Animals And Us
Where did we go wrong? Why did we remove ourselves from nature? What's with our hubris, our cultural will to dominance?
First be a good animal …
I can’t remember who said that but it came to mind as I begin to write a few thoughts about animals and our relationship to them.
Last night, was in a terrible funk. Might have been the wine, might have been the Willie Nelson, but just was in a terrible state. At my desk, not able to write. Listening to music, tears streaming down my face. Existential crisis.
And then I turned in my seat to pick up my glass of wine and there was Viernes, our Guatemalan street dog, sitting there, looking up at me, all glassy-eyed. She’s not like that, not the usual attentive dog. So this was strange. She sensed something in me, I’m sure of it.
A few days earlier, I had watched this documentary on Netflix - The Elephant Whisperer. Perhaps it is what brought on my funk. I highly recommend it. It did to me what good anthropology, good eyeballs on this earth, always does … reminds me there are different ways of living, being alive, viewing life and the meaning of our time on earth.
Man. We suffer from such horrible hubris. King of the beasts and all that jazz. Top of the heapism. Throw in a dash of our horrible anthropomorphism. Projecting ourselves onto and above everything. Man, the conquering worm, didn’t some poet whisper?
I wrote last time about the false paradigm of “man as machine”. It’s applicable here too, how we put ourselves above animals, don’t see them as our equals. How we barely attribute any emotion, any sentience to animals - only when it is to our convenience.
The documentary was about a couple who cared for elephants in southern India. Inspiring. Showing how we humans aren’t even one micron removed from animals, in all our glory and grotesqueness.
However, our world operates as if we are different. Higher. Above nature. It’s exactly this break with nature that is our current problematic societal paradigm - we are turning into Frankensteins. Quiet Franks though, not the big film types but softer, more insidious Franks.
Our cultural break with nature has been there for millennia, even long before the bible certified it and gave us permission to have dominion over the earth and all her creatures. And this break, this chasm is wrong. So terribly wrong. And it is the basis for so much evil, cruelty and suffering in the world.
I’m reminded of my early days of reading about the intersection of science and religion. I had some hope for us back then. In particular one book - Fritjof Capra’s - The Tao of Physics. (Dancing Wu Li Masters is another in the same vein). It was an attempt, a band-aid but attempt, to heal the divide between man and nature. Physics and in particular our early knowledge of quantum physics was shown to illustrate a singularity, a universalism that connects us all.
All things, all operate organically. There is a theory of everything. There is an animism underlying all matter. We just haven’t found the courage to believe it yet, to shirk off our hubris as “man” unkind.
Studies of energy show that is what we are, animals, man, fish, your table, that boulder, a fly - we are just energy. Bundles of energy manifested in different forms, packaged differently but all flying through time’s arrow, a parcel sent, address unknown.
I know I’m being widely poetic in my writing and musing about this but I’m dead serious. I’m disgusted how we live so divorced from all else. Like a petulant kid who won’t come out of his room into the garden to play. We suffer because we are so divorced from nature. I don’t want elephant whisperers. I want elephant screamers.
I think of my dear Mother. The goat whisperer. A St. Francesca of Assisi. She loved her goats and they loved her back. She could talk and know what they were doing. No kidding. She had broken the code. Like the man and woman in the documentary. They took the time to reject the divide of man/nature, that horrible dualism.
I remember a night in Corsica. I love the French for their meals that go on forever. Wine, cigarettes, talk, talk, talk, more food, more wine, talk, talk, talk, cigarettes … and one such evening, the topic of God came up. Everyone gave their conventional view, a few even saying, they just didn’t know. When I was asked, I said, “God is this fork (dramatically holding it up). There were gasps, all around. Mon Dieu. What sacrilege. Before being cut off, I went on to profess that God was all things, EVERYTHING.
You see, what the poet knows intimately above all else is this - the strings, the Ariadnian thread that connects all, us all, them all, it all. There is no man/nature divide. There is no animate/inanimate divide. Only entropy and our attempts to live through and in it.
My wish is for us all to become more humble in regards to our place on this planet earth. And in being so, become more charitable and kind to other creatures that share this home with us. I think in that, there might be some salvation and it might even by us some time until we are again all crushed up and remixed in that great recycling machine by and by.
Take some time and watch the short documentary. After, tell me if you don’t think we’ve got the narrative all wrong, us with our iphones and edonations to causes we know not of …