Capture!

me feeding a lemur. do we think it’s zoboomafo?

This weekend, me and a few friends found ourselves at a billionaire’s private zoo. It was…odd. The energy was murky. I got to feed a few marmosets which was pretty cool, but seeing them was also one of the more disturbing encounters I’ve had all year.

So many of the animals I saw definitely shouldn’t have been there and several of us wondered aloud how we ought to feel while roaming the grounds.

There was a moment when I walked into my host’s home when, upon seeing his art collection full of artifacts from varied cultures around the world, artifacts, which, as far as I could tell, brooked no actual feeling of affection or living relationship from its owner, but merely symbolized the power that money brings, I was thrown, like Raven in That’s So Raven, into a trance.

Suddenly, I was standing next to Eric Kilmonger in Black Panther in the British Museum, observing the stolen items the British Empire had collected and aware that these objects had, to the ignorance of the owner, great, animist power and were not merely things in the way we in the West have come to think of it.

Was I feeling offended?

Sure, but unlike Kilmonger, outrage wasn’t the only sensation moving through me, and it was the least interesting.

Something else was lurking in me and in the room and on those grounds; I think it was this disquieting feeling of awe at the realization that my host might not have fully grasped what he thought he possessed.

Now, before I go any further, it’s important you know that what I am about to say next is pure conjecture.

I didn’t have any deep or long conversation with my host; I couldn’t as he was quite elderly and quite senile. So my description is an intuitive guess and an attempt to describe my own feelings and the energy of the space rather than a rigorously proven, journalistic endeavor.

All that being said, I’m pretty sure my host had been captured.

That’s right: My host was captured.

Not just the tortoises and the albino wallaby and the rabbits kept tucked away in a barn.

He too had been captured and kept under artificial light, entrapped by a 340-year old “habitual tendency…to view the sensuous earth as a subordinate space … as a menacing region needing to be beaten and bent to our will…”¹

This detached way of seeing is starting more and more to feel like an unconscious performance anytime I run into it. It feels like a way we produce and reproduce certain kinds of choreographies to obscure the fact that we are always, interchangeably, predator and prey, and that we are mortal.

As Joshua Michael Schrei says in an episode of The Emerald Podcast on war and ritual ecstasy, ²

“Everything that lives is both food and the eater of food. The mother devours other life that will construct the embryo that will become the being. The being devours other lives to stay alive and then is ultimately devoured itself by nature.

This life, the very cycle of nature itself is one of birth, death, and devouring. As beings in this cycle, we are biologically constructed around this core experience: an experience at being at the mercy of the source of nourishment and the slayer of the source of nourishment, simultaneously.

When we dive into the root somatics of the food cycle, we see three hundred thousand years in which the source of all nourishment and life and bliss and the source of pain and trauma and possibly death were all one thing: The animal.

We ate animals. Animals ate us. We were prey. Have you ever felt the feeling of being prey…The relationship with the animal [used to be] intricate. It was fear, it was joy, it was reverential awe, it was tenderness, it was care, grief.

Imagine all the simultaneously paradoxical feelings at the spilling of the animal’s blood at the apex of the hunt: Joy at the abundance of the universe, relief at the ability to feed the baby’s mouth another day, awe and exhaustion after being pushed to the physical limit…recognition that no matter what, we are part of a larger cycle.

Sadness at the nature of this cycle. Joy at the nature of this cycle. Direct connection to something greater through enacting this cycle. Perhaps a feeling of ‘Oh Merciful Universe. what is this great paradox that you have brought me here only to place me here in this cycle of life and death?’

This is ecstasy: the pain and joy of the larger movement of nature of which the individual self is only a tiny part.

Has my host ever felt this ecstasy?

This, I think, was the question that lay behind my discomfort which arose because I sensed there was some hidden self-affliction stalking the room, like a Truman show whose producers failed to realize that if they spent their whole lives surveilling another being, they too would become incarcerated.

By oohing and aahhing at the animals, it felt as if we were being invited to perform only one aspect of the predator-prey-predator-prey life cycle and pretend as if “humans on top” was the only position that existed with hosts who really thought that was the way the world worked.

Does he know he is a vertebrae mammal, I thought to myself later.

Has anyone ever told him this? I mean the Anthropocene age isn't even that old.

Does he know his own nervous system contains relics of the past, that he is part lizard and shares a common ancestor with dogs? Does he know he is an animal too?

Has he ever wept in awe at the exquisite poetry of this? Has he ever danced in the rain and laid on the ground in humble acknowledgement of his dusty, mortal frame? Has he ever felt not just apprehension and horror in the face of these facts, but grace?

Has he made his peace with the fact that one day, probably very soon, he will become prey, a feed for earthworms and mycelium networks?

Or has he only related to the animal kinfolk in one way, as collectors’ items to be looked at and surveyed and captured by a process that he believes — or is it hopes — will never capture him?

1. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. David Abram.

2. The Emerald Podcast: War and Ritual Ecstasy. Joshua Michael Schrei