Sometimes I find myself calling out the chorus from a song I can never remember the name of and have to find with fragments of lyrics every time I want to have a listen to the full thing.
It starts off with this monologue, part of it goes,
"Somewhere in the Shires, surgeons had opened the mind of Mr. Stitchcomb, and found black apes gibbering on dark lawns..."
& & &
Animals don't know the law, nor would it matter much if they did. It is not illegal for a crocodile to eat a man, but if it was, the crocodile would anyway. If a dog, left alone in a room or even the house, were to find a perfectly good cookie on the table and choose to not eat it, I don't believe the dog necessarily even understands the idea of rules, as an abstract thing. Oh certainly, the dog may know that the master forbids that he eat the cookie, and obey - but the idea that somewhere above the master, conceptually, was the Platonic form of Dogs Should Not Eat Things From The Human Table? No.
But a good boy nonetheless, and without stooping to the idea that animals might know ethics or morals.
Speaking of pets, I've been left in the care of the cat. My simple task is to feed the cat at the appointed times, and to allow the cat to grace me with its presence whenever the cat decides that my body heat is worth the effort of rising from whatever patch of sunlight is available.
Among the cat's titles is "Chicken Cat", the cat who loves to eat chicken above all else. Chicken Cat is quite partial to a label known as "Paw Lickin' Chicken" having sampled a wide field indeed.
Some time ago, it was discovered that Chicken Cat had developed a severe allergy to chicken, and was rather fussy for some time before settling on an equal preference for one of several seafood varieties. Chicken Cat has settled, but has not become complacent. Chicken Cat, not so long ago, wedged her way into a properly closed pizza box full of hours-old buffalo chicken pizza, and triggered what was doubtless a spicy morning shit to kick off an allergen bomb of several days' discomfort.
To-day I unknowingly stumbled upon a secreted can of Paw Lickin' Chicken, and when I popped and slopped it the first thing I noticed was that the cat had engaged the turbonucleatic dimensional intrusion device, and had entered a state of n-manifold vibration. The second thing I noticed was that the dish was full of no kind of fish I had ever seen before. The third thing I noticed was the label, and the cat was forced to glow white-hot on untunable frequencies as I fed the entire thing to the garbage disposal and rinsed the dish free of any molecule of the forbidden protein.
I felt bad for the cat. There was no possible way for the cat to understand that it had been a simple mistake, and that it was poison to her. She could not possibly comprehend the series of concepts behind this radically tortuous gesture.
She ate the Kahuna Tuna anyway.
& & &
"... On closer inspection of the poor emaciated beast, it was agreed that a visit on the child's father was in order. Not a task to be relished it seems, as the man in question was affected by a strange disquiet which gnawed away at his faith. And it was rumoured that his days were spent sucking on the bleached bones of his dead mates ..."
& & &
The crocodile knows no law. The dog knows no Platonic rule or axiom. The cat knows no allergy.
Animals, particularly when humans are involved but in the most apeless of nature for sure, are subject to an abundance of existential ambiguity and yet seem to navigate it without the kind of dread that can overtake a person. But once I met an animal that, I think, had existential questions.
I used to live in Omaha, Nebraska. I found myself for a time with a certain amount of pocket money and absolutely nothing to do. I had civilianated quietly, and the friends that I would have spent time with were themselves scattered or on government business. I decided to avail myself of a deeply discounted (thank you for your service) yearly pass to the Henry Doorly Zoo, which was only a few minutes' drive from my shithole basement sublet.
It's not a large zoo, but it is decent. I have mixed feelings about zoos, and I have seen some very good ones and some very bad ones, if you consider the metric to be (as everywhere, all the time) how they treat the inmates.
The first time I went, I went on an unexpectedly busy Wednesday afternoon. Field trips, several of them. I didn't stay long, and on my way out, I asked an employee what their least busy times were. They gave me the dope and I came back a week later with a mission.
I put on a bright red Pokemon teeshirt and a plain black ballcap, and made a quick lap of the zoo before I went to the Ape-o-Dome. The ape enclosure at the Henry Doorly is a huge plexiglass bubble in the heart of the facility, and there's nobody in there but us. Gorillas, chimps, and ever so rarely, an orang.
When I got to the Ape-o-Dome it was deserted. I was the only person in that corner of the zoo. I did the hardest thing in the world and I walked in one door, walked the path inside the dome among the exhibits without looking away from the floor, and walked out. And then I did it again two days later. And then again the next week. Five trips without looking up from the floor, and then I went on a Friday afternoon, wearing the same teeshirt and cap I always did on Zoo Day, so they would recognize me.
The Ape-O-Dome was packed with people, doing all the obnoxious things people do in those places. I did my usual routine, except this time I snuck glances into the enclosures. The gorillas were either totally shut off or busy eyeballing glass-tappers. The chimps weren't out. The orang was in a back corner of his little front-facing tank. A tour guide was telling a group of kids about the orang's previous escapes.
The guy was a lockpicker and was known to go for walks around the zoo himself. He famously led a revolt, by which I mean he let himself out of his tank one night and proceeded to free as many other animals as he could get to, as free as he could make them.
The guy was subject to patdowns before changing rooms, and he'd figured to hide a piece of wire up in the far crack of his lips at the gums.
As I exited, I thought for sure I'd noticed a couple of the gorillas tracking me through the crowd. I was confident enough in the plan that I made five more trips, one in crowds, the rest during bum hours. But I started to linger. The walkway in front of the orang tank and the gorilla tank was a big oval, lots of gawking room, and there were large platform benches in the center. I started to stop for a few minutes and do nothing in particular while I sat on the benches and tied my shoes or just stared at the floor. A little longer. A little longer. And then I decided that the next time I went in and there were no other humans around, I would try to say hello.
When it finally happened, the lights were half-off inside and I could tell immediately that the orang was in his tank, the weight of his presence somehow not feeling related to his enormous physical size. I could feel the guy there. As my eyes made the short adjustment, I finally caught him in the off-center vision. It was the first time I had seen the guy anywhere but hunched in the farthest corner from the glass. The chimps weren't in their tank, and the gorillas were still around the curve. None of the apes could see each other from their tanks. It was just me and the orang.
I sat down on the same corner of the same bench I always did, and watched him carefully without letting my gaze actually hit him. He was sitting in an enormous pile of shredded cardboard - he must be in the afterglow of some enrichment activity, which was apparently turning a couple of fridge boxes into 1" strips by hand for a while.
I focused at his chest so I could at least get some kind of look at his face. Here it was. My big chance. First contact. What the hell do I say to this guy?
I reached out and pointed at the pile he was sitting on, and then made a stage-gesture of tearing apart a piece of paper.
He looked at me for just a second, and then he pursed his lips and hooted at me, nowhere near as loud as he could have, just enough to be heard, while grabbing a double handful of the stuff and throwing it up in the air.
You, tear?
Fuckin' bet I did.
I stole a look at his eyes and I saw a person's laughter. I saw a person who knew that he was surrounded by existential ambiguity and the determination to investigate as thoroughly as his hands and mind would allow.
There was no way I was going to top that, so I waved goodbye and walked around the curve.
& & &
And there's a part after the monologue, the guitar strumming intensifies, and the singer breaks into this song, it goes
"Oh, sucking on the bleached bones
Of my dead mates,
Trying to get to Parbold
For a quarter past seven,
And it isn’t gonna happen."
The whole song is a nonsense arrangement of elements of the monologue, itself boring minutia framed in a powerful nostalgia. But this is the part I belt out sometimes, and then sometimes I laugh, or sigh, depending on how I feel in the moment about the bleached bones of my dead mates. And I wonder what I'm late for. And I wonder if the orang ever worries about the same things, or if he's satisfied dreading the mortal coil alone.