Category Archives: elephants

Monkey Mind: On Nick Flynn, Bewilderment, Torture and the Circus

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In Nick Flynn’s memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, he introduces  the Buddhist concept of “monkey mind,” the restless, bewildered, unsettled mind.  It is also the structure he adapts for the book.  Like a monkey swings from one branch to the next, Flynn’s memoir  swings from one story fragment to another.  It is a book about torture and impending parenthood; about reading and relationships. These seemingly disparate pieces echo and resonate with one another when juxtaposed (with great care and craft). The pages reveal a mind responding to all that he is reading, witnessing and feeling. ( Flynn quotes Fanny Howe:  “Bewilderement is a way of entering the day ”)

What I am drawn to in narratives is the intersection of the personal and the political.  How does violence  on a global level, or an intimate level, affect our lives, and how do we reconcile and respond to these injustices?

Flynn received an award from PEN for his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the same night Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith won a sister award from PEN.   Flynn did not know then that Harris’ book advocates  torture, and what bewilders him even more was that Harris was given an award by a human rights organization for it.

Later, Flynn has the opportunity to go to Istanbul and meet with an Abu Ghraib ex-detainee, “Amir.”  “Now if asked, I’ll sometimes say, I went to Istanbul to bear witness, though at the time I was somewhat bewildered as to my role,” Flynn writes.

One of the parts of the book I found most interesting  is Flynn’s anyalysis of Standard Operating Procedures, the film and book project by Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch. There is further corresponence between Flynn and Gourevitch on his website here. Flynn’s main criticisms are that Morris and Gourevitch take the story of the torturers at their word, and refer to the victims by the often times derogotary nicknames the military police gave them and not by their real names or dignified aliases.  And in one particular controversial passage, it seems Gourevitch suggests that the pictures look worse than things really were.  Flynn writes to Gourevitch: Continue reading →

“Minds Enough to Lose and Histories that Can Only Hasten the Process”

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As I mentioned in my previous post, last year, I was in a craft course on memoir, which focused on narratives of trauma.  We had just read Teresa Cha’s Dictee.  After the third read, I understood it to be  a fragmented story exploring  rupture and  loss resulting from Cha’s separation from her mother, mother tongue, and her mother land, Korea. Dictee explores what it meant for an individual and a people to be torn apart by colonization, war and migration.

It was around the same time, I had been reading about post traumatic stress disorder in chimpanzees and elephants and was interested in similar questions in the animal context.   What does it mean for an animal as an individual or a species to be subject to similar ruptures?  In The Wauchula Woods Accord, Toward a New Understanding of Animals, Charles Siebert, explores this further when he examines psyche of captive chimpanzees.

Siebert visits Patti Ragan’s Center for Great Apes in Florida, which he calls “a place to house bad dreams.”  These rescued chimpanzees had previously been stripped of their mothers and denied their own chimpanzee culture. They like others born and bred for entertainment or biomedical research may have been “chimps with a name but no recollection of a tree.”  Though these animals are well protected and cared for now, traumatic memories can still intrude their present. He notes that chimpanzees “have, like us, minds enough to lose and histories that can only hasten the process.”

Siebert who has written several thoughtful and beautiful long narrative pieces about animals in the New York Times Magazine, incorporates some of that research in The Wauchula Woods Accord.   The book is framed around one evening he spends with Roger, a chimpanzee in the sanctuary,   but he provides background into a vast body of knowledge of our complicated history with primates.  The story of Lucy is one such example and you can listen to Siebert talk about her on Radio Lab.

What is also particularly fascinating in the book is  Siebert’s description of the history of trials against animals as described in The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials, where all animals were granted a lawyer—and “accorded the same legal rights as human beings, right down to being provided with the best available defense attorneys, and all at the taxpayer’s expense”   He goes on to suggest that if captive animals today who have been put down as a result of a violent outbreak, were accorded “the same legal privileges as their medieval counterparts, the most amateur lawyer would be able to get them all off on insanity pleas.” Continue reading →