Let’s go see the animals!
This is of language, the sound and sight of it, the signature and sign. The undoing of signs. The shattering of symbols, the gong of their echo. Notice this tongue as medium, as manipulated, manipulating music, a polyvalent creature in motion, now still. Oops, there it goes again. Got it. Sort of. To borrow an expression. This is a form of attention. Here, touch it.
Faces seen and unseen.
Was it Kafka who said that we are most human when admittedly animals? I can’t remember. The elephant would. We give each other pet names and share our own names, homes, and fashion motifs with pets. We are much less willing to engage with our vegetable sides.
The snap pea is probably great company, and no doubt leeks have dimension. When it comes to tubers, I can only imagine. Perhaps we have a hard time opening conversations with the ones whose faces are not––well, faces; whose beings are arranged in ways we can less readily recognize from mirrors and photo albums.
Maybe it intimidates us to interact on a conversational level with living forms that will not run, fly, or swim from us, who can’t make us heroes for luring them to our realms. Maybe we don’t know how to open conversations that don’t begin with a chase. These vegetables, they just show up––or don’t, allowing or resisting growth, harvest, cultivation. We can’t always find the narrative line of their movements, and it perplexes us.
Or maybe we don’t like to entertain the possibility of admitting when we are only seeds or going out of season; ripe for harvest or willing to be met by moles. The cat offers an easy meme and endless punchlines, and most of her jokes are on me. If this is any model, it’s likely the vegetables are doing something similar. From a plastic bag on the counter, the armed potatoes wave.
Studies in the anatomy of inheritances.
If you want to eat, it helps to be able to crack what nuts you can find. If you are finding nuts and trying to crack them, it’s best when you have the right tool.
Some capuchin monkeys can crack nuts easily because their forebears left them the right tools.
A medium-sized Long Island hermit crab looking to upgrade their home has the best chance of finding a larger castoff shell that has been vacated, but a very large crab is going to have a harder time finding an upgrade, as there are fewer oversized shells in the average vacancy chain. In related news, hyena daughters born to high-ranking mothers are getting early access to fresh meat.
Scientists studying these phenomena are asking questions. They are hopeful that a better understanding of the mechanisms of inequality may be useful when it comes to fostering change. Humans, after all, are vastly more cooperative than other species, one scientist observes, and cooperation is an asset that can work in any number of directions, depending on intent.
Inspired by:
This New York Times article on intergenerational wealth in the animal kingdom, and this one on property transfer in hermit crab societies.
