Deer come out of the poplars just as day becomes night; they move in the blue air. Dropped grain near the house glistens in the hollow they've licked and stamped over the weeks into snow. Their bodies are dense with strangeness and are weightless, brief electric arcs on the eye, eloquent, two does faring well this winter, bow-sided, v-faced, coming down the slope through low willow and wild rose that holds the last of light. They stop repeatedly, their coloratura caution; their bodies seem the constant, quavering afterglow of this strained attention. Yet the gold of the grain pulls the goldenness of them. They come the last steps quickly along a path notched with their prints from nights before and bend to eat. Shadow soaks into them. One of them jerks up a look, then the other. They see me standing by the woodpile. They stare. I stare.
Consciousness walks across the land bridge of the deer's stare into the world of things. This is knowing. It tastes of sorrow and towering appetite. Their look seems a bestowal; I feel more substantial, less apologetic as a physical thing from having been seen. The traded look goes on in the building dark. There is no intention here, nothing of fairy tale of hagiography, animals lying down with the solitary, animals bearing messages, scrolls caught in the clefts of their hoofs. There is only wild seeing, the feel of it unimaginable: I am seen straight through (of that, no doubt) but cannot say how I am seen. Travelling back through the conductor of this gaze, something of me, a slant I'd never guess, enters them. Their look has a particularity, an inexpressibility, so highpitched it attracts myths. No wonder some say the darkness of the forest is a god.
When consciousness crosses the divide into the wilderness of what is there, it expects to find a point of noetic privilege: at last a clear view into the heart of things. But what it does find on the other side is further peculiarity, a new version of distance. The deer bend again to eat, then again nod up a stare. The world is a collection of oddnesses, things so gathered into themselves, so ruthlessly at home and separate, they seem to shine with difference --- poplar, these does, wild roses. The weirdness, unreachability of things, is not abolished by any sudden aberration of intimacy, fluked into being by a deer's look, but is intensified by it. The desire to feel otherness as selfhood, to be the deer seeing yourself, remains; for me it never leaves, the old residue of Paradise, that amicable common life desire seems to remember, the old bone it never quits gnawing. Nor does language's impulse to shrug off their distance vanish. Yet both are qualified by the unyielding unlikeness of specific things.
Looked at by the does in the falling light, I am "seen home", attended closer to the centre of what is, deked from a stance of noetic propriety, an heirloom of spirit soberly passed on to me, the mind's fine aloofness from bodies. The long stare is the occasion of a loss of cognitive rectitude, a debauch in the low life of objects. But at home through the other's look, the things of home seem even more deeply themselves, "known" are further enclaustered in idiosyncracy. The opposite of objective removal from the world is not subjective union but an intensely felt differentiation. The deer show out from around the word "deer" and they have no name.
The world is its names plus their cancellations, what we call it and the undermining of our identifications by an ungraspable residue in objects. To see it otherwise, to imagine it caught in our phrases, is to know it without courtesy, and this perhaps is not to know it at all. To see with presumption is only to note the effects of one's bright looks, the glimmering classifications, the metaphors, is merely to watch oneself confidently gazing. The Franciscan John Duns Scotus said individuality was intrinsically intelligible, though perhaps not to us in our present state --- in the body, after the Fall. Perhaps never, perhaps to no one. Perhaps individuality is not to be known, only lived with, each haecceitas helping to shape the other by its proximity. The desire to belong to what the deer belongs to, the wildness, the thereness, is mortified but remains true. You crane forward into the world in appetite and enter it in sorrow knowing that this good desire that casts you out of yourself is right and must not be lost but is necessarily and sharply frustrated.
- Tim Lilburn, from "How To Be Here?", in Living In The World As If It Were Home.
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