Cold November Thoughts (Enhancing Facebook one irony at a time) He shows Himself only as his trace. To go toward Him is not to follow the trace which is not a sign; it is to go toward the others who stand in the trace of Illeity (that-over-thereness--the other that calls to us without words). The problem with me is really just part of a bigger problem with the world. Wild geese fly in formation, but then seven, sometimes ten, the other day eighteen inhabit the pond at Memorial Park. They don’t like me, but they seem to like each other well enough . Unrequited love is, most of us feel, the condition of existence. Life is nasty, brutish, and short (and all that), but a baby at its mother’s breast suggests something else or more. Compensation, perhaps? Suck on this instead of happiness. Or an alternate but parallel narrative? Life is terrible/beautiful. This does not appear to be just instinct. We are intelligent enough to know how to dispose of infants. In fact, many people do. Still, many sacrifice much to beget and to love and nurture their children. Similarly, humans care for their animals and not vice-versa. They also eat them of course and sometimes abuse them. Is this because we make a distinction between “our” animals and animals in general? Not exactly, it would seem, since sometimes humans even are attached emotionally to animals they raise and then later slaughter for food. [Objection: our emotional attachments can be “selfish” in that they gratify us and give us a certain pleasure. Is this an objection, though, or a description of human sociality? An ethical without-which-nothing?] On the other hand, there is a “higher” capacity at work, which can, obviously, be used maliciously. I mean that there is a big difference in the lives (if not the deaths) of animals (even those being raised for food) who are the objects of this human emotional attachment. It is impossible to imagine factory farmers being emotionally attached to “their” chickens which never see the light of day and never actually touch mother earth. Of course, there are terrible parents and terrible animal owners. What I’m saying is that we seem to be able to choose (beyond instinct?) whether we will love and nurture each other, children, animals. I assume we believe that animals, by definition, do not. If they do, they don’t write late night cold November thoughts about it. Wildness is romantic and over-rated. “Making soup” is less obviously exciting. But ethically, making soup is a form of making love unknown to coyotes. Although, to be fair to coyotes, they may have some tricks up their fur that we dont know. To be even fairer, animals also never poison the soup they never make. On the other hand, nature (God?) does hide poison around quite liberally in the fields of wild earth. The image of God in us may describe our abilities to make soup and make poison. And to choose to do (or not to do) either or both.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 22:09:57 +0000
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