Being a Beast by Charles Foster Read Free Book Online

some sort of muscular sphincter just before the entrance to the nostrils that they can close up when they’re digging to stop the earth getting in. But we haven’t, and in that dry July, at least at the top of the tunnel, it was terrible. When they’re hunting snufflingly through the world, nose to the ground, badgers of course can’t use that merciful sphincter: they need the scent to reach their nostrils. And then they blast out the dust in heavy snorts. That, between sneezes, is what we did as we excavated. Tom was filling tissues with silica and blood for a week.
    We used head torches. Badgers have more photoreceptive rods in their retinas than we do and have a reflective layer in their eyes, called a tapetum, which makes their eyes shine in car headlights and which bounces uncollected photons back into the retina. Badgers squeeze more light from their world into their brains than we do. The world gives them the same; they do more with it. The near dark of our midday tunnel would have been dazzling to them.
    It was hard work, but eventually we were done. We crawled down to the river, lapped from a pool where leeches waved at our lips, and crawled back to our chamber, where we fell asleep, side by side and head to toe, as all good badgers do. It makes the best use of the space. Tom always moved in the night. ‘Feet in the face aren’t friendly’, he said.
    I dreamt: the florid, in-your-face dreams that lie just beneath consciousness. The sort of dreams you get in the tropics, when things in green and gold dance to the beat of the ceiling fan. Here, though, the beat was Tom’s heart against my head, and the tune was the low hum of the hill and the girl’s voice of the river.
    I don’t doubt for a moment that badgers have some sort of consciousness. One of the reasons is that I’ve seen them sleeping. There’s plainly something going on in their heads when they’re asleep. They paddle, yip and snarl; the full repertoire of expressions plays out on their faces. There is some sort of story being enacted. And what can the central character be but the badger’s self ? The misty land of sleep is where our own selves, so often suppressed, denied and violated, walk proud and have an uninterrupted voice.
    It’s no doubt true that the dreaming badger is processing data from the day or night just gone; is trying out, for evolutionarily obvious reasons, the way in which it might, in the light of the new data, respond to future challenges. But this dry formulation doesn’t elbow out the self: far from it. The self is the substrate of the concerns that are being addressed.
    I’ve often thought that sleep must be doing something like a defragmentation program on a computer. Files are being shifted from where the day has dumped them to the cabinets from which they can be more easily extracted. When I self-hypnotise, my eyelids flicker in hypnotism’s emulation of rapid eye movement sleep, and the flickering is just like the flickering of the little red light when the defrag program is running. Indeed, I can feel the defrag. But the analogy is not complete. A defrag program doesn’t need a story. Sleeping badgers have stories, and stories need subjects.
    What might it mean for an unconscious creature to dream? Indeed to sleep at all? What’s being lost when ‘consciousness’ is lost? What accompanies the creature into the world beyond the veil? If badgers aren’t conscious in a sense comparable to us, their sleeping smiles and winces are more inscrutable than consciousness itself. I prefer the lesser mystery.
    âœ´ ✴
    We awoke in stages (or became more evenly awake, since the wild won’t usually abandon you utterly to unconsciousness: there’s too much happening), to the rattling of a jay and, more fully, to the growling of an engine. It was Burt, with fish pie.
    â€˜Bogus, I know, but I won’t tell anyone.’
    In fact, it