1. (lecture)

This question has been resonating with me since a long time ago, and there have been several encounters with traditional-ancestral knowledge, friends, books, art, and experiences with land itself that has shown me how the fact of extending a interspecies language is not just possible but necessary to success on our quest of giving a resolutive path to the crisis we are experiencing now. Therefore, to start this conversation I would like to introduce this topic of language by quoting one paragraph of David Abram’s book Becoming Animal, that can give us a simple but very clear big picture of it all:

 “While persons brought up within literate culture often speak about the natural world, indigenous, oral people sometimes speak directly to that world, acknowledging certain animals, plants, and even landforms as expressive subjects with whom they might find themselves in conversation. Obviously these other beings do not speak with a human tongue; they do not speak in words. They may speak in song, like many birds, or in rhythm, like the crickets and the ocean waves. They may speak a language of movements and gestures, or articulate themselves in shifting shadows. Among many native people, such forms of expressive speech are assumed to be as communicative, in their own way, as the more verbal discourse of our species. Language, for traditionally oral peoples, is not a specifically human possession, but is a property of the animate earth, in which we humans participate.”

When reading this statement, it is very simple to make sense of language as not something strictly human but as a natural condition belonging to all sentient beings. Language is reflected and conveyed in every and each pulse, breath, hunch, movement of earth and our co-habitants. However and despite the simplicity of this fact, most humans still find themselves too unfamiliar to it. Why does this fact seem so awkward to the majority of our species and for some it even seems like madness?

Well, it seems to me that it has a lot to do with the way we have defined mind and body in our life, and further, the way we have defined they should relate with each other and with the outer world -our mother earth-. It is quite evident, when having a quick look at today’s society, that we have rooted our language in a broken, unilateral and almost absence relationship between mind and body, we can see how they hardly interact with each other in our daily lives.

It is unavoidable that human language today is mostly a communication medium strictly limited to setting up a dialogue just among members of our single species, homo sapiens. Our language today is just the result of our fervorous “discipline” of being-existing-naming just under the dominance of what our mind tells while totally ignoring the agency and signals of our bodies. We have silent our bodies in the alchemy of constructing our language and our contemporary society’s logic is the most clear proof of it.

We don’t need to go further to see this, we just have to see how our body’s motion is in a city to illustrate its separation from the mind. For instance, when we need to move from one point to another we usually take a vehicle where we barely move our muscles while, in the meantime, we are swallowed by our mind to somewhere else but never present in our body. Furthermore, if we decide to walk the same dynamic happens because the city grill and traffic lights just makes it very easier for the mind to be in control and the body going on automatic, as if it were asleep. Our minds are most of our time in control of everything, and technology is playing as a medium to potentiate this stance of hers, while putting more and more distance with our bodies.

This fact have shaped our language and doomed it to be defined just by our mind, which  -as being practiced for centuries- have led us to a kind of self-domestication that sucks us away from the physical dimension of our territories, putting a distant between us and all the co-habitants with whom we share this planet, the rock, the tree, the bird, bee, the river… all the animated earth.

However, and despite this reality in the majority of our species population, there are still some glimpses-traces that recall an ancestral language that lets the body take part of its construction in the process of being-existing-naming all the outer world. As mentioned above, indigenous communities are ones of those minorities of human species who speak and exist within a millennial language capable of extending a conversation with our co-habitants and the whole animated earth, but also there are other explorations through art that can let us palpate this bilateral language.

One of these glimpses occurs in Italy. There, in the Alpine and Apennines mountains, exists a traditional practice called Alpeggio, (meaning “Alpine pasture”) in which we can sense a language that allows a conversation between humans and cows, sheeps, goats and other animals of livestock. This tradition is known to be born in the middle ages, and refers to the grazing of these animal communities on Alpine mountain pastures during the summer season, due to the nutritious and richness the fresh grass provides during this season at that altitude; but also due to the mutual benefit it provides to both parts: humans can get high quality products while the cows and others can be healthier, as this movement keeps them strong and avoids tuberculosis.

But how can this shift of shepherds and thousands of animals going from low to high altitudes of the mountain (and vice-versa) be possible?

Well, here is when language makes its part. This is an event that requires a special conversation between the shepherd and the cow/goat/sheep to get to the high altitudes of the mountain, but also a special and parallel conversation between them and the physical (topography) – environmental (climate) conditions of the territory. This movement is a practice called transhumance and is defined by a seasonal cycle that gives the signal of where and when the livestock has to be taken by the shepherd during the year: in winter the livestock stay in the stables at the foot of the mountain, in the valley; in spring they start their way up to the mountains, gradually, to be able of getting the Alpine zone in summer and stay there the whole season; and, in autumn they go down to return gradually to the valley and close the cycle to prepare again for winter. A very interesting relation with the mountain.

The conversation between both of them is possible due to an alternative language that links human’s body in equal agency as its mind in order to find the codes that together will be able to play as “words” and make this conversation possible. Codes that have taken the form of sounds and movements: whistles and nomadism.

On one hand, whistling is an ancestral/interspecies communication language spoken through phonemes that has played as the medium to establish a conversation between human and non-human world since our first days, a practice that arise from our necessity of survival in our foraging time by interacting initially with birds, as David Abram illustrates it with us: “birds are by far the most agile creatures within the forest, able to swoop from place to place and to gaze around as they fly, they naturally know a great deal about who’s presently afoot in the woods […] Their spoken utterances serve to keep the entire forest well apprised of what’s occurring within its depths», «They aided our survival in a far more immediate and practical manner[…] alerted us to the approach of dangerous predators”.

Today, we can see how this whistling did not remain just with bird species, but has accompanied us throughout our history playing as the intermediary with other species, as it is the case with mammals in the alpeggio and transhumance practice. Since the beginning of pastoral practices, shepherds have used whistling (together with tongue clicks and trills) with the cows, goats, sheeps, donkeys, horses, pigs… to tell them “this is the way” “we need to stop” “we need to go faster”, while the herd or flock will reply with its bleating or moaning sounds saying “it’s ok, as long as we are getting to the fresher grass” “not too fast, please” or “we are tired, we need to stop for a while”. A rhythmic discourse that results in a special ritual.

On the other hand, there is also a deep and full body participation within this majestic shift that complements the whistling. Both body forms, the human and mammal, play an important role in the conversation: Firstly, the human and mammal are in a nomadic dynamic that from the very beginning of the interaction places their body in a permanent movement that directly places it in the role of leading the awareness to take most of the decisions, specifically those ones related to where or when to go? How to get there?. A dynamic that both can be familiar with because their ancestors practiced nomadism for millenia, in the case of humans there were some indigenous communities in South America, Africa, and other territories that even today still practice it. And, in the case of cattle there were the aurochs (bos primigenius), the extinct wild bovine ancestor that practiced it, or the bison that still do it.

During the conversation, I intuit the body of both parts serves as a mirror between them that allows them to read and understand each other. For instance, when human and mammal’s bodies are on the track, they will adapt their velocity by imitating one to each other’s rhythm, finding a middle point between both velocities where both bodies’ muscles are comfortable enough to keep going. Here, the mind doesn’t interfere but once in a while when she comes along she will find the velocity either too fast or too slow and will make a disturbance that later both bodies will again rebalance through their mirroring language. Velocity will remain as the main signal between bodies to understand each other, and without it the whistle and bleating could not perform as it does: for instance, when one of them is tired, it will reduce its pace and slow-down the speed along with the specific code of whistling or bleating to ask for a time-off.

Whistling and nomadism together compose this mind-body interspecies language that since our first days has made it easier for us to obtain energy: the most sacred manifestation that lets LIFE thrive on this planet…but… have we made something easier for them?

2. (discussion)

Here, at this point, something makes noise and reveals that although this is a glimpse of language between human and non-human world, there is something that doesnt fit and send an alert that implies to question and review more carefully this relationship arose by transhumance and alpeggio practices… and it has all to do with what energy brings along when mentioned and realizing that it is the reason why this whole conversation is done in the first place. Having this common language between us and the non-human world doesn’t mean this conversation is totally horizontal, bilateral, equal and fair: we are not making it easier for them to get energy but quiet on the contrary. I could share here all the things we do with this community to argue and illustrate how we are not making it easier for them but it is not the goal in this opportunity. The relevant thing for me here is to illustrate how this is a consequence of our limited and precarious lecture and understanding towards energy’s role in all that we can call today’s universe.

What is energy? When we ask this, most of us would automatically think about a material and resource that functions to produce something, mostly related to other ways of movement and/or to materialize something. We think of energy as a resource that can be used in different ways to accomplish our desires and make our life “easier”, as industrial processes and capitalism have taught us. Rarely, we link energy to FOOD, although this generation is more aware of it, it is not yet the first thought when asking about it; and even when we are aware of it we usually relate it just as food for our body, this dense material made of multiple layers that needs to be movable for whatever thing the mind desires to do.

Very remotely there is an approach that reads energy’s role by trespassing the human life scenario, and then recognized it as the holder of a filamental web, invisible to our senses, that embraces all and nourishes not just body but mind and soul of all known forms of movement too, to let life thrive. Why is this lecture so rare between us? And, more importantly, what effects can this have in our life?

Again and over, this bias is due to our language, it is quite evident that it has been built based on an anthropocentric view, defining everything just by observing human perspective. At some point, we lose or forget our capacity of reading the whole picture, and as I see it, it has a lot to do with the inconvenience it represents in economical and political forces, they don’t want us to be aware of the effect of something in a microscale on the macroscale because that would stop or limit their insatiable power. They implanted us with the idea of categorizing everything, dividing and subdividing everything and to not related all the parts to each other; they have immersed us in an educational system where we are taught to seeing just one of the parts of a matryoshka and never ask ourselves where are the other parts or where is the great mother, until getting to the point of forgiving this part belonged to something bigger, to a great mother holding it all. We are self-absorbed in this way of lecture where the little part we are focused on is just our single species. 

We can sense how everything is connected in that invisible web, and how one thing affects the whole: in this case, our lack of lecturing energy’s role in its big picture, consequently, has trap the whistling-nomadism language -between shepherds and herds- in a dead end circle where will never be possible to have an horizontal and equal conversation: both parts will never be listened to and care to each other at the same extent if we persist under this bias condition. This is a reflection that invites us to look further from the romantic way of seeing these agricultural practices of alpeggio and transhumance. Because, although they are an intangible heritage of humanity today, and they are practicing an ancestral interspecies language, they still have a path ahead to really be sustainable and respectful with the

“natural” territory, which demands a horizontal conversation between both agencies.

3. (reflection)

Perhaps we should start to ask ourselves if it is really necessary to carry on with this activity year after year, perpetuating the whole life of each herd member under this practice that could represent a figure of “work” to them.  How would it be if we could hold a cycle in which each of the herd members “works” just two years of their entire life? How would it be if we could really extend a conversation where both parts can equally make it easier, in the same conditions,for the other to get energy? … Of course, asking this by having in mind the whole picture of energy’s role… Imagine, how would it be?

There is an urgency of coming up with alternative and interspecies languages that allow us to read the whole picture and transform our biased lecture into a more objective one, able to recognize and read the agency of all sentient beings co-dwelling with us. We need to awaken our bodies and give them agency in this reading too, because it has its own language and it is a crucial tool that can help us in this quest. This is a request that today is echoing more than ever for all the crises we are experiencing all at once now, which we can not face with the only language we have knowledge of today. Language is at the root of all these crises by playing as the driver but also it can be the counterpart by playing as the mediator for a solid solution.