Offering: October 2023

"Interacting bodies tend to tell the truth"

Image description: A selfie of a human with long brown wavy hair and a cream colored horse. The horse’s eye is visible, the human’s is not. The horse’s eye is sky blue. The human is wearing a brown sweater and gold hoop earrings.

Audio Offerings are on hiatus.

These last years I’ve been curious about the very weird and interesting field of animal studies. In part because I started riding horses, in part because I got a dog, and in part because of everything else I’m about to tell you. 

There’s a thing people with challenging dogs often say to one another which is some version of the sentiment that we don’t wind up with the animal we wanted but with the one most able to show us our selves. Sometimes in ways we might rather not see.

Mostly I think it’s something we say to ourselves to cope with the stresses of not having the dog we’d imagined over many years’ lead-up to taking the leap. In my case I came in with maybe ten years’ worth of projecting how it would be, which is to say it was a pretty unfair situation for anyone to come into. 

The poet Robert Bly comes to mind: 

“The drama is this. We came as infants ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ arriving from the farthest reaches of the universe…with our 360-degree radiance—and we offered this gift to our parents. They didn't want it. They wanted a nice girl or a nice boy.”

One of many ways I diverge from Robert Bly is that I don’t think we arrive to these things with a fully-formed gift. Mango was eight weeks old when he came home with me. He knew nothing about life. His body was a fraction of the size it is now. He had entire systems still forming, and which continue to change as he lays next to me.

At two months old, Mango got two new housemates. Humans, on their ways, becoming in discordant directions. Our paths, divergent as they were, were being mutually shaped. No one arrives out of vacuum-sealed plastic. We forge and press and play a role in one another. For better or worse. 

It’s a huge responsibility. And if you fear commitment, or have a tendency to abdicate power, or secretly believe you were born with a wrecking ball in your chest where a heart ought to be, claiming that responsibility can be terrifying. Also, this culpability is one of the things I’m most interested in. And it’s so readily apparent in my relationship with Mango. 

I believe it is generally frowned upon in the field of animal studies to uncritically generalize what we learn in interspecies relationships onto human ones, as if humans are all that matter. Haven’t the wants and needs of non-human beings been marginalized enough without us also “using” them as lessons toward our own anthropocentric ends? 

"Dogs are not surrogates for theory," writes Donna Haraway in her Companion Species Manifesto. "They are not here just to think with. They are here to live with.”

Mango and I live together. For sure. And, our relationship does teach me things that I think could be useful elsewhere. Like what a force that projecting capacity really is. So much of my frustration with him is that he’s not acting how I want a dog to act.

And I do see our connection as a space for becoming other than who I’ve been. Namely toward someone who’s capable of doing something with my wants and needs other than imposing them on others, and getting upset when they have their own plans. Also, owning my power. 

Donna Haraway being the iconic Donna Haraway was not enough for me to take a real interest in her work. I don’t understand a lot of her writing but I do like her writing on dogs. I became interested in her work for real when, in her Companion Species Manifesto, she scorned the “dangerous and unethical projection in the Western world that makes domestic canines into furry children.” 

“Dogs are not about oneself.” She writes. “Indeed, that is the beauty of dogs…Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships—co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all.” 

I needed someone to validate the queasiness that I feel one hundred percent of the times someone refers to me as Mango’s “mommy.” So much wrong with it, I don’t know where to start. It just never feels called for. Sure, he depends on me for almost everything. Among other things, it’s the the lack of imagination about what caretaker-dependent relationship roles can be named that rubs me wrong.

Anyway, I’m sure this is common for people like me who are inexperienced training animals but one of the big surprises has been that what you think is dog training is actually training yourself. For instance, one of the books a friend lent me when I first took Mango home was called How to behave so your dog behaves. What’s been (oddly) surprising is coming to understand the reality that in our interactions, my body is not neutral. 

It is objectively true that I have more power than Mango does regardless of how uncomfortable I might feel about it. He lives in a world that was not built with him in mind. And when the guilt or shame or whatever other hangups I have around the power thrust on me as a human in the Anthropocene get in the way of my acknowledging and thoughtfully wielding that power, I’m starting to see that affects him. He doesn’t feel safe.

I’ve spent a lot of time these last years thinking, reading, and writing about responsiveness, a lot of which has had to do with curiosity and openness to others. A huge part of it also is disrupting the fantasy of oneself as neutral.

In When Species Meet, Haraway tells the story of anthropologist Barbara Smuts who went to Kenya to study baboons as part of her PhD research at Stanford. Having “been advised to be as neutral as possible, to be like a rock, to be unavailable,” Smuts made an attempt at invisibility among the baboons. 

Not surprisingly, the baboons weren’t buying it. They knew she was a someone and not a something and were displeased with her energy. This revealed something about the limitations of language and the potential of bodies. Smuts writes, “With language, it is possible to lie and say we like someone when we don’t. However…closely interacting bodies tend to tell the truth.” (Sheesh!)

Recognizing the futility of her attempts to de-subjectify herself, Smuts started shifting her behavior. She altered how she walked, sat, held her body, used her eyes and voice. She started to pick up on the signals the baboons sent to one another to communicate their emotions and intentions, and began efforts to communicate in kind. 

“As a result,” wrote Smuts, “instead of avoiding me when they got too close, they started giving me very deliberate dirty looks, which made me move away…a profound change from being treated like an object that elicited a unilateral response…to being recognized as a subject with whom they could communicate.” 

Smuts’ subjectivity—which I might consider more broadly as owning one’s influence, but also one’s wants, needs, and desires—ultimately made her more reliable. When the baboons realized she’d receive their signals to move away, they became more able to do business as usual in her presence.

Her ability to enter into a responsive relationship also made it possible for her to express respect. She was able to communicate not only that she meant them no harm, but that she expected them not to harm her, either.

These ideas are so exciting to me because they are about so much more than having solid interspecies relationships, more specifically having a dog I don't have to worry about all the time. They’re about more than trying to develop relational capacities that I could theoretically apply in other relationships, too (and God knows I could use the help).

They’re about this emerging sense I have that, as Haraway puts it, “relation is the smallest unit of analysis, and the relation is about significant otherness at every scale.” Having experienced a significant relational loss earlier this year I am more convinced than ever that whatever it is I may be analyzing and at whatever time, the relational stuff is where the juice is. And it always comes down to significant otherness.

I’ll leave you with a couple related quotes from two theologians I admire on relatedness, god, and truth:

“Truth seems to be an interaction: an inter-activity…We belong within it. It does not belong to us. This testimonial truth is a relation, not a possession. It is a way, not an end. It is not a processed proposition but a proposal for an endless process.” — Catherine Keller, On the mystery

“To call God ‘relatedness’ is to use a word to express something that goes beyond all words…It speaks of God as possibility, as opening, as the unexpected, the unknown; as physical and metaphysical.” — Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water

Audio Offerings are on hiatus.

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