By now the mainstream culture knows what lots of us have always known: that emotional bonding with dogs, cats, horses, hamsters – even potted plants – is good for us and good for them. Such connection brings blood pressure down and allows us to feel less alone. I wish I could connect as well with any human being as with the dogs and cats I know. You may see that as evidence of mental immaturity in me; but others will know what I mean and will simply agree. Besides, (he said, defensively) to be thought “well-adjusted” in a warped society is really no outstanding claim to fame.
Is our great love of animals some “mere” extension of a child’s love for plushy toys, which comfort almost all small girls and boys? And, what about the ardor little children always feel when they encounter real, live pets – the kind that wet the floor and visit vets – like puppies, ponies, piglets, pythons, squid? Perhaps it’s not a sentimental silliness at all. Could this stuff be a primal feature of the human heart? Perhaps small kids perceive what we once could, but later lost. Young children have not yet been taught to renounce what they know. They’ve not yet been converted to the adult culture’s notion of what’s real and what is not. Perhaps your granddaughter perceives what we grownups can’t know: that Constantine, your first wife’s peppy Lhasa Apso pup, was once, a hundred years ago, your great, great grandma’s cousin, Billy Joe.
Then, later, at age 3 or 4, your daughter puts aside her well-worn velvet unicorn in favor of imaginary friends. In some way these fancied friends are real – if not in the objective sense, then at least in the psyches of those who believe they exist. Somebody famous (Hamlet? Shakespeare?) said: “There’s nothing good or bad, Goombah, but thinking makes it so.” The same goes for reality. What you regard as real is real for you. A Haitian who believes in voodoo, if convinced that he’s been cursed, may well fall ill and die – yes, really die! – unless he finds some way to have the toxic spell reversed. But those of us less credulous presume that voodoo = doodoo and are thus spared any such grave consequent distress.
When he was young, a friend of mine OD’ed on Catholic school. He’s in his latter 60s now, but any talk of God still quickly drives him up the wall. On Sundays, when he sees his neighbors setting off for church, he starts to rant: “Would you look at those lemmings? They’re totally nuts! They think they’re talking to a guy who died 2000 years ago . . . if he ever existed at all! Most humans thrive on mumbo-jumbo, superstitious crap! I need to lie down right away and take a goddam nap!”
I think my friend has a good point, but I admit that (just because I like the way it feels, and find it odd) sometimes I let myself believe that there is someone in the sky — or, maybe, deep inside of us — who knows and loves and cares for all of us. Could it be God? I know that’s weird, and yet, it comforts me. I’d feel like a copout or credulous sap if I allowed the solace I derive from that odd game to last for more than several minutes; maybe fifteen at the most. I seem to have a budding crush on something I can’t see or name, and wonder if that “something” might just be The Holy Ghost?