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Parable No. 9: The Hopeless Animal and the End of Nature 5

Mark Z. Danielewski Parable No. 9: The Hopeless Animal and the End of Nature1

Let’s begin with a name. Max.

A Preliminary Aside I think Max is a good name. And let’s make this his last name. And for a first name let’s pick Richartz — for the mu seum here. But let’s say he goes just by the letter R. So this evening, we’ll say our character’s name is R. Marx and if we’re feeling playful, we can perhaps involve an English pun so that it’s “Our Marx.” Oh, I mean Max! R. Max. Excuse me! And since we’re already there, in this territory of errors, where I was certain we’d end up eventually [Danielewski smiles], I also want to quickly destabil ize other words we’ll encounter. For example — since “animal” is in the title of this talk — consider Derrida’s fun with the plural: animaux [ani-mots]. Especially since words/mots are not an incidental part of tonight’s grave con cern. English is a little less playful than French. “Ani-mals” might give up “mals” — or bad things. In German, “animal” is tier. In French, tirer and tiers pres ent themselves as possible incarnations of tugging or levels. English can keep a hold of this question of levels — the animal as a hierarchical creature per haps? Also in English, with a little bit of urging, our German tier might become “tear,” bestowing upon our animal, or just ourselves, a sense of sorrow. But these are all silly ways of prying apart words in a way that may uncover

little but still more generally provoke us to consider whether or not any word can validly stake a claim on the creature we like to call so casually the animal. This much I can tell you — and with great certainty too — our character, R. Max, gives little thought to words.

Max is a woodcutter. He goes out with an ax and cuts down trees. And when he’s not swinging for wood chips and collapse, he’s a hunter. He likes to go out and kill things. Well, one day, Max’s brother dies. Max is not upset. He never really knew the man. The brother was a stepbrother. He

Winter Journals only finds out about the death because his stepbrother’s wife arrives at his doorstep with two cats. She and Max’s brother had a childless marriage, and now she’s returning home to France. Before she goes, though, she for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution is leaving R. Max the two animals/les animaux. R. Max has no choice but to accept them.

Now, the first thing he thinks about is, Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) “Maybe I’ll take these two animals out into the backyard, and I’ll chop their heads off with my ax. Because what am I to do with two animals from a brother I didn’t know, left by a woman who has just run off to another country where they speak a language I will never speak?” But as hard and as tough as he is, R. Max is not an unkind man. And so he looks at the two cats, and he decides that instead of killing them he will name them. The first cat, the male cat, he names “Lark.” [Danielewski has changed the name here from the original “Elam.”

NB: other small changes occur throughout the text.] Don’t ask me why — I don’t know. Not surprisingly, R. Max develops a fondness for this creature. Lark is a beautiful cat: sleek, powerful, a formidable hunter, clearly a creature to be reckoned with in the wild. The female cat R. Max names “Sibyll.” In fact, he doesn’t name it Sibyll; he names it something else, but Sibyll was the name of my cat, so I decided to in- trude upon this story and include her name here. Now in the eyes of R. Max, Sibyll is a hateful creature. All she does is hiss, and scratch, and piss in the corner.

ASIDE #1: No Cat in Sight I’d like to add a quick note here, and this is sort of the tricky thing about this entire narrative that we’re going to pur sue: what I do here is actually not what I do, and what I say is not necessarily the point of what I say, because what matters most is what will be left unsaid, what’s left open, what’s left wild. By the way, I’d like to commend you for coming here in the first place. You were very brave to show up to some thing that starts off with “the question of humanity’s dilemma with place will be addressed in terms of the nomenclat ure of the natural and blahblahblah, and anecdotes and blahblahblah, and subjects ranging from the emotional topographies of fear and hope and blah blahblah.” [The original title and description:

The Hopeless Animal and the End of Nature The question of humanity’s dilemma with place will be addressed in terms of the no menclature of the natural and more precisely the positioning of the animal as interlocutor, antagonist, anecdote, docent, screen, alle gory, substitute, vessel, guardian, difference, the indifferent, necessity, prisoner, deity, ci pher and finally as the unimagining human. Of course this will bring up subjects ranging from the emotional topographies of fear and hope, manufactured surfaces (and vocabu laries and vegetables) of denial to nudity, fur fetishes, mechanized companionship as well as medieval bestiaries, zoos, the pet industry Parable No. 9 not to mention the pictorial pastoral, wildlife photography and YouTube funny creatures; with some glancing attention paid to Walton Ford, Giorgio Agamben, Valentino Braiten berg, Temple Grandin and perhaps Cesar Millan. It’s unclear whether Danielewski will actually succeed in drawing all this together into a cohesive whole, especially since that whole must obviously also include matters of synthetic intelligence, speculative fiction and the architecture of fate. Still, perhaps by the end of the hour he will have managed to trace out a line describing why in framing the human dilemma with place, in terms of the animal, nature is now neces sarily at an end. Then again perhaps this is all just a grandiose way of giving himself an excuse to talk about his cat.] What is that all about? It sounds kind of scholarly, and yet . . . I’m a novelist. I’m not a scholar. What I do is something a little different. Which makes the subject even more elusive. So, is the subject re ally “The Hopeless Animal and the End of Nature”? That sounds pretty depress ing. Of course maybe this will be that depressing. Regardless, let’s rename it. How about “Parable No. 9 ”? OK? So let’s scratch out the first title and just write that. And perhaps it’s also worth emphasizing now that there will be a performative aspect to all this tonight. Usually when these kinds

of talks are given, they are typed out. [Danielewski has only a handful of note cards]. They’re often over-articu lated. Some eventually are published as chapters in a book. Then all you’re really seeing is a reading. [Danielewski paces the stage.] But I don’t just want to just read to you. I do want to give you a sense of where we’re going, even if I also don’t really know what will happen. And that’s because you and I through the process of time and that which reaches out between and beyond words will become involved. Maybe you’ll have questions. Maybe you’ll walk out. Maybe you’ll fall asleep. Maybe you’ll look at me like you don’t know what I’m saying. And by the way: if you do feel that you don’t know what I’m saying, that’s OK. You can think to yourself: “Well, he doesn’t know what he’s saying,” so long as you also recognize that you have no idea what you’re saying either. Then the night will be a success- — if you leave, thinking, “You know what? I don’t real ly even know what I’m saying when I’m saying what I’m saying.” My desire is not to finalize this topic but to open it up. And it’s a topic — as we’ll get into a little later — that has been with me throughout my work. In fact this subject of animality has become a little more overt with my current project — recently mentioned on some online forums — a multi-volume novel entitled The Familiar, about a twelve-year-old girl who finds a kitten. In fact, concerning those online forums, I just learned via some posts two Ger man words I didn’t know before: one is katzenjammer [a hangover; liter ally a cat’s misery] and katzensprung

[a stone’s throw; literally a cat’s leap] — did I say that correctly? No? How would you say it? Sprung? Like a little jump, right? Katzensprung also shares a similarity with the word quantensprung. Right? [An audience member shakes his head. Another audience member nods.] I’m fond of quantensprung in particular because my father used to talk about a “quantum leap.” He worked with actors. He pursued the idea that while you could teach technique and skill, and an actor could practice for hundreds and hundreds of hours in workshops and on the stage, she or he might still lack that quality that animates a performance and energizes an audience. My father would talk then about how it was possible to instigate a quantum leap — quantensprung — for the actor. So that the actor’s skills, just slightly recalibrated, might suddenly produce an experience that was far superior to anything previously demonstrated. But I digress, from hangover to a stone’s throw to quantum leaps to performative changes to transformative experiences, perhaps instigated by the word cat, and yet now so oblique as to constitute no such relation at all. In other words: back to Max.

Over the years . . . our hunter grew to not dislike these creatures. He got used to them. He fed them, gave them water, and in those early days came to think of them as little furry plants that hap- pened to move around. [Laughter.] Lark would leave the apartment and come back with birds and mice, and of course, R. Max identified with that. Sibyll never left the apartment. She just hid from him — hissed, pissed and shit.

Excuse my French — as we say in the US. [Unbelievably there is laughter over this terrible joke. We can only assume that here the audience is being polite.] Over the years, Sibyll would emerge for more than food and water. Now and then, she sought out warmth and even a purr. But she would never sit in R. Max’s lap. Never. Lark would sometimes sit in his lap, but never Sibyll. And then one day, R. Max was pet- ting Sibyll, just between the ears, running his fingers down along her back a little. Maybe it was true that time had made R. Max slightly more affectionate or patient, though we can question whether he noticed this emerging quality in himself. What he did notice, though, for sure was a little lump on Sibyll’s belly. It was a strange little shape. And it at once disgusted him. It was wet, oozing pale pus, and it was mushy, like soft gum, someone else’s gum, that’s been spat out and left to sit in the sun.

ASIDE #2: The Form of the Cat I know what you’re thinking: we have a problem. And the problem isn’t just R. Max’s problem, or even Sibyll’s problem. The problem is the cat’s problem. Because the general ity that is “the feline” is suddenly troubled now by this transgression of the figure’s border — that familiar aesthetic line has been disturbed. In Sexual Personae2, Camille Paglia describes — with great reverie — this curious power cats have of evoking the symmetries of their surroundings through their own form:

Cats are prowlers, uncanny creatures of the night. Cruelty and play are one for them. They live by and for fear, practicing being scared or spooking humans by sudden rush ings and ambushes. Cats dwell in the occult, that is, the “hidden.” In the Middle Ages, they were hunted and killed for their association with witches. Unfair? But the cat really is in league with chthonian nature. Christianity’s mortal enemy. The black cat of Halloween is the lingering shadow of archaic night. [Danielewski here is tracing an argu ment concerning the literal shape of the feline and so the above paragraph is not necessary. However, what is overtly posited in the talk is not neces sarily what matters most. Danielewski’s asides and apparent excesses serve an other argument that remains unnamed in the occult of his performance.] Cats have a sense of pictorial composition: they station themselves symmetrically on chairs, rugs, even a sheet of paper on the floor. Cats adhere to an Apollonian metric of mathematical space. Haughty, solitary, precise, they are arbiters of elegance — that principle I find natively Egyptian. Note that Paglia is not the only one to link cats with “chthonian nature” or deity. Let’s not forget Oedipus and the Sphinx with the body of a lion. Or stitched into smoky tapestries, Griffins with the torso and claws of a lion. Or in Ezekiel, the lion as the power of Israel. We also have St. Mark’s winged lion overseeing Venice. In one bestiary from the 13th century — around 1270 — a mother lion gives birth to a dead cub. However, three days later, the male lion returns and with just a breath restores the cub to life. A depiction, in other words, of the resurrection.

We also have the lion as courage, as regal, and — from a 15th century French book of hours; with likely a pun on the offspring of lions — serving as a symbol of pride. There are countless examples of the way lions and other great cats are used to represent various human beliefs, qual ities, and activities. To pick a more contemporary one, today we have a phenomenal artist named Walton Ford. If you’re not familiar with him, he’s an American painter who creates these life-size images of animals. For example, his painting of an elephant is the size of this wall. Of course, there’s more to Ford that just that. He’ll create a crazy image of a South American panther taking down a bull. Only upon closer examination will you realize that the bull is fornicating with the panther. In the background, the civilizations of South America are burning. It thus becomes a sort of hybridized, twisted allegory, and another way to view history, where the animal represented isn’t representing an animal at all. And we are just focusing on lions and panthers. We haven’t even mentioned tigers yet. There are too many examples to consider even a small portion. How ever, let’s quickly turn to one of my favorite quotes — variously attributed to Victor Hugo or Méry [Joseph Méry]: “God created the cat so man could pet the tiger.” What’s of impact here — returning us to the domestic cat — is this idea of our fa miliar feline as miniature. Consider how there are no miniature elephants. There are no miniature blue whales. There are large and small dogs, and large and little horses, but nothing quite prepares us

for the staggering difference between a four-pound Devon Rex and a thousand- pound Siberian tiger. Yet if you’ve ever had the privilege of seeing one of these big animals close up — whether a tiger, panther or lion — you’ll recognize at once its uncanny similarity to the little domestic cat — in shape, movement and attitude. Maybe this is one reason why the form of the cat resonates so profoundly throughout the arts, because while the domestic cat is itself, it is also a likeness of that which is itself and not itself but another very different self at the same time. Maybe it is due to this double-space of being and not-being that has led vari ous artists and thinkers to choose it as a representative of presence and absence. Of course we have Schrödinger’s Cat, which, in that famous thought experi ment, is both alive and dead. Or Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, which bedevils Alice and us with its smiling disappear ances. The artist Alexander Calder3 writes: “Remember that ‘action’ in a drawing is not necessarily comparable to physical action. A cat asleep has intense action.” His warning reminds us how a sleeping, dull animal can suddenly erupt into life. More so: the lines of the sleeping cat are the same lines of the attacking predator. Our cat inhabits both states at once. And of course, let us not forget Rilke. “The Panther” and “Black Cat” are well known but Rilke also wrote an intro duction to Balthus’ Mitsou4 in which he discusses the cat: You think they look at us? Has anyone ever truly known whether or not they deign to

register for one instant on this sunken surface of their retina our trifling forms? As they stare at us they might merely be eliminating us magically from their gaze, eternally replete. And then a little further on: Has Man ever been their coeval? I doubt it. And I can assure you that sometimes, in the twilight, the cat next door pounces across and through my body, either unaware of me or as a demonstration to some eerie specta tor that I really don’t exist. Going on to say: For you must agree with me that a cat does not become an integral part of our lives, not like, for example, some toy might be: even though it belongs to us now, it remains somehow apart, outside, and thus we al ways have: life + a cat, which, I can assure you, adds up to an in calculable sum. Rilke’s conclusion is even more rivet ing: “Il n’y a pas de chats.” There are no cats. A good enough place as any to stop but let’s not. Consider Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia5: The Dialectical Spirit of History would be an extravagant redundancy even if one could imagine what sort of animal it was supposed to be . . . a gigantic ginger cat, for example. And then, later on: But about the Cat . . . the Cat has no plan, no favourites or resentments, no memory, no mind, no rhyme or reason. It kills with out purpose, and spares without purpose,

too. So, when it catches your eye, what hap pens next is not up to the Cat, it’s up to you. Again, we see how the consideration of the cat initiates a becoming into some thing other than the cat itself. An idea we’ll return to in a second. In his beautiful book Dreamtigers6, Borges has a poem called “The Other Tiger,” which I’d like to spend a couple of moments on: Strong, innocent, covered with blood and new, It will move through its forest and its morn ing And will print its tracks on the muddy Margins of a river whose name it does not know (In its world, there are no names nor past Nor time to come, only the fixed moment) And then later on: . . . but already the fact of naming it And conjecturing up its circumstance Makes it a figment of art and no creature Living among those that walk the earth. Borges recognizes that what he is de scribing, what at first seemed so vivid and palpable to him, is already rendered by his words into merely a figure of art, forcing him to conclude: . . . and I go on, Seeking through the afternoon time The other tiger, that which is not in verse. In The Snow Leopard7, Peter Mat thiessen describes his trek into the Himalayas. His quest to encounter the snow leopard fails. And yet revelations abound. It’s funny because if you go to the zoo, as I have, and you look at a snow leopard close up, and more im portantly observe those around pressing in as close as the bars allow, you too will

wonder of them what I wonder about myself: “Are any of us really seeing the snow leopard?” Divorced from its context: its ability to walk the sheer paths of immense shelves of rock, up in the clouds, possessed by extraordinary balance and sensitivity, to the point that upon slightly disturbing a small stone, the snow leopard will, before continuing on, carefully return it to its place, so as not to knock the stone [a stone’s throw?] over the cliff, thus alerting animals below. There, in that context, the sound of no stone falling is the sound of the real snow leopard moving.

An Aside within an Aside: The Author’s Form Let me add, I’m very honored to be here tonight. I want to thank Roland for orga nizing this event [Roland Krischel who references to the importance of House of Leaves in his introduction to the ex hibit Do or Die - The Human Condition in Painting and Photography]. I want to thank him for creating this world, this exhibit about humanity, about life and death, birth, suffering, about how we perceive ourselves. Here Roland has invited this author to talk about such themes, but said author — said me! — ar rives declaring: “I wanna talk about the animal.” [laughter] Of course, the animal is present in much of my work. In House of Leaves, the Navidsons have a dog and a cat. And when they race down the intrud ing hallway that leads into an infinity of darkness . . . well, a dog and a cat can’t enter that. They slip at once through, and into the outside — that place unable to contain their animal continuity.

Nor are Hillary and Mallory the only animals in that book. There is a mur dered dog, there is a caged panther pacing for his freedom, there are cats that watch from the woods, there is something else there too . . . My second book, Only Revolutions, is even more concerned with animals. In the first half, many appear alongside the American highways; and then in the last half, as Hailey and Sam race into the oblivion of their love, these animals start to disappear, and at what cost, as the world is ravaged by this pursuit of “US,” or the United States, a troubling and consequential narcissistic self- involvement. But back to our friend Max.

The feline form Max had taken for granted has been disturbed by a lump. It is grotesque to him. And not just its physicality but in the way that it is re- garded by Sibyll, in the way she regards R. Max. It is this gaze of hers that dis- turbs him most. Because she sees him flatly. She sees him — recalling Borges’ poem, no “time to come, only the fixed moment” — she sees Max presently. She sees him without anticipation or an answer.

ASIDE #3: Not All Screens Take a deep breath, because now we are getting to the complicated part. Then we’ll simplify. True, some of you are here for complicated, but the rest of us will have to be brave. The climb will get a bit steep. Just remember: if you en counter some stones, it’s OK to knock them over, because we can’t all be snow leopards.

First, we need to consider the ques tion of gaze, especially as a measure of thought, as an identifier as well as an identifying action. Significant for poets, philosophers, scientists alike. In the poem “The Panther,” Rilke offers a vision of this great cat that sees only bars. Bars and bars compounded by more bars to the point that, in the name of more bars, it excludes the world it self. It doesn’t allow a world to exist. And even more perversely, it doesn’t allow the bars to mean a world. So it is a cage without a cage, continuing to trap the animal. Derrida has a confrontation with his own cat. It’s not a panther in a cage; it’s a small little cat that comes into the bathroom where he is standing, naked. And Derrida discovers himself ashamed. However, upon interrogating that shame, he uncovers that it’s the animal gaze that provokes seeing the animal, or the Other, in the Self. And it’s seeing that Other within the Self that consti tutes a moment to spark/encourage/ create this shame, this reflex. In fact, he must ask: “Is one ever alone with a cat? Or with anyone at all? Is this cat a third?” (In French, “third” is, interestingly enough, tiers.) “Or an Other in a face-to-face duel?” With the cat’s approach, we’re immedi ately in a dialogue, in a relationship, in a discourse, with ourselves. Because we have this unanswerable creature before us, this sentinel, this Sphinx, reminis cent of so many things in culture and history, and even within our genome responsible for who-knows-what kind of response to this visitation.

And one of the parts that I love about this, that sort of grounds us again, is when Derrida8 adds: I must immediately make it clear that the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on earth, the felines that traverse our myths and religions, litera tures, and fables. Continuing on: As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called “animal” offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say, the border crossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself. And in these moments of naked ness, as regards the animal, everything can happen to me, I am like a child ready for the apocalypse. I am (following) the apoca lypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict. I am (following) it, the apocalypse, I identify with it by running behind it, after it, after its whole zoo-logy. I know what you’re thinking: “That’s some relationship he has with that cat!” Now I have a cat named Carl, and he also comes into my bathroom when I’m naked. I’ve done this experiment. I’ve interrogated myself and asked: “Am I ashamed before his gaze?” And I don’t mean to disappoint you, or surprise you, but I’m not. Do I glimpse the creation of an “Other” in myself? That awareness? Yes. I think that part is definitely true. So I would say that we can look at animals as being “open” to our projections, finding therein, with

them, the psychology of our self that is reflected. What I want to emphasize — and what I believe is going to become more and more a part of the dialogue about ani mals — is how animals propose different things to our “Abyssal Self.” We all want to believe that all therapists are equal — or that the whole process of transference and projection is equal — but it’s not. Not all screens are created equal. One little cat may evoke one thing, whereas one very big tiger may evoke something else, and so on with lions and panthers. I don’t know what was called up when I was considering Carl’s gaze. Was he telling me something? What? Instead of shame, perhaps the kind of parable that’s unfolding tonight. After all, it was through Carl’s voiceless eyes that I began to see what I would be talking about tonight in Cologne. So far I’ve mentioned the poets, painters and philosophers. It’s also important to recognize that there are a lot of people who take cats seriously for being cats. A good way to move from the question of an inter-relational gaze to the criteria for just “animal being.” Let’s start with Vehicles — not at all about cats or animals yet very much about them. In Vehicles9, neuroscientist Valentino Braitenberg shows how one can cre ate a bunch of mechanisms with very simple rules — an attraction to light, say, or the impulse to move away from a moving object . . . Braitenberg offers various possibilities. He proposes that if

we do not know these rules, these little “vehicles” would appear to our eyes to be living. Furthermore, these rules could not be easily discovered. Potentially, one might mistake a cat for something more than a series of simple algorithms. There is a guy in Los Angeles — very popular in the United States — who has a show called “The Dog Whisperer.” His name is Cesar Millan, and he visits ce lebrities and their crazy dogs. Often he can just murmur to these dogs and calm them down. You see the most violent creatures that have just been wrested from crack houses and whatnot, and Cesar walks in and — like Jesus — calms the waters; the dog lies down and pants. Cesar was asked if he understands cats, and he had an interesting answer: “No.” Concerning cats, Temple Grandin is a bit braver. She is a woman with Asperger’s Syndrome, who writes very clearly about the limitations and benefits of this condition. In her book Animals in Translation10, she has a story about a woman named Jane who is convinced that her cat has ESP — a psychic ability to detect in ad vance Jane’s return home. Jane lives in an apartment building many, many flights above the streets. From the apartment it is impossible for the cat to see Jane enter the building. And yet the cat is always waiting by the front door when she enters. Temple Grandin remarks that animals don’t have ESP, but they do have ex treme perception. What Grandin discovers is that the building does not have a push-button elevator. Instead, it has an elevator op erated by a person. Whenever Jane gets

in, she says “hi” to the operator. The cat can hear her voice coming up through the elevator shaft and knows, even min utes in advance, that it’s time to go to the door. So, in the words of Grandin, the cat never predicts Jane’s arrival. For the cat, Jane is already home.

R. Max hasn’t read Temple Grandin. Or Valentino Braitenberg. Or Derrida. Or Rilke. And he doesn’t need to in order to understand this (and I’m going to say this twice): Sibyll’s death is a secret, even though he knows it, and she does not, though she stills keeps it. Sibyll’s death is a secret, even though he knows it, and she does not, though she still keeps it. R. Max is a woodcutter. He’s a hunter. And now, he’s a cat-owner. But I want to tell you a little bit more about R. Max: he is seeing a therapist. Because he has trouble with women. He has girl- friends, but he wants to get married and have children. That is not happening. And R. Max is getting older. With his therapist, he covers intense issues concerning his family history: old troubles, invisible scars. There is revelation, but there is no transformation. In the words of my father: no quantum leaps. In fact, at this point in our parable, R. Max has settled for realization. He is no longer striving to become but rather is trying to find satisfaction in just being. He has given up hope of anything more. Furthermore, as he watches over Sibyll, he realizes she is a creature without hope, too.

And yet, R. Max is human. He is power- less not to hope that she will get better.

ASIDE #4: Hope Hope. This is a subject I’m very interested in. To the common Marxian refrain, “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” let me add, “Hope is the opiate of the consciousness.” Now, that is probably a strange thing for an American to say. Obama ran on a campaign of hope. It’s in the name of wonderful foundations devoted to curing terrible diseases — in fact, the disease that Sibyll is suffering from. [City of Hope] And certainly, hope has many pro moters. From Theognis in 6th century BCE: “elpis (hope) is the only good God remaining among mankind.” Or from Pindar11 in 5th century BCE: “Sweet elpis (hope), nurse of the eld, fosterer of his heart.” Or from Hesiod’s Works and Days, 8th to 7th century BCE: But the woman [Pandora] took off the great lid of the jar with her hands, and scattered all these woes, and her thought caused sor row and mischief to men. Only elpis (hope) remained there in an unbreakable home within, under the rim of that great jar, and did not fly out of the door, for ere that the lid of the jar stopped her by the will of Aegis holding Zeus who gathers clouds. When I first heard that story when I was little — and perhaps you heard a similar version — it was a comfort. Out of all that pestilence and war — mischief of all sorts loosed upon the world — Pandora held on to hope. And we were grateful.

But it’s a little more complicated than that. Silvia Montiglio in Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture12 writes:

Zeus’s original intention was that any evil that was to strike humans should be ex pected by them, but at the last moment he changed his mind because life would have been unbearable. He made Pandora close the lid so that elpis tōn kakōn remained there. Now ills take us by surprise, which is not as unbearable. So “hope” in this sense means “expected evils.” That’s not that feel-good, is it? And yet, this kind of de-establishing of what that word means is not new. Consider this Eastern European saying: “Hope is the mother of stupid people.” Or this one by Francis Bacon — put a bit more mildly and wryly: “Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper.” Derrida — and we are going to be leav ing Derrida shortly, so you can sigh with relief — describes the human as a “promising creature.” That’s beautiful phrasing. We enact ourselves into the future. And how we position the future can shape our present. In this way, too, our emotional architecture over tomor row can create an imprisoning destiny, or fate, out of our wishes, our desires. Faith, however, is something entirely else and something that we’re not going to get into tonight. Tonight I’m just talk ing about hope. It’s a mechanism that in some ways blinds us from our present. It stills us from the action we desire. Be cause through hoping, what we desire is already kind of obtained. The acquisi tion through hoping deprives us of the action we need to take to move forward. It prevents, if you will, a kind of quan tum leap.

In the Proustian universe, desire or longing is a source of suffering. So per haps we can consider a new definition: “Hope is longing without suffering.” When we hope, we are permitted to long for something without suffering the absence of what we long for. And therefore, we are psychically blinded by this absence, this state of missing, that prompts longing in the first place. In other words, we deprive ourselves of the very stimulus that moves us forward. We could consider many ways that this affects the human condition, but tonight the question is simply: “Does Sibyll hope?”

R. Max doesn’t know if Sibyll hopes. I don’t know if she hopes. None of us may ever know. Sibyll doesn’t seem to hope, because longing brings her instant distress, whether for water, for food, for attention, for relief. Nor does her distress seem to come with any sign indicative of possible happiness. It seems only to come as an announcement of suffering. Sibyll is our “hopeless animal.” What then does R. Max do for our hopeless animal? He cares for her. He gives her necessary medicines. He feeds her. When she breaks out into a sweat, he washes her. If the male cat, Lark, picks on her, he protects her. Sibyll vomits. R. Max cleans it up. No longer will any matter of bodily accident deter him. Once disgusted by a little pus, he now effortlessly attends to her every mess, until the time comes — and why don’t we say that that time is today? Tonight? Now? — when the vet suggests putting Sibyll down.

How else to relieve her of her suffering? But R. Max can’t. He returns home. He wanders out into the night, this night. True, her death would ease his terrible pain. He finds a bar. A friend of his there sides at once with the vet. He’s even angry with R. Max. He had a sick dog once. The dog had no chance. He put him down immediately. He looks at R. Max, as he finishes his beer, his second beer, and says, “You make me feel like an asshole.” So R. Max wanders on. Maybe he comes here. Why not? Maybe he’s here right now. With us. Let him be. Let’s imagine he’s in the audience but he’s too dazed to hear anything that I’m saying. Except for these words: “Who here is really brave enough to put aside their own pain and respond sin- gularly to another’s?” R. Max is brave. He’s a hunter. He cuts down huge trees. “In nature,” he thinks to himself, “Sibyll would already be gone. She’d be deprived of water and food. She’d be devoured by the jaws of some very healthy, adept, hungry predator. But what is nature?” R. Max asks. “Am I not part of nature, too?”

ASIDE #5: To Move a Stone I’m reminded of one of my favorite little Turkish proverbs: “When the ax was brought into the forest, the trees said: ‘The handle is one of us.’ ” I am very grateful to a friend of mine, Rita Raley, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, who was going over some of these topics with me, especially concerning nature. Here’s how she advised me: “I’d say that anything that

comes with instruction manuals, i.e. landscape paintings, poems, treatises, guidebooks, trail books; anything that tells you how to use it must necessarily be understood as wholly constructed. It’s an invented idea.” She pointed me to Bruno Latour, who works on actor-network theory, and to object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism, all concerned with troubling, if not obliterating, the dis tinction between the human and the not-human. It will come as no surprise that there is currently a very intense dialogue going on about ecology, about our relation ship to animals, to the world around us. And yes, we are now moving from the Derridean concept of understanding our self through the gaze of the ani mal to understanding how we relate to nature, our surroundings, beyond this question of perception. Let’s consider the United States. We have this incredible Gulf spill, we have all sorts of ecological disasters here and there. Environmental disaster is the subject of the day. And this subject is something studied on a very formal linguistic level that may seem kind of silly and beside the point, and yet, it’s through such tiny refinements in lan guage that policy in the long run can be shaped. And I think that’s a very important point for us tonight: no matter that we are considering a little cat or a parable or whatnot, the sharper we get with language, the more effective we become with policies of change. Graham Harman in Prince of Net- works13 — a book concerned with the metaphysics of Bruno Latour — writes:

As long as we insist on a highly primitive form of relationality as the basis of panpsy chism, I am more than willing to pay dues to the movement. For so-called inanimate objects do not encounter disembodied qual ities alone, but encounter other objects. And it does not encounter them in their naked purity any more than humans do. Instead, it encounters a unified object swirling with accidents, which can change within certain limits without changing the overall object. This will occur differently for every sort of entity, and it may be possible to shed more light on each of these cosmic layers of psyche than is usually believed. And this is the important sentence com ing up: I would even propose a new philosophical discipline called “speculative psychology” dedicated to ferreting out the specific psy chic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone. I think that would make a really good rock ’n’ roll band name: The Psychology of Chalk. I would go hear them. [Light laughter.] Perhaps it’s the psychology of stone mentioned at the end of that quote, but I can’t resist now bringing up the German philosopher Ernst Bloch. This is from his Traces14 (which incidentally contains a few pages on “The Kitten as David,” which speaks to a lot of these themes): Another rabbi, a true Kabbalist, once said: To bring about the kingdom of freedom, it is not necessary that everything be destroyed, and a new world begin; rather, this cup, or that bush, or that stone, and so all things must only be shifted a little. Because this “a little” is hard to do, and its measure so hard to find, humanity cannot do it in this

world; instead this is why the Messiah comes. Thereby this wise rabbi too, with his saying, spoke out not for creeping progress but completely for the leap . . . So maybe it’s our quantensprung or katzensprung. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in The Coming Com- munity15 quotes this passage, but adds Walter Benjamin’s version: The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in another world. And the clothes we wear in this world those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little bit different. J.M. Coetzee, in The Lives of Animals16, addresses the animal at large — what we encounter, what we raise, what we slaughter, what we feast upon. In the commentary at the back of the book, Barbara Smuts proposes what I think is a very laudable refinement: “Don’t just refer to animals generally. Recognize their individuality.” In other words — and you know where I’m going with this — a cat is not just a cat, but maybe a Sibyll. A human is not just a human, but maybe a you. And per Bloch and Benjamin, and Agamben, let us recognize the signifi cance of tiny differences. Even if they aren’t stones — maybe especially if they’re not stones — but features of a personality and identity: be they chalk, the face, the animal gaze.

R. Max knows so many of Sibyll’s par- ticularities. Certainly after 15 years, he knows her play. So R. Max vows not to put her down so long as she’s still at

play. So long as he can still find in her a moment of enjoyment with a sunspot. Or enchantment with some floating fleck of dust. Or even the pleasures of a whiff of food. So he cares for her. Even as her breath starts to fail. [Danielewski stops moving on the stage.] Because she can’t move as far as she used to, R. Max builds her a box. It’s a special box: soft inside and heated so she’s warm. Lark the male cat won’t go near; he yowls, suddenly afraid. R. Max can’t keep his eyes from burning. Finally, one morning, he sits down, op- posite Sibyll’s box. She can no longer move. She can hardly breathe. Yet she sees him there seeing her without seeing the shame of the Other. Maybe instead she sees in a “fixed moment” the human that lives in the Other that she is. Because you know what she does then? She leaps. She springs! Who knows where this energy comes from. And do you know where she leaps? For the first time, she goes into his lap ... to seek refuge. Solace. Relief. Hope. There, with R. Max, she finds her home, her last breath. And there she dies. And R. Max, the hard hunter, the woodcutter, breaks down. [Danielewski’s voice breaks too.]

ASIDE #6: More Than Just Our- selves Quite an evening, huh? [Light laughter; Danielewski wipes away tears.] Some times when we get into very complicated things, we’re unprepared for the feelings they provoke.

Early this evening, we had a little light [Danielewski points to the windows]. Now it’s just dark. But I still find light here — in your eyes. Perhaps from this story. Though we have to wonder about this story. Literature, we might say, is the story of how we feel when we do what we do. Let’s also consider this idea: feeling is the history of our survival. But our survival is contingent on more than just ourselves. You see, our parable isn’t quite over.

Speculation is that not long after Sibyll’s death, R. Max meets a woman. And this time, she stays. There are even rumors of children. And if they will marry, we’ll have to look to the bells of Cologne to tell us. For certain, R. Max has changed. Lark, his male cat, has changed, too. He has gotten older. These days he brings only twigs that resemble birds.

A Final Aside By way of closing, but not finishing, I would like to suggest this: The animal suffers. Without hope. And we in the end must answer that anguish — in animals, in the animals in our selves, and in the animals in each other. The point is not to hope but rather to become the hope the animal cannot know to need. To extend our hand. To offer our word. To be a refuge. There is no greater bliss than this, nor a more impossible bliss: to end another’s suffering.

Thank you.

Endnotes

1 This article is based on a talk given at Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, September 30, 2010. Layout and typographical features form an integral part of this contribution and therefore deviate from the house style of Anglistik. 2 Camille Paglia. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. 64. 3 Alexander Calder. Animal Sketching. New York: Bridgman Publishers, 1926. 13. 4 Balthus and Rainer Maria Rilke. Mitsou. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1984. 9-12. 5 Tom Stoppard. Voyage: The Coast of Utopia, Part 1. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 104; 105-106. 6 Jorge Luis Borges. Dreamtigers. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964. 70. 7 Peter Matthiessen. The Snow Leopard. New York: Vintage, 1998. 8 Jacques Derrida. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Willis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. 6; 12. 9 Valentino Braitenberg. Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1984. 10 Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. New York: Scribner, 2005. 11 Pindar, (trans. Sandys). Fragment 214. 5th Century BCE. 12 Silvia Montiglio. Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 66. 13 Graham Harman. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Victoria, Australia: re.press, 2009. 213. 14 Ernst Bloch and Anthony A. Nassar. Traces. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univer sity Press, 2006. 158. 15 Giorgio Agamben. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 52. 16 J.M. Coetzee. The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.