We’re All Wild Now
the modern urge to roar
“This is the jungle and I am the prey” — The Cleaners from Venus, “Tukani: Monday Is Grey”
Lately everywhere you look there’s a lion or tiger or leopard emblazoned on something, telling you to be fierce, reminding you to drink water. Wild predators decorate sheets, notebooks, mugs, water bottles, and art prints. There’s something compelling about these powerful creatures looking fed up, pleased with themselves, or a little bewildered. Of course It might just be that they’re cute. But what if all those pink and orange tigers gazing back at us from popular lines of household goods are actually tapping into something about the current human condition?
A popular comic Twitter account claims to be a wolf living life in a corporate job, feating on meat in the woods when no one is looking. Notawolf constantly worries about being found out. Any moment his human disguise could slip, and his colleagues will discover that he is not a regular guy, but a wolf, who would just as soon eat them as chat at the office holiday party.
Predator personas allow us to feel things, to feel fed up, to roar, to want to eat the rich — if only figuratively. They allow us to see feelings more clearly than on a complex human face, to magnify them. They also convey a deep exasperation with the status quo and a sense of belonging elsewhere.
Children have always loved animals. Animals are cute, and they seem somehow simpler than humans. The human world for children is alien. As a kid I kept notebooks full of things I didn’t understand, mostly song lyrics. I couldn’t understood what was so hard about making it through the night, for example, or why so many people were anxious about their babies, not to mention the bevvy of songs whose lyrics were not well enunciated. I was Harriet the Spy, but instead of solving crimes I was trying to put together how the world worked from little hints. Pantiliners seemed like very sophisticated adult things, for important adult purposes. It’s no wonder kids often feel more at home with representations of other species. It’s like they’re not quite human, yet. We might even say they suffer from a kind of imposter syndrome about really being people. Maybe they never lose it.
When I played House in kindergarten, I always insisted on being the dog. House was a boring game — I had no desire to emulate being a parent, and emulating a child seemed pointless since I already was one. Being the dog was my act of protest against the inanity of House as an exercise in make-believe. The appeal for other children might have been the chance of temporary role reversal. Like the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, House offered kids the chance to boss other kids around with impunity, as their parents did to them. Even that seemed alien to me; not because I didn’t have a family, but because the great child-adult power struggle was boring. Kids are always everywhere subject to the whims of their superiors. Playing House as a child is like getting together with your friends after work and playing Boss. It offers no escape. As the dog, I could safely ignore what the other characters were doing, or mess with their mundane intentions, or run away.
As a kid, I had both had enough of the hegemonic structure of my existence, and felt alienated from it. The only interest lay in imaginary worlds where none of that mattered, and hardly anyone was human anyway. My first obsession was with dogs, since they seemed more well-meaning and relatable than most humans. I wanted to rule over them, benevolently, but this rulership involved no actual exercise of power — it was more of an honorific. Do children love fantastical worlds because they offer an escape from their mundane world, or because they make more sense? It might be both.
Children live in a shifting wonderland of epistemic ambiguity: a world where fantastical kingdoms are both real and not real, where they sometimes seem so convincingly more real than life. Yet no one is fooled. Neuroscientists can try to explain what happens in the brain when they do this, philosophers can try to explain whether children do or do not really believe in dragons and unicorns, but perhaps there is something more general we can say about the appeal of fantasy worlds. In them we have control. As the author of my fantasy world, there need be no elements that do not make sense. We are all princes and princesses going on adventures looking for magic things: straightforward. To live in the real world, for children, is to live in a world full of alienating mysteries.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel described the absurd as a kind of contradiction between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the events of our lives themselves. Even if this is not quite right, but the idea of the contradiction seems essential to what makes something absurd. We have in us a sense of how things should be. When met with events that simply do not make sense, or do not fit our sense of rightness, those events seem absurd. For children, the absurdities often (but not always) feel lighter. They believe they will figure things out later — that the world will make sense. The truth is that they will figure things out, but absurdity never fully goes away.
As we get older the mysteries evaporate, but the alienation remains. The misfit between the actual world and oneself is usually the strongest in teenagers, for whom it often takes on a feeling of urgency and desperation. If the absurdity of the world for children is just a mild bewilderment by everything, the human condition for teenagers can often be forlornness. Or at least it was for me. The world makes more sense, but your life does not. You cannot find a life that feels right. Just as young people date a succession of people for whom something is right but much is not, they find a series of situations like this too. You can wonder what it takes to feel at home in the world.
There are certain absurdities we are (almost) all subject to. We are watching the planet change. Racism continues to motivate cruel behavior and results in gross injustices. We are trying not to die of viruses. Many of us are economically doing worse than our parents’ generation. Americans have trouble finding affordable healthcare. People’s jobs are exploitative. It can seem like the only thing to do in the face of these things is to growl.
While the 1950s American Dream might have been to have a house and a small family in the suburbs, the millennial dream might be retreat to a cabin in the woods, where the emails will never find you. In our woodland cabins we will be animals, not quite ferocious but not quite human, reading books and tending gardens and practicing various handiworks. Wilding in a world that makes sense; hiding from the world that makes us wild.
The poet Louis MacNiece wrote in “Plurality” that “man is only man because he might have been a beast.” Philosophers through the ages offer similar sentiments, stressing how important it is that we are not just animals, but rational ones — animals who can think both for its own sake and about our actions. Regular animals get a bad rap. Part of what thinking encompasses is recognizing when things are bewildering, recognizing the absurdities of life.
Zhaungzi dreamed he was a butterfly, lithe and fluttering, and Gregor Samsa turned into a giant cockroach; but these are small animals. Insects can hide or fly away. It seems distinctively contemporary to feel a secret kinship with lions, tigers, and bears. The masks are coming off and the state of nature peeks out from under the edges of society and ourselves. The French word farouche means wild and fierce as well as shy and awkward. It derives from the Latin word forasticus, meaning living or belonging outside. Being aware of all the little ways we don’t fit into society, or the ways society fails us, can make us feel a bit farouche. Some of this might be a reflection on our own imperfect fit with social norms, or with economic structures that we seem powerless to change. The darker reading is that society itself is coming apart, and our increasing awareness of this reminds us that we are inching closer to a wolf-eat-wolf world.
Whether or not society is falling apart, we are aware of ways it fails us, and we fail it — ways the fit is imperfect. Babies and animals are wildest when they can’t get what they need. Helplessness in the face of impossible situations is a kind of wildness. One way to cope is to rise up with another kind of wildness in response, to channel one’s inner lion. Or tiger, wolf, or screaming possum. From recognition of the distance between how things are and how they should be comes the human urge to roar.
