Is the mind of a fox separate from the landscape it inhabits? The fox builds its den in the soil, its trails crisscross the fields, its footsteps bend the foliage, small plants cannot thrive where it chooses to habitually pass. The hedgerows conceal nests of mice and birds who shelter high enough to evade its passage through the land.
The fox searches for food. The farmer keeps his chickens in a coop high above the ground, he designed it to be this way at his kitchen table. The grouse hide in the undergrowth silently and still. The hare leaps from its hiding place as a walker passes too close and then runs away. The flora and fauna in the valley of the fox is settled into equilibrium, the action of the fox has sculpted it and the bounty within has sculpted him. The desire lines that run through the downs and pastures trace the balance between the will of the fox and the bounty of the land.
A juvenile owl seeks a nest of its own and flies into the night, it settles in an ash tree and hunts in the woods. The bounty of prey is insufficient to sustain both the owl and the fox. The mind of the fox adapts. A fence previously un-breached, a road beyond to traverse, and beyond that trees that yield fruit never before seen by this fox.
Slowly the fox passes through the hedgerow and the road is crossed, more easily as each day passes. Within the mind of the fox cortical remapping takes place. As he experiences these new sensations, the anticipation of passing motor cars, the adrenaline at his burst of speed, the astringent juice of the fruit that rewards the inquiry, the foxes physical structure is changed through neurogenesis. Synapses fire in new and desirable ways. The cartography of the fox’s anatomy, his physiology is altered, but so to is his anatomy, the object of his being is reformed. A new path is run through the valley, the hedgerow is now a portal and the field mice that used to feed safely in the orchard now must dig a deeper burrow. Now the subject of the foxes quest for food, the will of its being, has become the object of its anatomy as well as the object of its environment.
The fox searches for food. The farmer keeps his chickens in a coop high above the ground, he designed it to be this way at his kitchen table. The grouse hide in the undergrowth silently and still. The hare leaps from its hiding place as a walker passes too close and then runs away. The flora and fauna in the valley of the fox is settled into equilibrium, the action of the fox has sculpted it and the bounty within has sculpted him. The desire lines that run through the downs and pastures trace the balance between the will of the fox and the bounty of the land.
A juvenile owl seeks a nest of its own and flies into the night, it settles in an ash tree and hunts in the woods. The bounty of prey is insufficient to sustain both the owl and the fox. The mind of the fox adapts. A fence previously un-breached, a road beyond to traverse, and beyond that trees that yield fruit never before seen by this fox.
Slowly the fox passes through the hedgerow and the road is crossed, more easily as each day passes. Within the mind of the fox cortical remapping takes place. As he experiences these new sensations, the anticipation of passing motor cars, the adrenaline at his burst of speed, the astringent juice of the fruit that rewards the inquiry, the foxes physical structure is changed through neurogenesis. Synapses fire in new and desirable ways. The cartography of the fox’s anatomy, his physiology is altered, but so to is his anatomy, the object of his being is reformed. A new path is run through the valley, the hedgerow is now a portal and the field mice that used to feed safely in the orchard now must dig a deeper burrow. Now the subject of the foxes quest for food, the will of its being, has become the object of its anatomy as well as the object of its environment.