ENGL/CSCT 767:
Regarding Animals: Theories of Non-Human Life
Dr. David L. Clark
A Response to Francisco de Goya’s El Perro Semihundido
(In Philosophical-Fiction)
Sarah M. W. Bezan
Dec. 1st 2009
A Return
“I follow myself. I am. I follow. I follow myself. I am myself because I Follow.”
– Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am
“The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs – paws, claws, or fangs – different by an abyss of essence.
Only a being that can speak, that is, think, can have hands.”
-Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?
Strapped into her car seat with an arrowroot cookie in hand, two-year-old Anne-Marie watches a smear of
grey and brown pass by her window. Since her mom is busy humming along to the radio in the front seat, AnneMarie is quite alone with her thoughts.
Mom packed her sippy cup, her blanket, a bag embroidered with pink and purple flowers stuffed with little
socks, little shoes, little shirts. Mom did not pack Guenther, their little miniature Daschund. Short-haired, brown,
furry, warm, licky. Anne-Marie likes to wrap her chubby arms around his neck, and kiss his soft fur – that fur that is
so unlike her tawny-pink flesh.
“No, sweetie, Guenthy will just puke in the car on the way to Grandma’s. He’ll keep Daddy company here at
home.”
When they drive by the slaughter-house, Anne-Marie wrinkles her nose. In there, hogs are strung up and
gutted, chickens have their throats slit before they are dunked into vats of boiling water for de-feathering. AnneMarie has never seen the bloody packages that sit in the fridge, knows not of the hands that grasp the legs, loins,
tongues, and ribs.
They drive by the university that is full of words, ideas, thoughts. Anne-Marie has only discovered 200
words, and she is sadly learning more. These words make divisions, categories, calculations, simplifications. They
cover over and bury something inside of her, though she knows not what.
The arrowroot cookie is now soggy, so it is soon discarded on the floor. Mom passes her another as they
reach the city limits, where the smear of grey and brown turns fresh and green. Anne-Marie likes the change in
scenery, the shift in borders.
Soon they will reach Grandma and Grandpa’s. A return. Grandpa will swing her up in his arms, smelling of
soap, his face rough with whiskers. She will giggle and play with toys on the carpet, unaware of the gun-rack in the
hall and the fishing poles in the front closet. She hopes that Grandpa will take her to the barnyard, where she will
stroke the serially-named orange tomcat, Garfield – the tenth in a sequential string of anonymous, virile cats. This
purring, eponymous creature is quite unlike its overweight, lasagne-loving caricature.
Mom turns left at the Whitewood County Veterinary Clinic –that place of care and compassion, and of killing.
Thirty minutes more, before they turn into the lane hedged in Caragana bushes and looming spruce. The blur at the
window has turned from spring green to a flaming orange: a prism of sunset rays. Anne-Marie’s eyes have become
itchy and heavy, and soon she is dreaming.
A red and orange sunset, and an encroaching, apocalyptic darkness. The bloody sunset looks like a wall,
and the earth like a pregnant belly. A little head pokes out as she ascends (or does she descend?) the mound of
earth. A return. What does the phantasmal womb of the earth bear? In the sweet smell of the earth, the taxonomic
pens do not write or draw, and the dissecting table lays bare. What lies beneath the head of the dog? She follows
underground.
Bezan 1