The Zoo in the World
1.
I didn’t set out to write so much about zoos.
The story I published in American Short Fiction a few years ago titled “The Zoo and The World” began because I drove cross country for the first time, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, and I wanted to write about that, and around the same time I happened to read a story about a man trying to disguise his pet turtle as a hamburger to sneak it on a plane, so my cross-country story became an animal-smuggling story. In the course of writing about animal smuggling, I found myself incidentally writing about the Baltimore Zoo, and, soon enough, I couldn’t stop thinking about the zoo.
If it is possible to be haunted by zoos, I am.
2.
Why do we go to zoos in the first place? The quick answer is we want to look at interesting unfamiliar animals. But the root of that desire is more than a whim. Ultimately zoos are a product of our desire to experience something more than the ordinary life of worrying about bills and being stuck in traffic. We want to experience the authentic presence of nature. We want to have contact with a larger world, a realer world.
On those terms, visiting the zoo is always a little disappointing in a way that is difficult to articulate. The lions are sleeping. The crocodile tank is being cleaned. The jaguar in the tree has turned her face away.
We don’t encounter what we wanted to encounter. The animals don’t care about us. We see too clearly the bars of the cages. It’s another inadequate spectacle, familiar as a mediocre blockbuster movie. So we purchase ice cream cones and contemplate the forty-dollar stuffed chimpanzee in the gift shop and then head out to the parking lot and back to our ordinary lives, having learned nothing.
3.
I’ve been lucky to have lived close to the zoo in both Baltimore and Oklahoma City, and I have young children, so visiting the zoo became less an adventure and more a convenient, low-stakes free-afternoon activity. I think I came to experience the zoo differently because I went too often. It became clear that the zoo is more part of the ordinary world than a respite from it. And there is so much more to see there beyond whatever mystical insight there is to be received from wondering at the brightness of the feathers of unfamiliar birds.
It is possible to see more clearly that the animals are themselves, that they are living their own meaningfully non-human lives, despite our efforts to confine and define them, to force them to present themselves to our eager gaze. They sleep and stalk and play and shit and ignore us, alive.
It is possible to see more clearly that the human desire to know and treasure the world is always frustrated. It is possible to see more clearly how incomplete we all are, how we are always looking for something.
And it is possible to see more clearly the hidden doorway in the back of the warthog enclosure, the human network that created and composes the institution of the zoo itself, the mysteries of work and purpose that make the world, imperfectly, continue.
4.
In the end, a zoo is both more interesting and more ordinary than our wish for what a zoo could be. I think the question of what we are allowed or encouraged to imagine is the real world is one we don’t ask ourselves enough. The truth is there is nowhere that is not the world. But somehow our imagination allows us to believe that nature is distant jungles and mountains, not the patchy, trash-strewn forest just beyond the mall parking lot, and the parking lot, and the mall. We allow ourselves to imagine that real Americans are only present in small town diners. We agree that what happens in a classroom is not relevant to the real world, as if a classroom is not made of people.
If there is nowhere that is not the world, then there is nowhere that is not worth looking hard at and thinking hard about.
The World and The Zoo, Outpost19, 2020
