Living in an Alive World

A few months ago, I was on a hike with my friend Tom, who is in his 70s and has lived in the same small town in the Santa Cruz Mountains for 50 years. Tom and I walked single-file down a narrow set of switchbacks through a canyon carved by the creek that was also our destination. Our view was hemmed in by the steep, forested walls around us. It was one of those times when you’re much more in the mountains than on a mountain, and also one of those times where someone like me could very easily lose their orientation. But Tom knew at all times where we were.

Tom told me about a way of looking that he had learned while doing horseback trail maintenance in the area. In order to prevent an accident, like the horse slipping and falling off the side of a trail, you had to look in a similar manner to the way that, he claimed, a horse looked—keeping some focus about 10 feet in front of you, but also aware of everything in your peripheral vision. He called this “soft eyes.” When I tried it, I noticed the carpet of redwood duff and the backs of Tom’s shoes while trying to let in the tips of tanoak and huckleberry that were passing my head on the sides. Almost instantly, I felt that I was more in the place than I had been a moment before.

When I later looked up “soft eyes,” I saw that versions of the practice come up in mindfulness, martial arts, hunting, and, in the case of at least one player, hockey. One piece of advice I saw for practicing soft eyes was to pretend that you were looking “from the back of your head” instead of from the front. Try it yourself: Go outside, or go to a window, and focus very intensely on one thing at a middle distance. Then, let the rest of the scene in, near and far, including the far sides of your peripheral vision, and even your own body in the space.

Whenever I do this mental exercise, something physical happens: Besides the change in what I am actively seeing, I inevitably find that parts of my body—my brow, jaw, neck, and shoulders—relax. I find that I am breathing more slowly, or not at all. I realize that in my habitual way of looking, I have been straining, trying to get at something. Looking can be aggressive. It turns out this might be my default way of looking. When I shared this with a friend who is a visual artist, who uses soft eyes for painting and life drawing, she called this aggressive gaze one that is “preoccupied with theft or consumption.”

Try it yourself: Go outside, or go to a window, and focus very intensely on one thing at a middle distance. Then, let the rest of the scene in.

The difference between soft eyes and the implied contrast—perhaps we can call it “hard eyes”—took me back to something that the composer and sound artist Pauline Oliveros wrote about her practice of deep listening. Oliveros defined the practice as “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing.” For her, deep listening was something directed both outward and inward, to include the sound of “one’s own thoughts.” Oliveros wrote that she found deep listening necessary because we are culturally trained to do the opposite: to quickly analyze and judge, rather than to let something else in. The implication is that learning something like deep listening or soft eyes requires its own form of training.

In How to Do Nothing, I write a lot about art, mostly as a kind of attentional training ground. I mention my friend Scott Polach’s piece Applause Encouraged, in which audience members were ushered to a row of seats at the edge of a cliff, where they witnessed the sunset and then clapped before refreshments were served. I write about attending a performance of a John Cage piece that permanently changed how I hear by rendering me more attuned to the incidental sounds of a cityscape. James Turrell’s Sky Pesher is another such training ground, an enclosure designed to allow you to lean back and look at a square hole in the ceiling, a design that makes changes in the sky more accessible to the viewer, minute to minute and day by day. 

My other examples from the book are of observing the natural world, particularly through birdwatching, a practice that requires “doing nothing” but also using all of one’s senses in order to have an encounter with a mercurial being. I describe learning to use iNaturalist, an app that helps you identify plants, and how this changes the resolution of my attention to spaces that were previously just “a bunch of green.”

Yet I’ve come to feel that there’s something not fully developed in How to Do Nothing. That something has to do with who or what is on the other side of observation, as well as who or what is doing the observing. There are a few moments where I sort of hint at it. At one point, I write that, while looking at birds, I’ve gone from asking “What’s there?” to “Who’s there?” And I quote Gloria Bird, member of the Spokane Tribe of Washington State, recalling how her aunt once looked at what was left of Mount St. Helens and said, “Poor thing.” Bird’s aunt, she writes, “spoke of the mountain as a person.”

The difference between a what and a who has to do with time. In the case of birdwatching, you may first identify something by how it looks or sounds, but years later, still watching, you continue to see varied behaviors, varied responses. More familiarity just brings more questions—the birds become more mysterious, not less.

David Sibley’s What it’s Like to Be A Bird focuses on so-called backyard birds of North America: common species like crows, jays, and juncos. In his book, Sibley shows the step-by-step construction of a bushtit nest, something I’d noticed around my neighborhood. Writing about Sibley’s book for The Atlantic, I described seeing two bushtits on step one of the process. I had gotten excited; the birds were doing something! But then a squirrel got too close, and the bushtits started making an alarm call. 

Feeling caught up in the bushtits’ drama, as an observer wanting to intervene, reminded me of something surprisingly tender from Sibley’s introduction, in which he considers the agency of the birds he describes. “I realize this is enormously anthropomorphic,” he writes, “but how else do we explain the complex decisions that birds make every day, balancing competing needs such as finding food while minimizing effort and risk? Maybe the feeling an oriole has when looking at its finished nest is similar to the feeling human parents get when we look at a newly painted and decorated nursery. Maybe the chickadee ‘sleeps well’ after a good day of gathering and storing food for the winter.” 

More familiarity just brings more questions—the birds become more mysterious, not less.

There is more than idle curiosity at stake here. Something important is happening when Sibley tries to imagine what it’s like to be a bird, and it matters as much for him as it does, ultimately, for the birds. In his book Becoming Animal, David Abram asks, “Do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being surprised by other shapes of sentience?”

The key word there is “sustain.” This is a question about mutual enlivenment, or mutual survival. It suggests that something dies when the connection is severed.

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To get a better sense of what is actually at stake in perception of agency, let’s compare how three different science-fiction films portray the characters’ relationship to the nonhuman world.

The first is James Cameron’s The Abyss. In The Abyss, the US government sends a Navy SEAL team, made up of mostly men and accompanied by Dr. Lindsey Brigman, to investigate a downed submarine. Soon enough, the team members discover they are not alone in the deep sea. There is some kind of intelligence—not so much extra-terrestrial as sub-terrestrial—near their vessel. At one point, this intelligence forms a water column, a kind of tentacle, to explore the ship. The crew’s fear turns to curiosity as Brigman starts to communicate with the being. The water being responds to her presence and seems equally curious, briefly shaping itself to mirror her face.

Following this interaction, the water being moves to explore other parts of the ship, and the crew excitedly follows. But one member of the team, a trigger-happy meathead, reacts out of fear and mistrust, slamming the door shut on the water column. The door literally severs the connection between the water being and the team. The water splashes to the floor. 

In the end, the meathead’s attitude does not win out. The water being is an emissary of a much larger civilization, and the team’s survival ultimately depends on their halting interactions with it. What begins as a potential alien horror film becomes, to my mind, an interspecies love story.

The second film is Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, based on the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline. Sometime in the future, people escape their crowded and uninspiring physical environment by spending much of their time in the OASIS, a glittering virtual-reality simulation. It’s almost like The Matrix, except that everyone has chosen to be there. 

Early in the film, Wade Watts, the teenage main character, dons a headset and breathlessly describes the OASIS:

This . . . is the OASIS. It’s a place where the limits of reality are your own imagination. You can do anything, go anywhere . . . like the vacation planet! Surf a 50-foot monster wave in Hawaii. You can ski down the pyramids, you can climb Mount Everest . . . with Batman. 

As Watts describes this, the camera careens through a restless landscape of fragments, an AI-generated dream of physicality. Everything evoked in this universe—the height and history of the pyramids, the seasonally and topographically constrained activity of skiing, the physics of the ocean, the feeling of wind, even the very idea of distance—is an echo of an echo of the earthly.

Watching this scene, and much of the film, exhausts me. I feel as though I’m caught in an eddy once launched by the momentum of a stream, now cut off and curling back in upon itself, endlessly recycling whatever is left of Abrams’s “other shapes of sentience.” As the film itself ultimately acknowledges, the OASIS is dangerously absorbing, unrelated to the rest of life. In the novel on which the movie is based, Wade talks about a massive marketing campaign to promote the launch of the OASIS, whose ads show “a lush green oasis, complete with palm trees and a pool of crystal blue water, surrounded on all sides by a vast barren desert.” That desert, it is implied, is physical, embodied experience on Earth.

The third film is Hugo Lilja and Pella Kagerman’s Aniara, which, like Ready Player One, is set in the future. In Aniara, it is implied that humans have rendered Earth largely uninhabitable; they travel to Mars on ships that the filmmakers modeled off of ferries between Sweden and Finland. “You’ll want for nothing,” an on-board astronomer tells passengers, boasting of the ship’s algae-produced air, 21 restaurants, spa, and tanning salon.

Toward the beginning of the film, however, the ship is knocked off course. Staff reassure passengers that they will soon be back on track but, as time passes, it becomes clear that the ship cannot course-correct. It is headed toward oblivion.

As fear and despair spread, people begin crowding into one of the ship’s amenities: a virtual-reality room where people can lie down and immerse themselves in personal memories of natural scenes on Earth. But as more and more people visit, the AI that runs the room crashes because it cannot handle the accumulated grief and guilt of its visitors. 

Much of the drama in this plot unfolds between two lovers, one of whom manages to muster a sense of purpose for most of the film. Toward the end, the purposeful character creates an electronic image of an Earthly waterfall that can be projected outside of the windows of the ship. The ghostly, glowing image appears at a monumental size, bathing the faces of those who look out at it in a blue-green light. But for all the character’s effort, it is a woefully inadequate substitute for the real thing. No one smiles when they look at this image, which appears only as a monument to what has been lost forever.

Placed side by side, these films illustrate something about our relationship to those other shapes of sentience. In The Abyss, a mysterious earthly intelligence is still present, and we’re trying to make contact, even if such contact is fragile and threatened from all sides. In Ready Player One, some earthly presence might still be there, but we’re only making contact with echoes of it. In Aniara, the entire natural world is simply absent, a fading, unsustainable memory of something once alive. Not even its echo speaks to us. With its absence comes abject horror, meaninglessness, and a total loss of humanity.

The limits of human reality have always been human perception, itself bounded in part by imagination.

In Byung-Chul Han’s book The Agony of Eros, the titular agony is about a missing Other, who is always disappearing behind the screen of consumption and egocentrism, to which I would add anthropocentrism. Without this Other, Han writes, we find ourselves in the “inferno of the same.” Han’s description of this inferno sounds like the insular world of the OASIS: “The world appears only as adumbrations of the narcissist’s self, which is incapable of recognizing the Other in his or her otherness—much less acknowledging this otherness for what it is.” What we perceive to be the other “degrades into a mirror of the One—a mirror affirming the latter’s image.”

Han then contrasts this with Eros, a desire for true encounter with the Other. His description sounds like Brigman’s experience touching the water being in The Abyss, or her first glimpse of its glowing underwater civilization: “Eros . . . makes possible experience of the Other’s otherness, which leads the One out of a narcissistic inferno . . . A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love—which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength. This feeling is not the achievement of the One, but the gift of the Other.”

What is this gift? I would say that it is life in a world of totally dispersed creativity—an infinity of ways of being in the world. It is significant that The Abyss does not take place off-world but within it, in its very depths. It is not set in the future, but in the present. And the non-terrestrial intelligence is clearly modeled on existing forms of deep-sea life. It’s also significant that during the first moment of encounter, the point of view switches between that of the crew and of the water column, with watery film effects to emphasize the different perspective. “In here” becomes “out there,” and back again. The encounter is a gift that extends each person’s perception and imagination.

A similar switch happens later on in the film, and it’s just as important. Brigman and Bud, her estranged husband, need to swim from a flooding vessel back to their base, but only have one suit. Brigman decides to intentionally drown and go into hypothermia, hoping that her systems will slow down and she can be resuscitated later. Bud, wearing the suit, drags her through the water back to the base, where he and the rest of the crew attempt to revive her. Brigman is unresponsive for a long time, and then is declared dead. There is a point at which Bud, still trying to resuscitate Brigman, appears delusional to the rest of the crew. 

At the moment Brigman is pronounced dead, the film switches its point of view. It shows viewers what Brigman would be seeing: the faces looking down at her, the oxygen mask being resignedly pulled away. We are seeing the point of view of a supposedly dead being. What brings Brigman back to life is Bud’s refusal to believe that she is dead, that no one is looking out from that point of view, that no one is home.

The two times that The Abyss changes perspective—to that of an unfamiliar, non-human intelligence, and that of a supposedly dead person—suggests, to me, a crisis of perception but also an ethic of resuscitation. To be alive is to live in an alive world. But to live in an alive world requires that we can perceive the Other as alive, that it registers to us as something with its own presence.

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Of course, I’m using terms like “non-human” out of current necessity. The truth is found in the center of the encounter: Everything about what it means to be human is entangled with everything else on Earth. “I like the term ‘interspecies communities,’” writes Kim TallBear, a Sisseton-Wahpeton scholar. However, she writes, the term “does not capture all of the beings I see myself as in relation with.” TallBear points to anthropological work on northern Indigenous people who considered animals as well as natural objects and forces—“trees, stones, thunder”—to be sentient. Such choices, TallBear writes, “are ethical choices and are key in this project of constituting more democratic relations and worlds.”

When I re-watched The Abyss, I noticed that when Brigman touches the water being, someone in the background whispers, “Is it alive?” This question is maybe the best illustration of what I mean when I say there is more at stake in perception than idle curiosity. There is a certain form of un-detached attention and observation that cannot allow objects to remain “out there” but rather makes them into subjects and neighbors. Seen this way, we are not actors and objects in empty time; instead, we make time in every interaction, both with what we would traditionally call “alive” and with that which we would not. The present is no longer the result of determinism but response, not mechanistic reaction but creative intra-action. 

It is as important to stop and smell the flowers as to know that flowers can smell. In What a Plant Knows, Daniel Chamovitz writes, “Plants know when their fruit is ripe, when their neighbor has been cut by a gardener’s shears, or when their neighbor is being eaten by a ravenous bug; they smell it. Some plants can even differentiate the smell of a tomato from the smell of wheat.” But problems of language force Chamovitz to write a caveat: 

Our dictionary’s definition of “smell” excludes plants from the discussion. They are removed from our traditional understandings of the olfactory world because they do not have a nervous system, and olfaction for a plant is obviously a nose-less process. But let’s say we tweak this definition to “the ability to perceive odor or scent through stimuli.” Plants are indeed more than remedial smellers.

Plants also listen. In one case, scientists who played three minutes of bees’ buzzing to primrose flowers found that they produced sweeter nectar. To read an explanation of how plants smell or hear is to consider a world interwoven by language and perception outside our very narrow human range. 

I once attended a wedding where a peak of the Klamath Mountains was visible in the background, and the wedding officiant asked us to applaud the mountain.

In Ready Player One, Watts says that the OASIS is a place where the only limits of reality are your own imagination. It strikes me that this has always been true: The limits of human reality have always been human perception, itself bounded in part by imagination. In Sibley’s book, we learn that albatross can smell something from up to 12 miles away, and that some birds’ visual processing is so much faster than ours that our movies would look like slideshows to them. 

I have always been fascinated with these kinds of human attempts to reckon space and time differently than we’re used to. Sometimes it’s something as simple as a demarcation. For example, there’s a spot in Point Reyes, on the coast of Northern California, where an offset fence near the San Andreas Fault allows you to see the approximately 16 feet that the ground moved during the 1906 earthquake, in the same process that has moved land hundreds of miles and continues to do so.

Last summer I learned the scientific term quadrat, which refers to an area of habitat, usually one square meter, that is used repeatedly in order to study the population and distribution of plants and animals in an area over a period of time. Quadrats remind me of James Turrell’s square through which we view the sky, just applied to the ground or the seafloor instead.

What I’m describing here are different technologies of seeing—or, as I’ve called them elsewhere, “perceptual prostheses.” They have been my obsession for as long as I can remember, and even before I really understood why. As a child, I was drawn to both satellite imagery and microscope images; as an adult, I spent many years producing collages of things cut out from Google Earth. 

In retrospect, this obsession had to do with reaching to meet something, some other way of seeing. The human perception of reality is just that—human. It exists among so many others. In order to move beyond the limits of our habitual ways of perceiving, especially the impatient judgement that Pauline Oliveros diagnosed, we need prostheses like the fence and the quadrat, or even a pair of binoculars. 

We might need things to be slowed down, as I was reminded recently by an episode of the podcast BirdNote, “What the Pacific Wren Hears.” The producers first play the song at the speed that we hear it, but then slow it down to reveal a whole other universe of variation. Or we might need things sped up, in the form of time-lapse, in order to see something like a plant exploring, responding to, and pushing on its environment. Watching this time-lapse of a bean sprout, it becomes harder to deny that the plant has a past and a future, to believe that plants are somehow just simply “there.”

But it would be a mistake to end here, to read this as being only about the plant, and not the watcher of the plant. I recognize something in this translation. Its movement is a reminder that I, too, am not just simply here. I, too, am responding, as life does to other life.

Even if such a response feels buried in the debris of habit and everyday life, it is at least familiar from childhood. In a study of plants and media in the early 20th century, Janet Janzen describes the effects that time-lapse images of plants had on children in the 1920s. She quotes a French author’s recollection of a screening where “the animal-like movement of plants projected in time lapse were felt so intensely by children in the audience that they were then compelled to copy the plant movement.” The French author writes: 

A ‘fast motion’ documentary documented the germination of a bean [. . .] At the revelation of the intentional and intelligent movement of the plant, I saw children get up, imitate the extraordinary ascent of a plant climbing in a spiral, avoiding an obstacle, groping over its trellis: ‘It’s looking for something! It’s looking for something!’ cried a little boy, profoundly affected. He dreamt of a plant that night, and so did I.

I remember a pair of red-bellied woodpeckers I observed on a trip to visit my boyfriend’s family on the East Coast. Because I am from the West Coast, I had never seen a red-bellied woodpecker before, and it was hard for me to contain my excitement as I heard them call to each other. My instinct was to make the sound back at them, and I probably would have if the park hadn’t been crowded and I wasn’t trying to make a good impression on my boyfriend’s parents. But a child who happened to be walking behind us did respond, as children quite naturally do.

The children’s bean dance also reminded me of Repose, a 2021 performance choreographed by Moriah Evans for Rockaway Beach in New York. On an overcast day, 21 dancers moved from Beach 86th to Beach 110th Streets in Queens over the course of six hours. For Repose, Evans asked dancers to mimic the actions of beachgoers, become as inanimate as a stone, or do something called “crawl rock roll position.” Interviewed by The New York Times, Evans said that her original fantasy had been “to have 100 naked bodies on the beach kind of hanging out the way sea lions hang out on the cove . . . Just being in a state of repose.” The dance was not being performed for an audience in the traditional sense. “I say this as a kind of wish for the work,” Evans said. “We’re actually doing this for the waves, for the horizon, for the sky, for the sand, for the birds that pass by.”

For me, watching even the documentation of this performance is emotional. As it should be. I once attended a wedding where a peak of the Klamath Mountains was visible in the background, and the wedding officiant asked us to applaud the mountain. He said it half-jokingly, but it left me wondering why we don’t applaud mountains, and why we don’t say anything back to them. I have never been able to look at the Santa Cruz Mountains dispassionately, without a kind of longing, even when I’m very close to them, and I believe that I would not be myself without the shape of the Butano Ridge.

I think this is why Byung-Chul Han spends so much time in The Agony of Eros simply talking about love—not as something that “generate[s] pleasant feelings” but as something that “invades and wounds us.” It doesn’t leave us unscathed. It unsettles us, but in doing so, it also keeps us from dying to the world. The perception of aliveness is part of what keeps us alive.

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All this brings me back to the ultimate perceptual prosthesis, and the very thing that David Sibley apologizes for: the ability, or the propensity, to anthropomorphize. Anthropomorphism is often associated with anthropocentrism, in the sense that it suggests humans projecting humanness onto nonhuman entities. 

Even Charles Darwin couldn’t help himself. In a study of earthworms, he observed that something more than chance determined the part of the leaf each worm would seize on before dragging it into its burrow. Substituting paper triangles for leaves, he found that the worms were “able by some means to judge which is the best end by which to draw triangles of paper into their burrows.” Looking closely enough for long enough, Darwin concluded that not all of the worms’ actions were simply reflexive reactions. They could not be automata. 

In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett describes the way that Darwin “anthropomorphized his worms”: 

[H]e saw in them an intelligence and a willfulness that he recognized as related to his own. But the narcissism of this gaze backfired, for it also prompted Darwin to pay close attention to the mundane activities of worms, and what came to the fore through paying attention was their own, distinctive, material complexity. 

For Bennett, Darwin’s study is an example of how anthropomorphism, which initially seems to be about us, can actually be a catalyst for seeing something beyond ourselves. It is a view into a world not of simple subjects (us) and objects (everything else), and it enables a different kind of listening, the consideration that something or someone is a speaker in its own way.

In the end, it may not be completely different from listening to each other. In a wonderful Bay Nature article about whether salamanders have feelings, Brandon Keim quotes an animal behaviorist and environmental studies professor who allows that we can never know the perspective of another being. But, the professor adds, “that is also true of you and me: I will never fully inhabit your perspective. And that impossibility doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. Quite the reverse: It would be offensive if I refused to take your perspective merely for a lack of ever being able to know it perfectly. The trying is what matters.” 

Keim ends his article with a series of questions: What would it feel like to be able to grow back a limb like salamanders do? Do arboreal salamanders “feel a yearning to climb”? Do they have friends? Citing studies that frogs above a certain age have very high survival rates, he wonders, “Can an elderly amphibian be wise?” Unable to come to any conclusions, he writes that “[t]o even consider these possibilities, however wrong or speculative our answers might be, is to acknowledge life’s richness. It is an exercise in humility, a recognition that the limits of human knowledge are not the limits of reality. It is an act of kinship.”

I am softening my eyes to include everything around them. I do this for so long that eventually some boundary seems to fall away.

For reasons like these, listening is more interesting to me as a beginning than as an end. Listen deeply enough, and the act becomes more than a collection of impressions. It can instead demonstrate a world with far more participants, and participation, than you had ever before imagined. It is the door to a dialogue between earthly entities. And it opens onto a world that I personally find far less lonely.

But deep listening can entail more than just living in a richer world. As George Tinker, an Osage scholar, points out with some irony, there could hardly be anything more anthropocentric than humans believing that “everything in the world works differently from themselves.” If wanting to ascribe feelings to the nonhuman world is an anthropocentric crime, the opposite—failure to ascribe feelings to animals, or to respond creatively to plants—seems much worse, entailing an inert, clockwork universe of mechanistic automata, in which humans are the only conscious actors. The subject-object relationship of humans to the rest of the world has played no small part in the climate crisis in which we now find ourselves. If we are to course-correct this ship, whether and how we perceive the participants among us is undoubtedly one piece of the puzzle.

We first celebrated Earth Day in 1970, two years after the publication of Earthrise, the first color photo ever taken of the earth from space. This image, of course, was an enormous spur to the modern environmental movement. It represents a stretching of the imagination, a vision of our earthly surroundings from an utterly non-human perspective. Decades after taking it, William Anders said, “We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth.”

I ask you to imagine zooming into this picture, toward the North American continent, riven by a ridge called the Rocky Mountains. Go to a last-minute addition, geologically speaking, on its Western edge, specifically to a small set of mountains below the San Francisco Bay. Zoom into a river in that crumpled landscape, not far from the Butano Ridge—a river that empties into the Pacific Ocean. 

There, on the sand of its banks, you might see me. It is late afternoon and I am looking at the trees across the river, listening to them, trying to understand. I am softening my eyes to include everything around them. I do this for so long that eventually some boundary seems to fall away. In place of entities, all I sense is motion: of the air through the redwood needles and my own lungs; the water pushing past the sandstone cobbles, compressing the air and hitting my inner ear; the electricity on its pathways through my brain, reproducing the scene inside my head; the sun disappearing behind the ridge, the subsequent cold that I feel on my skin, the gravity keeping me on the banks. Something comes back to me, if only very briefly. I have set out to explore the trees and instead discovered—no, not quite myself. And not the individual trees, either. It’s something in between, almost like gossamer: a dialogue of earthliness. 

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Jenny Odell is a writer and artist based in Oakland, California. Her work includes the books How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. She is currently working on a book about repair. 

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin