Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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Hildyard doesn’t offer the narratives of therapy, social criticism or self-development to be found in other English pastoralists (Helen Macdonald, Ronald Blythe or Adrian Bell). Her style is more reminiscent of such contemporary poets as Kathleen Jamie and Alice Oswald, with their quiet and attentive watchfulness to a non-human reality they only half-understand. Her prose calls for, and frequently earns, the same respectful attentiveness from its readers.’ Emergency is a quiet novel that explores with remarkable subtlety the deep and fraying interconnectedness of life on earth. Hildyard writes with the precision and associative leaps of a poet . . . It’s something new that will linger long after you’ve finished reading.” Parallel to this creature, high above the pool of water on the quarry bed, there was a female kestrel, floating. The two creatures were at eye level with one another. The kestrel tilted and allowed herself to rise, just a little faster than the animal. Then the animal disappeared from my view, coming up through the ground; meanwhile the kestrel continued to ascend towards the clouds until, abruptly, she stopped. She stopped absolutely – as though somebody had pressed pause. Only the way her position varied very slightly, tilting one way and then another, showed that she was holding herself against a current.

Like many people, I had long been aware of these facts of interconnection and contamination – harmful minerals in personal devices; membranes that make my body porous – but there was little sense of continuity between these facts and the world as I moved through it. The ordinary life of my body stayed in its own world: that of a person who reads manuscripts, eats treacle tart, talks to pregnant doctors, and frequently drops her laptop – a person whose genes are all her own and who exists at a distance of some six thousand miles to the red earth passageways of the mines in south-eastern DRC. There is a significant if not ominous quiet in human narratives, which struggle to accommodate a real, breathing individual together with the story of her other lives, lived out on different scales, in the same story, in the same words. More-than-human scales are explained in reports, libraries, laboratories, theories – in places that have little room or concern for the daily experiences of real individuals. Meanwhile, stories about humans continue to go about their familiar business on the scale of the human body, a scale on which an individual character might talk or eat or eavesdrop.

A "sustained mediation on the potential of our human interconnections with all that surrounds us", Hildyard’s book is described to be "as much a lyrical celebration of life as it is a disquietude and call to action". I’ve found myself really interested in how that technology affects the way the analysts look at these occurrences… Their feelings about it. I think she finds it really hard to look at this stuff every day and then kind of… close the laptop and, you know, go and see mates or something, and it’s just a weird experience of being in the world that I think connects with a lot of us. Sharpe creates a speculative but informed account of the aftermath of the Zong massacre of 1781, in which more than 130 enslaved people were abandoned in the ocean. With the help of a marine geologist colleague, she describes the physical experience of a person who is thrown overboard, who encounters deepwater waves and is carried in the wake for a time, who floats and then sinks and drowns. She begins this narrative with disconcertingly technical terminology of transverse waves and perpendiculars, describing how the passage of a slave ship through water would create a wake—a V shape spreading outward behind the ship and disrupting the motion of the waves, moving across expanses of ocean with a ripple effect, diminishing as it widened. She discusses the depleted body mass of the people who were imprisoned on the ships. She mentions the sharks that traveled behind them. Then she poses a question: What happened to the bodies after they drowned? Another exceptional short story collection traversing centuries and continents. Alongside the title tale, my favourite story in this collection is ‘Winter, 2058’, a haunting description of a woman losing her grip on reality. The cause of her deterioration is one of the most terrifying concepts I’ve ever encountered. Jessie Greengrass’s sentences are crisp and thrilling, unsettling in their forensic precision. Hildyard raps with butchers as they cut flesh, describes a river flooding her house, and pulls in larger questions about the permeability of all kinds of boundaries. Her exploration of being at once separate and intimately joined ... gave me just the sensory bombardment I was hoping for.’

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.The academic Niall Martin has suggested that the value of Alexievich’s book about Chernobyl lies in its ability to listen into nonhuman spaces: it pays attention to the ways in which human destruction affects nonhuman systems, communities, individuals. He argues that the absence of sound can be as telling as any noise. (Rachel Carson shared a similar thought when she invoked a decimated ecosystem with the title Silent Spring.) Martin recommends attention to that which we cannot hear—a kind of negative attention. This mode of attention is not an encounter between “event and sense,” but “an encounter with something that is both present and absent,” a tool for listening to silence. Inside the silence, he says, we “hear our displacement from the position of auditor: as species we hear what our environment hears—and, in listening for silences in that environment, we hear our own displaced position as auditors within the Anthropocene.” I take this to mean that attunement with nonhuman silences and spaces is a way of placing oneself relationally. A person might understand her position in the world not by introspection but by looking out and paying attention to the agency of other things and beings, even when this view diminishes or displaces her right to priority. Another creature’s experience is different, and we do not know how it is different”, writes Daisy Hildyard in The Second Body. This playful and original essay touches on the limits of our ability to imagine that experience. Hildyard, a novelist who was trained as a historian of science, tries to find the ways we intuit boundaries between our bodies and our ecosystems, between ourselves and other animals.’ As Gretel searches for her mother, whom she hasn’t seen for sixteen years, strange memories from her childhood are churned up of her mother’s moods, missing children and a haunting river monster called The Bonak. The undertow of the novel is its riddle-like quality, in which words are given second, third meanings and new language is created continuously. I still haven’t got to the bottom of this book, though I’ve read it several times. It is as fractal as the river itself.

None of this was exactly new information. Ever since I was a teenager I had known that there were ghosts inside my mouth, microbes in my digestive system. They were interesting, a bit. What changed, as the scientist talked to me and we watched the cakes and spaceships, corkscrews and street-sweepers move on-screen, was the fact that she gave a simple narrative of the human body, not only as something which hosted these odd hybrids, but also as something which emerged from within them. I can understand why you would dislike language on these terms, but personally, I’ve never been able to feel it. I like talking with people and I like listening. I also I like writing and reading. Even the faults of language and the volatility of trying to put things into words are flaws to appreciate – I think – in a culture that has a scary love of perfection. The idea that language divides human from nonhuman has never felt very real to me, either. Sometimes next-door’s cat comes into my yard to piss. This morning I tried using words to tell her to stop and she got the message. (Maybe it’s in the way I spoke to her, my body and so on, but every articulation has its way and its physical form, words are always placed.) So for the essay, I’ve been speaking with people who monitor conflict in the environment, analysts or people who works for NGOs, who use very complex satellite technologies to look at landscapes from a distance and try to work out what’s happening in them. Hildyard doesn’t offer the narratives of therapy, social criticism or self-development to be found in other English pastoralists ( Helen Macdonald, Ronald Blythe or Adrian Bell). Her style is more reminiscent of such contemporary poets as Kathleen Jamie and Alice Oswald, with their quiet and attentive watchfulness to a non-human reality they only half-understand. Her prose calls for, and frequently earns, the same respectful attentiveness from its readers. In its insistence on the illusion of individuality and on the participation of human animals in the whole of earthly life, The Second Body might be an ancient text; in its scientific literacy and its mood of ecological disquiet, Daisy Hildyard’s book is as contemporary as the morning paper. If ecstasy means to go outside oneself, the word usually carries connotations of chaos and inarticulacy. Here, however, is a precise and eloquent ecstasy – and this slender book about who we are beyond our own skins is likewise much larger than itself.’

In a series of rich, lucid meditations, rooted in conversations with others (butchers, biologists, etc.) and in illuminating readings of literature (Ferrante, Shakespeare, etc.), Hildyard guides the reader through questions about global warming, the illusive boundary between human and animal life, and more. The Second Body is a subtle, original attempt to see humanity more clearly.’ HW: I really admire the bold experiment with form in this novel – the collapsing of past and present and of voice, and the way that seemingly unconnected events run into one another without separation. It flows, and yet I know it was probably difficult to construct. There is also a memoir quality to it. I’d be fascinated to hear more about how the structure of the book came to you, and why it felt important to call it a “pastoral novel.” This book succeeds because of the Because nutrients cycle through the ocean (the process of organisms eating organisms is the cycling of nutrients through the ocean), the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today. They were eaten, organisms processed them, and those organisms were in turn eaten and processed, and the cycle continues. Around 90 to 95 percent of the tissues of things that are eaten in the water column get recycled. Amphibian (adj) living both in water and on land. From the Ancient Greek ἀμφίβιος (amphíbios), meaning “both kinds of life”

Yeah, and to do it responsibly, and with consideration – but also to find a way to have a really joyful, flourishing life, rather than for it to be a question of painful denial. Because that is never going to happen or work, I guess.The hake’s scales meet the sea and the miner’s skin meets the mine. My sense of perspective had been disturbed and the people at the next table, sharing their private conversation about the woman’s invisible pregnancy, seemed many miles away. Their bodies were unfamiliar landscapes. It was the undamaged skin which sealed them off. I have concentrated on Hildyard’s final essay because it’s there that her themes cohere most convincingly, and her writing is most compelling. The first three essays describe encounters with animals alive and dead, and with scientists who make sense of life. There’s a convalescence story of an injured pigeon that she later describes as a pet, a visit to a butcher called Richard and a conversation with Gina, an American zookeeper turned prison officer turned investigator of environmental offences (such as the smuggling of exotic animals as pets, and the slaughter of orangutans to clear forest for palm oil plantations). Vida Adamczewski’s Amphibian and Other Bodiesis afeverish and wildly inventive first collection that brings together her award-winning lyric play Amphibianwith eleven new short stories, published by Toothgrinder Press. You can read ‘Keeping Sheila’, a story from the collection, here, and below,Adamczewski explores some of the books that inspired her work.