Scribblings with Green Chalk

Animals and Your Soul
If you’re like most people, baring your soul is tough, so the first thing you should do is get yourself an avatar from the animal world on which you can project your fears, your loves, and, most importantly, your festering hates. We suggest finding an outcast member of the animal kingdom to represent your soul’s voice. Perhaps start with a lemur. Say what you really want to say, but as a lemur might say it. Everyone will be all “Wow, I’ve never read a poem from a lemur’s perspective before!” (“Poetry by the Numbers” by Gary Rudoren)

I don’t know what kind of writing animal I could I be. It’s difficult to type or hold a pencil with a paw.

via Shakesville and that door behind you. I actually hope you are an imaginary friend.

Originally, I was going to post here a quasi review of my airplane reading from March. Half way through the third paragraph, I yawned. If I was bored writing it, I wouldn’t want to imagine what reading it would have felt like. Similar to a glass of milk with honey on a sleepless night… only painful?… Eh… I’d rather go with ’short and sweet.’ (If only I could use it as a motto and excuse in my thesis.)

My review of the National Geographic piece on animal intelligence, fast forwarded:

Pretty photographs but the pop-science explanation of the research methods made me cringe. Since the intended reader is apparently one that could not grasp the real thing, the writer gives them parrot-teaching magic tricks. And pretty pictures to look at. The intended reader will wait for some real articles on the subject. Without pictures.

My main reservation–a bitter cry to heavens: Why didn’t that brilliant dog cross my path when I lived in Vienna!?

Speaking of heavens and dogs: I’m all for iconoclasm. Love the word. It sounds defiant and has a great story to it. But I also love pretty pictures.

So, away with the bearded man, welcome my vision of God:

I don’t attach too much importance to the English anagram/pun but it’s nicely and prophetically fitting here. God (see picture above) is a lady and her name is Sunka. Which means ‘dog’ in the Lakota language, I’m told. Behold and admire.

Waving frantically and mouthing “no” is about all I can do. These days, I can’t help feeling like a bull an elephant in a china shop. I cross out the bull in accordance with the Polish version of the saying, where the elephant is the culprit. The elephant conveys my inept reaction to the red rag.

Here’s the menagerie of my thoughts at this moment. The earlier assertion that cats won’t be hijacking this space seems a bit humorous several cat posts later. Perhaps I should change my nom de plume (nom de keyboard?) to “Derrida’s Cat,” since Haraway’s presentation of the thinker’s dilemma has moved me so much. However, with a drawerful of notes and a stack of books and articles, my original MA thesis remains unwritten, still waiting for a better time. At the same time, though, animals are thought.

What is interspecies companionship and, delving further, what does failure in fulfilling the obligations of companionship consist in?

Haraway starts with the failure of perception, drawing attention to Derrida’s revelation of seeing his cat in her separateness and individuality, recognizing her intense presence. I’m not sure that sight as a sense is the source of failure, but it’s the model sense for explanations, so let’s stay within its realm. Stripped to simplicity, this is a problem of a commonly accepted blind spot blotting out animals as animals. What kind of presence do you experience when you look at or touch your pets? Do you ever wonder what the animal is thinking — stopping there, at that sense of wonder, at the question mark, not pushing toward an answer — what the animal feels?

I see two paths, intersecting at many points. Two paths that give different meaning to separation. One uses separation as a device creating distance to enable sight and an understanding of difference. The other separates the human from the world so that thinking becomes frozen within an exclusive human space, with metaphors of otherness created in the realm of human-only interaction. The first path leads us to seeing space through the animal presence, reflecting upon ourselves through it, retaining distance. Whereas the other entails the danger of smothering the animal in thought by translating its presence into comparisons and parallels that cannot do it justice.

Over at Wohnen in Wien, I commented on Jessica Valenti’s idea of treating pets as “starter babies.” In my momentary old-saying elephantine clumsiness, I’m afraid it came out as a criticism of Denise’s interest in the idea and I didn’t mean it that way. (Apologies again, Denise.) I understand the idea’s appeal. I don’t think that people who have pets are driven by ulterior motives. However, I believe they can be very, very wrong in their thinking about animals.

Here’s where I start waving. Frantically.

The catchiness of the term “starter baby” makes me cringe. Is this a new take on euphemism, where the animal is the unspoken, the abject, too “impure” to be noted in language? Or is this meant to uphold Paul Shepard’s tenet that pets serve as stand-ins for teddy bears? I should hope there is more to pet-keeping than human narcissism.

Wouldn’t it be too easy if one experience could serve as practice ground for another? Yet life doesn’t have a pause button, there is no draft phase. Everything is for real and really present. It’s happening. Parallels and simplifications help us organize our thinking about experiences and phenomena but they do not change the reality of the said experiences and phenomena.

Your dog is not a baby surrogate. It’s a dog. Please take your catchy blindfold off and see it as who it is. Taking care of animals does teach us responsibility; this is hardly a new discovery. Recasting it in the frame of parenthood training ground makes it sound like a revelation, whereas it really is a reduction. It takes our attention away from the question of animal rights, animal consciousness, and the conditions of human-animal co-existence and companionship.

Loving animals, feeding them, dealing with their feces is not in any way comparable to rearing a child. It won’t take the shock and difficulty away from parenthood. There are no stand-ins for experiences. Especially experiences as complex as both the relationship between parent and child and that between human and animal.

Coming back to Derrida’s cat: discovering the animal’s intense presence is a revelatory moment in Derrida’s essay, in his experience, and in Haraway’s framing of the story. Something Joyce would call an epiphany. Seeing the animal means mapping space differently. The intersection of the human and the animal gaze is an invitation to seeing oneself through the idea of an unfamiliar animal consciousness. The human’s inner otherness responds to the otherness embodied in the animal. Is this the entry to a new realm of perception?

Whatever it means in individual experience, it’s a gift, an impulse to thought. In order to approach the question of interspecies companionship (not yet define it), one must allow the animal to enter the eye. Derrida’s failure to build upon the encounter lay, according to Haraway, in his immediate turn towards translating it into purely human metaphors and parallels. The animal doesn’t exist there.

The first obligation of companionship is seeing the companion. Would the second be avoiding allegorizing and comparing?

Let’s start with seeing. Let the dog be a dog, not a “starter human.” It’s not a stub, it’s a fully-fledged being. PLEASE LOOK AT THE DOG AND SEE A DOG. This is how your story of companionship begins.

Jacques Derrida has a cat. It made my day.

One morning, Monsieur D. discovered that his feline companion was looking back at him…

He understood that actual animals look back at actual human beings; he wrote at length about a cat, his small female cat, in a particular bathroom on a real morning actually looking at him. “The cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literatures and fables” (374). Further, Derrida knew he was in the presence of someone, not a machine reacting. [...] He came right to the edge of respect, of the move to respecere, but he was sidetracked by his textual canon of Western philosophy and literature and by his own linked worries about being naked in front of his cat. He knew there is no nudity among animals, that the worry was his, even as he understood the fantastic lure of imagining he could write naked words. [...] But with his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him at looking back at him that morning. [...] Incurious, he missed a possible invitation to other-worlding.

(Haraway 19, 20; emphasis mine)

Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet arrived in the mail yesterday. I started reading it right away, like those distracted people who grab at books and life greedily and without a concept. (I am one of them.) I’m amazed and curious how she develops her idea of interspecies companionship, how different it is from Shepard’s.

Talking about companionship, or rather “bonding,” or not even that, since it could be merely a catchy theme… I saw SAD on several blogs recently. January appears to be a breaking point. Either that or it’s everyone’s New Year’s resolution to talk about their emotions.

Pets are out there too. I find the idea of pets as “starter babies” uncanny and… well… somehow disrespectful of animals as who they are. Reductive and blind to the otherness and the specific character of human-animal interaction. Denise wrote about it (commenting on Jessica Valenti’s article), I replied. I couldn’t disagree with Valenti more; I get the points, but I don’t accept them.

This is probably how many cat blogs are born.

There are many great things to be said about cats, but they’re not hijacking this space.

And yet I owe it to that gray cat to finish his brief story…

It was a he and his name started with “M” as I learned from a plea for help at the tram stop. The cat I saw fit the description: big, stripey gray male (judging by the size, it must have been a castrated male). I ripped off the phone number and left a message on the owners’ cat’s human companions’* answering machine when I got back home. I believe they found him, because the next day the note was gone.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about the idea of having pets. I don’t know if I could keep any of my own. If you’re not dead serious about your pets, it doesn’t seem fair to me to have them. Cupboard love has its laws. So do other dimensions of the relationship. I wish I had had the chance to hear a voice on the phone, to hear the relief of knowing that the cat’s still alive, the hope of finding him. I could have gone to bed that night hearing phantom purring, my “good deed” done.

I didn’t see it as a great feat, just fortunate coincidence. Yet, together with vitamin D, M.’s cameo in my life brought back the opening of Herbert’s “Mr. Cogito Ponders Suffering,” with “desperate actions to save stray cats” failing to bring inner peace.

Wishy-washy winter continues…

* I don’t know a good word for someone who keeps pets. If they’re mentally sane, the compromises they make don’t fit mere “ownership.”

I saw a cat outside my window this morning. One of the few benefits of a basement apartment is the view of birds on the lawn, clueless rodents, and, yes, an occasional cat. More often, however, you get to see the irresolute legs of someone heading to the supermarket or rubber boots of kids running towards the nearby playground.

Meanwhile, I feel like never leaving the house, only lounging in my pj’s and watching Katharine Hepburn movies.

When I lived in Poznań, someone explained to me why the city wouldn’t close down the old zoo, even though most of the animals had already been moved to the new zoo at lake Malta. Stare zoo, situated near the city center, was acquiring a ghostly quality, partly abandoned, dilapidated.

“They can’t close it down completely. There’s an enormous rat colony living off the zoo waste. If they shut it down, all those rats would flood the city.”

For a long time afterwards, I couldn’t shake the image of rat hordes overtaking the Poznań Old Town, streaming through Św. Marcin, swallowing Zamek. It reminded me of a movie scene I’m not sure I had actually ever seen. For all I know, I could have imagined the whole thing, as I admitted in my comment on Bowleserised’s post on foxes. My sketchy description reads as follows: … a movie scene from a USSR production which, come to think of it, might never have existed, only I dreamed it and convinced myself I saw it on screen. [T]he scene is communist tower blocks reaching high, high into the sky, concrete gray in a desolate landscape and wolves, wolves everywhere, with glowing eyes. And a voice saying that they’ve taken over the city.

Exaggerated, dreamed, romanticized, maybe morbid. Still, the rats are there, unwanted but hungry. Beyond antipathy and acceptance, rats simply exist in the cities as another layer of their population make-up. Tip the balance and they crawl out of hiding.

I didn’t know about the rat quarter under the old zoo before that memorable explanation, but there were plenty of strays where I lived then. My roommates and I helped feed the cats the janitor found in the dumpster until someone complained to the administration. The janitor was forced to give up the cats and leave rat poison in the cellar. Rats again.

In Vienna, a rat spotted one night by the main university building was the only stray I saw. After a couple months it became disconcerting. No surprises, no uncontrolled life. It’s hard for me to imagine that Vienna reached some sort of a higher level of “cityhood” when it became simply uninteresting for undomesticated animals. It seems more likely that only rats survived the effective catching and killing.

Where do you find the life of a city, in what circumstances do you see its contours? When I read Reznikoff’s animal poems, I see the city as a living space in an instant unmade and made up again by the discovery of birds in naked trees, foxes on the park lawn.

So I was wondering about the request for information about fox sightings in Berlin (see link above). Is the man looking for stories that a reader of Reznikoff might appreciate? Does he want to re-imagine the city in the mode of my USSR movie fantasy? Or is he a member of some sort of vigilante fox-hunting group for which fox is the new rat? Let’s get them before they eat us?… I’m too lazy to write to him. In this case ignorance might be bliss.

(The title is absolutely borrowed. I am intrigued by how powerfully this combination of beauty and emotion with dismemberment works. If you’re curious about the source, read Linda Gregg’s poem, completely unrelated to this discussion. If not, pass on to my rambling below.)

The conceptual marriage of beauty and suffering comes across as a Gordian knot. I say “comes across,” not “is,” because I don’t believe this link is necessary for our thinking about either concept. Yet together they come to produce a new quality, a kind of beauty martyrdom.

Many concepts are inverted along the path to salvation through beauty. (Something called “beauty” being conceived of as, paradoxically, both essential and produced, its production and attainment of a “natural-looking” ideal desired without questioning.) Most importantly, pain becomes anaesthetized in the beauty discourse. It becomes something purely imagined and exaggerated. In beauty martyrdom, pain doesn’t exist. It’s swallowed before the mind could let it come into being.

The mind. Smoothly inserted into the body, which is — what? An object? Property? Easily remodeled clay? Whatever it is, it is clearly divisible from whatever the mind is in this narrative. If beauty is married to suffering, then the mind is forever divorced from the body. In my rushed and perhaps somewhat inconclusive comment to Wildly Parenthetical’s post “The appropriation and normalisation of the body,” (which is a response to [What in the hell...] do things do things look like if we start with the body?, so I recommend reading both) I wrote: The discourse of beauty production further removes the body from the mind, depersonalizing it even further, it seems to me. The body ready for a “cosmetic surgeon’s” scalpel, with lines drawn on it is already dismembered, ready for another level of butchering. The justification for the practice erases identity from the body. The woman (it is usually the woman) is made to believe that the “imperfect” body is abstracted from her self and that the mind (as a fully separated entity) should have all possible creativity in determining the shape of its flesh encasement.

For a far more cogent and comprehensive argument, I suggest looking up Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth.

What I would like to focus on is the question of dismemberment.

It strikes me that this kind of dismemberment seems to have a completely different cognitive impact than the dismemberment of animals as described by Paul Shepard:

Breaking up the world in thought, attending to its diversity and discontinuity, discriminating differences in order to think–all this clearly threatens its continuity and wholeness. Learning the morphology of bodies has been likened to a kind of dissection. The butchering analogy extends as well to the naming of the internal part of the body. Oddly enough, it is the insides of animals that work against the tendency of the world to fragment. (The Others 47)

We need to cut up the world in order to make sense of it and animals are our primary models, argues Shepard. But “butchering” has two different meanings for him depending on the context. When the process of dismemberment is removed from our eyes and made the business of institutions that deliver to us ready products:

Butchery makes new categories by abstracting “meat” from the whole animal, creating a perceptual gap between the food and the thing eaten. (The Others 34)

I wouldn’t want to insist on direct parallels between the animal world with human participation and the human society which sees itself as abstracted from the broader natural context. But I’m tempted to ask if there is any human-to-human equivalent to creative cognitive butchery when the beauty industry so neatly fits the second description?

To what extent can we relate dismemberment to control or creation? Where is the point when these ideas become perverted? When and how did the marriage of beauty to suffering take place?

I like looking at owls. In case you didn’t know, now you know. I love how serious and quizzical they look.

I dreamt of owls last night. And maybe because I went to bed at 7 pm and slept over 10 hours, there were many of them. I don’t dream of animals often, which, as Paul Shepard confirms in The Others, is a sad truth about growing up. As a child, I used to have dreams crowded with mostly wolves, then dogs, cats, snakes, and owls… Thank God, pre-Christmas tiredness made me move back in time.

***

Because I cannot put it so beautifully, I quote:

The perception of animals ceased to be only a recognition. First swallowed in substance, then swallowed in thought, they were finally incorporated in psychic structures.

(Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, p. 3

Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind’s eye.

(Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals, p. 2)

[animals in dreams]

The child’s absence from its own dream is part of normal unselfconsciousness, without the “self,” “you,” or “they.” The child is said sometimes to be frightened by such dreams but not frightened in them.[...] These dreamt animals may be, very early in life, the dispersed elements of the unknown self — the body’s sounds, contractions, upheavals, secretions — and then also disguises of familiar people in stressful circumstances of ordinary experience.[...]As the child gets older, animal dreams diminish and a self emerges more frequently, as do familiar faces. [...] Throughout our lives animals in dreams may continue to signify unresolved concerns, intolerable truth, or interpersonal uncertainty. They are not a random choice of symbolic vehicles of the unconscious mind but a continuation of the maturing processes of humankind. They are nurturant among small children because animals are already synomymous with the mind’s drive to find order and the heart’s desire to affirm given reality.

(The Others, pp.75-76)

[marginal animals, owls among them]

Categories defined by human observers inevitably collide with animals at the edges of categories. Such confusing forms elicit strong responses, but even the ambiguous forms may be classified. Such “misfit” animals may be seen as anomalies, superior or diabolical, more interesting than the rest, for they challenge the very grounding of our thought in category making.

(The Others, p. 59)

Judaism and Christianity found other zoological, categorical equivalents of evil, such as the twilight forms (owls and bats at dusk), those between earth and water (toads and other amphibians at the streams edge), and those who undergo transformation (larvae, nymphs, and moulting forms). [...] Owls are the demonic equivocator of day and night; the larvae of insects and amphibians are are the deceivers of appearance. The image or call of each can be appropriated to signify disarray.

(The Others, p. 67)