Boundary? What Boundary?

Imagine yourself homeless in London. You sleep in a shop doorway – let’s suppose it might be Garrick Street in Covent Garden – with cardboard as a mattress and shoes as a pillow. Your head nestles in the indentation created by its own weight, while your determination supplies the feeling of absolute comfort.

It is 1995 and you’ve been leading this life for 15 years, punctuated with sporadic stays in cheap bed-and-breakfasts, hostels and night shelters. You don’t do drink or drugs. But you’ve been known to steal – pork pies and Cornish pasties from supermarkets; milk and bread from early morning doorsteps. And you are very fond of Eccles cakes. Once you stole a friend’s tent and paid for it with a criminal conviction. One way or another, in your early twenties you exhausted the goodwill of all your friends and now at the age of 39, as if to make up for it, you claim friendship with every pigeon in London: their amber eyes remind you of your mother.

Observing them, you’re surprised again and again by your own intensity of feeling. You expend significant emotional energy trying to imagine their subjective world. What is it like to go hungry by default? What is it like when a crumb is a meal? You, too, are hungry most of the time of course. But this doesn’t register as any kind of reductive explanation for why you find so much human meaning in these birds. Instead your focus is purely on the creatures themselves and, apart from feeding them, you’ll sometimes spot an opportunity to do good by untangling the stray threads tending to get caught in their feet. A single thread can act as a tourniquet, cutting off blood, and ultimately the foot itself. Considerable patience is required however, in order first of all to capture the pigeon and then work at the business of disentanglement.

Your sympathetic resonance with birdlife has a history. Ten years earlier, on repeated evenings in the autumn of 1985, you might have been found on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, intoxicated both by Bruce Springsteen’s music in your ears and by the spectacle of huge numbers of birds, swirling in the sky above Nelson’s Column. Starlings. Their murmuration seemingly synchronised with your own thought processes and with the music, making it impossible to distinguish a single responsible agency. Unless (who knows) the universe itself might be capable of agency, capable of thought? Exactly your impression. And maybe this whole interplay of thought, starlings, music – and you yourself observing – might itself be under observation from other stars and galaxies? It seems, in that moment, entirely plausible.

Such experiences of human-animal resonance must be common enough; the ones I’ve been describing happen to be mine, but you don’t need to be homeless in order to discover yourself in an animal. Nor need you be mad. Though it certainly helps. I’m myself eminently well qualified on that front, bearing a diagnosis of schizophrenia – which, by 1996, had earned me a forced detention in hospital and then a place in a high-care residential hostel. I never slept rough again.

Experiences of human-animal resonance must be common enough; the ones I’ve been describing happen to be mine, but you don’t need to be homeless in order to discover yourself in an animal

This watershed moment effectively divides my adult life in two, whereby the two halves present an opposition between raw nature (with which homeless people are forced necessarily to grapple) and civilisation (by which I was gradually reclaimed as the nineties came to a close).

‘Uncivilisation’ would be my word of choice to pin down what I went through when I was younger; it captures nicely what homelessness and madness have in common by way of contrast with the lives of the majority. And my intention in this brief essay will be to suggest that, in both cases (of a homeless person and a mad), some overlap – some merging – often occurs between the human and animal realms. In an obvious way the homeless and mad can find themselves viewed and treated like animals. But I’m interested in the idea of a genuine, actual overlap: kinship of the sort that might challenge (and perhaps even lead us to abandon) our deeply held sense of the ‘animal’ as something other.

Homeless. Mad. Animal. All three words require careful consideration.

Superficially the meaning of homeless is simple enough. It indicates a denial of that irrational sense of entitlement we have, as human beings, to the possession of a home. This is a feeling that runs deep, arguably all the way back to our evolutionary roots: Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. One of Jesus’ sayings, but also a vivid and thoroughly poetic evocation of homelessness.

What if however, for the sake of argument, we assume a general collapse of civilisation as being not just inevitable but already underway? Year by year it seems ever more likely, as the various disasters (meteorological, ecological, political) accumulate. In that case a future looms in which the very idea of home will have begun to lose its meaning; the qualities of stability, security and definitive reliability it connotes will no longer have the slightest foothold in the real world. To the inhabitants of such a future, daring even to think of home might well appear not just problematic, but thoroughly disturbing. And therefore conversely the idea of being without
a home would have lost something of its power to startle. For homelessness (literal or otherwise) would have become normative rather than exceptional; in that sense it could well be that the entire human species faces a ‘homeless’ future.

Likewise in the future the meaning of mad may turn out to be up for grabs. In other words, our collective difficulties might drive us en masse into a psychological state so utterly removed from anything passing for sanity in today’s society as to wholly blur the distinction between mad and sane.

My point is this. I know, from personal experience, what it’s like to find myself beyond the margins of civilisation; I know this thanks to homelessness and madness – categories whose otherness we take so much for granted that, if we encounter homeless people behaving crazily on the streets, we hardly even notice ourselves ignoring them (I find the same mechanism in myself, notwithstanding I was previously one of their number). Give the matter sufficient thought however, and anyone might be led to conclude that both homelessness and madness – apparently so marginal – are, on the contrary, central to the human condition and may yet come to define us all.

In a similar way, I believe the category ‘animal’, implying a distinct otherness, might reveal itself to future generations as being more of a piece with our own human nature than we currently imagine.

It’s true of course that, on the face of things, the concept ‘animal’ isn’t open to much ambiguity of interpretation. It would seem to articulate a given fact of the world. Animals exist in themselves; they are not a human construct and therefore can’t be deconstructed. Yet I wonder about this. Supposing humanity destroys itself, but the animal kingdom continues. Under these circumstances human beings would amount to nothing except a dead end on the proliferating tree of life; we’d retain significance and meaning only, and precisely, to the extent that we’d have been subsumed retrospectively into the animal kingdom as an evanescent ‘blip’, one small episode in the grand animal narrative. Yet surely that must mean we are animals right now. In which case the term ‘animal’ as distinct from ‘human’ is somewhat meaningless. And even ‘human’ itself becomes problematic. That full richness of our humanity we take for granted, once past and gone, is revealed as having been precarious and insubstantial all along.

Looking back to the early nineties I realise I actually lived as an animal myself, in many respects. The sheer will to survive has an ‘animal’ as well as ‘human’ aspect; it is somehow both and neither. I learned for example to empty my bowels in a field at the side of the road, and then afterwards wipe my bum with a finger and lick it clean. In fact I came to prefer this method even when I did use a toilet: I would always squat, rather than sit, with knees and hips bent and two feet planted precariously on the toilet rim. Bananas and oranges were eaten with great relish in their entirety by biting into the skin as if biting into an apple. But most of my food was got from black plastic rubbish bags at the rear of restaurants which I would raid at night, just like any urban fox.

Most of my food was got from black plastic rubbish bags at the rear of restaurants which I would raid at night, just like any urban fox

For sleeping, haystacks furnished a refuge so delightfully reassuring, I would frequently trespass into one and stay holed up for days at a time doing absolutely nothing. Just resting in my ‘animal’ state. There was such comfort to be had from this, so like the soothing effect of a mother on her baby, it raises once again whether the universe itself might be capable of psychological agency. For that was exactly how it felt. Shop doorways were a regular resource, and sometimes I was able to nest at basement level. Once in Edinburgh, I ventured cautiously down some steps only to find the area already occupied by a juvenile seagull sheltering, like me, from the biting November wind. Though close to fully grown, its repertoire of whines and whistles had an infantile pathos. Cats, they say, utilise precisely the pitch and timbre of a crying human baby when they miaow (they miaow mostly at humans rather than other cats) and the cries emitted by this lone juvenile touched me in a comparable way. So when I woke to find it gone, I felt real sadness and concern.

Above all, animal and human realms tended to meet and merge if ever I’d the feeling of not surviving, of perishing. I’ve in mind a particular experience that continued for most or all of my 15 years of homelessness and arose from my relationship with the motor car, or more especially, the noise of the engine. I should point out I was spending a significant proportion of most days right up close to the traffic, having fallen into the habit in my early twenties of getting around by hitchhiking. This was bound to be stressful of course. But still, I could never understand how a mere noise could climb inside my nervous system and inflict such exquisitely unpleasant sensations, focused for the most part in the region of my spine.

There were nevertheless certain clues, based on which, an explanation of sorts took shape. Less by any conscious thought, than by a subliminal process of collating the various fantasies that were an integral part of the torture itself. For one thing, apart from the physical discomfort, there was an unsettling quality of ‘wrongness’ about the roar of the traffic: it bore an uncanny resemblance to the literal roaring of lions. Or not necessarily lions. Animals in a general sense; creatures that lived and breathed, expressing fierce aggression and driven by appetite. This illusion was incredibly real without ever lapsing into actual belief. It was, if you like, a hallucination and not a delusion. But because it was so vivid, I experienced a correspondingly intense distress.

Another thing causing my distress was, again, an illusion: the engine noises seemed in some peculiar way to be expressing emotions belonging to the spirits of the dead. Ever since getting involved in spiritualism as a teenager, I’d been debating as to the reality of ‘life after death’. These deliberations were now bypassed and I found myself instead overwhelmed by a flood of fantasies. They were impossible to resist because they were felt in the body (the hallmark of a physical sensation being, as everyone knows, its unarguability).

Between the ‘animals’ I was hearing and the ‘human spirits’ I was imagining, I couldn’t tell any difference at all. Which made a certain kind of sense: for isn’t evolution a story of animal-human continuity? Also at the back of my mind was the knowledge that my DNA was inherited both from immediate human ancestors and from more distant animal ones. I wondered: what if all human beings possess an intrinsic capability for remembering, in the body, how it had once felt to be an animal? Was that why my body responded to the traffic the way it did? The animal ‘in my DNA’ felt incited to aggression, but these aggressive impulses were being stifled and suppressed (de-fanged if you like) by layer upon layer of civilised conditioning – so in the end they led nowhere and to nothing except this harrowing and altogether bewildering torture. For I was, in my deepest being without knowing it, a wild animal suffocating under painfully tight restraints. If this could happen to me, a relatively intelligent ape who understands what a motor car is, how must it feel to be, say, a deer or hedgehog in the lights of an oncoming vehicle?

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IMAGE

Maeve Fellerhoff
Gloves
Artist’s hair, animal fibre, claws
These gloves were made by combining a year’s worth of hair that I naturally shed with other animal fibers which were moulded to my hands through wet and dry felting. I created them to explore the relationship between this shedding and my own mundane animality. I find that in a world that insists on the divide between humans and other living things, my fundamental bodily processes feel both othering and absurdly animal.

Maeve Fellerhoff is an interdisciplinary sculptor and photographer based in southern Ohio who is interested in humanity’s intrinsic animality. She has been a part of several juried exhibitions and holds a BFA from Ohio University’s Honors Tutorial College with a minor in Biological Sciences.