Daisy Hildyard

What does all this have to do with you? Everything. What do an American barn owl, a Zimbabwean hippopotamus and a Norwegian reindeer have in common? What they have in common is that they all have a relationship with your body – they are all, in some sense

What they have in common is that they all have a relationship with your body – they are all, in some sense, your responsibility. There is a way of speaking which implicates your body in everything on earth.

It was around the same time that I started noticing the other animals. In the newspaper I saw images of eleven hippopotami which floated, dead, down a river in Binga, Zimbabwe. Dozens of barn owls fallen onto the Interstate-84 in Idaho. Tonnes of fish silvering the beaches in Montevideo, Uruguay. Hundreds of reindeer strewn across a plateau in southern Norway, after a freak storm.

Personally, I do not always find it easy to believe that I have two bodies. In a technical way, I believe in climate change, but I do not much act as if I do. (I take flights.) I don’t really inhabit it. I have never bought a book with Climate Change in the title because I feel that I wouldn’t find anything real inside it. I would like to see real people and real creatures within this reality – not only those who live on drowned islands in the Pacific, but everybody, everywhere – because that, I am told, is the point. We know that even the unconscious patient must be held responsible for the sky outside his operating room. This is every living thing on earth.

It’s a bewilderingly promiscuous world view

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.

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

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.

¶ 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.

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.