Animal Dreams: How Humans Think and Write About Animals
Our attempt to remove ourselves from the animal, our domination and use of non-human animals, is a deep wound in our psyche, a wound we’ve covered with various kinds of excuses like scar tissue.
MARC BEKOFF: Interview with David Brooks, one of Australia’s most skilled, unusual, and versatile writers, about his new book called Animal Dreams, a collection of essays about how humans think, dream and write about other species. David’s book is a wonderful companion to Melanie Challengers’ book ‘How to Be Animal’. Here’s what he had to say about how private and public conversations about animals reflect older and deeper attitudes to our own and other species and what questions we must ask to move these conversations forward…
MB: What are some of the topics you weave into the text and what are some of your major messages?
DB: I chip away at the self-serving denials and falsehoods with which we think and write animals out of, rather than into, being… Each of the essays in the book does or tries to do, some of that chipping away. In some, it’s in the area of poetry or fiction (not exclusively Australian: there are essays on Rilke, D.H. Lawrence, etc.), in the attempt to demonstrate how we might read resistantly, to reveal the ways non-human animals have been oppressed by or occluded in our literature, and how we might work to undo the techniques of that oppression. In others it’s looking at some major contemporary philosophers, to reveal the oppressions and occlusions of the animal in their work.
Other essays look at the depth of psychology of this oppression. I argue that our attempt to remove ourselves from the animal, our domination and use of non-human animals, is a deep wound in our psyche, a wound we’ve covered with various kinds of excuses like scar tissue and that it’s only through addressing this wound directly—attempting to repair our relationship with non-human animals, and with the animal in ourselves—that we can salve it. And of course, other essays have been stimulated by events in the world around me. In Australia, we have a terrible relationship with our wildlife. This relationship is reflected in and sustained by public policy. I look at that policy. There are essays on compassionate conservation and against “conservation killing,” for example, or on the predicament of kangaroos in the Australian mind. But all of these, too, are related by this work of undoing as I’ve come to call it. SOURCE…
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