Beast and Man in India

If you value your life and the struggle for survival, you must value all life around you. "Be a good [person], be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can."1 Animals are remarkably sentient creatures;their social behaviors “like humans, have their tragedies and mayhap (perhaps) their romances.” 2 The more time one spends pondering animals, observing their behavior, uncovering their human likeness, the sooner it becomes evident “how cowardly it [is] to hurt the weak and the helpless.”3 Hunting, purely for sport, is especially despicable. Even “the wild boar has been known to face and defeat the tiger, and though his first impulse is to fly before British sportsmen, he often makes a gallant stand before the unequal odds of horses, razor-sharp spears, and legions of yelling rustics brought against him.”4 If you look for courage or bravery in the animal kingdom, you will find it. If you wish to discover love between parent and offspring, you will find it; sadness, happiness, boredom, fright, and excitement are all exhibited by animals. Killing sentient animals when unnecessary for survival is meritless and unworthy of our evolutionary position.


1) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 12
2) John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 71
3) Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, 52
4) John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 180

Victorians in Asia

"The dominion of humans over nature has led to a devaluing of the natural world and a subsequent destruction of its resources"(Sullivan 922). The world is frightfully coarse and scarcely mannered; life is not only unappreciated, but abused. Most insultingly is how things have been defined by the word "just". It is just a chicken; it is just a tree. To use “just” about a living thing is attempting to strip the mystery of its creation and purpose. "Just" belittles the struggle millions of networked cells endured on the arduous pilgrimage of evolution. And what better way of protecting the damaging actions of man is there than establishing "a dominantly human-focused morality" for the "Western Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (Sullivan 922)? In their most sympathetic form, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all agree to some degree of responsibility and limited "obligation to creation" (Sullivan 922). The lack of significant emphasis in sympathy is evidently seen in our planet's ailing state. The damage exerted on the planet denotes a lack of compassion without measure. Global warming would be forgivable if it was the inevitable residue of an international economy that ended poverty. The cruelty and mass murder of millions of animals could never be appropriate, but the pain would boarder on understandable if the profit-bent food industry annihilated something as offensive as child starvation. The melancholy truth: we have the means to reduce cruelty, protect the environment, and drastically better the world, but our disturbing lack of courage damns us. We do not turn to each other, but blindly, anthropocentrically, delude ourselves with the manifestation of a personal God and a personal heaven that makes Earth seem small and petty. So long as that idea remains fashionable, and that is the way we should talk of it – like a sweater quickly going out of style, "harmony with nature and with other humans" cannot exist (Sullivan 923). Society can continue raping the world for a couple more hundred years; feasting feverishly on all of its natural resources until every life form is threatened. And since my arguments always suggest that no blissful kingdom awaits you, what motivation do you have to change? Do not allow yourself to be defined as an organism that knew how to care and love and wonder but cast it all aside. Realize what the consciousness offers: you are sitting and reading the combination of 26 simple characters that are instruments in "the art of writing... all that mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books" and vast libraries of binary bytes (Carlyle 609). Mankind always mysteriously conceives “a new vehicle and vesture [so] our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live” (Carlyle 608). All of life exhibits this evolution; to go against it is faster and eaiser than slowly sifting through reason, pondering science, and reforming the self. “Each person needs to remake himself or herself in the image of the divine ideal” whose life embodies “friendliness and compassion” (Sullivan 925). Epitomizing ahimsa by foregoing “causing pain to or killing any life out of anger, or from a selfish purpose” Mahatma Gandhi lived nobly.

I know how impossible it sounds to be reborn to any likeness of this man, but do not forget that one, simple man was all he was. My heaven is a world where men are more like Gandhi; my hell is where “the tree should just stop bearing any fruit”; our salvation is sympathy (Shilapi 931).

Holi Festival

.....I foray into Hindu religion on a glorious Saturday among some of my classmates and the wonderfully bleached and rounded fellow we sometimes call Bump. Mother Nature blows us cool and crisp air while Apollo’s chariot hangs at a comforting and warming distance. I, wary of Holika, the demon sister of Hiranyakashipu, king of demons, came ready to fight! Size matters not! I would use my noble hammer and smite the evil, vanquishing Holika once and for all attempting to burn her brother Prahlad so many moons ago. But karma had Hiranyakashipu’s evil plan turn, and Holika is burned in her brother’s pyre. I’m relieved; I’m a lover, not a fighter. And indeed I had come to the right place then. Why it wasn’t long before the holy people started singing and chanting for Radha and Krishna, and everyone worshiped in the name of love and selflessness.
.....I spiraled down into my sub-consciousness, zooming through a tunneled nothingness filled with high-contrast blotches and rings. When my decent levels off, as there is no bottom or top, Radha and Krishna stare tellingly at me. Inside of myself I cannot hide anything from anyone, and my unsettling heart beat fastens as the beating drums of holy men festively up their tempo. I sit Indian-style in a foreign Hindu temple for a moment as wispy ghosts of love are drawn fancifully in my imagination. My skin horripilates with waves of displeasure and desire to cry. Love conjures from the grave a Glorious phantom to illuminate my tempestuous soul , and from the vision, something mysterious and something serene begins. I recommit myself to love. Fearlessness funnels into the imaginary hammer that trumps Hiranyakashipu and I promise to love more. When I do not love, I will try to, and when I am not trying to, I am thinking about love. And my imperfect life will follow love’s perfect path.
.....Cat taps my shoulder; reality snaps into focus as my eyes open wide; her soft smile is gracious. “It’s time to eat,” she says, her mousy voice sounding full of etiquette. I eat two plates of food; Rooftop’s girlfriend doesn’t eat as much as samples, so I wrap up her plate easily. Bump shares with me a sweet round donut hole; a lawyer and his girlfriend sneak away to “change”. After the scrumptious vegetarian dinner Bump kicks off Dhulhendi, the powder throwing part of the festival. We laugh wildly, playing like children. One innocent coloring leads to another and suddenly we’re covered! The music returns and the crowd mixes dancing, running, and powder dousing. Smiles beam and jokes abound as Blake takes it in the mouth (hahaha). Oh, the Holi festival.

P2: Charles Darwin and Sympathy

Charles Darwin and Sympathy


We were born with five senses, our initial connections to the world; everyone is connected through these senses. We can share the medium of worldly experience because, for the most part, the quality and function of a sense varies very little between two healthy people. The sky is blue for everyone who can see it. Science is a collection of these confirmable observations. But for all of the understanding science has brought to the world, it is rarely used in establishing a connection to the world around us. We take what is convenient from science and ignore the humbling research that has us governed by the same natural laws that make cockroaches so difficult to exterminate. Our origin as a species, explained by Victorian scientist Charles Darwin, should elicit sympathy to the world and all of its living creatures.

Many people stare off into a sunset and wonder why we are so attracted to the cascading colors in the sky. This curiosity exists because we live and die by the sun. Our star starts the chemical reactions essential to the plants and animals we later consume. The renegade sunflower protruding out of a large crack in the cemented asphalt and all of mankind are equally dependent on the sun. As far as the sun is concerned, humans like flowers, use their time to sustain life and reproduce it. So why can we not stop looking up? Our cells are programmed to recognize the sun’s importance. They remember, even if we do not, that for life on this planet, the sun is critical.

Even with most of society writing it off as cancerous, the sun’s rays continue to permeate our skin, triggering our cells to produce vitamin D, the nutrient whose absence makes it impossible for the body to absorb other nutrients. The effect is the same in plants and other animals, tomatoes as well as chickens. Charles Darwin reasoned that if all life required the sun there must be a similar origin to all life. To Charles Darwin, all life is a deviation or progression from a common ancestor. Before Darwin’s pilgrimage to the Galapagos Islands, paleontology had already highlighted interesting connections between the fossil records of similar animals. And after the brave voyage of the Beagle, the small and poorly funded vessel Charles Darwin sailed on, the Tree of Life, Darwin’s personal analogy for his theory that all life stems from the same origin, was being confirmed. “[On the Tree of Life] the green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species.”

Evolution is denied by conservative Christians that fail to recognize that Darwinian theology could be used to expand Biblical phrases such as “God made the beasts of the earth” and “God created man”. By having animals and plants inhabiting Earth before man, the Bible supports Darwin’s series of events. Rejecting evolution has implications beyond the stupidity of foregoing one or two trivial facts. By refuting the progression from ape to man you cannot sympathize with life as a whole as easily because you have denied your primordial connection to living creatures; that is the implication of denying evolution. Evolution is the foundation of biology, our life science, which we use to treat, cure, and prevent decease. Natural selection describes the inevitable order of organisms based on their effectiveness. The beak variations on the birds of the Galapagos Islands are not accidental, inconsequential, or unnecessary. It is the driving mechanism for survival, prevalent in the gargantuan woolly mammoth and microscopic virus. This is how the universe functions and is what hammers us together. Darwin reveals that this world, differently assembled and dynamically behaved, is bound together. But fear and vanity have corrupted Darwin’s incomparable message. Many people, of varying religions, refuse to acknowledge this biological unity and have missed the source of all beauty in world. “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved”.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, but fails at uniting people as completely and widespread as it should to the animal and plant life around them. The Victorian response to animal cruelty lead to the creation of the longstanding Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824 and expanded to India in 1890, making it a moral priority to treat animals fairly. Moreover, since Darwin, science has expanded our knowledge of life’s similarities by isolating the DNA molecule. Chimpanzees share about 96% of human genetic code while the genetic variability between the author and reader is less than .1%. But compassion cannot be exacted upon mathematically; it is not the chimpanzees’ minute four percent genetic variance that invokes kindliness. If you value your life and the struggle for survival, you must value all life around you. "Be a good [person], be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can." Animals are remarkably sentient creatures. On top of bleeding when Monkeys are pricked, their social behaviors “like humans, have their tragedies and mayhap (perhaps) their romances”. The more time one spends pondering animals, observing their behavior, uncovering their human likeness, the sooner it becomes evident “how cowardly it [is] to hurt the weak and the helpless”. Hunting, purely for sport, is especially despicable. Even “the wild boar has been known to face and defeat the tiger, and though his first impulse is to fly before British sportsmen, he often makes a gallant stand before the unequal odds of horses, razor-sharp spears, and legions of yelling rustics brought against him”. If you look for courage or bravery in the animal kingdom, you will find it. If you wish to discover love between parent and offspring, you will find it; sadness, happiness, boredom, sleepiness, fright, and excitement are also all exhibited by animals. Killing sentient animals when unnecessary for survival is meritless and unworthy of our evolutionary position. Charles Darwin should be remembered for scientifically confirming that the driving force in the fiber of your being, as innately personal as it might feel, is the most common of traits.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species invokes sympathy; the connection of all species and exaltation of Homo sapiens as the highest link in the evolutionary chain demands a moral understanding, a caring for all things around you, a revering acknowledgement for the millions of years of struggle and adaptation that the simple sunflower represents. If we are the distant relatives of all life, the bondage of solitude is broken and we are never alone. Darwin liberates. Freedom from truth is the goal of the Victorian era.

A sunset represents the end of a day to a multitude of organisms on this planet. Even some marine life is aware of when the sun sets. The sun’s light bends differently as it sets, its prismatic effect splashing widely against the darkening blue sky. Life is like that light. White light bends into blue, green, red, yellow, purple, orange, and brown the way life branches into trees, birds, ferns, flowers, lions, elephants, and people. The sun is the center of our solar system much like a nucleus is the center of an atom. The universe has hammered together matter in a meticulously coordinated way. Our origins are in the stars, where heavier elements first came together. Living organisms are connected as syllables from sound, without care for distance, ethnicity, size, shape, or religion. When “things come to be turned inside out and put down for what they are” the sympathy displayed throughout the world to those less fortunate, less capable, and more needing will be the real measure of our evolution. Are we evolving towards selfishness? Or can we overcome materialistic temptation and “annihilate the self” in the pursuit of blessedness? Charles Darwin’s On Origin of Species can be wrongly interpreted as a weapon against sympathy. Some people find Darwin’s book anti-God and regressive; it has spawned social Darwinism among those that refuse to recognize the path evolution must follow if we are to prosper as a whole. Sympathy is the only way to understanding the “knowledge [of animals], which [is] more prompt and perfect in its way, and can help us save the lives [and souls] of men”.


Word Count
Count w/ quotes: 1759
Count w/o quotes: 1564
URL: http://forbump08.blogspot.com/2008/03/p2.html

1)http://www.thespiderawards.com/AwardsPass/WINNERS-NOMINEES/PRO-advertising/images/the-five-senses.jpg

2)http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_1161_217044_rodney-graham.jpg

3)Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2002), 63

4)http://www.detectingdesign.com/images/definingevolution/ape%20to%20man.jpg

5)“God”, Holy Bible: Genesis 1:25-28, (King James Version)

6)Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2002), 67

7)Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2000), 12

8)John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, (London: MacMillan and Co., 1891), 71

9)Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, (New York: New American Library, 2002), 52

10)John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, (London: MacMillan and Co., 1891), 180

11)http://exploratorium.edu/imagery/stills/prism.jpg

12)Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, (New York: New American Library, 2002), 52

13)Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, (Austin: Jenn’s Copy & Binding, 2008), 607

14)Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, (New York: New American Library, 2002), 48

Sympathetic Imagination

Sympathetic Imagination is a quality that cannot be obtained without the “annihilation of the self”[i]; to penetrate an object and become the object suggests the termination of your will, dreams, and needs. So is the sympathetic imagination a quality exhibited by the caring, or the understanding? That is, are some people born with imaginations that lend themselves to this metaphysical understanding, or does this sensitivity come from knowing everything about the object or person? Is it something that can be obtained through observation, or can it be studied? Probably both. I think we can ask ourselves what our dog wants. Once we understand his faces and mannerisms, we can come to memorize when they occur. When these two things become automatic, like a simple multiplication fact, and a rhythmic part of our daily routine, our sympathetic imagination for our pets wants is unconscious. It is a sort of love, like when you stare at someone’s eyes and know they want to be kissed. In that "extraordinary affinity, or sympathy [no] flavour of grossness" in life remains; "to share each other's emotions, fancies, and dreams" is something "super-sensitive, something absurd" – imaginary and obtainable.[IV] But how is this applicable to nature? “Ah, the heir, to his selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn”[ii]. Man is the heir here, and Hopkins suggests that our self-centeredness, our giant cities, sports cars, and monuments are clouding a special “vision” we should have with the universe. After all, mystical or not, we are the residue of an intelligent universe; human beings and our consciousness are a specialty in this vast space. But society is walking away from the “connection” – the sympathy, understanding, linkage to the world that spawned us. “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”[iii]. Was Jesus’ sympathetic imagination so powerful he was constantly overwhelmed by a total understanding of the people and world around him? What of Gandhi or Buddha? Maybe the sympathetic imagination begins when we realize that we are human for no particular reason. Why wasn’t I simply born a German Sheppard? If God has a plan for all live on earth, you should be thankful you weren’t one of dozen blossoms on the unnoticed shrub against the Victorian-inspired building. And if you have no trust in God, then it is purely luck and coincidence that the universe bore you human. Either way, while you stop to smell the roses, or observe the birds, or laugh at gay bounce of an energetic French poodle, you must force yourself to imagine the brevity of life, and the constriction of its dynamic, the confines that your human brain does not possess. If you can imagine yourself flying, imagine yourself not being able to move. If you can imagine yourself not being able to move, imagine yourself not being able to speak. And then imagine yourself speaking to everyone at once, in whispers carried by the wind. Now, imagine trying to do all your living in a week, and you have sympathetically lived as a flower. And it was a life, short and sweet, filled with growth, maturation, consumption, and procreation.

[i] Carlyle, pg. 607
[ii] Hopkins, Tragic Vision, http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/Hopkins's%20Tragic%20Vision.html
[iii] Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

[iv] Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, pg. 243/253

Pattern of Conversion

Science and faith, the wants of mind and heart, the struggle between physical and mental events, are paradoxes that perplex us. But this is the price of consciousness, of evolving to self-realization. It is a regal quality, for the highest form of life, that yields consequential responsibility? This unique, secular quality creates the juxtaposition: how are we a part of this world and a part above it? The implied disparity with nature can leave us dissatisfied when “all [of nature, animals and plants] save the spirit of man, seem divine”. [i] The unnatural, rotten need for success and pride, the debauchery, temptation, vanity, and maliciousness of human beings is a detriment to this world. It would be a greener, happier place without us. Yet, it contains us. And so, our ultimate goal must be to procure purpose, not of wealth, power, or sex, but of value and worldly continuity. This is the voyage; the pilgrimage taken by the most selfless and fearless of explorers, the rebirth worth being born for.

Several Victorians recognized this baptism, rebirth, or palingenesis. “The soul’s abiding hope lay in its conversion from the tyranny of self to the higher purposes of the eternal process”. [ii] In the Victorian Era, this idea could not be separated from its Christianity, since that was the road of redemption. This caused conversion to have Christian morality infused into it, demanding a certain abandonment of pleasure for cleanliness, “sacrificing the pursuit of pleasure to the love of God”. [iii] This demand is unnecessary. The connection to everything around you, and the genuine desire to help it, does not necessitate the sacrifice of personal pleasures. As long as our actions connect or strengthen a universal connection, they are justified; we cannot afford to forget that “the enjoyments of life are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing” like tennis, laughing, eating amongst good company, and playing more tennis thereafter. [iv] This disassociation of conversion and Christianity I stress only because of the conservative turn, and thus holistic abandonment, that Christianity has on this world. Christ, save me from your followers.
This is not to say, shy away from God! O Contrer! “Art thou [nature] not the living garment of God?”[v] And if God is displaced “at the outside of his universe”[vi], we should, as the most capable beings, take in the stern responsibility of caring and respecting all of it. We are all woven of the same particles, and while we are all differently strung, we are equally deserving of the “infinite love [and] infinite pity” [vii] we want for ourselves. This purpose is the apotheosis of your being, an “annihilation of self”[viii] to produce love and sympathy.

For the selfless: "the grey rain curtain of this world rolls back and all turns to silver glass; and then you see it: white shores. And beyond: a far, green country under a swift sunrise." - Gandalf, The Return of the King

[i] John Henry Newman, page 596
[ii] Buckley, Pattern of Conversion, page 594
[iii] Buckley, Pattern of Conversion, page 599
[iv] John Mill, page 694
[v] Thomas Carlyle, page 608
[vi] Carlyle, page 606
[vii] Carlyle, page 608
[viii] Carlyle, page 607

Earthlings

For reasons most obvious to Professor Bump, I met up with Cool Cat at around 7:15 pm. I arrived before she did, and I had already acquired the first round of vegetarian handouts. The faces of prominent celebrities garnished the pages; they were being quoted on why they were vegetarian. Although interesting, it did little to persuade me. For me, celebrities are stupid until they prove otherwise. So, I chatted up Cool Cat. We attempted discussing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the conversation couldn’t be torn away from the awesome hold Victorian literature has on us. Before the movie commenced, Cat and I grabbed some bagels. Well, Cat grabbed one; I took two, half a raisin-cranberry loaf, orange juice, and three vegan Oreo cookies. I generously laced the bagels with the tofu/cream cheese.

The documentary started innocently enough, cliché enough. The camera zoomed into the Earth from the majestic view of space; the voice of the capable Joaquin Phoenix introduced the Earth and her inhabitants. Plants, animals, oceans, water, it was all there. But the mood quickly soured. Words like racism, sexism, species-ism, prejudice, and injustice began weaving into his narrative. It was an assault on the senses. Pictures of animal slaughter were paralleled with Holocaust ones, Joaquin Phoenix mourned the explicitly connected actions of our brutally insensitive race. This is the gist of the evening: the human race has proven, yet again, that we are miserable, inconsiderate, pathetic excuses for animals. We are the only part of the animal kingdom that kills for sport; we are the only organisms on this planet whose selfishness far exceeds the natural balance between predator and prey. And we are crudely going about it. We are literally raping animals out of any possible happiness. We bled them to death, beat them to death, stomp on them when they’re in our way, cut their beaks off, and snip their tails off. There was such a cacophony of terrorized animal shrieks that my head is still throbbing from the maddening noises of their agony. They are massed together, killed together, under fed, in some cases over fed, and always mistreated. The cows that milked to exhaustion, living maybe half their projected life expectancy, are sold to fast-food chains. Hens are caged in pens so small they can never stretch their wings. This extreme confinement maddens them, and they bounce into the cages until they start losing their feathers, rubbing their skin raw into sores that get infected, but never addressed medically. And this evil industry makes no exceptions. How can it be someone’s job to fire steel rods into pig’s heads as they struggle to get away? How can women sit, contain a goose with their thighs, and pluck them bare? Why do matadors get something out of killing an animal that has been weakened and is unfairly matched from the start? We’re filth, nasty and rotten.

I’ve given up pork. I know I’ll eat meat again; it is going to be organic, and I will chew it wondering if any of the organic standards were really kept, wondering if my chicken lived at all like a chicken without the curse of man would. But I have given up pork. My audio memory can’t drive their piercing oinks out.