Jump to: navigation, search

The Observer (28/Aug/2005) - Pet theories

(c) The Observer (28/Aug/2005)

Pet theories

There are few more traumatic events in family life than the death of a pet. In this brilliant account of the demise of his daughter's Siamese fighting fish, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik not only reflects on dealing with her distress, but on the nature of parental white lies, children's hopes and the debt we owe to the films of Alfred Hitchcock

When our five-year-old daughter Olivia's goldfish Bluie died, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or at least more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie's life and his passing came to involve so many cosmic elements, including the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchcock's Vertigo, that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken.

To begin with, Bluie, as his name suggests, was not actually a goldfish. He was a Siamese fighting fish, betta splendens, a goldfish-sized fish that the people in petshops encourage you to buy in place of the apparently tetchy and sickly true Asian goldfish. The betta is a handsome fish with long, sweeping fins. It can be red or black or violet or blue and it is, at least according to the petshop people, the Vietcong of pet fish, evolved in rugged isolation in the rice paddies of Indochina and just about impossible to kill off. The only drawback is that male bettas fight with each other and have to be kept apart. It is not surprising these days to see a set of them on a child's dresser in Manhattan, held in separate containers, in a kind of glass-bowl parody of the co-op apartment building that surrounds them, each fish furiously patrolling its cubic foot of space and waiting for the other to turn up the stereo.

And then in a deeper, damper sense, Bluie was not really a fish at all. He was, like so many New York fish, mice and turtles, a placeholder for other animals which the children would have preferred to have as pets but which allergies, age and sheer self-preservation have kept their parents from buying. Olivia and her 10-year-old brother, Luke, desperately want a dog, and at Christmas Olivia brought the class hamster, Hamu, home from her preschool as an experiment in pet-keeping. Hamu stayed with us for a mostly happy, if sometimes jittery, holiday week and we reluctantly agreed to add a hamster to the family.

We went to the second floor of Petco, the mallish store on East 86th Street, where all the rodents are kept together - rats, mice, guinea pigs, hamsters and gerbils. Looking at them, my wife Martha had a foreboding sense of what Darwin must have felt looking at the Galapagos finches: that these things were not nearly so distinct as they had been trying to make you believe. Hamsters, guinea pigs and gerbils are all rats, and the differences, tails and no tails, cute noses and not, are really bells and whistles, niche-marketing gimmicks. Having spent 25 years of her New York life struggling to keep rodents out, Martha couldn't see spending time and money to bring one in.

So we talked the children into goldfish and then the weary fish salesman talked us into Siamese fighting fish instead. ('The goldfish will die,' he said, shortly. 'Then what?') We bought them bowls, gravel and decorative architecture to swim around in and took them home. Luke named his Django, and Olivia gave hers the descriptive name of Bluie. For a while, she seemed to accept his provisional, placeholding nature with equanimity.

For a pet condemned to live in so many brackets of meta-meaning, a fish passing as a hamster hoping to be a dog, Bluie had a pretty good life. In the constant struggle of parents of two children - one obviously large and one (especially to herself) irrefutably, infuriatingly small - to even life up, we got Bluie a castle, a bigger objet for his tank than we got for Django. It sat on the gravel and rose almost to the surface, a Disney-like princess's residence, with turrets, castellations and plastic pennants. There was even a route from the base of the castle to the top turret which Bluie could swim up.

A second betta, won at a street fair, joined Bluie on Olivia's dresser, but this new guy, named Reddie, had only a bowl to swim in. Reddie, we thought, kept pressing to the edge of his bowl to stare at Bluie's real estate with a certain resentment, the way a guy who lives in a condo on Broadway and teaches at City College might regard a colleague who writes bestsellers and lives in a penthouse on Central Park West.

One Sunday night, around bedtime, my wife called me into Olivia's room. Bluie was stuck in one of the windows of his castle, wriggling and huffing, with just his head out, looking ahead and trying to swim away. He wasn't supposed to be able to swim up there into the windows - he was supposed to stay within the channel in the castle. But the castle obviously had an architectural flaw.

'Bluie's stuck in the window!' Olivia cried.

'Calm down, Olivia,' Luke said. 'He's just a fish.'

'Bluie is my best friend,' Olivia said. 'I could tell him things I couldn't tell anyone else!' Until that moment, Bluie had seemed to be just a finny bit of decor, but at that moment, at least, he mattered to her crucially.

I watched Bluie wriggling in his window, staring out, stuck.

I felt for him, another victim of grandiose Manhattan real estate, undone by his own apartment. It was one of those moments, of which parenting is full, where you scream inside: 'I do not know what to do about this!' while the parent you are impersonating says calmly: 'I'll fix it.'

I picked up Bluie's bowl and took him into the kitchen, leaving Martha to console Olivia.

I slid the kitchen door shut, then reached into the water and tried gently to draw Bluie out of the window. I tugged lightly and then realised that he was really wedged in. I tugged again, just a touch harder. Nothing. I saw that if I pulled at all firmly, I was likely to rip his fins right off. I tried pushing him on the nose, urging him back out the way he came. Still nothing. He was stuck.

I looked around the kitchen. The remains of a sea bass that we had eaten for dinner - and that, doubtless, had a lot more personality than Bluie ever did - rested on the counter, filleted skeleton and staring, reproachful head, waiting to be tossed out.

'Why can't Bluie think, I got into this mess by swimming forward; I'll go back the other way?' asked Luke. 'It's like he doesn't have a rewind function in his brain.'

He had slipped quietly into the kitchen beside me and was watching, an intern to my baffled surgeon. Like many 10-year-olds, he is obsessed by what philosophers call the problem of consciousness but he calls it the thinking and feeling thing. 'Does Bluie know he's Bluie?' he would ask, when we watched the fish swimming in his bowl in Olivia's room. 'I mean, I know he doesn't think, Oh, I'm Bluie! But what does he think? Does he know he's him swimming around? Or is he just like a potato or something, only with fins, who swims but doesn't think anything?' What does it feel like, he wanted to know, to be a fish, a hamster, a monkey, a chimp? What does it feel like to be someone else?

When my sister, a developmental psychologist at Berkeley, came to visit, she sat Luke down and said, smoothly, that scientists once thought that life was a problem, but then they had not so much solved the problem as dissolved it, by understanding ever simpler forms of life. Luke's problem - why we know what it feels like to be alive - would probably dissolve into its parts, too. Luke had nodded, politely, but I could see he still held that the problem of think-ing and feeling certainly felt like a problem when you thought about it.

'Swim backward, Bluie,' I implored. 'Get out of there.'

Bluie, of course, did nothing but wiggle some more within his window.

'Is he thinking, I'm dying?' Luke asked at last.

Finally, I settled on a cowardly postponement of what even then I knew to be inevitable. I walked back to Olivia's room. 'Let's take Bluie to Petco in the morning and see if the experts there can help him,' I said to Olivia as we tucked her in. 'They've probably got a whole team of guys who are specialists in castle extraction.'

At five in the morning, I woke up to look in on Bluie. He was dead. I tried to think about what to do. I decided to take him out, still stuck in his castle window and put him and the castle into a white plastic bag. Then I sat down to read at the kitchen table, in the grey light of the June dawn, early summer in Manhattan feeling so much quicker and time-lapsed and vivid than it does in any other city, a wave of pollen, warmth and renewal blowing in the window.

My sister had given me a kind of reading list to help me answer Luke's questions at a deep level, and I had read many of the philosophers who have something to say about his problem. I read David Chalmers, who thinks that consciousness is the ghost in the machine, the secret, irreducible presence in the mind that distinguishes us from computers, goldfish and other creatures who provide only a zombie-like imitation of our self-knowledge.

I read those philosophers who think that what we call consciousness is just an illusion and bears the same relation to the workings of our real minds that the White House press spokesman bears to the workings of the Bush White House; it is there to find rationalisations and systematic reasons for feelings and decisions made by dim, hidden powers of whose pettish and irrational purposes it is aware only long after the fact.

Of all the theories that I came across, the most impressive was Daniel Dennett's. He argues that consciousness is a byproduct, not a point, that it is just the sound that all those parallel processors inside our heads make as they run alongside one another, each doing its small, robotic task. There is no 'consciousness' apart from the working of all our mental states. Consciousness is not the ghost in the machine; it is the hum of the machinery. The louder the hum, the more conscious you feel. If Bluie had had a more interesting life, he would have known that he was having it. Bluie did not know that he was Bluie because there was not enough Bluie going on in his head to make being Bluie interesting even to Bluie.

Luke woke up and padded into the kitchen. He asked what had happened to Bluie and I told him. We decided that we would bury Bluie before Olivia woke up and then tell her that we had taken him to Petco. That would buy some time, anyway. I emptied Bluie's bowl and hid it in the cupboard of my office. We carried Bluie, in his castle, in his white bag, down the hall to the trash room. We held our caps over our hearts as he went down the chute. Then I took Luke to school. He was silent on the way, but at the school door he turned to me.

'Dad, whatever you tell her, don't do a big Bluie's-in-the-fish-hospital thing,' he counselled me. 'That she'll never buy.'

When I got home, I woke up Martha. 'Bluie didn't make it,' I whispered. 'What are we going to do?'

'We're doing the full "Vertigo",' she announced, almost before her eyes were open. She had obviously been thinking about it since last night. 'You're going to Petco and buying a fish that looks just like Bluie, and then we're going to put him in the fishbowl and tell her that it's Bluie. If it worked with Kim Novak, it can work with a Siamese fighting fish.'

She was referring to the plot of the Fifties Hitchcock classic which we had seen about a week before. In "Vertigo", James Stewart falls in love with a mysterious, cool blonde beauty, played by Kim Novak, who he comes to believe is a mystical reincarnation of her long-dead great-grandmother, compelled to imitate her actions. When, like her great-grandmother, she launches herself to her death from a bell tower in a restored mission town, Stewart is devastated. Haunted and desperate, he stumbles upon a brunette shopgirl who looks eerily like Kim Novak, and forces her to dye her hair blonde. He dresses her in tailored grey suits, turning her into a precise replica of the Kim Novak character.

Actually, though, she is the Kim Novak character. She had been hired by the bad guy to play the part of the first Kim Novak character - another woman was thrown off the tower, as part of an insurance scam - and, to make it even odder, the fact that this is so is given away by the second Kim Novak character (in a flashback) right in the middle of the movie so that the viewer, unlike poor Jimmy Stewart, is never in doubt about the reason the new Kim Novak looks like the old Kim Novak. The meaning of Hitchcock's choice to give away the key plot point in the middle of the movie, against the advice of everyone around him, is, I have discovered, a subject as much argued about among the cineastes as the nature of consciousness is among the philosophers.

Martha went to wake Olivia and get her dressed for school.

'Bluie's in the fish hospital, darling,' I heard her say. Boys and men don't believe in the fish hospital; mothers know that it is where all problems should be sent while we wait to solve them.

'She'll just walk in, like Jimmy Stewart, and will be strangely reminded of Bluie, then he'll become Bluie for her,' Martha said a few hours later, as we watched the new fish swim around in Olivia's tank, though I could tell that she was trying to reassure herself that this would work. I had gone to Petco and bought a Bluie lookalike. It was easy - the bettas all looked like Bluie.

But I was beginning to doubt that this was such a good idea. I remembered that in the movie Jimmy Stewart goes nuts and Kim Novak ends up throwing herself off the bell tower for real.

'Are we doing the wrong thing?' I asked. 'I mean, won't she figure out at 10 or so that Bluie died?'

All this while Martha, as a New York mother in crisis, had her mobile cradled under her jaw. Everybody had had a dead pet problem. Goldfish had floated to the tops of bowls; hamsters had been found dead in their cages, their furry feet upward; and more gruesome inter-pet murders had taken place, too. Each family had a different tack and a different theory. There were those who had gone the full Vertigo route and regretted it; those who had gone the tell-it-to-'em-straight route and regretted that. In fact, about all you could say, and not for the first time as a parent, was that whatever you did, you would regret it afterwards.

I made only one call, and that was to my sister, the developmental psychologist. She explained to me, instantly, that it was normal for children to develop intense attachments to pets, even 'zombic' ones that did not reciprocate affection, and that a pair of Japanese psychologists, Hatano and Inagaki, had done studies of how children develop intuitive theories of biology by having pets.

'They claim that all kids, Western and Eastern, go from having primarily just psychology and physics to having a "vitalist" biology at about the age of six,' she told me. 'That is, they start to think there is some vital spirit - you know, kind of like Chinese chi - that keeps animals and humans alive, gets replenished by food, damaged by illness and so on. And here's the cool thing: Hatano and Inagaki show, experimentally, that giving kids pet fish accelerates the development of this kind of vitalism. We give them fish as a learning device, though we don't know this when we do it. Olivia is probably in transition from a psychological conception of life to a biological one, which may be why she's so bewildered.'

It seemed that the mere presence of a fish in a bowl, despite the barriers of glass and water and the fact of the fish's mindlessness, acted as a kind of empathy pump for five-year-olds, getting into the corners of their minds. Olivia was a vitalist and Bluie was no longer vital. According to my sister, children's education proceeds in stages. At three they're mostly psychologists, searching for a theory of mind; at six, they're biologists, searching for a theory of life. At 10, they're philosophers, searching to understand why our minds cannot make our lives go on forever.

'My sister doesn't think we're going to screw up Olivia's mind,' I said to Martha a few moments later. 'She does think that we're going to screw up her theories of biology.' Martha was still watching the tank and trying to see whether new Bluie would pass. 'Olivia is going to think that dying things go away to Petco and come back as good as new.'

Luke was the first one home. He studied the new fish. 'Does new Bluie know that he's not Bluie?' he asked. Reddie was looking at new Bluie, but we couldn't even guess what he was thinking.

In the end, when Olivia came home from school, we did neither the ingenious Hitchcockian thing nor the honest, brutal thing but, being New York liberals, the in-between, wishy-washy, split-the-difference thing. Martha told her that Bluie had been successfully extracted from his castle window by the fish specialists, but he had been so stressed by the experience that he was resting and it might take a long time for him to recover. Meanwhile, they had given us Bluie's brother.

Olivia took one long, baleful look at the new Bluie.

'I hate this fish,' she said. 'I hate him. I want Bluie.'

We tried to console her, but it was no use.

'But, look, he's just like Bluie!' we protested weakly.

'He looks like Bluie,' she admitted. 'But he's not Bluie. He's a stranger. He doesn't know me. He's not my friend who I could talk to.'

That evening, we took turns staying up with her, sitting in the rocking chair in her room and rocking until she slept. The room, I realised, was full of Bluies: things that she had ascribed feelings and thoughts and intentions to, all the while knowing that they didn't really have them. There were Buzzes and Woodies, American Girl dolls and stuffed animals from her infancy.

Children, small children particularly, don't just have more consciousness than the rest of us. They believe in consciousness more than the rest of us; their default conviction is that everything might be able to think, feel and talk. This conviction is one that entertainment companies both recognise and exploit, with talking toys and lovable sharks, though at some other level, the children are entertained by them because they know it's all made up. No child believes that her own toys in her own bedroom talk like Woody and Buzz in the movie. Ascribing feelings to things is a way of protecting your right to have feelings. Expanding the circle of consciousness extends the rule of feelings.

Olivia loved Bluie because it is in her nature to ascribe intentions and emotions to things that don't have them, rather as Hitchcock did with actresses. She knows that she is Olivia because one of the things that she is capable of doing is imagining that Bluie is Bluie. Though you read about the condition 'mind-blindness' in autistic children, the alternative, I saw, was not to be mind-sighted. The essential condition of youth is to be mind-visionary: to see everything as though it might have a mind. We begin as small children imagining that everything could have consciousness - fish, dolls, toy soldiers, even parents - and spend the rest of our lives paring the list down, until we are left alone in bed, the only mind left.

And yet, though I had been instructed by my reading that we imagine minds as much as know them, I also realised, looking at the little girl who had cried herself to sleep, that the difference didn't quite matter.

A pet is an act of empathy, a theory of love the child constructs, but it is also a living thing and when it dies, it moves briefly but decisively outside the realm of thought, where everything can be given the shape of our own mind, and into the cold climate of physical existence, where things are off or things are on.

Science might be dissolving life and mind into smaller parts but among the higher animals at least, with eyes, skeletons and hungers, the line between life and non-life is pretty much fixed and hard; from the other side of that window, no traveller - or goldfish - has yet come home to his bowl.

The real proof of consciousness is the pain of loss. Reddie, swimming in his studio, did not know that Bluie had gone; Bluie himself may in some sense not have known that he had gone. But Olivia did. The pain we feel is not the same as the hum we know, and it is the pain, not the hum, that is the price of being conscious and the point of being human. I looked at the sleeping child, hoping that she would be over her grief in the morning.

'Mom,' Luke said the next morning, 'you shouldn't have done that big Bluie's-in-the-fish-hospital thing. It just stretched it out.' The three of us were sitting at the kitchen table waiting for Olivia to wake up.

'I didn't do a big Bluie's-in-the-fish-hospital thing,' Martha objected. She was pretty tired. 'I did a big Bluie's-in-the-rehab-clinic-right-next-to-the-fish-hospital thing.'

'That makes it worse,' Luke said.

'Let's try this,' Martha said. 'Let's tell her that, though Bluie did die, this Bluie is kind of Bluie reborn.'

I thought she might have something and in the next 15 minutes we did a quick, instinctive tour of the world's religions. We made up a risen-from-the-grave Christian story: the Passion of the Bluie. We considered a Buddhist story: Bluie goes round and round. We even played with a Jewish story: Bluie couldn't be kept alive by the doctors, but what a lovely bowl he left for his family!

Then we heard the door of Olivia's room open, and she came to the table, theatrically calm, and sat down. 'I'm going to call the new fish Lucky,' she announced. 'And can I please have the Honey Nut Cheerios?' She knew that the Honey Nut Cheerios were, strictly speaking, off-limits, but that no one was going to call her on it this morning. It was, I thought, an inventive stroke. Did the name refer to new Bluie's unearned good fortune in getting a home after the death of the original Bluie? Or did it refer to his good fortune in being alive at all to swim around in the world a little longer? Certainly luck seemed like a wiser thing to celebrate in a fish than reincarnation.

But then an odd thing happened. After a couple of days of everyone calling him Lucky, we noticed that Olivia, on her own, began to call the new fish Bluie. It was as if, having made a grand and instructive emotional tour, she had ended up right where she started. We begin with the problem of mind, pass through the experience of pain and end up loving the same old fish.

I understood, suddenly, why Hitchcock had given the secret away in the middle of "Vertigo". The surprise is revealed because Hitchcock could not see what was surprising. He didn't think that there was anything bizarre in the idea of someone constantly being remade in the image of someone else's schemes or desires or weird plot points, because he thought that this is what life and love consist of. Suspense, not surprise, was the element Hitchcock swam in, not 'what next?' but 'how will we get to the inevitable place again?'

Hitchcock, after all, did not adapt to circumstances; he made circumstances adapt to him. When Grace Kelly married a prince, there was Kim Novak and when Kim Novak rebelled, there was Tippi Hedren. Every five-year-old has one Fish, as every great director has a single Blonde. What Hitchcock's films of the Fifties have in common with all the world's religions is the faith that death can be overcome, or at least made tolerable, by repetitive obsession. First the mind, then the pain, and then the echo: that is the order of life. James Stewart learned this; now Olivia had too.

Luke had a much more sinister view about what had happened to Bluie - less "Vertigo" and more "Psycho".

'What I think is,' he said, 'that Reddie put Bluie up to swimming into that window and then laughed inside when he saw what happened. It was the Revenge of Reddie. He hated Bluie all this time for having a bigger house than he did and finally tricked him to his death. Reddie is the bad guy, with all these plots and schemes. Look at him! He's the villain.'

And for a moment or two, watching poor Reddie innocently swimming in his low-rent bowl, I did think I could see an evil gleam in his small, fishy eye, a startling resemblance to Anthony Perkins in his drawn, nervous excitability and long-simmering rage. I watched him in slightly panicky wonder. He looked like a fish who knows his own mind.

Retrieved from ‘http://the.hitchcock.zone/w/index.php?title=The_Observer_(28/Aug/2005)_-_Pet_theories&oldid=127867’