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Monday 16 January 2017

Talking with meat: Some Thoughts on Animals and Communication


We cannot talk with animals. We cannot truly communicate; we can read body language and sounds, but we cannot converse, exchanging knowledge and stories. We believe we can, though.
            Communication worldwide is poor. Humans do not know what other humans are really trying to say or what they really mean; between mind and mouth the message struggles to be released. With animals, it is obviously a whole lot worse, but humans have built up a series of communicative myths to enable them to live consciously at peace with the world of nature. This can be seen in the ‘wild’ animal, whom we respect for having a language and endlessly attempt to communicate with or ensnare in some way; the ‘domestic’ animal, whom we talk to, chatter with, but are talking really to ourselves; and the ‘incommunicable.’ Here I will focus on animals that we exploit for meat as the ‘incommunicable,’ but I suppose it could be used to regard all manner of uncharismatic life; insects, fish, plants, pest animals.
            For the ‘wild’ animal, the best example I can think of when it comes to communications are cetaceans. Whales and dolphins have long been celebrated in myth and popular culture for their ability to converse and communicate orally through a series of sounds we have come to call ‘whales song.’ Some believe that, should certain cetacean species have the ability to tell stories, or share knowledge, they may have retained a culture dating back to their inception as a species over two million years ago. The whale song has become revered as mystical and magical; I remember reading a letter someone wrote in protest of the Faroese Grindadrap, where many pilot whales are slaughtered, claiming that whale song was ‘holding the ozone layer together.’ We cannot converse and query with the cetaceans however, or truly domesticate them like we have cats and dogs. For this reason, we mystify and mythologize the wild animal, for the over-powerful language we believe they have, and that we cannot use with them.
            We believe that we have deep understandings and communications with our domesticated animals. When I use ‘domesticated’ here, I refer to those we do not milk, eat, or use for other labours. Whereas with ‘wild’ animals, we give them animal and superhuman traits, we afford out domestic animals human sensibilities. We provide them with a name, a house, food that is not all dissimilar to our own in its process. We talk to them as if they really are going to converse or understand us. They may grow to understand certain signifiers of tone or plosives and other ear-catching sounds our languages make, and perhaps even their own name, but this is all in due course to what these sounds come to mean; food, sleep, pain, affection. The human talking to it’s pet is not talking to the pet, to the personality of the pet so much as to themselves; the human veneers the pet with their human interpretation and understanding of the animal, and talks to it, maybe even reading response in their illusory dressing of the pet.
            Finally, there are the other domesticated animals; the meat. To be able to eat these animals, we must believe that they cannot communicate meaningfully with each other, and especially not to us. Thus we render these animals ‘stupid’ and ‘dumb,’ using these sorts of terms for all animals we eat from bovines to tuna. One of the more powerful tools an animal welfare movement may have is to show that these animals can communicate. How do meat-eaters feel about cows knowing that they build meaningful and emotional connections with each other? It may sound silly now, but this sort of discourse is what turned the globe against whaling.

            Eating meat and treating certain animals as pests is often justified in human discourse as these animals are uncharismatic and stupid, often mystifying their communication as gibberish. Perhaps this will change in time, and we will stop eating certain animals in place of others, or all animals, or none at all.

The history-mining reader in J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus.


The fallabilities of recording and understanding history are not new field of J.M. Coetzee’s writings; “the Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” the latter story of his debut Dusklands presents us with a fractured yet whole history; fractured in the different reports and pieces of the narrative as a whole left out, but whole in its presentation; a first person narrative, an appendix from a fictitious descendant of Jacobus, and other add-ons (the use of J.M. Coetzee’s surname for the main character may also be seen as a conscious anchoring of the fictitious history in real history, forcing the reader to judge for themselves.) Later, in Waiting for the Barbarians, we are presented with an unlodged and nebulous environment, in an unnamed land populated by the denizens of ‘the Empire’ and also the mysterious ‘barbarians.’ Here history is a straining force; the barbarians alien approach to time and the importance of history can be unsettling.
            Coetzee’s 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus has a similar unlodged setting, but on a much more drastic scale. I have read some reviews that glance over this, claiming that it is Coetzee simply moving aside the humdrum lynchings of story, setting and other extrapalative description to make room for philosophical waxing in the novel, and space for the reader’s interpretations to blossom upon unanswered and often unspoken questions presented throughout. I believe that this unlodging of history and environment, being unusual in texts, forces the reader, through their discomfort, to mine for histories that are not there.
            The Childhood of Jesus feels very open in terms of space, yet is populated with many characters. The space in question is an unnamed land, where Spanish is spoken, (a similar confusion created as when Coetzee used his own surname for Jacobus?) or, more accurately, the populace has to speak Spanish, as we learn that Simón and David had to learn Spanish on the boat to Novilla, the main city. We know that Simón and David came by boat, from a camp called ‘Belstar,’ and that is about as far back for either of them that we are given. We are allowed some insights into these journeys; David loses a document on the boat supposedly detailing who his parents are, which is how he meets Simón, and Simón comments that the portmaster at Belstar will only allow boats out, not back to Belstar.
            The main characters are the only two we ever really get even a shallow insight into. The other Stevedores that Simón works with at the docks at Novilla engage only in the present, to the extent that they are dubious of ‘moving with the times’ and using a crane to save their heavy lifting, or to acknowledge the accumulation of the days upon days of shipping grain to a store that is overflowing and infested with rats. The epitome of such misplacement of past or future thought is Senór Daga, who acts with no understanding of consequence; he robs and engages in violence, and generally seems to float through his life.
            As such, the reader latches onto the small details we are afforded. David’s history, at least for the most part, we get to witness being built, but Simón’s we have not witnessed. We know small details; he had to learn Spanish, he can drive, his father pushed him high on the swing but he never fell off as a child, we know his hands were soft before becoming a stevedore and we know he is middle aged. This is the most we ever really get to know about any character; Coetzee offers us a line into Inés’ past when Simón says of her past at the luxurious ‘La Residencia; “I have no idea what it was like. I have never understood La Residencia or how you landed up there.” Alas, Inés “does not hear the question, or does not think it worthy of reply.” (Coetzee, p.312) Although it is mainly stressed with Simón and David, it is suggested that every character met is not native to this land, that they too had a history elsewhere, but are now fixed into the present, somehow landing up wherever they landed up, Inés in La Residencia, and Simón and David in the blocks.
            The novel ends with a group of characters breaking free of Novilla and the small and barren satellite towns it grows, onward to the town of ‘Estrillata el Norte.’ (Even the place names appear unlodged from a past or hint at environment; “They strike a town name Laguna Verde (why?- there is no lagoon)”) (Coetzee, p.310) Where they will cut off the short history the reader has been allowed an insight to, namely the histories of the characters in Novilla, thus denying the reader even the relevance of this short record. However, Coetzee’s latest book is a sequel entitled The Schooldays of Jesus, and so we shall have to see what residue of history we can drag across the gap.

Cited:

Coetzee, J.M. The Childhood of Jesus. (London: Vintage, 2014)

Tuesday 3 January 2017

wiki/Human


Under the brim of a red hat, through the pixels rotting in my computer, his eyes are hard and unflinching, like hot stones, bored into his head, bounced back at the lens. Stopped by some researcher, or some tourist, some invader, he stands straight, holding a long thing log, and bears down at the camera. This is the picture; this is the thumbnail for the Wikipedia page ‘Human.’ These are examples of an adult human male, and an adult human female, in Northern Thailand. These are the exhibits, the creatures behind the glass, the mirror.
            Their conservation status is ‘least concern.’ Least concern to who? The beasts I see prowling the streets, the ones in the glass towers deciding which animals are expendable and which are in the bracket of ‘threatened,’ their highest concerns are themselves.
            I wonder what animal could possibly have written this, this torch-light insight into the human world, something that suddenly feels so un-understandable and deeply complex… The era humans have churned through and sculpted, the anatomy of flesh, bone, organs, the psychology of social norms and language and dreams, the deep and blossoming flower of human thought, creation and destruction. Who could’ve written this?
            I walk past an old moustachioed man eating a hot dog on the beach front. A seagull takes the last of his bun from him. Children slithering in the remains of ice cream cones play stickily in the sand, communicating in their non-existent and lilting language. Arguments, laughter, noises, footsteps, the creations of human effort, engineering, accident, bloom overpoweringly around me.
            Past wondering if the writer of the article is human or not, I begin to wonder what, if they are human, they have missed out from this article, through being the subject. What haven’t we pulled out of ourselves and, frowning, jabbing with scalpel, exclaimed ‘What does this do?’ I sweat it out late in the room, reading over our tendencies to form ethnic groups and societies, to have consciousness and thought. Everytime I leave I watch the humans around me having to work it out in their habitats, having to solve each little puzzle for a little reward, avoiding failure in these puzzles for the bristles of pain it will bring. I watch them in their bizarre cultural and social gestures; someone proposes to someone else in the park, someone holds a door open for someone else, people wave, smile, blow kisses, kiss for real, snap their fingers, shake their fists.
            Least concern. Is it that we have the least concern for other animals, for the basic and natural maintenance of the planet? I could write a list of things I’m concerned about, and a lot of it is probably humans. Who is concerned about us? Do orang-utans and bonobos look at the stars in their forests and sigh; “I am concerned about our silly cousins, the humans.”
            I wonder if the gorillas could write a dense article about themselves if it would include trade and economics, art, music & literature, religion, philosophy, or war. We have absorbed these details into our being. They are unquestionably human, they are ours. We can’t change them if they’re in the article.

            I start spending a lot of time at the zoo, which I hated doing anyway, feeling too much pity for the prisoners. But I feel I am closer and closer to feeling the confusion, and the disgust, that must hold a deep and hot place in them, a feeling upon feeling humans. In the chambers of my mind I hear useless apologies echo.