Between John Berger’s Animals and Roger Deakin’s Trees

“Animals can be seen in eight of the twelve signs of the zodiac. Among the Greeks, the sign of each of the twelve hours that made up the day was an animal. (Cat first, crocodile last). Hindus imagined the world carried on the back of an elephant, which in turn traveled on a tortoise. These are three examples presented by the British writer john berger (London, 1926-Paris, 2017) from a time when the lives of animals and humans ran so parallel that it seemed as if they were part of a single world. However, this relationship implied a much greater complexity, which Berger explores in the pieces collected in the volume Why do we look at animals? (Alfaguara, with translations by Pilar Vázquez and Abraham Gragera).

“Animals are born, they feel and they die,” says Berger. That’s how they resemble people. But the absence of a “common language” encouraged a space for communication, a “play of gaze” whose philosophical implications Berger analyzes in the text that gives the title to the collection: from the original English interrogative Why look at animals? changed to the most affirmative Why do we look at animals?.

Berger engages in all manner of references, from literature to philosophy and cultural analysis, allowing him to move naturally from Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss to Donald Duck. His basic thesis is that the development of capitalist society diverted these parallel lives of animals and humans, although there are paradoxes such as the rise of pets. In his opinion, zoos are a “monument” of historical loss that interrupts “that view between man and animal, which probably played a fundamental role in the development of human society and in which, in any case, all humans had lived until less than a century ago . That look is gone.”

The fifth element

If Berger focuses on animals, so do the British Roger Deakin (Watford, 1943-Mellis, 2006) puts it on trees: “For the Chinese, wood is the fifth element, and Jung considered trees as an archetype,” he writes at the beginning Forest diaries. life among the trees (Impedimenta, translated by Ce Santiago). His most famous work has already appeared in Spanish, water log —water diaries—, which collects his jumps in all kinds of rivers, lakes, beaches, ponds and other liquid masses in England. And in this posthumously published book, he does the same with trees, also aware that, like animals, forest masses lose size or become domesticated. And the human relationship to trees, as a result, has been transformed. For this reason, Deakin quotes Auden: “No culture is better than its forests.”