How would you know?

“The ability of a person to penetrate the barrier which space puts between him and his object and by actually entering into the object, so to speak, to secure a momentary but complete identification with it” (192), somewhat solidifies, for a moment, the connection between human and animal ways of thinking. I have found that art, encompassing everything from sculpture and poetry to painting and music, is the only outlet that enables a person to literally, pun absolutely intended, set their own thoughts, morals and contemporaries aside and instead take on the instinct, fear and mindset of another, specifically, of an animal.

Poetry as an art.

In order to essentially step into the fur of an animal, we, as humans, must first classify what makes us distinct from them. Where is the line drawn between your own and the others? Which corner of art allows these ideas to be explored best? J.M Coatzee’s Elizabeth Costello, allows this boundary separating humans and animals as two separate species to be defined and crossed in his applause of poets Rilke and Hughes. Coatzee commends Rilke’s “Panther” in its ability to soften any foreignness that an animal may possess and make it familiar. “He dissolves into a dance of energy around a center, an image that comes from physics, elementary particle physics. Rilke does not go beyond this point – beyond the panther as the vital embodiment of the kind of force that is released in an atomic explosion but is here trapped not so much by that bars of the cage as by what the bars compel on the panther: a concentric lope that leaves the will stupefied, narcotized. “ (Coatzee 95) Coatzee writes this fiction piece of work conveying within a strong relationship between Hughes and Rilke. “Hughes is writing against Rilke…He uses the same staging in the zoo, but it is the crowd for a change that stands mesmerized, and among them the man, the poet, entranced and horrified and overwhelmed, his powers of understanding pushed beyond their limit….the cage has no reality to [the jaguar], he is elsewhere.” (Coatzee 96). Hughes does more than describe the opportunity to being imaginatively sympathetic towards the panther, he gets into a state of mind of which he is the panther. “Writers teach us more than they are aware of. By bodying forth the jaguar, Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals – by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and no one ever will.” (Coatzee 98).
Although it seems to have been a unanimous feeling amongst the selected authors for our reading this week, the idea of sympathetic imagination is not always a feasible goal for all. In Kafka’s “A Report for The Academy”, his protagonist, Red Peter, is an ape who becomes a human through physical and mental learning and training. Throughout the plot, Red Peter is either an ape or a human, never both.

Is physically morphing into the animal that you wish to understand the only way to accomplish this?

“And I learned, gentlemen. Alas, one learns when one has to. Once learns when one wants a way out. One learns ruthlessly. One supervises oneself with a whip and tears oneself apart at the slightest resistance. My ape nature ran off, head over heels, out of me…” (Kafka 662). Red Peter’s ape self left him, just in time for his human self to take shape. “I, a free ape, submitted myself to this yoke” (Kafka 658). There is a turning point in Red Peter’s life that he is not utilizing sympathetic imagination to feel an ape or a human’s feelings, but rather he actually becomes the other. Once he becomes one, he cannot go back to the other without falsely impersonating some aspect.
“At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom-“ (Hughes 668).

Is this what a jaguar sees? We would never truly understand unless we were them.

As mentioned previously, Hughes’ poem, “The Jaguar” the poet himself is mesmerized and afraid of his surroundings. The poet is not his human self in this poem, but rather he has put himself inside the cage, looking out just as the jaguar would be doing. I believe that poetry utilizes a surreal aspect of art that cannot be encompassed in fiction or non-fiction. The use of meter and rhyme has the ability to compliment completely the meaning of the other – the intensity of the exchange of self that Hughes himself has allowed himself to take.





http://www.art.com/products/p13062986-sa-i2290557/bella-decorative-poetry.htm
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7158/full/449026a.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbratton/1527679046/