WIZ 1500 Review: Paradox Lost (on us)?

Book: How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human
Author: Melanie Challenger
Penguin Books
New York, 2021

Reviewer: Patricia K.

Sporadically across history, more consistently for the last century, conscientious people have worked at dismantling human supremacy narratives other folks have shored up for millennia. At the hearts of such stories: belief that by virtue of dominance of other species, we human beings are the highest expression of intelligent life. Our superior qualities make us unlike anything else living. This supremacy entitles us to using whatever species we wish (including our own) to our benefit, in whatever way seems good.

You don’t need X-ray glasses to see through to this credo’s backbone: valuation of life—one’s own and others’—rooted in an ethic of hierarchy.  

Advertisement

Why poets need logic

Rerun alert: I wrote this post for the literary blog A Motley Vision back in February of 2006–nearly 14 years ago. My thinking about the role logic must play in poetry has not changed by much. In fact, in what people are calling our new “post-truth reality,” which is really just the good ol’ Might Makes Right mentality striving to elbow its way toward staging a comeback, I believe an intimate relationship between informal reasoning and creative endeavor even more critical. As unpopular as it may be by today’s social media standards, accepting accountability for one’s own thinking is healthy for the individual and healthy for society. But it’s especially healthy and invigorating when it comes to creating meaning, be it through word, visual art, or music.

Poets need logic for the same reason poets need some mastery of form. By crafting poetry within the discipline of poetic forms, poets gain proficiency in the full range of their art from arranging the barest stones of syntax to constructing soaring edifices of odes, sonnets, even free verse. Or we may compare the poet’s learning form to a singer’s practicing of musical scales, which the singer does so that among other things s/he may gain the accuracy and stamina enabling her/him to perform within the full range of her/his vocal gifts. The singer lives in musical constructs; the poet lives in linguistic constructs. Learning form is the responsibility of

anyone who accepts the poet’s calling just as learning basic musical technique is the responsibility of any musician aspiring to competence.

Environment Almighty

Adam designates the animals: an prime example of instrumental language’s usefulness. (Artwork’s real name: “Adam Naming the Animals,” by Theophanes of Crete.) Also, as an aside, Wow, why do we settle for a lion chilling with a lamb as a symbol of peace? That dragon lying down sheltering the hare beneath its wing would be pretty interesting.  The camel, though … I sense artist bias. Public domain image.

A Motley Vision readers from way back may recognize some content in this post. The older version appeared as a 2-part piece in 2010, then titled, “So You Say You Want a Creavolution? Well, You Know…”. I’ve since added an introduction and more material about language and the possible tensions that may be at work when competing narratives go to war. This version is also the outcome of a Facebook discussion where I crowd sourced a thinking problem I ran up against in writing an introduction for a chapter of my WIP, Showdown at Crossfire Canyon: At the Interface Between Language and Landscape. The online discussion resulted in a breakthrough that enabled my reworking the chapter’s introduction and fine-tuning the post.

 

Here it is; have at it.