Cuts: The Rhythms of “Healing-with” Companion Animals

Abstract

Contemporary human existence is often characterised as a kind of living peppered by technological intervention: our state of being a state of suspension between animality and technology. Yet the corporeal embodiment of human existence and that of the nonhuman animals cannot be subsumed by the avatars or memes of the online world. This paper theorises the reality of physical fragility and corporeal existence through devising a way of writing the powerful and healing capacity of coexisting with companion animals. Through writing, this paper performs and describes the coexistence of humans, animals, and pervasive media devices. The paper takes as focal material an auto-ethnography of the experience of the researcher in recovering from surgery to remove a section of damaged intestine due to Crohn’s disease. Paralleling the training and coexistence of a young dog with the worlding of the diseased human body, the paper traces the affective resonance of the companion animal as an integral part of the assemblage of contemporary life. The writing here breaks simple barriers of autoethnography and the limits of what might be a subject, a self.

In the contact zone between humans and animals, something does take place. This something cannot be translated into human knowing or human relations without loss and distortion of the event. Indeed, the human-animal contact zone becomes a contact without contact, a relation of non-relation and communication whose language would be under erasure.

—Ron Broglio, Surface Encounters (2011), xxiii–xxiv.

Author’s Note

I went to a conference about animals in the winter of this year. The participants were people of all kinds, loud and quiet, brusque and gentle, kind and hostile. They asked questions, all of them, with their work, with their writing. All of us were writing around and toward this nebulous term, this field, as it comes to be known, this space of distinction. We were writing around, toward, for, in a sense, animals. It was a space remarkably devoid of animals, of course, held in a cold sandstone university where animals are nowhere except in products and pictures and poetry.

For me and for others, it wasn’t home, and what this meant was that the dog I live my life alongside was in the care of someone else, out of his rhythm, while I was out of mine. I spoke about healing and loving and being, and I felt the real effects of separation anxiety. The boy I didn’t know well enough to let into my home, not really, but he was taking care of my dog nevertheless, knew how nervous I was, and sent me pictures on my smartphone. Pictures of the dog licking up found water, pictures of the dog curled into a couch that wasn’t mine. And as I read my thoughts and my experiences, something beautiful and powerful occurred. People smiled; they laughed at points. There was recognition: People saw the drive to write a relationship, to perform affect that has grasped and transformed life and the fact and process of living, and they asked to see more. They wanted to know little things, the color of fur, the sleeping arrangements, the feeling of being away. This paper speaks to all of us who live with animals: We are all, in some way, healing, and being healed.