“K: It’s like when you suddenly come to that kind of open spaces, where there are no trees. It’s just suddenly open. Then you go in there, and then you forget everything. Then you go on to find a new open space, and then you find a new open space, and then you go on and on, and you don’t think, and then you … or you can pick flowers. This is in fact the truth. This can happen when you’re a child. It suddenly appears a field of flowers, and then there is the sun, and then you forget the time. Then the legs become roots, and then you will be a tree that sways in the wind.”
When “Adam and Eve” was banished from the garden, they also left their place in the nature.
Could it be that we have always longed to return, and that longing reflects our
basic sense of loneliness?
In our culture the ideal has been rationality and reason. The beast has been a symbol of the wild and evil that must be controlled and tamed, like the irrational forces in man that threaten our understanding of the world and ourselves.
On her way into the forest Red Riding Hood is instructed to follow the right path, and not to fall for the temptation to go outside. She is driven out in the wilderness and ends up being eaten.
An important inspiration for “The Art of Being Tamed” has been the term “hunter insensitivity”.
In the book “The lonely monkey” (Bergljot Børresen, 1997) Børresen launches a theory about “hunter insensitivity”. She claims that it appears when the hunting instinct is in action, and that it is applied to all those who have animal feed on their menu. This instinct acts as a switch that turns off the empathy with the prey.
“Nobody has understood that when man considers himself most rational and unaffected by emotions he is effectively excluded from large parts of the reality, the strange subdued and a little distant, but intellectually effective mood that instinct triggers, has become a kind of ideal.”
