E.T. Final Paper

This is my final paper for the Environmental Theory course I took this semester, taught by Chris Schaberg. Though it is not directly related to other topics touched in this blog, I decided to post it at the suggestion of both my professor and thesis adviser, and saw after some thought several connections. The assignment differed from other papers I have written in that it was to be presented, and so written to be read aloud and heard. Now that I have presented it orally, my hopes in posting it here are that some of those who heard it can now also read it, and maybe even be affected by it in a new or stronger way. Maybe the words will be heard differently with the eyes. The other connection I recognize to the blog material is the dissection of the simple words of children upon which the paper is based. One of the essential aims of this thesis project has been to strip down words, to see them naked in their full meaning, to hold them to what they truly say. Finally, echoing back to the post "Language Frames Ecological Relations," I urged that with our words we ascribe our fellow creatures respect and agency by making them the subjects and not objects of our sentences. We have much to learn from children, who know to do this without telling.

[Captiv]ated Children

Briana Renfrow

A trip to the aquarium, for most “well-adjusted” adults, is a mundane activity, nothing out of the ordinary. The experience is pre-packaged to include entrance, instructive tidbits to ponder as you move seamlessly from tank to tank, the occasional “ooh” and “ahh” at a particularly striking display of color or teeth, the opportunity to have a photo taken with your torso transplanted on the body of a mermaid, perhaps a stuffed otter and some ice cream. The aquarium is the Disneyland of Nature, and thus regarded as the perfect place to introduce your child to the wonders of the animal world.

As a child is taught to accept captivity as a norm, to be excited but never troubled by the forced meeting of species that takes place at an aquarium, there are moments in which something curious occurs. It is in these moments that a child in his or her innocence will ask a question or make an exclamation, simply, about that which she sees. Suddenly the flow of continuity shatters, seeming normality dissipates as the unadulterated observations of a child uncover ignored grotesque incongruities of the scene, and so stalls the anthropological machine.

The intention of this paper is to explore these moments of intensity and friction, the disruptions that occur when a child says precisely that which he or she is not supposed to say, which is, perhaps, precisely what needs to be said.

“Run away! Run away!”

A child will pick up more quickly than any the very condition of captivity. While we as adults look past the glass to the image on the other side, our senses so accustomed to peering through illusory screens, the child most wise points to the very cage. Perhaps it is her identification with the lines and limitations, both physical and imaginary, which she encounters in her days, that causes the girl to sigh at the sight of the red-tailed hawk, “He wants to fly away.” Perhaps it is this same restlessness of a tethered bird which causes the young boy to squeal, “He’s trying to get out! He can’t get out!” when his mother says of the otter “Look, he’s playing.” The tank is not a window, but a mirror. The child wishes to assign the creature he sees agency beyond that which is possible for him or it—the agency to be free, wild even. And the child’s startling proclamation brings to the surface the strange irony that we too, are captive in the aquarium, in pockets of air amongst the water, and in our contraptions of artifice. The child is right to conspire escape. The toddlers, knowing best, often do, booking it through Adventure Island, dipping under the belted stanchions that divide neat lines to wait for a turn at the sting ray pet pool. Their parents struggle to detangle themselves from the redundant zigzagging ropes before chasing after them.

“Who catched them?”

The child not only questions captivity but pinpoints the captor. “Who catched them?” she asks, as if to say “Who could do this?” The appropriate answer is not an invisible institution that we can shrug to, or the anonymous authority that rules public spaces—an environmentality if you will—but a singular Captor, a Who, that is you and me and every human being. In her simple question is also the recognition that this aquarium is not a microcosm of Nature as it presents itself to be, in all its crafty set design, but that these creatures came from somewhere else and are here imprisoned. Seeing the red-tailed hawk perched atop a replica of a wooden shack you’d find “down da bayou,” a boy asks “Who put him up there?” and again “Can you get him down?” I cringe as I repeat the story I’ve been told. That’s Hazlot. They found her with a broken wing. She can’t fly. She’s tied down so she doesn’t hurt herself trying. No, I can’t get her down, that’s where she stays. Suddenly there are too many eyes in the place. I am the Captor. I am naked in my white collared shirt.

The Disneyland of Nature leaves no room for stories of captivity that would involve a free agent (in this case, a hawk) being brought in if not for its own good. It was rescued. It was endangered. It needed our intervention. The Disneyland of Nature neither has room for death nor decay, which may jeopardize its mythology. Employees of the aquarium have been trained to inform husbandry via radio in the case of a sick fish. We are to report “This is Volunteer to Husbandry. There is a package in the Mississippi Gallery.” A staff member shows up with a net, sweeps the struggle from sight of the visitors, and walks away nonchalantly, swinging a plastic bag containing the “package” in hand. What is behind the glass is carefully cultured as the Ideal, and Death is vigilantly omitted as to not spoil the experience:

“Just like a reflection, we can never actually reach it and touch it and belong to it. Nature was an ideal image, a self-contained form suspended afar, shimmering and naked behind glass like an expensive painting” (Timothy Morton 5). When Nature no longer serves this aesthetic purpose, it becomes garbage. We must dispose of the evidence as to not betray that perhaps we cannot always succeed as caretakers of our inmates. And the package becomes not food for other fish, but human waste. Fish food itself actually works in the reverse. Upon being asked by a girl at the sting ray exhibit “What do you feed them?” I replied automatically “Dead fish.” I did not expect her response: “How’d they get dead?” This time, I had no good answer. The child intuits the foul-play that happens behind-the-scenes, even when what is on display colorfully aims to pacify.

“We’re having a staring contest.”

The exhibition of live creatures, carefully labeled and separated from the viewer by glass, constructs a subject-object relationship. The human peering at the contained animal becomes a spectator as the fish becomes a thing, a prop for entertainment, and known only from afar by its aesthetic form and scientific name. A child in the cognitive stage of development of constant-anthropomorphizing, sees no such distinction between itself and other nonhuman beings. Caged or not, the alligator is not an object, but an equal subject, not just to be stared at, but staring back. “We’re having a staring contest” is to say “I acknowledge the consciousness of this strange stranger, and it acknowledges me.” Though the perceptions of Agamben’s tick, an alligator, or jellyfish may be vastly different than our own, the child sees that we share this world as equals, that together we play life, and that we touch.

A boy tentatively dips his hand into the sting ray pet pool. He is afraid, reasonably so. To touch a sting ray is not just to feel the surprisingly smooth and cool flesh of a strange stranger, but to come into contact with all its histories in natureculture. It is the pop culture man killer. It is the ideology of human domination and domestication of other species. It is corporate sponsorship and scuba diving. It is curiosity and fear. It is an evolved shark and a culmination of deep time. It is a delicacy. It is the reduction of language, how we do not know it past its name. The man killer hovers below the boy’s hand, and stays, as if it is enjoying the petting. The boy laughs in delight “This one’s very friendly!” His mom answers “Did you name it?” as if only this could legitimize such a bond.

Maybe there is something to a child’s insistence on naming everything he meets. He does it as if to elevate to the status of an equal the species he meets. The animals in the aquarium that receive the best care—the otters, alligator, and birds—all have been given names. All other fish in the aquarium are seemingly dispensable. Perhaps in making use of the “apparatus of anthropomorphism” as Bennett calls it, we could “re-people” the world, bow to the blowfish as a Buddha.

“Is it real?”

Again, I am faced with a deceivingly simple question. My first response is “Yes, of course it’s real.” But then I pause. What is it that I am being asked? I suppose I first must understand what a child’s perception of “real” is. Does “Is it real?” mean to say “Is it alive?” Or perhaps not, because that question implies the possibility that the unmoving animal in the tank could be dead. This could be what the child is inquiring, expressing mistrust in the Captor’s ability to keep such a monster alive. But there seems to be more to it. In lack of a synonym to “real,” becoming less and less sure that I could define such a word, I can only rephrase the question as its opposite. The child must mean to say, “Is it fake?” or “Is it a simulacrum?” or “Is it artificial?” The questions quickly spiral out of control. While the very large white alligator at stake here is most certainly not made of plastic, to what extent can it be called real? Or anything in the aquarium for that matter? If all the habitats are plastic, all sea water created on site with a complex mixture of chemicals, and food stock stored in a sterile lab, not to mention that nothing the creature does shouts “wild,” how is it not artificial, a product, an imitation of a “real” alligator? The child lifts the skirts of the American ideology that Jack Turner says “establishes reassurance through Imitation.” Her undergarments are rose-colored, but need replacement.

Even so. I cannot help but hear a faint echo, a chorus of whispers, the voices of Morton, Haraway, Price and Bennett that would seem discontent with this conclusion. Perhaps the issue at hand is not whether or not the creatures of captivity are real, or if captivity itself is completely futile. Haraway and Morton would agree that though the captive creatures are products of natureculture, they are part of the interweb of beings that is encompassed in the mesh, and Bennett and Price may even interject that even if they were made of plastic or dead, the very molecules vibrating in them, as well as all other molecules, ideas and perspectives they connect to, bear impact on the histories we live and inherit. What can be taken then from the child’s uncertainty about what’s in the cage is just that: an uncertainty or discomfort, an indigestion stirred by dissatisfactory relationships with our fellow meshmates. Haraway may have put it best that we must nourish that indigestion, revert to the fickle tummies of children as they encounter the world for the first time and find they cannot just stomach it.