sadness of the animate
It’s as if there were a cumulus of sadness
adrift throughout the floor plan, a cloud of melancholy
filling the rooms and hallways
swirling around the appliances
inhabiting corners and interior architectural niches like a….cloud.
It’s not terribly literary. Maybe it’s just pity
“for the human condition?”
I just got done telling you it’s not literary
It’s not a malaise, or whatever. It’s not that French guy
on Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ dust jacket
with his hand on his gut
all I can tell you is that the bad feeling,
when it shows up
emanates from my daughter’s guinea pigs
It moves out through the house from there.
“your – “
yeah. Maybe it’s just pity. I said that
anymore I’m beginning to think it’s simple pity
but the pity or sadness radiates out from their little cage
on the floor at the back of the house
their utter helplessness has real power; radiant power
It colors the whole house some days
like the old animation of an atomic blast radius
which starts from ground zero
with the illustrator’s naïve and almost playful little cartoon spark
because despite the horrid magic of what follows
the viewer needs to understand the catalyst is just a bomb.
Just a bomb going off
The spark is followed by a red swelling ball
and it quickly swells outward from ground zero
in a perfect circle
filling all the irregularities of the doomed city
the alleyways and schoolrooms and churches
a ‘swelling bubble’ atomic blast radius illustration
informed more by the technical limits of that day’s commercial art
than by the science of radioactive dispersion
or the observed practice blasts they’d conducted in the field
but it makes the point with an unintended accuracy
and the guinea pig sadness is like that
or feels like that
so sometimes (every time, actually)
when I feed the guinea pigs I watch them eat
yeah I watch them like a mesmerized jailer
and I feel a nearly debilitating sadness
this seems related to the sadness I felt one weekend afternoon
as a teenager, watching a man lean over the glass at JC Penney
carefully poring over the wrist watches
self-creating and oblivious
a hopeful and heartbreaking phatasm
the guinea pigs’ names are Chloe and Buff
they’re two little girls
their food is fancily packaged hay
the hay neatly fills an elaborately printed plastic bag
but is clearly just dead grass swept up from some field somewhere
and jammed into these bags
bits of thoughtless meadow
minutely parceled out to those whose interrupted Darwinian lot
was to roam the meadow
now we bring the meadow to them
I raise the hinged top of the cage
the hay is stiff and comes out of the bag in longitudinal clumps
that have to be smashed down into the dumb little bowls, two bowls
one for each guinea pig
per the human conceit the meadow has to be eaten from bowls
so the straw and bits of dried flower
get jammed down into the bowls
and all the while the guinea pigs are making their whistling sound
of joy or excitement and raising themselves up
their forepaws on the horizontal bars of their cage
then they run in to the eating section of the cage
over a little ramp, as lithe as you please
they eat with their grateful but
expressionless little feminine faces
looking askance at me like I might take the food
me, the giver
I’ve stood there for 15 minutes, 20 minutes
they’re completely unconscious, unenlightened, pure id
they don’t know they’re captured
what will they do after they gratefully eat
they’ll crap and then eat again
they don’t know they’re alive
what are they for
why are there living things that don’t know they’re living things
these anti-cartesians torment my soul
“We’re at the top of the food chain.”
shut up
every little scrap of meaning
isn’t defined or explained in terms of what eats who
“Life is an end, not a means.”
wrong and shut up
“Well. You mean being alive is a state that is only available
so that the living can see themselves.”
yeah. it sounds buddhist or whatever, but it’s not.
“What’s so great about knowing? What’s THAT for?
You want to ascribe a purpose to everything. Try that one.”
i’m working that out
“the animals are fine. Their cognitive darkness is a salve
they don’t know enough to be sad.”
the guinea pigs are a pillow pressed over my face
eat sleep eat eat sleep like the JC Penney guy
he wanted just the right watch
“He probably got it, too,” you remark.