"Animals of the Mind" by Bonnie Chau
I stood by the train tracks near my cottage, for over an hour, staring at the opening of a groundhog burrow, the ground nearby littered with dirt and leaves and rocks, and crumpled cans of White Claw, PBR, Natty Ice, and a single Lagunitas can. [Cue requisite pang of California nostalgia.] It was a sunny April morning, maybe in the low 60s. Hundreds of feet away, a college undergrad lay in the bright light on the grass, sunbathing in only a pair of shorts; others walked in pairs on the path near the poetry center building, where I was headed to do work. I first spied the groundhog as I was walking past on the tracks, and then it ducked out of sight. I’d seen a couple of groundhogs from farther away in the previous few weeks while walking around town, a flash of a furry creature running away, but groundhogs are new to me, we don’t have them in California—they don’t exist in the entire western half of the U.S. Now I was in the homestate of Punxsutawney Phil, and groundhogs were popping up like Whac-A-Moles. When I walked by again a few minutes later, I caught sight of the groundhog scurrying into its burrow. I stood and watched and waited. Minutes went by. Its head appeared in the opening, about the top half of it—I could see its left eye and left ear, and a bit of its nose. As I stared, over the course of minutes, its head seemed to be lowering almost imperceptibly. Its eye even seemed to be drooping shut, and I wondered if it was somehow falling asleep. I had to keep blinking to make sure I was seeing correctly, as its head disappeared incrementally from my sight. I stood and waited.
I had a book to write, projects to mull over, translations to work on. Soon, though, the groundhog appeared again. This time I could see its entire head, and it had something in its mouth, a pile of grassy things, and it scrambled out and adjusted the pile, and then slipped into another hole just a few inches from the opening it came from. I adjusted my stance, and waited, and stared. Occasionally my vision seemed to be getting wavy, but I was not going to budge. It was quiet out, except for a couple of nearby cardinals that were really going to town, and some other little brown birds (“LBBs”—this is actually a thing, all those indistinguishable little brown birds) singing. At times I imagined I saw a movement, the slightest of movements, but it turned out to be flies or other little insects, a spider web caught in the light, the breeze swaying a leaf. There were sounds occasionally: the scratching scrape of dry leaves, a faraway car driving past, a hammering in the distance, the murmur of chatting students walking by, but on the whole it was quite silent, and at some point I started wondering if it was possible that some of the barely detectable sounds I was hearing were the groundhog, busy underground. I wondered if anyone walking by might wonder what I was doing, standing stock-still facing the back of a shed tucked into a stand of evergreens. But I was waiting. Soon, or maybe not soon—the minutes went by, I had no idea how many minutes, perhaps five, perhaps twenty-five—but eventually, the groundhog’s head reappeared, unexpectedly chubby. We stared at each other. I was not going to back down.
I have always been able to spend a lot of time looking at animals. As a kid living in Irvine, which is basically built on anthills, I spent hours watching either a single ant or hundreds of them. It’s hard to feel like you’re making eye contact with an ant, but there is something about them that pulls at the mind. I’ve probably read John Berger’s 1977 essay “Why Look at Animals?” a handful of times in the last fifteen years, but it was impossible, after this groundhog situation, not to dig it out, and feel that its resonance with me had for the first time really settled into place. Berger writes:
Animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.
While I waited for the groundhog, I felt slightly exhilarated, slightly quasi-comically resentful. I couldn’t really imagine what was going on in its head. As Berger writes, the groundhog and I were living parallel lives because of a lack of shared language. I imagined that inside its burrow, the groundhog was very busy, digging? Gathering more sticks and grass and roots? Cleaning? Nesting? Organizing? Tending house? I thought about this instinct to anthropomorphize. Over the past couple of centuries human beings have become increasingly uneasy about anthropomorphizing, perceiving it as dangerous and harmful, an unease that Berger connects to the increased distance between human and animal. In the moment, though, I felt close to the groundhog. Whatever it was doing, I was sure that it was busy. Meanwhile I too had things to do, but I couldn’t move. I waited for it to re-emerge, and it waited for me to leave, but the groundhog could do other things while it was waiting, while I could do nothing. I was at the mercy of the groundhog.
Why was this happening to me now? It’s been a strange phase of life, in a strange phase of the world. What was the point of it? I just wanted to observe the animal. Maybe I was lonely. Berger writes:
[The animal] does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look….He is always looking across ignorance and fear. And so, when he is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him.
If one of the things we get from engaging with other beings is some sort of reflectivity, reflexivity, this past year I have been alienated not only from other people, but from myself. Much of the life that I have been able to encounter, not through a screen at least, for the past year, has been non-human. I have spent hundreds of hours—maybe even a thousand?—staring at birds, squirrels, spiders, gophers, lizards, ants, chipmunks, rabbits, fish, frogs, turtles, foxes, coyotes. One beaver. Plants, trees, flowers, shrubs.
Sometimes the animal looks back at you. Maybe even oftentimes. Though this, too, is fraught—while kayaking in Moss Landing off the central coast of California, one is warned to not make eye contact with the otters, this in itself is too much of a disturbance to the animal in its natural habitat. Sometimes a mutual stare feels like a showdown. When it’s a showdown with a coyote, it can feel scary, but I’ve had many a showdown with a bird or squirrel. Now I was having a showdown with a groundhog. I was not going to back down, I was for sure going to win. But was I winning? Was I winning when I had this voice in my head reminding me that the groundhog was getting its shit done and I was glued to the spot neglecting the shit I had to get done?
The longer I stood there, the more I felt like I was succumbing to a state of resignation, of prostration. I think what was happening was the dawning of the revelation that actually there was nothing to win, or not for me at least. I might “win” in the sense that I was the last one left staring, but the groundhog was not even playing. In all the encounters I was having, there was no human-versus-nature dynamic happening at all. If anything, the dynamic was that I was there in some strange state of absorption or porousness. I felt like if I was doing anything, I was simply placing myself in a position of submission. Have at me. Do with me what you will. The groundhog did not appear to have any interest in doing anything to me. The leaf or flower was not going to do anything to me. But they did do things to me, in a sense. They have all done things to me.
In March, I watched the documentary Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker, and was struck by footage of David Wojnarowicz’s talk at the opening of a 1990 retrospective of his work at Illinois State University in which he says, “Do you stop to get to know the person you sit or walk next to in this school? Do you make it comfortable for that person to express ideas that might change your ideas?” I think about being in a state or position permeable to change, about retracting our “ever-extending knowledge.” I think about materiality and malleability. I think about the texture of tenderness. What I have loved, so intensely, about Wojnarowicz’s 1991 Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, was the nearly unbearable sense of softness, against a nearly unbearable brutalness. I couldn’t look away because he couldn’t look away.
I think about how we are soft when we are young. I think about how I must have spent all of my teens and twenties trying to be harder and tougher, that this was what I felt I must be in order to live. And perhaps in my thirties, and onward, this is something I must work to retract. You spend your life trying to become harder and then you spend your life trying to tear down the hardness, to become softer. I think about being like a hermit crab during its shell evacuation stage. What do I really mean by softness? I think maybe I am talking about vulnerability. About openness and being a walking wound. I am often talking and thinking and writing about holes, about perforations, windows, porousness. My writing is often thinking through textures, and about states of hardness: being ice, being wood, being a statue. I am often writing about silence and stillness as protective. I am often writing about defense mechanisms, about fight or flight. I am often writing about soil, a rich and deep dark moist loamy soil. I think what I am trying to get at, when I write about these openings, these materials, these states, this soil, is a kind of openness and susceptibility. Soil is a growing medium for this indescribable thing we all want. A culture medium. A substrate material.
I rewatched one of my old faves a couple weeks ago, Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, and similar to rereading Berger’s essay, the unforgettable final scene hit me differently now, as the groundhog sat heavily, plumply, unavoidably, in my head. Batty the villain has just saved the protagonist Deckard’s life, and the two are slumped on the rooftop in the darkness and the rain. Before expiring, Batty delivers his famous mini monologue thinking back to the things he’s seen, a speech demonstrating his humanness despite being a replicant, but why is it that his memories of the attack ships on fire tell us he is something more than just android machinery? I think it has something to do with a susceptibility to being changed, a softness when you encounter another life, a parallel life. I imagine Batty watching the C-beams glittering in the dark, and I imagine that something is happening even when nothing (seemingly) is happening. Perhaps transcendence looks like nothing, on the outside.
The next day, as I walked to the office, I thought, well now that I know where the burrow is, I can’t not walk past it, and just as the burrow opening came into view, I saw the groundhog, scrambling back into the hole. I’ve done it again, I thought. I had scared it back into its hole, yes, but what I also meant was, you’ve done it now. Suddenly its head slipped out again. This is the word, slipped, or maybe slid. Berger writes:
Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises...had magical functions, sometimes oracular, sometimes sacrificial.
I stared at the groundhog, and it looked back at me, and its mouth was open and when I saw its little buck teeth, I thought oh my god, maybe I even said it out loud. In that moment, it might have been all those things: a messenger, a promise, magical, oracular. There we were again, looking at each other, and minutes later, it slipped back inside, out of sight. I remained standing. Despite all appearances, maybe this is the point—it looks like nothing is happening, but something is happening. You are changing me, I thought to the groundhog. You are doing something to me right now. We will never be the same again.
Bonnie Chau is a writer and translator from Southern California. She earned her MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University; and has received fellowship and residency support from Kundiman, Art Farm Nebraska, the American Literary Translators Association, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Black Mountain Institute. She is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood (2018), and is currently an editor at Public Books and the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell’s Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts.
