![]() ![]() The sense that we are being watched by a ‘wild’ animal (wildness is the key point here: a domesticated animal, according to Berger, cannot offer us its own narrative, because it occupies a place in ours), that we have been noticed by it, can be cause for shock. I understand the ‘companionship’ of which Berger writes to be the gaze of a being that reveals its individuality, its singularity to us. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.’ With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Just because of this distinctness, however, an animal’s life, never to be confused with a man’s, can be seen to run parallel to his. Man and animal are ‘similar, but not identical. ‘The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary’, wrote John Berger in the late 1970s in his essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ According to the British art critic, what we have in common with animals is birth, sentience and death. ![]() By Victor Micallef via Wikimedia Commons. The eye of an octopus, photographed in Cirkewwa in 2021. ![]() A glimpse of alien consciousness hidden in the pupil of an eye. Looking at me, she saw the same thing I saw looking at her. In that split second when we gazed at each other – a round pupil and a rectangular pupil – I was an animal being watched by another animal. The sight of her eye comes back to me along with the feeling that I have been noticed and recognised – as a creature with consciousness and a will, unpredictable and therefore interesting. And while this meeting of minds did not decide my life path, it had an effect on my diet and left a trace that I think will stay with me forever. My encounter with the octopus ended with us taking a walk together – she leapt from rock to rock and looked back to see if I was following her. He devoted the next five years to photographing whales on a 1:1 scale. Her eye was brightly lit Austin saw a calm awareness in it. Her fin weighs a tonne and is almost five metres long. He turned and looked straight into the eye of a female humpback whale. Photographer Bryant Austin recalls floating in the water when he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder. Perhaps in a way that was used by our common ancestor millions of years ago,’ she recounted on the radio programme ‘To The Best Of Our Knowledge’. ‘In that moment we communicated in a way that seemed to predate words. Instead, he lightly squeezed Jane’s hand. She was holding her hand out to him with some fruit, which he took, yet dropped it to the ground. ![]() Jane Goodall said that the most important experience of her life was the moment when David Greybeard, one of the chimpanzees she observed, looked her straight in the eye. What is it about encounters with wild animals that makes them stay with us forever? Aldo Leopold, father of the ecological concept in philosophy, recounted that one look into the eyes of a dying wolf – into its wild, green fire that, when extinguished, would take with it secrets known only to wolves and to the mountains – transformed him from a hunter into a staunch defender of the wilderness. Her eye widened, unveiling a pupil shaped like a straight horizontal line. I swam up closer, she was within arm’s reach. An amber eye glistened amid the soft red of her flesh. The octopus sat on a stone, wrapped in her own arms. ![]()
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