Something Fierce
Something Fierce
A dominant primordial beast, eligible to burst forth (I suspect it of you)
Today, another favorite short piece revisited (with audio). I was about to call the “piece” an “essay”, but that’s probably a stretch… it feels more like maybe a prose poem (I’m not clear on these categories). Whatever it is, I’m happy with it, I think it says what I wanted to say, in the spirit I wanted to say it, and looking back at it now, I don’t think I’d change anything about it. It was originally published in Volume 6 of Eat Clean, Run Dirty Magazine1. I’ve added my own photos for this version (and of course the audio is new).
Something Fierce
I learned it first from Jack London and his “dominant primordial beast.”2 Then I found Walt Whitman’s speculation: “I now suspect there is something fierce in you, eligible to burst forth…”3
Neither of them named it (perhaps it has no name). London saw it in dogs, as a proxy for what he saw in man. Whitman saw it in the Earth and felt it within himself.
I suspect it of you.
I think you already know it’s there. I think you’ve felt it (I think I’ve seen it on your face).
Maybe it was in some depleted moment in the woods, wet-cold-tired and miles from sanctuary, when the wind gusted sleet into the numb rawness of your face, and instead of misery it brought you… something powerful that you couldn’t name, something that gripped you and moved you forward and let you feel truly alive for the first time in months, maybe years.
Or maybe it was late in some long and hard race: final miles, final climbs, exhausted, every part of you hurting and wanting only to stop. Until something happened, some spark landed within you and flared into a flame and you accelerated. The pain, the miles, your goals — all of it slipped away, and you were fast and strong and smooth again. It wasn’t that those other things were gone, only that they no longer mattered, and for some period you were unencumbered by anything but the feeling of your body moving well across the land.
Maybe at the end of some adventure, you looked back at the mountain and asked (of the mountain, not of yourself, and with no conscious hubris) “Is that all you’ve got?”
It doesn’t come from the gel you just ate. It’s not the music in your head or the thought of meeting some arbitrary time goal. It’s not even your competitive nature reacting to the sight of the runner ahead of you (the one you will now catch and pass). It’s not a thought at all, and it’s not motivated by any kind of thought-based calculus you might try to apply to it (or use to access it). It is some weird blending of anger and joy and strength and pain, and it’s none of those things, exactly, but it has all of their various properties and powers.
Does a hawk revel in its hawkishness as it plunges, sky to grass, to fill its talons with the living flesh of a dying rabbit? It has no conscious goals, it’s mainly stimulus and response. If it feels pleasure in its actions, it’s only the pleasure of inhabiting its hawk body with its hawk nature, the “pleasure” of being a proper hawk.
But pleasure is the wrong word, isn’t it? If it feels anything that we could recognize, I think it must feel “rightness.” And I guess we’re mainly stimulus and response, too, and maybe “right” is as close as we’ll get to describing the way we feel when this “unnamable fierce something” bursts forth and carries us along.
Maybe I’m wrong (about you already knowing). Maybe you don’t suspect your own fierce something, haven’t met it yet.
Maybe it’s nascent, an embryo yet to be birthed. Maybe it’s just undiscovered. Maybe it is a fierceness suppressed (consciously or not), or a fierceness denied (maybe you must be dragged kicking and screaming into the light of your own wild nature).
Regardless, I believe it is eligible within you, within everyone. I think you are eligible.
I think it’s a gift, a precious, primal relic from our animal past and an elemental fire of the soul. I doubt we can understand it (we can’t even name it), and I’m pretty sure we can’t summon it at will. But we can learn to recognize it, we can intentionally enter its realm, seek it out and be open to it.
And when we find it, in those brief moments of clarity and animal glory: honor it, embrace it, and ride it for all it’s worth.
Treat yourself to a subscription to this magazine (Eat Clean, Run Dirty — it’s a fresh take on the world of trailrunning (and outdoor adventures in general). It’s a pleasure to hold it in your hands, and it’s full of original content like this, from like-minded people, presented in a wonderful way.
From one of my favorite books, The Call of the Wild, by Jack London. “The Dominant Primordial Beast” is the name of a chapter (along with other chapters like “Into the Primitive” and “The Law of Club and Fang”). How could any child resist a book with chapter titles like that? And how could I spend time with a book like that and not want to write with similar power about similar truths?
The phrase is from the final line of the chapter, at a key moment of transition for the main character, a once-domesticated dog named Buck. He has just defeated Spitz, his nemesis:
Buck stood and looked on, the successful champion, the dominant primordial beast who has made his kill and found it good.
from “Earth, My Likeness” in Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman