Deep Down Things

True presence—whether in the life of a bird, a mouse, or a human being—demands attention beyond the self, a reckoning with the vastness of the other lives that shape our world.

BY DEREK FURR

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I WATCHED AN OSPREY as he fished near the lighthouse at Kingston Point in New York. He pulled up from a glide into an arc. His neck craned down, he beat his broad wings, hovering. This was the pattern for several minutes over the confluence of the Rondout Creek and Hudson River, where shad rolled the water. Twice he broke from the hover and dove, coming up empty the first time, quivering as he ascended to shake off the water and frustration. The second time he brought up a fish as large as his own body. He struggled to get airborne while the fish writhed in his claws. The fish won, though it fell from about 20 feet up. The osprey kept climbing, then took a wide, gliding turn over the area. He seemed to be recollecting himself before he settled back to the work of fishing. When I left, he was still at it, glaring at the river and pounding his wings.

For the osprey, as for most birds out in the early morning, this labor—the hunt for food—defines much of life. The creature is built for that purpose, second only to reproduction in importance. As he fishes, the osprey is fully present—being and doing are inseparable—and if I think “so persistent!”, I do him an injustice. He has not reflected on failure and decided to continue. He has simply continued since survival depends on it.

What of my observing? What is the purpose of my being here, doing that? There is joy, all the greater for the live observation than had it come from a video or a book. When I walk on the waterfront, I anticipate such joy. But that’s more the promise of the walk than its purpose. At least one reason that I come here is to shed unawareness. It takes a while. Wrapped in thought, nagged on by my phone which notifies me of nothing worth attending to over and over, I could easily miss a giant masked raptor, let alone the thousands of creatures that in this same place and time are searching, hunting, hiding, feeding, all with a degree of concentration that shames my distractibility. As I tire of observing and become anxious about time passing (shouldn’t I be doing something more productive?), the osprey keeps at it, indifferent to time and oblivious to me though I do not doubt he had noted me on the periphery and counted me unthreatening. Animals are nearly always aware of us and have calculated their response before we realize they’re near, assuming we ever do.

Becoming aware of a fraction of the lives above, below, and around us, of the other creatures not just experiencing but making the world, shrinks the ego. Our ambitions and concerns swirl around us like a personal dust devil. We blow along disturbing sparrows and oblivious to katydids and assuming that man (sic) is the measure of all things. Not that as a rule, we’re conscious of the needs of other people. Think about W. H. Auden’s brilliant interpretation of the Brueghel painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Icarus’ death matters to Icarus and presumably to Daedelus, but it doesn’t register with the person “just walking dully along” or to his dog, whose lives signify more to them than the falling boy. They don’t see him, or if they do, they soon forget. Stuck in four lanes of traffic, we curse our luck. We have so far to go before we stop for the day, and we can’t even see around the truck ahead to find out what’s holding us up. We get frustrated. We play with the radio. We slap the steering wheel and peer out the window. Eventually we pass the smashed minivan and the ambulances and cops. There is a flicker of shame. Those were people, going somewhere, too. They had plans for tomorrow. We really hope no one died. Someone turns down the music, at least until the traffic clears.

The creature you stop to observe—that particular osprey, on that June morning—is full in its specificity. The life not yours in the landscapes you occupy is vast. Go beyond your small patch, and the scale seems inconceivable. What is your obligation to try to conceive of it?

In the pandemic, awareness of other human lives and their suffering involved conceiving of a scale that stretched our limited capacity. Even if politics had not distorted our vision, Americans may never have responded appropriately to the difference between 10,000, 100,000, or a million. In a series of studies, Paul Slovic and his colleagues described the human tendency to sympathize more with the one than the many. An image of a single desperate child is more likely to yield a practical response than a plea attached to masses of children. Recall Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Kurdish-Syrian refugee who drowned when the raft carrying his family capsized five minutes into their journey. His body was photographed on a Turkish beach after being pulled from the water. The pathos of the image—his smallness, his being alone—led to story upon story and did more to elevate US and European consciousness (however temporarily) regarding the crisis in Syria than all the coverage to that point. We must have known that there were thousands like Alan, suffering and dying in conditions not of their making. But the one body in a red shirt, curled face down in the surf, the soles of his shoes upturned… a body that soon had a name and a story wouldn’t let us turn away. Why would video of thousands of refugees in similar distress—the kind of video that had become a regular part of the news cycle—be any less effective in galvanizing all of us on our sofas to act? Slovic shows that even increasing the number from one child to two children affects our capacity for compassion. A sense of futility sets in as we question how effective our small contribution could be in addressing a need that seems to be perpetual and ever increasing.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes that when people in a privileged position react to an image of suffering, there is a danger that they may not recognize their role in it. However well-intended, sympathy may be “an impertinent—if not an inappropriate—response.”

There is the video of George Floyd’s murder. There are the stills of people clinging to a plane as it departs Kabul airport. Each has become a synecdoche—for Black lives, for the victims of empire. They are vast, larger than the single life. But one of the most powerful gestures to arise from BLM protests after Floyd’s death was “Say Their Names,” followed by a litany of invocations of individual lives—Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks. The chant demanded particularity, not to deny the symbolic weight that Floyd’s image, for instance, had gathered, but to sustain the individual’s particular life a little longer than the breath that was taken from them. It is not impertinent to meditate on a particular life that has been rendered symbolic—on the life, not the symbol. Zaki Anwari, a member of the Afghan youth soccer team. Fada Mohammed, a dentist from the outskirts of Kabul.

At sunrise a daddy longlegs was trying to scale the steel slope of our kitchen sink. I needed water for coffee and didn’t want to drown him. How to help him escape without crushing a delicate leg? I stood in a fog, kettle in hand, the non-arachnid spidery insect tumbling repeatedly toward the drain.

Flash back two weeks to my worst recent interaction with the creatures that share our home. The story that I’m about to relate brings me pain and embarrassment. We have an old Tupperware salad spinner. I took it from the cabinet and put it in the sink to prepare to wash a handful of lettuce. When I removed the lid, there sat a mouse. I started back, the plastic bowl tipped, and the mouse tumbled into the sink. It froze, and without a single thought, as if my arm were on a spring, I whacked it with the lid. What manner of beast am I beneath this vegetarian, animal-rights exterior? How simple to have scooped it back into the salad spinner and put it outside? Even simpler to have let it thaw and scurry off, to be caught later in the little gray humane traps we have for that purpose. I lay awake that night worried that I have hidden tendencies toward violence. I have no doubt that the mouse was a conscious being with desires and perceptions.

Didn’t it long for food, wish to remain alive, imagine—so briefly—an escape? Killing it without good reason (and such a reason would be hard to produce under the circumstances) is marginally different from slaughtering a pig and worse than squashing a bug—itself an act that should not be automatic. We’re not automatons, and neither are insects.

Hence my dilemma at the sink. Shaking my head to clear the fog, I found a sheet of printer paper for the daddy longlegs to tiptoe onto, and I lifted him to the floor. That simple. No one died. Coffee was delayed by less than two minutes.

The death of that mouse, the life of that insect: I want to believe that attention to the smallest lives in our midst, maybe even a little curiosity about those lives for their own sake, will be disruptive. It could be an antidote to the toxins in the air as authoritarianism rises again, with its love of generalizations and platitudes. Our capacity to care for the human is adumbrated when we are careless about the nonhuman. “And for all this, nature is never spent,” Hopkins wrote. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” We might call Hopkins’ freshness the germ of a soul. In the US, the soul has been coopted by a subset of reactionary Christians and dismissed without reflection by a subset of the college-educated. The rest of us tend to ignore it altogether unless asked if we believe we have one. In his lectures on death, the Yale philosopher Shelly Kagan addresses each of Plato’s arguments for the soul in the Phaedo and concludes that none is satisfactory when measured against the physicalist perspective. A body doesn’t need a soul, but a person needs a body. Looking for the person, Kagan argues, “follow the body.” When I watch an osprey, I wonder if belief in souls diminishes respect for bodies, human and other, all of which have evolved to states of glorious complexity that no human laboratory can approximate. And yet it’s just such complexity, which manifests in personality and feeling and intention, that drives me back to “soul.” I want a word, a large word with a history, for what moves when I finally listen to the evening resonant with creatures calling to each other, or for what stings when I see a fellow creature senselessly cut down. To imagine a soul is as good a way as any to encapsulate why, when we do finally regard the joy or suffering or simply the daily life of another, we feel a connection and, however fleetingly, a responsibility.

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