The fly
After an urgent noisy flight the housefly perched craftily on my desk and started to clean itself. It did this by elevating its rear legs and stroking them together in an intricate pattern as if playing music or performing a conjuration. Then it took a few staccato steps before stopping and scything its legs across the edges of its wings. Curious, I imagine shrinking down to fly size to observe more closely. I’d rather expected the fly’s chitinous exoskeleton to gleam like obsidian. For there to be a metallic zing accompanied by a shower of sparks as those armoured legs scoured each other, but I was surprised to find that the fly’s hide had more muted visual tones, was softer than I had imagined, and the sound was similar to that made when brushing a carpet.
Because we associate flies with dirt and disease, I was fascinated to see a housefly attending to its own hygiene. I wondered why it had picked that moment to spruce up – was it part of a general routine? Had it begun to feel a bit grimy? For all I knew it might just have been shamed by another fly for being scruffy and letting the team down. However, some brief Internet research revealed that houseflies rub their legs together to unclog the smell organs they have on their limbs. So this fly had landed next to me essentially to blow its noses.
Let’s take a closer look at the housefly – a critter defined by its relationship to humans, often negatively, as an unwanted guest in our spaces. Ecologically speaking, houseflies are commensal with humans. Commensal species live alongside each other with one benefiting but with neither being harmed by the relationship – rather like a housemate who picks at your leftovers. Houseflies emerged as a distinct species some 40 million years before humans recognisably branched away from their ape cousins. Presumably, at that point, houseflies were also close associates of apes, but perhaps feeling strangely unfulfilled as if there was something missing from their relationship. I imagine the flies observing our gradual metamorphosis with great interest and, without quite understanding why, getting especially excited at the point when our forbears started building shelters. They watched greedily as these shelters gradually grew in sophistication to a point of being commonly called houses, whereupon the houseflies felt right at home and cemented their relationship by moving in. ‘Yes’ they thought ‘this is what destiny feels like’.
So houseflies have been with us for our whole journey as homo sapiens. Longer in fact. That’s the depth of our fellowship.
The wasp
While, ecologically speaking, animals are often defined in relation to their habitat, the idea of animals occupying a niche is often an approximate one. They don’t really care about authenticity – of being found in the upper canopy or beneath the thorny the scrub, instead they will happily take advantage of any likely looking terrain. We had direct experience of this recently. We have an outside door in our bedroom that opens onto the garden and during a warm spell last spring we kept it open all day and through the warm nights too. A queen wasp took advantage of this situation, venturing in to sculpt a nest on a sloping part of the bedroom ceiling. She was adorably sleek, purposeful and entirely unmoved by our presence. I presumed that the location ticked all of her boxes – it was dry, sheltered, and convenient for many local sources of wood pulp. She scavenged from human constructions, sheds and fences, stealing the material from which we had fashioned our own home in order to build hers. As she worked we admired her deft artistry. Her mouth parts skilfully crafted delicate structures – an inverted cup tethered to the wallpaper by a slender stalk of papier-mâché hanging like a miniature lampshade. Then she started fashioning a smaller cup in the centre of the first which was destined to become the inner chamber where her grubs would be nurtured. Not wanting a living wasps’ nest in the bedroom and mindful of her labours we kept the bedroom door shut before she had progressed too far, presuming she would start over in a new spot if access to her existing nest was denied. But she was a determined monarch. Frequently we saw her hovering outside, perplexed at the mysterious barrier. We saw her on other occasions trying to gain entry via the back door as well, as if looking for an alternative route to her nesting site. Gradually, our sightings grew fewer we became lax allowing the door to stay open thinking she had finally given up. But she returned, and after some fruitless searching for her original nest, which we had removed, she started her labours all over again. Her doggedness and determination were amazing to witness. While it’s tempting to casually dismiss her actions as blind, mechanical and instinctual, watching her it felt different to that – much more like the manifestation of an essential energy, a familiarity of urges and needs. Making. Sheltering. Nesting. Nurturing. Belonging.
Home making
We have many varied and evocative names for animal homes: nest, hive, sett, holt, lodge, den, vespiary, burrow to mention but a few. It’s as if the lives of other creatures has some primal fascination for us. But even within their own homes animals don’t live in a solitary single species way. I have a strong childhood memory of recovering an empty bird’s nest. It weighed lightly in my young hands but felt more solid than I had expected. It was a mass of of dry densely woven stalks with a lined, smooth, cup-shaped depression in the centre that had cossetted the birds’ eggs. I was amazed but also slightly aghast when, after a week or so, it burst into life with an abundance of scurrying insects. I was shocked at something supposedly inert abruptly revealing itself to be teeming with life all along. My dad explained that the nest was a perfect place for insects to lay their eggs, and they would undoubtedly have laid eggs already on the materials the birds had collected. Thus the nest had been a starter home for scores and scores of critters, not just the baby birds for whom it was intended.
Amongst plants and animals it is common to cohabit in this way, for example, many non-ant critters will live happily in an ant metropolis, causing more or less of a nuisance to its citizens. Epiphytes are plants that perch non-deleteriously on other plants. Hermit crabs occupy the shells discarded by molluscs. In the wild, homemaking is an exercise in living with and living alongside. It is a multiplicity of commensal relationships where my tales of the fly and the wasp don’t offer any surprises.
Homemaking in the wild has other familiarities, involving as it does the consumption of materials and disturbance to the local area. Beavers gnaw down trees to make dams which, on the face of it, appears to be an unhelpful and destructive activity. But then the subsequently formed wetlands become a watery suburb for an even greater wealth of species. In a balanced ecology the damage due to homemaking is also at the same time an enrichment. An actually beneficial disruptive business model. I suppose this could be the case for human dwellings too. It is just normal ecology for there to be collateral damage when we make our homes, for our homes become places for critters to inhabit too, and for us to tolerate our guests. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our home-making as humans, except when we get carried away with it. When the damage becomes wholesale destruction. When we make those homes exclusively for ourselves. When our toleration of cohabiting critters diminishes to the point of extermination. Ah…
Whilst wild critters make homes for themselves, or sometimes move in with their critter kin, the other side of the coin is that we get involved in making homes for them. I have in mind here constructions such as bird boxes, bat boxes and insect hotels. These ‘artificial’ homes work by echoing ‘natural’ forms. They are simulacra of clefts and fissures occurring in the wild as unplanned outcomes of growth, entanglement and decay. It’s weird how we have to manufacture places for wild critters as the accidental nooks and crannies they might normally occupy become scarce, largely because we eliminate them from our buildings, and hollow out wild places through our own encroachment. Given that cohabiting in the wild is the rule, then the human making of animal homes could be viewed as a sort of appeasement – a recognition of an ancient and sacred responsibility to share our spaces.
I imagine how needing to intervene to provide places for critters to live becomes a necessary trend, a slippery slope, with increasing numbers of biological forms being replaced by human fabrications. A forest gradually morphing into cyborg forest as we have to continually drip feed interventions to prop up the increasingly limited wildlife that remains. Trees with access panels revealing circuit boards, structural joists and a filigree of spun glass tubules conveying mysterious fluids. Buzzy clouds of mini-drone pollinator robots zipping between flowers. On spotting squirrels in this forest we are uncertain if they are artifice or one of the remaining biological critter-types that the cyber-forest was built to support. A future like an out of control Philip K. Dick storyline.
Despite the apparent enthusiasm of critters do move in with us, there can be a wariness and reluctance too. With human-made animal homes things are not always so straightforward as ‘build it and they will come’ as a friend of mine attested when showing off his newly made bat boxes. He encouraged others to make their own, but advised that siting is critical. There is a subtle art to recreating a space that a critter will take notice of and assess as suitable. Patience is also needed – it may take a couple of seasons for the bats to discover the boxes and decide they want to make their home there. Perhaps it takes time for the boxes to become weathered, to be noticed but at the same time to seem less intrusive and awkward and begin to feel like safe spaces. We notice the moment when wasps or mice invade, but we don’t notice the preamble; the scouting out, the testing of the water that may go on beforehand.
Toby and Jerry
It is fascinating to watch animals making sense of alterations to their surroundings. Our next door neighbour had a studio assembled in his back garden. It went up by stages: first a mini JCB excavated a space, the edges of which were baulked by timber, then concrete laid. As the building went up initially a wooden frame was constructed, then walls, roof and cladding. While this was happening, our neighbour mentioned that Toby, our dog, had been providing ‘moral support’, which was code for: “he’s been barking a lot”. We joked that if Toby got into their garden he might urinate on the structure to claim it as his own. Toby wasn’t the only interested critter. The neighbour’s cat, Jerry, had been climbing on the studio’s skeletal frame, but with characteristic feline caution, bringing his nose up against the wood to test its scent, moving warily, continually glancing around as if it might do something unexpected.
Admittedly Toby does have a tendency to bark at something that for him is strange or out of place or if there is unusual activity on the boundaries of his space. And while neither my neighbour nor myself spoke directly of the animals behaving in a territorial way, this was the thought that seemed to frame our conversation. Now I come to think about it, Toby doesn’t really have any choice about what his territory is as he is hemmed in by fences, doors and walls of our making. Perhaps territory is something that we ascribe to animals in a simplistic way, rather than something singular and powerful that they experience. Maybe I should ask Toby if he has a territory and what he considers it to be? He does have a tendency to respond to things that appear to be strange or out of place, but this is true even in locations away from home. Famously (within our family, at least) he barked furiously at a pair of hay bales that had rolled out of a field and lay upended in a gully. Toby’s barking is often about responding to something that is different or surprising where he can alert and offer counsel.
Human spaces, in terms of ‘territory’, tend to be layered and nuanced. There are spaces within the house that might be the dominion of a single person: a bedroom, workroom or kitchen. The house as a whole is the domain of those dwelling within, which is often, but not exclusively, a nuclear family. If there is a garden this is where our plant and critter kin are allowed, but in a highly regulated way. Fences and hedges mark borders and offer impermeable barriers to dogs, but allow birds and insects and cats free reign. Cats, being part domesticated and part feral, can be a source of discord between neighbours as their wanderings break the rules by proxy. Moving further afield there are neighbourhoods where locals are accorded greater rights than visitors. Neighbourhoods open out into regions and districts where belonging is signalled by accent, dress and comportment. Could animal territories be more sophisticated than we imagine, and similarly include a variety of overlaps and compartments, rules and exceptions?
While Toby was confined to barking at the studio construction from our garden, Jerry the cat was able to get closer and inspect the new structure directly. Cats are proverbially curious and are drawn to check out anything novel or altered in their surroundings. We only have to leave a cupboard door half ajar and our cat will nose it open, and then have his front two paws inside before pausing and carefully looking around, his whole body language exclaiming “tentative”. It’s possible Jerry was just making sense of this wooden apparition, reconnoitring, coming to terms with it, seeing what its possibilities are as well as its dangers, finding out how it fits in.
Psychogeography
When used in a biological sense the word territory refers only a slender dimension of the full complexity inherent in relationship with place, and presents only a narrow range options for those engaging in that relationship – owning, marking, defending, encroaching. There appears to be something deeper, more visceral, happening as Toby and Jerry respond to the abrupt changes associated with the construction phases of the studio. It’s almost as if they some kind of ritual to keep up with the shifting ‘psychogeography’ of the space. The term ‘psychogeogrpaphy’ comes from the French Letterist movement – and refers to the way that spaces, urban spaces in particular, make us feel.
Our pet critters seemed to be recalibrating their sensibility, adjusting to the shifting feelings they have for this mutating structure, adapting to its new psychogeography. They did this through a sequence of stages: initially being frightened and alarmed – demonstrated by barking loudly to alert others, or watching cautiously from a distance. After a time they became more settled which allowed their curiosity to come to the fore. Warily they explored the new features, in Jerry’s case by literally climbing all over them. Slowly and incrementally they accommodated the change to gain a renewed sense of equanimity and confidence. Yes, urinating and scenting may have a role to play, and again, one way of viewing this is the marking of territory. Another is as establishing a form of connection and intimacy.
These observations made me think about the ways humans respond to changes in their environment. What happens when there is an abrupt shift in psychogeography which then becomes dramatically out of kilter with our sensibilities? Rural developments are notorious for stimulating high levels of controversy. Wind farms are especially notable for invoking hostility, but even rewilding efforts can create a backlash from adjacent landowners because the messy, tangled, unplanned aspect is at such odds with their ingrained sense of the landscape’s rightful appearance.
Resistance to change is usually explained in two ways, one general and one particular. The general way relates to our cultural sense of what the landscape ought to be, what it should look like, how it should be managed. The particular way relates to direct impacts on us, where our space might be encroached upon, our view despoiled, our privacy breached. At the same time our identity is often woven into our surroundings so that when things change this threatens our sense of who we are. This is especially true for those who have grown up somewhere, been part of or adopted a community and shared a solidarity symbolised by buildings or landscapes – even ugly ones – those brutalist high-rises towering like sentinel figures over our childhood. Rather than being passive, like a backdrop in a play, what we took to be scenic was actually integral to the action all along.
Our feelings resonate and respond to the energies and aspects of our surroundings. One way to think about it is as a layered personal space which has a series of concentric zones, similar to those of the atmosphere as it extends away from earth. Just as the earth doesn’t end at its surface, we don’t stop at our skin. We have spatial sensitivities beyond our one metre zone of intimacy, the nebulous stratosphere of our psyche that permeates the landscapes or cityscapes around us.
So when an unwanted change happens, it can be felt viscerally as a violation of this extended personal space. We feel the intrusion as literally painful and traumatic – not an event ‘out there’ that we are reacting to, but something that is being wrought bodily upon us. Our psyches and the places we dwell within are fused together – even in modern times we can become melded with the land and hold it in our soul. And when there is upheaval, because of the distress and alarm, we bark just as loudly as Toby does. We rage about those changes with our neighbours. Then we form groups where we can consolidate our opinions, focus them, and express our collective hurt. Like a pack of dogs all howling in pain.
Barking
We tend to get stuck at the ‘barking at it’ stage, though. We find that accommodation that comes naturally to animal critters is really difficult for us to achieve. Alterations to our surroundings may rankle for years – long past the point we have lost the argument, lost the planning war and the construction has taken place. Resentment lingers. Our sensibility remains offended. Our grief never fully resolved. These feelings can be amplified because we perceive the intentionality behind the change. We can ascribe it to the agency of other human beings acting out their interests in conflict with our own. We realise that we are being trampled unheeded by the unassailable will of powerful others.
There is also an element of fear to our uncomfortable experiences of psychogeography. When our surroundings change we abruptly gain a painful awareness of them. We are caught short by a realisation that they are full of significance for us yet their preservation is out of our control. We always assume we build our lives on solid enduring foundations – place, community, culture, the air that we breath, a predictable climate, the company of plants and animals that we can wonder at, all of these things are taken as given. So it is especially scary when the things that sustain us are revealed to be more fragile and less permanent than we had realised.
Resistance to change is often seen through the lens of political motivation. It’s easy to bring to mind the lefty bemoaning the lack of respect for working class culture as drab estates or tower blocks are replaced. Or the conservative ‘nimby’ objecting to developments close to their quaint village in the home counties. Or even the ‘deep green’ raging at wind farms for fouling the ‘natural’ landscape with monstrous human constructions (often blind to the irony that the land owes its current appearance almost entirely to human activity). But all of these political manifestations have common roots; at their heart they are all driven by a bond with place and a disturbed psychogeography. Buddhist philosophy tell us that all attachment leads to suffering. But in Western modelled societies we are encouraged to develop attachments – to brands, corporate culture, career, and lifestyle, whilst simultaneously being expected to be flexible, mobile, adaptable and to accept disruption and change. Our feelings are acknowledged and entertained when this serves the system, but overlooked and dismissed when the system needs to serve us. We are told we are essential one moment then discarded as abject in another. We are encouraged value tradition but to be expected to adopt newfangled ways. To be proud of our heritage yet to accept uncomfortable revisions. Encouraged to love the wild places whilst being implicated in their destruction. To be simultaneously sensitive and to unfeeling.
When change occurs, an intriguing idea is that we might get stuck barking out our opposition because we never get the chance to re-calibrate to the new psychogeography in the same way that the animals did in the case of of the studio. We are prevented from going through the full rituals that we see the animals perform. We rarely get to do that wary but playful exploration. We typically only have token interaction with a proposed development and the actual construction. We may get to see 3D renderings of the development, raise a voice at planning meetings, or stare through small windows in building site hoardings at the messy business of construction. This seems to be part of an enforced passivity as we are persuaded we have to take our environs as scenic and deterred from interacting with them in a more embodied way. We don’t, and often we are not allowed, to explore or clamber over the locus of change, which would be ruled out for reasons of safety, or just seen as pointlessly inconvenient for whoever is sponsoring the development. And then when the building or feature is completed, be it a windmill or a new high rise, then it is often something alienating, cordoned off, owned and regulated by some distant entity – something from which we are excluded. While we might feel that our pets have enclosed lives it is chastening to realise this is true also of our own condition. Our own freedoms are rationed. The case is that we can’t be the critters we need to be.
I’m tempted to say next that if we had playful access to places as they are re-imagined, demolished and rebuilt might help us let go and move on. But we humans have a way of complicating things. In western modelled societies, at least, there isn’t really ‘a’ place where change occurs, but a multiplicity of places – the offices of the architects assembling the latest concept, of the hedge-fund mangers bankrolling the development, the offices of the business conglomerates handling the construction, of the landowners, of the regulators and the consultants, of the councillors who give permissions. These are a bewildering multiplicity of rooms in an inaccessible palace where where wealth and privilege are welded together into an unassailable bureaucracy. So it is the places where every secret handshake, nod, wink, favour, exclusive membership, privileged connection occur that our barking needs to be heard. It is these places where we need to have unconditional playful access.
I’ve switched to talking about this from a ‘human level’ – but we have already observed that this is a critter-level need too. It’s notable that our wild kin are only represented in formulaic ways in the planning process, perhaps via ‘ecological impact assessments’, or a requirement to ‘replant ancient forests’ (how the massive contradiction of this gets overlooked I’ve no idea), or by adding swallow nesting sites to buildings. Sadly, a more direct representation of plant and animal voices comes only from the protesters who occupy tree houses and underground dens, chain themselves to oaks and lie in the path of JCBs.
We consider the places given to humans and those reserved for animals to be separate zones. We scorch the earth to build housing estates on the one hand, and encircle wild places with defences against human encroachment on the other. We are both assailant and defender. The ally and the enemy. The problem with us playing both of these roles is that the battle becomes politicised as being between two warring camps of humans. As this happens, the plant and critter needs become sidelined and quickly fade from view and their authentic voices evade us. It’s Swampy that makes the news, not the muted trees he is defending. It’s Greta that becomes the headline, and not the heating climate itself. It’s the XR we become angry at, and not the catastrophic extinctions they protest against.
And while some stand valiantly to protecting wild spaces it’s still much easier to slip up and allow their destruction than it is to restore their former ecological glories. The undoing may take moments. The restoration hundreds of years. It’s like resisting gravity. You can make some brief gains, maybe hold your own for a while, but the force you’re contending has the unfair advantage of being remorseless. Everything ends up levelled at the end. The only countervailing power with enough strength to resist would perhaps be a spiritual one: a renewed sacralisation of wild places. However, none of our mainstream religions are really that interested, and sadly the remaining vestigial paganism is too diffuse to make a difference.
Part of the problem is that we see the our needs and the needs of our critter kin to be divergent and at odds. As we see it, our need is to exclusively acquire the space to expand our own activities. Our need is the order of the ploughed field and not the chaos of the jungle. Our need is streamlined productivity of the farm and not haphazard growth of the untended scrub. While all life competes, for the most part it does this in a limited and local way. As humans we bypass and override the limits that organisms normally impose on each other. We’ve ended up inventing a competition with us on one side and all other life on the other.
To avoid a disastrous ending to this tug of war between falsely divided human and natural realms, we need a plan. We need to dissolve this separation from our wild kin and establish commensal patterns of living-with and living-alongside. There is a concealed appetite for this. There was much excitement in lockdown as critters, seemingly bold as brass, re-inhabited quietened urban spaces, no longer disturbed by human noise and activity. A movement called ‘We Are The Ark‘ encourages all to create their own mini wildernesses as a refuge for sheltering our wild kin through these difficult times. Unsurprisingly, there is a positive psychogeograpy created for all that engage in these acts of fellowship.
Listen to the animals
So where have we got to? This essay has meandered through several different topics, and at this closing point you might expect me to pull all these threads together. I can do that for you! One thing that had prompted this piece was that I’d read a lot recently about how it is crucial for us to establish a new basis for our relationship with plants and animals. We need to do this as part of a return to a more ecologically intact way of living – to save our own bacon if nothing else. We need to undo the damage of a long estrangement, to welcome back and be welcomed, to acknowledge plants and animals as our lost relations and extend the courtesies of kinship to them.
There’s a suggestion too that there is much to learn if we ask questions of our wild kin. The idea isn’t entirely off the wall – think of how children’s picture books often feature animal stories that convey all manor of lessons. Obviously we can’t converse directly with plants and animals in a conventional human critter kind of way, as if we were Dr Dolittle, nor did these authors suggest there was a particular semaphore we should be using. The way they did it was to engage in patient observation and hold open a receptiveness where they could ‘hear’ plants and animals speaking with their being. I thought I’d try something like that and see what might happen.
From the fly and the wasp I learned that our partnership is deep and that that the distance between us small – there was so much to identify with in their everyday activities, including cleanliness and homemaking. I learned that language divides us unnecessarily. We apply words like ‘territory’ and ‘instinct’ to our critter kin where we would instead talk about ‘place’ and ‘needs’ or ‘urges’ if we were referring to humans. The human relevant terms hint at a richer experience and greater autonomy compared to critter relevant ones, which are more reductive and diminishing. I reckon that either we have to accept that humans are more instinctual than we care to believe, or that our wild kin are closer to us in sentience than we have previously imagined. Whichever way we choose, both gain and neither are diminished from this levelling out. It’s as if our ‘gift’ of consciousness isn’t an enhancement that makes us superior, but instead something that has been bolted on the side, like an afterthought, that actually weighs us down.
From the Toby and Jerry, I learned that in order to feel secure, there’s an essential need we share for to be actively engaged in the changes occurring around us. Paradoxically, the absence of a interactive relationship with our surroundings diminishes our capacity to countenance change. Instead, we retain an anxious dependency on things staying the same as a condition of the modern world, which in turn impedes us from making those changes now so very necessary for our own survival and to maintain the richness of life.
A final point to make is that one change in our surroundings underway now, for which we are responsible, is the continual and dramatic decline in numbers of our wild critter kin. While it is hard to determine extinction rates to any degree of accuracy, it’s a certainty that many animal populations have collapsed in the past 100 years. Of course, diminution of wild places creates a new psychogeography which increasingly manifests itself as an eruption of “ecological grief”, or else a more diffuse collective sadness at this appalling loss. These feelings occur strongly amongst environmentalists mourning the fading ecosystems they have been intimate with, but they becoming more common as a general affliction too. I realise there is a tendency to romanticise ecology; the thing we grieve after may never have been as it is in our imagination. But we are experiencing a profound loss, even if we don’t always have a precise image of what it is that has gone. And in darker moments we feel this as fear.
This essay owes a debt to Timothy Morton’s ‘The ecological thought’ and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘Braiding Sweetgrass, Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey and this song https://youtu.be/xSodcmCAzis – Ghost Town, by Greentea Peng. And others, obviously, but these are the main ones. The ludic or playful ways of engaging with our surroundings also resonate with the Letterist, and later, Situationist movements. Well worth looking up.