Wolves bay at the setting moon, their howls crinkling the ears of River side Elk. The Elk bugle the arrival of their former shepherds and their herd glide from the muddy banks of the Yellowstone. They look back in calm acknowledgement that they won’t see these parts again and these parts will be all the better for it.
Listening to The Emerald podcast, as the host, Joshua Shrei, and guest, Bayo Akomolafe, dance across landscapes imagining a new language and habitat of the over Psychologised Modern, several of the rising ridges of thought offered me vantage over a thoughtform I had been contending with for some time. The thoughtform, 'how do regenerative practices enter our homes and what does this mean for us? was shaded by Joshua Shrei discussing the Yellowstone National Park.
Yellowstone, that Montanan monolith, now standing for the splendour of Human intervention, offers us a new glimpse into the modern environmentalism that subsumed the hippies, the anarchists and the civilised indigenous. Inviting the monsters in disrupts the safe, status quo appeasing, techno-solutionism types of responses that permeate the air around these discussions.
Lupi-regenerative interventions, bringing the wolf back to the park, had an astounding religious impact on the park. By religious I mean it etymologically, the re-aligning or the re-ligamenting of an absent limb or organ to the body of the park. Wolves were seen as only preventing Human thoroughfare and exploitation. Treated like fields of nettle, they were seen only as an interference with Anthropocentric utilitarian endeavours. The Wolves were felled by a new predator, Humans, who wanted to hunt, forage and drive cattle through the region. The new predator was not familiar with the ceremony of predation within this region, so as the Wolves were targeted en masse and, their ghosts haunting the Yellowstone, watched as the Elk, uneducated in the ways of riverine systems without their Lupine teachers, chewed, grazed and stomped these areas clean of new growth. The birds left, the beavers left, the aspen left and the River frayed.
Wolves were sewn back into that body in 1995 and many bodily functions returned. The rivers deepened and their banks became firmer. Trees returned to these banks when the Wolves evicted the Elk populations from the waterfront views and their roots became the village of continuity upon the park's arterial River.
Wolves who are forced to transgress lines of domesticity and wildness terrorise ecologies, Human and Otherwise, into abundance.
Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, tells of how the monster disrupts our regular programming. The regular program of whiteness, which flattens the Otherwise, quells the dendritic rhizomes of perturbed sameness. The monster, he proffers, is vital:
“[W]e’ve needed monsters to define ourselves, to teach our children what not to do, to sound warnings about the future, to define the territorial boundaries of our habitats (and therefore carve out the wilderness)…” - When You Meet The Monster Annoint It’s Feet
The Monster is the otherness we reject, the otherness that makes the standard squirm and makes the ten tonne hammer of dominant culture hesitate in the air long enough for Crow to steal it away. They are the arbiter of grief and loss, carrying them on their crooked backs and also imprinting their lessons. And still more, they remind us where we ought not to go before our ways of relating become entangled with a body deeper and stranger than an individual Human’s.
Learning, as Stephen Jenkinson puts it, that where we are, the wild is not.
Now this notion of reintroducing the monsters or rather of inviting their shadow to darken our door, is a keystone poetic of regeneration. Your backyard is a Yellowstone waiting for its religion with the death bringer, with the disfigurer, with the monstrous.
Her beastly maw clicks open and cackles behind the crackling of our Hearth. Our senses pique, we remember our eyes and ears and legs. We remember our heart and its quota of beats. We remember our priorities as our whole body turns toward those dearest beings we cannot be without and will surely sacrifice in the name of protecting. In the Modern, our literal arteries, vascular and interstitial, would bifurcate their edges and saunter through the holy places of our intra-porous selves, as the feasting overpopulated Elk of fast food and fast lives and fast satisfaction are evicted from the waterfront views of our community dependent health.
“In a reimagined notion of the sanctuary, the ‘monster’ plays a major role. The monster is an agent of reconfiguration and a critique of form; it disturbs the familiar and reshapes the bodies we are used to. It resists categorization in its corporeal excessiveness. The monster welcomes the fugitive, the broken, into sanctuary; the place becomes a site for bodily reconfigurations. For re/memberment.” - Coming Down to Earth.
So now we contend with the first rule of Modernity, safety. You know those beings we turn our whole body toward knowing we would sacrifice to protect them? Despite the adrenaline, despite the forecasting of your defeat as they are broken on the cliffs of Time or tragedy, no matter how high the walls, no matter how sharp the spear, no matter how rigid the legislation, there is no saving them indefinitely.
Humans with a priority of safety, seeking contracts from all living beings to negate this generative terror and in so doing they nullify the pre-existing pacts of reciprocity with the Trickster and the monster.
In Anthropocentric conversations this fascism, or this stricture of the other, is propagandised as a necessary response to ensure safety. As the field of safety expands, everything and everyone that might threaten the ever petrifying status quo is targeted. It’s not exile to the wild places anymore. It’s utter annihilation. We will bargain with the devil at the crossroads with the entire world, if only to protect a Loved one. Safety irritates the monster and the Human, behind its stony walls, becomes rigid and fragile.
So what does it mean to invite the monster in? It means allowing the wild up to your back step. It means advocating for the strange and the overgrown and the migrant species. It means having places you don’t go, the same places the monster breeds and sleeps. In these offerings to the Otherwise of a more than Human kin, you make a pledge to step away from the safe choices of politeness and straight edges and isolating walls.
A sacred reverence of the monster, inviting the beast within, making meat offerings at the altar to their shadow reminds us and rebodies us that the wild is right there - right there in immanence and right there in just presence.
Ryan Dickinson