PaulShepardMessage

In late 1994, shortly after he was diagnosed with the cancer that would claim his life a few years later,
Paul Shepard spoke at the Museum of Natural History in New York as part of the "Writings on the
Imagination" lecture series sponsored by The Touchstone Center. His subject was "The Origin of the
Metaphor: The Animal Connection." (The full text can be found in Encounters with Nature by Paul
Shepard, edited by Florence R. Shepard, a Shearwater Book published by Island Press 1999.)

He ended his remarks with "a letter delivered to me by a bear" to humanity from the Others, the
animals. These were the last words he spoke on a public occasion.

The Forest, The Sea,

The Desert, the Prairie

Dear Primate P. Shepard and Interested Parties:

We nurtured the humans from a time before
they were in the present form. When we first
drew around them they were, like all animals,
secure in a modest niche. Their evident
peculiarities were clearly higher primate in
their obsession, social status, and personal
identity. In that respect they had grown smart,
subtle, and devious, committed to a syndrome of
tumultuous, aseasonal, erotic, hierarchic power.
Like their nearest kin, they had elevated a
certain kind of attention to a remarkable acuity
which made them caring, protective, mean, and
nasty in the peculiar combination of squinched
facial feature and general pettiness of monkeys.

In ancient savannas we slowly teased them
out of their chauvinism. In our plumage we gave
them aesthetics. In our courtships we tutored
them in dance. In the gestures of antlered heads
we showed them ceremony and the power of the
mask. In our running hooves we revealed the
secret of grain. As meat we courted them from
within.

As foragers, their glance shifted a little from corms and rootlets, from the
incessant bickering and scuffling of their inherited social introversion.
They began looking at the horizon, where some of us were both danger and
greater substance.

At first it was just a nudge--food stolen from the residue of lion
kills, contended for with jackals and vultures, the search for hidden newborn
gazelles, slow turtles, and eggs. We gradually became for them objects of
thought, of remembering, telling, planning, and puzzling us out as the mystery
of energy itself.

We tutored them from the outside. Dancing us, they began to see in us
performances of their ideas and feelings. We became the concreteness of their
own secret selves. We ate them and were eaten by them and so taught them the
first metaphor of their frantic sociality: the outerness of themselves, and
ourselves as their inwardness.

As a bequest of protein we broke the incessant round of herbivorous
munching, giving them leisure. This made possible the lithe repose of
apprentice predation and a new meaning for rumination, freeing them from the
drudgery of browsing and the grip of relentless interpersonal strife.
Bringing them into omnivorousness, we transformed them forever and they
entered the game as a different player.

Not that they abandoned their appetite for greens and
fruits, but enlarged it to seeds and meat, and to the risky
landscapes of the mind. The savanna or tundra was essential
to this tutorial, as a spaciousness open to infinite
strategies of pursuit and escape, stretching the senses to
their most distant reference. Their thought was invited to a
new kind of executorship, incorporating remembrance and
planning, to parallels between themselves and the Others and
to words-our names-that enabled them to share images and
ideas.

Having been committed in this way, first as food and
then as the imagery of a great variety of events and
processes, from signs in dreams to symbols in metaphysics, we
have accompanied humans ever since. Having made them human,
we continue to do so individually, and now serve more and
more in therapeutic ways, holding their hands, so to speak,
as they kill our wildness.

As slaves we stay close. As something to "pet" and to
speak to, someone to be there and need them, to be their
first lesson in otherness, we have shared their homes for ten
thousand years. They have made that tie a bond. From the
private home we have gone out to the wounded and lonely, to
those yearning for unqualified devotion-to hospitals,
hospices, homes for the aged, wards of the sick, the enclaves
of the handicapped and retarded, and prison.

All that is well enough, but it involves only our minimal, domesticated selves,
not our wild and perfect forms. It smells of dependency.

They still do not realize that they need us, thinking that we are simply
one more comfort or curiosity. We have not regained the central place in their
thought or meaning at the heart of their ecology and philosophy. Too often we
are merely physical reality, mindless passion and brutality, or abstract tropes
and symbols.

Sometimes we have to be underhanded. We slip into their dreams, we hide in
the language, disguised in allusion, we mask our philosophical role in "nature
aesthetics," we cavort to entertain. We wait in children's books, in pretty
pictures, as burlesques in cartoons, as toys, designs in the very wallpaper, as
rudimentary companion or pets.

We are marginalized, trivialized. We have sunk to
being objects, commodities, possessions. We remain
meat and hides, but only as a due and not as sacred
gifts. They have forgotten how to learn the future
from us, to follow our example, to heal themselves
with our tissues and organs, forgotten that just
watching our wild selves can be healing. Once we
were the bridges, exemplars of change, mediators
with the future and the unseen.

Their own numbers leave little room for us, and in
this is their great misunderstanding. They are
wrong about our departure, thinking it to be a part
of their progress instead of their emptying. When
we have gone they will not know who they are.
Supposing themselves to be the purpose of it all,
purpose will elude them. Their world will fade into
an endless dusk with no whippoorwill to call the owl
in the evening and no thrush to make a dawn.

The Others