“Try to praise the mutilated world.” – Adam Zagajewski
I can’t pinpoint when I first started thinking about vultures, but I think it may have been when my husband informed me that a family of turkey vultures had moved into an abandoned house, perhaps half a mile from where we currently live. He said that he’d seen them going in and out of the attic, emerging like black umbrellas from holes in the roof. He said he assumed they were nesting in there, perhaps raising a small clutch of eggs.
Something about this image – the vultures in the attic – kept returning to me for months after I was made aware of it. There was something about their presence that comforted me, and my mind kept going back to that strange gothic picture, rubbing over the thought like rosary beads. I liked thinking of them there, in their dark, quiet attic, protected and nurtured by human neglect – as remote and unbothered as in a vast wilderness, a half mile away in the heart of the city.
We live in a neighbourhood that is subject to violence and neglect in equal measure, where each feeds the other to generate displacement. While hostile, of course, to the lives of human beings, these conditions are conducive to the invisible lives of vultures. Abandoned structures, including houses and cars, are a preferred nesting site for vultures in cities, since they resemble the bird’s ideal nesting site in nature: the sheltered hollow of a large dead tree. The vulture makes few, if any, edits to such cavities, whether arboreal or manmade, but moves right in and, as often as not, lays its eggs directly on the floor.
Vultures are lazy: they take what they’re given. The Cherokee called them “the peace eagle”, in reference to the fact that they do not kill but eat only what has already died. Even in flight, they are known for their languidness, a sort of sloppy, downward drifting described by one scientist as “contorted soaring”, “like a kind of kiddie roller coaster bumping up and down”. This style of flight, which relies on very little flapping, allows them to relax atop currents of turbulence where, for example, the highway meets a band of trees. There they can coast for hours, calmly searching, nostrils finely attuned to the odour of death that follows what we call “the moment of impact”.
A vulture’s beak, though hooked and hard like a tooth, is not sharp enough to pierce large animal hides, so it always begins feeding at a pre-ordained point of entry: sometimes the eyes, but often the anus. Some people say that the vulture lacks feathers on its pate for the simple reason that it often sticks its entire head, up to its neck, into this orifice—the better to grasp and draw out the entrails.
I tell my husband I am interested in living like a vulture: by this, I mean, with a minimum of striving. It is striving, I think, that gives birth to violence, that gives us the proverbial root of all evil. I am interested in resting in zones of unrest, in watching the margins for moments of impact. I am interested in beginning at the simplest point – in starting there, and plunging naked into whatever I might find.
*****
One of my earliest memories is of a roadkilled deer. I have no reference points by which to date the memory, but I think I must have been six or seven. I was out walking with my uncle and his dog along the side of a highway in Mountain Top, Pennsylvania, which is one of those smudged, spread-out towns that constellate the exurbs of America’s large cities. There were no sidewalks in Mountain Top, so the highway shoulder was the sidewalk, and there, trailing far behind my uncle and his dog, I came upon the prostrate body of the deer.
Since I was born and brought up in a city myself, my familiarity at that age with highways was somewhat limited; my familiarity with deer even more so. I’m not sure, thinking back on it now, that this wasn’t in fact the first deer I ever saw – this dead one I almost stepped on by the side of the highway, its body crumpled like a puppet from which someone had removed their hand.
I don’t remember having questions about the nature of its condition – I knew, somehow, what dead things were. What I remember is my uncle walking up ahead with the dog, and me hanging back, just for a moment, with the deer. It was smooth and brown and even in death, somehow wild. I must have disturbed it – perhaps with my foot – or maybe I just bent down to get a closer look. Whatever happened, at this moment, the memory goes dreamlike: the body somehow shifts or twists, revealing a rippling clot of maggots.
*****
I didn’t learn to drive a car till I was in my mid-twenties, by which point I had developed a skittishness well out of proportion to the task. Multiple family members had tried to instruct me, as well as two ex-boyfriends and at least one roommate, but I remained resistant to their efforts, largely out of a feeling approximating terror. A lifetime of passively gazing out car windows had attuned me to the many ways in which cars can be instruments of destruction, to their occupants, of course – I had seen many accidents, glass smashed and scattered, bumpers punched in, airbags distended and dangling like jellyfish – but also to the non-human world and its carless inhabitants, whose soft bodies are not, and never can be, sheathed in metal.
Raccoons, cats, dogs, possums, pigeons, squirrels, toads, skunks, tortoises, foxes, and deer, yes, deer. All smeared and smashed like rotten fruit, some barely recognisable, some largely intact, painting the white highway lines with their guts, condemned for the crime of slowness, of innocence, of failing to be afraid for even one second. They are the unheralded, the unmourned, the unseen, and the forgotten – the collateral damage that accompanies speed, which is another word for carelessness. There is no state or national register for roadkill, no wildlife agency that numbers the dead.
Now that I am older and have learned to drive and, in fact, drive regularly, though never happily nor without that old, low hum of terror, I see them often, drifting, like motes in the eye of the sky – the vultures. Their peace unmarred by the commotion below – the traffic and honking, the pointless here-ing and there-ing, and the plumes of exhaust that even as I write this are slowly but surely warming the earth – they seem to be waiting calmly for the end of the world.
*****
The turkey vulture has very few natural predators. Its sense of smell is keen enough to detect the scent of carrion from over a mile away. Its nostrils are gaping holes in its head, so capacious they make their way clean through its beak and form a hole through which a pencil – two pencils, even – could easily pass. When threatened, it is known for its vomiting reflex, which can be deployed from ten feet away and has an aroma so hellish it defies description. At rest, it freely pisses and shits on its own legs, which cools the blood vessels in its lower extremities and stains them chalky white. The pH of its stomach is approximately zero, surpassing that of car battery acid, and capable of dissolving metal, bones, plastic, and rock. Incidentally, it is also capable of neutralising a number of virulent pathogens – including rabies, botulism, anthrax, and tuberculosis – that might otherwise be transmitted.
Its wrinkled head, which is pink and suggestive of mange, gives the overall impression of being too small. Black and hulking, its body resembles an ill-fitting cloak thrown over some clumsy first draft of a bird, one which God had intended to consign to the trash. Because it lacks a syrinx, the vocal structure that allows birds to produce song, the turkey vulture instead produces a sustained, low hiss: an uncanny, borderline frightening noise that sounds like it should otherwise be emanating from a Halloween display. On the ground or in trees they are known for standing in what is called the “horaltic pose” – from the Greek for “marking the hours” – with their wings outstretched to the fullest extent, as though pointing to 10 and 2 on a clock. According to ornithologists, they do this to warm their bodies for flight, but to the untrained eye, they resemble nothing more than miniature Draculas stretching their capes, preparing to wield their hooked white beaks like giant Cyclopean fangs.
The translation of the turkey vulture’s scientific name – Cathartes aura – is the subject of some debate. Sharing the same root as the Greek catharsis, meaning purification or purgation, it either means “purifying breeze” or “golden purifier”. This beautiful phrase, belying all the turkey vulture’s ruder characteristics, never fails to endear me even more to its bearer: a pissing, shitting, vomiting bird that comes to cleanse our souls.
*****
I once saw a deer on the outskirts of Baltimore, struggling to stand after being clipped by a car. Staggering like a drunk in the middle of the highway, it knotted up traffic for miles in its wake, and as we sat stalled in our own car, watching it teeter, the blue and red lights of a cop car appeared. I assumed they had come to execute the deer, to “put it out of its misery” as is euphemistically said. Windshield wipers: back and forth, a slow rhythm. Traffic sluggishly pushed us onward. Haze of headlights and mid-summer rain. The deer, and its agony, receded.
*****
At the beginning of her article entitled “Of Love and Loathing: The Role of the Vulture in Three Cultures,” Brooke Byrd foregrounds a Latin phrase from one of Aesop’s fables: “Ex damno alterius, alterius utilitas”, which translates as “From misfortune of one, advance of the other”. Such a transactional response to suffering and death does not endear vultures to the general public. Indeed, the popular conception of vultures has been profoundly negative in most cultures, from the Greeks who thought that they “prognosticated slaughter”, to the early Christians, who thought them “an abomination among the birds”. Charles Darwin thought they “wallowed in putridity” and openly called them “disgusting”.
Yet, as Byrd notes, “The Egyptian hieroglyph for vulture also signifies both ‘compassionate’ and ‘mother,” and “in Hebrew, the word for ‘vulture’ also means ‘pity,’ ‘compassion,’ and ‘mother.’” The legend was that vultures were consummate parents who fed their young from their own blood. Egyptian women used their feathers to ease the pain of childbirth, and in Egyptian, Greek, and Christian lore, all vultures were “solely female and fertilised by the wind”. Byrd continues:
An excerpt from Plutarch’s Quaestiones Romanae illustrates this: “They say indeed that male vultures are never found; indeed, all are female.” … [Vultures] symbolised “feminine nature unhampered by interference outside itself” and “absolute independent authority.”
I suppose it doesn’t surprise me that a bird considered “abominable” would be associated with “unhampered” female authority. But what I find most fascinating in this history is the twinning of motherhood and vulturedom: the way in which the vulture’s role – to clean up after violence has been done, a role so necessary yet so scorned – can be interpreted as a form of caretaking, even mourning. A group of vultures feeding, after all, is called a wake.
*****
The truth is, I had come to identify with vultures, as I always have with unloved things, long before I knew anything about them and shortly after they took up residence in that old abandoned house. I didn’t know their longstanding association with the feminine, nor about their parenting habits or the mechanics of their flight, but before I ever researched these specifics, I knew there was something about them that I liked.
On the phone with a friend, I explain my theory that in life there are three archetypal figures: the deer, the machine, and the vulture. The whole world is contained within this mythic triangle, which can be transposed onto other similar threesomes but can’t be encompassed by any of them:
the worker, the capitalist, the artist;
the prey, the predator, the witness;
the child, the father, the mother;
childhood, adulthood, old age;
I am half-kidding when I explain this theory to my friend, but the more I think about it, the more I feel its resonance. The world is full of machines, full of “drive,” full of greed and ambition, and though no one “intends,” as such, to kill the deer, they are nonetheless killed in uncounted droves. Their bodies pile up – headless, legless – along highways, barely glimpsed from the perch of passenger seats: there for a moment, then gone so quickly a backward look cannot recapture them. This is how we live, what the system requires. What can we do? We must drive.
And wafting above, the dark shape of a vulture, clothed in black to administer one final rite. It is the vulture who numbers the dead – the vulture, alone, who notices.
*****
I believe I can feel the earth dying. It’s a feeling so strange that, when I first felt it, I didn’t know what it was. It’s somewhere between grief, nausea, and terror – so faint, sometimes, that I’m not sure it’s there, yet so potent it can’t be ignored. When I first felt it, I assumed it was something diagnosable, a condition demanding a pill or a therapy. At first, I assumed it was simply depression, which I’m prone to, and which I’ve felt before at various times in my life – a dull, dragging weight on my everyday existence.
But the longer I’ve felt this strange sensation, the more I am aware that it is not a “condition,” not something that can be medicated away or salved with the psychic manipulations of strangers. Unlike depression, it doesn’t drag or deaden. Instead, it unsettles, like an off note in a symphony. It feels like a feeling I am being called to feel, as though, as a child of the earth, I am called to feel its suffering. Touched, like a bell, at the core of my being, something rattles loose and quivers.
*****
At my day job, I work as a gardener, shepherding plants into, and sometimes out of, existence. Under my inexpert tutelage, the earth produces new life, new flowers, new seeds, new possibilities so willingly, it is easy to forget about the sixth extinction. I see insects and birds come to visit my gardens, finding shelter and sustenance in the heart of the city. And I think of the plants that used to grow here – not just here, in these gardens, but here in this city – before asphalt, before bricks, before concrete existed. I think of all the softness that has given way to hardness, all the violence that has been done in the name of human progress. All the rain that is now wasted, shuttled into storm drains, untouched by the roots that so direly need it. All the unmourned killings of insects, wildlife, plants, and trees – trees that you wouldn’t believe today, ancient trees larger than any of us can imagine, with roots that spread like arteries beneath the earth, making air for us, literally giving us life.
When I think of all this abundance, all this generosity, spoiled and rejected, flayed and consumed, I could cry. But instead I plant another aster, another beardtongue, another phlox, knowing as I do that it is not enough: flowers for the wake, for the end of the world.
*****
What does it mean to mourn for something, or someone, that is still in the process of passing away, that is dying bit by individual bit in numbers that boggle the mind and stagger the soul? It is not the same as mourning a single death or the death of someone you once knew. The mourning of environmental collapse is like mourning past, present, and future in one: for the creatures that once lived that you will never see, for the ones you see now but won’t tomorrow, for the ceaseless procession of death and destruction that stretches as far forward as science has dared to predict.
Is there an ethical way to behave amidst such pillage, so much of it set in motion by systems beyond our individual control? Perhaps, as Annie Dillard suggests, this is a question beyond the grasp of the human mind: “We are here to witness,” she writes in her essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk.” “All we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.”
Yet such impartiality is not quite right, or at least, it doesn’t ring true to me. For my part, I look to the vultures and their coasting, bumping flight: not struggling, but drifting; alert yet relaxed. They greet the tide of death not with glee or despair but with their instincts: they do what they were born to do; they take what they are given. They are never seen to kill another, nor to hasten what comes in time, and they never shirk their task until there is no putridity left to sicken. The cleanliness of bones. The clarity of bones. Death enters the vulture and becomes more vulture, or as Robinson Jeffers writes in his poem titled “Vulture”:
…what an enskyment;
What a life after death.
Though we know that it will not stop, that the sixth extinction is not over and may never be, still it is our duty to live like vultures: we must praise, as best we can, the mutilated world, and care for it as it passes away, bit by bit. We must swallow its rottenness, however abhorrent, and lift up what life remains.
