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The dogs are dead. I don't want to see what's inside of them. That's the cruelty of a dog, or a cat, or a rat, or a weasel, or anything furred and open-mouthed, anything that licks its young, anything that pants or snorts or purrs or growls or wafts moist breath against your hand, anything warm-blooded, that you can put your palm against its torso and feel its heart beat.
(Have you held a shrew? it feels like they're dying. It feels like an insect beating its wings against the inside of your hand, battering itself to death.)
The cool intelligence of a reptile, or an insect, or a fish, is mostly all projection. There is fear there, sure, but indistinguishable from the mindless thrashing instinct not to die. Like a magnetic shaving being repelled from its polar opposite, like scraps of paper picking up the updraft from flames and flying away to safety. They don't make faces. They don't show terror. You don't hear them screaming.
When they crawl or swim or glide across your skin, there's no intimacy that lets you make-believe they love you.
That's the cruelty of being mammalian in a world ruled by hairless apes. There's all the capacity for emotion there, expression, joy and sadness and fear and loss and deviousness and greed and smug self-satisfaction, and no capacity to live privately. They're naked, every fucking emotion jolting down their nerves and involuntarily wagging their tails, standing their fur up on end, gleaming in their eyes and mouth and tongue. That dumb animal awareness exposed to the world with no option to tamp it down and put on a neutral face and go about your day without every eye on you.
No animal is born for scrutiny. We're social animals, not societal ones. We only really see each other through a web of necessary relationships. Parents, children, rivals, subordinates, superiors, lovers, mates, siblings, caretakers, predators, prey, symbiotic ties. I know you because I need you, because I depend on you in one of a hundred different ways, and that necessity is what endears you to me. We're hideous alone, patchwork products of evolution, simple-minded, feeding our own biases, focused on building scaffolding to support our own self-interest and well being. Who could love you, objectively? Who could tally up your pros and cons and conclude that another person should depend upon you for their continued happiness? We invented a God to tell us that we were loved, and concluded that we absolutely weren't worthy of it. That's what Grace is, isn't it? The conclusion that we otherwise shouldn't be allowed to exist.
Go into a shelter and argue for a dog's right to exist. To eat, to breed, to piss and shit as it will, to wander the streets and bark and scream at every stranger, to mark off its own territory, to defend its life with claw and fang. Argue that a cat should be allowed to predate, to fend off all perceived threats to its safety. Go ahead, argue for a rat's right to be happy.
A human can at least dissemble. A human can withhold. A human can put on a public face and offer that up to the world. If we're excoriated, revealed to be two-faced and hypocritical, all our flaws put on display - at least there's always the option to say: that's not the real me. That's not my entirety. You don't know me like my friends know me, like my family knows me, like I know myself. I'm here, underneath all of it. I'm just slightly displaced, always one step away, just beyond your judgement. I'm here.
Or worse, imagine being abruptly thrust into a celebrity you were totally unprepared for, imagine that fannish idolatry, that validation from strangers, and having it come and go, ebb and flow with the attention span of crowds. Imagine living like that, imagine being responsible for a thousand strangers' happiness. But even then there's always the small consolation of restraint, of fading gracefully, of the intellectual understanding that all those people never saw the real you at all. They were following a trend, validating their own biases, picking out the bits of you that they liked. They were looking in a mirror, seeing the possibility of their own acceptance, their own success, a place for them in the herd. All they were seeing was a person to teach them how to be, a position they could occupy in your wake.
A dog doesn't have that luxury of knowledge. A cat doesn't. A rat, a hamster, a weasel. Anything furred. Anything bright-eyed and screaming. There's nothing to an animal but boisterous fulfillment, nothing but bare affection. Feel them licking at your fingers, watch them dancing at your feet, understanding nothing but kindness and cruelty, food and hunger, affection and neglect. A dog can't understand why it's loved, it can only pant and wag its tail and prick up its ears and prance. A dog can't understand why it's being yelled at. A dog can't understand why it's needed. A dog can't understand why it's being killed, or being left to die.
We see a dog and think, if only we could be so happy. A dog only understands loyalty, you know? The words, 'can I pet them,' a stranger's hand running through its fur, cooing baby talk in a stranger's voice. A dog only understands itself and the other. A dog can only understand that it must have somehow been their fault.
The dogs are dead. There's something I could have been, probably. There's a thing absent of affection. There's a thing that used to be. There's a thing that screamed.
(Have you held a shrew? it feels like they're dying. It feels like an insect beating its wings against the inside of your hand, battering itself to death.)
The cool intelligence of a reptile, or an insect, or a fish, is mostly all projection. There is fear there, sure, but indistinguishable from the mindless thrashing instinct not to die. Like a magnetic shaving being repelled from its polar opposite, like scraps of paper picking up the updraft from flames and flying away to safety. They don't make faces. They don't show terror. You don't hear them screaming.
When they crawl or swim or glide across your skin, there's no intimacy that lets you make-believe they love you.
That's the cruelty of being mammalian in a world ruled by hairless apes. There's all the capacity for emotion there, expression, joy and sadness and fear and loss and deviousness and greed and smug self-satisfaction, and no capacity to live privately. They're naked, every fucking emotion jolting down their nerves and involuntarily wagging their tails, standing their fur up on end, gleaming in their eyes and mouth and tongue. That dumb animal awareness exposed to the world with no option to tamp it down and put on a neutral face and go about your day without every eye on you.
No animal is born for scrutiny. We're social animals, not societal ones. We only really see each other through a web of necessary relationships. Parents, children, rivals, subordinates, superiors, lovers, mates, siblings, caretakers, predators, prey, symbiotic ties. I know you because I need you, because I depend on you in one of a hundred different ways, and that necessity is what endears you to me. We're hideous alone, patchwork products of evolution, simple-minded, feeding our own biases, focused on building scaffolding to support our own self-interest and well being. Who could love you, objectively? Who could tally up your pros and cons and conclude that another person should depend upon you for their continued happiness? We invented a God to tell us that we were loved, and concluded that we absolutely weren't worthy of it. That's what Grace is, isn't it? The conclusion that we otherwise shouldn't be allowed to exist.
Go into a shelter and argue for a dog's right to exist. To eat, to breed, to piss and shit as it will, to wander the streets and bark and scream at every stranger, to mark off its own territory, to defend its life with claw and fang. Argue that a cat should be allowed to predate, to fend off all perceived threats to its safety. Go ahead, argue for a rat's right to be happy.
A human can at least dissemble. A human can withhold. A human can put on a public face and offer that up to the world. If we're excoriated, revealed to be two-faced and hypocritical, all our flaws put on display - at least there's always the option to say: that's not the real me. That's not my entirety. You don't know me like my friends know me, like my family knows me, like I know myself. I'm here, underneath all of it. I'm just slightly displaced, always one step away, just beyond your judgement. I'm here.
Or worse, imagine being abruptly thrust into a celebrity you were totally unprepared for, imagine that fannish idolatry, that validation from strangers, and having it come and go, ebb and flow with the attention span of crowds. Imagine living like that, imagine being responsible for a thousand strangers' happiness. But even then there's always the small consolation of restraint, of fading gracefully, of the intellectual understanding that all those people never saw the real you at all. They were following a trend, validating their own biases, picking out the bits of you that they liked. They were looking in a mirror, seeing the possibility of their own acceptance, their own success, a place for them in the herd. All they were seeing was a person to teach them how to be, a position they could occupy in your wake.
A dog doesn't have that luxury of knowledge. A cat doesn't. A rat, a hamster, a weasel. Anything furred. Anything bright-eyed and screaming. There's nothing to an animal but boisterous fulfillment, nothing but bare affection. Feel them licking at your fingers, watch them dancing at your feet, understanding nothing but kindness and cruelty, food and hunger, affection and neglect. A dog can't understand why it's loved, it can only pant and wag its tail and prick up its ears and prance. A dog can't understand why it's being yelled at. A dog can't understand why it's needed. A dog can't understand why it's being killed, or being left to die.
We see a dog and think, if only we could be so happy. A dog only understands loyalty, you know? The words, 'can I pet them,' a stranger's hand running through its fur, cooing baby talk in a stranger's voice. A dog only understands itself and the other. A dog can only understand that it must have somehow been their fault.
The dogs are dead. There's something I could have been, probably. There's a thing absent of affection. There's a thing that used to be. There's a thing that screamed.
