Pop 89: Blood & Guts

By Madonna Hamel

Walking along the Frenchman River at dusk yesterday, Spring sang her song. From one side came a thousand frog arpeggios, from the other the descending winnowing of snipes. On bass: hooting owls and moo mooing cows, with solos by the magnificent meadowlark, backed by robins and choruses upon chorusses of twittering little brown birds.

The atmosphere filled with song sent me into rapture, replaced my worry about about a cultural obsession with technology with a holler of “Thanks!”. Where else in the world can you go for a walk in the evening and be inundated by sounds that are entirely natural, not man-made?

And when’s the last time you heard the word “twitter” and thought about birds? It’s a slow creep - this usage of the language of the natural world to define technology. I think it’s a clever way of easing ourselves out of the physical world without realizing we’ve left both the wild and our bodies behind. Academia and the corporate world both use the language of athletics and body without inhabiting blood and guts reality. Words like “nimble”, “agile”, “pivot” - a vocabulary used to describe gymnasts, sprinters and basketball players - constantly show up in the rhetoric of universities and businesses

Much has been written about how we overlook the natural world with distancing and disembodied language. In a blog post called: “When it comes to nature, what language are we speaking?” freelance writer Sarah Boon gathers a variety of quotes on the subject. From Rebecca Solnit she gives us: “The destruction of the earth is due in part to…its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters.” And from Robert Macfarlane she quotes: “By instrumentalising nature, linguistically and operationally, we have largely stunned the earth out of wonder.”

She also references George Monbiot warning us that our language for nature has become cold and scientific: “Places in which nature is protected are called ‘sites of special scientific interest’. At sea, they are labelled ‘no-take zones’ or ‘reference areas’. Had you set out to estrange people from the living world, you could scarcely have done better… Wild animals and plants are described as ‘resources’ or ‘stocks’, as if they belong to us and their role is to serve us.”

But there’s something else going on that isn’t just about us looking at the woods and seeing only lumber. As if to assuage our pricked conscience about our lack of relationship with nature, we word-jack the language of nature and make it fit our brains and computers. We cover up our disembodied state by turning physical language into conceptual language. We hope by redefining ourselves and behaviours using the language of nature we become un-separated from nature.

The language of the body seems to be used most in two very disembodied places - the university and the corporation. If I hear one more dry academic speak of “robust” “engagement” and “nimble” thinking, or one more tech company’s brag about AI’s “agility” I think I am going to barf. Barfing may be the only tactile way to prove my point, which is, in keeping keeping with a vocabulary of natural and organic processes, that we’re being fed a bunch of BS. However, sadly, because it’s not actual BS - it can’t even serve as decent fertilizer.

Using the language of bodies doesn’t bring human beings closer to embodiment. But it can be used to assuage our fears of loosing touch with the living world and assure us we are still behaving humanely. One tech company who prefers to see themselves as an “organism” and who specializes in “faster transformations” along their “customer journey” uses the analogy of sprinting to explain why, “as an increasing number of tasks are taken over by cognitive-intelligence capabilities, companies will need to take many of the lessons learned from lean management and update them. Like a sprinter who needs all her muscles to be finely tuned and working in concert to reach top speeds, fast-moving institutions must have a system to continually synchronize their strategies, activities, performance, and health.”

Such language is a long way from “we are a part OF nature.” And it doesn’t come close to understanding that: We ARE nature. Nature to the marrow. Nature to the end. From dust we come and to dust we will return. Slowly, every day, we’re each becoming good compost, moving from blood and guts to humous,“Human” comes from the same word as “humous,” after all.

While on a long cross-Saskatchewan walk led by Matthew Anderson and Hugh Henry the full realization that we ARE nature hit me like a ton of field stones. We were in the Cypress Hills region where horses were free to run wild. A storm was coming and I was lagging behind the rest of the group. I’d come across a circle of stones so huge I wondered if it might be a medicine wheel. I knelt down to get a closer look and put my hand on one of the stones. That’s when the wondrous-strange feeling swept through; I knew it was alive.

Next I had a brief, glorious glimpse of all of us from above, from the long game of history and I came to the full realization, with my whole being, that the stone was made not just of vegetation and organisms compressed over time, but of humans as well. We are nature.

I was brought back into the moment by the voices of my friends yelling and pointing. “Yeah, yeah, “ I said. “I’m coming.” I assumed they were pointing at an incoming storm. But when I rose and looked behind me, there stood seven wild horses, manes lifting in the rising wind. I was so awestruck by their presence I fell to my knees. They stood before my venerating self for a few moment then galloping away, but not before they circled me and the circle of stones, their manes flying behind them.