What Animals See When They Look At Us — On The Proximity of Animals, p. II

I have here a postcard of an image from a Bill Viola piece. It shows an enormous white owl looming up, wings spread, behind an ordinary office desk. On the desk one sees the dark outline of a lamp, a laptop, and a digital clock against the bird’s white feathers. Off to the side is the vague outline of a vase of flowers. The piece consists of a video of the owl, enlarged to monstrous size, projected on a white wall behind the actual desk.

Naturally the joke is that here is this giant owl inserted into a human workspace. The name of the piece is “The Sleep of Reason,” and it is described as a video and sound installation, the sound consisting of an amplified recording of the bird’s wings beating as it takes flight. One is led to surmise that the “studious” nature of the owl, as it has anthropomorphically and metaphorically come down to us, suggested this juxtaposition; indeed, there is a sort of serious, “getting down to business” look in the owl’s black eyes, set back bead-like in its great oval face, if one chooses to see it that way.

Recently, for the first time, I watched Out of Africa, the film that tells the story of Danish author Isak Dineson’s time in Africa. There is a telling scene when Robert Redford’s character, an ivory hunter who is depicted as having a “native” relationship to the country and its animals, is asked how it will be different once the hunting format shifts to that of the safari, the hunt for sport rather than commerce. “It won’t be any different for the animals,” he says, and then, reflectively, almost as an afterthought: “Maybe it will be different for the animals.”

Elsewhere in the film, reference is made to a certain native tribe, who are described as having a special, almost primeval relationship to the land. Their undoing, asserts the same character, will be that they have no regard for the white man; they literally can’t see him. This is made clear in a scene when a group of them are shown running in formation across a plain towards a group of travelers. At first there is tension, reaching for guns, but the tribe simply runs right by them without pausing.

Now if one were to write a history of animals during the age of humankind, one is immediately led to this question: which species were able to see man, in order to avoid or adapt to his presence, which were able to keep from being seen, which were eradicated, which prospered, and what was the function of adaptation/proximity in their fate. It’s natural, for example, to consider human proximity lethal to animals’ existence, as in the case of American bison and certain birds. But think of the rat. Through cunning, adaptation, and an almost symbiotic relationship with the urban human population, rats have prospered to the point where they are estimated to outnumber humans by several billions.

And there is an added poignancy, I think, to that Viola piece, if one gets beyond the obvious joke to register it as a statement on animal presence/proximity to man. As not only the metaphor of the “night owl,” chipping dutifully away at work while everyone sleeps, but as reverse metaphor – the owl’s “office” being its presence on the margins of the human, late at night, in trees, hooting, hunting, keeping watch.

What has also proved lethal to animals, as Berger points out, is their seeming inability to speak to us. To say, no, stop, I like this, I don’t like that. Perhaps just as deadly, however, is the tendency to “put words in their mouths,” to imagine, even with the best of intentions, what it is that an animal would say if it could speak. There seems to me a double danger in this. First, it puts animals on a sort of psychological “hit list,” where they begin to exist in the imagination, thus lessening the reality of their actual presence. Berger notes Disney cartoons, toys, stuffed animals in this connection. In extreme cases, it can even be used as a tool to posit animals’ participation in their own demise. I remember a series of commercials in California, which purported to be sort of jokey conversations between cows out in a pasture. The point was that they were very lucky to have all this room to graze and sun and whatnot and looked forward to being milked. Happy cows make for good milk/cheese/meat, was the gist of the human-voiced tag at the end.

The second danger, as noted in part I of this essay and hinted at above, is that when animals do speak to us the only way they can, through their instincts and actions, we feel betrayed, as if they were breaking a prior agreement that exists only in our imagination. When the shark attacks a surfer, when the lion turns on its tamer, when a dog turns on its owner, we are confused, partially because in our minds we have been conversing with these creatures. They have seemed to give their assent (less so with the shark, to be sure), if not to a partnership, then at least to a mutual tolerance with mankind.

But what would it mean to try to meet the animal without recourse to language. How many messages are we missing before we get to the bite, the attack, the extinction?

A project I had undertaken several years ago was meant to explore the relationship between humans and dogs. At the time I was living in San Francisco with a couple who owned a dog that seemed a vibrant and playful personality, hungry for attention and contact, but also at times afraid, sad almost to the point of despair. I befriended it and took it for frequent walks and runs, noting the strange relationship it had in the household to each of us, how it was used as a sort of emotional medium, how it took on this role or had it thrust upon it to varying degrees. In the writing I immediately ran into the problem outlined above, that is, I had to resort either to speculative description or a “putting of words into its mouth” that felt forced and false. Writing and research only seemed to exponentially multiply the questions and confusion of the project.

I took a step back from the project, moved out of that house, lost touch with the dog. But it led me to take my job as a dog-walker, and to get a dog once I arrived here in San Marcos. My desire to understand “dogness” in my day-to-day life was a new and intense interest, one that seemed to go hand-in-hand with the introspection of therapy, the decision to go back to school, a further step in personal growth and “individuation.” Perhaps this is all the dog was trying to communicate to me, across the millenia, from the depths of the subconscious, across the simple, silent space of a room in a house.


The Coronation of the Queen

Now the dog appears in my work more as a motif, a recurring image, a flash of something glimpsed in peripheral vision, as, I have always thought, it appears and disappears in the paintings of Rubens (see above). That is my current relationship to it, and it does feel more natural. But I imagine it will continue to evolve and change, if I remain patient and listen.

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One Response to What Animals See When They Look At Us — On The Proximity of Animals, p. II

  1. Tina. says:

    This piece of yours is one of my favorites. And, while packing some office stuff into boxes the other day, I found a copy of Berger’s essay you made for me.

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