The Zoo is a place where you can replace your stick-figure representations with direct perception. It’s easy to overlook everything: “oh look a rare bird,” and “cool, a giraffe.” But you can also stare intently at the facial hair of a gorilla up close for 2-3 minutes with complete focus and marvel at how strange it actually is.
I looked it up, and I’m surprised there’s no term for the uncanny that emerges from looking at non-familiar animals up close. It’s most obvious with cockroaches perhaps. That’s an obvious biophobia. Squirrels, dogs, and horses are good example of acclimated animals that we are accustomed to. But there’s a feeling of grotesque when you see a human-looking eye on a mammal as strangely-formed as a rare hog—familiar parts in an unfamiliar whole. Maybe the grotesque comes from imagining a human being transfigured into it.
Maybe the “evolutionary uncanny” is when nature reprises parts (eyes, lips, or hands) into whole that seems uncanny or frightening.
Throughout my time at the zoo, I had trouble putting the right words to what I was feeling, and I couldn't help but coin the phrase, "all of God's retarded creatures." This is obviously absurd and inflammatory, especially with the adjacent G-word and the R-word; I can’t say I even agree with it, but it speaks to the alienation and distance that language creates from nature (and the hubris of a linguistic creature).
This taps into an idea in DFW’s “Consider the Lobster” essay. Despite him saying how we should be more conscious of how we boil lobsters alive, he closes by confessing that he feels that animals are less morally important than humans and he’s not sure why. This has been an open loop for me. I have a positive regard for animals, but I know people in my life who exist on both extremes (ie: my wife sees dogs on par with humans, and my grandfather thinks dog == rat).
At some point while wandering the Bronx Zoo, I found myself thinking that nature is this force that rapidly mutates and complexifies life in order to find a "breakaway pattern." I am, obviously, as I write this, an inheritor of that pattern, and you, by nature of reading this, are an inheritor too. And so when I look at the rhinos, I don’t see cute or powerful animals, but sadness over a breed of mind trapped in a tankish form-factor. A human-centric way of seeing animals is that they're failed mutations in search of a perfect form, a being that can transcend itself.
It gets me wondering, “what is it like to be a Rhino?” This is the basic question of consciousness, and when you really imagine the felt experience of an animal (especially a caged one), it can feel uncomfortable, even alien. There are physical, sensory, and of course cognitive differences across species, and within a species—it all gets me wondering how primary language is to the human experience. Is it the thing? Without speech, there is no civilization; even if we are "trapped" by or language in some sense, we also owe our being to it.
Does DFW’s feeling that humans are the most morally important species comes down to linguistic supremacy? And is this generally true, or is it hubris?
Other notes:
- 12:30 PM – Evolution comes from tight feedback loops: in nature, in language, in identity, in art.
- 02:00 PM – A name for the lens when you look at an animal species and estimate how many years it might take for it to evolve into a language-using advanced society given the right environmental niche. “Monkey: 15 million.” Etc. I asked GPT, and it said that octopi, ravens, and raccoons show the most promise.
- 02:56 PM – Near the entrance of the Bronx zoo, they have neoclassical building with animal ornamentation, and there are many jokes to be made about monkey college.
