On the evening I am collecting my thoughts on Graeme Gibson’s Bedside Book of Beasts, to my door arrives a parade of animals, some of them not much taller than waist-high in the night’s early going. They climb the steps and exclaim in unbelievably high-pitched chorus, “Doritos!” when supplied the ceremonial offering, and then hop back into the dark to join their friends the pirates, vampires, ghosts, and princesses. Not a few Pooh Bears silently size me up from curbside strollers, along for the ride.
Beasts, a sort of follow-up to 2005’s Bedside Book of Birds, is beautiful. Like Birds, it’s a miscellany of stunning illustrations and short readings, set in large type, from our history of trying to figure out the creatures that surround us. As a miscellany, it’s easy to dip into at random, to meditate on a 17th-century illustration, for example, of a strange creature—from the caption-writer’s best guess, a “bear/sloth”—or to consider the nondescript animals that look on as a lion maws the neck of a bull in a 14th-century Arabic version of the Book of Kalilah and Dinana. Why do they smile so?
“I’m hoping in some sense that people will recognize stuff in it out of their own experience here or there or maybe even just some dim past that we all carry about with us,” Gibson tells me over the phone when we spoke a week prior to Halloween.
While Birds and Beasts are presented in a similar manner, Beasts sets itself apart not only for covering a different set of vertebrates. Whereas Birds was a book about how humans wish they could fly, Beasts is a stir-stick for the memory of our species. Remember when we thought of ourselves as not entirely human? The book is rife with examples of human-animal hybrids and shape-shifters. Two images stood out for me.
The first is a detail from an ornate cauldron (first century BC, Denmark) depicting a sitting man holding up a snake in his left hand and wearing antlers, watched by a crowd of deer. The other is of a somewhat crude wooden carving that is nevertheless undoubtedly a human with a lion’s head, carved 30,000 to 34,000 years ago, according to the caption. Jean Clottes writes of the figurine: “This not only reinforces the great importance of felines to Paleolithic people, but also highlights the fluid nature of their belief system, in which borders separating humans and animals were easy to cross.” I just find it amazing that humans have been humans for so long.
“What I’m trying to get at in this one is—” Gibson pauses for a moment, rethinking how he wants to describe his purpose for Beasts. “I’m sitting here and we have a bunch of trees outside my study window. All the leaves are a wonderful colour. What I’m trying to convey is that—those leaves, the recognition, whatever pleasure it gives us—that is a response to an ancient experience of ours. It’s not just aesthetics. That feeds us in some way.”
A favourite quote of Gibson’s is from E.O. Wilson: “The natural world is still imbedded in our genes and cannot be eradicated.” He makes frequent reference in our conversation to the deep history of human kind spanning six millennia—a history in which, if shrunk to the length of a day, the Industrial Revolution and the years since would barely last past a sneeze. It’s hardly surprising, with that perspective, that the image of my friend the man-lion still resonates.
“The Pleistocene, which formed our species, took us from being early anthropoids to being largely what we are now, but with different memories and different patterns of knowledge. We spent 80,000 generations becoming what we are now.”
So we like to dress up as animals—hence the jaguar ringing my doorbell and our ability to even imagine a story like Where The Wild Things Are. But we also like to make animals in our own image. One story later on in the book declares it outright: “Bears are like people.” Anthropomorphism rears its head—Ernest Thompson Seton giving rabbits human thoughts and all that, not to mention Disney.
“I don’t mean it literally, but our brain is almost like an alien being. Because it doesn’t understand nature,” Gibson says. Will our alien brains ever really figure out what it is to be a bear, absent our own human thoughts? “No,” Gibson concedes, “I don’t think so.”
“For the longest time, anthropomorphism was one of the greatest sins anyone could think of in terms of studying animals, and yet science is unable to study the individual differences within a species. […] If you live among wild animals, it’s clear that certain animals have different characters. As soon as you start saying this one’s behaving differently, then you’re fooling around with anthropomorphism. But the really intriguing thing about human beings to me, and to most people I think, is not what we’re like as a group but what we’re like individually. I have no difficulty with anthropomorphism at all unless one’s trying to prove something scientific with it.”
The animals may or may not be laughing at us, and we’ll probably never know for sure, but that doesn’t stop us from trying to cuddle up to them. The Bedside Book of Beasts is a testament to how we’ve always wondered why the animals smile so, and why, on our best of days, we might feel like an animal in disguise.
The Bedside Book of Beasts is published by Doubleday Canada.
