| September 1
The Animals Arrive
Last weekend Sara and I ventured out, our first such experiment since the pandemic shutdown in March. We went to an exhibit at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, MA. It was a small exhibit in their small gallery, so fewer people and less time inside. Safer.
The exhibit was called “The Animals Arrive.” I had to go.
The artist is Lin May Saeed, a German-Iraqi artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her subject, as one critic has put it, is the “complex entanglements of humans and animals.” Of course, when I see the words “German-Iraqi,” I can’t help but think of the complex entanglements of humans with humans. When I read further in the brief biography provided by the Clark and learn that “her roots are German-Jewish” as well as Iraqi, I am even further entangled in the human to human scene.
Luckily, Saeed’s canvas is more encompassing and she takes me back to the larger scene, a world inhabited not only by humans but equally by animals other than humans. “With empathy and wit,” according to the introductory text at the Clark, “she tells stories, both ancient and modern, of animal subjugation, liberation, and cohabitation with humans, working toward a new iconography of interspecies solidarity.” In explaining the intent of the exhibition’s title, the text notes that “many of Saeed’s animals arrive to reoccupy spaces that were once theirs; in other words, they return.”
For as long as I can recall, I have felt a kinship to animals other than humans. I grew up in Toronto at a time when both milk and bread were delivered by horse-drawn wagon. If I was home when the milkman or breadman arrived, I would go visit the horse, fascinated by the bag of oats often attached to its head, fascinated by the huge feet draped in hair, drawn to the eyes, touched by the horse’s massive calm.
In third grade we were given our first writing assignments. For one such assignment, we were asked to compose a diary. The instruction was to discover some facts about a famous person, then imagine a day or week in their life, and make up entries. I composed a week in the life of a blue jay.
We had taken in the neighbors’ cat when they moved away. Henry was an outdoor cat. On one of his adventures he must have bothered the nest of a blue jay, because one day he came home with a large hole pecked in his forehead. My dad, a pharmacist by training but a country boy by birth, pronounced it the work of blue jays. He cleaned, disinfected, and bandaged the wound, thinking the odor alone would dissuade the jays from dive-bombing the cat. It didn’t. We had to keep Henry in to protect him.
When we could no longer stand Henry’s crying, my dad suggested I carry him out to give him some air. “They will never attack him if you are holding him,” said my dad. But they did. I no sooner stepped out onto the porch than I was buzzed and once in the yard they swooped. My diary told what I imagined was their side of the story.
When we moved to Indiana and my relations with the human animal were temporarily problematic, other animals meant even more to me. Here I discovered cornfields with cows and cricks with crawdads.
The afternoon of the first day I spent in Indiana, my mother and I were standing at the kitchen sink looking out the window. Our new house backed up on an open field owned by the American Legion but rented to a local farmer. As we stood there a procession of cows made their way across the field, heading home for milking, according to my dad. I was mesmerized. The next day I made sure to be out by the fence as they passed so that I could see them up close and perhaps have eye contact with some of them. Such large animals; such gentle, delicate eyes, brown and lash-fringed; such wonderful guttural sounds; such purpose to their progress. Watching them became my after-school treat.
On the way to school I crossed over Hurricane Creek, so-called because in the spring it was wild and flooded its banks. In this creek, which I soon learned to call a “crick,” were crawdads, tiny crayfish that look a bit like a lobsters. I loved to catch them, look at them, and then put them back in the water, hoping their day might be better than mine. I loved to wade in the creek, to feel the water-washed stones under my feet, and to poke in the mud for anything else that might be alive. I learned to watch out for the junk people threw off the bridge and to swear I would never mess up a creek that way.
I vowed that when I grew up I would become a veterinarian. I wrote to Cornell for information on their school of vetererinary medicine. they replied that the did not accept women.
Ever since my family acquired Henry, cats have been part of my understanding of my world. Though my brother will remind me that we often treated
Henry very badly, dressing him up in outfits so that we could then photograph him, testing his ability to fall by holding him up and dropping him down from ever higher perches, I responded to his indifference. While our chums’ dog craved our attention, Henry couldn’t have cared less about us. Indeed, shortly after our move to Indiana he defected to the home of our next door neighbor who lured him with sardines and salmon and a satin bed. “Cats go where they’re loved,” Mrs. Brackett told my mother. “Nonsense,” said my mother to me, “cats go where they get the best deal.”
I still need a cat in the house to keep me honest, to remind me that there are other ways of being in the world than that of humans, to keep me puzzling over how and what something other than myself might see, feel, and think. Our cat, Tanner, currently has a problem. She has licked her lower belly bare of fur, a behavior our vet, a woman in a practice where all the veterinarians are women, calls “fur-mowing.” I tell Sara I she is bored and restless and needs to go out. Sara tells me I am projecting.
Sara is probably right and we are exploring allergies and bladder issues first. It is really hard to keep from making other animals into us. It is really hard to hold onto their otherness.
Which brings me back to Saeed and her work. As part of the exhibit at the Clark, Saeed chose several works from the museum’s collection that present more traditional human-centered views of animals and provide a contrast to her own perspective. My favorite is the pairing of Durer’s woodcut of St. Jerome and the lion with her own interpretation of the scene in which the saint removes a thorn from the lion’s paw (see below). Durer’s lion sleeps at the saint’s feet, tamed and adoring. Saeed’s lion gazes straight into the saint’s eyes. We can’t predict what he will do once the thorn is removed, but it is unlikely to be fawning.
On her website, Saeed posts a question:
Hello to you all, how do you live?
Rabbit :
We live in small groups, have no fixed partnerships.
Build widely branching tunnel systems,
in which our young are born, naked and blind.
We still reproduce when imprisoned.
Hare :
I live solitary. Sleep in a shallow hollow.
My offspring are born with fur and open eyes.
I have never been domesticated.
Humans :
We don’t quite know.
Until we have found out, we wage wars. |