Meera Atkinson

The Animals + Writing one-day conference was held today ahead of Life in the Anthropocene. The Writers-in-Residence would like to thank everyone who participated with a special thanks to Natalie Edwards for convening the day. We would also like to invite participants to post any (within reason size-wise) writings that might have been generated in the workshops (personal call out to Sandra here), and/or to share your thoughts and impressions on what got tossed around or what you took away from the day. And of course we continue to welcome submissions from delegates (don't be shy!) and comments (which can be in the form of creative response or not) on posts from all comers. 

James Hatley, Salisbury University

I.
Someone needs to let you know,
you who lie buried
along the mountain path.
After centuries of rest
the disturbance is regretful,
but in this matter, 
not only the living  
are involved.
Today, you are to be informed:
Never again will Okami, 
a shadow imperceptible to the night
lope down these slopes
with no more sound than
the falling of moonlight
upon a leaf,
never again will Okami
dig up your childrens’ and
chidrens’ childrens’ graves,
to feast on their insentient flesh, 
to bare its teeth at any dog or human
fool enough to intervene.
Fierceness has left this mountain,
and your memory must now walk 
unaccompanied
into the Pure Land.

II. 
With strange water 
scooped up
by an empty metal dipper 
from an empty bowl of stone,
I wash my hands
at the great shrine
before praying to the wolf
who is not here.

III.
Oguchi no Magami,
Large-Mouthed and Pure God:
In the womb realm of compassion,
You were the bearer of swift death.
Your jaws gaping, your muzzle bloodied,
You preached mayhem to the ravens,
softness to the water,
indifference to the falling stars. 
Recently marooned 
in the diamond realm of acute mindfulness,
You are giving birth to and suckling
an infinite congregation of buddhas
from whose inopportune howling
forgotten elements are arising,
and all suffering begins anew.

Meera Atkinson


Walking, alone, at dusk
past old man trees and women hipped hills,
green mountains dotted with flame trees
and windows warm in old homes.

Cows and calves; wind through hair; cicadas.
Sunset throws a lantern glow,
the air fat with heat and light.

Under a wooden bridge
the river ripples in silver strips,
and fireflies, white and electric, dart,
and children call to fairy hearts.

Breath flutters like a small-boned bird
when bats burst sudden into plum red sky
-thought turns to feathers, gone

carried off by wings.

Liana Christensen

Zoo Haiku 6

my spine bowed

beneath your culture

donkey work

If you've only just discovered the blog please do scroll down the page to view previous posts, which can get a bit lost in the wash as blog action heats up. To get the best sense of it go to the bottom of the page and begin from the beginning; weigh in anywhere you like.

A. Marie Houser

As I write this, I am fifteen hours away from my arrival in Sydney. I am in Los Angeles, which means, I am nowhere at all. When someone says that they are from L.A., or live in L.A., or going to L.A., that person should be required to give exact coordinates. No one block, neighborhood, or zip code represents the whole: synecdoche is not the trope for L.A. The city multiplies, a self-replicating virus, and about all you can say of it in toto is that it’s dirty, there are palm trees, and one can go thirty miles without seeing even a dog. The anthropocentric machine began with Spanish missionaries, who planted the tall, ornamental palm trees that L.A. became known for, and eventually grassland, scrub, and woodland gave way to a strange sort of landscape, overlaid onto the region by virtue of irrigation. Sprawl is not the word for the vast armature of L.A.’s freeway system: to say “sprawl” and adequately represent the reach of what we call 'L.A.', one would have to invent syllables to plop in the middle of it -- in the manner of someone from the deep South – or one would have to not say it at all, but trumpet it, an open blow improvisation laid down in the middle, one that takes hours, so that the only person left standing in the bar is that joyous trumpeter – everyone else laid out drunk on the floor.

As though to escape the anthropocentric machine, Angelenos bunch up against the shore, huddling there with shopping carts, BMWs, graffiti cans, surf boards, and rollercoaster tickets.  It seems not even passerines can countenance this, for I haven’t heard any at all. Perhaps they have made use of the low-lying buildings, nesting and singing in the corners of the flat roofs or perhaps the buildings confuse them: I ask myself what these shapes mean in a passerine world. Skyscrapers at least make for clouds and sky; ramblers hunker down like mounds. What in the natural landscape exists at the height of these mid-level buildings, except buildings? Trees, perhaps, but trees are not, so far as I know, square.

My bodily disorientation in this place called L.A. is perhaps why, when I travel here, I feel little but depressed. By the time I get here, from Minneapolis, a mere three-hour flight, I am also usually in pain. But I’m not always: the trouble with a pain syndrome is that it expresses itself unpredictably. It’s not a matter of figuring out what’s wrong and then working out the equipment or assistance to make do. Last night, my shoulder subluxed; today, the nerves between my first rib and clavicle are compressed, and my hand is surging with the tingles. So far, my intestines aren’t painfully spasming, but I feel like throwing up.

The uncertainty of this place, Los Angeles, its refusal to be named, exteriorizes the uncertainty within my body. The one thing I am certain of: pain.

There are many reasons why, five years ago, I turned to face the anthropocentric machine: what it had been doing, and keeps doing, to nonhuman animals, the suffering, the death. But it coincides with the time when pain began to most fully articulate itself through my body, describing a topology of extremes. The communion I had felt with the natural world and with other animals transformed under the sign of pain into ethics, and with ethics, action.

Synecdoche attends the anthropocentric machine: literature breaks down nonhuman animal bodies, represents them as parts: eyes, muzzle, or tail, it depends on the species. The anthropocentric machine gives rise to isms besides speciesism: it trains its violent, rupturing eye on other bodies that do not conform to 'normalcy,' including the bodies of persons with disabilities. It demands that we fix ourselves, and if we cannot fix ourselves sufficiently, it will find ways to exclude us. Ableism expresses itself through our language, just as speciesism does: cattle become the synecdochic 'head of cattle,' chicken becomes parts like fryers and breasts; disabled bodies become the nonstandard in expressions such as 'I see,' 'let us illuminate the concept,' and 'I was blind' – the implication being that knowing is seeing, and those who don’t see don’t know.

Literature informs, guides, and challenges our conceptions of the world as much as marketing campaigns and books of law. For those reasons, I have conceptualized The After Coetzee Reader and The Disabled Vegan Reader ­­-- two projects that seek to bring excluded bodies back. Our bodies are a way of knowing, but each being’s body has its own way of knowing. Individuals within a species are as different from one another as they are from other species. Multiplicity offers us a way to push back the anthropocentric machine.

Time to board my flight to Sydney. I sometimes think, with Derrida, that a deep originary lack informs humans’ conceptions of ourselves, enduring in our need to define ourselves against other animals, under the synecdochic sign of 'Animal.' This airplane may outdo birds in size and speed, but it will never know the sky as they do.

 

Liana Christensen

Zoo Haiku 5

bird heart

crosses the line

of flight

Meera Atkinson

When I was a young woman newly interested in animals in terms of politics and ethics I met an older female animal rights activist who once remarked in passing during a conversation: 'And of course, there's a strong link between feminism and animal rights.' This was before I'd majored in philosophy as an undergrad, and well before I read feminist theory in earnest as a Masters, and more recently a PhD, candidate. At the time I didn't know quite what she meant, but I do recall feeling instinctively that the point must be an important one.

Just as Virginia Woolf argued for space for women in literature and for their creative and financial autonomy and independence in the lectures that became the perennial essay, A Room of One's Own, and just as the suffragettes before her argued for the place of women in public life starting with the vote, animal advocates now argue for the recognition of animals as beings in their own right and for their liberation from human rule, or at least for the lessening of their suffering. And indeed one doesn't have to look far in any patriarchal culture to observe the association between speciesism and sexism in which women and animals are considered inferior to, or valued less than, the human male, with both objectified, commodified and oppressed in ways the privileged human male is not, or at least not on such a large structural scale. Some, like Katrina Fox at The Scavenger, also argue that female animals suffer more than male animals. But if the connection now seems obvious to me, it is no less complex. Questions of race, class and culture, for example, complicate any temptation toward a neat coupling.

Just as there are as many kinds of feminism as there are feminists, there are many kinds of animals advocates, ranging from animal protectionists and welfarists, traditionally understood to be moderate positions that seek to minimise animal suffering, to animal liberationists (the term 'animal liberation' widely thought to be coined by Peter Singer in his 1975 book of the same name), to abolitionists, though the term has not generally taken off and is rarely used in public discourse around animals. ‘Animal rights’ and abolitionist theories often go hand in hand and this is the most prominent and radical term in popular use, being closely aligned to veganism and sometimes to direct action on behalf of animals. Where animal protection and welfare often accept, tolerate or promote the continuing use of animals by humans, the basic tenet of animal rights asserts that we humans do not have the right to use non-human animals for our own purposes, either for food, clothing, entertainment or medical research. And then there are those who don't identify with any of these positions or who reside in the grey areas between them. 

A book titled Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethics for the Treatment of Animals refuses the welfare and protectionist terminologies and 'animal rights.' Publisher Weekly states that, 'Feminists have criticized contemporary animal advocacy theory for its reliance on natural rights doctrine and utilitarianism, which, they claim, have a masculine bias (rights and rules) that denies the morality of responsibility (caring),' and that the collected writers 'explore the ethics of care as applied to animals.' Whatever our allegiance or preferred term, this has been a year in which both gender and animals issues have taken centre stage in Australian discourse and politics, from the vicious treatment of Gillard to proposed hunting in NSW national parks. 

I'll finish with my all-time favourite text (kills me every time) that in my view embodies this link between women and animals, feminism and animal advocacy: Marilyn Monroe as Roslyn (her best performance in my book) in John Huston's 1961 masterpiece, The Misfits, delivering her 'three dead men' speech in the climactic scene. Hats off to Arthur Miller for his brilliant and important screenplay, a fine example of powerful writing about the exploitation of animals, gender relations and suffering under patriarchy.



 

Liana Christensen

Zoo Haiku 4

lion on a rock

horse shies for fear

of something worse