Elizabeth Costello: Parte Deux

     Is poetry not meant to stir you? To make you feel an entire spectrum of emotions: the most elating of joys, the deepest anguish of despair, etc. I mean, that was the argument they were touting to me back in high school literature classes-- thus the weeks dedicated to poring over Yeats, Shelley, Byron, Bradstreet, and the like. We were all going to become one with the masters and learn to see the world through new senses. Right? In today's collections of Cooetzee, Hughes, and Kafka, for example, our senses are assaulted on several fronts. Jaguar is fraught with very masculine, (I would say), seething, bottled up, hot energy just boiling under the pages. The intro mentioned a primal, natural world unfettered by ‘industrial servitude.’ "Primitive" is just one word to describe it, but one cannot help but feel slightly uninhibited when reading it, themself--- and a little tight in the stomach as well.  It reminds me just how humble I must be, for no matter how hard I try to describe the emotions and feelings evoked in a poem, I always find myself searching for words. (It's all quite frustrating for an English Major to be evaded by the language she loves, but I find myself unable to really capture the depth of the connotations and craftsmanship of a poem concisely; thus, it's a little difficult for me to encapsulate in a short blog, with its powerful imagery and appeal to the senses: all that talk of blood, being enraged, "prison darkness," “his stride is wildernesses of freedom.” Sorry, guys, I have a hard time being that eloquent under a time constraint.)

William Blake can display it much better than I, in something most of you have probably been exposed to, The Tyger.

Then there is Coetzee in both Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace, who (particularly in Disgrace) seems to unpack and make various comments on human nature as much as animal nature. Yet, nothing about these situations are simple or pristine or uncomplicated (or even harmonious). We are constantly reminded of the difficult relationships, the human shortcomings, and just generally that life is a bit of a brutal struggle-- for everyone--- animal or human. These are by no means "happy endings." They are not really endings at all, honestly. They leave something to be said, something to be lived beyond when we leave these characters, and perhaps something to bother us as we go about our daily lives from thereon. 

Savage cartoon. Seriously, google "poems" and "death" and "nature"--- you will have reading material from not until eternity. But let us consider how relevant death, life, and just existence are to these readings. 

              Now,  I’m not trying to be macabre here, but think about death as it pertains to Red Peter for instance, or the thousands of dogs helped along in Disgrace. You get to a point when you do actually start wondering if "death would be better" as Elizabeth Costello had proposed in an earlier reading.  It’s all a bit disturbing, in some visceral way, as it should be. Art should make us uncomfortable (especially if it hits home to reality a little too closely). We should squirm a bit in our skin. No use being too comfortable. How many references to "enduring," rather than "living" life were made:

“Forgive me, Lucy… For being one of the two mortals assigned to usher you into the world and for not turning out to be a better guide.” (536) 

“I’m not sure. I don’t think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.” (539) 

“I do mind. I mind deeply. I wouldn’t want someone doing it for me who didn’t mind. Would you?” (539) 

 “[of her perhaps pregnancy] At least it won’t be forever, my dearest…at least you will be spared that.” (541)

 Death is Fine, but Dying by e.e. cummings. It is interesting to think that the great equalizers and only 2 absolutes about ourselves in this existence is that we are born and someday die. Huh... that's the same for animals, too, isn't it-- be they sentient beings or creatures without two brain cells to rub together? My point is that we should stop dividing ourselves along classifications and utilities and worth-- it's exhausting, and in the end, pointless. I can honestly say this. It's not too late for me to change my ways, (I'm working on my eating habits, promise.) but I can tell you that my kids probably just won't eat meat at home or at restaurants, and that's just the way it'll be, and they won't know any different. Yay! Hope for the future generations. But I've rambled.

The impressions left above, talking of birth and death is very interesting when juxtaposed with ideas that humans have a much too complicated/fearful look at death and our own self-importance, and how animals do not think of life or death like us at all-- that it is just a reality somehow embedded and accepted in them. 

But that seems to be part of the problem, doesn't it, how we overcomplicate the issue with all of these opposing sides-- each with their own ideas? We are not like Red Peter just increasing the knowledge--- we're fighting. We're displayed in all our vainglory and mean-spiritedness. 

“I don’t know what I want to do. I just don’t want to sit silent.” Cooetzee(104)

Now I know that this could be potentially confusing, because it is in trying to "overcome" the problem that we set ourselves against each other and end up fighting. To that, I say, adopt some of Red Peter's genius and learn to be 

   Now let's talk about human nature. What do we see from these writers? Humans are brutal, we're inherently a bit vindictive and all confrontational (taught from a young age to be fans of schaddenfreude).

“Are you not expecting too much of humankind when you ask us to live without species exploitation, without cruelty? Is it not more human to accept our own humanity – even if it means embracing the carnivorous Yahoo within ourselves – than to end up like Gulliver, pining for a state he can never attain, and for good reason: it is not in his nature, which is a human nature?” Elizabeth Costello(100-101)

It is only since victory became absolute that we have been able to afford to cultivate compassion. But our compassion is very thinly spread. Beneath it is a more primitive attitude.“(104) 

“It’s admirable… but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.” (534) 

“ They [pets] are part of the furniture, part of the alarm system. They do us the honour of treating us like gods, and we respond by treating them like things.” (536) 

 “Yes, we eat up a lot of animals in this country… It doesn’t seem to do us much good.” (538) 

Above, the video is slightly creepy, slightly off-putting, very British, and a real song. Apparently we were not any more open-minded about animals in the 1950's, when this song was performed for a BBC radioshow. Shocker!

Still, there are those in art and other expressive areas of thought who literally focus their entire life around trying to embody another, to envelop themselves in their thoughts and feelings and mannerisms--- lovely people called actors. Here are a few promotions for "Kafka's Monkey," based on Report, that were performed at the Vic Theatre. You have to wonder what kind of preparation this woman did for her part.

“As long as one tries to fit the three actors [gods, beasts, and men] into just two categories – which are the beasts, which are the men? – one can’t make sense of the fable… Is he a god or a beast? They feel it is the appropriate test. We, instinctively, don’t.” (102)

Is this what humans are like? Are we sympathetically imaginative? Are we not, as a whole? What IS our nature? 

“If I were asked what the general attitude is towards the animals we eat, I would say: contempt. We treat them badly because we despise them; we despise them because they don’t fight back.” (104)

 I can’t necessarily say that I agree with this. We are often more apathetic than violent, but that is what I would like to think at least, and it is a learned trait. 

“And of course children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don’t see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.” (106)

I can't help but feel like we (all of us) are just looking for a little happiness-- so says "Happy Hoffman. "

Or perhaps we just need to learn to be poets, ourselves, and exercise senses of feeling that go beyond sight or hearing or taste or touch. 

Is that what we were supposed to get from this? I feel very idealistic thinking so.

“Without the greatest inner calm I would never have been able to get out.” (523) Red Peter speaks of the tranquility within that has saved him from going mad. He has found his "happy place."
“On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I wished to achieve. You shouldn’t say it wasn’t worth the effort. In any case, I don’t want any man’s judgment. I only want to expand knowledge.” (526)

“Think comforting thoughts, thing strong thoughts. They can smell what you are thinking.” (537)“How does she get it right, this communion with animals? … One has to be a certain kind of person, perhaps, with fewer complications.” (542) “When his daughter is moving off and says. “I agree, it is humiliating… Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start out at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity… like a dog.” (543)

I look up to those who can be positive in a somewhat brutal world, the idealists, the ones who have hope for the future:

I still believe, in spite of everything, people are truly good at heart.”  —Anne Frank

 “They are good people, in spite of everything.” ~Kafka, A Report to an Academy (523)