Eating Alone
On seeking certainties
A cooper’s hawk that lives in Fort Greene Park comes to the maple behind my apartment to eat its catches. I have seen it two times now in as many years. I’m tempted to regard these rare sightings as some kind of portent, imbued as they are with the mysticism of any encounter with wilderness. The first time I saw the hawk, early on a January morning, I was taken by surprise, having lived here for years without seeing any in the gnarled old maple behind my building. I’d seen plenty of squirrels and sparrows, and a proud woodpecker who works on the crown of a severed trunk that rises over my deck. But the hawks I’d only ever seen in flight, or else perched on the highest treetops or brownstone cornices, looking down in kingly survey. These sightings seemed a blessing of sorts, an invocation of some ancient logic. The hawks know when and where to be, and if I meet them, some part of me must know as well.
I had been sitting on my living room floor, legs crossed atop a folded blanket, propelled by some strange discipline that carried me from a rare fit of insomnia into the early morning. I can’t account for my wakefulness that day, for my deviation from the depressive groove I’d been so doggedly digging the last decade. But there I was, facing my window like an altar, like a television screen, and there was the hawk. Astonishment: the screen sucked me up like a portal, and in an instant I was a trespasser, no longer home, no longer safe, a stowaway on someone else’s vessel. A caller beckoned me to watch, and I watched, craning my neck like a child at the top of the stairs after bedtime.
It took a minute for my dumb domestic eyes to parse the scene as I peered through the dingy window into the gray morning. To see a hawk at eye level was remarkable, and doubly so to see it not just looking, but doing, doing something sacred and vicious in the thin mist of nautical dawn. It stood on a thick branch with its back to me, brown and white tail feathers bobbing as it hunched over the object of its efforts. What was it doing? Like a sudden answer, the hawk uprighted, yanking a thick skein of meat from the carcass of a pigeon it had pinned to the branch by its talons, a pitiful mass of feather and bone. It was eating. Eating and looking in turns, darting quick, jealous glances over its shoulder every few moments.
If it saw me there behind the window, it didn’t let on. I couldn’t have threatened its grisly work if I’d wanted, slow and soft as I am, cocooned in brick. The hawk bent and uprighted again, in its beak a tangle of intestine like a slippery beaded necklace still caught on inner tissue, tensing against the wrenching force. Where had I seen this before? A scene from some childhood story came to mind: the young heroes huddled, barely taller than the kitchen table, watching breathless as a wizened crone unzips the body of some small creature, drawing out the loops of viscera in her bare hands to peer at them in the candlelight. Augury in entrails. What notion of the future could be clawed from an animal’s gut? But it seems a fitting method for prophecy. Such nosiness should come at a gruesome cost.
Faced with that hawk’s fierce vigilance from the confines of my carpeted home that morning, I thought I must be more prey than predator. I feel like prey these days: tired from eight hours’ sleep, always hurrying to the next task and hardly keeping up, while the vague dreams I carry to bed each night remain undone, as far away as ever. I eat my meals alone, sitting on the floor at my coffee table, my dog watching from the couch with passive interest. He keeps an eye on things, but he won’t be bothered to solicit a claim. Our den is no place for a wild contest.
We’re both predators by birth, he and I, and especially him with his gaping mouth of varied teeth, each one an expert tool for its particular job. We are far from the killing and carving of our meaty sustenance, but his wildish nature is buried shallow in his fearsome jaw, and if it goes too long unused he gets restless, and sniffs around for something to gnaw on. He doesn’t mind me when he eats, doesn’t even mind if I move his bowl to make room for the vacuum—he just follows the food where it goes and keeps about his business. We eat together, alongside each other, but without any company of our own kind. He certainly doesn’t mind it, and nor do I, though company wouldn’t require me to fight and claw for my supper. Talk, I’ve found, spoils my appetite. Loneliness is epidemic, the experts say, but in this regard I must be more predator: I prefer to eat alone.
Guts are like anything else: once you’re looking for them, they’re everywhere. And I’m not the only one looking. The artist Amanda Crouch has made a practice of finding guts, which she documents in her work Extispicy in the Everyday, a collection of photographs centered on visual patterns which evoke intestinal topography: tangles of thread and wire, the swirling layers of pastry in an oreja cookie, a hole in the ground cast in stark sunlight. Extispicy—divination by means of inspecting entrails—is quite a well established practice. The earliest evidence dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, where Sumerian priests derived meaning from the innards of sacrificed animals.
The signs vary. Black spots on the organs, the curve and length of the colon, the coils of intestine like rings of a bisected tree trunk—all these could be read as portents both individual and collective. Guts which appeared in the likeness of Humbaba, the ancient protector of cedar forests, were a harbinger of impending revolution. Archaeologists theorize that the whorl of entrails at least partially inspired the labyrinthine spiral pattern that appears in many ancient cultures. We’ve developed quite a fascination with this pattern, and it seems we may have a penchant for rendering it in the world. We seek out a labyrinth outside of us since our feet can’t walk the one inside, and if we can’t find one, we build it. That such far-reaching futures and monumental designs could be derived from the animal body seems fitting. We are all pieces of some larger whole, and this final stretch of digestive tract we carry in our abdomens is the portal through which what we consume returns to the rest.
My own guts are uneasy. My appetite shifts beneath my feet. Presumptions I’ve come to rely on slide away like rootless soil. Food that used to pacify me sits bland and inert in my stomach; the old pastimes and fixations have staled and soured. My restlessness goes unremedied, and I pace the floors of my own labyrinth without intention, veering wildly in hopes of a way out. I’m stumbling with hands outstretched, careening into walls and doors, waiting in pitch black for a clarity I cannot summon by want alone. Or maybe I could, if only my want were directed at something I could name, a destination or a circumstance the pursuit of which would break my inertia. But the want is untold, it has no container and cannot be reduced to the terms of ambition. I’m awaiting an earthquake, a cataclysm that will swallow up the knotty sheets of undergrowth and leave behind a life unbidden, something bare and brazen that will stand in the sun.
At a loss, I’ve grasped at every flash of light that catches my eye. Should I move to a new city? Start a new career? Take a lover with his own ambitions to subsume my uncertainties? I play at divination, reaching wildly for signs that will relieve me of the waiting, that will anoint a clear path through the darkness. I follow each blinking lantern to its bitter, dead end, scrabbling desperately against the bedrock before I turn to wander again in the dark, black crescent moons of dirt packed under my fingernails. What gruesome cost would I pay to know my future, to be certain of my own heart?
This maze has no center—the only way out is through. I won’t walk the ground I’ve trod a second time. But the ground has surely been walked by others before me, the riddle puzzled a thousand times by a thousand pairs of feet, the dirt beat smooth by the myriad lives whose courses have converged into mine. Those footsteps wind a thread of blood across the floor, sometimes knotted or braided or worn to a single strand, but never broken. It is here I have no face, no eyes to note the red against the blackness. I can only feel, feel for the straining bloodline of fiber in the dirt, the wriggling prehensile softness of a knowledge deep below the winding roots.
I see the hawk in the maple again almost a year later. This time it’s afternoon, and I am cat sitting. I pick up the cat and carry him to the window, and we are both a rapt audience for ten minutes or so. The cat’s eyes dart knowingly, and I wonder what he might understand in the hawk’s jerky movements up and down, what he sees that I miss. The hawk looks back at us, it surely sees us, two predators encased in glass. It doesn’t mind. It holds the slippery sigil of the future in its mouth, and swallows it whole.