Open Journal Montreal

So, big news, the “chickadee” sound and all its variations mean something. The more “dee’s” the more intense the predator, and the little songsters are so effective with their rallying cry they can actually summon other species to come help. Maybe the chickadees will be our translators, our way in to the coded world of animal communication.

When AnneMarie was at the Biodome a while back a few giggly girls asked her to hold their video camera while they narrated something for school. She pointed the machine toward them, and over their shoulders at the penguin herd. And at that very moment the whole gang of witty, suited, flightless birds turned to face their audience-and the capturing machine- and with one mind opened their arms wide. AnneMarie had to give the camera back, but the evidence of their “hello I’m open” gesture is out there somewhere.

In this review of the new film “March of the Penguins” (scroll down the page to get to it) reviewer Lisa Schwarzbaum seems for a moment to be headed toward the same old “yeah, but they’re just birds” deflation of the anthropomorphic love and survival narrative the movie tells. She does mock the film-maker’s imaginative recreation of the birds’ communication, but then she adds a surprising twist: “They are birds, miraculously designed, as all living things bright and beautiful are, to reproduce.”

Initially I was all hackles-up at this simplistic hetero claim, as it seems to exclude not just homosexual love, but also all the people born unable to reproduce, and those who choose chastity, and those who don’t manage to hook up, and everything we do besides make babies, from the great ‘design’ (making it a very limited and blinkered design indeed.) But then I started to wonder if all this difference, this unique life and variation, might be included, in unexpected ways, in the miracle of all things reproducing.

If the basic evolutionary driving mechanism is reproduction, and it’s the the key to our design, then acts of communication and collaboration, system design and building, government, education, music, football, whatever, are either all elaborate theaters for the performance of our desirability, and subconsciously we participate to hook ourselves some mates, or else they suggest a more complicated understanding of what is it we want to reproduce. Maybe we don’t just want to reproduce little versions of ourselves, or continuations of our species, but beings connected to the rest of the everything that is reproducing. Maybe with our sentience we’ve added (or discovered) dimensions to that which is reproducing. Not just living things, but ideas, kindnesses, and cruelties have a way of making more of themselves. Maybe we improvise new nets and tactics to deal with unexpected collisions and deviations on the way to reproduction- poverty or inherited abuse or culture (valuing male over female life, say) make a “successful” reproducer abandon their product, and the system of living things improvises to fill the gap. I think we need to keep our minds open to the surprising and delightful ways we find to right the balance, because, by definition, it won’t look like what we expected.

We know now, for example, that many animal species, including penguins, choose life-long homosexual monogamy, and that sometimes they adopt abandoned eggs and make great parents.

Realizing all the ways our feathered and furry neighbors communicate and collaborate twists back into an interesting challenge to the way we think about human evolutionary success. I always wondered as a kid in intro to philosophy why we so rigidly defended our exclusive right to sentience. Why do we need to be the only ones who think and feel?

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[ originally posted on Friday, June 24th, 2005 at 11:58 am and is filed under Everything, Gender, Writing. ]