So how is the wild wound up in this masculine transcendence of theI sraeli nation? If we recall the first definition introduced of the wild, we cannot assume an ability to return to the wild- that would be to assume that the wild is a locatable place for which we need only find to inhabit. We must instead interrogate how the practices deployed by the Israeli state- Pinkwashing and Reproduction- as invested in by the United States go about taming wild desires. We could even say that the taming of wild desires is that which Israeli’s policies and practices gather around; what the United State’s in our support for Israeli innocence, technology, tourism, and economy, gathers around.
Let us introduce another definition of wildness that Halberstam has proposed: “[T]he wild does not simply name a space of nonhuman animality that must submit to human control; it also questions the hierarchies of being that have been designed to mark and patrol the boundaries between the human and everything else” (Halberstam 5, emphasis mine). It is through the creation of hierarchies- the order of society- that the wild is sought to be tamed. If imposing order (through democracy) is what is behind the US, Imposing order (through democracy) is what the US does. How is this taming done? Well, in one instance the US spent around $725 billion on national defense during the fiscal year (FY) 2020 (https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/budget-explainer-national-defense Aug 2, 2021). Yet, how is this spending justified? We have discussed earlier the idea that preparing for the inevitable creates the inevitable, yet such an argument cannot account for a social acceptance of this vast amount of spending- not to say that there are a lack of opposing voices to this erroneous spending.
Falconry, from Britannica, is “the sport of employing Falcons, true hawks [whatever that means], and sometimes eagles or buzzards in hunting games” (Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/sports/falconry) The idea of falconry is to tame a wild bird to use as an extension tool for hunting. Or to say that the tamer (the human) seeks to tame the hawk because of that which the tamer cannot do- again, the “fantasy of lack.” Yet we will see that the division between tamer/tamed, human/bird, are often not so easily distinguishable. ]“The desires here gathered under the heading of the ferox merge with other partial and contradictory formations (a desire for flogging and cuddling, rapacious greed and care, pedophilic fantasies, predatory practices, and deep, often erotic, regard for the child). These desires are not nice or right, good or true; they are feral and unbound; they long to fly” (Halberstam 78). The desire that pours from the unstable relationship between tamer/tamed, human/bird, comes invites us to rid ourselves of the taxonomical distinctions of sexuality and the designations between good and bad.
Halberstam guides us to one narrator that is in a relationship of blur: Helen Macdonald’s narrative H Is for Hawk in which phrases such as “I was turning into a hawk” (84, Halberstam 85) and “I have gone half bird myself” (161, Halberstam 85) allow for Halberstam to argue that “In communion with the bird that can never be thoroughly tamed, the human, it seems, turns wild and begins to share in the bird’s orientation to death and predation” (Halberstam 85). “The bird’s orientation to death and predation” cannot be deduced to be right or wrong. For the bird, this orientation is simply its existence; without such drive the bird would have a hard time surviving. Therefore, this orientation opens us up to a field of wild potentiality. One in which we as humans can reenter into a plane among planes of wild erotica; disorder. Yet, Macdonald is keen on demonstrating what can happen when a human drive to tame is imposed on this wild potentiality: [Slide 30]“the imagery of falconry was ubiquitous within the Third Reich, and Hermann Göring [second most powerful man in the Nazi Regime and head of the Luftwaffe- the German air force (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hermann-Goring)] himself was an avid falconer” (Halberstam 86). A commitment to tamer imposes an order on that which is indifferent to order. Through which, the national projects (of the Third Reich and the United States, and now Israel backed by the United States) do what is behind what they do: Impose order. “Humans cannot bear reality but cannot bear the wildness that limns it either, and so in running away from reality while only skirting the wild, the human sets itself up in a fairly small patch of what we call life” (Halberstam 85). But what happens when the attempts to dominate by the tamer are undermined by that which is sought to be tamed? What happens when the dominator becomes, not the dominated in a reverse relation, but rather unbecomes?
Halberstam introduces us to what happens from an inability to tame the falcon in the meditation upon J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. Baker, in what Halberstam likens more to a “instruction manual” (78) than a narrative, instructs us on how the relationship between human-hawk is not one of tamer/tamed, nor is it about domesticating that which is interpolated as wild (the hawk). Rather, “[Baker] wants, in the process [of falconry], to become strange to himself; he longs to denature his own sense of the human and at the same time shove human forms deep into the brutality of a natural world that exists without them” (Halberstam 79). To engage in falconry is to unbecome human. It is to lose oneself enough to lose the attachment to that which delimits the human in an orderly society. How is unbecoming one potentiality within the plane of wild potentials opened up by the failed (does the designation of “fail” hold?) practice of falconry? “Wildness beckons and seduces, it promises extremes, and … it weaves a spell of bewilderment. It is an invitation to step outside of the ordinary and into a world shared with animals, oriented to predation and networked with nonhuman codes of interaction, flight, and resistance. So intensely alluring is this world of wild things, which limns our own, that some humans have longed to enter it not as visitors, but as part of it” (77). As such, I argue, to ethically responding to the call of the wild- the call that invites us into the plane of wild potentiality- is about accepting that “invitation to step outside,” to engage in sharing, to be undone by the “orientation to predation” as opposed to deploying predation as a death-making project; Entering into the wild is about learning to fly.
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