Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  FINIS

  An old man now, I still hear them screaming—and still need, after so many years, a help that no one can give. I am not religious, much less Roman Catholic. But I went once (this was 1976 or ’77) to a church in Mont-Royal (Église Saint-Édouard) and told a priest through the screen of a confessional that, as a boy, I had killed my father with a hydraulic press and set upward of a thousand more members of my immediate and extended family on fire. I was instructed to pray ten Hail Marys. I tried once more in the spring of 1983, during the term of my engagement to someone whose portrait photo I still keep in my sock drawer. There are things about me, I said—and asked her to sit with me and watch on videotape a film that would begin to explain … None of you believes me either. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re not listening. At the end, we tell our stories only for ourselves and for one reason alone: to keep them real in our own minds until dementia comes like a fungus moth to chew holes in the fabric of memory.

  From Experimental Animals

  A Reality Fiction

  Thalia Field

  The continued shameless duplicity of the so-called Animal Protection society makes it clear that we need more help handling the growing problem of stolen animals. To do this, the girls and I support private charities like the shelter at Garches (modeled on one at Battersea, supported by Queen Victoria). As a token, Animal Protection offers to pick up a few dogs, deliver them to Madame Faure at 34, rue de Buci, six, seven, ten times a day—in addition to what she and the other women collect—and then, nightly, we drive them to Garches. But Garches isn’t winterized, and our meetings focus on funding a winter home in Paris. Note that in the same building as Madame Faure is Mademoiselle Mazerolles, who only collects cats.

  Remember when Mademoiselle Huot ended up in the paper for hitting Professor Brown-Sequard with an umbrella—just as he was about to experiment on a little monkey? Oh, she was a deed doer! And she even wrote down the details, so her bravery could one day be known:

  I stuffed myself into the shadows, guided by the half-light of a door slightly ajar. I opened it all the way. It was the amphitheater. No one. A vast table on a large single step made a platform almost even with the first row of seats, right in the middle of which I sat myself. A board informed me of the special of the day: experiment on a monkey. Half a dozen students—of whom four were female—spread out toward the bleachers, some distance from me. Foreigners, I could tell by their looks and their babbling. Here was the whole scholarly public in Claude Bernard’s ancient amphitheater that at one time held five hundred people … hee hee, the value has gone down on the blood market!

  And so, ladies and girls who dare join this adventure, don’t forget to make yourself pretty when going to the enemy, to bring mistakes and distractions that will damage his tranquillity and safety and make him drop his solemnity. God and the devil will each find their place.

  Brown-Sequard trotted in, saluting with a little paternal gesture to his disciples. He adjusted his glasses to get a better look at me, seemed satisfied … and initiated his first lesson. I understood we were going to see him start by cutting the vocal cords of the monkey—thus, this meant a painful operation without anesthetics that would then prevent him from crying out. The animal was not yet there. The animal was then brought in attached on a vivisection plank, a poor little child monkey, making supplications with its eyebrows that would make you fall to your knees, and now to me—me who felt like its mother at that moment—me rolling in guilt, in mud, to save and steal away this monkey to the other side of the sun. Who knows how I approached, calmly leaned on the platform “as if to see better”; how, as the operator lowered the scissors toward the victim’s throat … vlan! In a second, my umbrella hit, and harshly fell broken … O this dream of one moment in a blue eternity! The man’s cry brought me back to reality!

  This same Mademoiselle Huot later visits a public event at Trocadero, where Dr. Laborde has a rabbit strapped into the vivisection trough. She jumps onstage, demanding him to stop, bringing the show to an awkward end. That evening, she is visited at home by an emissary from Animal Protection, nervily accosting her because Dr. Laborde is a member of the governing council! Claude held the same post. That tells you what you need to know about the SPA. We tell these stories among us, and some write them down. Night after night, you can be sure to find Madame Delvincourt on her rounds up and down the hills—especially to the Jardin des Plantes—carrying baskets of pâté for hundreds of cats. She told me that in another life she didn’t like cats, and in this life she must labor on their behalf.

  I know Claude smugly calls our efforts “Don Quixotry.”

  At some point, you and Mademoiselle Huot get so rightly sick of the Animal Protection Society that you decide to found a new one entirely: the Popular League against the Abuses of Vivisection, with Maria Deraismes and a new treasurer, Mr. Serle, of 84, Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In a letter to the editor of the Herald of Health, you announce: “Its president is no less a person than the great poet Victor Hugo.” Victor Hugo: “My name is nothing. It is in the name of the whole human race that you make your appeal. Your society is one that will reflect honor on the nineteenth century. Vivisection is a crime. The human race will repudiate these barbarities.” The devout Robert Browning, a vice president of the Victoria Street Society, writes two antivivisection poems, and Christina Rossetti publishes a special pamphlet, but our Victor Hugo makes us proud: “Human cruelty to animals might one day rebound upon our heads like Nero’s cruelties.” Your new French Society against Vivisection sponsors many lectures—it’s here we would have met—really, Anna Kingsford, don’t you think we did?

  Florence Miller recalls:

  As the leading scientific advocate of vegetarianism, Anna Kingsford was invited to lecture before the Sunday Lecture Society, and the Honorary Secretary, Mr. Domville, came up to me at a meeting one evening and said, “You are a great friend of Mrs. Kingsford’s, could you ask her to dress more plainly to appear on our platform? You know we are a scientific society and we avoid anything of the Stage order, so I feel that she is not suitably dressed now for the platform.”

  “Nina,” I said to her presently, “have you got an all-black platform gown? Mr. Domville says his Committee likes their lady lecturers to be all in black.” She understood and made a moue at me, and she did appear in black—and looked more beautiful than ever!

  Claude’s Red Notebook:

  Physics teaches us that matter is inert, that is to say that it cannot produce movements by itself; some conditions are always required to intervene and change its state. Can one support this in physiology? How can volition be explained?

  Is he the gadfly that drives you to wander, speak, and lecture? Mad, you are the ragged virago, doctor or white Magian.

  Prometheus: “It is worth it to indulge in weeping over evil doings if one is likely to win the tribute of a tear from the listener.”

  Io: “Zeus inflamed by passion’s dart has called upon me to unite in divine union. Hiding in the pastures, I became animal, and spurred by the gadfly now toil with revealing this body of truths.”

  When you speak, do you hear yourself moo? When you look, do you see a cow and try not to choke at this fat, ugly version?

  Chorus: “What a tale to strike our ears with sufferings so hard to look upon or hear about; grievous to endure. We shudder to behold.”

  Claude’s Red Notebook:

  “With animals, feelings only translate through movement, and we can easily confuse the lack of feeling with the paralysis of the motor nerves, and vice versa.”

  Chorus: “Speak then and tell all. It comforts those in pain to know beforehand all the pain they still must bear.”

  ***

  “Fanny, what’s got into your ladies, loose in the world without a mote of sense!” “Fanny, are these kittens worth all this trouble?” “Do you really think animals and humans are the same?”
So many people just cower unseen, not forced to find the questions behind all the answers. But as a long-term member of a desperate chorus, I have stolen the eloquence of those who speak center stage. In the preface to La Comédie Humaine, didn’t Balzac write that all animals and people have been created “on one and the same principle”? Yet aren’t there as many opinions as there are mouths to say them, and still we divide the sides into just a few?

  Claude: “The immediate object of study in experimental medicine isn’t man but animals; man is only the goal that stays in the mind, outside the perilous experiments.”

  Man, animal, animal, man—words can’t hold the confusion, so it’s best to just wander straight into it, making a mess of what’s always been a mess. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: “There is, philosophically speaking, only a single animal.”

  Claude: “Physiologists … deal with just one thing, the properties of living matter and the mechanism of life, in whatever form it shows itself. For them, genus, species, and class no longer exist. There are only living beings; and if they choose one of them for study, that is usually for convenience in experimentation.”

  I might add that, for a long time, animals were considered equal enough to men to get the same treatment under the law. Put in jail, the animals received the same food as the other prisoners, and had the right to the same lawyers, even though some judges worried that spells could allow animals to harness the “witchcraft of silence” and thereby not feel the pain of the tortures inflicted on the men (maleficium taciturnitatis).

  Claude: “We must admit nothing occult; there are only phenomena and the conditions of phenomena.”

  Claude to Madame Raffalovich:

  Again on the subject of savage beasts, you were interested in the hedgehog family I mentioned earlier and on whom I had designs. Alas, all is finished. There are disasters even here and unhappy families. The family had four little ones and a mother; a dog killed one, a flood drowned two, and the last died of grief, I think. The inconsolable mother has left, at least we haven’t heard or seen her since she spent several nights making nocturnal echoes with her plaintive cries.

  But the devil or his adjuncts will take every chance to penetrate the humble mind of a Christian. The extremity of control that the church held over all aspects of village life severed Claude’s ancestors from the symbolism, reciprocity, and pleasure of nature. No moment too private, no forest too dense, for the church to ignore. But as members of the household, and therefore under the king’s ban, animals also enjoyed the same wergild as women and peasant workers, and their beste covert had the same rights and responsibilities as humans. In the case of violent crime, for example, the death penalty was required, especially for domestic animals—for not only was evil incarnate in the beast who committed the deed, but also in the infested home that could be vexed for centuries, its aura corrumpens holding title to the real estate until the sin was fully paid. The animal, convicted in the court and hung in public, was often dressed in human clothes and mask.

  Mary, looking on, “knew through her compassion what it is to be a mother.” Christ on Calvary said, “Here is your son” and so it is that labor pain is not about childbirth but the pain of interceding, for Jesus came not as a king, but as a poor creature, helpless and inviting motherhood of everyone. You might say that Christ took all the positive aspects of the world for the church, leaving nature with nothing but pagan symbols, and devils and dragons that would steal our innocent souls, or our children in sacrifice. But it’s not enough to refrain from wrong—the devil waits for any crack through which to enter. Every day chants and admonitions against demons must be said, as much as prayers for the dead, and every so often an actual exorcism to call out some Lignifex, Latibor, Monitor, Shulium, or Reromfex. Lucifer himself is known to make appearances, until the priest with bell, book, and candle confronts him. Yet given the baptisms, the churchgoing, the exorcisms, where do all the devils dwell? Ah, the church replies, they easily take residence in the beasts, one step above hell, where they can exert their intelligence and fool people into believing these creatures have souls and hearts and minds like us. But since we are taught that this is a ruse, we justify the mistreatment of animals who are merely possessed, just as centaurs and satyrs, dire chimeras and dragons are. The pious Catholic works beside the Father in punishing monsters.

  Jesuit Father Bougeant, from Philosophical Amusements on the Language of the Animals, 1737:

  What matters it whether it is a devil or another kind of creature that is in our service or contributes to our amusement? … If it be said that these poor creatures, which we have learned to love and so fondly cherish, are foreordained to eternal torments, I can only adore the decrees of God, but do not hold myself responsible for the terrible sentence; I leave the execution of the dread decision to the sovereign judge and continue to live with my little devils, as I live pleasantly with a multitude of persons, of whom, according to the teachings of our holy religion, the great majority will be damned.

  Claude to Madame Raffalovich:

  I’m sitting under a tree in the vines neighboring my woods; I’m imitating the cries of the buntings with a decoy, while at the same time moving a mirror that sparkles in the sun under a dried branch on which will perch the birds, victims of their coquetry. It’s truly curious to see with what joy these two-legged creatures, feathered, consider themselves and complement each other in this contemplation. It’s in this moment that I unleash my rifle shot and the murderous bullet comes to deliver them to Marriette’s cooking pot.

  So humans are sinners and by substitution can only absolve sin if someone innocent lifts it from us and carries it for us? We are given our punishments, some during life, some after death—but isn’t there a final judgment waiting, and then our sins will be known to all?

  Anna Kingsford, letter to Florence Miller:

  The great need of the popular form of the Christian religion is precisely a belief in the solidarity of all living things. It is in this that Buddha surpassed Jesus—in this divine recognition of the universal right to charity. Who can doubt it who visits Rome—the city of the Pontiff—where now I am, and witnesses the black-hearted cruelty of these “Christians” to the animals which toil and slave for them?

  Ill as I am, I was forced, the day after my arrival, to get out of the carriage in which I was driving to chastise a wicked child who was torturing a poor little dog tied by a string to a pillar—kicking it and stamping on it. No one save myself interfered.

  Today I saw a great, thick-shod peasant kick his mule in the mouth out of pure wantonness. Argue with these ruffians, or with their priests, and they will tell you, “Christians have no duties to the beasts that perish.” Their Pope has told them so, so that everywhere in Catholic Christendom the poor, patient, dumb creatures endure every species of torment without a single word being uttered on their behalf by the teachers of religion. It is horrible—damnable. And the true reason of it all is because the beasts are popularly believed to be soulless. I say, paraphrasing a mot of Voltaire’s: “It if were true that they had no souls, it would be necessary to invent souls for them.” Earth has become a hell for want of this doctrine.

  Animals quickly recognize signs of kindness, not in another world, but right in our hand, and that’s how to coax even the most terrified cat with a caress and a morsel, sometimes a quiet moment in the courtyard as we await the next driver in the chain of escape. But however much some of our friends cuddle and love the cats, it’s the dogs that have always filled my girls’ faces with joy. It was rumored that in the Middle Ages, dogs didn’t get the plague, and so were considered agents of the devil. But even they can tell when they’re maligned, and they look at us quizzically and ashamed. Canine protectors guide men through death and birth, like Anubis sitting where the sun sets each day, watchdog of the land of the dead, calibrating the scale that measures the deeds of a dead man’s heart against the feather of truth to see who gets another go. T
he city of dogs, Hardai, drew followers of Anubis, who also accompanied Hermes bringing the dead to Hades. Later he became Hermanubis, dog headed but more friendly, his cult becoming Saint Christopher’s. Ritual massacres of dogs were thought to cheer the gods and head off violent summer weather. Black dogs were preferred for sacrifice, to purify a journey or please ghosts. Scattered among infant graves, puppies were thought to absorb illness, after which they and the disease could be disposed of.

  Anna Kingsford: “In what shall we say the practices of the secret devil-worshippers of medieval times differed from those which now go on in the underground laboratories of the medical school? … Nothing is easier than this method of gaining knowledge, for the operator sacrifices nought of his own to gain it; he gives only other lives and these the most innocent he can obtain … It is black magic which, in order to cure a patient, first transfers his complaint to an innocent victim. He who accepts health at such a cost shall but save it to lose it.” Under Roman rule, Asklepios, Apollo’s son, had temples where gentle canines, cynotherapists, walked among the sick or lay among them licking their wounds. Asklepios competed directly with early Christians, and so his temples were defaced and destroyed. The dog who licks Lazarus’s sores came from a church built on the site of an Asklepian temple, and Christ resurrected him.

  Father Bougeant: “Thus a devil, after having been a cat or a goat, may pass, not by choice, but by constraint, into the embryo of a bird, a fish or a butterfly. Happy are those who make a lucky hit and become household pets, instead of beasts of burden or slaughter. The lottery of destiny bars them the right of voluntary choosing. Pythagoras’s doctrine is untenable in its application to men and contrary to religion, but it fits admirably into the system already set forth concerning beasts as devil’s incarnations, and shocks neither our faith nor reason.”