“‘We must sometimes be cruel to be kind…’” (119).
Click to play: Cruel to be Kind by Nick Lowe Download: ?media_id=E2CDE907E08840F3A13DC7E963C5E85D&sitename=b12325794706179301
And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariners’ hollo!
‘God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus!
Why look’st though so?’—‘With my cross-bow
I shot the albatross.
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work ‘em woe;
For all averred I had killed thebird
That made the breeze to blow.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
When Coetzee introduces the albatrosses in chapter two, he does so in a way that reminds me of Coleridge’s albatross, “There is an albatross colony on the hillside, they are advised; they are welcome to photograph the birds, but should not approach too closely, should not alarm them” (55). The mariner of Coleridge’s story makes the mistake of disrupting the albatross—killing the albatross. By doing this, he disrupts the course of nature. The wind no longer blows, and the ship is lost in the Antarctic. Blaming the mariner for the bad luck, the crew forces him to wear the dead albatross as punishment:
Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the albatross
About my neck was hung
The albatross is given a supernatural, powerful role in the poem. He signifies the force of nature, the well being of the crew, and a shining hope. There is no motivation for the mariner’s actions—no reason for him to shoot the albatross from the sky. He does so on a lark, which results in the death of the crew members and a fate worse than death for himself.
Coetzee, too, gives the albatross this supernatural feeling, “’An albatross,’ she remarks to the woman, speaking softly. ‘That is the English word. I don’t know what they call themselves.’ The woman nods. The great bird regards them calmly, no more afraid of two than of one” (56). These birds, after Coleridge’s poem, are believed to carry the souls of lost sailors. To kill one would be considered an omen of bad luck. By killing one, you lose your way.
Recently I’ve read Neuromancer for my Rhetoric in Cyberculture class. Neuromancer is an AI. The “left-hemisphere” of an AI that has been split in two—Wintermute and Neuromancer. Wintermute is the brains, the planning the data, where as Neuromancer is the personality. Neuromancer is the answer to immortality. A person’s memory is stored as either ROM or RAM. Neuromancer “is the dead, and their land” (244). When Neuromancer (Necro+romancer) says this, “He [Neuromancer] laughed. A gull cried” (244). The only other noise in this land of the dead is the cry of a gull—an albatross.
What has fascinated me about the book is the role of animals—they are virtually nonexistent. When one character—very cat-like in her own description—sees that her companion has not finished his meal, she yells, “’Jesus, gimme that. You know what this costs?’ She took his plate. ‘They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn’t vat stuff.’ She forked a mouthful up and chewed” (Chapter 11). Yet that same character is always wearing black leather—black Paris leather. The author makes it a point time and time again to describe how hot her body looks in the black Paris leather. Why, then, are the people unable to identify a horse or commonly eat animals, but they wear black leather jeans and use calfskin bags? The book is extremely inconsistent with its rarity and sacramental status of animals.
Which brings me to zoos. What is the purpose of zoos? Are they to preserve rare animals, to display their importance in the ecosystem, to put them on show? Hughes’s poem reminded me of my trip to the San Antonio zoo in January 2008. There, I saw Lucky the elephant. I stood there watching Lucky for a good ten minutes (much longer than the usual glance and walk by that most animals receive). I was concerned about what she was doing—picking up a stick with her trunk, raising her front foot, raising her back foot, dropping the stick. Over and over and over again. Some parents told their child the elephant was dancing, but like the jaguar, “[her] body is just the engine shoving it forward,/ Lifting the air up and shoving on under” (331).
Later I went online to research Lucky, and found out she had been abused during circus training. I signed a petition to relocate her to an elephant sanctuary—but that seems like such little effort now. Animals in zoos, in what I have experienced, is treating them like, “they are a part of the furniture, part of the alarm system. They do us the honour of treating us like gods, and we respond by treating them like things” (335). Further more, I disagree that animals have, “already been through it. Born with foreknowledge…They don’t have to be told what steel is for…They are born prepared” (337-338). Perhaps not all zoos are like this, but they don’t have a private life, as Coetzee explains:
‘Don’t animals deserve a private life as much as we do?’
‘Not if they are in a zoo,’ she says. ‘Not if they re on show. Once you are on show, you have no private life. Anyway, do you ask permission from the stars before you peek at them through your telescope? What about the private lives of the stars?’ (33)
For a brief moment, I misread this passage. I read “stars” as people. As celebrities. We give celebrities just as much a private life as we do animals in a zoo. Even less, if it were possible. So my mind splits here—do we treat animals any differently than humans, really?
Today on Speedway, they had a picture from Josephine’s blog. A picture of a monkey about to be electrocuted. On the picture they had, “If this is wrong, then how is this right?” and beneath it was a picture of aborted fetuses. Do we need to face human rights before animal rights, take them simultaneously, or give a preferred order of animals over humans? The sign suggested corporal punishment and animal abuse were on the same level of fetus abortion—is it?
