It Goes

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?

One morning all that was burning.

Dead lovers salivate.

Broken hearts tessellate.

Broken hearts tessellate.

Broken hearts tessellate.

Broken hearts tessellate.

“I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.  I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”  She paused, and suddenly picked up her glass of milk and brought it to her lips.  ”I knew it,” she said, setting it down.  ”That’s something new.  My teeth go funny on me.  They’re chattering.  I nearly bit through a glass the day before yesterday.  Maybe I’m stark, staring mad and don’t know it.”

“How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?” 

George Eliot

If she was faintly aware of fresh difficulties ahead, she was sure of her ability to meet them: it was characteristic of her to feel that the only problems she could not solve were those with which she was familiar.

Today Carl Zimmer spoke in EEB 301, Evolution and Behavior of the Sexes, on his recent article in Time Magazine discussing animal friendships.  I considered saying “so-called” animal friendships, but his whole point was that they are not so-called, but actually can be defined in much the same way we define our own friendships.  Surprisingly, the word friendship, which had been taboo in science, accused eternally of anthropomorphism, Zimmer says, ought to be reconsidered.  However, this only applies to a small selection of social mammals.  These special cases are unsurprising: chimpanzees, baboons, dolphins…Higher social mammals, species that reside only a few rungs below us on the scala naturae Aristotle taught us to love.  Zimmer’s article wasn’t particularly astounding on first read-through, perhaps because a youtube culture that gushes over a 100 year-old giant tortoise sidled up to an orphaned baby hippo has desensitized us to how inexplicable that phenomenon actually is.  But Zimmer’s lecture clarified something important about animal friendships - that in order to be classified as a friendship, it is not the behavior itself that matters, but how it is allocated.  You can hang out with an individual who is not your kin, display helping behavior, and connect social memories you have about that individual, but if these actions are not exclusive, they don’t count.  Strength of bond is not important, but expression of preference for certain individuals over others in a group.  Zimmer said Time insisted he cover dog friendships because Time readers are obsessed with dogs (guilty), but his comments were dismissive.  Dogs don’t have anything resembling friendships no matter how much we want to see it.  I have to accept this as true, and it is - dogs only show preference against individuals that have caused them harm.  Otherwise everyone is fair game.  This would seem to support the scala naturae: if dogs can’t form friendships, they must be far down the ladder that tells us how much respect a species deserves.  However, I would say the opposite is true.  Dogs show us that friendships say nothing about how deep and meaningful a social bond can be.  Friendship is rather a classification of social bond.  Scientists searched in vain for evidence of friendship in wolves because pack loyalty was, to them, one of the deepest connections between individuals seen in behavioral ecology.  The real anthropomorphizing going on, it seems to me, was faith in the word friendship itself that led us to establish an injust hierarchy among creatures.

“Purity in body and heart

May please some — as for me, I make no boast.

For, as you know, no master of a household

Has all of his utensils made of gold;

Some are of wood, and yet they are of use.”

Chaucer

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” - Nabokov

My own nausea is empathetic.

Bella has sex with Edward, who is half a ghost. Jacob is a talking cat. Most of the prose is given over to descriptions of Bella making pasta.