Scribblings with Green Chalk

Walking madness has set in again, as soon as it stopped being dark and cloudy all the time. I climbed up on the Philosophenweg on my first night in Heidelberg and I went up there several times between my finals to inaugurate the spring. There’s more to it than these pictures from walks with friends (waving to Denise). And it’s all about getting off the path anyway.

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My tastebuds are incapacitated. An eating disorder in my teens and later ulceritis have turned my relationship with food into something of a marriage of convenience. I tend to compliment dishes with “interesting,” as if suddenly drained of adjectives. I am grateful for good food, but I lack culinary imagination. I have fleeting food obsessions but no true love ensues.

I wish I could write seductively about peanut butter. Nothing makes you appreciate good peanut butter more than bad peanut butter. I felt like Rapunzel’s mother, asking a friend to get me real, serious organic peanut butter from the US army grocery store uncanny shopping land. I could not deny my intense real-peanut-butter hunger, even though I could not write an ode to peanut butter nor a lament for the bad peanut butter I had in the past months. As a birthday gift, my friend gave me two big jars of crunchy and creamy. I’d never have guessed it would turn out to be such a marvelous gift. I went for a birthday week with peanut butter toast, peanut butter toast with my mother’s jam, and, of course, apples with peanut butter, and peanut butter without company.

Magically, the sun’s declared a temporary cessation of hostilities. In hope of catching some natural vitamin D, I took a long walk yesterday with a curious pause (thanks to my friend and the passport I forgot to leave at home) in uncanny shopping land where I binged on American women’s magazines, coffee, and a brownie. Caught the last sun rays on the way home and had apples with peanut butter before sleep. The life.

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.

… wishy-washy winter continues.

Those who claim that boredom is a disease of the lazy have been too much in love with misanthropy to notice the insidious boredom of being busy. There’s an empty spot in the midst of the bustle. Boredom’s unmade bed. Baudelaire’s messy chest of drawers. Yes, I am busy. Yes, I am reading an interesting book. It’s not helping.

In the middle of the night I go to the kitchen to heat up milk for a cup of cocoa. Not much of a comfort. Something is off. Unhinged. But it works. Strangely.

The pewter gleam of late morning only fades to early evening darkness. I feel that the weather makes me stupid. No snow, no frost to bite your fingertips, your toes. I’m as unexcited as the bored kid in the picture below. Winter wolf’s toothless. I don’t even need a gun in that basket. I’m bored. Occupied attention doesn’t help. Cocoa doesn’t help. I don’t like myself so blasé.

[Image found here.]

Reading Bowleserised’s latest post, I missed my remembered excitement about fairy-tales, Angela Carter, Neil Jordan’s movie adaptation of “The Company of Wolves,” and all those other things that seem like they happened a hundred years ago, though the dates in letters and documents say otherwise. I know I’m in a momentary funk but the moment lingers.

I feel like changing out of my pj’s into other pj’s, sleeping through the rest of the season with snacks in between. Of course, nothing of the kind is happening. I go to school every day, write my papers, do my presentations, getting busily bored. There must be some cunning plan to get out of this, like Old English riddles and charms. It’s worse than “unfruitful land.” An unfruitful brain looks nasty on a resumé. People will eat me for dull blog posts. I’ll die bored.

Help, I’m stuck in the world of vitamin D and green nail varnish.

Soon I’ll know all the lyrics from Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton’s Knives Don’t Have Your Back. Please help me before I dig out my Portishead records and start singing along with Beth Gibbons.

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.