Crack Open Yourself in a Catsuit
The free-fall sensation of creating in that very moment something new. He’d enjoyed speaking into the taut, cool silence of the stage, feeling it crack open before him as he offered himself to the audience, yes, but more importantly to the story. Anything that let him absent himself from his life.
— from “Happy Fortunate People” by Brandon Taylor
What is it about thinking about animals that allow us to explore own selves, like putting on and discarding costumes?
Right before I left for the ferry to Provincetown a few weeks ago, I left my copy of Bitch in the car.
It surprised me when I did it. I loved the book, I was close to done, and it was an excellent joke as I moved from bar to friend’s house to restaurant. “What are you reading?”
“Bitch,” I’d say, raising the fuchsia cover and watching the person across from me absorb the hyena, ripping off the top half of “Bitch”’s “I”.
The problem was that I don’t pull off bitch very well. Worse, I felt like everyone can tell. You know how some people have resting bitch face? I have the opposite. You want directions in a new town? You want a casserole? You want an obscenely large favor?
You scan for my face.
I smile easily, maybe that’s the problem.
I’ve only been asked to smile once, probably because I smile all the time naturally. I was leaving work on the way to see my Dad, who had just been hospitalized. It was the security guard at work who told me I’d look better if I was smiling. I normally like him, but I couldn’t help it — I told him. “My Dad’s probably dying. I just got the call from the hospital.” The other security guard was a woman; she looked at him and shrugged like she had warned him not to say that, ever, to anyone. “Bitch, I warned you,” that shrug said. I bet he never said it again. I hope he never said it again.
Bitch — I liked pulling on the hot pink leotard, swiping the lipstick carelessly, but when it came right down to it, I didn’t have the swagger & I knew it.
Instead, I brought An Immense World, by Atlantic writer Ed Yong.
Young’s whole thing is that different species live in different worlds defined by different senses — their “Umwelt.” Cows look stupid to us — never moving their heads — because they don’t need to, their field of vision is a nearly perfect horizon, ideal for a grassland environment, they can see a herder coming from the front and a dog from the back at the same time. What they can’t see is up, what they can’t see is down. They have no need of up or down. Why would they need up or down? They have around.
Other animals of course have smell. Or sped up vision — so fast, that to animals like the killer fly, our sprinters would look as if they were taking a stroll.
“Everyone asks how we catch the killer fly,” [one of the researchers said.] “You just move towards them slowly with a vial. If you’re slow enough, you’re just part of the background.”
I mentioned last week that my friend Michéle and I met some Furries on one of our hikes.
I’ve since been in touch with several of the Furries we met; Helios, a snow cat, wrote me to say:
Unlike other fandoms (think fans of Star Trek or Star Wars, for example), we don't have a singular piece of source material like some movie franchise gluing us all together. We're just a large group of animal lovers who prefer to use an animal inspired identity to socialize and interact.
It seemed a little strange at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if it wasn’t something we’d all like? To crack open our own selves, to explore the world through another Umwelt? To be a bitch every once in a while if we can’t pull it off usually, or to see the world in a cow’s 360 degree circumference. Maybe it’s part of wildlife’s fundamental attraction.
I’m still sorting my way through the material Helios sent me, from documentary The Fandom to FurScience — and I’m also finishing up An Immense World — & I’ll write more about this as I learn more.
In the meantime, one piece of good news:
Wishing you all a wanderful week.
At first, I didn't "get" the references to the hyena biting off the top of the i in Bitch. Cracking open the self is rather different, isn't it? Or maybe not. We've all felt our well-established selves begin to crack when something disrupts us, a job loss, an accident, a death, but The WanderFinder reminds us that a crack can be joyful, a chance to see the world and ourselves from a different point of view; like a cow or a whale or a hyena, even through a catsuit.
P. S. Why does the cover of Bitch feature a hard-to-recognize hyena" I think I read that male hyenas are very good dads. Are we supposed to know that?
I've written about how the day I saw Star Wars way back in 1977 I also saw The Island of Dr. Moreau and actually liked Moreau better. I spent the rest of the summer running around in the woods and fields with my dogs, imagining myself as some half human/half animal superhero creature.
These days I work harder to reconnect to my own animal nature, something we all have and are to varying degrees deeply disconnected from. I am surrounded by representations of animals – images on my walls, carvings, plastic figures – in a way that if someone suggested them as religious talismans they wouldn't be too far from the truth. I even collected one each for the seven sacred animals who represent the ideals behind my Anishinaabe Seven Grandfather teachings. I like them. We have much to learn from them. They were our original teachers after all, they can teach us again.
I'm thinking of a Blackfeet relative who told the story of when he was at university and some anthropologist tried to tell him the Blackfeet are a patriarchal culture. He urged the guy to go visit his mom and aunties and see if he came away without scratches and broken bones for suggesting such! He went on to say that this perception came because when whites encountered Blackfeet, it was the men they met first. But not because men were "in charge," but because their roles were defined by how their relative, the buffalo, interacted with threats. The herds would circle, and the bulls were the first line of defense. I'm not doing the paraphrase justice, but it was wonderful.