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Overview
What does novelist, essayist, and memoirist Jenny Diski know about animals? She wasn't really sure as she began to write this book, and she may not be sure now. But of this she is certain: our relationships with, and attitudes toward, animals are really worth thinking about. In What I Don't Know About Animals, she shows why.
Diski sets out on her wide-ranging investigation by remembering the stuffed cuddly creatures from her childhood, the animal books she read, the cartoons she watched, the strays she found. She considers the animals who have lived and still live with her (most especially Bunty the cat), animals she has encountered close up, and those she has feared. She examines human beings, too, and how they have looked at, studied, treated, and written about the non-human creatures of our shared planet. Ranging still further, the author interviews scientists, discusses Derrida and his cat, and observes elephants in Kenya, always seeking the key to the complex relationship we in the modern West have with animals.
Subtle, intelligent, and always engaging, this book is a brilliant exploration of what it means to be human and what it means to be animal, and the uncertainty of what we can know about either.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300180626 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/20/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Jenny Diski contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and many other papers and journals in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, UK.
Read an Excerpt
WHAT I DON'T KNOW ABOUT ANIMALS
By JENNY DISKI
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2010 Jenny DiskiAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18062-6
Chapter One
THE REAL AND THE STUFFED
I was born in the mid-twentieth century in the dead centre of a great city. I am what one historian calls post-domestic. My grandparents came to England from the shtetl: they had been traders, furriers, tailors, not animal husbandmen, but at some point they must have ridden horses, or used them to pull carts. They would have kept chickens and killed them under the watchful eye of the rabbi. My mother, although born in London in 1912, knew how to singe and dress chickens that came, head and feet on, all the insides inside, from the kosher butcher behind Warren Street underground station. Even so, like many children of immigrants my parents put the shtetl behind them as much as possible. Their broken-accented old people were old-world embarrassments, for all that they had made the bold journey from a hostile middle Europe to unknown and faraway city centres.
Neat, clean clothes confirmed how far we had come from the old country. My mother did not mess with dirtying nature, except in the kitchen to prepare it to look other than what it had been by chopping and cooking. My mother and father both fled from the ghost of the shtetl into the urbane. When I was young we lived in a centrally heated block of flats. A man way down in the basement stoked the boiler; another man came every week and took the dirty sheets and brought them back washed and ironed. My mother spent her days dusting and polishing and cleaning, but our flat was so small, I can't imagine how it occupied her for more than half an hour a day. She washed herself and me as if we spent our lives excavating dark and grimy tunnels. Especially down there, in the animal — the natural — the private — parts. She flung a handful of washing-soda crystals into my bath to get rid of any 'germs' that lurked on my body. Not that it had much opportunity to get dirty — clean knickers every morning and careful lessons in how to wipe yourself after urinating or defecating. My mother was prepared to confront the dirty animal, but only to ensure that it never, ever got a hold on our existence. My father shaved with a strap-sharpened razor, left a manicured garden of moustache on his upper lip, forced his wavy hair flat on his head with a hair cream and vigorous brushing and splashed more scented stuff on him to keep the smell of body at bay. But according to my mother, he was not as fastidious as she was in the matter of washing or in matters of other people's natural parts. My mother abhorred his washing and sexual behaviours as 'filthy'. Good things were 'nice', bad things were 'not nice'. Clean was 'nice and clean'. Good was not making a mess of the clothes that were specifically chosen to show how much we were not people of the countryside. When I wailed miserably about my woollen vests, which I insisted were scratchy, she told me they couldn't possibly be, they were made of the finest wool to be bought in 'Brussels'. Shops in cities, not sheep in fields, ensured their goodness and quality. Post-domestic.
Any dogs, cats or birds I encountered on the streets were always to be ignored and avoided. But there were exceptions. The great masses of starlings in central London at that time were a sight to see, worth stopping and looking up at, swarming in their tens of thousands on the roof of the National Gallery in the late afternoons, and taking off simultaneously in a fluttering, shrieking cloud that swooped and rose all of a piece across the London sky. And in Trafalgar Square, I regularly fed the pigeons that stood ravenously on my hands, shoulders and head to get at the corn on my open palm. A strange anomaly of urban animal wariness. Now pigeons are flying rats, filthy and disease-ridden. They have been exiled from Trafalgar Square, and are shot in the dead of night to discourage their presence on public buildings and under bridges. The millions of starlings have disappeared too. But I have a photograph of my mother and me, standing at the foot of Nelson's Column, with pigeons perched on our heads and shoulders, and my mother smiling quite benignly.
I went with her to the butcher and sat in my pushchair, close to the pale sawdust, looking at slabs of meat on the counter, tidied with string into unfleshy shapes that bore no relation to anything that had ever lived. It was the shop where they neatened death into food. And it was a kosher butcher, which meant, additionally, that the meat had been drained of its life blood and prayed over as it was killed. By the time it got to the front of the shop, it had been processed as far away from the once-living creature it had been as it was possible. And the processing continued back home in the kitchen. Salt beef was an oval cylinder bound with string; fish was filleted and covered in matzo-meal batter or moulded with carrots and simmered into wet, doughy balls; liver was chopped and mixed with egg and onion into a pâté. Only chickens remained somewhat lifelike. At the butcher, they were whole, though dead and featherless, hanging by the neck from hooks in the window. A little bit of bucolic reality. They even retained their shape and features in the cooking, after my mother had burned away the last bits of feather. Chicken soup — essential Jewish food — was made with the whole unjointed chicken, minus the head, but including the giblets (gizzard, liver, heart, neck), any unlaid eggs (a special treat, little hard-boiled yolklets), and the amputated feet. Actually it was as much Chinese as Jewish, but gnawing on a chicken's claw, all succulent and chewy gristle and bone, and being presented with the rubbery gizzard, was a weekly childhood happiness. So all my experience of the non-human animal was the smell in the butcher's shop, various mediated parts of a cooked chicken, close encounters with disease-ridden flying pests and an appreciation of starlings.
Yet not quite all, because in the far reaches of my memory is a farm. I can't verify this at all because no one remains who would know, but I have certain pictures in my head of being very young and on a farm. A holiday farm is my first thought. I stayed there more than once. I remember the kitchen table and sitting round it with elderly grown-ups and quite a lot of other children, as I only very rarely sat round a tableful of people at home, and certainly not one in a kitchen, but at a dining-room table, for special occasions and separated from the manufacture of food. My parents weren't with me on the farm, but I have an image of them arriving (both, I think, together) to visit me at least once, nor was there anyone that I knew or can identify. There were pigs, and I adored them. I can see myself in their pen making friends with them. I can't specifically remember any other animals though there is a generic feel of farm animals around. I also have the manure smell of the farm in my memory, and the recollection of feeding, even possibly of me trying to milk a cow. I think I liked being on that farm. There is a young woman with trousers tucked into wellington boots showing me how to look after the pigs and not be afraid of them. I must have been very young indeed, the recollections are so fleeting, set tableaux without much context, but I remember people smiling, being kindly. I don't doubt that this happened once or more than once, but I'm surprised. There are two possibilities: either it was a holiday place that took children, and my parents thought I should have the experience of farm living, or it was a foster home during some time or times of trouble — which were plentiful enough for me to have been fostered on various later occasions, which I do remember clearly. It is possible that the local council sent me there during some crisis. It makes sense of the powerful memory of kindness. This strikes me as more likely because I can't imagine my mother or father sending me off alone anywhere at that age, and surely not back to the countryside of their old people's past. It was dangerous and embarrassing. We were among those, in the 1950s, who drove to the outskirts of London, picnicked by the side of an A road and considered it a day out in the country. At quite a young age, I roamed around London quite freely, often alone, but streets were considered safe once I got the hang of crossing the road. A farm was so strangely away and remote from anything I remember about my parents. Or perhaps the children's farm is a figment of my imagination. I don't think so, but I really can't be sure. For whatever reason, I think there was just a little muck and domesticated animal life in my childhood. I still love pigs.
There were a few flesh-and-blood non-humans in my urban childhood. A budgie called Georgie. Blue. He said 'Who's a pretty boy?' a lot, and sometimes answered 'Georgie' when asked his name. He lived in a cage on the sideboard, and once a week flew around the small living room when his cage was being cleaned by my mother. He perched on my finger with his sharp, grasping claws, and stood on my head when he came to rest. There was something a little alarming about him flying free in the living room, and I was always quite relieved when he was put back in his cage. I can't say that I had a sense of Georgie's individual existence: he was an entertainment enclosed in a cage within a room, not unlike some of my wind-up toys, a simulacrum of Tweetie Pie. If asked, I would have said I loved Georgie, but then I said all sorts of things I knew I was supposed to say, often enough about love. One day when his cage was being cleaned Georgie flew out of a window my mother had forgotten to close. I may have cried, but I didn't really care.
There was also one or several goldfish, which I won at Battersea or Hampstead Fun Fair. There was always only one at a time, and it repeatedly jumped out of its small circular bowl and was to be found dead on the carpet, or I'd wake in the morning to find it floating on its side on top of the water. All goldfish were one. They swam around for a while and then they died. I don't think anyone asked me if I loved the goldfish.
And once I found a baby bird at the base of a tree in Regent's Park, fallen from its nest. I scooped it up carefully and took it home, cupped in my hands, to the flat. My mother, confronted with the poor, helpless, squealing thing, overcame her distaste and got a saucer of bread soaked in milk. We tried to feed it with tweezers, but it wouldn't or couldn't eat, and writhing in our nervous, urban hands, wriggled away and fled to the darkness and warmth behind the radiator, where it got stuck. It was a grim nature lesson. My mother, panicking, as I would now in the same circumstances, tried to tease and then poke it out with a prod of some sort — a wooden spoon, a fish slice? The wretched little creature screamed for its own kind, and shrank from the probe, and we wailed and flailed around trying to get at the trapped bird, making it retreat even further into stuckness, and us all the more appalled. It was doubly in the wrong place. Not at the foot of a tree under its nest, and wedged in the domestic human space between a far-too-hot metal radiator and the living-room wall. Eventually, the cheeping stopped. My mother flapped on the phone to the porters down in the entrance hall and one of them arrived to dig out and dispose of the corpse.
It was an experience that was much more distressing than watching my mother prepare a dead chicken for the pot. Baby birds, like baby anything else, are fearsomely attractive, with those same big eyes and rounded head that evolution happened upon to make hearts melt. It was helpless and I rescued it, as I thought, and then it all went terribly wrong. This was the danger, and always has been with befriended animals, even the ones we call pets. It would not behave as a rescued creature was supposed to behave. It didn't understand enough. It couldn't be told or reassured. It wouldn't eat, it didn't love us or trust us, it tried to get away from us, and turned from a sweet baby creature into a trapped and dying animal. A disappointment. A let-down. A regret. Unlike my three stuffed bears who were completely reliable. Once the baby bird was behind the radiator, I didn't want it any more. I only wanted it not to be there, never to have seen it, not to have picked it up. I knew it wouldn't survive, and that I hadn't saved it. It was a baby thing that I had brought home to die a much worse death than if I had left it alone. At any rate, a death in my presence. The first and, until I was in my forties and my cat was put down, the only one. My fault, but its fault, too, for not behaving properly. For not complying with the rules about humans saving animals; but having a life — a nature — of its own. I was disgusted by its horrible end in my flat. As soon as it was stuck behind the radiator, actually, as soon as it refused to eat, I wished it would shut up and die immediately.
The memory of the baby bird I rescued must be in the shadows of the story I wrote at primary school about ducklings. It was a school composition the class had been set when I was about nine, perhaps a couple of years after the bird died in the flat. Write a story. A vague command frequently asked of children, but something most editors would hesitate to demand of professional writers. My story became a literary scandal, which, I like to think, suggests I was always a natural writer. I wrote about a country-living girl of my own age who, walking along the river one day, sees a family of ducklings cheeping helplessly around the dead body of their mother. The girl goes home, gets a cardboard box and collects the baby birds, the whole squawk of them. She takes them back and keeps them in a barn (a proper rural story, this — not a pavement in sight). She nurtures them with bread soaked in milk. They thrive. Little by little, they grow. They rush to greet her when they hear her footsteps coming home from school and follow her everywhere. She lets them swim about in the bath and collects worms and other slimy creatures for them. She is their mother. Other children envy her and she allows them to visit her ducklings sometimes. No adults interfered in this story. I must have supposed, probably rightly, that country children had much more freedom from them than we city kids had. Eventually, the ducklings are fully grown, and their saviour wisely decides that they must live natural lives. She leads them crocodile-fashion down to the river, with tears in her eyes but knowing she is doing the right thing. At the water's edge she stops and even as they cluster around her legs for comfort in an alien environment, she hardens her heart and shoos them in. One by one they flop into the water, flap about in panic and then each of them gets the point of their webbed feet. They set off immediately, quacking, ducking and diving, and swimming off down (or up, what did I know about which way ducks swam?) the river. The girl — let's call her Jenny — though I'm sure I wouldn't have then, stands and watches them disappear into the distance. Not one of the ducks looks back, not one of them offers a sentimental farewell, they go off and get on with their lives without the slightest indication of gratitude or even memory of their nurturer and saviour. Jenny watches them go, and understands that they are different; she had no right to expect anything from them. She goes back some time later and her ducks are there, she recognises them. She throws them some bread, and as they pluck it from the ground she calls out their names. The ducks take no notice. She reaches out her empty hand. The boldest duck runs forward and pecks at her outstretched fingers with an angry quack. As soon as they finish up the bread, they waddle away back to the water and swim off without a sign that they ever knew her.
I left it at that and let the moral draw itself. It was a tough little tale for a small girl to write, cynical even: the knowing structure set up to be sentimental and sweet and then pulling all that sickly stuff away from the reader at the end without flinching. I'm interested that I knew about gratitude and the lack of need for it between humans and animals, and that Jenny, the character in the story, had such a resigned acceptance of it. I can imagine writing something very like it even now.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WHAT I DON'T KNOW ABOUT ANIMALS by JENNY DISKI Copyright © 2010 by Jenny Diski. Excerpted by permission of Yale University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PART ONE IN THE BEGINNING....................11 The Real and the Stuffed....................3
2 Dream Animals....................18
PART TWO US AND THEM....................37
3 Divisions....................39
4 Otherness....................52
PART THREE WATCHING....................77
5 Getting Nearer Nature....................79
6 In the Lab....................117
PART FOUR LOVE AND HATE....................161
7 Under Our Skin....................163
8 The Good, the Bad and the Helpful....................193
PART FIVE RESPONSIBILITIES....................217
9 The Death of Lunch....................219
10 Who's in Charge?....................265
Epilogue The Fruit Stare....................298
Notes....................303
Bibliography....................308
Acknowledgements....................312