Living as a Bird. Vinciane Despret. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Vinciane Despret
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Афоризмы и цитаты
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509547289
Скачать книгу
‘Matérialités de la politique’ at Liège University – in particular Florence Caeymaex, Édouard Delruelle, Jérôme Flas, Antoine Janvier and Ferhat Taylan; Sophie Houdart, Marc Boissenade, Élisabeth Claverie, Patricia Falguières, Élisabeth Lebovici from the Call it Anything collective; Tomas Saraceno, Ally Bisshop and Filipa Ramos.

      Pauline Bastin and her decoys, Laurent Jacob, who reminded me about the disappearance of birds, for their welcome and their company.

      Laurence Bouquiaux and Julien Pieron, for their interest and their friendship.

      Roger Delcommune, Christophe and Céline Caron, Samuel Lemaire and Cindy Colette, and Lola Deloeuvre who, in one way or another, made my life, and Alba’s, so very much more comfortable while I was working.

      My family, Jean Marie Lemaire, Jules-Vincent, Sarah and Elioth Buono-Lemaire, Samuel and Cindy once again, who supported me and reminded me that life is about more than just writing.

      And Alba, for her infinite patience.

FIRST CHORD

      There are more things between heaven and earth (the realm of birds) than our philosophy can easily explain.

      Étienne Souriau1

      It all began with a blackbird. My bedroom window had remained open for the first time for many months, a symbol of victory over the winter. The blackbird’s song woke me at dawn. He was singing with all his heart, with all his strength, with all his blackbird talent. From a little further away, probably from a nearby chimney, another bird replied. I could not get back to sleep. This blackbird was singing, as the philosopher Étienne Souriau would say, with all the enthusiasm of his body, as animals do when they are utterly absorbed in their play and in the simulation of whatever it is they are acting out.2 Yet it was not this enthusiasm that kept me awake, nor what an ill-humoured biologist might have called a noisy demonstration of evolutionary success. It was the sustained determination of this blackbird to vary each series of notes. From the second or third call, I was spellbound by what was transforming into an audiophonic novel, each episode of which I greeted with an unspoken ‘and what next?’ Each sequence differed from the preceding one; each was reinvented as a new and original counterpoint.

      Étienne Souriau referred to the enthusiasm of the body. The composer Bernard Fort told me that certain ornithologists use the word ‘exaltation’ with reference to skylarks.3 For this blackbird, the word ‘importance’ imposed itself above all else. Something mattered, more than anything else, and nothing else mattered except the act of singing. And whatever it was that mattered was invented in a blackbird’s song, suffusing it completely, transporting it, carrying it onwards, to others, to the other blackbird nearby, to my body straining to hear it, to the furthest limits to which its strength could convey it. Perhaps that feeling I had of a total silence, clearly impossible given the urban environment beyond my window, was evidence that this sense of importance had seized me so powerfully that everything outside that song had ceased to exist. The song had brought me silence. The sense of importance had imposed itself on me.

      The blackbird had begun to sing. Something mattered to him, and at that moment nothing else existed except the overriding obligation to allow something to be heard. Was he hailing the end of the winter? Was he singing about the sheer joy of existing, the sense of feeling himself alive once again? Was he offering up praise to the cosmos? Scientists would probably steer clear of such language. But they could nevertheless assert that all the cosmic forces of an emerging spring had converged to provide the blackbird with the preliminary conditions for his metamorphosis.8 For this is indeed a metamorphosis. This blackbird, who had probably lived through a relatively peaceful winter, albeit a challenging one, punctuated from time to time by a few unconvincing moments of indignation towards his fellow creatures, intent on maintaining a low profile and living a quiet life, is now singing his heart out, perched on the highest and most visible spot he could find. And everything that the blackbird had experienced and felt over the last few months, everything which had, until that moment, given meaning to things and to other creatures, now becomes part of a new importance, one which is urgent and insistent and which will totally modify his manner of being. He has become territorial.

      1 1. E. Souriau, Le Sens artistique des animaux. Paris: Hachette, 1965, p. 92.

      2 2.