Counterpoint

      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.

From that day on, my window remained open every night. With each successive sleepless episode like the one I experienced that first morning, I rediscovered the same surprise, the same sense of anticipation which prevented me from going back to sleep (or even wishing to do so). The bird sang. But never before had song seemed so close to speech. These were phrases. Recognizable as such. They caught my ear in exactly the same way as words themselves would do. And yet, in that sustained effort imposed by the urge to avoid repetition, never had song seemed further removed from language. This was speech, but taut with beauty and where every single word mattered. The silence held its breath and I felt it tremble in tune with the song. I had the most clear and intense feeling that, at that moment, the fate of the entire world, or perhaps the existence of beauty itself, rested on the shoulders of this blackbird.

      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.

Perhaps also the song affected me so powerfully because I had recently read The Companion Species Manifesto by Donna Haraway.⁴ In this extremely beautiful book, the philosopher describes the relationship that she has forged with her dog, Cayenne. She explains how this relationship has had a profound effect on the way she relates to other beings, or, more precisely, to ‘relations of significant otherness’, how it has taught her to become more aware of the world around her, more closely attuned to it, more curious, and how she hopes that the experiences she has shared with Cayenne will stimulate an appetite for new forms of commitment with other beings who will one day matter in the same way. What Haraway’s book does, and I was struck by this in the context of my own experience, is to stimulate, encourage and bring into existence, to render attractive, other modes of attention.⁵ And to focus attention on these forms of attentiveness. It is a matter not of becoming more sensitive (a rather too convenient hotchpotch of a notion which could just as easily lead to allergies) but of learning how to pay attention and becoming capable of doing so. Paying attention here with an added sense of being attuned, of ‘giving your attention’ to other beings and at the same time acknowledging the way other beings are themselves attentive. It is another way of acknowledging importance.

The ethnologist Daniel Fabre would often describe his profession as one which focused attention on whatever prevented people from sleeping. The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro came up with a very similar definition of anthropology, describing it as the study of variations of importance. He writes moreover that, ‘if there is something that de jure belongs to anthropology, it is not the task of explaining the world of the other but that of multiplying our world.’⁶ I believe that many of the ethologists who observe and study animals, following in the footsteps of the naturalists who preceded them and who took this task so much to heart, invite us to follow a similar path: that of becoming aware of, of multiplying ‘modes of existence’ – in other words, ‘ways of experiencing, of feeling, of making sense, and of granting importance to things’.⁷ When the ethologist Marc Bekoff says that each animal is a way of knowing the world, he is saying the same thing. Scientists cannot, of course, dispense with explanations altogether, but explaining can take many very diverse forms. It can, for example, be a way of reconfiguring complicated stories as the vagaries of life which stubbornly insists on trying out every possible variation, or it can mean trying to seek answers for puzzling problems, the solutions to which have already been invented by this or that animal, but it can also reflect a determination to find a general all-purpose theory to which everything would conform. Put another way, there are explanations which end up multiplying worlds and celebrating the emergence of an infinite number of modes of existence and others which seek to impose order, bringing them back to a few basic principles.

      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.

Notes