Scribblings with Green Chalk

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.

Soon it will have been a year since I first came across these lines. It was in a copy room at Cornell, some two days before I was leaving. It was snowing outside, the end of February. A gray day. The photocopier hummed as a friend of mine made it spit out new pages. I read.

Lying there always is the you
and the you is acting
contrary to what is wise.

The events then were revolving, it was a carousel I couldn’t stop because I couldn’t speak, and if I could have spoken, it wouldn’t have meant anything, I knew. In the spinning, those lines were a faint comfort. I smiled then, I remember. It was one of those smiles that don’t work and yet you try to pull it off. As if you were standing there, next to yourself, trying to be there for yourself. Trying not make it a movie scene in which you are a heap of marbles that scatter on the floor.

When I met Mary Jo Bang a couple months later, I wasn’t able to tell her what those closing words of “The Magic Lantern” meant to me. I didn’t want to say them, so I showed them to her on the page. Later, I got a signed copy of that book of poems which has been moving with me ever since.

I still don’t know how to write about the discovery of my own stupidity as a necessity. I cannot help thinking, even now, that things would have been better if only I could wind back the tape of decisions and actions, held back curiosity, have known that there was a pitfall that meant stepping into a story which would swallow me. Is the advice, do not talk to strangers? Or something more demanding, something that requires rigid control, an obsessive scrutiny of movie scripts to avoid patterns, a calculating approach to your own emotions, forever asking yourself how much am I allowed to feel?, and, of course, the gift of running fast?… Is there perhaps an instinct some of us might have lost? One that needs to be recreated with artificial means, using string and wire. (more…)

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.

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.

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)

Last night I finally pulled out of my mailbox an envelope that wasn’t from the bank.

It’s not that I terribly miss getting paper letters. Because so many letters I sent got “lost” somewhere on their way, I am generally very reluctant and distrustful towards the post. Reading Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 only made things worse. I don’t romanticize paper letters. When they get to the destination, it’s a hundred years after you wanted to say what you wanted to say. Also, I don’t think they’re more “real” than email, only more tangible.

To get a beautiful handmade card from a friend you haven’t seen in a long time is so much beyond that.

The letter in your hand is a point in the cosmos when and where you know things are in the right place. I was standing in the dark and the rain, feeling that I know my spot in the universe: after all my moving the letter finds my address (which means I’m here), it comes to me from a place I’d been to before (which means I once was there and there was here for me), and it’s from a dear friend (which means that although there isn’t here anymore, it wasn’t all just a dream — not everything dissolves when places change places).

As you can see in the picture above, the card is amazing. It tells you a lot about Denise, more than all my praise and affectionate descriptions could… And it speaks volumes about December in Central Europe. Christmas time has become an extension of autumn and we’re very unlikely to get snow before mid-January. (Unfortunately, pretty fiery leaves such as this one are also hard to find at this time of year.) The message inside I’m not sharing. Admire the leaf.

Denise, you’re the sweetest.
And this is the sweetest thing.

I would like to have a life-giving rigor: getting up with the sun, being able to drink the first cup of coffee without the burning sensation in my stomach. Or doing away with dreaming of the scent of coffee, at least. Welcoming the day in silence and with pleasure. Not crawling out of bed after trying for ten minutes to unglue myself from sleep. Not the low blood pressure blackouts I know.

But I have not just gotten up. I am undulging in the reverse of what I wrote a few seconds ago. Which makes it more desirable, perhaps. But how can the morning be calmer than the night? Until I find my discipline, this is what I have: I am wide awake and wondering if I could take the fat cat out to the patio and show him the stars in a hopeless but, you must admit, endearing attempt to share my quiet hours with someone who won’t make them less quiet.

I still feel like Stevens’ “Snowman” quite often, which is why the header is trees crusted with snow. I might let them thaw for a while, I think. I took some pictures during the walk in the gorge with Debbie today and she told me about a woman who would take a picture of the same tree each day throughout the seasons. It does sound like one of those great ideas that you wish you had thought of but that are distinctly someone else’s. I cannot offer a photo-biography of any of Ithaca’s trees or of any trees anywhere. But I want to read my random snapshots can as hints at my decision-making. I wanted to see what was underneath the snow and here I am.

All my recent moving has left me somewhat despondent. I have wanted to write something here but instead found myself trying to unpack things that will soon need to be packed again, re-establishing a friendship with a cat that’s forgotten I exist, calling old friends that were all very busy…
Walking around Poznań I feel like a tourist. When I was there in winter I got the impression that the city spat me out. All the places that should be familiar seem somehow sealed off. Remembered but not felt. Maybe I should dip a madeleine in tea or reread Proust. Or maybe just leave it as it is.

So I’ve been quietly trying to figure out which I want more: cookies dipped in tea or to move.