Patrick Lawler teaches at the SUNY College of
Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse.
The Animals We Once Prayed To
What I liked about Marlin Perkins was his avuncular gentleness even as he
subdued a hippo with a tranquilizer gun.
I believed he cared immensely.
You knew eventually, if he lived long enough, everything would be
saved. Everything would be secure in his
zoo. Queen Hapshetsut of Egypt
established the first zoo. After ousting
her husband, the Queen filled her garden with exotic animals, sending her
subjects on animal-collecting exhibitions to bring back monkeys, leopards,
birds, giraffes, greyhounds.
When
I see
my wife deliciously
stroking the cat,
I get nervous.
As I'm writing this, the
Miss America Pageant is on in the background – the way it was when I was
growing up. As a child I only went to
the zoo once. The feeling of exhilaration subsided into nausea. Instead of august animals, I saw cages with
filthy elephants, depressed lions,
hyperactive monkeys. It was like
visiting a hospice. It was like walking
into a ward of TB patients.
It
was like
looking
into the punctuation
eyes of heroin addicts.
The bear, puffy,
stoical, tried to ignore us, imagining the Chinese Parks of Intelligence. The traveling menageries of London. The garden-zoos. The bloody amphitheaters of Rome. I'm not really certain why we have this urge
to capture and display. Maybe we want
everything to look like us.
In the background the contestants
for
Miss America
are
talking about their habitat.
They
are giving examples
of
their mating rituals.
They
are discussing
their
place in the food chain.
Sometimes I think
watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
spoiled me for real life. I expected too
much from my encounters with the creatures of the earth. Mr. P. and Jim (who always did all the tough
work) would hop in a Land Rover and go chasing a wildebeest or a leopard around
a savanna. Eventually, after some good
action shots, they would
tranquilize and cage the animal, sending it off to be studied in a laboratory,
where, if all went well, it would reproduce.
Everything seemed perfect.
Marlin sensed his place in history.
Cosimo de Medici, in the
14th century, tried to revive the amphitheater.
After parading the animals through the streets, he released them into
the Roman blood-theater. The animals
were so exhausted they fell asleep. The
tigers curled under their paws, the rhinoceros snored. It looked as if Marlin Perkins had inoculated
them, tagged them, and left them snoozing.
On
Wild Kingdom
everything was dying.
Suppose
this is really true.
Suppose
everything is leaving us.
The
Walruses wobble off the Alaskan cliffs
at
Maggie Beach. The whales and caribou
committing
suicide. Maybe the only thing
left
to do is try to collect what we have destroyed.
Maybe the animals – the turbaned birds,
the rubber seals, the hair ribbon snakes –
are
saying: We've had it.
No one knows why things happen. Maybe the only thing left to do is become
forensic
experts sifting the earth for evidence of our existence: a pink swimsuit, an
evening gown, a false smile. I'm a
little ashamed to say this, but I'm paying more attention to the talent portion
of the pageant than I expected I would.
Miss Kansas is singing an opera.
Miss Alabama is tap dancing
as if she is trying
to get something off her.
On one of the episodes
of Wild Kingdom (in one of the rare
ones when Mr. Perkins actually does something), Marlin is in ankle deep water
with a python when it begins coiling itself around him. Jim comes to help as he always does (this is
what I like about Jim), but he also becomes entangled. Eventually they get away, but for a moment,
a brief moment, it seems they are doomed, trapped in some colossal debate
between body and mind. It makes for
great drama as the snake, like a huge muscle, twists itself around their bodies
– Jim and Marlin connected forever, or so it seemed.
And, in spite
of my fear
of snakes, I began routing
for
the python.
I no longer fear snakes,
but one recent episode in my life has caused me to reevaluate my certainty that
we can ever totally overcome our fears.
I was in the Museum of Science and Technology when Mary, a friend, a
poet, and employee of the center, placed Elizabeth, a python, around my
neck. At first, I felt comfortable; then
its head began to take an interest in my face.
It was all I could do to hold it back.
I gripped it for all I was worth.
Mary said:
What are you doing?
You're hurting her. You're
holding her too tightly.
I felt bad, but I
couldn't let go. The snake was headed
toward my face. When the
snake was removed, she said that I was perfectly safe. She said that there had been only one recent
incident where
Elizabeth had bitten the nose of an educational presenter – but nothing like
that had ever happened before.
In
a Copenhagen zoo, a new
Homo
Sapiens exhibit features
a
Danish couple living in an apartment
between
the zoo's lemur and monkey cages.
Ipolito
de Medici maintained
a
human zoo containing Africans, Indians,
Tartans,
Moors, and Turks.
I wonder if he would
have been interested in the Miss America pageant. A magnificent specimen from every state. Regis Philbin asks the five finalists
questions about who they are, about what they intend to do. Their answers seem trite but strangely
genuine. Like Regis, himself.
"We
sit in front of our screens,
our TVs.
our
computers, safe and
sterile," paralyzed
by
the "complexities of our
lives," by our own
isolation when all around us is "vibrant
with
connection." The animals we once prayed to
are absent from our lives.
The
python moving toward our faces,
could
have been a vine of energy. Maybe one
day
I
will loosen my grip. Maybe one day
I'll say:
OK, I'm yours.
Before Montezuma's great
zoo was destroyed by Cortez, the starving Incas had begun to eat the animals. We are starving in another way, but the
consequences are the same. It's tiara
time as they crown Miss Kansas the new Miss America. I hope her reign will be long and uneventful
– like the life of Regis Philbin.
I
remember seeing
pictures
of the Sarajevo
Beauty
Contest.
The
contestants
with
shrapnel scars
from
war, with bullet
wounds,
with missing
limbs,
carried a banner
that
said: Do Not Kill Us.
I should have paid more
attention to the commercials on Mutual of
Omaha's Wild Kingdom. It is as if we
are in this parade moving toward some kind of virtual apocalyptic
slaughter. If we are lucky, when we
arrive at this terrible destination, we will fall deeply asleep.
We need Marlin Perkins to save us. With his Land Rover and his faithful Jim, he
will track us down in our living rooms.
He will drug us, tag us, study us, relocate us. We'll wind up in the rain forests, the
savannas, the Alaskan cliffs overlooking the sea, the tundra, the
mountains. If all goes well, we will
reproduce.
But,
first, we will topple
into our screens,
a dart in our thighs,
our mouths barely capable
of moving. Our bodies, numb and floppy,
we lift our faces and look into the sad,
exhausted eyes of Marlin.
Slowly and with great
difficulty, we say: Do not kill
us.
But we really want to say much more.