My friend Joe S, our lab manager, had a lot to teach me. A dark-haired American Irishman with, I gathered, IRA connections, he was all about rough justice. When I asked how you decide what judges to vote for he said to always vote them all out. I actually did that for a while until I finally met real judges.
He also said that someday he was going to open the doors to our group cages and just let all our pigtailed and bonnet macaques out into the Colorado sunshine. They would struggle to survive in the middle of a city. His emotional, though not practical, judgment was that their freedom would be worth it.
Joe was complicated, not just an idealist/anarchist. Here he expresses an opinion about rock climbing.
He was married to a native American who was the inspiration for a Ken Kesey character, and he had a kind of biological mystical streak. We were hiking once and came across some cattle.
“When I look in their eyes,” he said, “it’s just a blank. Nothing in there because they’re all just one Cow.”
Now, he and I were well acquainted with the individual personalities of about 70 different South Asian monkeys. So he was not an animal bigot. I think his point was that we had bred domestic animals so that they lost the need for individuality. They were all archetypes of the One Cow. Or some might say they all had Cow Spirit: eat, sleep, and moo.
I know that people who raise livestock can see personalities in their animals. So Joe was overstating his case and he probably knew it.
We all like to oversimplify. It makes life … simpler. The Jungians say that humans inherit a number of archetypes arising from a collective unconscious. We are happy to look at a thing and say that’s an example of an archetypal thing-y.
An aside here, because I can’t help myself. I think that what we know about developmental biology makes the idea of purely inheriting symbols and images pretty much a joke. Those things require experience, and our cultures provide it. Of course, if you believe in a non-physical origin of consciousness, then a collective unconscious could exist and have in it anything you can imagine.
However, biology definitely gave us a kind of archetype: the species. It’s not the modern version of species that is defined by gene flow or graphs of genetic relatedness. Those are complicated. It’s the common-sense idea of a species as a predictable, Platonic ideal.
Cows look like and act like The Cow. But I often remember what Joe said when I am with dogs. A Dog wants to bark, and mark, and smell your hand first, and wag ingratiatingly ever afterward. To get your attention they will swim at your feet, curving left and right like a fish. Their eyes are eloquent.
Travel can give us new visions of Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” But we really connect with nature when, by repetition, we become familiar with a species’ archetype, to recognize its surprising essences. Such as: the fierceness of hummingbirds, the assertiveness of chickadees, how peonies crumble, collard greens endure, bindweeds grasp, dragonflies flock, mushrooms wait, and watermelons float. The dead leaves of a pecan tree smell earthy, herbaceous, and alive, like a dryad might. Magpies chatter without ceasing. Elephants use their 70 sounds to talk all night, mostly about lions (true, I’ve heard them do it). Rhesus monkeys must have invented bullying (I’ve seen that a lot).
Every dog I ever had was an instance of The Dog, though they each had quirks that I shall remember until I stop
remembering
anything.