It became obvious that Grace was grieving the loss of her chick.

She remained close to the nest, puttering, looking here and there or inside the nest again. She was uncharacteristically quiet. She chased away other chickens. She was aimless but unwilling to leave. I spent time sitting with her. I took moments to slow down, to meet her “where she is”, and tell her how sorry we are for her loss. Now she sits near me as I read and write. (I sit on the porch, still not far from the nest.) The most touching thing is how she maintains eye contact.

It prompted me to search for written-down experiences of (communication, community) living with chickens, and I found this book called How to Speak Chicken by Melissa Caughey. She means literally speaking their language, deciphering and returning their clucks and bokks, as well as gaining entry to their flock. I do already speak to the chickens in words and sounds. I’ve been surprised how closely they listen and the things they seem to understand. But Melissa takes it to another level and clearly knows more than we do about her chickens, about what they want, about their feelings, their fears and joys, their quirky (individual) personalities, and all their ways of self-expression. 

At first, I felt shy that I would mourn with Grace, for a chick who knew only one beautiful day. When chickens are not just eaten by them, but treated worse than garbage, by humans, by the thousands and millions. (And, well, Los Angeles is burning.) But I shouldn’t be shy. Community with the non-human is a gateway to deeper understanding.

Too many instances of it (community with the non-human) are treated as un-serious, dismissed as “merely subjective”, reduced by dualist (Cartesian) dogma (in partnership with certain religious traditions, especially Christianity in its understanding of human will, i.e. Augustine and Aquinas) to machine-like instinct, safely compartmentalized into the category of “pets”, explained away as the primitive behavior of pre-scientific minds, (children or women or the brown-skinned), or the flaky spirituality of new-age nonsense. This is part of the same modern and enlightenment-era thinking that provides justification for rapacious colonial expansion and empire, as well as chattel slavery, and all else that is generally called “white supremacy”. The culturally assumed solution to this (“white supremacy”) has largely been to gather non-white humans up into the exclusive flock of intellect- and/or “free will”-endowed beings, while partitioning away the rest of the natural world (non-human animals, plants, ecosystems, rivers, oceans, mountains, canyons, stars, moons, etc.) in a separate category of the stupid and/or dumb, unworthy of ethical or moral consideration. Except inasmuch as they are useful, to the human.

Humanism, when seen from this vantage, is the cultural effort to replace white supremacy with (a dubiously racially neutral) human supremacy. But the violence (ignorance, self-abuse) of supremacy remains. The in-practice meaning of “free will” retains nothing holy, becomes the freedom to exploit, abuse, and generally disregard the suffering or wellbeing of those without it (without “free will”). All of us (humans) have suffered from this humanism. And because humanism assumes the human to be dual, human and animal, (as opposed to human animals), humanism divides us against our own embodied selves.

The violence of human separatism can be observed through a cultural Scylla of embodiment issues, from the body’s hijacking by commodification, (“the beauty industry”, including online “influencers”), to abuse by for-profit pharmaceutical corporations (in the name of health), to cultural conflicts over sexuality, (including over manifestations of gender), to the marginalization or cultural “turning away” from the elderly and the disabled, to addiction and other crises of habit (i.e. obesity, heart disease, diabetes, social media, “AI”), to crises of mental health and suicide, etc. (Here I include “AI” as an embodiment problem, as a mis-relation of human thinking to human bodies. Although I don’t think this is the only way to interpret it.)

Non-human does not mean stupid. Only the most rarefied facets of our experience (if any) are uniquely human. Most of the time, humans interrelate like any other animals. But look, there is plenty of love in this. It’s true that our chicken family will never read and discuss a Plato dialogue with me. Neither will most humans (including you). Neither would your own child, especially if it passed away only a day after it was born. We are almost wholly joined by bonds of affect and imagination. Whatever it is that is uniquely human, we can’t even be sure that it lends itself to community. Humans stand out from other living animals not by their social or political coherence, but in their (uniquely) dysfunctional or unstable relationships with each other, and with the world. The most destructive become historically notable mostly because of an idiotic pretense of supremacy. It works until it fails.

Does it count as trying to understand the world, if you assume at the outset its stupidity? To assume its stupidity is expedient. It may get you to Mars, it may get you a big mac, or a house in the suburbs with enough cashflow to supply (frequently replaced) digital devices for a family of four. To assume its stupidity makes it seem okay to do unfathomly terrible things to the non-human. There isn’t such a sharp divide between concentration camps and factory farms, the fossil fuel industry and violence against women. To the extent that, as metaphors, they read as obvious, clichéd or tedious, if not offensive. And yet, these are its routine, its daily complicities.

What is it? It is a living thing, saying “never again” with each exhalation, and with each inhalation, “always already”.

My husband buried his father as well as his sister, according to Muslim tradition, so he knows how to wrap a corpse in preparation for burial. Once the chick died, having lost its voice, its movement, its warmth, and its self, Grace no longer interpreted it as the body of her child. (A reminder that we are but interpretations of each others’ bodies.) We removed it from the nest without her objection. We lit some small incense sticks, E set it on a small wood-block table, wrapped it in several pieces of white cloth. He dug a hole under a rose bush, about the size of my hand. I placed it in the hole, he covered it with dirt. He placed a stone to mark the location. I put small white and purple melati flowers.

Grace sees what we do. She sees me crying. I tell her it wasn’t her fault, and she’s a really good mom.

The other chickens, her grown babies, come by and check in. She snaps at them, still defensive of the nest. Frankie is never far away but gives her space. Grace moves a little farther from the nest, day by day. With reluctance, she releases the feelings and memories of her baby. Today, we gave them their favorite treat, boiled peanuts. Frankie, as usual, made sure that Grace got more than the rest.

Natural divisions are temporary, like rivers between us that are never the same, or hypothetical, like bridges that dissolve as we pass beyond them, or revelation, like eggshells cracked open with tiny horns on our hatchling beaks. We grow into other lives. Nature in motion is constant incompletion, otherwise we would all stop dead in our tracks. History is the ontological mismanagement of time. There is no cause for despair, but hope is only from the cracks, and the light that gets through them. What this means is that the future is not the measure, and to stop expecting victorious outcomes. Build to rebuild, and to rebuild again. Live in the truth of one beautiful day. Sacrifice your heart at the altar of its creation.

(One way or another.) Community with the non-human is the gateway to self-understanding.