by Harvey Lillywhite.
Henry Beston (June 1, 1888 – April 15, 1968—an American writer and naturalist, best known for The Outermost House, written in 1925) said something about us animals that I find remarkable:
Since we’re talking about animals, naturally it’s the little appositive at the tail end about “prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth” that took me by the shoulders and shook me up.
Okay, he romanticizes animals when he imagines that their world is older and more complete than ours. In fact, it’s the bizarre and arresting lack of finish and completeness of our world and theirs that his phrase, “the splendor and travail of the earth,” sets before us so unexpectedly. Also, to assume we’re all prisoners is so 19th century. I think the existentialists did away with that notion pretty well, didn’t they?
But here’s the thing. On the one hand, you have me in my suburban neighborhood 10 miles north of Baltimore. We have an impressive list of nations of animals, including the necessary domestic dogs and cats, lots of white-tail deer, the requisite squirrels and songbirds, endless streams of crows, cottontails, raccoons that leave muddy paw prints on the tops of our garbage cans, more red foxes than you would think possible, opossums with their opposable thumbs, groundhogs, chipmunks, rats, mice, spiders and stinkbugs, etc. They people the landscape as though for our entertainment, sometimes our annoyance. They’re cute if not so cuddly.
We debate about the real kindness of feeding them, especially in the winter. I myself heave leftover food scraps over our rail fence into the small strip of woods in the easement behind our houses. My neighbors frown on this practice. I myself speak aloud to all the animals whenever I see them as though they were my neighbors, too. I tell them they’re okay; they don’t have to fear me; I make kissing noises to appease them and hold out my empty hand to them offering nothing much. If I could, I’d feed them from my hand—well, maybe not the rats. When I find insects in the house, I try to carry them out when I can. When it comes to these animals, I’m a softee.
But then on the other hand, I’ve seen the video of lionesses springing from a dead run onto the backs of stampeding wildebeests, slashing razor claws across their boney backs and sinking huge fangs into their terrified, vulnerable necks—what democrats and republicans, the wealthy and the poor, would no doubt do to each other if they could. And I’ve seen the video of beef processing plants and the chicken slaughterhouses. I’ve ridden behind big rigs crammed full of turkeys headed for packaging, shedding feathers. I’ve seen the video of war, the execution by a bullet to the head of a kneeling, blindfolded man. And once off the hiking trail in the Tetons, I encountered a big black bear who was interested in having me for lunch.
It’s the confluence of these two worlds, the splendor and travail of the earth, that makes so much sense to me.
What a dilemma it became for us to take our small kids to the zoo. I remember loving the Salt Lake City zoo when I was young; it was a wonder, and I couldn’t ever get enough. What heroes the polar bears were to me when, during a class trip, two of them were humping in broad daylight, and 8-year-old Beth Smart, who sat next to me in third grade, asked our teacher what the bears were doing. Priceless, I thought, even back then. The thought that we’d be eaten immediately if we fell over the rail into their environments was tantalizing. But the Baltimore zoo was so horrible when I took my kids—who also loved it. One small little wrought iron cage after another, each with a Big Cat or Monkey from Africa or South America or Australia, and a red sign in front of most of them, ENDANGERED SPECIES. Zoos had become politically incorrect.
I told my sons that animals are people, too, that they think and feel and communicate as all animals do, even us. Each of the animals is intelligent, even us. My sons laughed at me and at that idea, which is so totally not supported in our culture. Born lawyers, they’d ask me why I eat animals if I liked them so much. That was an easy one. We’re at the top of the food chain. We kill and eat everything that can’t eat us. I told them how my father took me hunting, how I shot and killed rabbits, skinned them, cut them into pieces, cooked them, and ate them. Once, I admitted, I shot a porcupine. It was, as I look back on it, an execution and for no reason at all except that I was holding a gun out in the mountains, and I was a man. In fact, I cut off one of its paws as a souvenir. I was 12 or 13, hunting with my Dad. I confess this with as much self-loathing right now as though I’d murdered another person. It was heinous, and I should have gone to jail for doing this. But nothing much happened, except for the little scar on my psyche that luckily grew over that gross spiritual violation and has reminded me for the rest of my life that I and the amazing porcupine, without its paw, are exactly equal in the splendour and travail of the earth.
It’s so easy and inconsequential for me to say how I honor all the animals. The world I grew up in was far more wild than the one I live in now. I had a horse as a kid and rode it bareback through the fields with no saddle or bridle, just clinging to its mane. I heard coyotes howling when we camped out. Most of my neighbors kept animals just as they grew vegetable gardens and planted fruit trees. The pig you fed in the morning could well have been the pork roast you enjoyed at night. We weren’t that squeamish about this fact. There was no need to ask, as Allen Ginsberg’s fictitious Walt Whitman, busy eyeing the grocery man, asks in a supermarket in California, “Who killed the porkchops?” We knew. It was us. Right, the splendor and travail of the earth.
These days, at least here in suburban Baltimore, all the raising and butchering is done off stage, behind the curtain. In my American Indian Literature class, when we read about a buffalo hunter killing a buffalo, sprinkling pollen on its nose, inviting it to live well in the next world, and then slitting it open and taking a bite of its still-hot liver, we can’t imagine such a thing. But we’re all related, as that hunter knew.
Mindfully, I might say, I try to get my sons, now in their 20s, to honor all parts of life. Of course we celebrate the victories. But the defeats and tragedies are equally honorable and need to be honored. All the animals need to be honored, I tell them. The only honest prayer, I explain to them both, is THANK YOU.
My oldest son, who studied Buddhism in a college class, tells me about the secret of detachment, how that’s the path out of suffering. But I disagree. And I call on all the animals to back me up on this one, even the dead porcupine who’s lost paw I’ll never lose: only total attachment can lead to any hint of enlightenment at all. Love this world. Love it as big and as well as you possibly can. Yes, we passed a decapitated deer on the side of the road on the way to our holiday shopping. Attach that to what your life is because life is all of this—all the animals, all the splendour and travail of the earth.
I tell my sons and all the animals that I believe none of us is a separate being. In my view, the cosmos, far beyond our abilities to know and experience it, is all one living being: the stupid woman who nearly backed into me in the parking lot, the goofy, hopeless, and totally misguided idiot who votes differently than I will, my dead Mom and Dad, their dead Moms and Dads, all our relations, the whole circus and circuit of this splendor and travail of the earth, just one teeming, dirty, utterly hopeless lover. So thanks to Henry Beston for his words. And thanks to all of the animals, unfinished and incomplete as we are as always, prisoners in the splendour. . . .