San Francisco garter snake, an endangered species |
March 27, 2016
‘The
inanimate becomes animate.’
– Alia Volz, Snakebit
Mutability and
chaos. Change. Shedding of a skin, the slithering sinuous amidst the
still and hiding plants. The danger of the unknown.
Snakes and reptiles
contain the unknown, display it to us. They are mobile, alive. They
share with us the ranging search of the eye, the gnawing need of the
gut. They are very much like us.
At once they are
utterly strange. The clawed feet of the lizard, his alien pupils and
shambling gate. To say nothing of the slither of the snake, writhing,
out of our mind’s reach. We may watch one part but not take in the
whole. Their vestigial limbs long since withdrawn inside themselves.
Their eyes, while we share similar features, hold a darkness like a
cave that spreads, past what their small heads ought to contain,
opening onto the cavernous interior of the earth.
No wonder their
shapes touch our most primal fears. Long ago they must have been one
of our more potent dangers. The body remembers. This is one of those
clear examples, of the unbroken thread of the physical, our bodies to
those of our ancestors. That we can have this fear, this bodily fear,
of something rarely seen in our citified lives, these small and
mostly harmless garter snakes, gopher snakes, rubber boas, these
little creatures living as they have for so long, forced into
increasingly attenuated habitat. Like so many dangers, civilization
would amplify that fear in order to shut away the individuals in a
preserve called ‘nature.’
The civilized mind,
trying so hard to separate from the body, yet still inextricable from
it, still utterly beholden to the physical. Our thoughts are feelings
in our bodies, our sensations equal thoughts, inseparable. But the
attempted separation from the body leaves us unmoored from the
physical ground, in this portable culture. It causes the fears of
that dark unknown beyond civilized borders, beyond city wall and
beyond egoistic mind. In the gut, in the wild, that unknown darkness
looms large and dangerous and vague. What is not seen or felt, only
dimly intuited, captures the worst of the imagination. We fill the
dark with a pit of vipers.
The snake becomes
the very epitome of fear in the civilized perspective. Volz: ‘They
are shape-shifters … Snakes are deception, surprise, mutability.
They violate the predictable. Snakes are agents of chaos.’
In this civilized
age, we have worked hard to produce a human habitat that seems on the
surface to be static and predictable, none of the surprise the
non-human presents. From the ordered grid of planned cities to the
blocks of factory-farmed corn to the sterile cornucopia of the
supermarket, everything predictable and on-demand, ordered down to
the smallest variable.
This must be a
facade and a fiction – it cannot remain for long. It has done
so just long enough for us to see it as commonplace. But being is
fluid and dynamic; it implies change. In the face of this, our
obsession with the inert seems fallacious, a cul-de-sac. Almost a
yearning for death, or deathlessness.
Meanwhile, those who
live closely with the more-than-human, with the broader landscape
that gives rise to us, they often see the snake as sacred, for the
same reasons it is fearful to us. Mutable, it implies all mutability,
of matter and being. That unknowable depth in the eye of the snake
implies the mystery that will never come fully to light, limited as
we are by each form. The serpent is the mysterious truth that cannot
be kept still. At once, each snake is another individual, here in
this land, like each human. Across that threshold we find a being not
so different, she with her hungry guts, the scents on her tongue.
So-called deception
is then merely our own limitation in seeing, a limitation
civilization promulgates. If we stop seeing ourselves as the center
of some cosmic narrative, we can acknowledge that what seems
deceptive is not aimed at us, is not a trick designed to steal
something from us – it is only things being as they are, partly
hidden from our limited senses.
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