We have never been humans – no human has ever stepped on the surface of the earth. However, since their first symbolic utterance mortals started to walk on the earth, naming (i.e. conferring being to) what lives and what dies. Possessed by symbolic language, humans are the only mortals, the only animals who experience in an existential way the constant presence of life and death, that is, who stand in relation to both in a manner that these define their existence, shaping who they are. In contrast, an antelope does not think being and does not exactly perceive the “death” of others: after an antelope is killed by a leopard, its non-presence is easily forgotten by its fellow antelopes, which, right after the attack, tend to go back to normality as if nothing had happened. Other animals may feel loss or even mourn in similar circumstances. But mortals’ thoughtful (or meditative) awareness of death is what makes them uniquely mortals. With language – which, again, opens the domain of being – and the aforementioned awareness comes, too, their psychological complexity, which manifests itself, among other things, in the abysmal feeling of losing control over one’s own life, or of being displaced in it, or in “anxiety” and, eventually, “existential crises.”
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“I wonder if this whole thing can be thought of in terms of territorial rights,” writes John M. Hull after losing his vision and feeling hopeless before what he calls a “hot rock,” that is, complete darkness. “Blindness,” he goes on to say, “takes away one’s territorial rights. One loses territory. The span of attention, of knowledge, retracts so that one lives in a little world. Almost all territory becomes potentially hostile. Only the area which can be touched with the body or tapped with the stick becomes a space in which one can live. The rest is unknown.” Furthermore, Hull describes his becoming a child in the eyes of others: a man who is ignorant of almost everything and who needs to be taken care of. Hull therefore holds to have lost his territory together with his sight, and thereby too his capacity to claim recognition and authority, to say “I am” in the face of others. For, usually, children are not taken seriously by adults, and still, they can demand authority, whereas a blind person often cannot out of fear of not being fast enough, or attentive enough, or aware of what others may see instead. The only secure territory Hull has is his own body: a territory (so he thinks) empty of anyone else. Hence he feels the need to affirm himself in a socially-shared territory: in the face and the eyes of others. In short, with the problem of the “territorial rights” comes the pressing existential need to affirm one-self in being.
The fragile existential ground distinctive of mortals and the consequent need they have to imprint in being is shown in what follows, as well: “A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best as he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos,” write Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. The child feels the vertigo of non-being and tries to suppress this sensation by marking his own territory using sounds. Notice: the child is initially groundless, which explains his fear; therefore, he has to create a place for himself out of chaos: his place will be his territory, the locus for his world to be there, the ground of his being, his imprint, or his affirmation.
What we are trying to think here is why a mortal child is afraid of darkness in a way that is different from the manner in which other-than-mortal youngsters seem to be afraid of it. Or do their respective ways of feeling fear not differ from one another after all? Maybe we are just confused here by our anthropocentrism?
Perhaps not. If dolphins and whales are different from spiders and cactuses due to their bio sonar (among other things), it can be said too that mortals are different from other animals due to their symbolic language; and it can be argued that the aforementioned experiences of existential panic are due, in the last instance, to their symbolic imagination.
Take, for example, Eduardo Kohn’s experience of losing his connection with reality while traveling on a dangerous road in Ecuador, as he describes it in How Forests Think. By imagining all kind of terrible disasters and getting extremely anxious, he ended up doubting his belongingness to his own body. Do other-than-mortals get scared to the point of doubting their own embodiment and senses? Most unlikely. Mortals, in contrast, experience existential vertigoes and can easily go mad: they are prompt to lose their ground.
This and other similar experiences can be explained by the fact that symbolic language separates us from what is immediately available to us through our senses.(*) Therefore we, mortals, are seldom naturally centred in our bodies but tend to drift away from them and what surrounds us with our distinctively-symbolic imagination and language. Thus too our psychological need for self-definition and our physical need to concentrate on what is present (which explains the popularity of meditative practices in our information-saturated world). Conversely, a bird – a knot of sensations – is always-already affirming, marking, imprinting its territory with every breath: it is always in place, centred in what is present to its experience, “saying” yes to it with every movement. In other words, a bird does not ask itself “does god exist?” or “which profession should I choose?”; nor does it feel terrified before the “unknown” or fear the irruption of “chaos.” In short, a bird is never separated from life – which consists in that very imprinting and of which every movement, every vibration of sound, every blink of an eye, every moment is a forceful “saying” yes, yes, yes, yes.
(*) Due to its abstractness, unlike both iconic language (in which the signifier and the signified resemble one another) and indexical language (in which the immediacy of the signified is patent in the signifier as its cause: the roar of a jaguar evinces its presence), symbolic language removes us from sensorial immediacy: it distances us from what we sense.
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