From the human eye (I) to the more-than-human we

Text & Images: Daria Nita

A cellist and a saxophonist are improvising a jazz piece. Two families with strollers stopped in front of them to listen. Next to them, a boxer is practicing their best moves on the punching bag. Ding ding! It appears like this little crowd is blocking the way for some cyclists. Ding dong! The nearby church bells ring. Perhaps taking it as their cue to leave, the two musicians wrap up their jam on a final resounding note, and the public claps. They wave bye-bye to the two babies in their strollers, say thank you, and pack up their instruments. 

As I start walking again, towards the Eastern exit of the park, I get lured in by piercing screeches and look up to see a bird that seems to be doing pirouettes in the air. Getting closer, I realize that what I had originally mistaken for a hanging branch is actually a pair of shoes that have been laced together and thrown into a tree – they are now hanging, suspended from a branch. The screeching individual, a crow, is holding onto one of the shoes with its claws, trying to take flight with it. Tangled as they are into the branches of the tree, the shoes do not seem to wish to be taken anywhere. I look down for a second to grab my phone so I can take a video of the silly event, but when I look back up the bird has already left, probably gone on a quest to find another (easier to retrieve) treasure. 

In the months of February and March, my usual travel to campus got altered because of construction work: the tram I usually took from Muiderpoortstation to K. s-Gravesandestraat stopped running, and the only alternative I had left was to walk the 30-minute journey instead. On the first day of that new journey, I realized that instead of walking alongside Oosterpark like Google Maps suggested, I could walk through Oosterpark for a mere 5 additional minutes. Over the course of those two months, I became so enamored with my little morning park walk that I kept on with it even after the construction ended and the usual tram line was reinstated. Reflecting on the theme of “Metamorphosis” for this edition of the Cul, I had the initial idea to put my beloved Oosterpark in the spotlight and share tidbits of my human and more-than-human encounters. I had the feeling that, entering through the North gate and exiting through the East gate, there was a progression from “human territory” (the area with the punching bag, benches, the hotel and the Montessori school) to “bird territory” (the pond area that was overrun by birds). My idea of metamorphosis was one of shifting from one species’ realm to another. I thought it would be doing justice to the birds by recognizing their dominion. I continued my journey through the park:

I decide to sit down on a bench, looking out at the water, and slowly realize I have now entered bird territory. The main sounds I could hear before – the water of the fountain as it splashes down into the pond, the occasional ringing and rumbling of a tram passing by, a low murmur of human conversations, words and voices indistinguishable from one another – are all overtaken now by cowing crows and whistling songbirds. In front of me, a little to the left, a seagull stands perched on a high tree stump, surveying its surroundings, its gaze swiping left to right, right to left. I take my eyes off the seagull as I get distracted by a spectacular duck landing right under it, sliding on the surface of the water in a dramatic splash. Bugged by the incessant, loud cawing, I look towards where the sound is coming from only to see that the crows seem to have taken over the right side of the lawn, right in front of the fountain. I can count 14, 15, 16 of them, some strutting around, some taking flight and landing back again, others cocking their head from side to side, as if they were trying to solve a very difficult equation. Soon I realize why they have all amassed there: someone is throwing breadcrumbs at them. “DROP IT!” I hear behind me. “Drop it! Let’s go!”. I turn around to see a poodle getting scolded by its very British-sounding owner. The dog drops the (quite enormous) piece of bread it had in its mouth and they both move on to continue their walk. The bench I’m sitting on wobbles as a little kid behind me jumps on the backrest and makes the perilous crossing from one edge to another, in equilibrium. As I am looking down, typing this all on my computer, the perched seagull announces its departure with a loud squeak, and I look up just in time to see it take off its tree stump and land in the middle of crow territory, shoving some out of its way to get to the leftover breadcrumbs. It seems like it was on a mission after all. 

I very quickly realized, as I was trying to paint the picture of these two very different worlds, that there was no such clear separation between them. Thinking myself in human territory, I could not help getting distracted by crows cowing. Having arrived into bird territory, my eyes kept moving off the birds and to the kids playing nearby, the dogs walking behind, and everyone’s meetings and conversations. After watching dozens of ducks and seagulls fly, takeoff and land on the surface of the water, I tried to take a picture of the pond that sits majestically in the middle of the park, but what I managed to capture instead is two people seeming to have a really nice time on a picnic blanket, right in the middle of bird territory. Maybe it wasn’t bird territory after all? 

Trying to go beyond my binary biases, I got inspired by a course I am currently taking, called “Deep Ecology”. The term deep ecology was coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. In short, deep ecology rejects the idea of the human-in-environment, to instead imagine “organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations”. Going beyond any hierarchization or even separation, deep ecologists conceive humans and more-than-humans as equal living beings that can relate to each other intrinsically. Opposed to “shallow ecology” which Arne Naess argues is just a movement to stop pollution and the destruction of the environment for the benefit of the future human generations to come, deep ecology operates under the understanding that we are all in common – humans, animals, plants, microbes – and that everyone’s well-being should be guaranteed, beyond any anthropocentric hierarchization. Deep ecologists understand that separate parts of an ecosystem operate as a whole, inextricable from one another. 

Armed with my newfound understanding of the meaning of life, I wanted to try to write a multivocal account of the parkscape. But I struggled to find a way to do justice to the more-than-human actors. How do you give a voice to something that doesn’t speak to you in the same language you’re speaking? 

With that question still in mind, I went on a vacation to the north of Denmark with my friends at the end of May. We spent 8 days in a house in the forest, either laying in the grass outside when the sun was out, or sitting inside with all the windows open when it was raining. There were spiders in every corner of the ceilings, beetles on the firewood we were bringing in from the outdoor shed, birds in the early morning singing so loud it was impossible to hear anything else. One of the afternoons, we took a bike ride to the beach. Halfway through the forest, we saw a deer. It looked at us for just a second before the sound of my bike falling scared it off. 

I managed to snap a quick, blurry picture with my camera as it was walking away. Somehow, the moment felt a little sacred. Like we had gained the right to see this, because we had conformed to life in nature, because we had spent hours rolling in the grass all week, staring at snails, listening to the birds, sleeping with the windows open. 

Whenever a moment like this comes into my life, I am reminded of a poem by Jared K. Anderson I read years ago: 

An ant crosses your carpet. A spider weaves a pattern older than mammals beneath your stairs. Just nod, breathe, and think, “Good. It’s all still here. The forest, the mountains, the desert. At home in my home.” The sterile white box is the stranger. Not the ant. Not the spider.

Maybe giving them a voice will come with time. Maybe for now we can start with sharing our space.