When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, Wayne, white man, stared from his Morris chair at the bleak, black Sea and all alone bewept his outcast state, when he
imagined that he could turn and live with animals, so placid and self-contained they seem, always at one with their breath, centered, grounded, authentic, whole, blissed with ignorance, never sleeplessly examining their lives, never whining about their awkward
swings, dropped balls, fizzled throws, their failures of concentration, never plagued with the mania of owning things or of establishing and maintaining reputations, never kneeling Confucianly to their ancestors, never worshipping Christianly an intercessor,
gradually it occurred to him that he was selectively imaging meditative, cud-chewing bovines scattered among daisies in a fenced, grassy pasture, contentedly belching and farting methane while koantemplating the sound of one cow crapping, these images
that he stared at long and long bringing him tokens of his Buddhist, quantum self, reminding him that everything changes, nothing endures, the profoundest question being not what does life mean but how does one stop suffering, the profoundest answer being
by doing nothing, by letting go of self and other fictions, fictions, like everything, no matter how seemingly exquisite, being nothing, by and by it occurred to him also that the placidity of unfenced animal existence in the wild is the real fiction to let
go of, animals being fettered not free, their lives fraught with turmoil, constantly in peril from predator and privation, constantly on the qui vive, ears, eyes, noses, and heat sensors pricked, avoiding, evading, attacking, competing for food, for
mates, for status, establishing pecking orders, kick-bite orders, alpha and beta hierarchies, staking out urine-scented territory, building nests, ever paying allegiance to their atavistic instincts, their physical placidity an illusion, their mental placidity
ineluctable, and he exulted that he could long, daydream, think abstractly, examine his life, no, he would not choose to live like an animal, not even the king of the jungle, let alone a domesticated cow, he would choose consciousness, choose suffering,
choose the ultimately meaningless search for meaning, not the lobotomy of self-renunciation. Get over himself? He could not, nor, truly, could any human whose mental faculties were intact, full awareness of the world impossible without an intervening
'I,' a consciousness of self that emerges unbidden from the bubbling of the brain, the enlightenment of atonement an illusion, suffering and joy the double helix of life, and vowed that he would be at the batting cages when they opened in the morning.
[Wayne, I am dismayed by your beliefs that animals are fettered, not free, and that abstract thinking is the summum bonum of life. The instincts you malign as fetters are actually liberative; they enable animals to act freely, genuinely,
in harmony with themselves, uncontaminated by thought or self-consciousness. Humans, on the other hand, obsessed with self-consciousness, lack authenticity. They are oppressed by thought, crushed by the constraints of the very
culture they have invented, slavishly confined by batting cages. Charlotte]
[Imma agree (so fun to say, but am I culture-appropriating?) with Char that wind-swift thought, the power of ratiocination, is a mixed blessing. There is something
to be said for being a bee in a hive, an ant in a hill, instinctively fulfilling a social role, operating without internal conflict. OTH, I agree with Wayne that without self-consciousness, there is no joy. The self-harmony we attribute to non-humans
is meaningless because it is not something they experience. The enlightenment of atonement is a worthy fiction available only to humans--and can be achieved without paying penance in batting cages. Dave]