The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard

On reading about climate

I keep unintentionally picking up books that turn out to be brilliant but devastating. This is what I get for not reading much about a book before I begin it. I prefer not knowing what I’m getting into — it’s so great to be surprised — but the downside is … not knowing what I’m getting into. That said, The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard was a painful read but also mind-alteringly great.

I had glanced at the description of The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard a number of times trying to understand what “the second body” means, but then I put the book away, not finding a quick and easy answer. When I finally committed to reading it, it turned out that there is no quick and easy answer because it takes the whole book to explain it.

The book is about bodies, identity, selfhood, and climate change. “The second body” means something like the global ecosystem that is also, in a very literal way, the body of every being on earth. Your first body is easy to understand — it’s the one you think of as “your body.” Your second body is the whole world that you might think you are separate from, but you are not. This is why she uses the phrase “second body” instead of calling it “the earth” or “the global ecosystem”: it’s easy to think of ourselves as separate from the earth; harder to maintain that separation when the earth is your own, literal body:

The second body is your own literal and physical biological existence — it is a version of you. It is not a concept, it is your own body. The language we have at the moment is weak: we might speak vaguely of global connections; of the emission and circulation of gases; of impacts. And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another.

We are not separate, and to think of ourselves as separate is an illusion — a very common one that is hard if not impossible to overcome, but an illusion nonetheless.

The book begins with Hildyard holding an injured pigeon in her hands. That pigeon is real and concrete, a body she can hold onto, a “first body” that is separate from her own “first body,” but whose life she can affect in immediate ways: she thinks about how she could wring its neck and eat it, but instead she nurses it back to health. When the pigeon recovers its ability to fly, it takes off into the sky and becomes — from Hildyard’s perspective — part of the “second body”: more abstract, difficult to see, part of a group (a flock of pigeons) rather than an individual. It has joined the generalized “world” that seems to be a separate thing from her. But she knows it is not.

Hildyard then tries to make sense of how the first and second bodies relate and how one can live with a real understanding of what the second body means. It’s largely a problem of perspective and scale. To understand the second body can make the first one seem to disappear — what does the individual matter in the context of the whole world? But living in the first body makes it hard to grasp what the second body is and how it is also our own. The pigeon seems real when Hildyard is holding it in her hands, less so when it’s a dot in the sky.

To think through all these ideas, Hildyard does a series of interviews — with a butcher, a criminologist, and several scientists — and looks at examples from literature, including Shakespeare and Elena Ferrante. She researches what “life” is, what animals are, and how scientists write about human beings as though they are not “nature.” In the book’s last section, she uses the loss of all her possessions in a river flood to describe what it was like for the second body (in the form of climate-change-affected flooding) to become devastatingly real and pressing.

My attempt to define the second body might make the book seem abstract, but it’s not, or, rather, Hildyard moves from the concrete to the abstract and back again with ease. I love how she makes it seem so effortless. She uses section breaks, which suit her leaps from topic to topic, but within each section, she’s able to move from her own thoughts and emotions to, say, ideas from her interview subjects, literary examples, scientific claims, and/or philosophical ideas, and it makes for reading that is slow but enormously satisfying. I’m out of the habit of writing in my books, but I wrote in this one.

I do not like reading about climate change. It’s enormously depressing and anxiety-inducing; I feel stuck between wanting to be a responsible person who knows what is going on and feeling that reading about climate change is paralyzing and that I can’t live with the anxiety it causes. If someone described this book as being about climate change, I would probably not have read it.

But it’s as much a book about identity as it is about climate. It’s about the way our self-conception has led to the climate crisis, and it offers a different way of thinking that might help us address it. How would our lives change if we thought of the earth as our body? How would our language change?

The language of the human animal is that of a whole and single individual. you are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself — to be whole, to be one. Move away from this personality, self-expression, and you risk going out of your mind, being besides yourself, failing to be true to yourself, hearing other voices or splitting your personality: it doesn’t sound good. This careful language is anxious, I think — threatening in a desperate way. You need to take care of yourself, it says. You need boundaries, you have to be either here or there. Don’t be all over the place.

Climate change creates a new language, in which you have to be all over the place; you are always all over the place. It makes every animal body implicated in the whole world.

If I’m going to read about climate change — which I do need to do — then I find this kind of writing and thinking most helpful: it gets at the root (or one of the roots) of the problem.

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Recently Published

New small-press books out this week that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:

• The Music Game by Stéfanie Clermont, translated by JC Sutcliffe (Biblioasis): “Céline, Julie, and Sabrina come of age at the start of a new millennium, supporting each other and drifting apart as their lives pull them in different directions. But when their friend dies by suicide in the abandoned city lot where they once gathered, they must carry on in the world that left him behind.”

  

• Wilder Winds by Bel Olid, translated by Laura McGloughlin (Fum d'Estampa Press): Short stories “that draw on notions of individual freedom, abuses of power, ingrained social violence, life on the outskirts of society, and inevitable differences.”

• Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au (New Directions): This book is finally out in the U.S.! I’ve heard a lot about the U.K. Fitzcarraldo edition. “A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo…. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here--is it only the daughter?”

• Tender by Ariana Harwicz, translated by Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press): The third in Harwicz’s trilogy. I read and loved the first one, but just haven’t made it any farther. “Under the spell of a mother's madness, the French countryside transforms into a dreamscape of interconnected imagery: animals, desire, the functions of the body.”

  

• the déjà vu: black dreams & black time by Gabrielle Civil (Coffee House Press): “Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, the déjà vu activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech, and lyric essay into performance memoir.”

• Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt (NYRB, originally published in 1980): “Set in 1970s Japan, this tender and poetic novel about a young, single mother struggling to find her place in the world is an early triumph by a modern Japanese master.”

New on the TBR

New books acquired:

• No Name in the Street by James Baldwin (Vintage 2007, originally published in 1972): Another book for my James Baldwin collection, since I’m trying to read more of his books this year. “James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness and the later events that scored his heart with pain.”

  

• Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, edited by Carol Brightman (Harcourt, Brace, 1995): I’ve been in the mood for letters lately, and I love Mary McCarthy. I have yet to read Hannah Arendt.

• The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Iona Macintyre and Iona Macintyre (Charco Press, 2020): The rest of these books I bought during a Charco Press sale. “1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland.”

• Resistance by Julián Fuks, translated by Daniel Hahn (Charco Press, 2019): A “portrayal of the formation of a family under extraordinary circumstances, told from the point of view of the youngest child.”

  

• Fate by Jorge Consiglio, translated by Carolina Orloff and Fionn Petch (Charco Press, 2021): “This novel focuses on a group of characters who are all in different ways endeavouring to take control of their fate. Their desire to lead a genuine existence forces them to confront difficult decisions, and to break out of comfortable routines.”

• A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti, translated by Fionn Petch (Charco Press, May 2022): “Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach's Goldberg Variations, Luis Sagasti's second book to appear in English takes the guise of a musical scheherazade, recounting story after story, vibrating to celestial harmonies.”

Currently Reading

• Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry (Beacon Press, 2019): I’m reading this as part of Lauren Goldenberg’s online book group focusing on women’s biographies. If this interests you, you can sign up through this tweet. Lauren sends out emails on the reading every week and then the group meets on Zoom at the end.

  

• Backwater by Dorothy Richardson (1916): This is my other group read — more information on the group here! It’s the second in Richardson’s 13-volume work Pilgrimage.

• Wahala by Nikki May (Custom House, 2022): my current audiobook. It’s another one — like Erdrich’s The Sentence — that is absorbing enough I’m not tempted to switch over to podcasts.

The Cormac Report

Yesterday was a day off for Cormac and we took one of our dogs on a walk in the woods. Cormac is not super into hiking right now, and, honestly, unless it’s a short hike up to a great view, I can see why a kid might not love it. It’s generally not all that exciting unless you get really lucky and see a bear or something. I loved hiking as a kid, but we didn’t do it that much, so maybe I never had the opportunity to get bored.

Anyway, the best way to get Cormac to enjoy a hike is to promise he can tell a story the whole time. I do not understand it because I was never like this, but he loves to talk and can do it for a very long time once he finds a good subject. Lately he’s been making up an epic about our three pets, two dogs and parakeet, that he continues from hike to hike. I’m afraid to say I can’t tell you much more about it because I only selectively listen. I’m sorry, Cormac! I do make sure I nod and smile at the right moments, and we make it work. This does mean he pays more attention to his story than he does to the trees, but that’s okay. The dog got walked, we had some outside time, and he’s using his imagination. It’s a win.

Have a good week everyone!