Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  I’d argue that my animal imaginings essentially were spiritual, and that they made an intense there for me via the thousands of hours of cartoons and books, the Wonderful World of Disney, and my own goofy solo play. It certainly wasn’t the there on which entire cultures were built (was it?), but I believed it like a zealot. Despite the fact there were no real ones around me, I used these warped ideas of animals to help me solve problems, I sang animal songs to soothe myself, and I certainly spoke to them in a kind of prayer.

  My faith—and I was reared far from religion—was this blank space in which the late twentieth century “animals of the mind” were free to romp as I saw fit. I now have a spiritual there, and it is my only one, warped as it may be, where Berger says nothing exists anymore. My sense of story, art, imagining, the words for writing, the ways of coping—they all come from the experiences that my phony zoo contributed to my early youth.

  My mom took me to the National Zoo in DC, where a thousand other onlookers and I watched a giraffe give birth (“Can you believe we were here when it happened?”). At the Bronx Zoo, I rode a camel. My dad put me on his shoulders at a low-rent South Carolina zoo and I poked at an ostrich with a stick until it bit my Keds sneaker. At Zoo Atlanta’s week-long summer camp, I watched Wild World of Disney videos in the lab behind the reptile building, where one of the yellow snakes had the same name as me. We were gently led through parts of the flamingo enclosure and we even played red rover in the empty polar bear exhibit. Running and yelling where the polar bears roamed each morning felt like touring a celebrity home.

  Most of these zoos had undergone renovations into our current breed of animal tourism, their verdant habitats and outdoor viewing pavilions replacing the concrete cages and tire swings of earlier times. These zoo designs were no longer the meager “theatre props” Berger decried in the late seventies, with only “dead branches of a tree for monkeys, artificial rocks for bears, pebbles and shallow water for crocodiles.” This is not to say, of course, that they were any more natural.

  According to Berger, “The zoo cannot but disappoint.” It only presents “lethargic and dull” specimens removed not only from their natural environments, but also from any natural drive or individual interest. They cannot inspire, or even exchange that crucial glance with the humans who visit them. There are no “parallel lines” between human and animal life in a zoo, because, as is the case with house pets, the animal life has become so dependent on humans that it is no longer viable alone.

  But I do not recall a disappointment like Berger describes, because at the zoos, I was often too busy to look at any animal for very long. Here is something else Berger was probably unable to foresee: my visits in the 1980s were to zoos that had marginalized the marginalized animals. Along with creating more convincing habitats, these new zoos built scores of distracting “discovery kiosks” and activities—rock walls, coloring stations, kiddie trains—that lined the paths from one enclosure to the next. At dozens of sidewalk carts, you could buy T-shirts or concentrated orange juice in a plastic container—shaped like an actual orange! It was more like visiting a theme park than a menagerie.

  No longer was the main purpose to see, as Berger says, the “originals” of the stuffed mammals from our bedrooms. I was there to gallop about and play, to be my own animal. The kiddie games ran interference for the zoo creatures which, for me, were more like the robot critter band at that pizza place. They were an underscore to a party, the jazzy accompaniment to an afternoon outside with horseplay, a picnic, and maybe a present or two.

  Where Berger says every zoo-goer raised on Peter Rabbit asks herself, “Why are these animals less than I believed?” a decade later, I think I’d have been more likely to ask, “Why are these animals even here?”

  The section on zoos is the grand finale of the essay; Berger concludes with the lamentable image of a crowd at an animal cage, standing before a creature that will not look at them in any meaningful way. The crowd, then, can only look at each other as “a species which has at last been isolated.” Here he says, is the failure of zoos. Perhaps this explains why, by the time I arrived at one, they’d given me other things to do. And, it must be said, several things to buy. Maybe this is the real question kids of my era should have asked when they skipped into the zoo: “Since commerce took real animals from me, shouldn’t it have to make for me a viable replacement?”

  That same year as the Humphrey story and the zoo camp, my grandparents took me to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. This was their year of Lancelot—“the Living Unicorn,” as he was billed on the 1985 souvenir program. I bought the program with three dollars of my own money and, after the circus, thumbed through it for weeks until the glossy pages fell to pieces. It said the Living Unicorn had just wandered into the big top one day the previous year, provenance unknown. Lancelot was ageless; there were no facts to weigh him down other than the fact that, according to the program, he ate rose petals for dinner. In the full-color photographs, he usually stood next to a spangly, Miss-America-cute woman, his long white hair—not so much a mane as a suit of poodle curls—gleaming and very possibly permed.

  The horn at the top of his head was prodigious: twice as thick as that of the title character in The Last Unicorn. It was also covered in opalescent pink paint, trunking up from Lancelot’s forehead in a glittery shaft. In one photograph, he appeared with two children about my age. The blond boy in the photo smiled out toward the photographer, but the little girl next to Lancelot stared right at the unicorn with unabashed awe, like she’d forgotten all about the person taking her picture. Lancelot himself gazed into the middle distance, looking like a little, white Rick James. Who knows what he was thinking.

  The program also featured a pullout poster that I taped to my closet door. It was a Lisa Frank–style portrait of Lancelot in a hot pink frame, above the caption “I Saw the Living Unicorn!” I’m not certain how many differences I noticed, back then, between the illustrated poster unicorn and the photographed one. But now, it’s obvious that the drawn unicorn is horsier, with a straight-up mane, a fuller muzzle and a longer, broader neck. The eyes are much less hircine, and they stare straight into the viewer.

  At the circus, Lancelot didn’t gallop in; he rode. His entrance was on a hydraulic float trimmed in Grecian curlicues, with a curved dais at the top of it, slathered in gold paint. On the dais was a waving handler, dressed sort of like Glinda the Good Witch, who stood beside Lancelot. The unicorn himself had a tiny gold pedestal atop the dais, on which he could only arrange his front two feet.

  A follow spot stuck to the vehicle as it zoomed around the ring; Lancelot stood erect, but sort of jostled in the motion of the float. Schmaltzy orchestral music boomed from the Civic Center speakers. From my seat, Lancelot was little more than a white furry blob. But when his shellacked horn, firm and proud on his cranium, caught the spotlight, everyone around me inhaled. He was much smaller than a horse—maybe pony-sized—which, being small myself, I found exciting.

  I now wonder why the circus didn’t just strap a horn to an actual pony. They could have easily used showbiz magic to sell that trick from an arena-sized distance. But the circus was working a different angle with this critter that, even from yards away, was no horned horse. Perhaps they needed a horn that would look more legitimately rooted in photo close-ups. They knew I would obsess over that program, so they wanted a unicorn that read biologically true at home, away from the smoke and spotlight. But I think it’s more likely that they wanted to surprise us over anything else, even if that surprise involved a ridiculous specimen. It’s brilliant circus logic: that this jarring, not-horse-body was so weird, it would make sense when you learned it subsisted on flower petals. In other words, the circus hoped the more unnatural Lancelot looked, the happier I’d be.

  What I recall feeling at that matinee is an aching deep in that tender, only-child place inside myself. It softened the suspect details of Lancelot’s freaky body. Under the “tent,” I had a foundational unde
rstanding something was fishy about that unicorn, but still, I ached for him. The emotion, for me, wasn’t about his realness; it was about sitting (relatively) near something that represented offsite magic. This is a reverse of Berger’s zoo animals—failed attempts at real versions of stuffed bedroom toys. Lancelot was the glorious opposite: a fake spectacle at the center of the ring that confirmed all my homespun, isolated imaginings to indeed be believable magic. Wild and insane Lancelot was before me; he could be both visited and dreamed about. The unicorn goat was, for me, both there and here.

  Along with sensing, and then ignoring, that the unicorn was phony, I also knew it was probably some kind of victim, though even that didn’t deter my pleasure. I could not yet grasp how costly a real animal’s presence in my imagination could be. Of this I am the most ashamed, because I know a version of that ignorance still lives in me. I didn’t grasp, or I refused to consider, what kind of subjection was possible—the various ways humans open up and alter other creatures.

  The tales of Beatrix Potter never mention that billy goats are born with their horn-buds loose, floating right under the skin for the first week of their lives. It never occurred to me that a person might vivisect a newborn goat—graft the buds from their rightful place above the eyes to the frontal bones of the skull. Ten more days into the baby goat’s life, this process would be impossible, as by then the skull has ossified. But an enterprising human with a fresh goat on her hands can divide the kidskin forehead into four dermal flaps and rearrange them—in a process called “pedicling”—so that when the horns form, they fuse over the pineal gland and erupt as a single keratin pillar.

  How could I ever have imagined that, even as obsessed with fantasy as I was? Where in my wildest seven-year-old dreams was US Patent #4,429,685, which legally awards authorship of “a method for growing unicorns” to a separatist religious leader turned veterinary surgeon named Timothy G. Zell, alias Otter G’Zell, alias Oberon Ravenheart?

  After a New York City performance, someone called the ASPCA about Lancelot. The FDA performed a careful examination and declared him a perfectly healthy, if deformed, goat. Another phone call was made to the New York Consumer Protection Board to challenge whether Lancelot could legally be billed “unicorn.” The circus responded with a full-page ad in the Times—“Don’t Let the Grinches Steal the Fantasy!”—and refused to admit that it bought Lancelot from Zell for a six-figure sum. Lancelot lasted another national tour, and then disappeared from the circus, who hasn’t mentioned him since.

  Of course, none of this controversy was in my head when I saw Lancelot. I was just one of the thousands of Americans born in 1978 that watched a surgically altered goat ride a golden chariot around their local civic center. But here I am, thirty years later, trying to explain what happens when I look at animals, and the creature that palpitates my tenderest spot is that hot mess of an animal—over the humpback whale, the baby giraffe, or the snake with my own name.

  Maybe this is the coda to the final zoo scene of “Why Look at Animals?,” as this is what an animal consciousness can now become. Four decades past Berger, the animal of my mind is a gaudy but satisfying creature that had little to do with fact from the get-go. Though unprecedented and unnatural, his form still exists. It holds a wonky, mythic nature—which is the only nature a kid like me will ever understand.

  The animal of my mind is bright and dandy and painfully incorrect. He’s living proof of my whacked-out desires and my ability to ignore cruel realties. And weirdly enough, he’s government-sanctioned; Lancelot follows the rules. The lines between our two lives are not so much parallel as bent—by sheer will, like spoons—until they touch.

  Rather than a wild mustang or a trusty hound or even a Beatrix Potter bunny, my relationship with animals best resembles this cream-rinsed, mutant goat with a watery eye—this survivor of backwoods surgery with a pastel-bedazzled wang sprouting from his brain. The here and there of Lancelot grow together in my place, in the parts of my mind that—at the site of my beginning—were pulled back and rotated to sprout an outrageously new thing. There’s a distinct possibility that every time I write about an animal, I am only writing about him—which might also mean, horrifyingly, that I’m only writing about myself.

  Yes, Lancelot says, and turns to me with his sparkling, goaty eyes. He looks right into my lonely soul and something in my cranium shakes. Come see what has been made for you—see the Living Unicorn. Come here, Elena Marie. Look into my eyes. Can you even believe all the ways you and I were made for each other?

  Ms. Patterson finally scolded her and signed “bad gorilla,” whereupon Koko signed “funny gorilla” and laughed.

  Associated Press

  KOKO THE GORILLA tells a famous joke:

  Father-gorilla, Mother-gorilla, Baby-gorilla hungry. Need work.

  Mustache-man tell: “What work?”

  Father-gorilla tell: “Really together show. Fine show. Good practice. Lights-off good.”

  Mustache-man tell: “Hurry, give me.”

  Father-gorilla tell: “‘Hello!’ do Mother-gorilla; ‘Hello!’ do Father-gorilla. Together dance; clap people. Father-gorilla har-monica; Mother-gorilla clowntime; clap people. ‘Hello!’ do Baby-gorilla. Skateboard do, puppet dance do; clap people. Father-gorilla kiss, Mother-gorilla kiss; gorilla hug, Mother-gorilla nipple find; clap people. Nipple kiss, nipple rub, nipple pinch, nipple slap, nipple-on-bottom, nail clipper nipple, many many nipple touch. Tongue nipple. Nipple sandwich.”

  Mustache-man tell: “Who nipple?”

  Father-gorilla tell: “ALL nipple. Now Father-gorilla, Mother-gorilla peekaboo pickle. Poke stomach. Peekaboo pickle with pat-bottom. With walk-up-my-bottom. Pull-out hair. Nasty time. Mean love. Mother-gorilla leash-on pickle; skateboard ride do. Clap people.

  “Mother-gorilla find Baby-gorilla. Little noodle pull. Zip mouth shut. Strangle tadpole. Mayonnaise necklace. Father-gorilla there; sit Father-gorilla. Thirsty Father-gorilla lick; Mother-gorilla strap-on. Baby-gorilla sit Mother-gorilla. ALL PEEKABOO PICKLE. Trouble pickle.

  “Baby-gorilla get Ingrid. ‘Hello!’ do Ingrid. Ingrid turn-around; Baby-gorilla wrestle. Ingrid trouble. Devil Ingrid. ‘You bad dirty toilet Ingrid.’ Ingrid pudding do. Ingrid laugh; Ingrid eat. Ingrid sick. Mother-gorilla taste. Bottle-match! Ingrid electric pudding. Ingrid get Father-gorilla. Pickle bottle-match! Peekaboo pickle on fire now!

  “Ingrid hole smoke-ring blow. Mother-gorilla hole blow harmonica. Father-gorilla dance, balloon-on-noodle. Baby-gorilla clowntime, balloon-on-tadpole. Ingrid hole smoke-smoke. Around together skateboard do—smoke noodle balloon harmonica ride all! Harmonica hole play ‘Purple Rain!’ All MAYONNAISE RAIN! All finished! Thank you.”

  Mustache-man tell: “Wow. What name show?”

  Father-gorilla tell: “WE WONDERFUL SNOB PEOPLE!”

  Mustache-man smile-frown.

  Drapes.

  We do not easily distinguish, emotionally, between a human eating an animal and an animal eating a human.

  Alistair Graham, Eyelids of Morning

  OSAMA THE CROCODILE lived on the banks of Lake Victoria in Uganda.

  So begins “A Crocodile Called Osama,” a passage from the Conquering Comprehension student workbook. Written for Australian early readers, Conquering Comprehension is divided into twenty-six units, each unit consisting of a brief essay that models a mode of writing, followed by a half dozen critical questions. Unit two, “Literary Description,” is a detailed scene of a girl named Abigail looking out a window. Unit four, “Procedure,” is a bulletpointed kayaking how-to. And the five paragraphs of “A Crocodile Called Osama” make up the entirety of unit three, “Factual Description.”

  He was nearly five metres long, weighed a tonne and, during his long life of sixty years, had killed and eaten eighty-three people from the village of Luganga on the shores of the lake.

  The simple fuchsia sketch of a Nile crocodile that hogs much of unit three’s page space offers very little that’s either factual or descriptive. Th
e drawn reptile has a narrower body than a sexagenarian croc would. The illustration’s eyes are not googly enough. The belly should be thicker and dirty purple; the tail should be longer and striped. And lots of apex predator facts go undescribed in the text: how Osama could hold his breath under water for an hour, or halt his digestive juices to postpone hunger for one year. How he could walk on land if need be, and how, in his younger days, he might’ve galloped. How he hovered in the brack of his lake for up to a week in pursuit of a single creature—one ton of stillness in ambush.

  Apart from the deeds of his horrifying past, Osama had developed a new and fiendish habit:

  These are the facts of size and biology that conquered centuries of human comprehension. These facts led people to name Nile crocodiles as their gods—greedy deities who rob and swindle and fuck on the backs of half-eaten humans. They drove men, these facts, to adorn a tame croc with jewels and to sing to it at festivals, and they inspired humans to decorate themselves as crocs, or feed the entrails of their dead kings to the monsters in their lakes. These facts make fishermen smear the hulls of their boats with crocodile fat to deflect lightning, or cover their skin with croc brains to ward off further croc attack.

  he had begun tipping over the villagers’ fishing boats to grab a fisherman and even jumped into the boats themselves to claim his victims.

  But none of these facts of nature, legend, or hunger appear in unit three, “Factual Description.” All the 320 words of the passage offer its young readers is the “description” of a conquering and the “fact” of an incomprehensible name.