animals form a community with similar reasons for moving about, and an analogous way of changing place; they embark on the same search for the cleared path, the best possible passage, the stream where they can quench their thirst or just revel in the joy of the living water, the sunlight in which they can warm their skins after the cold valley, the coign of vantage over the valley which allows them to orient themselves a little and see what’s coming, the shade in which they can cool off at midday, the detour round the peak. A wolf’s trail always takes the path of least resistance. And that’s why a human being will naturally follow an animal path (if the animal has a certain corpulence), and that’s why, in it and through this path, there is something like a momentary blurring of the distinction between man and animal which proves how close they are, in the vital, lived experience of their pacing along the same trail. They see it with the same eyes; they are mammals that open up the path with the same aims and the same ways of thinking and deciding. Despite the differences, despite the unapproachable strangeness of other forms of life, there is at certain points something like a community of vital issues. This is what becomes evident in forest tracking when, for example, we discover a lost track because we have guessed that it was towards that babbling stream over there that the animal went when the temperature soared, or when we know in advance that, on this pass, the wolf, imbued by the sovereign desire to make its territory known to everyone, will have left a mark, which indeed we find right there. In passing, we unwittingly experience the time of myth: a time when human and non-human animals are no longer clearly distinguishable.
Like any good intermediary, it is to be hoped that a diplomat who has gone to enforest himself among other living things, even for a day or two, will comes back transformed, made serenely wild, far from the phantasmal wildness we attribute to Others. Whoever lets himself be enforested by them should, we hope, come back a little different from his werewolf trip, turned into a half-blood, straddling two worlds. Neither degraded nor purified, just other, and able to travel a little between worlds, and to make them communicate, so that he can work to bring about a common world.
The earth, that is sufficient,I do not want the constellations any nearer,I know they are very well where they are,I know they suffice for those who belong to them. 8
Notes
1 1. I have translated Morizot’s French quite literally, even though in English we would not refer to ‘going into nature’, since he is making a philosophical point about nature as ‘other’ to culture. (Translator’s note.)
2 2. Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, translated by Janet Lloyd (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
3 3. Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (translated from the French).
4 4. Gilles Havard, Histoire des coureurs de bois, Amérique du Nord 1600–1840 (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2016). A coureur des bois was a French-Canadian trader, usually in fur, who worked closely with the indigenous people of North America, mainly in the seventeenth century. (Translator’s note.)
5 5. Walt Whitman, ‘The Song of the Open Road’, in Leaves of Grass (1855).
6 6. Emanuele Coccia has written eloquently on this phenomenon in La Vie des Plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange (Paris: Rivages, 2016).
7 7. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 193.
8 8. Walt Whitman, ‘The Song of the Open Road,’ in Leaves of Grass (1855).
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