S.A.C.R.E.D. Mindset

Save Annoying Creatures, Respect Earthly Divinity

Oct 03, 2023

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— Jonah & Erin

Denis Johnson, who died in 2017, is a Top 10 Spyplane Titan of Literature. The other day I (Jonah) popped open his monumental 2007 novel Tree of Smoke for a re-read. I’d forgotten the opening sequence, which is dreamlike and horrible.

It’s 1963 and JFK has just been shot. On an island in the Philippines, an 18-year-old American navy seaman named Bill Houston, Jr., has learned the news and wandered into the jungle with a rifle and vague intentions of killing a wild boar.

Instead, a small monkey grabs his attention from a rubber tree. “Not precisely a wild boar, but it presented itself as something to be looked at,” Johnson writes. What happens next unfolds with a disturbing sense of quiet. “Seaman Houston took the monkey’s meager back under the rifle’s sight. He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey’s head into the sight. Without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger.”

The monkey falls to the ground, where “Seaman Houston was terrified to witness its convulsions.” He approaches “and, from the distance of only a few yards, he saw that the monkey’s fur was very shiny and held a henna tint in the shadows and a blond tint in the light, as the leaves moved above it... The shot had been low, exiting from the abdomen.

“Seaman Houston felt his own stomach tear itself in two. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he shouted at the monkey, as if it might do something about its embarrassing and hateful condition.”

Houston lifts the monkey carefully, and Johnson continues: “Its breath came out in sobs, and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked. It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing. ‘Hey,’ Houston said, but the monkey didn’t seem to hear.”

The animal dies in Houston’s arms and, standing there alone in the jungle, he weeps.

Mamma mia — “Jesus Christ!” is right. The pacing of the scene is incredible: Houston fires his rifle so unthinkingly, with such casualness and no preamble, but then Johnson narrates the aftermath of this decision — the monkey’s final moments, Houston’s mixture of regret and displaced disgust — in sustained, terrible, unlikely detail.

Among the tragedies in this passage is that it’s only after Houston shoots the monkey that he really looks at it — and that, despite the intensity of his looking, the monkey, dying in his arms, does not look back at him. The world is chaotic and contains abundant, nonsensical cruelty. When we perpetrate cruelty ourselves — especially when we do so “without really thinking about anything at all,” and cause the suffering or death of a putatively “lesser” being — we become that much more isolated and alienated from what is good in the world, because we forego an impulse toward nurturing & kindness, which is stabilizing and centering, and replace it in ourselves with cold, dead chaos.

Reading this chapter again the other day, I was hit by its weight first & foremost because Johnson was a GOAT with the pen, but also because I’ve been developing a highly apropos new Spyplane Mindset about how to live:

S.A.C.R.E.D. Mindset — which holds that we should Save Annoying Creatures in a show of Respect for Earthly Divinity.

I didn’t have monkeys in mind when I began formulating this mindset, because monkeys are generally speaking highly charismatic — as easy to empathize with as non-human beings can be.

I was thinking about very small and uncharismatic bugs, like, say, gnats: “Nuisance” creatures of the kind that, when they buzz around our faces, we often reach out to crush them — reflexively and, like Houston in the jungle, unthinkingly. Unlike Houston, though, when we kill them, we tend not to think very much about it before or afterward, except as a gnarly managerial problem of how to deal with smears.

But however little you might consciously think about it, somewhere within you, a toll is taken all the same — and a little spore of cold dead chaos attaches to and starts to corrode your soul!

That’s where S.A.C.R.E.D. Mindset comes in, which, at bottom, is an extremely easy practice to adopt: The next time yr at the cribbo and some annoying creature zigzags distractingly into your field of vision — presenting itself to your lizard brain “as something to be looked at” and then eradicated — try and wave it away, and if it persists in distracting you, spend the ~2-3 minutes necessary to get a glass and a piece of paper, catch it, and simply release it outside.

The most straightforward reason to do this is that it feels much better to take a moment to try and save something, and to succeed, than it feels to kill it. And the only thing that this good feeling requires from you is that you replace one minuscule gesture that ends another being’s life with another minuscule gesture that doesn’t.

Ideally in encounters with annoying creatures we’d possess the forbearance of the cow — beautiful and blessed sweeties who do swat at flies now and again but on the whole tolerate (what we regard as) the intolerable when it comes to bugs getting all up in their s**t.

On occasion I’ve attempted the “bovine challenge” of just letting a gnat buzz around / walk on me. But my impatience quickly wins out. And so — whereas I once would have simply crushed the gnat like I’m some lumbering oafish giant who has confused his mass for the prerogative of a god — I get up, grab a glass and a magazine subscription card … and I try to be the shepherd.

Now of course there are levels of enlightenment when it comes to this S.A.C.R.E.D. Shepherd s**t. A mosquito, for instance, wants to suck your blood and, depending where you live, might give you malaria. Lil bro has crossed a line from “annoying uninvited visitor” to “hostile assailant” and should get taken the f**k out of the paint.

Ant infestations present a more vexing problem. Ants obviously rip, but they can lay “annoying siege” to a home in a way that, once it happens, is hard to remedy by any means short of patently disproportionate total annihilation. When you decimate a colony of ants it may be in some difficult sense “justified” but it is also deeply sad, and it’s healthy and just to at least acknowledge that sadness.

Cockroaches are a related case — a knotty one if you ask me, worth interrogating a bit. Roaches obviously look nasty as hell, and their presence in a home can apparently agitate asthma and allergies. But sometimes I wonder if their real “crime” is that, like mice and rats, roaches are disgusting indexes of our own disgustingness: They thrive in the same grody, despoiled & wasteful modern habitats we do, and in that sense they reflect something back to us about ourselves that we do not like — and so we villainize & exterminate them!!

Spiders and centipedes in the crib are more clear-cut cases. If you’re a child you might initially see in these creatures a “creepy crawly” to be feared and reviled. But then someone wiser informs you that these friends will do you no harm — and that if you leave them be they’ll eat other bugs that annoy you more. Letting spiders cook is a way to outsource your “pest” management to the food chain.

Relatedly, if you catch and release a bug into the outdoors it might immediately get eaten by a bird, but fine, that’s tight, that’s the way things go, that’s healthy biodiversity. Killing that same gnat in your house is none of those things.

Ultimately I’m not interested in hashing out a hierarchy of “beneficial” bugs, though, because I’m not making a scientific argument here, I’m making a spiritual one — and natural science, for all that is dope about it, is also a site of intensely contested power relations, and can often be warped and circumscribed by all kinds of impure biases and incentives.

Take forests. Trees communicate and share resources via complex subterranean fungal networks, which we know thanks to bestselling forest ecologist and Spyfriend Suzanne Simard, who helped discover what has come to be nicknamed “the wood wide web.” Much of her career early on was spent getting ignored and condescended to by scientists directly or indirectly in the pockets of Big Lumber, whose prerogatives bent the field of forest ecology to its own purposes, allowing bad science to flourish because it was good for the bottom line.

Or take bees — these MFs give each other elaborate directions from the hive to faraway pollen sources through some weird s**t we now call a “waggle dance.” For a while, until we grasped this, the wonders of bee consciousness were not even glimpseable by us. Similarly, bees produce a resinous substance called propolis that honey harvesters have traditionally regarded as a headache to be laboriously disposed of. But it turns out to have antibiotic properties that help bees withstand disease!! Since so much of bee science is wedded to / financed by the commercial honey industry, though, our understanding of something like propolis, with zero market value, was (and continues to be) hobbled. There’s a great recent New Yorker article specifically about debates in the world of beekeeping, with broader implications for how we (fail to) conceive of our relationship to the natural world generally.

I try and keep this myopia in mind when a creature’s intelligence is invoked in the course of an animal-rights argument. Octopuses are smart as h*ll and capable of immense emotional complexity, you’ll hear, so you shouldn’t eat them. Pigs are as smart and emotionally intuitive as third-graders — very possibly smarter than your dog — so you shouldn’t eat them, either. I’m down with this line of argument as long as it doesn’t stop with creatures we recognize and “verify” as smart, but goes on to open up a vector for empathic connection with all creatures. Because I don’t think intelligence or its absence should be a determining factor in which species have a right to live or die.

And more to the point — as with the bee and forest examples — the premium we put on intelligence in other animals is funny because we routinely prove ourselves too dumb / solipsistic / hubristic to even perceive other kinds of intelligence!!

So instead of referring to our own imperfect metrics when it comes to handing out interspecies death warrants, why not use a different measure? Why not refer to EARTHLY DIVINITY, where we realize that — intelligence and size and “benefit” aside — to thoughtlessly swat a gnat is to behave in a way that is godforsaken and even low-key demonic: the exact condition that Houston faces at the start of Tree of Smoke.

This S.A.C.R.E.D. s**t might seem foolish and impractical at first but I think that’s mostly a matter of undoing ingrained behaviors. I butted up against this myself last night, when I saw a moth — not merely annoying but a threat to sick wool-based jawns — fluttering beneath one of the several sick Akari lamps that festoon Spyplane HQ extremely tastefully.

I was doing something else and was, like, ‘Am I really gonna put everything down and save this f**ker??’

Not two minutes later, though, I was on my front step, uncovering a glass and letting bruv zigzag off into the night. It was easy, it felt good, and as a direct result I’m sure that I stood a little taller and breathed a little easier and the clothes I was wearing looked that much doper on me.

Next time you encounter an annoying creature, who not err on the side of the divine?

P🪰E🪰A🪰C🪰E until next time

— J & E