Writing about animals at this moment, I catch them in the act of disappearing. Some are gone already: the groundhogs are dreaming their 6-months’ dream in their burrows. With unseasonably warm weather, chipmunks are zipping madly back and forth storing some food and eating the rest: amusingly, half-eaten nuts line the top of the retaining wall. The raccoons are still around, but curiously have ceased to be social and no longer come out to greet me at night as they do in the summer. The deer and squirrels are perpetual. This year I have not had turkeys: who knows where they go? Who knows where any of them go, how they all survive? I worry about it, and put out food, a practice with a shaky legal status here, as feeding the deer is illegal in North Royalton. But of course if I put out food for other animals, and the deer happen to eat it…. Oh, they’ll all survive, I’m told. I’m even told I am harming them by making them dependent on me and thus losing the edge of their survival skills. Oh, they do have the most amazing “animal cunning”: after all, where has that winter mouse, caught in the humane trap in my garage, come from but out in the cold and snow?
There is even a remarkable book about it: Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, by Bernd Heinrich (2003). In his introduction, Heinrich speaks of reading Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” when growing up as a teenage in western Maine. I too read it in high school. It is a story of a man who does not survive in the frozen Yukon, and why? “The trouble with the newcomer, London wrote, was that ‘he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things. Not in the significances’” (2). Heinrich speaks of his own book as an education of the imagination: “Each species experiences the world differently, and many species have capacities that are far different from ours. They can show us the unimaginable. Thus, the greater our empathy with a variety of animals, the more we can learn” (3). For all that, many animals do not survive the harshness of winter and may die of starvation, so I put out food. I enjoy seeing exotic animals in zoos, but my main concern is with the ordinary animals in my semi-rural, very large front and back yards in North Royalton, Ohio. People on dating sites say that you must love animals to have a relationship with them, but they mean pets. I do have a guinea pig (another has just died, at the incredibly ripe old age of 7 ½ years. Guinea pigs normally die around age 5, so Mira lived up to her name and was a miracle). But wild animals? People very much do not love the animals in their yards—they are pests. The deer eat gardens and bushes and are claimed to be a hazard running out on the road, a danger that is greatly exaggerated so that there is an excuse to hunt them twice a year, closing off the park with signs that say “wildlife management” is in process, signs that make me burn with anger every time. There is a near-hatred of groundhogs and raccoons. Squirrels are grudgingly tolerated but they may get into things, and occasionally do. The minute they become inconvenient we cease to be animal lovers.
Mice seem to be something of a test case, a touchstone for loving the unlovable. What is it with the people who have a horror of mice, people who are plenty tough in other ways? Have they ever seen a field mouse? They look as harmless as in fact they are, though it is true that their enormous, jet-black eyes give them a slightly alien look. They are indeed the most inconvenient of species, always trying to come in when the weather grows colder, and there is no keeping them out, because they can squeeze through the narrowest of cracks. I trap them in humane traps and release them in the park—which is also illegal around here, so don’t tell. I will admit, though, that I too have limits to my sentimentality. Last year, I had to give up and have a company ring my car, which is parked outside, with poison traps, because the mice were repeatedly getting into the car and chewing the electrical wires. The environmentalist movement giveth and taketh away: I am told that over a decade ago, auto makers switched from vinyl-covered wire to a kind of environmentally friendly wire whose sheath is soy-based. The problem is that that sheath is absolutely delicious if you are a mouse. After $1500 in car bills, I felt I had no choice, though I know the mice die horribly from that poison. So I understand a kind of them-or-me hard-heartedness. It keeps me from feeling holier than thou. At least, unlike with the lethal traps, I do not have to confront the bodies.
But about the illegal immigrants in the house I am unashamedly sentimental, my confidence bolstered by having good company. The most famous pro-mouse poem is Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough,” from November, 1785:
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, O, what a pannic's in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Wi' bickering brattle! I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee, Wi' murd'ring pattle!
Burns regrets “Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin.” Yes, the mouse steals and hoards: “I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve; / What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!” If a mouse moves in, you may go to put on a shoe and find an acorn in it; more than once someone decided to hide a nut in one of my acoustic guitars. In the 20th century, Theodore Roethke, who has some wonderful animal poems, wrote “The Meadow Mouse,” doubtless with the precedent of Burns in mind, about his attempt to care for an orphaned baby mouse. But one day the mouse flees his shoebox shelter and disappears, and Roethke’s aching compassion for what might happen to it expands at the poem’s end to include all the helpless creatures of the world:
I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass, The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway, The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising— All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.
Mice are among the homeless, despised as the homeless are despised. Another of the great animal lovers, Loren Eiseley, speaks of a mouse who ended up in his pot of ferns after its home had been eliminated by construction. “The Brown Wasps” is one of the great essays on the uses of the imagination, and one of its quest heroes of the imagination is that mouse:
I could imagine what had occurred. He had an image in his head, a world of seed pods and quiet, of green sheltering leaves in the dim light among the weed stems. It was the only world he knew and it was gone…. | About my ferns there had begun to linger the insubstantial vapor of an autumn field, the distilled essence, as it were, of a mouse brain in exile from its home…Every day these invisible dreams pass us on the street, or rise from beneath our feet, or look out upon us from beneath a bush. (231-32)
It is remarkable how often the word “imagination” comes up in relation to animals. How could I pass up an article with the title “Rats May Have Power of Imagination, Research Reveals”? According to a recent article in The Guardian (Imagination of Rats), “Researchers have found that rats can navigate their way through a space they have previously explored using their thoughts alone, suggesting the rodents have some sort of imagination.” Eiseley was there long before them, but it is nice to see his fantasies validated. Though that may not always happen, and that is okay. In another of his greatest essays, “The Innocent Fox,” Eiseley comes upon a fox cub in its den while the mother was away. The cub is too young to be afraid. And in fact, it wants to play. Eiseley says:
It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat. | Yet here was the thing in the midst of the bones, the wide-eyed, innocent fox inviting me to play, with the innate courtesy of its two forepaws placed appealingly together, along with a mock shake of the head. The universe was swinging in some fantastic fashion around to present its face, and the face was so small that the universe itself was laughing. (209-10)
Eiseley picks up a bone and shakes it with his teeth: “Round and round we tumbled for one ecstatic moment” (210)—a precisely chosen word, for “ecstatic” means going out of oneself. Eiseley ends the essay by saying, “It is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish, but, as Thoreau once remarked of some peculiar errand of his own, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society” (212). Especially not to the Royal Society, for they might only report it to all the aristocratic fox hunters over there. As well as badger hunters: another great 18th century animal poet was John Clare, whose poem “The Badger” describes in horrific detail the brutal hunting and killing of a badger, who stands up against all odds. It is enough to make you want to resign from the human race. I have not played with a baby animal, but I have watched baby animals play. In the summer, baby groundhogs and baby raccoons play with one another on the deck exactly as the fox cub played with Eiseley. They wrestle: one gets atop another and pretends to bite his head. Then they struggle some more, and then the other one gets his turn on top. They get so into it that once in a while they fall right off the deck onto the stairs, but they hardly seem to notice: they are having too much fun to stop.
What is our imaginative relationship to animals? It seems to me possible to construct a typology of animal imagery in mythology and literature that spans two poles: from humanized animals to animals experienced as mysteriously Other. Humanized animals are just human beings with fur. Perhaps the oldest way of domesticating animals, so to speak, is by turning them into fables, which are talking-animal allegories, in which the animals and their behavior are humanized by being turned into ideas, into morals. It can be a fairly superficial genre, but Aesop retains his popularity, and Kipling’s Just So Stories and two-volume Jungle Book revive the technique for modern times, significantly as children’s literature. The Just So Stories for younger children adopt the deliberate naiveté of the animal fable, answering childish questions such as how the leopard got his spots. The Jungle Book, for older readers, preaches a higher moral lesson that Kipling calls The Law of the Jungle. The Law of the Jungle is not the Darwinian “survival of the fittest,” but in fact quite the opposite. There is a moral law in nature that restrains even the predators, an order principle to which both animals and human beings owe obedience. Kipling’s colonialist conservatism in on display here, but there is a “natural law” theory of interpreting the United States Constitution. The human order should follow the moral order inherent in the laws of nature. It is perhaps sufficient commentary on natural law theory to say that one of its prominent advocates is Clarence Thomas. Apparently the laws of nature are interpreted to be those that favor the right people, namely, Clarence Thomas.
Donovan has a scathingly satiric song, “Rikki Tikki Tavi,” named after the mongoose in The Jungle Book who defends the humans he has adopted from snakes. The mongoose is supposed to be a protector upholding the Law of the Jungle, but Donovan’s mongoose is fed up with human hypocrisy:
United Nations ain't really united And the organisations ain't really organised Riki tiki tavi mongoose is gone Riki tiki tavi mongoose is gone Won't be coming around for to kill your snakes no more my love
Kipling lifted this tale from the Panchatantra, an ancient Indian collection of animal fables, mentioned in the previous newsletter, and, through newsletter synchronicity, by Salman Rushdie recently addressing the Frankfurt book fair. He says (Salman Rushdie, the Panchatantra):
[I]n India, I grew up with the Panchatantra, and when I find myself, as I do at this moment, in between writing projects, it is to these crafty, devious jackals and crows and their like that I return, to ask them what story I should tell next. So far, they have never let me down. Everything I need to know about goodness and its opposite, about liberty and captivity, and about conflict, can be found in these stories. For love, I have to say, it is necessary to look elsewhere.
Humanized animals commonly appear in traditional folktales, modern fairy tales and children’s literature, and cartoons. In some Indigenous Creation myths that are close to folktale, talking animals create or help to create the world. In one such myth, a woman falls from the sky, with the usual don’t-ask-don’t-tell dream logic of myth, and the animals go to great effort to fetch up mud from the bottom of the primordial waters so that the woman has a place to dwell, some of them even dying in the effort. On the other hand, some of the Indigenous Trickster figures are animals, such as Coyote, Raven, and Crow. The poems in Ted Hughes’ Crow make the latter into a representative of the all too human, a nasty figure whose humanity we would like to repudiate, but can’t. The crow who narrates John Crowley’s fantasy Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (2017) is an attempt at a sympathetic portrait of someone who’s not so bad once you get used to the idea that he lives on dead flesh. The attempted humanizing of animals is not confined to literature and film. The attempt to teach chimpanzees American Sign Language, however equivocal its results, was motivated by the assumption that chimpanzee consciousness is enough like human consciousness to be expressed in human language. But an excuse for at least some carefully considered anthropomorphism could be that animals may be more anthropomorphic than most people know, if only because most people are not in contact with them. Every year, by mid-summer, the raccoons have gotten to know me so well that, first of all, they talk to me. No, I have not been living alone too long: raccoons have a language of growls and guttural sounds that can seem unnerving until you get used to it. But I have, and I talk back. They are glad to see me, knowing there is food, and follow me to the food dishes, at my heels like dogs. One night, when I bent down to empty the bucket, one of them put his paw tentatively on my hand. I will remember that moment all my life.
But animals are sometimes experienced as a form of the Other, as in the 8th of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. As is evident from recent newsletters, I have been reading a lot of the great fantasy and science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin lately, who has translated the 8th Elegy in her volume Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, which collects stories and poems by her about the whole expanse of nature: animal, vegetable, and mineral. Rilke’s poem opens by saying that “With all its gaze the animal / sees openness. Only our eyes are / as if reversed” (191). What this means is that, although animals are conscious, we have self-consciousness or ego consciousness that retracts from our natural environment, faces inward. This is the subject-object split of modern philosophy, which Blake called the “cloven fiction.” It is a result of the Fall, conceived by Romantic and post-Romantic writers as a fall from harmonious union with the environment into alienation. The animals did not fall: in a very real way, they are still in paradise. They are a part of their world, and their world is part of them, whereas we are exiles.
In this phase of the imagination, animals are sacred manifestations of a higher order of being. LeGuin’s book is titled after a poem by Denise Levertov, “Come into Animal Presences,” included in the volume, whose thesis is “Those who were sacred have remained so.” Therefore, “An old joy returns in holy presence.” Perhaps it is the larger and more powerful animals who most impress us with a type of presence, holy or unholy, and perhaps most powerfully the horse. My friend, mentor, and dissertation director Ted Chamberlin has written about the profundity of the human relationship with horses in Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations (2008). Personal relationships with horses are possible; at the same time, horses are gods, and apparently sometimes jealous gods if Peter Shaffer’s play Equus (1973) is to be believed.
When St. Francis preached to the birds, then, it was a rather odd way of preaching to the choir, but perhaps his real audience was human. Capitalists take note: Francis extolled birds for following Jesus’ advice and taking no thought for the morrow, devoting themselves to their real task of praising their Creator with song. Becoming a kind of anti-Aesop, he contrasted them with the ants, of whose work ethic he disapproved because of its worldliness. But Francis’s real importance lay in his mystical bond with the birds, who came to perch upon his shoulders, making him a refreshingly different figure in a religion that came to fear and hate nature as the realm of the devil. When I was in grad school at the University of Toronto, there was a “pigeon lady,” as she was called, who used to sit on a bench in Queen’s Park and feed the pigeons, letting them actually land on her. I once saw her so covered in pigeons that she could not be seen.
The human figure for whom the connection with animals, and therefore with their different mode of being, is not fully broken is a recurrent type from the very beginning of Western literature. In the Gilgamesh Epic, Enkidu is a “natural man” who roams with the animals in the wilderness. Gilgamesh civilizes Enkidu by having a prostitute seduce him. This fall from innocence produces twin results that are aspects of the same thing: he learns language, but the animals flee from him. It is unutterably sad. He does, however, gain human love, in the form of a fast friendship with Gilgamesh. Tarzan, brought up by apes but also Lord Greystoke, is a later version of Enkidu.
In Norse myth, and therefore in Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas, the hero Siegfried tastes dragon’s blood and thereby understands the language of birds. The dragons of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea stories are awesomely, terrifyingly Other, and they speak an old tongue that is primordial, essentially different from merely human language. Jung said that in the imagery of mythology, literature, and dreams, in other words the archetypal imagery of the deep unconscious, the animals that can be humanized are those closest to us, especially the warm-blooded mammals. Animals lower on the evolutionary scale seem increasingly Other, inhuman, sublime but ominous, potentially demonic. Dragons are serpents, and although there are people who keep snakes, iguanas, and so forth, those animals are not “pets,” that is, not companions with whom one can relate socially, as to a dog or cat. I suspect the fascination is precisely in the Otherness of the alien life form. Ditto for tarantulas. In his poem “Snake,” D.H. Lawrence castigates himself for throwing a log at a snake that had merely come to a watering hole to drink and presented no threat. He blames his petty, cowardly ego for showing disrespect for a lord of the underworld, a chthonic power. Lawrence has a novel called The Plumed Serpent. It is a very bad novel, but its title image is taken from Aztec mythology, in which the union of bird and serpent represents the paradoxical union of the two poles of the Chain of Being, upper and lower. Birds have their own spectrum: those at the bird feeder belong to the humanized world. Hawks, eagles, and other birds of prey are more Other. Beyond that are the vast mythological birds like the roc, and beyond even that are the angels, who are not birds, of course, but who are portrayed with birds’ wings for a reason. We are back to Rilke again: the 1st Duino elegy speaks of angels, and says, “Every angel is terrifying.” They are messengers from a higher realm, and when not sentimentalized on Christmas cards share the Otherness of that realm.
Sentimental as I can be about animals, I am at the same time a bit skeptical at some of the attempts to see animals as unfallen, sacred presences. That is not exactly wrong, but it is not the full story either. I live in a house whose whole front wall is glass, and I observe animals on a daily basis, as well as interacting with them to a limited degree. While it is not explicitly in the Bible, Christian tradition has always held that, contrary to some of the writers previously mentioned, nature fell along with humanity: Milton plays it that way in Paradise Lost. It is true that there do not seem to be nearly as many bad animals as bad human beings, so perhaps animals did not fall as far as we did. But there do seem to be bad animals, bad in just the way that human beings are bad. I am not talking about animals that have become vicious or neurotic because of human mistreatment, but of animals out in their natural environment. Deer are supposed to be the gentlest of all creatures—Bambi, and all that—but there is an occasional deer that is just plain mean. And it is usually a doe—the bucks tend to have a quiet gravity and forbearance that goes along with confidence that they are the lords of deer society. Usually, deer and the smaller creatures, such as raccoons and groundhogs, create a peaceable kingdom where I spread the food out on the ground. Many of the deer are sweetly patient with baby raccoons and groundhogs who do not yet know prudence, let alone manners, and go right up to the deer’s faces to get at the food. But once in a while there is a doe who is a complete jerk. She not only tries to drive off other deer, but stamps at the raccoons and groundhogs and could easily injure one of them. One last year there was an ultimate worst case. When her behavior became intolerable, I went out and drove her off—but she immediately returned and defied me, stamping on the ground. Then she started to kick at the small animals again. This went on four times one day until I finally chased her across the creek.
However, there is a larger pattern than individual personalities (and there’s no use talking with anyone who thinks animals don’t have individual personalities). Poets did not need Darwin to know that the peaceable kingdom devolved into nature red in tooth and claw. In the Divine Comedy, Dante divides the worst sins, those of deliberate malice, into sins of force and fraud, forza and froda. These are an imitation, often deliberate, of fallen nature, which is an unending cycle of predators and prey, violence and cunning. Men are conditioned to identify with the predators, to be lion kings, alpha male baboons, to cover their battle armor with images of hawks and eagles. Most of this is just neurosis, but the cycle of predators and prey is real, and is disturbing. Well, at least to some of us. “Death is part of nature” is often used as a rationalization even in some Wiccan and Goddess-religion circles, because after all not all violence and death can be blamed on the patriarchy. We cannot afford to be too involved in what the hawk does to the rabbit, especially if we are not vegetarians and are doing the same thing ourselves, just with someone else doing the killing and gruesome preparing for us.
Anyway, the hawk has to eat, and cannot help its nature. It cannot become a vegetarian. And of course we are always killing something—plants are alive too.
These arguments are truly unanswerable, so it is understandable if people preserve their peace of mind with a cultivated indifference, a shrug. But peace of mind is bought at a price of deliberate blindness, and there is always a price to pay for repression. Descartes denied that animals had consciousness, let alone souls: they are basically automata and do not really feel pain even when they may seem to. This kind of desperate rationalizing is in denial about the nightmarish cruelty of our treatment of animals. There is nothing about the “survival of the fittest” that justifies what is done to animals in factory farms, in product testing labs, which is a result of capitalist greed, not the need to survive. “It’s not as if they’re human or something” is the excuse offered down through history for all kinds of animal mistreatment.
Joseph Campbell speaks of four functions of mythology, “the first of which might be described as the reconciliation of consciousness with the preconditions of its own existence. In the long course of our biological prehistory, living creatures had been consuming each other for hundreds of millions of years before eyes opened to the terrible scene… until, one day, the crisis occurs that has separated mankind from the beasts: the realization of the monstrous nature of this terrible game that is life, and our consciousness recoils” (147-48). He quotes Schopenhauer: “Life is something that should not have been.” I do not feel doctrinaire about this, but people who disapprove of zoos do not always seem to consider that the alternative to a life that is, yes, perhaps boring in its protected sequestration is a plunge into the ferocity of eating and being eaten, along with a considerably shorter life span.
For those who are not content merely to repress, to refuse to care, myth and religion have traditionally offered two ways to deal with the consciousness of the food chain, of how we are all eventually recycled. One is transcendence, escape from the forza-froda cycle of predator and prey into a supernatural realm above it. Not all such versions are Christian: in “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats says that, “once out of nature,” he wants to become a golden bird upon a golden bough, watching time go by while being unaging himself. The other is immanence, that is, accepting the cycle of predators and prey but adding reincarnation, as in the system of karma, maybe even with promotions if we’ve been good boys and girls. Even if not, we always get another ride on the merry-go-round. Flowers have been symbols of cyclical immortality because they always return in a new season. Rationally, we say, well, they’re not the same flowers—but maybe they are. Something of the same has been speculated for the prehistorical hunting societies. Maybe the vivid pictures of animals in the Paleolithic caves are part of a mythology of rebirth: the individual animals die, but a kind of animal archetype abides. James Dickey’s poem “The Heaven of Animals” dreams of such a cycle. It is impossible to imagine predators without their hunting instincts, so perhaps heaven for them would be a state of being in which their prey “feel no fear, / But acceptance, compliance, / Fulfilling themselves without pain”:
At the cycle’s center, They tremble, they walk Under the tree, They fall, they are torn, They rise, they walk again.
There is a third suggestion: that these alternatives are not either-or but somehow both-and. How can that be? I am not wise enough to give a definitive answer here, but the beginning of insight might lie in a revolution of the imagination that turns our perspective inside out, puts it through a Vortex, to use an image of Blake’s. A supernatural heaven and a system of literal rebirth are projections of the imaginative states of detachment and engagement respectively. We must plunge into life and commit to it, knowing we will suffer for it and eventually die. At the same time, as the mindfulness movement suggests, it is necessary for an independent part of the mind to remain detached, observing, beyond it all. This is easy to mistake for mere indifference and repression, but I think it is exactly the opposite, an acceptance: “This must be.” Maybe what Nietzsche meant by amor fati, love of one’s fate, when he wasn’t just posturing about it. In Jungian terms, the ego is engaged, while the Self is detached, the image of God, whose detachment in the face of the agony of the world seems simply cruel, but which just maybe could be something else. After all, he too was engaged and detached, the Son and the Father, watched himself being nailed to a cross, watched his own agony, watched himself die. Maybe what we call redemption is a perfect balance, never quite achieved, of these Contraries. Jungians speak of an “ego-Self axis,” which solves nothing but is nevertheless suggestive. It’s a strange world, and we are strange beings.
Redemption is not just for ourselves, however. How do we save fallen nature? This goes far beyond remedying needless extinctions: how do we change the very nature of nature? Must all the poor mice suffer forever? The two most famous of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience are “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” emblematic of Innocence and Experience respectively. “The Lamb” is recited by a child who loves his pet lamb. But when we read “The Tyger,” we understand that the child’s pastoral view is sweet but insufficient. The tiger represents another aspect of nature, the sublime, nature as an Otherness of titanic power. Yes, the tiger is a killer, whose philosophy concerning lambs is summed up by the word “lunch.” And yet, we would not want to make the tiger lie down with the lamb by taming the tiger into a pussycat, though I admit that that is rather what Blake’s to-me-inadequate illumination of him does. The tiger is wild, and his wildness is part of what we admire. Obedience school is not the answer. Wild animal trainers in circuses are very ambivalent figures.
Another way of trying to redeem wild animals from their predatory ferocity is to humanize them through development of their native intelligence, or, in science fiction, increasing that intelligence through some technological means, a recourse that has come to be known as “uplift.” But in both traditional and modern scientific romance, the outcome, while not inevitably tragic, is equivocal. Despite what I said about the attempt to make real chimpanzees talk like their namesakes in cartoons through teaching them American Sign Language, it is language, the Symbolic Order, that alienates us from the natural, instinctive state in which we begin. Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest, half man and half fish, snarls at Prospero: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to curse.” H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau replays the pattern of Frankenstein: the mad scientist creates intelligent animals because he wants to be worshipped by them as a god. Recently, and poignantly, we have Rocket the uplifted raccoon in the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy of superhero films. The tragedy of uplifted animals is our tragedy projected upon the animal world. We are the uplifted, caught between our deeper, instinctual selves and the ego consciousness that is, as psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan have shown, linguistically structured. The prisonhouse of language is a zoo, and we are the animals in it.
Before we know what it would mean to redeem nature, we will first have to learn what it means to redeem human nature. Writers from Jung to D.H. Lawrence feel that modern humanity evolved too quickly, so that consciousness has become cut off from its instinctual roots, the energy reservoirs of pleasure and power that are now repressed into the unconscious, and, because repressed, destructive. The form of the modern quest myth is a descent into that instinctual realm, not to “go native” like Conrad’s Kurtz, regressing into savagery, but to reconnect consciousness and reason with the instincts. Art is a primary instrument of that reconnection. Once we learn what it would mean to naturalize ourselves, to become the noble savages of romance without the primitivism and colonialism, maybe we will be ready to consider how to humanize the animals without denaturing them. A naturalized humanity and humanized animals, equal opposites: what is this but the world of the children’s books and the cartoons?
I know I am strange to be up at night thinking about these things, especially as I have no real answers, only riddling intuitions. But the mice are worth a little effort, even if all I can do myself is take them to the park and let them go, hoping they find what they need.
References
Campbell, Joseph. “The Four Functions of Mythology.” In Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers. 8th edition. Edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. Pearson, 2012. 147-51.
Eiseley, Loren. “The Brown Wasps.” In The Night Country. University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Eiseley, Loren. “The Innocent Fox.” In The Unexpected Universe. Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1969, 194-212.
Heinrich, Bernd. Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival. Harper Perennial, 2003.
LeGuin, Ursula K. Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. New American Library, 1987.
When I showed your piece to my mother, who lives in the country, she replied: "The writer does not know my deer who are afraid of all small animals and will scatter if my ducks decide to join them in eating at their pans. I do have a couple of “mean” deer who don’t allow other deer to eat at the same time they do."