SNC

Wild Quoll Fight

I have watched this video twice. I know very little about the person who posted it. The first time I watched it I thought, “This is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in my entire life.” The second time I showed it to my girlfriend, and I began to tear up. After I told her how beautiful I found it, I began to sob. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and no words I could say could replace it.

I have no idea what a quoll is. I have never heard of one, and I have not searched it up. Maybe I will, later. But they are strangers to me. I have never been to the country where they live, and I do not know what it is like there. Neither do I know precisely what it is like inside their flesh. Still I watched it and I was struck with such immense and undeniable feeling: HERE YOU ARE, in the dark, with your long tail and your dark fur and your spots, your mouth open wide, locked in with another animal just like you, fighting to kill and die.

I know so astonishingly little. Watching this I did not picture myself at all as the person holding the camera, but of course that’s the perspective I get. Even that much is so limited in what can be communicated to me. What is the quality of the air like: how humid, how cold or warm? And the ground, what does the soil feel like? What about the sounds in the air beyond the scuffling and the panting—cars, insects, voices? And then, what do the wild quolls sense? What colours do they see with the differing cones in their eyes, and what do they smell? How does it feel to touch each other in that way when you have a body which is that size, with that kind of fur and skin? What does it feel like inside of their mouths? Does it hurt, when one presses their paw into the other? How easily can they move like that? And I do not know about their society either. The fight is clearly ritualized because they so intuitively hold each other in a certain way and lock mouths in a certain way. And then the final moment at the end, where one of the two flees—in that moment I could not help but feel, no matter everything that I do not know, that there I am, THAT is me, on my four paws watching my enemy run away.

Who knows what the cause of the fight was? Humans say we know so much, because we assume our fellow animals are simple creatures because they cannot tell us much. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to think that someone is dumber than they are when they can only barely speak your language? Dumber and less complicated? It is so much easier with other animals, but not a single person on Earth derives the depth of their existence merely by the ability to communicate it, let alone to communicate it to me, some human in another continent. Why should I have to know about it? You are an animal. You are born on a certain day, at a certain time, to certain parents. You move around, you eat, you sleep, you drink, you shit, you piss, you breathe, you have relations with your fellows of one kind or another, and sometimes you kill them—yes, you kill, all the time in fact, and so do I. Recently I killed a tiny little person, a tiny yellow person, who was on the page of a book that I was reading in the park, because I absentmindedly and unthinkingly tried to brush her away, thinking she was a speck of dust. She also was born on a certain day, at a certain time, to certain parents. She also moved around, ate, slept, drank, excreted, breathed, had relations with her fellows, and I presume, sometimes killed them, some way or another, perhaps ones even smaller than herself. What was it like for her to live in the way that she lived? Who are you to say I should not think about her when my life is so much the same as hers, just at a different size and for a different length of time, and with the ability to speak to you because you are a language-creature? She is what I am, and what has happened to her is what will one day happen to me, because I will also die, and I am no greater on that day than she is, and no less.

Still, though, I am alive. I breathe, like the wild quolls breathe, if they are still alive at the time that I write this. And I fight, too. There is so much aggression inside of me, which I also express in ritualized ways, to keep it under control. Does it burn in me in the same way as this person that I say I am, in New South Wales? How can I possibly say unless I am told, and I will never be told. But it does not matter that much. I have attended to what I have seen and I feel it in me, because I am not so different from them; they cannot hide that they spend their lives like I spend mine. Right now I am writing. Doesn’t that seem to be different from them? Well of course it is different but that does not matter, because what is important is not the ability to establish some sort of identity rationally but to be implicated, and by God I am implicated in this quarrel they have. I am implicated in their breathing as a breathing thing, in their violence as a violent thing, in the warmth of their blood as a warm-blooded thing, in their writhing in the earth as an earth-writhing thing, in their proximity to death as a dying thing. Even now, what is happening in me is what is happening in them: my heart is beating, my lungs are respiring, my gut is digesting whatever I last ate, my eyes are blinking, my blood is flowing, microbes are floating around in my organs, and I feel in some ways pleasure and in others discomfort. My limbs move and my senses pass from one perception to another. All of this could be false and there would be other things, things I share even with plants, intimate things: coming to exist and dying, relying on the light of the sun, drinking in water, having a smell. They are implicated in my existence; they are an interpretation of my existence and I am an interpretation of theirs.

The fighting is vicious. These two remind me of the knights of Le Morte d’Arthur who encounter each other at random in the woods and, often at random, hack each other to pieces. And doing some research, it seems that they do not live long: if they live past being pups, they live one to five years, and often exhaust themselves with fighting as they mate. Neither do they feed themselves in a pretty fashion, since they are carnivores and devour other people, with their own lives and their own personalities, and sometimes die in the process, such as when they swallow up a cane toad. None of this really tells me anything. The fact that I can articulate something changes very little. I know that I likely have Dermodex mites in my skin which I never see, but does knowing it make me have any more of an intimate relationship with them than I had before? We are not joined in a conceptual manner! We share a common life no matter whether I acknowledge them or not. All the acknowledging of what a wild quoll’s life is said by humans like does not get at what I care about, which is that fact of opening your eyes from a blink and finding yourself with a body very much like mine with your mouth on your rival’s mouth.

I had a friend who lived for a time in a rural setting in Australia, and she has told me about how she once went out for a smoke and found herself face-to-face with a kangaroo. She also told me that she knew a young man who was torn apart by a kangaroo, but there is no reporting to suggest that this is true. She may not have been honest with me. The image stuck with me, and it is a terrible thing, for one person to tear another apart. This one woke up one day, with their own specific disposition toward their own specific mode of our common Earthly life, and so did that one, and this one tore that one apart. It certainly happens every day with a wild quoll and someone else, since they are carnivores, and that is how they get their living. How can I excuse it? Of course there are a thousand excuses, and I accept them all the time, and I do not act as though killing one person is the same as killing another. I do not act as though I have killed my own mother, although I have killed a little person who lived on my page for a time. Still, one who has shed a person’s blood will have their own blood shed, and the price of killing is to be killed. I also will be killed! And because I have inflicted suffering, I will suffer. By this I know that I cannot, ultimately, excuse it, because I am involved, and can imagine myself bleeding out like any hunted animal, pain shooting through me, and faced with a death that I cannot escape on a day when so much else was going on with me, so much else I could have done for a time, in brain and all my other organs. I have to take it seriously because it will happen to me, in some form or another, so I examine how it happens in the lives of other people and how much is lost and destroyed, and I cannot help but cower and be afraid.

Violence is not beautiful. But these two are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, maybe, maybe the most beautiful, or at least that is how I feel now. I cannot help but feel it, that this moment of frantic scrambling in the dark, in a world which has not allotted long life and abundant joy to wild quolls, is a jewel that is worth more than the manifold cosmos, the kind of jewel that the young Naga girl gave to the Buddha and that caused her to become, at once, a Buddha herself. My whole life is there, breath and struggle and biting and fear and nearly death until, all of a sudden, the one who had me pinned to the ground sprints off like lightning and I have a moment to look around. And how can I help but love them who live in this way, however much it hurts? They cannot be made irrelevant even if no one knows about them, even if no one knows who they are, because still, even in five hundred million years or a billion years when the sun boils up the Earth beyond the point that life can live, they will have something to do with you and me, and whoever might be alive then. We are not, in fact, at liberty to kill ourselves, because we do not really know what is happening inside of us at every moment, we cannot take stock of all the details of what we experience and what we do, and we are left to parse it in one mode at this instant and in another in the next, with no possibility of a master schema, filling up and dumping out and filling up again like a bucket in an amusement park. We can certainly kill, but God knows who is doing the dying. So we may not feel that it matters to us, this person killing that person, and we can get through our whole life without thinking about it at all—in fact, we can “kill ourselves” and get the matter over with. But you did not know what was happening beforehand, or to whom it was happening, so how will you say, by this action of yours, that you have determined that nothing more will be of consequence to you, nothing more will matter or pertain? You do not even know who you are acting toward, or what it is you are doing.

You are permitted to love your fellow creature because you do not have to know what you are doing, or what you are committing to. You will love them in one mode and you will love them in another. You will take your life to pertain to theirs, and theirs to yours, emptying out one goblet into another goblet endlessly. They will be familiar and alien by turns, and you will have so little power to force the matter, one way or another. And you will still be ignorant and suffer and die, and it will thwart the ways you planned to love them. This way their lot is yours, and you will live in it and die in it. Your own incomprehension is their own incomprehension. One day you will be bound, and brought where you do not want to go, and spread out your hands, just like they do. But at no time, and in no place, was there ever found anything which boiled down to what it then and there was, not ultimately. And Lemuria does not move as time moves. She does not pass as time passes.