Hell isn’t full of flames. According to Dante, it’s cold. Flames rise, drawn toward the centre of creation, a blazing point of heat and light. Hell is full of furious argument, hundreds of unrepentant dissenters, ranting about the suffering of their family and the righteousness of their faction. They all disagree about the nature of reality, but as we journey to heaven, everyone starts to agree with one another, and eventually, their voices are joined into harmonious songs and sudden, involuntary shouts of Amen!
In Paradise, Dante stops encountering human persons and begins to speak with flames, balls of glass, letters in the sky and at one point, an enormous eagle formed of dozens of souls, acting and speaking together, ‘as many coals give out a single heat.’
Most of the souls go unnamed, but we are told that the pupil of the eye is made out of the soul of King David, and sitting above him, composing the eyebrow, are the Roman emperors Trajan and Constantine, the Biblical King Hezekiah and the Italian King William the Good. Previously, in hell and purgatory, the souls which Dante meets have offered up little testimonies which describe their lives and the sins which have placed them in whatever predicament they’ve been allocated. But Paradise, unfortunately, seems to be a lecture hall. We won’t hear why King David is curled inside an eyeball. We won’t hear if he likes it or not, if it gets tiring, or what he does all day. We don’t know if he actually is the eyeball, or if he’s just sitting inside it? Did he kill Goliath, unite the tribes of Israel and defeat the Philistines, all for this? His voice is lost in the strange amalgamation which harmoniously informs Dante how a virtuous pagan might end up in heaven despite not knowing Christ. A miraculous eagle, with the combined strength of a dozen great military leaders, employed at the very peak of heaven, all to explain HR procedure. What a waste. The very pinnacle of human excellence, toward which every soul in purgatory is slowly climbing, is the destruction of humanity. To be truly human, is to be a bird. To truly be a bird, is to be a bureaucrat.
When the eagle speaks, he describes the end times, ‘There will be seen the pride which makes men thirsty / And send the Scot and Englishman quite mad.’ In the twentieth century, two mad and prideful Englishmen, wrote mad and prideful books. Books about birds. In The Goshawk by TH White and The Peregrine, by JA Baker, we meet two writers who, like Dante, are ‘midway upon the journey of our life’, walking through dark forests, brooding over their exile, ruminating on the punishments they face. A bleak medical diagnosis, a hidden and sternly suppressed sexuality. Medieval Florence has been swapped for 1930’s Buckinghamshire and 1960’s Essex, and the tortured sinners which Dante meets are swapped for birds, rats, foxes and badgers.
TH White, who will go on to write The Sword in the Stone, orders a goshawk from a breeder in Germany. Using a manual from 1619 (Edmund Bert’s Treatise of Hawks and Hawking), he ties leather straps to the birds legs, lifts it to his hand and constantly bates it, encouraging it to leap and fall, tangling itself in the straps until White lifts it back to his hand. Over and over. For long days and nights, White walks in circles, bating the bird, reciting Shakespeare, unable to sleep until the bird falls asleep in his presence. Once the goshawk finally gives in and accepts a human touch, the training can begin.
But TH White fails to train the goshawk. While the writer is painting his house, the twine which tethers the hawk snaps. White panics and chases the hawk into the surrounding woodland. Part Two of the book is a description of the various traps he sets, the days he spends lying next to them. All in failure. He is told by a local poacher that the bird was found, hung by the ‘jesses’, the leather straps which he attached to the hawk’s legs in the first chapter.
According to the medieval Book of St Alban’s, certain types of bird should belong to certain types of people. A goshawk is proper for a yeoman, which could roughly translate into modern terminology as a small business owner, or landlord. A peregrine, however, is only proper for an earl.
JA Baker, whose biography, birthday and even full name wasn’t known by his publishers until recently, wrote The Peregrine in 1967, describing a winter of obsession, following a hawk (female) and a tiercel (male) peregrine. Although the book begins with sober descriptions of the bird’s common height and weight, its habits and colouring, the book soon veers towards the Inferno. As Baker, on foot and on his bicycle, chases the peregrines and slowly begins to take on their character. The clear winter skies warm the heavenly peregrine soaring above the Essex coastline, but fail to melt the frost which lies across the birds prey. Like unrepentant sinners, the bodies of crows, woodcocks, jackdaws and shelducks lie broken, steeped in frozen mud, suffering the punishment of heaven. As the months pass, Baker begins to meet the half eaten birds as they die. He finishes the job.
As I approached I could see its whole body craving into flight. But it could not fly. I gave it peace, and saw the agonized sunlight of its eyes slowly heal with cloud. No pain, no death is more terrible to a wild creature that its fear of man.
He smells and tastes their meat. Hear the guilt-stricken Christian in this quote …
A rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis, just a twitching pulse beating in a bladder of bones and fur, will feel the vibration of your footstep and drag itself away into a bush, trembling with fear.
We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.
But are we killers? Do we stink of death? The dead animals which Baker encounters are strewn like murder victims surrounded by suspects. Killers who have forgotten to conceal their crime. One still holds a dagger, one still holds a noose, one holds a candlestick and one a lead pipe. Birds stink of death, so do foxes and badgers, so do cats and dogs, so does the rain and wind, so does the changing seasons, so does time and space. The unique fragrance of man is deodorant and pot-pouri. We stink of domestication, not death. Baker introduces pity to the Essex coastline, and mistakes it for cruelty. A bypasser, shocked by Baker’s brutality, might run across and force him to let go of the injured bird’s neck, sparing its life. Then they might phone the RSPB, who would wrap the bird in a nice clean blanket, place the bird on a nice clean table, and kill it anyway. Humanely.
Robert Macfarlane, in his introduction, says ‘The Peregrine is not a book about watching a bird, it is a book about becoming a bird.’ The plotline, almost imperceptible at first, is Bakers slow approach to the peregrines side. Eventually, the bird kills, eats and sits on a fence, tolerating Bakers presence. As the sun sets, the bird falls asleep, just an arms length away. Despite the intentions of the book, Baker has accidentally repeated the first step towards the training of a bird of prey. If the book continued from that point, we can assume that even without consulting TH White’s trusty Treatise of Hawks and Hawking (1619), that Baker would not pull his coat over his head and run towards the oncoming wind, would not circle the estuaries from the vantage of a thermal current, would not scowl at the earth, searching for ducks and pigeons to pinion and kill with the nose he has hardened into a beak, or the fingers he has curled into talons, but would lure the peregrine to his arm and coax it into flying and hunting at his command.
Art schools and philosophy departments the world over are currently attempting to think with or through the peregrine. To organise dialogues with moss, mushrooms, cloud formations, bacteria. Inviting squirrels to lead seminars. Debating whether we are in an anthropocene or a capitalocene, or a carbonocene, or even a cthulucene. They are attributing intelligence to stones, to mycelium networks, to the roots of trees. What was the human anyway? Aren’t we animals? Aren’t we aliens? Aren’t we birds? They form collectives which take the shape of eagles, and speak in one voice, like many coals, giving out a single heat. But the writers, artists and university lecturers are perched on the eyebrows of these eagles, they have curled themselves into the pupil of the eye, and think we don’t notice them. Arching the eyebrow, manipulating the eyelid, are they winking at us?
For the Catholic thinker Jacques Ellul, these approaches, no matter how much de-centring is going on, no matter how reliant on, or suspicious of technology, these poetic solutions match the more prosaic governmental solutions on offer. Carbon taxes, carbon credits, carbon capture, a third, fourth and fifth industrial revolution. A Bluetooth chip on every dandelion. Full bars of 5G at the bottom of the ocean. For Ellul, the problem is technique …
Man’s concern to master things by means of reason, to account for what is subconscious, make quantitative what is qualitative, make clear and precise the outlines of nature, take hold of chaos and put order to it.
Like JA Baker, we cannot trick ourselves into believing we are animals. And like TH White, we cannot domesticate without inadvertently killing. Ellul’s solution, in the first chapters of his book The Technological Society, lies in static, pre-modern, pre-Dantean Europe.
The society which developed in the tenth to the fourteenth century was vital, coherent, and unanimous; but it was characterized by a total absence of the technical will. It was “a-capitalistic” as well as “a-technical.”
From the point of view of organization, it was an anarchy in the etymological sense of the word – and it was completely nontechnical. Its law was principally based on custom …
This was also true with regard to the military, the principal activity of the time. Combat was reduced to its most elementary – to charging in a straight line.
A green, non-technical society will always choose to go the long way round. To do the wrong thing, in the inefficient, but decorative way. So heavily draping the natural world with inhibiting ceremonies and taboos that whole landscapes become sacred and unapproachable.
The alternative is a Dantean heaven, full of flames. Every weed, every slug and slater, every starling, sparrow, peregrine and goshawk, administrated and inhabited by human souls. In this nightmare of complete enclosure, every bird’s feathers needs to be counted and fixed, every bee needs to be carried to the flower, and every fly needs to be tied to the spiderweb. The dissenting screeches of dying birds and rats, defeated Florentines, Popes, Roman Emperors and Hebrew Kings, all forgotten, every insect, every animal, every plant and rock, every seashell and shard of coral, joined together by sudden, involuntary shouts of Amen!