Secrets Secrets

My ex was really into secrets. While a concerning statement no doubt, she was in no way secretive in our relationship. Instead, she had a deep sense of curiosity around the idea of secrets. Often curious about the how and why secrets presented. I frankly found it an odd topic to focus on conceptually, but I don’t think it was until recently that I understood where she was coming from. Secrets are perhaps a misnomer in my head, but I think that the absence of information is essential to life. It gives rise to narration, ritual, folklore and culture. It also creates an allure that I am irresistibly drawn too, especially within the natural world.

Byung-Chul Hung’s The Crisis of Narration makes critical note of transparency and its ill effects on society. Through his lens, the information age is characterized by an up close and transparent relationship to information. This however, leaves little room for secrets, and thus little room for narration as narration by default, leaves out information.

“In the information and transparency society, nakedness intensifies and becomes obscenity. However, this is not the charged obscenity of the repressed, prohibited or secret, but the empty obscenity of transparency, information and communication: ‘It is the obscenity of what no longer harbors any secret, what can be dissolved without remainder into information and communication.’ Information as such is pornographic, because it has no cover. Eloquent, narrating is only the cover, the veil that weaves itself around things. Covering and veiling are essential to narrative. Pornography does not tell anything. It gets right down to it, whereas the eroticism of narrative indulges in incidental details.”

The oscillation of distance in information is what Byung-Chul Han calls aura. I can’t help but to think that this aura creates an irresistible seduction to the natural world. Moths, owls and jackrabbits have all been intense hyper fixations for me at one point or another. The connecting variable is that little is known of their ways. Surely the human’s need for information is part of this allure, but I also think their absence of information allows us to cowrite a narrative with them. Have you ever seen an owl or a jackrabbit? It’s a mythical experience to be sure. You have seen them in movies, heard folklore tails and probably already have more connotations to them than many animals, but even with all this, you have probably seldom witnessed them. Their presence is a mere apparition in the landscape, one that greats you only for a brief moment in time.

I was volunteering for The Nature Conservancy in 2022 out in Leola SD. The land steward, and now close friend, let me know of the jackrabbits’ presence. I figured surely, his stories were mere hyperbole. He mentioned their elusive nature, massive size and command they had on the prairie. It wasn’t until a couple weeks later that I spotted my first white-tailed jackrabbit. I was passing a small corn field fluddle, when I noticed I was being stared at by some foreign object. I didn’t even know what I was looking at, initially. My first impression was that surely this was a coyote based on the size alone, but as my sights focused, I realized I it was the white-tailed jackrabbit. It wasn’t more than 5 seconds when the jackrabbit decided to dart out into the nearby stubble. I was in awe. The stories of hyperbole weren’t mere folklore, as the jackrabbit is a walking hyperbole. Towering ears far too large for its body, huge stature for a rodent and eyes of rich amber. Needless to say I was hooked.

In jest, Nate and I would joke about the dangerous nature of the jackrabbit. How it was secretly the guardian of the prairie. Coyotes and Ferruginous Hawks would run away at the sight of their presence, as to avoid falling victim to their appetites. Surely this was all good fun, but deep down there is a part of me that believes the jackrabbit is some sort of God in the prairie.

I remember toward the end of my time at TNC, I was wandering up a hill when my second jackrabbit bolted out just some 20 yards away. Over the hill it went, and I thought surely, this would be my time to get a good visual. I followed suit and sprinted to the top the hill. It took me no more than 10 seconds to breach the peak, but as I scanned the prairie the jackrabbit was gone. If you had no personal experience with jackrabbits, you might think I was hallucinating. Honestly, a part of myself wondered the same thing. The rabbit had come to me, gracing me with its presence, but only for a moment as if to keep the secret alive.

Secrets, secrets are no fun, they say, but I disagree. Secrets act as an interesting tool. They allow us to project a part of ourselves onto whatever thing lacks information. Surely that contains risk, but it also allows us to bond with 'things' and co-narrate our story with them. For the jackrabbit and I, the space between what is known is filled with a sort of projection from our shared connection. These secrets of each other, allow us to ultimately fuse our lives together as it allows a space for narrative formation. I feel a kinship to the jackrabbit and a sort of spiritual connection to them. To say this perceived bond is some subjective force, I think discredits the nature of Jackrabbits. I think it’s critical to note the importance of assemblages and by extension, the 'thing power' that creatures have. You cannot separate our connection as a subject-object relationship. We are bound and thus we we share an identity and depth, even if our perception differs. My relationship to the jackrabbit cannot exist without its participation and more importantly, without its secrets. Each experience I have with them adds to their mystery, and unfolds in a rich narrative field. These stories are cowritten by jackrabbits to be sure, and thus, they share their voice in my narration.

Last fall I went pheasant hunting with Nate. His dog Sage was doing good work and flushing birds up from the cattails. In a mere flash, I noticed a large white rabbit dart some 5 feet away from me. I aimed and fired, knocking down the jackrabbit. At the time, I didn’t even know it was a jackrabbit. I had never seen one in the winter before so I ignorantly thought it was snowshoe hare. Nate came over and congratulated me on the jackrabbit. I remember having the same reaction as my ex did when I first shared the story with her. “You killed god.” Again, while joking and partially in jest, part of me felt that I had somehow committed a taboo act. Frankly, this is one of the only times I had proof that jackrabbits were actually real and not some delusion all of us grasslanders shared. Ultimately though, I felt even more bonded to it than I previously had. While I am a materialist at heart, a part of me still felt I had connected with the divine. I was now in the presence of a spiritual being and felt a step closer to source. I still have the jackrabbit meat in my freezer. I feel I will know when the proper time to use it is. Part of me is scared to use it in a way that doesn’t honor the guardian of the prairie. I am not a very good chef, and I wonder when and if I will get a jackrabbit again. As a result, I am waiting until I can produce a meal fit for gods.

Did you know the white-tailed jackrabbit has a smaller wikipedia page than the jackalope? How odd, that the jackrabbit’s secretive nature helped produced a mythologized being that has more information written about it. Secrets are powerful, but remember, so is the jackrabbit