Untitled with Buffalo Scent, Martin Finnin (oil on canvas, 100 x 150 cm)
I remember coming across an article quite a while back, where the writer was of the opinion that humans’ tendency to speak to animals was demeaning to both animals and humans. On the surface this perspective would seem to tally strongly with the theme of my own project. The idea would be that speaking to animals treats them like fellow humans, and divests them of the dignity and mystery of being specifically non human etc. etc. It also casts a question mark over the motivations of the human in wanting to communicate to the animal in question.
But funnily enough I’m not sure I completely agree with the idea. There might indeed be something quite appropriate in humans speaking to animals, as long as it is not some sort of deluded attempt at communication, that is: if it is ultimately an aesthetic act. In this sense it would be similar to prayer, where no response is, or should be, ever received. Receiving a response would make it a rather deflating and depressing experience, on consideration. It would set up a mundane and restrictive cause and effect relation between humans and the Godhead. We have enough of cause and effect in everyday life.
It would seem that language — which, being “language” (the word in my “language” for “language”…I find myself wanting to put every word in inverted commas) is only ever my human language— is the defining characteristic that makes us humans the animals that we are. (For now, I’m going to ignore the possibility that authentic humanity lies in transcending language…). Language is our special move so to speak; spiders spin webs, chameleons change colour, cats land on their feet and humans speak. So perhaps it is by speaking to animals that the rift between us can be, certainly not crossed, but made less divisive somehow. Speaking to an animal, without ever expecting a response, is perhaps when a human animal exists in its most human-animal-like state with other beings. This thought, which admittedly I’m finding hard to express, hinges on the idea of communing, or community, rather than communication.
Unless they’re engaging in the drama of predator and prey, different species of animal more often than not seem to ignore each other. Even symbiotic relations are healthily self-oriented. And yet if we observe a simple scene in nature, where a number of animals are present — a frog in a pond, a spider in a hedge above it, a flock of geese flying above this, a ladybird on a leaf a few meters away, a dog barking in the distance, all simultaneously engaging in their own specific animal being — what we see are animals gracefully ignoring each other, in such a way as to render the scene, ‘appropriate’ somehow.
Animals ‘hang together’ easily, like the balance of forms in an abstract painting. Birds and fish and frogs etc. are thus in a communal state of being even though they never communicate, because they exist fully immersed in species specific states. They commune because they don’t communicate. But despite this mutual detachment, there is an underlying rapport there; ‘abiding’ maybe is the word. For the human then, speaking to an animal could be a communal gesture, a way of entering comfortably into this abiding community. Like the strange geometric lines that commune with the other more organic forms in Untitled with Buffalo Scent the brilliant oil painting above by Cork-based artist Martin Finnin.
Speech would be the specifically human contributiuon to the ethereal rapport that exists between all living organisms, situating the animal that speaks within the arena of the other animals that do their own species-specific things. And this idea of rapport interests me because, on the one hand it leaves the rift between animals and humans untouched, but on the other renders this rift less divisive somehow.
As always, I’m drawn to the suspicion that language, thought and reason are no more or less expansive or commendable than other special attributes that other animals possess; as ‘deep’ and sophisticated as web-spinning or trans-oceanic navigation in birds etc. This would make language more a mode of behaviour than a carrier of meaning. (Q: Would this make the results of language, whether destructive or constructive, a natural part of the whole ecosystem?)
But, if we are to accept speaking to animals as being philosophically justifiable, it would still, I think, have to be quite a specific mode of speech to ensure that the sense of human superiority doesn’t break the rapport. Again it’s a question of aesthetics. No pontificating, no ordering about and no baby talk! Keep it cool. A quick greeting maybe and a brief, happily one-sided chat? I don’t know…