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(suitable for framing)

Do I identify with exploited animals too much?  Is their fate as impervious to alteration as my own would appear to be?  Wounded, trapped, captured, caged; made the subject of nature's experimental procedures, its overriding imperative to create a species worthy of survival – or perhaps, simply to create new species (simply to create); subject too to experimental procedures carried out by humans, the first species to presume upon the powers of nature, to take upon itself the task of guiding & shaping what were hitherto entirely "natural" processes for the sake of human benefit:  could any of the sufferings borne by nonhuman & human animals alike, be avoided?  Are these sufferings, morally speaking, good or bad, right or wrong; or are they merely, to nature & so to humans as well, a matter of indifference?

Although I sometimes mix self-pity with the pity I feel for animals exploited by humans, pity for the animals, felt for their own sakes, also exists.  Nature may be indifferent; or at any rate, its reactions to human interference – as to any change wrought by those who, whether they be human or nonhuman, embody nature's pitiless power, its remorseless (though resourceful) drive to create, then destroy & create anew – cannot be codified by such moral precepts as "good" & "bad," "right" or "wrong."  But I am not indifferent, nor are the animals who suffer at human hands indifferent; & if the sufferings of animals (& if my own suffering) are neither "right" nor "wrong," it cannot be denied that they are painful to endure.

My identification with animals was first inspired by a boy's love for nature.  But whether the boy's love for, & retreat into, the world of nature was preceded by his sense of being exiled from "normal" human intercourse, or whether it followed after, I can no longer tell; it appears to me now that the two were ever intertwined.  I was always a misfit; my preference for nature, for solitude, for books, for introspection, was both the source of my social dysfunctionalism & my solace from the psychological distress this dysfunctionalism brought me.  All my distrust of conformity, & my dislike of those social & economic imperatives which require it, has its roots in this dysfunctionalism, whose influence is so central to my being, so core to my personal development, as to have come to appear universal in scope & application.  The human species, with its ability for self-knowledge, self-absorption, abstract thought, & technological sophistication, seems to me fundamentally problematic – also highly dangerous.  I see pictures of cruelties perpetrated upon animals so severe in kind that it seems to me as clear as daylight that they represent a variety of dysfunctionalism of such extreme measure as to constitute nothing less than a form of insanity.  The cruelty likewise inspires a kind of insanity in me, knowing what I now know myself to know.  For the dysfunctionalism of society is not my own, but rather, is its obverse:  I identify with nature & with nonhuman animals because I understand that it & they are what I myself also am, that we come from the same place & together constitute a whole – whereas much of the rest of society denies this fact, or ignores it, to the peril of us all.  Whether the dysfunctionalism represented by the relationship of the human species to the natural world springs from a fault inherent to humans – our "fatal flaw" – or is, more simply, symptomatic of some greater, more far-reaching evolutionary goal, I do not know.  What I do know is that humans are responsible for causing an amount of avoidable suffering so immeasurably large that it long ago ceased to be fathomable (which fact itself has now become part of the problem); if we are to solve the dilemma such vast suffering presents us with we must, I think, both reach forward into the future & back to our roots, find some new combination of what we are (& will ever remain:  a subject of nature) & what we would become.  We must evolve, I think, into something almost entirely new . . .

wound