I will use this chapter to provide auto-ethnographical reflections about how my explorations of Listening honed in on Feeling using the Body. There are two parts: I will exhibit and articulate a visual ontology called Thread ontology, which is going to be contrasted with the web ontology that was used in the previous chapter. In the second part, I expand on the fundamental dynamics of Thread ontology, which is characterised as Love. This metaphysical conception of Love will be put to use in drawing our attention to further dimensions of Listening, that many humans do not practice with as much confidence as many nonhumans do.

The main point of this chapter will be to argue that I could listen to cows because I became a cow, partially. This becoming is obviously strange and so I will try to articulate how it works by developing abstract visualisations and concepts that allow me to explain on my own terms.

Contents

introduction to Love

04/10/22 [UTR]

I am made of love, all I am is because love.

It is possible that I am ending my career as a philosopher with an essay about platitudes. In this chapter I will explore statements such as “everything is connected” and “love is everywhere”. You will read my text whilst challenging me to do this in a sophisticated enough manner for me to deserve the title of a Master of Philosophy and involving the cows that this text is meant to be about.

I’ll start the chapter by front-loading my starting points and motivations. Below is a short description I wrote as part of my project proposal at the start of thesis writing.

11/04/22 [UTR]

I want to develop a notion/version of Love that is ambiguous in terms of its ‘goodness’. It is a take on love that is not meant to serve as a backbone for an ethics but instead a metaphysics. Tentatively, I summarise ‘Love’ as a form of becoming where one thing will literally become like another thing. In aspects of its very disposition, one thing will be exactly like another.

Qualitatively, this process of becoming is one that I have experienced. When in the presence of cows or a cow, my ‘attunement’ as an embodied and present researcher is best characterised as becoming-cow. That is not to say that I became a cow, or that my whole disposition was analogous to a cow’s. What happened is that in some respects, however slight, I met the cows in a state that is exterior to the interiority I or others would attribute to a normal Samar. Note that this notion poses a critical threat to the idea of ‘individuality’ which would require that the organism that is me or a cow are distinct and distinguishable owing to their skin-bound state of embodiment.

The working title of this text has been “Listening, with dairy cows”. The last chapter was about using theoretical devices from socio-linguistics in order to notice all sorts of expressions I found at dairy farms. But the theory didn’t provide clear ways to verify the possible explanations it produced. So the forms of expression that I want to dwell on in this chapter are selected to provide a very different perspective on how we might produce meaning from what we notice others to be saying- I won’t only look at the expressions of the cows, but also expressions from within my own body. I am not going to talk very much either about the senses typically associated with perception, like sight or smell or hearing. Instead, I am stretching and stepping into and stretching the sense we refer to as Touch. I want to investigate what dairy cows and dairy farms made me Feel. I will treat what I felt as a primary tool for discerning expression and constantly ask: whose expressions am I feeling? The point I will thread through the chapter is that learning how to feel, with our bodies is a way to listen to what another is trying to say.

<aside> 🤝 Your task is not to seek for love. but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Rumi

</aside>

3.1 Thread ontology

The goal of this chapter is to explore, with you, how different strategies to visualise the body can generate different ways of relating to- or listening to-, the other that might actually be inside of us. Instead of referring to what’s ‘outside’ of us as a means to make meaning from the ‘inbetweens’ of the encounters I had at dairy farms, which the semiotic assemblage theory encourages, I became curious about turning my attention ‘inside’ and noticing what can be listened to there. This shift comes from a need to respond to some puzzles which I’ll start with.

3.1.1 the puzzles

Missing 99

I made friends with a cow, 99, that was left behind in the shed every day whilst the herd went out to graze. She had an injured leg which prevented her from moving. I saw her standing only once when the farmer was hitting her with a stick to encourage her to go and have her udders drained with the rest, but any other time the farmer came to get her she refused to even try.  When I approached her as she lay down, there was a fear in her eyes that would soften into sadness and then calm. A similar transition every time I’d go and stand by her. I felt like my visiting her meant something to her. I would go to the shed before everyone started to come back for the evening so that I could observe the full re-entry process. Then I would get some minutes to stand by her. And if I went when the cows had already returned, I would find her eyes on me- wondering if I was going to stand by her or if I was more interested in the other cows. When we were alone in the shed I’d stand in front of her bed, and we’d look into each other's eyes from across the bars. Sustaining eye contact until I became distracted and looked away. I contracted covid which meant I couldn’t go for more than a week. When I returned, the shed was empty and there was no sign of 99. I wanted to believe that she had gotten better and gone outside, but I was also dreading the opposite. Since there was no trace of her in the shed, I grew hopeful that she had recovered and thought about finding the herd to see if I could spot her. On my way to get on my bike, I saw a thick blue rope poking out from behind some wooden boxes. The rope formed a large ring that had been torn very crudely. My eyes followed the frayed edges and saw that 99 was printed on it.

Months after, I was cycling on a motorway that momentarily became a bridge to pass over another motorway. There were blue skies, some clouds around. I was alone on the cycle lane, a car would occasionally fly past. I remembered 99 and started crying. Still, more than a year on, I will be moving around whilst alone and think of 99 and feel my chest contracting. I have to make an effort to distract myself and carry on with other thoughts or whatever I was meant to be doing.

Close up of 99, captured by me

calf Dreams

There’s another similar story from my supervisor’s fieldnotes:

I wake up in the dimness of my bedroom in the middle of the night, silence everywhere, my heart is beating irregularly and fast. I’m sweating. Even when I open my eyes in the half-light, I can still see how the day-old calves looked at me when I walked in: vivid, alive, curious, excited, with sparkling, dark shiny eyes, long eyelashes, pink noses. My heart rate doesn’t slow down, I feel terrible.. I can still see in my mind’s eye how the six calves are separated from their mothers, confined in tiny metal boxes, heads sticking out between the fences, hardly any space to turn around, and no possibility to groom or touch each other… While trying hard to fall asleep, I can feel how two cows touch my cheeks, one on each side. Soft noses, warm, breathing gently. Ever since my fieldwork with dairy cows, these wake-up moments have become regular guests in my life.[^cornips23]

I included this excerpt in a presentation a few months ago when I said: “What interests me about this passage is the reappearance of specific encounters with specific cows whilst Leonie is at home, distant in both space and time from the cows. How is it that these memories resurface in such a vivid way, even though she is far away? Now I’m not sure if its memory that draws out emotions, or something else. I now want to explore: How can Leonie feel these cows from afar?

Marfo as Cow

Theres a painting by an artist, Kojo Marfo, as part of a series called, “Dreaming of Identity.”[^marfo] I look at it regularly just to wonder: Why has he painted the cow into the body of the family?

[/cornips2023]: Cornips, “Getting to know the dairy cow: an inclusive and self-reflexive sociolinguistics in multispecies emotional encounters.”

[/marfo]: “Dreaming of Identity,” described by artist Kojo Marfo in a video by JD Malat Gallery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxOoFXW1-VQ

Muted John

3.1.2 the Body review

3.1.3 Spinoza’s Monism

3.1.4 the Artificial and the Dead