Stop Separating Me

            I have this dog named Flower.  She’s a scruffy tan terrier, probably mixed with greyhound because she’s fast as hell.  And yes, she does look like something invented by Dr. Seuss.  She is also the best hunter, besides a cat, that I’ve ever seen.  I hate that.  Well, unless civilization crumples, then I’ll be happy because she can bring me dinner and I’m pretty sure she would share.  Aside from being lethal she’s very generous and maternal in her general attitude towards life.  She attempts to give me a slobber bath daily

            So, this morning as I head outside to pick up the dog shit, Flower’s got a woodpecker in her mouth.  When I yell, it frightens her and she lets it go, then grabs it again by the edge of the wing.  I throw my coffee cup at her, hey, you use what’s on hand in an emergency, she lets go and the bird makes a mad dash on foot, tangling itself in the two layered fence, half hogwire, half chain link.  As my dog tries frantically to regain her grip on the bird, I conk her on the head, taking her aback long enough so that I’m able to get a hand on the poor terrified bird.  As it screams and pecks my hand, I can see it’s gotten itself into quite a pickle and I can neither push it through the tangle of fence nor pull it back out.  Finally, I am able to get one of its wings into position and turn it so it can move forward. I midwife the bird through the fence. I watch it on the other side, worried that my dog broke a wing, but it manages to align them and shake them straight.  I’m about 70% sure it will recover.

            “Bad dog.  Bad dog.”  This said with limited conviction, exactly the same way as when she killed the ground squirrel, the tree squirrel, and the collared lizard.  She’s only doing what her breeding tells her to do.  Catch and kill small creatures.

           

            When I was a little kid we had a dog.  Shane was barrel bodied, with shortish legs, mostly black coloring but some brown around the muzzle so maybe there was a little Rottweiler in there.  He was my best friend, by far the most interesting and loving being in the family, and when my parents gave him away because my sister’s asthma doctor told them to—never mind the fact that my father continued smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day, in the house, for another 3 years—I was decimated.  Our cat, Francis, got the heave ho too.  What I remember most about that time is that we kids were not allowed to talk about it.  Shane and Francis were gone, period.  Humans are more important than animals.  I was supposed to accept this as a given.

            At catechism on Saturday, thoroughly grief-stricken, I confided in a nun about what had happened, and told her I’d be happy when I died, that I was going to be very good so I could see Shane in Heaven.  She told me unequivocally that of course I wouldn’t.  Dogs don’t have souls and can’t go there.  When I asked her where they went she said, “nowhere.”  

            Something inside me started screaming that day and has never stopped.  I wanted my dog back so bad that I would have gladly followed him into Hell but “nowhere?”  I hadn’t any idea what to do with that.  I wondered how I was so different from Shane, and resolved that if someone like him, someone so playful, sweet and warm couldn’t go to Heaven, then I didn’t want to have anything to do with the place.  What was there to do there anyway?  Sit at the right hand of the Father?  For what?  How long did I have to sit?  Everything grown ups thought mattered was boring, and to hell with it all.  That was the beginning of the end of Catholicism for me.  Years later, at about the age of 14, I managed to avoid attending church by clinging to the leg of the bed harder than any limpet to any rock in all of human history.  I haven’t been back since.  If I am so different from Shane, if someone like him cannot be my brethren and kin, then I didn’t want to be me.  Being a human was just too much of a burden.

            Years later, schlepping through the first year in college, I took a logic class and was fortunate enough to have a wonderful teacher.  Bill was smart, completely in love with his subject, and along with his goofy grin, had long blond hair and didn’t seem to give one goddamn about what other people thought about him.  He’d dress weird, drag around found objects; I remember a long stuffed snake and a digereedoo, and when it came to making sure his students understood the material he’d do just about anything.  For instance, one day he did a miles long logic derivation and since it wouldn’t fit on a regular paper, he did it on a long roll of butcher paper, which he unfurled into the classroom.  By the end of the semester I could do long derivations just like that, and discovering my love for logic, decided to major in philosophy.  But it wasn’t all as much fun as logic.  No, no, no, far from it.

            As a matter of fact, Epistemology (the theory of knowledge) felt like a bad acid trip.  My professor styled himself an old southern gentleman, his bushy hair parted hard on the side like a confederate colonel, had a humongous belly and for some reason I never did figure out, loved to say the words “beef bourguignon.”  Either he thought he was neato because he could say it, or maybe at some point he’d succeeded at cooking it.  Maybe he could even spell it.  Anyway, he would use it in all his examples: “If a beef bourguignon falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really make a mess?”  That kind of thing.  But the real problem with Epistemology was that it was there that I first encountered Rene Descartes and his “cogito.”  Now, I’m no historian of philosophy and it is many years later, but the way I remember Descartes is a foppish, sulky French guy sitting by a Dutch oven, whatever that is, and wondering whether or not he existed.  I mean, on a purely physical level I’m guessing he knew it, otherwise why would he have bothered keeping warm by sitting next to an oven?   But he wanted to prove it so he could argue with other people.  After 3 days and having eliminated everything else…Let’s see, I shit therefore I am, I refuse to get out of my pajamas therefore I am, my earwax is thickening therefore I am… none of the answers he came up with really had the oomph he was looking for.  I suspect his underlying desire was the need to prove that Man is special and stands above and outside the animals in the “great chain of being.”  The great chain of being was a very popular idea back in those days.  It was hierarchical and went as follows: first you had God, then angels, then saints, then regular humans, then animals and loads of other stuff that Descartes didn’t think mattered.  It was a happy day when he came up with his cogito.  First, because he could leave the damn Dutch oven which had undoubtedly gotten cold by then, and second, he thought it was iron clad proof that he existed.  “Cogito ergo sum,” (everything sounds smarter if you say it in Latin) “I think therefore I am.”

I never did figure out whether or not he still existed while he was sleeping and presumably not thinking, but better minds than mine have had at that one.  The point is, back in those days if you were a philosopher who didn’t want to be tortured to death for heresy, everything you came up with had to be consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church and Descartes’ cogito was so consistent with church teachings, with holy scripture, with Aristotle and Saint Augustine, that not a single clerical feather was ruffled.  God had made man in his image and of course the Almighty is a boffo thinker, so Man must be too.  Case closed.  Of course, an unfortunate corollary of the cogito is that anything that does not think, as defined by Man, lacks existence. So, were you for example, to throw a cat into the fire and it screamed, it wouldn’t be because it was actually in pain, since it didn’t exist in any real, meaningful way.  It would simply be due to a physical reaction, like the outgassing of a green log.  I’ve never read anything that made me believe Rene Descartes was a sadist; and I don’t imagine he made a habit of throwing cats into fires, but it does logically follow that if he wanted to he could have without transgressing any moral boundaries.

It’s interesting to note that Descartes “cogito” is entirely consistent with biblical teachings which dictate that Man is, fundamentally, a divine creature that stands apart from the rest of creation.  This seems to me an incredibly lonely place to be. But fortunately, it is also completely wrongheaded.  The fact is that my DNA is 99.9 percent the same as the bum who just knocked on my door looking for someone named “Frank,” but also as Lebron James.  It is 98.6% the same as a chimpanzee, 98.4% identical to a gorillas, 92% the same as a mouse (really!)  I share 84% of my DNA with my dog, 60% with my neighbor’s chicken, 80% with a cow, 90% with a cat, 61% with a fruit fly and 60% with a banana.  In other words, I am not “me.”  “You” are not you; and “they” are certainly not “other” and therefore inferior.  We are all DNA in seemingly infinite configurations inhabiting a planet called “Earth.” We are the same thing.

I remember a short story by Martin Amis.  In it, the aliens surveying Earth could not tell one thing from another.  They simply broadcast, “Hello DNA!” And when they got no answer, decided not to worry about wiping the planet clean of whatever this slimy stuff was, so they could take it for themselves.

I believe the Christian creation myth, elaborated on and reiterated by philosophers like Descartes, and the consequent internalizing of the “great chain of being,” is wholly responsible not just for the separation we feel from one another, but for the separation we feel from the natural world.  And in the name of this separation, and by giving ourselves permission to minimize the importance of every other creature on the planet by virtue of our specialness, we’ve all but guaranteed our passing from existence.  There have been many human cultures that did not understand human beings this way; many Native American peoples rightly view human beings as part of nature and other species not as inferiors but as other nations.  However, this sensibility is functionally extinct on Earth today.  Its absence has been described in many ways, but unfortunately the only thing that comes to mind at the moment is that or the masturbating comedian Louis C.K., who called it “the big sad.”  It’s always there, in everyone to greater or lesser degrees, like a spiritual sucking chest wound.  We try to fill it with stuff—electronics, cars, big houses, money, or substances--drugs, booze, massive amounts of food, but it never entirely goes away.  We are forever trying to fill a hole that our egoism, borne of our insistence that we are better and more important that every other creature on the planet, has created.  But we never will.  In amputating ourselves from our non-human brothers and sisters we have instead, cut off ourselves from ourselves.

We are not better that the fish of the seas, the whales, the dolphins, the deer in the forests, the tigers in the jungles, the koalas in the trees, the snakes in the desert.  What we call human intelligence is nothing more that a feedback loop born of opposible thumbs paired with large brains in order to manipulate our environments.  Hopefully, this will not be repeated again in the evolutionary future.  I’m not terribly worried about it, since it’s only happened once and while it’s impossible to calculate the odds, it seems unlikely.

As for the nun who told me I’d never see my dog again, fuck you, Sister.  You’re probably dead by now, sitting at the right hand of the Father, chained like Princess Leia to Jabba the Hutt, and I sincerely hope it’s every bit as boring as I imagined it would be when I was 6.  When I come around one day, with Shane and every other wonderful non-human friend I’ve had in all the years since I first gazed into your empty eyes, I hope every damn one of them lifts his leg, on you.  Then we’ll head off.  And live happily ever after.