Watching the Elephant

The strange relationship between our animalistic nature and our Olympian pretensions takes many forms. The anthropomorphic tendancies of some pet owners is perhaps one of these. Dressing pets in fashionable clothing, conducting continuous conversations with them, hugging and kissing, and endowing them with names normally associated with human beings. All of this appears to be an unconscious attempt to make an animal human. Just as we do to ourselves

The billions of pounds spent on toiletries as we desperately attempt to obscure and nullify the odure of our physical existence. The psychological segregation of bodily functions in our day to day activity, where any reference to defecation, urination, ejaculation, menstuation, and perspiration are greeted with astonishment, embarrassment, or strained laughter.

In our entire lives we have probably never imagined our political leaders flatulant on the lavatory, or trying to see their pimply bottoms in the bathroom mirror. It is a form of life long repression, which ends with disease and death. Suddenly, our physical existence springs out like a tiger from the abstractions of sovereign debt, inflation, G7 chinwags and airport delays. We are real again.

We are mortal.

Of course, the everyday repression of our physical selves is more cultural, than academic. Piles of books and articles about anthropology and psychology would remind anybody who wants to know, that our social behaviour is in many ways predicated by our animal needs, drives and dispositions. In many ways, the complex modern world is nothing more than a bizarre manifestation of primitive needs, competition for resources, hierarchies and a dim awareness of 'something beyond'.

My personal, favourite way of examining the link between our sophisticated lives and our animal heritage, is to look for the DNA signs of earlier particular species in those around me. In the chaos of a public place, I sometimes fancy that I can spot the apes, mice, warthogs, pigs, wolves and snakes which now bustle along the streets as thinly disguised urbane citizens - their previous lives more obvious than their current ones.

May I recommend 'Bungle in the Jungle' by Jethro Tull. And for the literati, another look at 'Animal Farm'.