The following essay is a recent piece that will appear in the catalogue for "A Live Animal", an exhibition exploring our relationship to the animal world at Root Division, San Francisco.
Cristina as a Porcupine, in Sustained by Visions for the Chicago Cultural Center, 2008.
Animal Exchanges
by Jeremiah Barber
Being the only person encased in my own body, I often wonder if I exist beyond my own imagination. I started thinking about my relationship to others, and became intrigued with the connection we feel to animals––is that mere projection or is anything of substance happening between us and the animal world?
For my first collaborative artwork Sustained by Visions, I challenged friends and acquaintances to perform for my video camera as their spirit animal, or the animal they see themselves as being most similar to (I myself was an otter). Everyone, it seemed, had a story of a surreal exchange with an animal. Ideally I would ask the same questions of a dragonfly or octopus––would we be named as the spirit animal for any other?
Jeremiah as an Otter, in Sustained by Visions for the Chicago Cultural Center, 2008.
Once I was swimming alone in the deep water of Lake Michigan, well above my head, at a stretch of undeveloped but not unvisited beach. I could soon see something small and dark floating on the horizon and began to swim towards it. The beaches of Northern Michigan were so clear and unalloyed in my youth that any object in the water warranted inspection. But this was truly exceptional. I had found a floating bat.
The bat was face down in the water, wings outspread along the surface like a toppled sail. His wingspan was 4 inches at most, and water formed itself into little droplets on the curve of his shoulders. I put my arm beneath his body and lifted and as my arm split the water to either side like a submarine calling to the surface I felt the distinct prick of two clawed fingers pinching into the muscle of my forearm. Once a still floating mass, this small being came into life on my arm. I could see his minute black eyes flashing with his blinks and his mouth open and close lightly with breath. There was no time for understanding as I was still deep over my head and now with another to care for and I needed to get to shore.
Paddling with the left arm, I never took my eyes off the small creature that encompassed my right arm in front of me. His ears were startlingly large and bare like two bandshells, his back feet seemed useless draped wet behind him, and the veins that ran through his wings I could now see were actually needle-thin bones shaped like the bones in my own hand. They formed a support for the wing and each finger protruded from it, ending in a tiny claw. The two that gripped my arm were his thumbs.
Being young and proud of such unusual accomplishments as this, I thought about the recognition I would soon receive on the beach. Walking on sand now I carried the bat in front of me like a waiter carries a fine, white linen––we couldn't be missed.
We approached the first cluster of sun-bathers, a family gathered on a row of towels, and I watched the bat lock his head directly towards them, open his cavernous mouth lined with tiny, frightening fangs and let out a hiss like that of a cobra. I could see pink arches along the roof of his mouth as he turned his furious face back and forth hissing, directing his scowl fiercely towards individual people who stood confused to our right and left.
I altered my path to avoid as many people as possible and headed directly into the woods. There on a fallen cedar log I left the bat to dry out in the sun. It took some convincing to get him to leave my arm, and though he was still damp and moving very little, when I returned the next day he was gone. There was no evidence of his survival or demise, but I have to think a bat that can survive a drowning would live to eat another gnat.
My bat encounter seemed first to be a novelty, but quickly came to hold great meaning. The bat in his kind, desperate clutch of my arm clearly recognized that I was saving him. And yet his aggression on the beach showed he had lost none of his animal instinct. In his perception that the people were all jeopardizing, he affirmed an exceptional relationship to me.
In Sustained by Visions I asked for written feedback from the participants, and no two were alike except for one thought, a common line in Cristina's (porcupine) and Joshua's (deer) writing. Both said the most significant aspect of becoming an animal was becoming a human again, walking out into the busy Chicago street and encountering a crowd of people who seemed unaware of their porcupine nature, their deer nature, their animal nature.
Joshua as a Deer, in Sustained by Visions for the Chicago Cultural Center, 2008.
Animal behavior mirrors the metaphysical with clarity, if only by prioritizing. Annie Dillard wrote in Living Like Weasels, "I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular[...] but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of living in the purity of the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive."
These feelings seem both the gift and limitation of language. Our primitive experiences are also those that are beyond words, animal exchanges wherein we know precisely where everyone stands: who might fight and who might befriend.