Tangent? OK.

Well, I started this blog saying I'd write about my three simple pleasures in life; sports, music and food. Without even writing anything about music yet, I'm going to take a massive side-step and write something rather random about books. Ah well, I am rather simple...

What I've been reading, and thinking about, recently is Michael Chabon's rather good, non-patronising teen-fantasy (think Pullman rather than Potter) SUMMERLAND. It's an alternative universe story that draws its inspiration from Native American mythology and presents you with all variants of sentient dwarves, werebeasts, goblins, giants, oddities and pixies. These species live at various degrees of proximity, knowing of each other with varying degrees of certainty - some are close neighbours (with one forming a considerable portion of the diet of the other!) whilst others are mere rumours and myths to each other. What this got me thinking of is the position of humanity in the broader world. Is there really any difference between our relationship to the squid of the sea when compared to the giants of the frozen north and the reubens of the middling in Chabon's fantasy world? We both live in different worlds, have occasionally encountered each other and there's been some occasional eating. The big difference seems to be the fact that most creatures in SUMMERLAND are able to communicate in some way - inter-special - which allows them to recognise their common 'humanity', for the lack of a better word, should they be disposed to. Has our inability to communicate meaningfully with animals resulted in our apparent disrespect and abuse of them, their territory and their right to life? Or, is this just a natural mechanism of the animal world - you don't see plagues of locus/ants/squid chastised for their inhumanity and thoughtlessness? I think this is where the crux seems to be. As philosophers have argued about for years, we have some sort of an objective, reflexive sense of who and where we are. We have powers of REASON. I guess where I was really going with all this, is do animals share this power, but not the ability to communicate it to us? Perhaps they share it in differing degrees, as they seem to have differing powers of problem-solving and intelligence, but with no way of communicating it to us, at least not in ways we'd understand. I guess maybe a dog's returning of a stick may be their attempt to share with us their powers of reason. "Look", they say, "I understand that you threw it away, but want it back, so I will oblige. I am exercising my faculty of reason yet still you wont let me on the sofa. What must I do?!". Or maybe not. But they seem able to achieve the most incredible feats of navigation, organisation, adaptation, ingenuity and creation yet we still don't credit them with anything approaching respect-worthy intelligence. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and I'm certainly not suggesting we shouldn't eat/farm/fish them, but, perhaps, we should do so bearing in mind the possibility that they might be sentient, reasonable beings with no means of telling us. That would be shit. For them.

Well, that is possibly the most worthless thing I have ever written, seeing as it doesn't reach anything approaching a meaningful conclusion. Seeing as the whole point of this blog is for me to practice my writing, the lesson here should probably be something along the lines of thinking before I write. At least slightly...