Exquisite Corpse
While procrastinating doing work, I started a youtube spree of this guy named Andrew Ucles. A lot of people use youtube to produce their own shows without a studio or a network. Usually that means stuff like comedy sketches, animations, or bagel recipes, or whatever. But this guy right here uses youtube to produce a gritty, word-art riddled, home video version of Steve Irwin Crocodile Hunter. He’s out there catching hawks with his bare hands and spearfishing eels while I’m sitting with my laptop looking at a “Navy Bike to Work Blazer” open on the other tab. As a begrudgingly squeamish individual, I’m in complete awe of the fact that this guy is grabbing deer poop and smearing himself in kangaroo blood just to touch an animal. HE’S LITERALLY PUTTING HIMSELF THROUGH ALL OF THIS SHIT TO PET SOMETHING.
I’m being mostly hyperbolic here for the sake of the joke. I get that it’s about being a part of nature and returning to a simpler time. It strikes a chord with me because I procrastinate even the things that I want to do. This hunky slab of man is out in the unforgiving sun for hours on end for a payoff that lasts for a disproportional amount of time. I’m just dumbfounded and jealous of this guy’s energy and passion.
The real reason why I wanted to talk about this guy is because of this one moment in this one video where he’s capturing a fox barehanded (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL38nvuKazM). At this point I’ve seen enough of his videos using carcasses as bait to be cerebrally conscious of how sad it is to see a dead body. The loss of a life is depressing because its the end of a potential. An incomplete promise. A river closed off and dried. But there’s this one part where he goes into the foxhole and I realize that it’s made out of a dead, hollow tree. And that got me thinking about how tree carcasses aren’t sad to us. In fact, they’re beautiful. We see a forest as a tossed salad of living trees and corpses but we don’t even bat an eye. Hell, even Disney movies romanticize dead trees. As plants they’re way out of the bounds in relation to our empathy radius. That’s why moral vegetarians are pretty much chill with murdering plants. They’re outside of our biological nuclear family, so fuck those guys, right?
But I think that there’s more to it than the fact that we don’t empathize with trees. I mean, we’re going as far as deeming their corpses as beautiful. I think it’s because a dead tree only leads to more life. Foxes make little homes underneath the bark, mushrooms sprout from the logs, squirrels store nuts in the dead hollows of the trunks. I think that trees are immune from the horror that’s usually an intrinsic aspect of death because their death creates a promise for new life.
I felt like that was worth sharing because I think that the shape of that idea could probably be true for a lot of other things.
