Sebastian Trapp: Speed in nature

In the early morning of February the 18th of 1248 the people of Parma in the north of Italy attacked the enemy that besieged them. They burst out of their town into Victoria, the city the hostile army had built and named so self assured. They knew that the emperor who had assailed them and his most important man were not there. For several months the Parmesians had observed the every day life of the hated enemy. Therefore they knew that the time for an attack was right when he left his camp to hunt with his falcons. They were successful, and more than that. They not only defeated the enemy but spoiled him of nearly everything. They took the crown that he wore in high feast days, a marvellously crafted jewel, studded with diamonds and as big as a pot, as a contemporary recorded. Furthermore the seal of the king of Sicily fell into their hands. This forced him to issue several decrees to prevent their abuse by his opponent. The Carroggio Tremona, a fight wagon, was the most famous craft. The enemies of the town of Tremona, which was allied to the emperor, could not resist the temptation to take away souvenirs, so that shortly after the victory there was not much more to be left but the wheels.

The only truly unique and unreplaceable booty of the expedition is not listed in the chronicles. It was a manuscript, especially prepared for the king, wrapped in leather, with an ornament in gold and silver. The text was embellished with paintings and miniatures. Unfortunately it was seen for the last time only twenty years after the battle of Victoria, when it is mentioned in a letter in 1265, and was never found again. It is the book on the art of hunting with birds, written by the besieger of Parma, Frederic II, King of Sicily and Jerusalem, emperor of the Roman Empire himself. Because of other lesser copies it is still in print today.

Frederic was a truly remarkable character. Because of his contact to Arab scholars and his undramatic thinking as shown by his interest in philosophy and national sciences, the clergy became very much his opponent. Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him as being the personified antichrist. The biographer of this pope wrote that he, Frederic, turned the title 'majesty' in a hunting tenancy and he became instead of being decorated with arms and laws, surrounded by dogs and shrieking birds: a hunter instead of an emperor. He traded in the sublime sector for the hunting spear and released the eagle of triumph, setting aside the revenge on his enemies on hunting birds. Only very few appreciated Frederic's work, but in many respects it is still valid today and remarkable in being based not on ear witness and admiration but skilful observation and a careful and detailed description of the observed. Thanks to his extraordinary ability of mental penetration which was occupied mainly with the understanding of nature, the emperor composed an opus on the major calibration of birds, with which he proved how deeply he was devoted to penetrating investigation.

Reading the book, one can not help but being deeply impressed with the extensive knowledge Frederic had compiled. Not only on the breeding and training of the falcons he used for hunting, but also on their anatomy and their illnesses. But the scope of the used book is much greater than that. It covers not only birds of prey, but the life of all different kinds of birds, giving detailed insight in the life cycles, their preferred habitats, their habits including their travels in autumn and winter time and much, much more. In modern language I would have to say that he gives a detailed account of the anatomy, behaviour and ecology of birds in general. In the fourth book of this opus he describes the different ways falcons use to attack a standing crane and gives his opinion on the reasons for the different tactics. Against standing cranes some fly high, other low and others again in medium altitude. Those who fly high, straight and fast do so to get faster to the crane which they choose and be able to swoop down on him harder; those who fly in a curve and fast do so to get the best direction to the wind if they are not thrown directly against it; those which fly slow and in a curve do both because of the wind and also to rouse the cranes which they do not dare to attack on the ground; falcons which fly in a moderate altitude and slow do so to rouse the cranes; those who fly in a moderate altitude and fast do so in order to reach the game as fast as possible, that is: before it flies up and away...

Perhaps now you begin to get an idea why I talk to you about this old and not to well-known book. After all this is a conference on speed, not on possible grandfathers of modern national sciences (be they ever so fascinating). But Frederic II can serve me as a starting point for the argument that I want to make here. For this argument it is important that he was a very modern man on the one hand, but lived long ago in the distance past on the other. He was modern in not believing what he had not actually witnessed himself. In his attention for the detail and in his attempt to understand what he had seen related to the settings, the environment in which he observed it. But he is very old-fashioned in another respect: he never talks about speed... The descriptions of the ways in which falcons approach the game that I read out to you demonstrate that clearly. He does use the words 'slow' and 'fast' to describe the falcons, but that's it. Even when he comes to rating his birds, he is only talking about the different ways to fly to the prey. The high flight is the most laudable and praiseworthy one, because for those falcons it is the easiest to swoop down upon the game. Even if the crane saw up in the distance, high-flying falcons get up to them quick, precisely because they swoop down from great altitude. Frederic is using those words, but he never talks or thinks about speed. He never compares one falcon in being faster than the other let alone the speed of a falcon to the speed of his prey.

Today in textbooks for pupils one can read that the falcon reaches a speed of about 200 kilometres per hour, much faster than all the birds he attacks. But this, being faster than other birds, is not the reason why falcons are successful hunters. Frederic, who devoted much of his life to the hunt with birds -- too much of his life many would have said -- knew why they are. In fact, the idea of seeing the reason for the falcons' success and its extraordinary speed conjunctured to him.

This is for two reasons: the first reason lies in our culture. The concept of speed as we know it is a very recent, a very modern one. The Oxford English Dictionary gives old meanings of speed which sound strange and alien to us: 'abundance, success, fortune, lot, a system of health'. Today, if somebody talks about speed, we understand it to be a property of a process, mostly a movement in time that at least in principle can be measured by an instrument, by a technical device, and therefore can be compared. This kind of speed, as expressed in units like kilometres per hour or rounds per minute, connotates the uniform movement: it is a mechanical speed. This mechanical speed was invented together with the rail road. In the time before the rail road people travelled by coach. Not only did they see how strenuous it was for the horses to pull the carriage, they themselves were shaken up and down so that at the end of the journey animals and passengers alike were exhausted. The movement was a highly irregular one, and at every turn and every obstacle the coach slowed down and after a while the horses got tired and became slower. This irregularity of the movement was seen clearly once the rail road was invented. In 1826 an advocate of the rail road described the movement of a horse as 'limping' and 'irregular' and compared it to a locomotive which drives uniformly and fast on its rails, not in the least constrained by the speed of its motored movements. It did not take long until the perception of travellers changed and the uniform and fast movement of the locomotive was seen as natural, whereas the nature of the animals pulling began to appear as dangerously chaotic. Therefore it is not surprising that as early as 1825 one predicted that soon a nervous man will board a wagon pulled by locomotive and feel much more secure than he did in the time when he travelled in a coach drawn by four horses, all of them different in strength and speed, being stubborn and uncontrollable and subject to all the weaknesses of flesh.
So the kind of speed that we talk about today and that we talk about on this conference came into being more than half a millennium after Frederics' death. He could not talk about speed like we do.

But the second reason for me is much more important. The second reason lies in the nature of the falcon. It lies in the nature of its prey and it lies in the nature of nature. To talk about the speed of a falcon is an abstraction, beforehand -- at least for some purposes -- a meaningful one. But it is also a distraction, it distracts from the way in which falcons actually hunt. Comparing the speed of the falcon and its prey leads us nearly inevitably to the image of a race with the aim being the falcon reaching the other bird, with the end -- if the falcon is fast enough -- being the killer. But, a falcon should and would never try to outpace its prey. Frederic, who for living in the middle ages could not be distracted by the modern notion of speed, saw that clearly. He knew that they are birds, he gives the example of the bittern, who would, if a bird of prey would fly after them trying to catch them, throw their excrements against it. Taking into account how caustic these excrements can be, this would be a serious threat to the pursuer who would definitely try to avoid this.

So, Frederic never saw the hunt with birds as being a kind of race. The quotations I gave at the beginning show that clearly. He always describes the behaviour of the falcon: how it leaves the fist, how it approaches the prey, what it obviously has in mind when choosing a certain route to the crane. He has in mind where the cranes stand, what they do and which way to attack would be the best for the falcon. The most 'laudable' one, as he puts it. In all this flying, curving and searching, the rousing, gaining altitude, the hesitating and swooping down -- in all this there is simply no place for honoration of speed. When I say: the falcon reaches a speed of about 200 kilometres per hour, then I talk only about a very brief moment, a blink of the eye in which the falcon approaches something that is compatible with our idea of speed, mechanical speed, that is the moment when he darts down on the other bird, the wings pressed against his body, unable to steer and therefore moving in a straight line. This is the only moment where our idea of speed is actually applicable and it is the only moment that is addressed in the textbook talking about 'speed'. A second later, when the claws of the falcon hit the other bird, it tumbles, catches itself and is trying to get altitude again, then speed again is without any real importance even for the human observer.

This in principle holds true for humans too. But technique has prolonged the moments of mechanical speed that we experience enormously. We are used sitting in a train, taking an airplane or driving along on a motorway in a car. This means: we are used to the experience of uniform mechanical speed, so much that for us it even makes sense to talk about 'the speed of a pedestrian' even though he may stop all the time, talk to other people or look at the window of a shop. For an object moving as irregular as a pedestrian we get by by talking about 'average speed'. But this is beside the point. The mechanical speed was invented by the rail road, not so much by humans. In fact, the first passengers of the rail road were very much irritated and confused by the uniform movement of the train with them sitting in it. It was not the shortened time of travel between the home town and the place they wanted to go to. In the beginning the train was not really faster than a galloping horse. These first passengers were not accustomed to the sensation that the speed of a machine ridiculed their own rhythms. It took quite a while until people started to get used to places they knew floating by as a landscape. Impressions that are much to familiar to us to be noteworthy. We, being transported all the time, are so much used to the kind of speed machines produce, that just speed makes perfect sense.

Finally, looking at a falcon high up in the sky or at a kid romping and rolling about in the street, I doubt very much that this notion of speed brought forward by machine humans invented is the idea one should have in mind talking about humans themselves, about ourselves. It does not really matter whether we wish the speed of the human society to accelerate or to slow down. As long as we look at humans with speed in mind, we will not look at humans humanely.