Offering

Offering was a performative action where I remained largely motionless next to a hummingbird feeder for two hours—moving only to refill my red-painted ear, which slowly dripped the home-made nectar I used an eyedropper to refill. The concept for the 2017 performance, and the video which documents it, arose from a 2011 watercolor, where the I drew an inset detail of a hummingbird drinking from a woman’s ear. This image of cross-species intimacy and gift-giving remained with me for years, and I waited for the chance to attempt to make the image real. At ACRE residency in Wisconsin’s Driftless region, which I help run and return to annually, I had the chance to make this ‘offering’ to the many local Ruby-throated Hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris). I had stood next to this feeder many times in the past, remaining still long enough for the hummingbirds to approach and fly past my ears—a somatic sonic experience which really defies textual description. This gesture which I invited the hummingbirds to engage in, contained both implied threat (the long sharp beak, the fragile eardrum)—and an embedded eroticism. A vulnerability and a desire.

Ultimately, the hummingbirds never accepted my offering. This was my expectation, and reinforces for me an idea I often think of: a hard lesson from a childhood of unrequited friendships with non-human beings. Many humans, like me, long for a closeness and intimacy with the natural world—most especially with the beautiful non-human others we often covet or fetishize. We see this in the wolf t-shirts, dolphin stickers and owl tattoos which we use to tell other humans “who we are.” But the true expression of this longing has no ethical way to be fulfilled. We know it is wrong to keep a wolf in our homes, to watch a dolphin perform in a tank, to clip the wings of an owl so we can enjoy or even possess its beauty. Hence, our longing must simply remain an offering, with no expectation of reciprocation. Though we are certainly animals, in many ways we also stand forever apart. We can never truly know “what it is to be a bat.” And yet, this does not diminish our desire to continue to offer ourselves as companions to the vibrant non-human world. Whether through act of imagination, act of empathy, or act of care we can never quite reach the other side, but it is always meaningful for us to try to reach across the space between ourselves and the other…and it never hurts to offer.