This week's New Yorker
has a story by Adam Gopnik about a little girl who was traumatized by
the death of her pet fish. It's an interesting story, not available
online (subscribe, already!) but I thought its critical message, about
our attachment to creatures and things, got short shrift. The writer's
psychologist sister explains that children go through a phase where
they ponder What is Life? before they move on to pondering the deeper
questions of Why? Though I confess I'm always quick to quibble with
psychologists, I think this is a very simplistic way of looking at it.
I don't think we ever really outgrow our attachment to people, other
creatures and things. We're just socialized to see such attachments as
excessive, and to sublimate, rationalize or at least not talk about
them when we get older.
Is there really any difference between the imaginary friends of our
childhood and the invented and half-invented people of our adult
fantasies (sexual, romantic and other)? Don't tell me I'm the only one
who can't bear to throw out a stuffed animal toy, no matter how sorry
its condition. And don't tell me I'm the only one that feels a pang of
remorse when they trade in their old car for a new one.
We all have attachments to people, places (how many of us have never
been homesick?) and things. It serves a Darwinian purpose -- to keep us
in 'our place'. It's nature's counterbalance to the yearning to learn
and explore new places: Some of that is OK, but without some
centripetal force to counteract the centrifugal, we'd all go flying off
in every direction and there would be no community, no continuity. What
we think of as nostalgia is perhaps our equivalent of the instinct that
keeps migrating birds and animals coming back to the same nesting and
wintering sites every year, even if their experience the previous year
was traumatic.
At the end of Gopnik's story, his little girl moves past her rejection
of the replacement fish and becomes re-attached to it, even calling by
the old fish's name. If we were honest about it, we's admit we are all
constantly looking for replacements for people, places and things we
were once attached to. It's all about connection to the Earth, and to
each other, and there is nothing more frightening or difficult than
'letting go'. So many human emotions are tied up with this inability to
let go of ones's attachments: nostalgia, grief, remorse, inability to
achieve closure, the thirst for revenge, 'rebound' relationships, and
the shock when our possessions are stolen or repossessed, just for
starters. And the more, and more valuable, these attachments become,
the more anguish their loss costs us.
I've always believed that even the love that people (and perhaps all
creatures) feel for each other is largely a construct of attachment.
The way person A loves person B is probably utterly different from
person B's love of person A, yet each sees their love as mutual,
reciprocal, more or less equal. My guess is that if we could somehow
change bodies with a person (or pet) we loved, we would be shocked,
absolutely bewildered, at how different their feelings for us are than
what we project them to be from our own, lonely, frame of reference.
(When I was younger and I was asked what I would wish for if I were
granted just one wish by a genie, I always said I would want to change
bodies with someone else, just for a moment to feel what it was like to
be someone else -- a loved one, a female, a beloved pet, or more
recently a bird. My answer today would be the same.)
Such projection goes along with every attachment. When we become
attached to someone, or some place, or some thing, we accord it
attributes that are entirely imaginary -- we cannot possible really
know how (or if) they really feel, how our relationship to them is
reciprocated. But it is absolutely essential that we do so, because
otherwise we could have no relationships with people, animals, places
or things at all. We can anthropomorphize all we want, but my guess is
that all living creatures become attached to other creatures, to places
and things, in ways that are not substantially different from the way
we do. That is perhaps why, except for modern 'detached' man, there is
such extraordinary mutual respect among Earth's creatures, and respect
for the Earth. We cannot bear to hurt what we are attached to.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
