Studies in the Responsibilities of Scavenging
Responsibility, Loss of Appetite, and the Flow of Life
I am a scavenger. Having never learned how best to ply this as a trade, I know myself to be a scavenger by custom. There are those, and they are many, who would turn their nose up to such a life, but these are just the people that have yet to realize that we already share and pick at the same growing mound of refuse. The scavenger is not seduced by the mere appearance of novelty, for its instinct is one honed by the endless novelty that comes with learning of the many lives of the object. As a mode of consumption, decomposition is not valued, for it brings to our mind’s eye the image of a corpse’s passing away, the stench of death that, against any logic of nature, interrupts our experience of the flow of life. To see ourselves involved in such a process brings horror, disgust, a loss of appetite. We do not see how, in our own life’s practices, we are frequently at our most honorable when we, knowingly or not, assume the habit of the scavenger, and at our most base in the ceaseless generation of the new, a relentless pursuit of the untainted. For it is a great contradiction that the society most capable of creation is the one that has surrounded itself with reservoirs of its own remains, just barely out of sight, and only hidden to those who do not follow sight with recognition.
Invoking the scavenger conjures a natural image in the creatures we see turning from the edges of our social world. At the waste transfer station, I frequently observed the birds that assumed this role, and very often that ideal representative of the tradition, the vulture. In the months spent observing their eyeing and picking apart of carrion, scouring dumpsters and asphalt for edible remnants ground into its crevices by truck tires, I began to develop a wonder towards my fascination with them, a sense of identification taking shape. I can begin with what I respect of it. There is in its practice, no aversion to what it discarded. While not recognizable to the sense of homo-economicus, it would be rash and ignorant to deny their actions any imperatives of economy, for its metabolism takes on a distinct ethos, Though we are prone to think the vulture a coward, an ugly bird at home in filth and decay, we do not recognize its peculiar relation to death from which it feeds. We are accustomed to imputing bravery onto these beings that kill, these kinds of prey who pre-empt and command death by choosing it for others so that they may live. We do not see the ceremonial dignity of the vultures circling, and in fact we resent its patience. The column that forms in the sky through these flights becomes a transient and shapeless monument to the prey, as it is afforded a chance to recognize and accept what is to come, what can no longer be averted. What disturbs us in this is not the consumption of the dead, but the reverence in the act that reveals the predators we valorize to be guilty of something that the scavengers have deemed unnecessary.
There is a dimension in our form of life in which death and demise are understood to be but a passing away, only in part an end, and never a complete vanishing. The momentary airborne tombstones made by vultures, the monoliths preceding their feasts, allow us access to this in ourselves, for where the predator practices the brute submission of one life to another by way of killing. The scavengers of the world look upon the dying to say “we came here knowing that we cannot save you in this life, but through us you may yet live on.” The scavenger offers a recognition that the predator denies. In this act it presents us with the possibility of moving among the dead without creating death, and so too the availability of a different ethical relationship between life and death in a metabolic interaction that is conscious of their interdependence, not merely acting blindly upon it. A notion of responsibility arises from these depths, though we abhor and turn our backs upon this act of resurrection that appears to arise spontaneously from nature.
Yet the moment’s revelation passes into an elusive terrain once more, for the raising of the dead still only encounters death after its instantiation. It is at its best a response, at worst, reaction, merely a passive development in evolution whereby weaker animals have learned to survive. But that is the science of the mind that looks upon the objects of nature as it would an industrial machine, a language closed off to the imaginative genera of utterance that precedes knowing, from which knowing emerges in fits and starts. We will not make the mistake of underestimating the scavenger, but rather seek unto it terms we would afford our selves. Is the way it receives the dead and dying another means of calling demise into being? If this less than generous judgment is indeed the case, is there not a redemptive quality left unexamined in its activity?
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