The Second Body

This pigeon

did not greatly care about the young lady’s playing, except when she played the song of “Spera Si”, from Handel’s opera, Admetus; then it would come and sit by the window, testifying pleasure; when the song was over it would fly back to its dovecote, for it had

This pigeon

did not greatly care about the young lady’s playing, except when she played the song of “Spera Si”, from Handel’s opera, Admetus; then it would come and sit by the window, testifying pleasure; when the song was over it would fly back to its dovecote, for it had not

did not greatly care about the young lady’s playing, except when she played the song of “Spera Si”, from Handel’s opera, Admetus; then it would come and sit by the window, testifying pleasure; when the song was over it would fly back to its dovecote, for it had not learned the art of clapping wings for an encore.

¶ The word animal, like the word nature, is one which can include the human or exclude it. I know that I am an animal, that in fact I have been able to talk to pheasants. I also know that I am not the same thing as the rotting fox tail. If I found a rotting human limb sticking out of a hedge, I wouldn’t take it home as a birthday present for my dad. Is a human an animal? To be an animal is to be an individual, and also a part of life across the world. Humans can situate themselves inside this life, but we are also able to separate ourselves from it – to look down on it, as in the Earthrise picture, or in the biology textbooks which describe Human Activity as a global force.

humans continue to think of themselves as separate. Where there is no clear boundary between human and animal, there is a sense of fear. This has been the case at least since the Minotaur (half-man, half-bull; flesh-eating). In The Tempest, a man called Prospero rules an island, and enslaves its native inhabitant, a strange creature called Caliban. Like the Minotaur, Caliban’s identity is unclear – when a man called Trinculo first encounters him, he cannot work out what Caliban’s body is. It is both human and non-human, and this is disturbing to Trinculo:

What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not of the newest Poor-John. A strange fish!

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.

¶ 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.

Why horror? The word in English and Italian has the same root. It comes from older words meaning to shake with dread, to prickle, as the hairs stand up on the back of the neck; to bristle like an animal’s skin – it is a fear that is particular to the animal body. This is consistent with the descriptions we are given by Lila, who makes the reader feel her horror in her pungent experience of other humans. She compares human bodies with inert objects and animals, and describes her disgust at this perception. These bodies are too physical to be bearable. How poorly made we are, how insufficient. To see the body as physical is to notice its inbuilt mortality.

Like the characters in ‘Elephant’, Marcello is no longer visible as an individual, but has become indistinguishable as a physical entity. Clark characterises Billy by the emissions of the vehicles he owns, and Lila witnesses Marcello quite literally melting into a human-car hybrid. For Lila the experience is very much a physical one – it causes her to describe the bodies of her friends and family in a kind of extreme detail

The second body appears to pose a threat to the first body – the real one, the one you live in. Any body which is global cannot accommodate an individual, who moves in her own individual way, who makes individual choices and has individual thoughts – this global body, which is entirely without boundaries, doesn’t understand that individuals exist at all.