I open the window and place a tripod with a stereo microphone on the balcony below it. I run the microphone cable through the adjacent fan, plug in the connectors for the left and right channels, close the window quietly, and with the recorder on my lap and headphones on, I sit down on the edge of the made-up bed. I slightly increase the sensitivity on both inputs and press the record button. And then I just listen with my eyes closed.
It's a late September Tuesday, not long after dawn.
What I hear through my headphones is a fairly standard urban soundscape. A tram rumbles along on the left – the bogies rattle on the tracks, the tracks pulsate in the stone pavement; metal scrapes against metal and a sharp, groaning sound cuts through the street. On the next balcony, a neighbor is watering flowers from a tin watering can; water splashes in a metal container, flowing between the flower boxes; I imagine the scent spreading piercingly from the damp clay across the balcony. Early female laughter rings out from an open window. A gust of wind sets off a chime on the opposite side of the courtyard. On the ground floor, someone opens a plastic container and throws out the garbage; the opened lid hits the side of a trash can. In the distance, a train is honking its horn as it arrives at Holešovice railway station. And now the police siren wailed, a sonic knife that cuts through the city's sonic smog - that colorless sludge of thousands of engine noises, humming air conditioners, appliances and generators, reminiscent of the sound of the surf or a waterfall - like the voice of a piccolo in a hundred-piece orchestra.
But there are also many small ones sounds, sounds barely audible, delicate and difficult to classify. Is it my imagination, or is a wood-rotting larva gnawing through the wood of the old battered stool? And who Did he just buzz right past the microphone? Maybe I'll be lucky enough to record a long-billed woodpecker that visited our balcony – regardless of the creeping morning chill – at about the same time last week. And yes, there are birds too – quick-blooded, quick-talking, musical like few others. Here above the Letná rooftops, birds are omnipresent. Pigeons, kestrels, magpies, jackdaws, ravens, jays, goldfinches, tits and recently also stretching chickadees and siskins – a sign that summer is definitely behind us. Every now and then, a blue tit or a great tit will fly to our makeshift feeder; its beaks dig out nuts from the plastic net; its talons lightly tap the railing; its volatile wings ruffle the supple air.
And then there are their voices: whatever the birds do, they immediately set to music, translating it into a form of musical expression. Even though I don't hear the same things they do (my life is depressingly slow compared to them), even though I don't understand what they say (my language is depressingly unmusical compared to them), their voices sound close and familiar to me. I know that when I listen to them, I listen to life in its purest form, ancient and sacred. I know that anything This morning I hear outside the windows, starting from cars with their people and ending with birds with their music, is a manifestation of life.
It's a late September Tuesday, not long after dawn. And the city is spreading its sleepy wings.
When it comes to cities, the usual story goes like this: We have mountains and we have forests (deserts, seas, oceans…) and these are the domain of the wild and uncultured – in other words, grown in its own way. And then we have cities as the antithesis of everything brutally wild, the domain of the human, the outpost and bastion of civilization. Cities! Here we can truly be human. Here ours and the wild (and the evil with it) are gone. In such a story, there is a deep chasm between the city and the surrounding world – culture and nature. This once had a material dimension in the form of walls. Although their purpose was primarily defensive, they also expressed the desire to separate themselves from the inscrutable enlightenment. The walls delimited the precinct of order; that which is under control (and vigilant surveillance) from that which is disorderly, chaotic and downright dangerous; the horizon of the wider more-than-human world. Today, walls are no longer built around cities (unless we count their modern form as the belt of uniformly looking warehouses, wholesalers, fast food outlets and gas stations that hold cities in a choking commercial grip); However, physical walls still act as phantom barriers in the collective mind. Whether we like it or not, we still tend to see cities as spaces that somehow stand out from the surrounding world, that form a kind of wild a world-for-the-world, where the inhuman has no place. Most of us still think this way: The city, by its very nature, defies nature; it is at odds with the natural world, it denies it. If you are looking for nature, look elsewhere.
But as can be seen from the introductory listening description, ordinary sensory experience provides us with a more colorful picture; a picture in which the human (and now let's ask what it actually is) human?) is conspicuously dominant, but one that would be desperately incomplete if it did not include the wildly throbbing worlds beyond its supposed borders. Let us underline the supposed three times here. The city has clearly defined boundaries in the zoning plan, but when I walk out of it, I see none, I experience none; only one type of landscape – with all the opportunities and risks it brings – slowly flows into another. There is no threshold, no break.
Go to the window. Look out. Listen. What do you see and hear? Is it only the sound of passing vehicles, or do you hear something else? Are the dry seeds of the Asian clownfish and the leaves of the jerlin rustling under your windows? Can you see the quacks flying in from the river? The image of the city that our senses paint for us is not closed, surrounded by a rampart or a moat, but open and permeable; one would like to say, sharedMy hearing, my sight, my thinking body – lively in conversation with the world – receives a clear message: the city belongs to life, it is the home of the human being. and of non-human life, and is itself a peculiar expression of intricate biological processes and rhythms. Like a snail's shell. Like a porcupine quill. And if there is any boundary, any seam or caesura between the (so-called) cultural and the (so-called) natural, then it is certainly not to be found in the physical world.
Our (and certainly yours) bathroom or toilet is the abode of light-shy fish. We share the bedroom and kitchen with ant explorers (originally balcony conquerors), who gratefully collect anything that accidentally ends up on the floor while cooking or dining. An empty Scrabble box was chosen as her nest by a solitary handywoman; day after day she returned through the living room window to continue building a clay chamber, into which she eventually brought a paralyzed spider and laid an egg (yes, you guessed it right, the spider served as food for a hungry larva that later hatched from the egg). And I'm not talking about all the unexpected flowers and unexpected types of wild grass that grow in our balcony flower beds throughout the year, even though no one has sown them.
Cities are not surrounded by an airtight force field that would separate them from the outside world. We are connected. The bond is water, air, sunlight; the world-out there flies to us on the wind, sits outside our windows and makes no great distinction between whether it finds itself in the gentle shade of a loess ravine or on the roof of a First Republic apartment building. A city is a place to live like any other. A city, the American novelist Tommy Orange would say, belongs to the land. And because this is the case, it is possible to establish a deep and lasting bond with the natural world in cities all over the globe – from Prague to Tokyo.
I can imagine what some of you will say. All of this is nice, but why do so many of us in cities – and especially in large ones – feel that “nature” is missing here? Why do I feel like I have to go outside the city, and preferably somewhere very far away, where the city is just a fading memory, in order to spend some time with “nature”? To a certain extent, I understand such a complaint. In the middle of the desert, it is not difficult to intensely experience the presence of a more-than-human world – human influences are suppressed to a bare minimum, or at least not noticeable. In cities, however, such experiences are rare – and the path to them, despite the multitude of disturbing influences (light, noise, but also olfactory pollution), is not easy. It is as if we are constantly looking through several opaque layers, trying to drink through unbreakable glass. So many imaginary walls stand between us.
It is all the more important to remember that even in cities, “nature” has not disappeared, that it is present and within reach every day. After all, many cities today are even more biologically diverse than the surrounding commercial landscape, devastated by the desire for quick profit. If we therefore have the impression that “nature” is something unattainable (and luxurious) for a city dweller, it is not so much because it is inaccessible in space and time – that it is missing in cities for some reason, but because we ourselves have distanced ourselves from “nature” in our minds; that we have decided to believe the story in which our own (falsely unique) culture excludes us from the natural world, that we think of our own nature (nature in miniature) as something unnatural, unnatural. As a result, cities are also unnatural as a biome created by humans (and colonized by non-human life).
Let's try to replace this story with a new one, in which distance dissolves into kinship, estrangement into proximity. Even if I find myself among sky-high skyscrapers and can't see a single living thing, a single tree, for miles around, I don't stop being in touch with the natural world - with myself, with my living center. Nature is like the weather - you can't think and act (or be in any other way) outside of it, you can't escape its moods and changes, its influences; you can't undress from it if it's uncomfortable for us. I can be beautifully hidden from the torrential rain in a heated hotel suite, but the weather outside still touches me and affects my mood, my days; it still reflects in my inner weather.
But maybe the problem is elsewhere.
The city seems to be too general a term to evoke the diversity of living forms that most cities conceal within themselves. Generalizing terms have an unfortunate tendency to absorb diversity; they are like a black hole that devours the light of concreteness. They may point the way to a fundamental unity and wholeness (look, all of this is life, color, and the world at once), but at the same time they obscure the richness of the forms that make up this unity. When I say that birds sing, I am describing a certain objective experience – in other words, I am not saying anything misleading in principle. At the same time, however, all species diversity is lost in such a statement (do nightingales, reed warblers, warblers, tits, do they sing?), not to mention the originality and extensive semantic richness of what we call birdsong for the sake of communication – and sometimes also for the sake of simple convenience. Generalizations lack a specific dimension, a specific experience; they are too abstract, too large; their scale suffocates imagination, thought and feeling. If we remain with them alone, all the concrete details that allow us to experience the city in an expanded way will disappear: steppe locusts with smurf-blue wings on a dusty, slatey slope, clusters of brightly blooming goldenrods, which are hit by the harsh midday light, a young buzzard circling over a desolate orchard, lichens on an old hawthorn, a green lizard under rotting sackcloth, a flock of martins on fermenting rowanberries. It is precisely such small encounters that remind us that the city is a living model, whose architect and weaver is life itself. It is precisely such small encounters that move us closer to living truth cities.
So we need the very word “city” to evoke a different image than it has so far; to become wilder, in a way, something more. So that, in addition to endless waiting in line at the office, squeezing in the crowded subway, dodging passing vans and shouting over rumbling trucks, we also imagine cobalt kingfishers on the river, a stilt fishing in the foamy stream, a shorebird feeding its young – in short, all the life that has voluntarily chosen the city as its home. And even better this one a specific kingfisher, which I regularly see in Prague's Stromovka, this one a specific squirrel from the Jirásek Weir in České Budějovice, these concrete shorebirds from Prague's Podolí. They all inhabit and share the urban space with us, they are our neighbors. By filling the city with concrete animals and plants in our imagination, we break through the mental barriers that surround this word in the human imagination, limit it and pre-lend it a certain shade. The city suddenly becomes something more: a common living spaceWe will cease to understand it exclusively from a human perspective, it will cease to be species-exclusive; we will rid it of its inhuman facelessness.
What is the easiest way to achieve this? We must accommodate another experience cities – literally. We must concretize our experience of urban space, make it tangible, anchor it in our senses – only then will it appear to us as inherently alive – and only then can it inspire us to a different, life-supporting (and non-human culture) development of cities. When I say the word “city”, I feel how difficult it is for me to imagine the vibrant community of human and non-human resonance that every city actually is. It is difficult for me to touch the city in this way, to experience it – perhaps even to be wounded by it. A city without concrete experiences with non-human life – concrete looks into non-human eyes, a city untrodden, unexplored on one’s own skin and perceived only from behind car windows or from the inside of sanitized offices, is an abstract, flattened, empty city. Achieving a broader and truly living understanding of the city is only possible to the extent that we expose ourselves to the city, give it a chance; if we merge with its everyday flow. The only way to know rain is to get soaked to the bone. Anything else is just wordplay.
The first step is simple. Walk through the city. Walk through the city regardless of the season. Day and night. Listen, look, smell. Don't be afraid to get down on your knees, maybe even get a little dirty. Look for the city within the city. Its rejected side. Go off the beaten path. Walk on the edges of the familiar, look under the stones. Visit places that are only anonymous places for others, overgrown and unkempt, yet breathing, free. Try to imagine what lies beneath the concrete; go as deep as you need to. The spirit of the urban hive never sleeps.
I try to show something similar during sound walks (walks in the field, during which you actively listen to your surroundings and your own body) and also in the sound recordings that I make in various places around Prague and České Budějovice. Sound is a particularly useful sensation for these purposes, because it reveals the presence of life even where a cursory glance tells us that there cannot be any. Listening costs nothing. It can be practiced anytime, anywhere. And just like improvising in the pentatonic (five-tone) scale, you cannot, so to speak, miss a beat when listening; the only possible barrier is the fear of the unknown, the inability to relax. Any – even if only briefly – conscious listening is beneficial and leads to a deeper understanding of the world around us, my relationship with it.
I repeatedly talk about listening here because it is currently my main interest, but practically any activity with a focused engagement of the bodily senses significantly shifts us towards a different experience of urban space; and in fact, any time spent in urban terrain. I know from my own experience how extremely beneficial urban birdwatching, for example, is. This is mainly due to the comprehensive view of the natural world that birdwatching inherently requires. Getting to know a bird (beak, as a close friend of mine would beautifully say) means being able to distinguish it not only by appearance (which also changes over time), but also – and in some situations exclusively – by voice and sound expressions, by favorite environment, time of year, but also trees and woody plants, the time of their flowering, and so on. If it is true that we are ecological beings even without acting so-called ecologically (that is, environmentally considerate and conscious), and this is purely because we are entangled in a network of earthly (and in a broader sense cosmic) ecological relationships, then birds are the ideal animal species for learning about this important fact. We cannot truly know a being without knowing the network of relationships in which its life unfolds and is realized; which revives. I am hard to understand without knowing my family background, my lineage. I am hard to understand without knowing the sweet-smelling soil that I kneaded and turned with my bare hands as a child. The colored dust that covered my face, clung to my nails. Without the music of the heart that accompanied me from my mother's womb. The stars and planets that were present at my birth.
It all starts with attention. But in order to be able to convey our experiences, we also need an adequate language to express them. A language that would be able to encompass and evoke the often stunning richness of urban life (and our perceptions). Such a language will always be only approximate (if we are to speak about the world at all, to bear witness, if we are to through us (to grasp the world somehow, to know ourselves through language, we must inevitably commit a certain degree of simplifying violence on it), but this should not discourage us from such attempts. The search for a new language will certainly not be easy – we have many obstacles ahead of us, both material and immaterial. But I believe that it should not come exclusively from one source. The truth about the world can only be revealed to us by a multitude of mutually complementary languages-perspectives: as when the objectifying language of science meets the rejuvenating language of poetry, playful as the flight of a swallow.
According to Chickasaw poet and essayist Linda Hogan, we must learn to rekindle the reverence for life that we so desperately lack today. We can start by seeing the city as a place where human and nonhuman life can mutually benefit and fulfill their purposes. Every time I see a small child playing in the park, pointing out to an indifferent parent a jay in a treetop or a grasshopper in the grass, I think it is not too late to re-enter a sacred dialogue with life. Sympathy for nonhuman life (let us call it noble) biophilia) we all carry within us from birth – and perhaps even long before – without distinction. It’s just that our shared cultural environment does everything it can to nip this sensitivity in the bud. Understanding the city as a community of life (in the broadest sense of the word) may be a way to reverse this development, or at least direct it. tender direction. After all, the majority of the human population does not live in the countryside, but in cities. It is in our interest – and in the interest of the entire planet – that cities are livable and that every city dweller feels part of its fragile and resilient network.
We said to ourselves that the journey to a different experience of the city begins with taking a step out. So let's step out the door together. Maybe we'll barely walk a few steps and see a creeping rustle in a crack in the wavy asphalt sidewalk. Maybe we'll be intrigued by the dark green of the moss under the eaves, the purple brushwood with its round capsules, through which the moss spreads its microscopic spores. And what kind of voices are those flying in the twilight? Aren't they jackdaws and ravens flocking in front of their night roost? Aren't they a young blackbird persistently begging for a bite? Aren't they the song of the blackbird that has saved us so many times from falling into the deepest darkness? I can only guess what new and unsuspected worlds will spread out before you, as soon as you pay attention, as you come to your eternally hungry senses. That you will perhaps see the city as a living community of earthly multi-life is just the beginning.
Never judge a city by its concrete.
Recommended literature for exploring "nature" in cities:
Gavin Van Horn, The Way of the Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds, University of Chicago Press 2018
Kelly Brenner, Nature Obscura: A City's Hidden Natural World, Mountaineers Books 2020
Melissa Harrison, The Stubborn Light of Things: A Nature Diary, Faber & Faber 2021
Esther Woolfson, Field Notes From a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary, Granta Books 2014