“I don’t like planets. There’s dust and weather, and something always wants to eat the humans.” —The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy, Martha Wells
I had the most beautiful hunting day recently, just before the season ended with my tags unclipped. I got out just before dawn to a place I haven’t been to in two or three years and it was so gorgeous and full of deer I chided myself for not going earlier in the season. I’d been hunting smaller parcels closer to home with no luck—one bit of state land in particular is my favorite spot to go hunting, even though I’ve literally never seen a deer in there in any season. Plenty of fresh sign, but no deer. I think I just go for the larches and chickadees.
The day before the American Thanksgiving holiday, a few inches of fresh snowfall overnight had me following several sets of fox tracks, two to dens, and tiny little rabbit hops leading across hillsides and under trees. And a lot of deer.
Shortly after turning from the old logging road (pictured above) into the hills, I spotted a doe through the woods. This is not a doe-hunting time of year in this place—bucks only—so all I could do was watch, and that was a gift all its own. The doe turned out to be two does, and they spotted me after a few moments. I stood as still as I could for over half an hour while they took turns stamping their front hooves and huffing warnings about my presence.
Deer alarm snorts, with a snow-crunch as my foot shifted and an airplane passing overhead.
My feet grew tired and cold-numb, but I watched the sunlight move through the woods and old man’s beard lichen wave in a barely-felt breeze and it was one of those days where I didn’t mind being chilled and stiff and wishing my knees were younger. Eventually, the does wandered up over a hill, and I sat on a fallen tree and took my hat off and watched the light for a while longer.
About an hour and a half and a couple of hills later, I had been sitting on a stump for a while watching a small gully that showed evidence of a lot of recent hoof traffic and finally decided it was time to make my way toward the car so I could go home and get started on Thanksgiving dinner preparations. I stood up, turned around, and just up the hill from me was another deer with—I thought I could make out from its head rising from a dip in the ground—short antlers.
I lifted my binoculars, slowly slowly, and sure enough, it was a young buck. I stood there staring at it for a few moments, heart racing, before remembering that there was a purpose to my being out there standing calf-deep in snow wishing I’d brought more hot tea with me. I lowered the binoculars, raised my rifle, breathed, aimed carefully.
And missed.
A couple of years ago I heard an interview with the German philosopher Andreas Weber, which was interesting enough to prompt me to buy his book Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene.
I finally started reading it recently, and found it different from what I expected. The language itself is a reminder of why I quickly dropped the idea of being a philosophy and physics major in college (if there’s one word besides “blog” I wouldn’t miss from the English language, it’s “dialectic”), but what got my attention was Weber’s immediate inclusion of the commons. “‘Commoning’* is a metabolic reality,” he writes. “The body itself—our own individual bodies, for that matter—is possible only through participation in reality as a commons.”
It seems fitting that I started reading Enlivenment during hunting season, when I spend a lot of time out in the woods, most of it thinking about what this interconnection is, what it means to be out there, what I owe the place, what I expect or hope from it. How to stop more of it from being closed off for privatization.
And even more, what it is about humans and our culture that dismiss the centrality of these thoughts. That see the pure act of taking, or even the pure act of doing, to be goods in and of themselves. How the domination and control of nature have defined our relationships with it for centuries, and how the same mindset might be perpetuating itself in ways I can’t see. For which I appreciated Weber’s insights on the Anthropocene (which he extends later into the idea of sustainability):
“At present, I am concerned that the idea so predominant in the Anthropocene approach—that we can reconcile humankind with the unconscious, organic in itself and in others (human and not human) by subverting all of this under the power of culture—is just another attempt at domestication. We can see in it one more claim for controlling the world.
The neoliberal market system and its prerequisites . . . follow this method of exerting control by dividing the world into two halves: one nonliving sphere that needs to be colonized, and one that oversees and manages this control. The world, however, becomes better not through control, but through participation.”
I always come back to thinking that a need to control is born from fear. It transforms itself into something else, though, crawling all over human psyches and prompting a kind of pleasure in the act of controlling. I can see it in photos of successful hunts posted on social media, especially in what’s known as the “grip-and-grin” post-hunt or post-fish photo. I’ve read persuasive pieces on how these photos honor the animal as well as the hunt, but I can’t ever manage to see them as other than displaying a person’s triumph over a dead foe. To many, that’s a mischaracterization. Fair enough. But I don’t personally know many people who take and post those photos who care much about the animals and their own intentioned lives. Some, but not many.
We can’t help but consume—to be alive is to consume, to participate in death—but we can help how we approach it.
It was interesting to think about this practice in the context of Weber’s idea of enlivenment. “Ecological existence is only possible through gifts,” he writes, but the same is true of art.
“This has to do with the fact that art tries to capture aliveness from the inside.” (Emphases added.)
I’d like to think about that for a very, very long time. Is the purpose of art to make aliveness visible? To bring it into another’s sensory experience, to make possible the embodiment of interconnected aliveness? And what happens when art tries to serve the opposite?
The buck gave me a second chance, waiting there on alert while I fumbled around with my rifle. By the time I realized the bolt was caught on the scope cover, he’d run off over the hill. I waded through snow around the side of the hill hoping to catch him if he came back over a ridge, but all I found was yet another doe who huffed at me for a while from behind some bushes where I couldn’t see her.
When I came home after that day of hunting, almost my last and the closest I came to bringing home food this year, my kids asked—amused, as always; I don’t know why but they find my itch to hunt funny—if I’d gotten anything.
“No,” I said, and told them about seeing the buck and missing it and that I was kind of bummed.
“Good for the deer,” said my daughter.
A reminder, if I needed it, that the commoning part of this, the interrelationship, is what matters. We are still eating from the elk I brought home last year, and I’ll never forget the few moments that led to her being in the freezer, the long, frigid day spent in the Sweetgrass Hills, the way she seemed to wait patiently while I scrambled to get my frozen fingers in position.
“This notion of the ‘meaning of life,’” writes Weber, “embodies some simple, everyday questions that stand at the center of human experience.” What are our needs, how do we make a living; what are our relationships and what do we owe them?
“My proposal is to shift focus to a new question: What is life, and what role do we play in it? . . . How is the metabolism of goods, services, and meaning possible without it degrading the system in which they operate?”
Good for the deer. In a strange way, I feel like I owe that deer’s ecosystem—our ecosystem, our home—even more than I would have if I hadn’t missed. Those words remind me that this hunting thing, it’s not about taking or even consuming. It’s about a relationship. And it goes both ways.
*No matter how many times I’ve typed “commoning” in this newsletter, the platform insists on auto-correcting it to “communing.” I find this hilarious and also intriguing. The commune, at least in the Soviet sense, came partly out of the traditional Russian mir, the “shared responsibility” village that shaped life in that country for centuries. There is a relationship between a commune and the commons, just as there is one between today’s intentional communities and the commons, just as there is between each of us and the commons. That’s part of the reality of being alive; the question is how aware and intentional we are about that relationship.
Some stuff to read or listen to:
The same Andreas Weber with the essay “Skincentric Ecology,” a beautifully written love letter to lichens, but also to life, on the Center for Humans & Nature: “Although I was only watching them, the velvet spheres out on the roof made my body tingle. They made me joyful, nervous, and restless. It was a view of other beings’ skin. The voice inside that whispered to love back did not originate in my head; it was my skin murmuring.” (This essay is included in the anthology Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, which I haven’t yet read all of. There’s a nice interview with the editors, including Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Orion.)
The Conspirituality podcast recently did a two-hour episode titled “Doing Good in Impossibly Bad Times” on the Bund, which they describe as a “leftist communitarian group that resisted fascism and protected Jewish people during the Reich.” (The pre-episode chitchat ends at about 31 minutes.) Just in case, you know, anyone feels in need of something like that right now. Or always.
Erica Gies’s essay in Psyche, “What does water want?” looks briefly at efforts around the world to restore natural water flows, which Gies has dubbed the Slow Water movement: “Fresh water’s true nature is to flex with the rhythms of the earth, expanding and retreating in an eternal dance upon the land.”
An interview from last year with Tyson Yunkaporta (author of Sand Talk) on For the Wild podcast in which he mentions something I wish everyone would talk about more: “60% of capital in the world is what? Land is what’s most of the capital in the world. That’s what’s used to leverage derivatives and futures into infinity, is that land. That’s why we’re not allowed to have access to it.”
Mercedes Valmisa writing in Aeon on classical Chinese philosophy and the realities of life’s interdependence: “When humans participate in co-acting along with things, there is more than resonance and harmonisation at play, because intentions are introduced into the equation. This leads us to the third claim embedded in the co-action paradigm: that humans should design their actions so as to take into account all the others participating along with them. . . . One of the many powers of individualism – certainly one of the most corrosive ones – is that it makes us blind to the structures, institutions and resources that enable our possibilities to act and to become who we want to be, both personally and as a society. The way individualism makes us see social reality is the heart of its efficacy.” (I’m struck by the “intentions are introduced into the equation.”)
Elizabeth Winkler in The New Yorker on what seems to have been the world’s first (known) author: Enheduanna, a priestess living about 4300 years ago in what is now known as Iraq: “For hundreds of years, students learned by etching Enheduanna’s words onto clay tablets, and about a hundred of these copies of ‘The Exaltation of Inanna’ survive. But since their discovery, in the mid-twentieth century, scholars have fiercely debated Enheduanna’s authorship.”
I was recently catching up on issues of Montana Outdoors and found myself cutting out pages of the July-August issue from this year, on 100 things to see and do in the state. Now I have a little pile of ideas for next summer’s family trips. Sometimes it surprises me how little of the state I was born and raised in I’ve actually seen. Though to be fair, it’s a big place.
Ethnobotanist Dr. Susan Leopold was on Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast talking about United Plant Savers, her learning trajectory in ethnobotany, and a lot I never knew about American ginseng and medicinal plants.
I mentioned a long time ago that I like the Pondercast podcast in part because it reminds me of really good middle of the night college radio in the early 1990s. (Also, unlike many podcasts, it’s short.) The recent episode “Lists” fit that niche nicely: “What started out as the abacus has turned into an alternate universe of information we no longer need to burden our brains with. . . . Umberto Eco says, ‘Look to lists for the history of culture. . . . What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.’”
Antonia,
This December piece was so profound for me on many levels, and I am compelled now to respond. When I first hunted deer, elk and antelope in the mid 1970's, my partner and mentor was from a line of subsistence hunting loggers, and the sole criterion was meat - any season, any gender, any time. Concern for the animal was limited to a close, clean shot where compassion was more or less sidelined in favor of filling the freezers and keeping an eye out for the warden. As the years passed and I was exposed to sportspeople and started bow hunting, there was a welcome shift not only towards compassion, but towards a sense of the links between all living things and what a fine, fine line, if any, separates the 'inner' from the 'outer.' During a body work session in India in the 90's, decades and continents away from the Rocky Mountains, I had a traumatic experience. As she deeply worked my chest it triggered insufferable emotional pain and tears. It was around images I had retained of the elk chests I had ripped open during field "dressing." When it was over I realized a repressed horror that I never knew existed as the result of all the violence I had ignored. I realized then that if I were to hunt again - and this was not a given - I would have to absorb, deeply, indigenous ways of approaching the hunt. Be well.
So tell if you will/can: was it an intentional miss?