though one cannot be both an individual, and a member of the collective.
The elk who was looking in the window has now moved on, is part of that group of four in the photo at the top of the post. That group of four are part of this larger group — today we have the big herd in the yard — several hundred animals, coming up from the bottomlands below our property, from Sixmile Creek, trickling up out of the tiny remnant hanging valley we call “the soccer field” crossing on either side of the separate two bedroom motel unit Chuck had moved up here decades ago, slowly grazing their way across the property before climbing the slope to the next flat patch above us.
Like most prey animals, they’re a herd. They move as a herd. Later, when I have to go out to turn on the car, I’ll stand on the doorstep for a moment, talking to a cow elk who is probably fifteen feet away. She shies at the sight of me, her head going up in that skittery way that horses have when they’re scared, although she also reminds me of a llama, the weird way their heads move.
“Hey there,” I tell her. “It’s just me.”
I’d like her to move, so I can bring poor Hank-dog out for his morning pee, maybe let him walk around a little before we head back into town, but I don’t want to spook her. If I spook her, she’ll panic and start running, which will cause the rest of them to do the same. They’re herd animals. When one reacts, they all do. There are a lot of theories about herd behavior, it’s motivations, and its evolutionary or survival mechanisms, but I’m mostly concerned in that moment, standing on the doorstep with this individual cow elk, who is a large wild animal, and quite close to me who is also capable of spooking the entire group of large wild animals moving through our property. I am a short woman, who would rather not be in the middle of a stampede as I go to turn on my car.
The problem I am having with the Hildyard book is that I really enjoyed reading it. It’s been interesting to see this notion of the second body catch hold, interesting to hear other writers talking about it. HIldyard’s wry persona is very appealing. However, I remain baffled by the binary opposition she keeps positing between the individual and the collective. Here, when she refers to “the global body” she’s referring to the famous Earthrise photo taken from space:
When we look at the global body, it is impossible to relate that body to anything individual because there can be no certain borders between one thing and an other. We do not know what is relevant to the individual body. and what is outside it, because the atmosphere and the individual body are inside one another. Therefore we cannot help seeing every individual as a part of the whole world: the whole of life becomes a mass and it becomes impossible to differentiate one thing from another.
It would be one thing if Hildyard was simply a professor of literature, as she seems to present herself through most of this book, but it turns out she has a Phd in the philosophy of science. While it’s kind of fun to follow along as she goes on these quests, looking for answers to whether or not humans are animals — a quest motivated by her nagging sense that she does not “feel like an animal”, and then her quest to discover what cell biologists can tell us about the nature of life itself, I found myself frustrated by her dedication to pre-modern binary dualisms. That she’s looking for answers to complicated ontological questions “in the biology textbooks” made me kind of batty.
And it made me batty because she’s pulling a kind of sleight of hand here. She’s claiming that the second body is “real”, when it’s actually just another ontological theory or model among many. It’s an interesting metaphor, but she’s claiming it’s not, and because she hasn’t cited any sources, aside from that single Timothy Clark talk, which has been collected as an essay, and is interesting, but hardly definitive, we can’t really make an informed judgement about where this theory of the second body fits into the larger body of thought about scientific and ecological ontology.
Because she refuses to situate her argument by citing any of the modern philosophers in this field, it is hard to trust in her thesis. Theorists too are herd animals, and while individuals stand out, they’re also embedded in intellectual networks, geneologies of thought. Perhaps the narrative stance of her inquiry is intended to keep the discussion rooted for a sort of common reader, one who might be put off by theory, but for me at least, it causes me to lose faith in her project. She makes blanket statements like “Since Darwin we’ve known that species don’t exist.” Really? What we? Yes, there is an ongoing argument about what constitutes a species, and whether species are simply human constructions, or do offer a foundational way to categorize forms of life, but it’s hardly the kind of settled, universal truth claim that she presents it to be. Scientific and ecological ontology is a rich field, and to ignore the work of theorists like Donna Haraway who has been writing for decades about the ways that knowledges are situated in their social, economic and political realities, makes me skeptical about Hildyard’s quest to find singular definitive answers of the sort she seeks. Haraway has also been writing for decades about the “cyborg” qualities of human life, that we’re a collection of animal, bacterial and mechanical life forms all tumbled together. Why does Hildyard not address these ideas when she’s writing about the “horror” of the undifferentiated nature of human life? There is so much interesting thinking about the interconnected nature of life, none of which she addresses. Anna Tsing, for example, whose work on the entanglement of mycellial and capitalistic networks surrounding the trade in matsuke mushrooms has become the basis of a whole host of works exploring how the symbiotic networks of mushroom ecology can provide core metaphors for ways we can rethink our ways of being in the anthropocene. Both of these women are major theorists of a different kinds of second body thinking, and that Hildyard never addresses any of these modern theorists, that she acts as if this work has not been done at all, really makes me skeptical about her entire argument.
Back on our doorstep, I’m still talking to the elk cow who stands between me and my car. She doesn’t panic, but she does move off, which is what I wanted. She crosses the irrigation ditch and joins 25 or 30 other elk on the far side.
I have no problem seeing these elk as sentient beings, even though the interiority of their lived experience — their thoughts and fears and desires — remains opaque to me. I have no problem seeing these elk as both individuals and as members of several herds, herds which come together and break apart depending on variables that I’m not privvy to. I have no problem seeing these elk, and Hank-the-dog as animals who exist on a continuum of animal life with me, a human being. And even as I find the binary oppositions that fuel Hildyard’s book confounding — even as I do not understand why she sees the categories she describes as mutually exclusive — I can appreciate the voice and tone and the power of the metaphor she’s built, a metaphor that seems to be reproducing itself in the work of other writers. But I don’t quite believe it. I’m not convinced.
I walk the 20 feet or so to my car, grateful it starts on this cold morning. One of the few we’ve had this winter. Ten below zero Farenheit, but calm. A beautiful crisp morning. When the winds kick up again later it’ll be bitter, but for now, it’s glorious.
We haven’t had enough of these days this winter, or any of our last few winters. We don’t have nearly enough snow either. We’re all worried about summer, about wildfires, about drought. Unlike Hildyard, climate change does feel real to me, here on the lower slopes of Emigrant peak, where we can see bare rock at the top of the mountain, where the snowpack is so low, where we’re surrounded by a large herd of wild animals. And perhaps, that makes all the difference.
This is a beautiful, provocative essay, Charlotte, and it’s one I will continue to think about. Thank you for the writing, the thinking, and all the ways you are doing important work.
Thanks Linda — I’m trying to re-train my lit crit muscles after a very long absence. There are some really interesting thinkers writing about these issues, and I’m trying to stop arguing with them in my head and start doing it in writing again!
I kinda lost track of you with the pandemic and the mess that is the bird app. So glad to be reading your words again.
Lots to think about here. I love how you intercut your discussion of Hildyard’s book with the elk. And how you talk to the elk. Makes all sorts of sense to me.
I find it so strange by what Hildyard is horrified by. Some days I think thank goodness my body isn’t inviolable, thank goodness I am connected to everything. I sure can’t do life by myself.
Amber! Hello!
My instinct is *always* to talk to the animals — probably the residue of life as a child who was always small for my age and who grew up in barns “hello horse, please don’t kick me horse, I’m right here horse …”
I hope I’ve characterized the Hildyard correctly. It’s mostly a really interesting read, but I found this aspect so jarring — you know that feeling when you’ve been arguing with another writer in your head for a long time? I’m trying to do that outside of my head a little more …
Welcome! And thank you for reading and posting. With the Substack implosion, it feels a little like we’re back to the message-in-a-bottle internet days.
I grew up by lakes, rivers, trees, then farmland. Animals made more sense to me than people did.
I pulled Hildyard’s book off my shelf. I had started it but never finished it. I think I’ll take another run at it. Just browsing through it, I’m confused by what she is trying to accomplish. Trying to understand how she is animal? Perhaps I just take it for granted that I am animal daily or she’s speaking on a level that I’m not following.
Or maybe I’m just not very good with boundaries, in general.
Fascinating thinking about this.
Thanks for writing this stuff down!
Oh let me know how you do with it! It has that sort of hypnotic quality that a lot of Fitzcarraldo books do, and it took me until the 2nd pass to really clock how … odd it is.
She’s mostly known as a novelist — Hunters in the Snow and Emergency. So perhaps it’s a kind of experiment?
I’m not sure if it’s a UK thing? Or maybe a UK academia thing? I’ve hit roadblocks with some UK nature writing and binary anthropocentrism — H is for Hawk had me walking around the house waving the book and yelling at poor Chuck about it in a number of places.
My thoughts on the book got long. Sent you an email 🙂
Very much enjoyed this essay. And I find myself in thorough agreement; I’ll look at Hildeyard’s books tonight, but if she “does not feel like an animal” than she and I have very little in common. In fact i think you’re right, our animality is core.
I don’t know how you found me to email me this but I appreciate it a lot.
Solitarity
Jed
Hi Jed — thanks for the nice comment! Did you sign up at some point for my LivingSmall newsletter? Perhaps on Substack? My hunch is that Hildyard is working in some traditional, dualistic UK system of thinking, but it is perplexing. Normally I’d just pass on by with the thought that it’s “not for me” but it’s getting some traction in wider circulation, so I wanted to think my way through it … welcome aboard! I hope you stick around …