Monday, June 8, 2009

What Do They Think of Us?

I think that I'm superior in intellectual capacity to any of my dogs and cats. I type prosaic words on a computer; my cat 'Lil Bit licks his own butt. I read the works of Alan Watts and Spinoza; Jasmine, the dog, chases her own tail. I manage the house finances -- what little there are -- with Quicken; my dog Heidi barks at butterflies and waving stalks of grass.

Yes, I occupy a higher rung on the evolutionary ladder, I tell myself over and over again.

But who is to say that all of my supposedly advanced capabilities amount to anything of significance in an absolute sense? Maybe it's all window dressing. Maybe it's all illusion. Maybe the rest of creations of this world are laughing their fool heads off at the ridiculous antics of the human species.

I often wonder what THEY think about US. This is a difficult discussion to broach because any attempt to expound on the point comes off as sounding like a form of anthropopathism. So, I'm not suggesting that caterpillars, tulips, viruses, whales and dogs think in the same ways we humans do, but it's rather pompous to suppose they don't "think" in some form at all.

What do the crows think while they glide overhead and look down to see me trudging away pushing my lawnmower through damp grass? It sometimes sounds as if they are laughing. "Look at that idiot sweating his gonads off in the afternoon sun. Why is it so damned important that the grass in his yard is of a uniform height?"

Do our dogs fetch balls and sticks as a way to humor us? I've often wondered if this act is really one of role reversal. In our minds, we do it because we think the dog enjoys it and also has this deep need to please us, their masters. But maybe, from their point of view, they engage in this game because they think we enjoy it and we also have this deep need to please our pet, our master.

Whatever the case, it's truly a sad situation because we really don't know what the world looks like from any point of view that is not human. We have no genuine clue what the world looks like to our dog or a flu virus. This kind of isolation feeds and breeds the egotism that exemplifies the human experience.

It's simply because we know so little that we presume we are superior.

1 comment:

  1. wow.we do all these things to better our life because we feel that this is what we have to do, yet society shuns the folks who don't do any of this because they see no need to do all these acts or own all these things. I then think to myself what would I do with out all my toys, why do I have all these. I think its all do to progression, of man thinking why and how, and this is what we get- I'm kind of rambling now and not making any sense lol

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