Page 104 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

and then would trot over to drop one of her extra catches under the clothesline so the dog could reach

it. While I thought this might have been coincidence the first time, I saw Mollie do this several times,

and saw also that the dog found each little body and joyfully played with it for the better part of his

otherwise monotonous days.

The little wild cat had reached across to the dog, with every appearance of empathy and decision-­‐

making. Perhaps this was the germinal moment of my desire to experience creatures reaching across

species lines, and of longing for them to communicate with me, not pet to owner, but creature to

creature. I wanted to know them, and didn’t know how to initiate the dialogue. Would any of them

reach across to me? Could I learn to reach across to them?

As I entered college and in 1961 attended a year of medical laboratory school and then college again,

my educational experiences sharply distanced me from creatures, as well as from the human body.

Medical language was constructed in 17th-­‐century Latin-­‐based syllables expressly to achieve this

distancing, to ensure the emotional stillness necessary to cut someone open and work on fixing their

internal organs. “Cardiac” is so different (in meaning) from “heart.” However, the specialized

distancing necessary for science and its preoccupations then became part of a broad Western

philosophy about the nature of reality, and of nonhuman beings. Nature was mechanistic, this view

said, and fishermen echoed: “fish don’t have feelings.” Creatures don’t think, this view insisted; they

operate solely on “instinct,” imagined as a set of pre-­‐existing internal settings that somehow came

about through evolution without intention or volition, without interaction and culture.

Despite all this, my path kept returning to the open curiosity and affection of my childhood. I

conquered an irrational terror of wasps by giving them water, and learning to remove them from my

house with a piece of paper and an empty glass. And I continue to cherish those life moments when I

can still my incessant human activity enough to just be with another species long enough to learn

something.

The cleverness of their communication system came clear when with a friend in India, I watched a

group of ants—a medium-­‐sized light red variety. Their task was to insert the body of a long, slender-­‐

winged beetle into a crack about three feet up a wall. The group had posted four overseers that