A rant for the critters and the objects and the people.

[flexagon]

To preface this rant: right now I'm halfway through the six-book series by Orson Scott Card called The Tales of Alvin Maker (correct me if I'm wrong, grammar freaks, but you don't italicize a series name, do you?). It's set in the American midwest at at time when slavery was a contentious issue and there were cultural clashes with American Indians. As a result there's a fair amount of race-centered thought in the book's characters, and there are a lot of capital letters where I'm not used to seeing them: Black men, White women, Red people. I'm also reminded that black men used to be called bucks... indeed, there's a rapper out there named Young Buck, isn't there? And as a result of all this reading, I thought of the word 'buck' when I noticed a well-built black man in the gym today. And that started me on a much longer thought process.

First: 'buck' is kind of a neat thing to call someone. Deer are pretty, graceful animals that are easy to idealize. When I thought of that person as a buck it was easier to see the beauty in him (which wasn't particularly hidden anyway, but I digress). And I was thinking damn, it's too bad we've messed up yet another word with our stupid racism.

I also thought of the one time a waitress in New Mexico touched me on the shoulder and said "What pretty markings you have from the sun!" and for just a moment, something about the word markings made me feel like a beautiful wild animal. I smiled and believed her, and those were the only two seconds of my life that I haven't thought my freckles were anything but disgusting.

I remember my dad in his worst PTSD-stricken, Vietnam-remembering moments sobbing about not being an animal, or that other people thought he was just a [fucking] animal. Someone, whose throat I would like to excavate with a fork, must have told him this back when he was a Marine. And then there was one time he was asking me desperately how he was going to keep going after my mom left him, and I almost came out with "Because you're an animal!"--meaning, of course, that the animal drive and patience and will to live that's within all of us would save his life. I didn't say it, but god... if I had, I don't think the fallout would have been good.

So in the end, what I'm wondering is why we don't take pride in our animal nature any more than we do. It has nothing to do with not being human... we are human too, and inside/underneath that, we are, quite obviously, animals. Why then is it an insult? Why is it assumed, if we call someone an animal, that we are calling them just an animal? I have always taken so much comfort in knowing I have a primal drive to live that's much stronger than all the Gordian knots my brain can tie itself into, and animal comforts available that can soothe me better than logic. Our animal nature lies at the center of us, and if we don't like it, that seems like a terribly self-destructive thing to me.

* * *

That's as far as I was going to take this thought, until on the way back from the gym I realized it could go a step further: under our humanity and animal nature, we are another thing whose word has become an insult (at least in verb form), and that is: we are objects. No denying that one unless you want to go the "we are eternal patterns of energy" route, and even then you have to admit we are housed pretty deeply in our physical bodies for the moment. And yet, again, to objectify someone seems to necessarily mean to just objectify them. I wonder why that is. We are objects and something more. Objects that move and live and speak. And if we don't want to be objects, what? We don't want bodies, we just want to be ideas? And if we don't want to be animals, what, we want to be inanimate? Dead? No... we have a lot of layers, and if only the outermost one is civilized and urbane, that doesn't seem like a reason not to love them all.

This rant brought to you by a sculpture, a chair (ask the cats), a toy, a mammal complete with reptilian primitive brain, a blogger, and an MIT graduate. Who has pretty markings from the sun. :)

Comments

[miyyu.livejournal.com]

I agree, although Shadow of the Hegemon was actually quite good. It's about Bean's life prior to meeting Ender. There is another book out that is a sequel to that one, also about Bean, basically picking up where Shadow left off. That one's on its way to me as I write this.