The early twentieth century bio-philosopher Jakob von Uexküll studied the private worlds of animals, and the perceptual differences and similarities between our worlds. Uexküll used a musical metaphor to explain his idea that each organism has a distinct, subjective and all-consuming life-world. To Uexküll, in the words of Dorion Sagan, “Organisms are instruments in a sort of celestial music show of which we hear only strains.” In his view, as Sagan writes, the multitude of earth’s organisms — a word derived from the Greek word, organon, for “instrument” — formed a many-membered orchestra of extraordinary richness.
(Photo courtesy of Charles Siebert)
Once, while attending a symphony by Gustav Mahler and sitting beside a young man absorbed in following along the score, Uexküll wondered if it is “the task of biology to write the score of nature.” “Each voice of a person or instrument is a being for itself, but one which melts into a higher form through point and counterpoint with other voices, which from then grows further, gaining richness and beauty in order to bring forward to us the composer’s soul,” he wrote. “Reading the score,” the young man sitting beside him told Uexküll, “one can follow the growth and branching off of the individual voices that, like the columns of a cathedral, bear the weight of the all-encompassing dome. Only in this way does one get a glance into the many-membered form of the performed artwork.” Our guest on this episode has devoted his career to observing and writing these interplaying “scores” of natures, the stories of animals, through prose and poetry. His work has allowed millions of readers to hear and appreciate anew strains of non-human animals in nature’s symphony.
Charles Siebert is the author of three critically acclaimed memoirs: The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward A New Understanding of Animals, a physical and metaphysical exploration of chimps in retirement homes across the US; A Man After His Own Heart, a journey into the literal and figurative heart of our being; and Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral, a memoir that led one reviewer to call him New York City’s “sweetest, most clear-eyed chronicler since E.B. White.” He is also the author of a novel, Angus, which is an autobiography from the perspective of his Jack Russell terrier; an e-book, Rough Beasts: The Zanesville Zoo Massacre One Year Later; and a children’s book, The Secret World of Whales. A journalist, poet, essayist, and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Siebert has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Vanity Fair, Outside, National Geographic, and other publications.
In reporting about animals from parrots to elephants to the pigeons that live across from his Brooklyn apartment, he brings to our collective understanding of animals depth of humanity, awe-inspiring sentences, scientific understanding, and keen attention to the core and complex questions of conscience that animals raise. In this episode, we speak with Siebert about his reporting on humans’ wonder for and wounding of animals, the reach of metaphor, and what he discovered in the gaze of a chimpanzee named Roger.
Recommendations:
Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry about looking at animals in the Jardin des plantes, including Duino Elegies
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
The Metaphysics of Apes by Raymond Corbey
Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science by Donna Haraway
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
Life: An Unauthorized Biography by Richard Fortey
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