First, anyone who has had to care for a seriously ill animal knows that it's no less exhausting, emotionally and physically, than caring for a seriously ill person. In some ways it's much more taxing, because you can't reason with an animal or persuade it to do anything that it doesn't want to do; you have to force it to recover, and even as you act in its best interest the animal learns to fear you, although it does still love you. People at least comprehend, even if they can't accept, the consequences of their recovery. So in addition to draining you of all energy, ambition, and intelligence, the task also makes you feel guilty as hell, because even though you know you're doing the right thing by trying to make the animal well again, you can't help but feel like recovery comes only by way of abuse.Second, bullshit. Anyone who spends nearly thirty thousand dollars on medical bills for an animal, who devotes over four hours each day to feeding, cleaning, and administering medicine to that animal, who has made such an honorable and lasting commitment to that animal in order to offer it some small comfort in its loneliest moments--and yes, rabbits get lonely--anyone who has demonstrated through her actions and not just her intentions that animals deserve the respect and priority accorded to other semi-sentient beings like John McCain has earned the right to grieve over that animal's death. Sentimentality, by definition, is cheap, pornographic, and unearned. Through our care and attention we make deliberate, serious progress toward understanding these creatures and, if we choose, allowing them to live by the same simple rights--protection from cruelty and, when possible, guarantee of health--that we recognize for other wild beasts like children, even if we don't actually enforce them. Sentimentality consoles, immediately and unthinkingly, and it works to level and reduce experience, not enhance or complicate it. Deciding that some animals--I wouldn't include, say, tuna or snakes or chickens, although that may be because I'm ignorant and lack even rudimentary knowledge of chicken psychology--are intelligent and engaged with the world--oh, not in the way that humans are, in their dasein-I'm-so-profoundly-not-a-monkey lifestyle--but intelligent enough and engaged in whatever way it is for a rabbit or a dog or a big bird to be engaged with the world; deciding that, and I mean consciously choosing to live with that value and to practice it, changes your relationship with any animal. From that time forward you have to consent to guarding its welfare and acting as its ward, while also admitting that although it cannot care for itself in the way that fully functioning humans can cross a street without getting juiced or deposit money in a bank, it thinks and feels and behaves in a way that is totally its own, and that is not dependent on or even available to its human caretakers. This strangeness makes it remote, and its physical dependence makes it immediate. Understanding that paradox encourages any animal owner to feel deep sympathy for his pet but also know, at every moment, that this creature is not human, does not reason, and has no use for symbols. That is not sentimentality; that is respect.
Which brings me to my third and final point. Rabbits are complicated. They do very weird things and they plan ahead and can use strategy to accomplish a goal. They play practical jokes. They solicit affection when they're bored or happy and want to be left alone when they're tired or sick or depressed. They are ticklish. They recognize nuances in human emotion. They steal objects just because they know you want or need them. They become bossy or mean for no apparent reason. Sometimes they want nothing to do with you. My older rabbit enjoys being punished. My younger rabbit is afraid of balloons. Both of them know how to open their cages, forcing us to find new security measures to keep them in. My older rabbit begs and begs to be let out, just so that he can lie on the floor. My younger rabbit likes to get stuck in small places, and I really mean stuck, as in she can't move. Go figure.
My point is that whatever they aren't--and they definitely are not human--rabbits and other higher order mammals, at least, have their own system of values and codes that makes their lives dense and difficult and delightful. Occasionally that system overlaps with ours and we get a glimpse into their odd little world, but mostly we just observe it from a distance, noting with humor and consternation that a rabbit will climb anything, no matter how precarious the ascent or unprofitable the summit, just for dubious pleasure of being on top of it.
Real people giving real time and very real resources to sick, injured, or even healthy animals may be unwise, impractical, or inefficient, but it isn't sentimental. Dressing cats as cowboys is sentimental. Putting tiny dogs in purses is sentimental. Believing that your pet is just like you is sentimental. These absurd behaviors console us by pardoning our stupid, sad, lazy, unpardonable insistence that animals be toys, cartoons, or domesticated, furry babies. Unfortunately, your callous and unthinking rejection of animal grief is equally sentimental, because it consoles you that some firm metaphysical divide separates the intellectually sound from the humanly irrational. Classicists, I've noticed--and this also goes for the sort-of classicists who study anything up to but certainly NOT including the big, blubbery boys of the Lakes who made compassion for tethered ponies righteous and hip--too frequently retreat into the Swiftean cloudland of rigorous, human ideals whenever they're threatened by the disordered, gross spectacle of real world business. Carnivalesque is fine as long as it's in a book; when it comes groping at you down the street wearing urine-stained, tattered fatigues and carrying a soiled American flag, it looks more menacing. What defines you as a person, and, thank God, extends your interest in life beyond literature into the dangerous play of actual, not simulated, disorder, is your willingness to walk up to that peeing hobo, shake his hand, and say, "God bless America."
Those who are willing to invest serious value, to stake time and meaning and life on instability, to live, as claimed Keats--the prophet and darling of all those classicists who secretly fear the real Romantics--in negative capability, they bow uniquely and beautifully under the weight of their experience. But they live honestly, and they understand that sometimes we risk being wrong in order to gain the grace and severity, and the eventual calm, that comes with choosing to love a world that is not determined, not reasonable, and not ours.
And by the way, also in the book are detailed instructions on how to check a rabbit's urine for excess calcium, so stow your sentimentality. Caring a lot for something most people think is worthless is not the same thing is imbuing an object with more meaning or worth than it merits. Moreover, imbuing it with less is sentimental, a special kind called cynicism. Myxomatosis is not just a poem by Larkin.
And I apologize for the angry response. I'm dizzy and anxious and I'm sick--really sick--of people thinking that rabbits are just fuzzy escapes from reality. Just . . . watch what you say about an experience you can't possibly relate to. That woman's story isn't a narrative, it isn't art to be examined for quality or device; it's a part of her life. And by going through what she did, by investing in it as she did and by committing her own precious energy and health to her rabbit's rehabilitation, I think she earned the right to every word. She learned the subtlety of that trauma and refused the consolations of cold criticism and colder fantasy, and that is the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. We're all free to feel; that is the great gift of experience. When we feel more or less than we should, given the circumstances and our own explicit values, we slide toward one or the other extremes of sentimentality: faith and cynicism. To feel, to feel honestly with no taint of personal interest or self-protection, is an extraordinary achievement and is thoroughly unsentimental. We should be so fortunate to speak and feel with definite purpose and a reason beyond mere reasoning, and not to evade the responsibility of ourselves and our world by using intelligence to annul intuition. Otherwise, we feel with an imperial heart, and whatever charity we exercise toward any fact that does not profit us comes perilously close to indifference, or worse, pity.
Or have I read too much Wordsworth?
Iron-Hearted Ass-Bot: My honest-hearted Koko, believe me, in my youth I lost an atrium for every hamster, a ventricle for each tropical fish. I set up a small hospital tank for my beta, whose beautiful fins were bitten off piecemeal by the other fish in the main tank, and when the resulting finrot rendered the poor creature unable to swim and changed it from a deep blue to a suffering white, I euthanized him in a bag of painless ice. When my cat died after a long illness, I cried my ass off, long after boys were to have given up tears. I really do pick up earthworms dehydrating on the sidewalk, and toss them back into the grass. I tell myself it's good for the soil and the world, but secretly I know it's because I've never grown up, and I care for every passing worm. I once wrote, at the end of an absurdly overwrought but nevertheless honest poem:
The inchworm, not yet blown away,
That clings its last few moments to my windshield,
May never enter your considerations;
But to me, it will grow once more a flower in the field,
Like a Stoic emperor and his ancient Meditations.
But mostly I understand other people's devotion to their pets; I know very well that that was real pain New Orleans felt for all the dogs and cats it lost. Nor should anyone feel silly or guilty for forging a direct and meaningful connection to an animal. That woman indeed earned every word she wrote.
But--that's her loss, her life, and while I respect it, I don't think I can feel it with anything like the full impact it has on her. Just as she would express sympathy for me and my cat, but would not--and really should not--feel my grief herself. I don't think I'm a cynic for wanting to keep my own griefs mine, and letting others lose and grieve as they must and will. The classical authors I most love are those who understood and emphasized the intolerable privacy of grief; if Euripides' choruses seem so obsolete, so unhelpful, that's because they've learned they cannot really identify, nor even quantify nor adequately describe, what Hecuba must be feeling. MacKenzie's Harley can't live in the world, and The Man of Feeling can never be a full or complete novel, because its hero's approach to a world of loss is paralytic and self-consuming, not to mention impractical to an absurd degree--he's respectable, more respectable than I can be, but absurd. Augustine came to realize that his tears for Dido were wasted; he also came to weep a lot for a different fiction--what you here call faith--and I personally think that's just as silly and philosophically fallacious, but that historically disastrous error in the other direction doesn't vindicate his tears for Dido, who wasn't his rabbit, and who could never be saved by his tears.
I also gotta say I think there is some lingering merit in humanism. I know human beings are fallible, often horrible. I can't care for John McCain more than for my own hamster, but I can and should care for the average human being more than I care for the average animal. Not because of any cold-hearted intellectualism, but because I could be anybody, but could not be just anything. My feelings for your hobo, if I have my sanity, will be greater than my feelings for his dog, and not because I disrespect his dog. Is it not possible, even imperative, to care more for a man than a beast? In a sense, philanthropy makes exactly as much sense as misanthropy, just as I would hate in a greater degree the man who murdered one brother than I would the tiger who ate another, so I should love in a greater degree my fellow man, because there is no such thing as a fellow tiger.
Maybe not. Actually I think I love tigers more than human beings. Surely the nobler creature. We've already had it out about tigers. But even that way of evaluating--all tigers, all lambs--belies the notion that I care more for tigers than people, because automatically I differentiate between people--I hate some and love others, and only if I in some way owned a tiger could I love or hate it more than the rest of its kind. Dunno what I'm trying to say, and I'm probably full of shit and contradicting even the previous paragraph, but I also know I don't hate God or Nature or Whomever because my cat had to die; instead, I hate God or Nature or Whomever because my grandfather had to die. A rabbit is not a fuzzy escape from reality--no way would I ever really be such a dick as to think so (though I reserve the right to scorn the fictional rabbits of Watership Down, dammit)--but the loss of a rabbit is not an irreplaceable loss, not the end of part of my world, not in the way the loss of a person is.
In any event, my grief for my hamsters was normal--overstated but normal, and I'm glad I felt it. But there have been times in my life--looking back I can recognize them now--when I was not feeling in proportion to any object. When I was feeling too many losses and feeling too much grief for each loss. A cat mourned as a grandfather is mourned, a grandfather mourned like the whole fucking world had died. I too felt dizzy and sick, even on wonderful days without the death of anything. It wasn't my fault and eventually it went away, but at the time, it had nothing to do with who or what had died, nothing to do with Spenser for me or Wordsworth for you and anyone other than myself out of balance, viewing the world through sick and tired and flagrantly mistaken eyes.
So I thought of it this way: if I was feeling way too much, I would focus--whenever I could focus--on things that had no emotional content, since I could depend upon my fucked-up self to imbue those things with enough feeling to make them matter. If shit that ordinarily mattered suddenly mattered to an intolerable degree, shit that ordinarily didn't matter would now matter just enough. I thought to myself, "Okay, for whatever reason, right now I'm a perfect little sadness machine, who can turn any song into 'Leavin' on a Jet Plane,' any movie into 'Dancer in the Dark,' any painting into 'Guernica,' anybody's dying rabbit into my own beloved, dying friend. Meanwhile, 'Leavin' on a Jet Plane,' 'Dancer in the Dark,' 'Guernica,' and my own friends' real or projected illnesses are intolerably sad. Therefore, I will listen to neutral shit, to the Pixies, and I'm going to watch 'Ronin,' look at 'Night Watch,' and play with my rabbit while I still have time. And someday, hopefully, all these things will return to their neutrality--I will no longer identify, unbelievably, with Black Francis's caribou, with Robert De Niro's hitman, with all ninety-eight Dutch dudes in that painting, with my rabbit instead of my people. Not out of disrespect to any of those things, but because I am back in proportion with the world, and can love and care for those things as they are and as they deserve." Was I a traitor somehow? Was my depression in some weird way a moment of clarity? Probably. Do I feel less now? No doubt. But we're only human, so I figure I gotta go easy on myself. Otherwise I'll end up like David Foster Wallace, and that's just loss, nothing more--loss to my friends, loss to the world, and loss of myself.
Slothrop: The Ass-Bot, so mired in his hate for rabbits and Watership Down, apparently couldn't be on the same blog any longer as Slothrop's anecdote about the death of his father and about how Slothrop, too, cried after reading about Smokey the bunny. Nor was Slothrop's advice to Ass-Bot to go read Into the Wild and watch L'Eclisse taken in good faith; instead Ass-Bot thought he'd eliminate the whole problem by erasing Slothrop's post--poof!--as though it had never existed, and to replace it with some cracked out biological argument about how cool tigers are, but not cool enough. Well let me tell you, Slothrop has just about had it with people and Asses and robots erasing him from existence. Next time the Ass-Bot makes it out of Dallas, a city which has done wonders for his humane sympathies, especially if expressed in concrete terms like plastic surgery, well, he'll get a sob story of his own when Slothrop's cock loosens all his batteries and the lights on his gizmo heart and his gadget lungs grow dim. If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt. What wood the Ass-Bot do?
No comments:
Post a Comment