These innovative creations are a welcome break from correcting a batch of opaque papers on sharks and fear.
I like the spare yet surreal look of this art show, but I LOVE that it’s
happening in Shanghai!!
Check out Banksy’s “Sirens of the Lambs,” a sad and weird traveling piece on animals
slaughtered for food.
David Foster Wallace (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“That’s great! That’s just great! You’re certifiable! Do you know that, Quint?” Brody (Roy Scheider) hollers after Quint (Robert Shaw) smashes the boat’s radio (no more calling in for a bigger one) with a baseball bat.
I replayed that “Jaws” scene endlessly in my head on the way back from Catalina as my dive teacher filled out my diver certification card. I am by no means “good” at diving, but I am no longer afraid of bleeding ears or the large sharks attracted by the ribbons of blood pulsing from my exploding lungs.
The ocean is beautiful—heart-rendingly so. But I don’t want to disturb its inhabitants. I don’t want to shine flashlights in crevices to see lobster, or play with sea cucumbers. Even as I thrilled at the glimpse of a retiring purple octopus curled up in a rock hole, I felt a rush of feeling for the little guy. I know that octopus LIKE to be left alone. And lobsters seem to value their privacy as well.
I felt glad that I would be teaching David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” in the morning.
The essential question is this:
How do I commune with animals, while not interfering with their nature, their ways of being?
It’s not that animal rights guilt precludes my enjoyment of the natural world, but thoughts about animal consciousness increasingly shape my experiences.
I grew up riding horses and still love doing it (as a way of seeing the countryside), but even that activity is fraught with complications: bits, and crops and heels into ribs. I recently discovered this observation (given in sign language) from the always candid Koko the Gorilla:
Koko looks at a picture of a horse with a bit in his mouth:
K: horse sad.
CD: Why?
K: TEETH.
(Check out more of Koko’s insights in this fascinating argument for the personhood of gorillas).
More on this idea of displacement & communion soon. The sea hath ignited in my mind the power and glory of language while it seemed to have sapped the very marrow from my bones.
Nearly busted with pride when a student who’d done the extra credit assignment on “Blackfish” told me she was going to a protest at SeaWorld in October. She felt a little cautious. “My friends said people get arrested there.” I reassured her about not ending up in the slammer, but I hope she doesn’t get turned off by any weirdos. Last year, another young attractive student of mine attended her first “Fur-Free Friday” in Beverly Hills. She had a great time, aside from “this old creepy vegan guy” hitting on her. Gross.
All the day’s teaching blurs into one extended conversation on animal consciousness with a few diversions into fragments and run-ons. We discussed a great essay called “Fear in the Shape of a Fish” about, among many other things, shark attacks in Hawaii and the clash between the native people for whom the shark represents an ancestor spirit and the hired shark hunters. The writer (forgot her name, the book is in the car) investigates her own “intellectual sympathy” with the sharks as well as her fear, which she ultimately transcends without ever sacrificing her awe at the mystery of these fish, and the impossibility of any shaman, hunter or scientist of ever really knowing their true nature.
Presentation Mindmap: Networked Consciousness (Photo credit: inju)
In another class, in another school, taught an essay about animal consciousness called “Cats, Bats, Crickets and Chaos” by Lewis Thomas. I asked the class to meditate to appreciate the “wisdom of emptiness” that Lewis discusses–the no-thought-enlightenment that humans can hardly ever attain and animals probably achieve just by being.
One shy, smart kid in the corner totally got it: “I went into a trance,” he said. For many of them five minutes of stillness was unbearable, they laughed or didn’t even close their eyes. I grew impatient and found myself scolding students for saying things like “I can only meditate in the mountains or at the beach.”
The more I lectured them (in reality only a minute or two), the more coarse and human I became. Gone was the fleeting bliss of no thought, my tenuous link to animal consciousness. I felt as alienated from the reality of nature as the wizened vegan trying to coax the lovely college girl into bed by appealing to her compassion for helpless animals. Gross.
You know what really pisses me off? When people use the word “harvest” to refer to hunting animals. As if bears were wheat or lemon sharks were lemons. Of course, “harvest” is only one of many really awful euphemisms like “animal research,” or “by-catch.”
Maybe the bigger question is why human beings seem hellbent on killing the things that are already disappearing?
For the vanishing lemon sharks of Jupiter Florida, the National Marine Fisheries Service has proposed that the new “harvest” date begin on January 1, 2014 just as the sharks are gathering to give birth to their pups.
Please read this post from Sharksavers and leave your comments for the NMFS asking them not to change the opening date of fishing season.
The comment period closes Monday, so please take action this weekend. It will only take 5 minutes or less!
English: Lemonshark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A cavalcade of shark chores at school: plastering the joint with handsome sea-blue flyers advertising Ralph Collier’s lecture, xeroxing piles of articles, realizing that not everyone is as utterly fascinated with all things shark as I am, although some students seem keen on learning more and one kind soul gave me a shark Pez dispenser.
I realize some of this lack of interest in sharks is not just disguised fear, but disgust. Sharks are fish. “Fish are gross,” one girl said. “They stink.” I thought of Jonathan Foer’s argument (I am too tired to reproduce it here) about fish being separated from us–living in the water they retain their otherness.
Another form of distance. Another barrier to overcome.
I described how beautiful the leopard sharks looked when I saw them in La Jolla, their spotted gold bodies rippling in the current. I gently suggested that our associations with smelly fish perhaps originated with the dead sea creatures laid out on slabs of ice in the market or languishing in filthy tanks.
I asked the class to write a few questions to ask Ralph Collier about shark behavior, attacks, etc.
A boy in the front row said, “I want to ask him if sharks have emotions.”
“Great question!” I exclaimed.
Although I felt too embarrassed to admit it, I’m still recovering from the crushing realization that this widely circulated shark-man love story was a hoax.
I had to remind myself to take a deep cleansing breath when I noticed a few of my students texting during “Jaws” today. Later, one of the guilty boys confessed the movie was “just too scary” and with the acute senses of a predatory fish (or a fellow neurotic), I detected residual fear in the shuffling way he gathered his books and hid his eyes behind a lank of dark hair.
Several people laughed when the bereaved Mrs. Kintner slaps Chief Brody in the face for keeping the beaches open and letting her son Alex get chomped. Is this a kitschy moment? Perhaps. But I always found the scene too odd or mysterious to be pure melodrama. The black-veiled Mrs. Kintner is accompanied by a silent old man who might be her father or grandfather and the two of them progress in some odd inversion of a wedding march toward Brody.
As Antonia Quirke noted in her BFI essay on “Jaws”: “She’s much older than the other mothers at the waterfront. This child was her last chance” (35). Quirke also notes that a slap in the movies normally stands in for sex, but “[t]o be slapped by Mrs. Kintner in mourning is like being kissed by a skeleton, it has that disquieting taboo mixed in” (36).
The book store ran out of my shark texts which may have explained this group’s lack of enthusiasm for uterine cannibalism or the ampullae of Lorenzini. So other than typing up a quick shark biology quiz, I’ve been checking in with the STOP OCEARCH activists. Sad to hear that the New Yorker did a story about OCEARCH (thanks for the tip, Connie), but pleased to know that a film exposing these charlatans (Price of Existence) and other marine exploitation is in the works. I’ll try to do what I can to help with the fundraising/consciousness raising for this project.
Performed a hodge-podge of shark chores today: signed this petition to ban shark fin soup in Australia, stuffed more envelopes in my endless restaurant letter campaign, did miscellaneous shark-related schoolwork. But what really kicked my ass today is this post from the Vegangster blog that extends the argument of John Lennon’s 1972 song “Woman is the Nigger of the World” to animals. (John Lennon is pretty much my favorite person ever, but more on that later).
I have been a “sloppy” vegan for quite some time, eating bits of goat cheese here and there, and once every few months an egg or two and I never feel good about it. I’m also tired of whining about how hard it is go completely vegan. Feeling guilty and lame about my half-assed veganism is even more difficult.
Woman Is the Nigger of the World (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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