Animals
High up in the roof of the Berlin State Library, over the football-field-sized reading room where I come to consume silence free of charge, there reside weasels. I know because sometimes these weasels have rows, nasty snarling affairs that bring to a halt the whole academic-industrial complex (the serious corners, sans headphones), as we listen to the resounding paw-falls scampering through the fire-proof hollows of the drop ceiling. A contrast to our decorous mentation or a metonymy for the racing anguish of our immured thoughts? What I mean to ask is: do we find animals more interesting for their strangeness or for their resemblance to us? I’m not sure how long our attention would be held by a creature that neither, as we understand it, fucks nor fights, say a giant amoeba holding court in the sky. What I do know is that whenever the weasels are at war, there are always a few people who look not at the ceiling, but around the desks, as if looking for whomever might be in charge of these noisy beasts. These animals I would not trust.
We judged the farm where the dog would not come. Its masters wanted to summon it for the amusement of a visiting child, but, like a serious, long-suffering serf beckoned suddenly to folk dance for visitors he’s never seen, the dog only ran around with an air of obsequious confusion, approaching and darting away, approaching and darting away, as if trying to suggest an important business that he could not be reproached for remembering. We judged. Floors do not warp from stomping, walls do not crack from shouting, but an animal seems to reflect the balance of cruelty and kindness in its master’s hands. For several weeks we felt leery of Thailand’s famous smiles, which seemed belied by the presence, in every town we visited, of cats whose tails looked like they’d been whacked—was it some national hazing ritual?—with a meat tenderizer. Only later did we learn that these twisted, knobby stumps were caused by a genetic defect, one that for centuries had been prized by the Thai royal family, the legend being that they hung their rings for safe-keeping upon the kink. So prized that any human caught trafficking in them would be put to death. Indeed, the cats did seem rather confident, receiving our caresses with the unctuous indifference of U.N. diplomats receiving parking tickets. Of the people put to death we thought not at all.
A story from the around the 1970s: her family owned a giant, hairy, slavering beast of a dog, as black and determined as nightfall, and this dog, which she was supposed to supervise, would not be supervised—he would slip its collar, jump the fence, or else dig under it, ripping up roots with his monstrous paws, and dart down the street to visit his favorite madogmoiselle. Their business complete, he pushed his way into her owner’s home, took a seat on the man’s favorite armchair, and growled at anyone who approached. The only trick to make him docile was to shove a bar of soap under his nose. I don’t know if this is a nostalgia for a certain permissiveness to the unusual that I falsely attribute to the past, but I can’t imagine such a dog existing today. Either he’d be a normal big dog, or he’d kill someone. Soap would not enter the picture.
Animals, we are told, make terrible gifts, which is another way of saying that they make the best gifts, if you know what you’re doing. I knew what I was doing, close enough, anyway—am I proud of that? Sometimes, I still have a chance to say hello to that cat over video, the cat whose first scent outside the extended womb that was her birth-home was my clammy hand, whose first unknown sound was my gushing voice, and I’m crazy but I imagine, when I say hello, that she turns her head, as if trying to find where the sound is coming from, and then I think, however briefly, that the best gifts ought not to be given.
A certain aged relative, who might not recoil from kicking a foreigner from a life raft, has such an apparent well of empathy for animals that when she speaks of the fox whose forest was cut down by developers, the fox for whom she left out scraps, and watched as it led her kits, with an anxious animal stoicism, down the newly paved streets, when she speaks of this you can almost see the tears running down the fox’s careworn cheeks, in part because those tears will be, as usual, running down my aged relative’s. She has a peasant’s sentimentality, a phrase that comes to mind when I think about the line Dany Laferrière wrote about his distrust of peasants, who he sees as inclined toward fascism. Next thought: the pig I saw hogtied on the floor of a barn in the Hmong village, forced to wait for the shaman to call his number (after the chickens, who were kept in a big plastic seed bag). At one point, the pig started squealing so loud as to overpower the chanting, and the farm boys keeping watch tried to wrestle it into silence, smiling, one jabbing his knees into the pig’s ribcage, another thrusting a stick into its mouth. The pig, I guess, unlike the fox, had spoken his plaint, in which case the conclusion I would draw is that one should be cautious around those whose benevolence only extends to the silent forms of weakness.
My attitude toward animals was shaped a little too much by one section of “Dogs for Dummies,” which I labored over as a boy in the hope of demonstrating to my parents that I would make a suitable suzerain to such a creature. Much of the book was readily digestible, but then came the part that described the necessity of what was called “expressing your dog’s anal glands.” I did not know what “express” meant as a verb, a confusion that was compounded by my unfamiliarity with the phrase used to clarify the picture, which has haunted me ever since with an image of asthenic foam: “suds up.” All these children I knew were regularly “suds-upping” their dogs on the butt? And no one had ever mentioned it? It was the conspiracy of the century. Or were they consigning their dogs to the rashy bloat of glands unexpressed, the torturous crackling of suds insufficiently upped? I put the whole business away. I could not believe, and it’s a lack of faith that drags on me to this day, that life was designed to look after itself.