Rilke and Berger – On the Proximity of Animals (Part I)

A response to Rilke‘s writing on animals, including “A Meeting” and “Mitsou”; John Berger‘s essay “Why Look at Animals?”

What’s ultimately denied in the equation of animals in relation to man is the animal in man. This seems obvious, and almost anyone confronted with the notion that he or she was denying their own animal nature would, one imagines, vehemently protest; yet I remember the resistance last week in class to the idea that things have a life of their own, however inhuman, vegetable, perhaps elemental.

I had been thinking quite frequently of a cartoon that I remember from childhood. In the cartoon a man and his dog are crossing the street. A truck comes and runs them over pancake flat. An ambulance comes. The medic drawls “Plasma,” and then “Dog plasma,” but in his urgency gets them mixed up, sticks the man with one I.V. drip and the dog with the other. Speeds off. The man wakes up: Woof woof. The dog wakes up: What happened?

As I read the Berger essay, my dog stared at me from its bed in the other room, a distance of perhaps 20 feet. There was a thunderstorm with frequent loud cracks and crashes, and he seemed anxious until I should meet his gaze, which was then sort of questioning and needy. Finally he came and lied down at my feet. I moved the chair so that I could sit beside him on the floor. He shivered against my leg while the thunder crashed.

What was the relationship here, the terms of the exchange? What was exchanged, who comforted who, who was scared of the storm, where did the fear begin and where did it end? Was there even a fear, or just the occasion for some sort of altered proximity that stands in the place of language?

And what has all this to do with art?

I think back to when I had a cat. When I was a boy, living at home with my parents. One day it got through an uncovered vent into the air ducts. I sat by the vent calling to it and dropping down food. I remember that I sat naked by the vent, with just a blanket to cover me. Finally the cat quite calmly crawled back up the duct into the room. There was a thereness to the cat’s presence then that never would have been had it not first so utterly and blithely disappeared. Years later, after I had moved away, I was home for a holiday and asked my mother where the cat was. “I had it put to sleep,” she said…

* * *

But what else is missing from our universe that used to be present, if not central? One thinks of looking up, as well as down and around. Birds. Stars. The weather. I am frequently astonished to discover they’re still there – stars and birds, the one at night and the other during the day, when I’m out walking around. It’s difficult to even see them unless one really tries, and almost impossible to have a relationship to them as immediate and intimate as one imagines used to exist between them and people.

It was while walking dogs in San Francisco that I began to look up at the birds in the parks where we’d walk, sometimes carrying a pair of binoculars for this purpose. Hawks were a frequent and thrilling sight. But also great blue herons, the occasional owl, even the quick-flitting patterns of “ordinary” birds over the sea.