The Second Body

Daisy Hildyard

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781910695487
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. When every human body has an uncanny global presence, how do we live with ourselves? In this timely and elegant essay, Daisy Hildyard captures the second body by exploring how the human is a part of animal life. She meets Richard, a butcher in Yorkshire, and sees pigs turned into boiled ham; and Gina, an environmental criminologist, who tells her about leopards and silver foxes kept as pets in luxury apartments. She speaks to Luis, a biologist, about the origins of life; and talks to Nadezhda about fungi in an effort to understand how we define animal life. Eventually, her second body comes to visit her first body when the river flooded her home last year. The Second Body is a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth.

In order to see your second body, then, we need to move closer. The Earthrise picture shows you the whole world, but you can’t see individual lives in it – only mists, gases and abstract emissions. There is a sense of horror which apparently comes from the fact that your body is a physical thing with porous boundaries. Nobody in the world can be completely insulated from the atmosphere; the atmosphere can be influenced by any living body. Therefore each body is involved with every other living thing on earth. Your first body could be digesting a piece of bread in Lagos at precisely the same time as your second body is acting on the internal organs of a seagull in Kamchatka. The activity of a certain species of alga in the south Pacific has determined the composition of the air that you are breathing right now. For the second body, there is no stable boundary between one species and another: we’re all in the same boat.

I thought that I might be able to capture the second body, trapping it inside a real body, by looking at it as a part of animal life. To be an animal is to be in the possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be integrated within a local ecosystem which overlaps with ecosystems which are larger and further away. To be a living thing is to exist in two bodies.

This is not how it feels on the ground, however. You live in your own individual body. You are distinct from other animals. The first time I remember knowing that I was seriously different from other animals was one day in June when I was about ten, when I was walking home from the school bus and I noticed something pale sticking out of the hedge. On approach I could see a tatty, furred stick. I lifted it out.

Somebody must have put it there – it was high in the hedge and sticking out like a sign. It was old and very dusty – so much fluff and dust were disturbed when I pulled it out of the hedge that I could see particles rising through the sunny air and entering my nose. It smelled strongly, of dried meat and something more acidic. It was fully, silkily furred at one end, the fur degraded to fluff, then mange in the middle, and the end was pure bone. I felt panic. It was my father’s birthday. I took the foxtail out of the hedge, for him.

My father was at home, the door was open, sunlight fell flatly on the carpet. I don’t know where my mother or my brother were. My father asked me what it was in my hand. I held my arm out away from my side and the old foxtail at a right-angle to it. Clenched tight in my fist, it heated and began to release its smell with greater power. It pervaded our small front room. It’s for you, I said.

He looked at it but didn’t come any nearer. He said that he didn’t want it, and he asked me where I’d found it. There was a moment’s silence, and then he asked if it was outside the pub.

I knew that to cry would be a serious mistake and so I was unable to say anything. I knew the place in the pub, on the wall with pieces of brass on leather, where the foxtail had been mounted on a piece of wood. My father spoke quietly. Take it back where it came from, he said. And then come back here. And make sure you wash your hands.

I ran all the way. I gulped in sobs. I wasn’t much of a crier and I didn’t know why this object had raised such an extreme response.

I couldn’t find the place in the hedge. I walked up and then back, looking for any small gap or broken twig. It seemed important to put it back where it came from but I couldn’t find a sign. The bone must have been stabbed directly into the hedge in a way that avoided making any impression at all on the branches that surrounded it. In form, the bone itself was like a branch. I waved the tail like a sword. More and longer grey hairs that only became red at the tip slipped loose from their attachment to one another or to the bone, and waved in the air in a twisting helix-like motion so that they caught the light. The dust was light enough to escape being pulled down, and so it drifted upward. It was drawn in through my open mouth and my nose with my inward breath and I took it automatically into my body, my body rejected it, I sneezed. I found it difficult to breathe. Minute parts of fox were pulled into my lungs.

¶ We are repelled by other animals. Since Darwin, we have known that species do not exist, but you probably don’t really believe that if you are a human. We believe in the reality of species, even if we do not believe in their truth. From where I am now, I can’t think what attracted me to the mangy fox bone, but something made me reach out for it. I needed to be taught that its flesh was not my flesh.

When I looked up HUMAN in ecology and zoology textbooks, I saw that the species boundaries were firmly in place. I was surprised. I would have thought that the scientists would have been able to show me how I am an animal. I thought that technical concepts like genes and ecosystems would integrate us – but instead I found that the authors found it difficult to talk of humans as a part of animal life.

First I went to the ecology textbooks, because I thought this could bridge the distance between humans as a part of life on earth in general and the existence which we live locally, in one place at a time. I thought that ecologists would describe how humans, among other animals, fit into habitats in different parts of the world. I thought it would show me how my life is integrated with the foxes which go through my bins, and not only with my human neighbours. To see the human in its own ecological niche is to see how the single body, living its life, has an influence on an ecosystem which we do not necessarily perceive. Humans do not see themselves as animals in their day-to-day lives.

In the books I opened, though, humans did not seem to be living on the earth, or within ecological communities, so much as they were steering and adapting, and ultimately destroying other animals. The other animals lived in nature – natural communities existed anywhere the human was not. One textbook, Behavioural Mechanisms in Ecology, describes a distinction between natural habitats and those which have been disturbed by man. The author says that human disturbances have consequences for other species – for example a mistle thrush might change its territory when man encroaches on that territory. The word disturbed implies a corrupting influence: it is not that man might also inhabit the bird’s habitat (for example, by making a home or growing food), but that the arrival of the human is the end of the natural nature of the habitat.

I looked up HUMANS in the index of Ecology from Individuals to Ecosystems – but there is no entry for the human as a creature. There is only an entry for ‘Human Activity’.

Human Activity – carbon cycle perturbation

ecosystem health impact

estuarine nutrient inputs

fossil record

habitat restoration

hydrological cycle perturbation

lake nutrient budgets

management strategies

nitrogen cycle perturbation

phosphorous cycle perturbation

pressures/state/response

species invasions management

sulphur cycle perturbation

sustainability

terrestrial communities nutrient input

To read this list, you could be forgiven for thinking that the human is a climatic or divine force rather than a form of life. The activities of the human drive and alter the ecosystem, they determine lake nutrient budgets, habitat restoration, and they are instigators of various forms of perturbation. However they do not appear to be subject to any ecosystem themselves – it is unclear, for example, how a fleshy body might perturb the hydrological cycle. It is as if the human sits outside the earth, looking down on it, deciding which elemental cycle to perturb next.

Another author, another textbook, makes a statement on the human habitat: Important problems can be traced to the increasing domination of natural communities and ecosystems by human activities.

Important problems sounds impressive, but it does not help us establish anything of much interest. Where is the human habitat? There is a sense that the human is exceptional: not really an animal. If I asked somebody in the street to direct me to my habitat, they would probably send me to a large lifestyle shop called Habitat on the Tottenham Court Road, which may be as good a sign as any of the way in which animal nature is played out in the human body. The shop is as unnatural as anything we create: in the rapacious human pursuit of home furnishings, it involves the consumption of miles of polythene and cable ties, fumes from delivery lorries, and so on – many things which could make a pigeon choke. And yet there is something animal down at the bottom of it: the desire to have some room of your own and a nice cup and bowl comes for us all in the end. The human buying himself an emerald green velvet sofa from Habitat is not so very far from the badger who drags the dirty leaf mould out of her sett every night or the pigeon building a nest out of elder twigs and cable ties.

The authors of the ecology books make a distinction between the natural ecosystem and that which has come into contact with the human. This distinction is not quite clear to me: the natural habitat is disturbed, altered, dominated or changed when a human comes into it. On the ground, it would be difficult to draw a line showing where a natural habitat becomes a disturbed habitat, but the distinction is useful in helping readers understand how human activity is influencing events on the planet, and the behaviours of other species. The authors are not confused, but pragmatic. It would be disturbing if they implied that these borders were imagined, unclear or insecure; a world in which all living beings are physical entities, which can all act on the atmosphere; a world in which every individual body is a perpetrator and everybody is a victim; a world in which there are no clear boundaries between one species and another.

Not far along the bookshelves in the same university library there was a collection of animal behaviour publications. I took down the textbooks of which there were several copies, as these books would be on undergraduate reading lists, and therefore their thoughts and teachings would be in the minds of the next generation of biologists and zoologists. The ecological textbooks had shown me how the human has power over other animals, and how human disruption and intervention causes several important problems, but what I wanted to see was the human as an animal – the human among other animals.

I took out the first book and leafed through the Contents pages. There were some chapters on MAMMALS. There was a passage on Mammalian Mating Systems which divided mammals into several categories:

Daily Female Movements Predictable

Daily Female Movements Not Predictable

Seasonal Harems

Permanent Harems

Immediately I had some questions: In which category does the human mammal belong? Are the daily movements of the human female predictable or erratic? Does she belong in a harem that is seasonal, or permanent?

As the book did not give any indication, I tried to work out the human categories for myself. I thought about the females I know well, and asked myself: If I was to think of them at any given time of day, would I be able to predict where they are and what they are doing?

	Predictable	Erratic
	Robin	Nina
	Ella	Sumi
	Raina	Vivien
	Edit	Beth
	Rose	Rachael
	Robyn	Sarah
	Amy	Annie
		Charlotte

My conclusion was that young and old females tend to act more predictably (Robin and Ella are both grandmothers; Raina, Edit and Rose are not yet at school); while the females in the right-hand column are all of reproductive age, and their movements are more erratic. However, there are outliers (Robyn, Amy) and in conclusion, I am not convinced that the human female fits this paradigm.

Elsewhere in the textbook, the authors describe how individual males of many species and families aggregate around hotspots to pick up females, and that weaker or unattractive males will aggregate around attractive “hotshot males” in order to attract females.

Do you recognize this as something human? The authors do not identify it as such. There are obvious reasons why they do not refer the phenomenon of the ‘hotshot’ male to the human species, or examine the possibility of a correlation between attractiveness and popularity in humans as a simple and singularly biological event (in order to attract). It would sound at best comic, at worst insulting, to use the objectified language of behaviourist observation in relation to the ways in which men and women are attracted to one another – this is material for the novelists. It is possible that the deer, bacteria, the white-bearded manakin – species cited by the book – are not as complex as human organisms, and therefore their sex and courtship can be explained more simply, in terms of their bodies. However, the description did not make me think of the deer, the bacte...