(part 1 of 2)
Earlier this week, I started to write about “animals,” and truly, it started out about that broad: I love animals, something a second grade girl might write on the front of her notebook. Uncertain of how to proceed, I began to think about what I always feel regarding animals: something about gratitude, for how animals provide me with a crucial reason for being alive, given our capacity to communicate with them, however clearly or cloudly, across our varying strangenesses. I wanted to write how this communication, whether wordful or winged, makes me aware of myself relationally to all other things breathing, regardless of species. And further, how an awareness of being among other beings, with the capacity to exchange meaning particularly across species, incites, to use a Rachel Carson phrase, the greatest sense of wonder. It’s different than with people—we expect, or at least we hope—that we can communicate sensically with our own species. But to have a meaningful exchange with some other creature is something I will never stop marveling at.
This exchange is at the heart of why anything matters to me at all, given our single emergence from a star exploding. Back to the second grade girl: consider the hot-pink generic-Converse hi-tops with specially selected fruit shoelaces that I wore, and was mocked for, on the first day of my new elementary school, so that I felt the laces were dorky, the shoes generic. If only I had known then: it didn’t matter about them! We’re all just a bunch of animals trying to figure things out. And, our time is brief.
When I can communicate with another animal, (and to be clear, sometimes it’s just an understanding to “stay away”) I feel intensely the underlying everything, the basic premise that we, the two of us creatures, are in the universe at all. Because here we are with our different sensory strengths, quivering together at a storm. Here we are feeling a little blue, so pile on the pickle. Or, here is my dog carrying my partner’s dirty shirt into the kitchen and dropping it beside said partner’s chair, on the morning he has left for travel (yes, this happened). To experience these little moments is to remember that I can coexist meaningfully with something that looks and behaves (mostly) nothing like me, but who has come, ultimately, from the same nothing that I have. Therefore, I feel the chanciness in it all. The brevity in it all. Those moments of exchange become little stars in vastness unfurling.
A section from Mark Payne’s wonderful book The Animal Part: Human & Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination supports my fixation with human-animal connection, particularly, my interest in our shared origin as beings who happen, through the chance of DNA and whatever other magic, to be born into one body or another. Payne writes:
To deny that we can imagine the lives of animals, when imagining the life of Napoleon, Emma Bovary, or our dead and distant relatives is something we could not imagine not doing, is to involve oneself in a denial of what it is to be human in the first place.
In short, to honor “what it is to be human,” is to remember we are also animal. Payne continues his argument, citing philosopher Stanley Cavell from his The Claim of Reason:
‘To withhold, or hedge, our concepts of psychological states from a given creature, on the ground that our criteria cannot reach to the inner life of the creature, is specifically to withhold the source of my idea that living beings are things that feel; it is to withhold myself, to reject my response to anything as a living being; to blank so much as my idea of having a body.’
Payne follows up, with a further citing of Cavell:
It is as one living animal to another that the other animal ‘calls upon me; it calls me out.’ No one can answer this call for me; ‘only I’ can ‘reach to the other’s (inner) life,’ by responding to it as to a voice that I recognize.
To respond to another animal “as to a voice that I recognize” is to once again acknowledge the wildness of anything existing at all, is to praise this coexistence where we make and find meaning through our communication with other species. Such meanings keep me grounded. Equally, all, having a body is the thing, and the thing to remember. We can only go collectively from there.