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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Animals4/04/2007 21:19:20In recent months I've been drawn to animals in a strange and unprecedented way. Perhaps, I say, it comes from living without my lover. It is also my developing study of evolutionary psychology and its relation to religion. I fantasize about watching animals, about spending a lifetime engrossing myself in their worlds, their cultures, their languages, and their violence. It is connected to the question of environmentalism too, of finding ways to conceive of compassion for the world we are destroying. Our world is bigger than we realize. What we are is also the animals. Yet in so much of my studies, it is only the human, isolated and alone (except for God), that is of concern. Religion is defined by so many (except a very few researchers beginning to apepar) as what humans do and nothing else does. Same with self-awareness, with certain kinds of memory. But every scientific study I read on the subject tends toward showing the closeness of connection. Less and less, it seems, can these things be only human anymore. The building blocks of nearly everything that is human are sprinkled throughout the animal kindgom. And precisely the psychology that makes us want to be something else, to be so self-importantly human, is an instinct, and as such it connects us to what they are. I saw a picture of Jane Goodall today and wanted to burst into tears. And then it just occurred to me that this all connects to the dream of Star Trek that has driven me since I was a kid - in which human divisions dissolve when the Other appears as familiar to self and the scale of human identity changes - when the aliens land peacefully and welcome us into the galaxy. What if we landed, so to speak, if we announced to ourselves and to the animals that we are their fellow living things? It has been done before, of course. But I have never before felt such a desire to do it now. Of course the world is not so easily saved. But it is kind of a beautiful dream. That the things all around us all the time might save us from ourselves. We are surrounded by our sisters and brothers, by the flesh of our flesh and the spirit of our spirit. Sorry if this sounds weird. It is kind of supposed to.
re: - 4/06/2007 23:46:10
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