Unwholly Other
By Chris Arthur
This is a personal reflection on otherness, not an academic article about “the other,” so what follows favors a meandering approach over a point-by-point linear unfolding. I’m writing an essay, not an exposition. Where to begin? I want to weave together points relating to seabirds, likeness and difference, an idea from an influential book about religious experience, bats, and metaphor. I’ll also touch on my own experience of being othered, and suggest that the way we treat the natural world seems often to be underlain by a mindset not dissimilar to the brutal othering of racism. I could start with any of these interrelated frames of reference—I hope the connections between them will become clear—but it probably makes sense to start with the most straightforward.
This takes us to Edinburgh, many years ago. I’m newly arrived in Scotland’s capital from Belfast, the city of my birth. Northern Ireland is in the grip of the Troubles. Bombings, shootings, burnings out, sectarian murders are all regular occurrences. I’ve had some close shaves and am glad to have left. Edinburgh’s peacefulness provides a welcome contrast. I’m long-haired, scruffy, and speak with an Ulster accent. I’ve been offered a place at the University of Edinburgh to take a Master of Arts degree in Religious Studies. The way religion has become distorted into the toxic tribalism that’s disfiguring my homeland – each side viewing the other with loathing and suspicion—has made me interested in religion as a phenomenon. I’m looking forward to studying it and advancing my understanding of the tragic tangle that’s seen Ulster’s Catholics and Protestants treat each other as warring factions, enemies instead of Christian coreligionists.
One morning I visit a launderette near the ramshackle flat I’m sharing with several other students. I load my clothes into the machine, set it going, and go off to do some shopping. When I get back, I look for a laundry basket to transfer the clothes to a dryer. I can’t find one, so ask the only other customer, a woman in her fifties, if she knows where they’re kept. “They keep on getting stolen,” she tells me. When, ill-advisedly as it turns out, I ask who by, she looks at me with naked hostility and says “By people like you. We never had this trouble until all the Irish students starting coming to Edinburgh.”
I was annoyed, but not particularly surprised, by her accusation. In those distant days young men who wore their hair long were almost invariably students and they were often viewed negatively by the older generation. And I was used to instant categorization and judgment sparked by hearing my accent. In some places I was viewed with suspicion and made to feel unwelcome as soon as I spoke. This was understandable, I guess, given the innocent lives lost in bombings of public buildings—bombings that had spilled over to the British mainland, though thankfully not to Scotland. But however understandable people’s apprehension might have been, it still hurt to know that, in their eyes, I was tainted with the stain of paramilitary thuggery. I was as appalled by it as those who saw me voice-allied to its violence. Though I don’t think she viewed me as a potential terrorist in this way, the woman in the launderette was clearly resentful of the recent influx of Irish students fleeing the Troubles. Her assumption that, as one of them, I was therefore automatically a thief, was an ethnic slur that I resented.
When I told my girlfriend what had happened at the launderette, she shrugged it off as a minor irritation and reminded me that when she’d been looking for a place to stay the previous year, during a brief sojourn in London, she’d routinely come across properties for rent with signs that bluntly stated “No Jews. No blacks. No Irish.”
Thankfully, things have become more enlightened since our student days. It’s now inconceivable that landlords (or landladies) would get away with posting such openly discriminatory exclusions. No doubt some property owners still try to operate such bars covertly, but at least the tide of public opinion – and of legislation – is now very much against them. Notions of equality and valuing diversity, treating people as individuals rather than dismissing them as stereotypes, have gathered impressive momentum in recent years. I like to think —I hope not naively—that my experience in that Edinburgh launderette wouldn’t happen today. People are at least more circumspect about what they say, even if they may still think in ways that are negatively othering.
One of the books I read for my degree studies in Edinburgh was Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. It was first published in German in 1917, with John Harvey’s superb English version following in 1923. His translation was praised by the author as better than the original. The book is still in print today. Its subtitle explains Otto’s area of interest: “An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational.” I was interested in the key role Otto gave to religious experience, to people’s direct feelings of what he termed “the numinous.”
The idea that the raw voltage of something holy, perhaps divine, ran through human religiousness was one I found appealing. The weighty carapace of doctrine, convention, dogma, things approved by authority and frozen into traditions, inflexible codes of belief and behavior, didn’t much interest me. But I was fascinated by what gave rise to them. Otto seemed to have his finger on the pulse of what lies at the root of the world’s religions, their generative heart, the live wire around which grow layers of insulating—sometimes smothering—interpretation.
Though I was interested in religion and how it impacted on human behavior, particularly in an Irish context, I didn’t regard myself as religious, and, truth be told, was far more drawn to Buddhist ideas than to Christian ones. In my days of childhood church-going I’d encountered nothing even remotely approximating the electrifying numinous experiences that Otto detailed, with their overwhelming sense of encountering something otherworldly. My memories of sitting beside my father in those hard-backed wooden pews are of feeling bored, rather than being touched by anything energizing or inspiring. When I read Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, his descriptions and examples of numinous experience brought to mind nothing conventionally religious. Instead, they made me think of watching sparrowhawks in a small wood in the County Antrim countryside about eight miles from Belfast. The wood bordered a lake and was surrounded by a mix of marsh and rough grazing for cattle. I often went birdwatching there. For me, the numinous threads in life were coiled most richly around these few acres and the abundance of life they hosted—trees, wildflowers, birds, and all kinds of other creatures. In a way, it became a sacred place for me. I suppose it’s not too far off the mark to say that it prompted—and/or fed—a kind of nature mysticism.
One of Otto’s recurring descriptions of numinous experience is that it is felt as something “ganz andere,” which John Harvey translates as “wholly other.” In some ways I liked the idea that beneath all the cumbrous superstructure of religions that’s so evident in the world, so familiar and tangible—churches, mosques, and temples, synagogues and gurdwaras, holy books, rituals, sacred objects—there’s something of an altogether different order, something wilder, freer, harder to point to and categorize, like a seam of pure uncontainable energy.
But I was suspicious of Otto’s description too. If something is wholly other, would we be able to apprehend it? Might it not just pass undetected through the net of our senses? How would we know it was there? If there’s absolutely nothing to compare it to, if its radical otherness makes it entirely alien, if it has no qualities or features except for an absence of anything specifiable, if it has, so to speak, no cognitive handles for us to get a hold of, would it not just slip out of our grasp without our ever knowing that we’d touched it? In what way would it be possible to be aware of such a (non)thing?
Religious experiences are often said to be “ineffable” by those who have them—that is, entirely beyond words. Again, such claims left me wary. As every writer knows, many things are difficult to describe, some momentously so, but if something shrugs off words completely, denying application to even the roughest approximation, it’s hard to see how it would register its presence on us. The philosopher J.L. Austin once described “like” as a word that allows us to shoot round corners. With it to hand it means that even if we’re faced with something novel and beyond our immediate comprehension we can rely on “like” to provide at least the rudiments of a description. If something is wholly other, if every word we might apply slips off it without gaining any purchase, if we can’t even say what it’s like (what it’s more like, less like, unlike), does it make sense to think that it falls within the realms of what it’s possible for us to experience?
Likeness lies at the heart of one of our key cognitive tools – metaphor. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson put it in their landmark study, Metaphors We Live By, metaphors “are capable of giving us new understanding of our experience.” George Steiner gives a nice example (in After Babel) when he suggests that the first time someone saw autumn in a person’s face it constituted a revolution in the way life was understood. If something is wholly other, if it shrugs off all elucidating comparisons and enlightening metaphors, it’s hard to see how it would be different from absence, a kind of void, a perceptual and cognitive black hole in the face of which the mind would flounder.
I find Otto’s “wholly other” an idea fraught with problems. But I’ve come to think that something just a little less extreme can cast light on the way sparrowhawks and other creatures and the wild places they inhabit strike me as being invested with a special kind of quality, a power, an energy, a vibrant sense of presence, that has much in common with the numinous. Such things possess a high degree of otherness, but not one that’s completely off the scale. It’s hard to conjure descriptions that convey the sense of otherness emanating from them, but it’s not impossible. Like can be applied, metaphors can be generated.
I mentioned seabirds at the outset. Let them fly in now, living counterweights to Otto’s theological abstractions. And let them do so via Adam Nicolson’s profound and brilliant book The Seabird’s Cry. Nicolson offers a series of highly personal perspectives on the lives of a handful of species. Informed by his eclectic reading—of scientific research, literature, history, geography—and by his extensive travel and firsthand experience, The Seabird’s Cry is an extraordinary piece of writing. It’s well deserving of the accolades it has garnered since its publication in 2017. As Robert Macfarlane says, “it is a work that takes wing in the mind.” It would sell it short to categorize it as simply “a bird book”. It is, rather, a richly resourced and beautifully written mix of elegy and exploration. Not only does it take us on an empathetic and revelatory voyage into the unique life-worlds – umwelts – of some fellow inhabitants of our planet, it also shows the often tragic consequences when our lives collide with theirs.
The Seabird’s Cry is suffused with a sense of close proximity to the numinous. Forget the mundane take on gulls or cormorants that we might adopt on daytrips to the seaside. For Nicolson, seabirds constitute “otherness as a dimension of the real.” The birds that he writes about so lyrically, with such verve and knowledge—fulmars, kittiwakes, puffins, gannets, albatrosses, and others—are presented not as something wholly other, but sufficiently different from us to spark a sense of something almost sacred—and certainly special enough to warrant our respect if not reverence. Seabirds manifest “a beauty on the margins of understanding.” They are creatures that, says Nicolson,
have magnetized my mind, drawn me to them year after year, partly in amazement at the nakedness of their lives, its cruelties and beauties, the undressed nature of their existence, partly in envy, in longing to be what they are.
Reading Nicolson’s take on seabirds there’s a sense of encountering something that’s both sufficiently other from us to give a sense of different ways of being, different approaches to living, different touchstones of value and meaning, yet that’s sufficiently rooted in our same realm of existence that we can grasp and name their otherness and in so doing better appreciate it. At one point, when he’s writing about albatrosses, he describes the astonishing life paths they follow as “songlines” which are “laced around the world.” In his view, the phenomenal distances these birds travel, their navigational skills, their ability to perdure through the harshest conditions, amounts to a manner of being, an umwelt, “to which the only sane reaction is one of awe.”
The way Nicolson describes the seabirds that fascinate him certainly suggests that they are deserving of our esteem. But clearly our usual reactions to them, far from being awe-filled, have more often been dismissive or destructive. How else can we account for the enormity of the fact that—very largely due to us —“over the last sixty years, the world population of seabirds has dropped by over two-thirds”? Seen through the perspectives that Nicolson provides, such a statistic has a definite air of sacrilege about it. We have treated these other lifeforms in a way that seems rooted in ignorance, contempt, and callousness. Their difference from us is viewed as a diminishment, allowing us to treat them as irrelevant or inferior.
As I was reading The Seabird’s Cry, I was powerfully reminded of another piece of bird-oriented writing that’s similarly suffused with a sense of the numinous, J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. Now widely recognized as a modern classic of nature writing, Baker’s book, first published in 1967, condenses into the compelling narrative of a single half-year his decade-long experience of watching these magnificent birds of prey. But Baker raises far wider issues than those that pertain solely to one raptor species (Falco peregrinus). His book is a masterclass in observation and the difficulties that attend it. He writes with beautifully lucid exactitude, his startlingly unexpected phrasing tracing the contours of his experience with uncanny precision. Yet, for all his observational brilliance and mastery of the art of prose description, Baker is adamant that “the hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.” He flags up the impossibility of fully catching and describing what happens as he observes his peregrines—and yet he manages to convey a potent sense of their quicksilver otherness threaded through the time and space that they (and we) occupy.
In Owls and Other Fantasies, Mary Oliver says “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” J.A. Baker and Adam Nicolson are among the nature writers who put her dictum into practice. Their writing alerts us to the fact that we’re surrounded by the “unwholly other” in the various non-human creatures with whom we share this planet. The umwelts of these creatures are not ours, yet we can recognize their familiarity, our common engagement in life’s struggle, how every species, human and nonhuman, seeks niches in which it can flourish. Easily dismissed as mundane, ordinary, even unimportant if we look no further than the labels of our commonsense vocabulary, the lyrical perception evident in Baker’s and Nicolson’s writing shows how paying attention in the manner Mary Oliver recommends reveals birds and other lifeforms around us in a new light. They present them to us as things to wonder at, swathed in the numen of their unique, mysterious, but not ungraspable otherness.
Given the acuity of vision and imagination brought to bear on his subject, it seems apt that the title of Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry is taken from one of Seamus Heaney’s poems in Seeing Things. Too often, seeing things seems precisely what, in large measure, we fail to do. If we saw the natural world with any degree of accuracy, could we treat it with the disrespect that has become so evident in the environmental catastrophes unfolding around us? In presenting their visions of “otherness as a dimension of the real” in the birds that fascinate them, writers like Baker and Nicolson offer a corrective to our usual outlook, one that in its penetrating insight into the true nature of things might be seen to have parallels with the Buddhist concept of “right seeing” or “right view.”
Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What is it like to be a bat?” is a useful touchstone to keep in mind when reading books like The Seabird’s Cry and The Peregrine and thinking about the nature of the otherness they reveal in their subjects. Baker’s and Nicolson’s close attention to the birds on which they focus —coupled with their artistry with words, and their extensive specialist knowledge—means that we’re brought close to the unique magnetizing presences of the creatures that have captured their interest. But however intimate a perspective they provide, however skilled they are in observation, imagination, and empathy, however ornithologically well informed, there remains an uncrossable gulf of difference between us and the birds they write about so compellingly. The birds are not wholly other, but their otherness is nonetheless considerable.
Nagel suggests that the occurrence of consciousness is widespread. “It occurs,” he says, “at many levels of animal life”—this includes peregrines, cormorants, gannets, and albatrosses. The fact that an organism has conscious experience “means, basically, that there is something that it is like to be that organism.” But exactly what that like is remains beyond our reach. It’s easy enough to imagine ourselves equipped with various bat-like features—the power of flight, an appetite for insects, a nocturnal pattern of activity, using echo location for orientation. But imagining what life might be like when lived with these characteristics would, according to Nagel, only be suggestive of what it would be like for us to be like a bat, not “what it is for a bat to be a bat.” When we consider that impenetrable mystery, the nature of another consciousness, we come up against the essential otherness that separates us from it. As Nagel puts it:
Anyone who has spent time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
Writers like Baker and Nicolson bring us into illuminating proximity with what’s fundamentally alien. They alert us to the entrancing otherness that exists all around us. To label something as other in this sense is emphatically not the kind of othering that sees what’s different from us as inferior, in the manner of the woman in that Edinburgh launderette (obviously a relatively innocuous example of what can be such a toxic tendency—with potentially lethal outcomes). It’s clearly important to be aware of how othering in this negative manner can happen across a wide range of instances, to recognize the sleight of hand by which what may seem at first like harmless enough categorizations (“Irish students”) soon smuggle condemnation into their labelling (“thieves”), and to teach ourselves to notice the way descriptions slyly morph into denunciations and how identifying characteristics can be conjured into demonizing differences. Appreciating the other in nature relies on viewing it as a matter for celebration rather than disapproval and rejection. The value of books like The Peregrine and The Seabird’s Cry lies in the way in which they present their subjects as “unwholly other.” Far from being demeaning, difference is seen as a source of wonder. Baker and Nicolson are adepts at “estranging the familiar”—othering the familiar—taking what’s too often treated as routine and ordinary and showing how extraordinary it really is.
In his Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature, Jonathan Rosen provides a good thumbnail sketch of the intertwined dynamics of similarity and difference, sameness and otherness, ordinariness and extraordinariness that come into play when birds are regarded with the kind of close attention Mary Oliver recommends:
The birds are like stars, pregnant with mystery but also remote, unfathomable. And so we give them names, like constellations, to make them familiar to us. We cling to that familiarity and need it desperately, but always alongside the familiar is the unfathomable. In the night sky we still see the light of dead stars, and in birds, too, there is the spark of something ignited eons ago, flashes of extinct forms that somehow put us nearer to our origins even as they baffle our desire for simple understanding.
The calibrations and names that we normally employ to measure and categorize the world are geared to rough and ready dimensions that are concerned with managing the day-to-day practicalities of living. The durations we tend to think in are set to minutes, hours, days, years, individual lifespans, recorded history—stretches of time that we can grasp. “The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.” The seabird or the peregrine or sparrowhawk that we see flying past us far outpaces these usual measures. They are part of a bloodline of hard-to-comprehend ancientness. If, for example, you think of their beginning, a new tonnage shunts into the picture, laden with an altogether different gravity of meaning.
By thinking of beginnings, I don’t mean how they start as eggs, cradled in the capsule of the nest. The algorithms that govern individual lives are amazing enough in themselves — mating adults, egg laying, incubation, embryonic development, hatching, fledging, flying, pairing, dying—but these stages of existence are expressions of a yet more astonishing story. Trace the thread of their existence back in time, beyond the truncation of single lives, and it connects to an ancient bloodline of being. Every bird is part of a nerve that runs from the skin of the present far into the body of the distant past. Where did this nerve start? Follow it back through the eons and you can see it buckle and torque into different forms. Go back far enough and you’ll come to Archaeopteryx. Beyond that distant precursor there are yet older forms. If Sankar Chatterjee and others are correct in their reading of Protoavis texensis, we can perhaps point to a Triassic bird that’s 75 million years older than Archaeopteryx. Whatever entity is considered to be the first true bird, it will, in its turn, have emerged from more archaic forms. The lineage stretches back through time until eventually, like all living creatures, what we see here and now connects with the spark of life’s first shimmer and glint some four billion years ago. Like every multi-cellular creature on the planet, birds emerged from unicellular forbears. Like every member of the animal kingdom, each individual bird was forged and tempered from the ore of long-vanished primordial creatures. Seen against the backdrop of their long occupancy of time, the changes that they’ve gone through, the lineage they’re part of, the way they’re exquisitely adapted to the niches that they occupy, Adam Nicolson’s suggestion about awe being “the only sane reaction” to them seems entirely reasonable.
And if, as well as thinking about the beginnings that birds point back to, you simply reflect on where they are, the coordinates that emerge are reminders of how much our usual reference points are only abbreviations, fictions we’ve invented and grown familiar with that give us something we can grasp. Pinpointing where we see a peregrine or a fulmar may initially seem easy—they’re there in a woodland or cliffside. But every location is held within wider territories—county, country, hemisphere and planet, and beyond that within galaxy and universe. Each bird we see occupies a planet in a solar system that’s in the Milky Way, one of the trillions of galaxies thought to exist. The Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbour, Andromeda, is 2.15 million light years away. The furthest galaxy yet detected is 32 billion light years from Earth. The presence of a bird may seem straightforward when we see it flying across our vision, but that flight is held within these environing, unwholly other, immensities—in which, of course, we too are situated. The temporal and spatial beat of the rhythm that animates birds when we stop to really think about them challenges the metrics of our usual verbal pulse-takings and reminds us what an extraordinary thing it is to be alive in the world.
One of the pleasures of reading essays is that—whether through quotation or reference—they are a bibliographically rich genre, offering all sorts of reading suggestions. One of the pleasures of writing them is the opportunity they afford to recommend good books. As well as those I’ve already mentioned, Spark Birds, co-edited by Jonathan Franzen and Christopher Cox, is well worth considering. Published in 2023, it offers a selection of the bird-related material that has appeared over the last thirty years in Orion magazine, one the anglophone world’s premier journals for environmental writing.
In a fascinating, if saddening, chapter on extinction and how, as he puts it, “bird lives and black lives intertwine under the long shadow of history,” J. Drew Lanham writes what is in part lyrical lament, and in part an exhortation to change how we live. He sees extinction wrought by human hands as something similarly sinful to racism. Both stem from “a callousness based on judgmental whim,” Such whim and judgment spectacularly fail to see what is really there or to treat it in an appropriate manner. Lanham urges us to recognize that whatever the differences between lifeforms may be, “we are part and parcel of nature” and that “how we treat one another determines who we all are or might become.” For Lanham, “racism and sending another species to extinction grow from the same rotten core.” Both forms of rottenness are surely rooted in an unthinkingly dismissive attitude to the other, one that fails to pay attention to the intriguing differences with which the world is so richly woven, but uses them instead merely as pivots on which to spin a vacuous dualism of us (important, privileged, primary, the center of things) and them (inferior, marginalized, secondary, there to subjugate and exploit). The catastrophic results of such a mindset have become increasingly evident as the multiple crises of the Anthropocene gather their lethal momentum around us.
If I was taking a philosophical rather than an essayistic approach, I might at this point introduce the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly what he has to say about the ethical centrality of otherness (which he refers to as “alterity”) in such books as Humanism and the Other and Alterity and Transcendence. His high valuation of “The Other,” what he says about the importance of celebrating and learning from the differences between us and other people, his sense of another person being a “universe of mystery” to be approached with awe, care, and concern is surely on the same wavelength as the kinds of outlooks I’ve been examining—though his focus on a single species (us) seems a significant limitation. As an essay rather than a piece of philosophy, I want simply to draw things to a close. It seems apt to do so with another quotation from Adam Nicolson. Describing seabirds as “one of our imaginative reservoirs,” he says that they “come to visit us in our mundane existence, creatures from the otherworld temporarily and for a moment afloat in ours.” They are “a reminder of the beauty and mystery of existence.” Such reminders (of what should be obvious) seem increasingly necessary if we’re to learn to treat as the precious others they are the lifeforms with whom we share our fleeting moments of being.
Chris Arthur was born and grew up in Northern Ireland. After working as warden on a nature reserve beside the shores of Lough Neagh, he went to university in Scotland. He’s now based in St Andrews. His work has appeared in a range of journals, including: Fourth Genre, North American Review, Orion, Sewanee Review, and the Threepenny Review. Solstice Literary Magazine awarded him their 2024 Michael Steinberg Nonfiction Prize. His most recent book is What is it Like to be Alive? Fourteen Attempts at an Answer. For details of his work see: www.chrisarthur.org
