Like many writers, artists, and generally sensitive beings, I think a lot about the emotional porosity of bodies—or perhaps, the capacity for all living beings to be emotionally porous. I love that between two living creatures some combination of intuition, empathy, and the imagination can create a kind of language that resides in no written alphabet. These alphabets of fragmented memories, strong mossy odors, fears of hallways, heart beats, missed mothers, elk marrow, sodden park, keys’ crash, burred ankles, milk teeth, ocean debris, pencil nub, mud, beatings, back door, bird cry, it’s alright, and so forth, form the basis for human-animal and animal communication. Which is to suggest, without a word you could ever write or say, the animal and the human-animal find ways to share one another’s joys and anxieties and carry each other toward peace in feeling and being felt. Annie Dillard said it most simply perhaps: “I pat the puppy.” Something is exchanged there. This may sound obvious, but I don’t think it’s easy— true communication with an animal requires a dismantling of hierarchies in which the human takes a seat beside her fellow species. For me, the perfect metaphor for rethinking our relationship to other species comes in the form of a dog named “Human,” owned and “curated” by French artist Pierre Huyghe, in his retrospective currently on view at LACMA. Ironically enough, such a simple act of naming invites deep rethinking of our own human position in the world. There’s a moment of initial taken-abackness, I think, in learning a dog is named the name invented for you.
Shifting strongly in mentality from how different to how close the degrees among creatures has become a major preoccupation of mine in the past year, namely for two reasons: one, my partner and I adopted a very loving, very troubled PTSD suffering dog named Coda, who has revealed a range and extremity of emotions I never before witnessed in an animal, and two, the recent, lovely book by writer and scientist Laurel Braitman called Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves. I could write pages about how Coda has transformed my life and thinking, but that is real rabbit hole territory. Instead, see Braitman’s wonderful title—and rather then, a bit about her book.
Through a combination of personal pet-owner experience, scientific research, and visits to a variety of animals and their caretakers around the world, Braitman explores the similarities of animal and human emotion in a way that is both freeing and grounded; that is, she’s careful not to over anthropomorphize while quietly arguing through story and science, how often humans are able to sense, or even perhaps know what an animal may be “going through,” and vice versa. The challenge she offers is one simple and enormous: might we go one step further than merely acknowledging, when pressed, that we too are animal bodies, and actually embrace the fact that we share similar organs, DNA, family duties, physical hungers, bad memories, eyelashes, and so forth, with our various species’ counterparts? Acknowledge what your heart/brain are going through may not be so far off from what your dog’s heart/brain are going through? All are part muscle, part mystical. All are rare in being born. In Braitman’s stories, time and again I feel the marvel of being here at all, those gentle, open-mouthed moments that animals have the power to inspire, offering ourselves reflected in their silences and joys, their paws and eyes.
Madness asks us to meet animals on equal terms, and its pages are full of painful and triumphant accounts of the years-long struggles of many caretakers to reach their animals in shared, emotional spaces. These are spaces born of creativity—an ability to join science with intuitive understanding, underscored not least of all by humility. One of the most touching instances Braitman shares occurs in Thailand where the elephant should be king, queen, but is so often circus trick, slave. While visiting an affectionate mahout named Pi Saorte and his troubled elephant Noon Nying, Braitman asks Sarote,
“…what enabled him to heal a troubled elephant like Noon Nying. He said, ‘Jai dee,’ and placed his hand on his chest. Literally translated, this means ‘good heart,’ but it means more than that, too. It signifies good intentions, wholeheartedness, and something else more mysterious that I was never able to quite pin down. ‘If you have jai dee,’ he said, ‘the animals will know it, and they will have jai dee too.’ ”
What strikes me about this passage is the way that Sarote reverts instinctively to gesture to try and convey the indefinable quality of jai dee, known only to those who have experienced it. Perhaps this is like any love, in the way jai dee unfolds languagelessly in regards to speech. If we are lucky, we get to experience that feeling with many people in our lives. If we are lucky, we also get to experience that feeling with many animals in our lives. I am grateful to Laurel Braitman for writing a book that reminds us of this.
Next week, continuing the human and animal relationship theme, I will turn to poetry and explore a few poems about dogs—poems that are rare in their successes, I think, as a writer can only hope to get close to evoking jai dee’s soft, invisible strings.