Every family has its myths and thus its little boxes. For example, in my family, each child had their own kingdom: I was the book girl, my sister the animal lover, my brother the sportsman. And we were so obedient to mythology that, when we grew up, I continued to be surrounded by more and more books, my sister became a veterinarian, and my brother went on to play tennis for a university to go to college. In fact, come to think of it, each of us to this day sustains our lives with the thing that is our passion (or our addiction).

In my case, the many books that pile up around the house certainly are an addiction. And so terrible that perhaps they—along with family mythology—have gotten me addicted to words and gotten in the way of other forms of communication with beings. When did I discover this? Now.

I will tell this story.

As I mentioned, the animal lover in my childhood home was my sister. She always had dogs, hamsters, fish and all the non-human language kingdom. After she grew older, she became an expert on large mammals (like cows) and fish as well.

I was interested in “humans,” the word that almost always means that what you know about humans comes from the words that have been written about them. How then was I going to connect with animals? It could only be through the experience of other people who were also from the realm of words and knew how to communicate that experience.

And so I went to some writers for help in writing this text—and, as you will see, I stole a bit and came up with an actress who is above all an artist (someone who uses an art form to bring a new way of looking at something).

The first one who gave me a hand on this journey was Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. There are many animals in her work and many texts about the relationship between humans and animals.

Do you have a nose? I’ll bet you do, because besides being people, we are also animals. Man is the most important animal in the world, because besides feeling, man thinks, solves, and speaks. Animals speak without words.

This is perhaps the synthesis of her thinking, not only about our relationship with animals, but also about our place in the world. In The Woman Who Killed the Fish, she describes, as a kind of diary, her relationship with animals. All animals, the ones she has had and the ones she has observed.

One woman I talked to said that Lispector’s book changed her life when she was nine years old. It was the first time she felt she was not being treated “like a child.” Lispector had this ability to know how to talk to anyone, of any age. And to treat children as what they are: not “children” in a lessor sense, but beings in the making, who are in the phase of freely receiving all that the world can give them. The real world, translated into real language and that, although it may seem imaginative, is in fact the most objective. For it translates our way of seeing and feeling everything.

Going back. In this book, she tells about dogs and about different ways of loving.

One day, walking through the streets of the city, I saw a mutt. The mutts are so intelligent that the one I saw sensed right away that I was good to animals and was in the same minute excited and wagging its tail. As for me, it was only by looking that I soon fell in love with his face.

Love with dogs is almost always reciprocal without much conflict. Maybe because there is no verbal language for people to express themselves too much and thus get in the way. And since it is a light, reciprocated love, it protects us from loneliness:

“Dilermando was almost as intelligent as a two-year-old child. He lived behind me so he wouldn’t feel lonely.”

Other times dogs protect too, but in another, more concrete way: they work as alert sentinels and owners of a certain territory. So it was with Jack:

I don’t remember what breed he was because I don’t see any differences, I like all human and animal breeds. Jack was one of those dogs that barked all the time and watched the house so that burglars don’t get in. Jack only did a few things in his disciplined life: he barked, ate, mated a lot, watched the house, slept, and played with us. He had a very lively life because he enjoyed everything he did. Just like me, because I do several things in life and I like what I do.

As in many relationships, the bond of love unfolds in a process of identification: “just like me,” he and I do what we like. In fact, it’s a privilege, to be able to follow one’s own desires.

In Almost Truly, another children’s book, Lispector reverses the narrative voices and changes up the usual positions on the human-animal scale. It is her last companion, Ulysses, who narrates the story, “I’m a little naughty, I don’t always obey, I like to do what I want, I pee in Clarice’s room.”

Throughout the book, it is the dog—the narrator subject—that shows his life with Lispector, the narrated object. The narrator shows how he speaks and stays quiet, walks, sits and exerts himself in that house. The beginning already shows this dance of voices in the indistinct web of species, in a language of simultaneous translation: “I keep barking at Clarice and she writes what I tell her. In fact, it is almost the same language that is spoken from one being to another, in the radicalization of the transfer of subjectivities.

Continuing the tour through Lispector’s work, we see that this horizontal human-animal communication is always there. And as much in language as in affections.

In the short story “The Buffalo,”  the narrator comes face to face with another large, strong, and voracious mammal. Such a clash that she allows herself to live down to the depths of the hatred that pierced her viscera. She, a woman once subjected and dominated, now encounters the other and allows herself to be an active subject, one who hates and kills.

The woman stunned in surprise, slowly shaking her head. The buffalo calm. Slowly the woman shook her head, amazed at the hatred with which the buffalo, quiet with hatred, looked at her. Almost innocent, shaking an incredulous head, its mouth ajar. Innocent, curious, going deeper and deeper into those eyes that unhurriedly stared at her, naive, in a sleepy sigh, neither wanting nor able to escape, trapped in the mutual murder. Trapped as if her hand was stuck forever to the dagger she had craved herself.

In The Passion According to G.H., we have another way of being confused with the other animal, this time by introjecting it completely. In this case, devouring a cockroach in the anthropophagic gesture possible for the mistress who infiltrates the maid’s territory. Beyond the expected encounter with the human, there is the radical otherness of the incommunicable animal. Beyond the animal kingdom that can be communicated, we enter the realm of the Kafkaesque insect, the cockroach that G.H. will devour on her Via Crucis.

Sometimes the encounter with animal otherness is enigmatic and beyond the flow of language or affection or embodiment. What takes place is pure mystery, questioning between philosophical and existential, as in “The Egg and the Hen.”. Lispector herself said that she did not “understand” what she had written in that short story.

Here we are already at the threshold of the living being, animal and seed, chicken and egg, potency of life and enigma of origin.

The egg is something suspended. It never lands. When it lands, it is not what landed. It was something that stayed under the egg. – I look at the egg in the kitchen with superficial attention so as not to break it. I am very careful not to understand it. Since it is impossible to understand it, I know that if I do, it is because I am making a mistake. Understanding is the proof of error. To understand it is not the way to see it.—Never thinking about the egg is a way of having seen it. 

And not understanding is the matrix of her writing. This is what is behind the letters and her writing seeks to write itself endlessly, as it took me an entire doctorate to meditate.

Back to the woman who killed the fish…

That woman who killed the fish is unfortunately me. But I swear to you that I didn’t mean to. Me, of all people! I don’t have the courage to kill a living thing!

This is how the author begins the book. And throughout it she provides testimonies of her many relationships with animals, as a lawyer in her own defense, to end up asking for forgiveness for her crime. What is the main argument? The lack of language. The time when not a word was said between Lispector and the animals was the only time she killed them:

They must have starved, just like people. But we talk and complain, the dog barks, the cat meows, all animals speak with sounds. But fish are as mute as a tree and had no voice to complain and call me. And when I went to look, they were still, skinny, reddish – and sadly already dead from hunger.

And back to my own story. As I took this long walk through the many Claricean animals, I realized that the little joke that was told in my house might not make that much sense. My siblings always said that I never wanted to play with the animals in the backyard. And that I always preferred to be with the books. To which I would reply: I prefer animals that talk.

I began to realize that my childhood mythology that divided the world of books and the world of animals was not quite right. And that maybe things are more complex than two kinds of beings, with two kinds of language.

How naive I was, really. These are just the little boxes of words and consciousness that try to imprison what is real.

Then I remembered to also return to a text that had impressed me in the time when, I don’t know how, I had two cats.

Actually, I know how. My friend gave a kitten to my son, also a baby. The way my baby son called the cat was very beautiful for a psychoanalytical mother, almost like the Freudian game of Fort-Da, a process of elaborating the mother-child separation. He was one year old and just beginning to learn the language of words. The kitten, poor thing, days-old and frightened, hid under the sofa. My baby: donnn. That was “over,” “done.” When the other is outside the scope of my gaze, it is over. Have you ever thought how anguishing this is? When the mother leaves?

Well. Then the cat would come out and my son, human, in ecstasy, would laugh. Then the cat would disappear again: donnn! And this happened so many times, just like Freud’s grandson with his reel and practically the same words to elaborate the separation anxiety, that the cat’s name became Don.

The second cat came to the house a few months after this one. I think they can smell each other the same, the interspecies connection. The mother cat went to breed on the roof and one fine day another kitten fell into my garden, so small next to the other that its name could only be this: Baby. I mean, that is what I imagine my son thought when he started calling our new kitten Baby.

And that’s how I had two cats, Don and Baby. And so I went on to read The Cat Inside, by William Burroughs. I was very impressed by that book. Then and again now, as I reread it to write this text. I seem to understand perfectly (always a mistake to think that, I know, but it is true) what he is saying. Things like:

Wimpy gives me images of my son, Billy, and my poor father. It’s ten o’clock at the Price Road House. I go to the pantry for milk and cookies and hope my father is not there. Frustration makes me moody and impertinent. “Gay” was not a usual word in those days. He is there. – Hi, Bill. The pathetic plea and the eye pain. – Hi. Nothing, just cold hatred. If only… too late. It’s all over. Only the rock garden remains. Another flashback: about two months before I leave the Stone House. I am sitting in the armchair by the fireplace with the white cat on my lap. I feel a sudden twinge of hatred and resentment. I am not so sure about moving into a house. There is no money! More likely a small apartment. Sandboxes… intolerable! I can smell you from here. I wonder if the white cat disappeared in a burst of resentment. People and animals can leave in spirit before they leave bodily.

Or, beyond the personal story of his life plot, with the character Bill, his father and his cat, Burroughs brings us nothing less than a treatise on the cat-human relationship. He also gives a general postulate, perhaps one of the most classic formulations of his—and of all—literature that delved into this topic:

I postulate that cats began as psychic companions, as family members, and have never moved away from that role. Dogs began as sentinels. On farms and in villages, it is still their primary job to announce anything approaching. They are hunters and watchdogs, and that is why they hate cats. – Take a look at the services we provide! And meanwhile, all cats do is gloat and purr. Mouse-hunters, eh? A cat needs half an hour to kill a mouse. All cats do is purr and divert the master’s attention away from my honest shit-eating grin. The worst thing is that they have no notion of right and wrong. Cats do not offer services. They offer themselves. Of course they want affection and shelter. Love is not free. Like all pure creatures, cats are pragmatic.

Clarice, my son, Don, Baby and Bill have taught me this. We have psychic companions: all those, beyond or beyond speech, with whom we can experience an encounter. An emotion, affection, letting oneself be affected and be with.

Some might call this drive, a primordial impulse, a libidinal connection. Perhaps one of the most concrete metaphors for encounter is sexuality.

And so I’ll end with something new that I discovered recently, and that also influenced me on this long path of searching for my animal viscerality. It was the series Green Porno, by the brilliant Isabella Rossellini. She wrote the script, directed and acted in this series of audiovisual animations. Yes, I know I went off script from what I set out to do in this text but let’s take this as just the icing on the cake to close.

We were fascinated watching the episodes, me and my friend who showed me this series (yes, we need friends to open our horizons of encounter). It shows the sex life of animals, with their courtship rituals, mating, pregnancy and upbringing.

Gods in heaven, how animal we all are. What is life after all? I am even afraid of thinking too much and ending up identifying myself with the praying mantis, the snail or the fly. Our species Sapiens is not just 150,000 years old. It carries within it the struggle for life, which is already celebrating an anniversary of millions of years.

So, returning, after so many years, to Lispector’s animals, to Burroughs’ cats or to the sexuality of us all, I discovered that I didn’t need to be unrelated to animals to be able to dive into the realm of words. And I understood, again, how old and complicated and mysterious life is, and how strange the categories are. Humans vs. animals; night vs. day; animals vs. letters; men vs. women; Blacks vs. whites, words vs. silence.

We are all living, subjective beings, each in our own way.

Now is the time to open all Pandora’s boxes and let our unconscious connect more freely.