The limits of empathy

I encountered a strange insect on the road. I turned back after passing it, feeling like it was something unusual. As I approached, it began tossing and twerking its long, flexible abdomen up in the air, like, devil-may-care, la-di-da! I looked it up when I got home, and discovered it was called a rove beetle. They don’t have the armored, trundling tank appearance of other beetles, because their wing covers are very short, and that long bendable abdomen protrudes so far beyond them. Incongruous with the animal’s apparent insouciance, I read that they flip their abdomens up like that “especially when frightened.” It made sense, considering that rove beetles usually live under rocks and logs, and this one had found itself on the vast, exposed plain of an asphalt road. No wonder it kept trying to huddle up under the shadow of the arch of my shoe. I realized I had misread this animal completely.

I read a book review last week on the ethics of our relations with animals. As many such pieces do, it was all very interested in the question of sentience. I had figured the root of “sentience” was the same as “senses,” so I tend to consider every living thing to be sentient. Apparently, however, “sensing” is not the same as “feeling,” and feeling gets described in a suspiciously human-centric way. Almost like, “if you are a human or smart in a way that humans can recognize, then you have feelings. If you aren’t, you don’t.” For this reason, I appreciate even more the Missouri Department of Conservation’s use of the word “frightened” when it comes to rove beetle twerking. They casually assigned sentience to an insect, which I think is correct.

Sometimes it seems to me that I have struggled, in some ways, to understand other people all my life. It has felt a bit like traveling in a foreign country: these are recognizably other humans, and they do the same basic movements as all other humans, but they feel a little off, from what you’re used to. It’s hard to place—gestures, stances, how close or far away from other people they think is normal—you find yourself feeling a slight friction, moving through their world, having to think your way through everything, unlike back home, where things come to you automatically, in a sub-cortical flash. I have lived my whole life in my home country, even my small home region of my home country, and always felt a little off-kilter, weird, puzzled. I have felt the grinding mental labor of trying to grasp why things go the way they go like I am trying to grasp an alien outlook, another kind of mind. Like an ant’s. Or a Canadian’s.

I have been thinking a lot about empathy. Supposedly a deficit in us autists, it’s something I have, in actuality, always suffered from an extreme overabundance of, if it’s possible to have too much. (I don’t really think it’s possible, but it is painful.) The book review about animal ethics pointed out that humans can relate fairly well to other mammals, and imagine their emotional states, and even can extend that to other vertebrates, but basically hit an empathy wall probably at around fish. Definitely insects. And plants are far beyond the pale. No one, the writer suggested, can really grasp what it would be to be a plant. It struck me as a strange thing to say about all of us humans. In truth, I have always found plants relatable, and understandable. Their pacing, their fixity, their inscrutability. I have, in moments of overwhelm, slipped away from all the other animals to sit beside a plant. Their nervous systems seem to match mine, and I have regarded goldenrod flower clusters and cattail clumps the way you might regard a human face.

I have lived in this body more than forty years, and only now am learning why so many things have always been so difficult for me. I have always scanned the landscape around me for hiding places. Yesterday, I pointed to a tree in the middle of a traffic circle, and I asked my husband if he ever sees trees like that and imagines scrambling up into them and observing the world from up there, amidst all that humanity, but invisible to them, cloaked in leaves? He said no, he absolutely had never thought that. This is remarkable to me. Everywhere I go, I peer into hollows inside rhododendrons, or the spaces under porches, or overgrown lots mounded with bittersweet like I’m a sick cat looking for someplace to disappear. I am sick a lot of the time, and I am coming to understand that this will always happen because I am not wired for the world we inhabit. It was built for nervous systems other than mine.

How I seem…

There’s a garden center near me that sells large shrubs and small trees, too big to fit inside a car. They will deliver for a fee, or you can drive them home yourself, uncovered in the back of a pickup, but if you do that, it voids the warranty on the plant, because, they say, they can’t be sure the ride was not fatally stressful to it. I have seen plants being transported this way on the highways, buffeted around by the air, which they are used to, but without being grounded, which they are not. The terrible sensation that must be for a plant, when wild winds come and you don’t have a grip in the earth, and instead you are slipping around in a plastic truck bed and the sensation of hurtling forward is one you have no equipment to understand. When I see plants going through that, I relate, utterly.

How I am.

I am now engaged in the twin projects of trying to understand how my consciousness and my neurology differ from “neurotypical” people’s, and of how to convey to those people around me what it’s like in here. They are projects that feel familiar to any English major, I suspect, and I feel at a distinct advantage by that education. Casting myself into other consciousnesses, via novels, plays, and poems, was what I mainly did for four years. I found an absolutely brilliant treatment of these kinds of efforts in a book I read recently. School for Love, by Olivia Manning, follows an orphaned teenage boy named Felix as he waits for his life to restart in Jerusalem in 1948. He is basically friendless, but for a Siamese cat named Faro whom he loves with his whole self. He writes about her for a school essay on ‘The Animal World.’ This passage, so meta, as the kids used to say, gets at the nature of consciousness, and the question of what it means to feel something deeply, but not be able to put it into words:

Felix went back to his room to write slowly, in a childish forward-sloping hand: ‘Faro is a little cat, but being a Siamese she is not an ordinary cat. She has some toys of her own and the one she loves best is her rabbit’s paw. She brings it and places it on my lap and waits for me to throw it. When I throw it…’ Felix paused, sucking his pencil-end and cogitating how he could describe the flurry and pin-pricking of claws with which Faro went off his knee, leaping, flying - like a leaping frog, perhaps he could say, but it reminded him also of the pictures he had seen of the fruit-bat; her brown velvet toes stretched, stretched in excitement, looking webbed as they stretched, she would pounce on the rabbit’s paw - then back she would bring it to be thrown again with all the flurry of before. After a long pause he started to write again: ‘She sails through the air like a frog and lands on the paw, then she brings it back for me to throw again.’ Another pause - now he had to describe how, when she got tired of playing with the rabbit’s paw, she would continue to jump down after it, just to show her appreciation, but slowly and more slowly, and then, in the end, she would place it, not on his knee, but out of reach somewhere, perhaps on the window-sill or the bed. Then she would settle herself beside it with paws curved in beneath curved breast - he could see the dark paws neatly placed beneath the white swansdown curve of fur, her head half up, erect but dreaming, and that lioness poise, that unselfconscious dignity of a queen! The picture hung on his mind as on a cinema screen, but how could he put it into words? He sighed and wrote: ‘When she is tired…’

It’s a joke, a trick, of course. The only reason we plausibly believe Felix has this rich sensory experience of Faro is that he’s got Olivia Manning ghost-writing for him. Without her, without verbal access to his experience, his dull little essay about the cat would leave everyone believing he’s a dull boy with a sort of gray paste where deep and textured feelings might have been. This is the tyranny of sentience as uttermost, and of verbal language as the best (or only) evidence of sentience. It throws up a daunting barrier between us and everything else, to be sure. If Felix can’t write well enough to make himself legible, emotionally, what hope does a cat have? Or a rove beetle?

It’s probably true that most people find insects too alien to be relatable, or understandable. I, however, find them almost too human-like sometimes. The other day, I thought to lay my finger beside a fly that was resting on my knee. I expected it to either fly, or to crawl onto my finger, but instead it dropped straight to the ground. Perfect comedic timing — a pratfall, playing histrionics for laughs. A beetle did the same thing today, after sliding sideways on my thigh for a bit, skittering, spraddle-legged like Bambi on ice. Though it had flown to my leg, when I touched it, it plummeted to the ground as if it had forgotten how. It was familiar slapstick.

Plants don’t do this. Few people personify plants, because they don’t seem capable of resembling us in any meaningful way. Some people, like me, do relate to plants this way. Bryan Pfeiffer is one, perfectly ascribing emotional states to the postures of bloodroot plants, as is David E. Perry on the personality of Geum triflorum.

I am grasping, slowly, that the ground state of my system is plant-like. Slow to process, to respond, to furl, to unfurl, to twine and tendril. Reacting on a time scale imperceptible to human eyes. Happy to stay put. Slack-faced, blank, inscrutable, all activity invisible, like a frequency too low for anyone else to hear. I am learning I need to spend a great deal of time among no one but plants, if I am to survive the rest of my life.

I’ve been reading a book of poetry by Maxine Kumin for a few months now (plant-like pacing). She’s got a poem called The Dreamer, the Dream, and the last half goes like this:

[…] and in fact he comes
upon great clusters of honey mushrooms
breaking the heart of old oak

a hundred caps grotesquely piggyback
on one another, a caramel mountain
all powdered with their white spores
printing themselves in no notebook

and all this they do in secret
climbing behind his back
lumbering from their dark fissure
going up like a dream going on.

Besides plants, there are always poets for guides, who get it, and who have weird ideas, like that trees dream in mushrooms, that make absolute sense to me.