There’s a line in one of Thomas Hardy’s novels that I remember the gist of, but can’t track down. I can’t remember which novel it’s in, and I love Hardy, so I have read many. It’s something about an old farm gatepost, smoothed in a patina of grime from generations and generations of cows rubbing against it as they passed. The line about all those long dead cows says something about how they are “unimaginable in their oblivion.” Googling those words, or my general impression of the context doesn’t yield anything. I find that frustrating and fitting, so if you figure out where the line occurs, don’t tell me.
I got to thinking about oblivion on a run, passing by a house that used to have two dogs in the yard, and now has only one. This is how I learn of the presumed deaths of dogs. I stop seeing or hearing them on my runs. People are different of course. I have a neighbor whose increasing physical decrepitude is measurable by how close he parks to his front door. Currently, he pulls his Prius very nearly up the granite stoop. When he dies, there will be public records, an obituary, and this is a small town, so people will mention it to each other. When dogs die, on the other hand, they just stop turning up outside, or their owners stop walking them and after a while, you think, “I wonder what happened to that dog I used to see” and what happened is probably that it died.
There used to be a tall, supercilious sighthound down the road—an Afghan hound or a Saluki or something—one of those dogs that looks like Janice, the groovy, lady Muppet. This dog always had its head and ears wrapped in a snood. I don’t know why. It always barked at me. Then one day I realized it had been a long time since I had seen it.
My grandparents had a dog when I was little. I have been trying to remember its name, and one morning I woke up and thought, “Bandit” and I think maybe that was its name. Whenever I think about that dog, I also think about the seafoam green canister vacuum cleaner my grandparents had. Maybe because both the dog and the vacuum were low to the ground, and rounded at both ends, so it could be hard to tell if they were coming or going. Bandit has been dead for many dog lifetimes. My grandparents have been dead for a generation too, but their names are written down places, and Bandit, if that was the name, will be swallowed up by the same oblivion that claimed Hardy’s cows.
I think about Donald Hall’s Names of Horses. The oblivion of those long dead horses, and the deeper oblivion of the nameless trees that made the cordwood the horses hauled, and the trees themselves made of molecules drawn up from the soil with dead horses in it.
When I was in veterinary school, there was a bulletin board that displayed thank you notes from callers to the school’s Pet Loss Hotline. It was staffed by vet students who would talk to people who needed a witness to their grief over their dead animals. There was one thank you note, written by a child, addressed to a dog, reading “Daizy You ar gone but deFUNLee missed.” Decades on now, that line comes back to me. I can’t rescue Daizy from her oblivion; I never even met the dog, or the kid that wrote that. The kid would be almost thirty now. As long as that kid remembers that dog is as long as she escapes oblivion.
I am back in a classroom again this spring. My students and I have been thinking through how life is sustained using mealworms as our models. The little orange grubs have become our mascots of sorts, with their simple needs: carrots to eat, oatmeal to burrow in. If they live to be adults, they will go from grubs to adult darkling beetles. The students got to talking about other sorts of grubs and caterpillars—other fleshy, practical forms of larvae, underappreciated compared with the flashy adult moths and butterflies they may become. A student mentioned about tomato hornworms, and the fate so many of them meet. Describing it inevitably engenders horror—a mother wasp injects her eggs under the hornworm’s skin, and the hornworm is devoured alive from the inside out by voracious wasp larvae. Hearing this, another student was quiet for a bit, and then said, “Do you think the hornworms understand what’s happening to them?”
Once upon a time, I had a student who would listen intently to explanations of how organisms reproduced sexually. Fish spawning, the male spilling semen over a cluster of eggs on a streambed—this student would raise his hand, and, very seriously, in his heavy Boston accent, ask, “Do they get pleasure from that?” Insects depositing sperm packets into females, he’d ask it. Pine trees launching wind-borne pollen into the air, he’d ask it. He also was always asking if we could have a pizza party in class. He became something of a punchline.
Jenny Offill:
“But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.”
When my current student asked if the hornworms know they’re dying, I felt the previous version of myself scoff, but also try to give a reasoned and scientifically sound explanation for how we can be sure that hornworms don’t know much of anything at all. But my current self is much less sure of things generally
, and does not rear up on its hind legs in a posture of professorship like it used to. Instead, I told the student about this poem.
The English major part of me began parsing, constructing an essay that no one assigned. One joy of being the age I am now is that I may read with a non-conceptual understanding, and no textual analysis. I can let it only wash over me, and recollect the brutal and relieving truth. After all, my biology class is using mealworms as a universalizing model—just like us, they eat, breathe, and shit.
Leonard Cohen:
He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tube
Nothing to it but inputs and outputs. Our deepest pleasures are these. What reason is there to think that my student sage was off base those years ago—trout, beetle, pine tree, hornworm—why should we think pleasure is our special human province? What do I think I will never be? Nothing. Not even immortal.
A deep, delightful, and deft reflection on the convertibility, accessibility, likenesses, and passages by living beings, through living beings. Input, use, and output, of life by life. How else can life (or lives) live, one might say.
The revolutionary aspects of the life cycle suggest that we let our social categories revolve too. Status goes up, down, and around. It reminds me of this exchange in Hamlet, after the death of Polonius [I beg indulgence for length of the quote]:
Claudius
Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
Hamlet
At supper.
Claudius
At supper where?
Hamlet
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service — two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.
Claudius
Alas, alas!
Hamlet
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
Claudius
What does thou mean by this?
Hamlet
Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
Claudius
Where is Polonius?
Hamlet
In heaven. Send hither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him I’ th’ other place yourself...
[Maybe some worms are in worm heaven, too. And others, well, maybe the other place.]