Читать книгу Flash Count Diary - Darcey Steinke - Страница 11

Long before Darwin uncovered the evolutionary forces that linked us to animals, menopause itself was associated with the ineffable, the bestial, the base. A French medieval alchemist explained that if you took a hair from an old woman’s mons pubis, mixed it with menses, and planted it in a dung heap, “at the end of the year you’d find a wicked venomous beast.” Edward Tilt, the author of the popular 1857 book The Change of Life in Health and Disease, associated the change with violent behaviors, drinking binges, stealing, suicide attempts, and recklessness with money. One of his patients, he claimed, believed the devil had lodged inside her womb. “Something is sent to the brain,” he wrote, “so that women are no longer the mistresses of their own actions, she is fuddled with animal spirits.” Tilt, a medical educator and member of the Royal College of Physicians, wrote that hot flashes were preceded by “strange sensations, which resemble pulses, like a live animal throbbing in the stomach.”

One of my menopausal correspondents wrote to me: “Reporting that I finally get the whole animal thing regarding menopause, suddenly my physical body is very present. Heart palpitations. Strange bloating. Shape shifting like a motherfucker.”

The anthropologist Ernest Becker has written that menopause is an “animal birthday,” a reminder of our “creatureliness.” Other animal birthdays for woman are menstruation and birth, but both, unlike menopause, come with captivating and all-consuming new worlds. Sexual desire rises with menstruation, along with physical pleasure, intimacy, the vagaries of romantic relationships. Birth brings the transformation of motherhood; our brains are reworked so that a new and tiny person’s needs supplant our own.

Only menopause arrives without absorbing directives. Instead of new obsessions and responsibilities I feel a nothingness, a negation. It’s a void created in part by an oversexed patriarchal culture that has little room for older women. The message, never stated directly but manifesting in myriad ways, is an overwhelmingly nihilistic one: Your usefulness is over. Please step to the sidelines. Counterpart to inner emptiness is an outer invisibility. One woman told me that after she turned fifty, she felt herself becoming more invisible each day. In the novel Calling Invisible Woman, Jeanne Ray writes about Clover, a fifty-four-year-old housewife who discovers that a pharmaceutical combination of hormone replacements, calcium tablets, antidepressants, and Botox has made her and other women her age literally invisible. The novel’s real horror is not the invisibility itself, but that no one, not even her husband, notices that she is missing.

In turning to animals, I wanted to study a few female mammals in middle age, hoping they might be a conduit to what the philosopher William James, in one of his lectures, called the “more.” I’m not sure if menopause, with all its needling, exhausting symptoms, triggered or exacerbated the dark feelings of spiritual malaise I started to have at fifty. But I found the texture of my soul not Melville’s damp and drizzly November but a cold and newsprint-y March. I less wanted to knock off people’s hats than I, in my loneliness, wanted to touch strangers’ hair.

Becoming animal. This does not mean I go feral or become base. It is not complicated. If you pay attention, you can feel animal many times a day: when you fuck, shit, breastfeed your baby, run, swim, eat, or have a hot flash. But I find it hard to sit in the void with my animal self. I want to check my phone every few minutes, to make sure I have enough soy milk for my morning coffee, to see how many people liked the picture I posted on Facebook of my cat.

Menstruation brings thoughts of the beastly to the writer Carmen Maria Machado. “I think of my body as an animal,” she writes, “one that perpetually needs more than I can give her.” Menopause, too, brings the sense of being animal. As one woman breaks into a full-body sweat at a parent-teacher conference, she feels like “a trapped animal.” Another feels like she’s finally able to accept her corporeal form: “I am conscious that I am and have always been an animal.” There is the woman who thinks of her hot flashes as honey badgers, as in the social media meme “honey badger don’t care.” Many women associate a new don’t-give-a-fuck quality with the animal. For most, including myself, a sense of the animal is connected to mortality—that we are creatures inside a life cycle. For the first time, I feel I have a time stamp, an expiration date.

Nothing quite prepares you for the sight of an elephant up close. Ambika, the sixty-eight-year-old, post-reproductive female I’ve come to visit at the National Zoo, is like a swatch of a dream ripped out and pasted into my flat and ordinary reality. When she opens her mouth, her breath makes a big cloud of condensation in the cold air. She reaches her trunk up, the tip wet and pink like a toothless second mouth, and sniffs my shoes, my shoulder, my hair.

For weeks, in anticipation of this visit, I’ve been watching YouTube videos of Ambika delighting crowds with sprays of water and by throwing dirt up onto her back. I’ve read her biography, researched by her keeper Maria Galloway: how she was captured in 1959, at age eleven, in the Coorg forest in India, trained by a mahout in an elephant camp, and shipped to the United States on a steamer. When she caught a cold during the crossing, she was given, along with her usual hay, a fifth of bourbon and a ten-pound bag of onions.

Galloway points out signs of age: Ambika’s bony protruding forehead, her frayed cabbage-leaf ears, how she drags her right foot because of arthritis in the ankle. She’s smaller than the other elephants, delicate, even frail. Her energy is centered, though, steady and intense, unlike that of the young bull who, with his trunk, continuously rattles the gate lock.

It’s this gravity that in the wild gives older female elephants their edge. Matriarchs lead their family groups to food and water and dig wells in times of drought. They are skillful listeners. Phyllis Lee, an elephant researcher at the University of Stirling, found that the older the matriarch, the longer she listened to audio recordings and the better she was at deciphering the unique sounds of other elephant groups, as well as distinguishing the roar of female lions from that of the more dangerous male lions. Karen Mccomb, another elephant researcher, found that matriarchs also distinguish between tribes. When played a recording of phrases of the elephant-hunting Maasai tribe, the matriarch signaled for her family to form a defensive bunch, while phrases from the Kuba, a tribe that does not hunt elephants, elicited no response at all.

Across animal species, both menopause and post-reproductive life are not common. Some female insects and fish have short but heroic post-reproductive lives. Salmon, as is well known, die after swimming upriver to spawn. Research has shown that those females who live for even an extra day can protect their eggs from predators. The adactylidium mite mother makes the ultimate sacrifice, as her young hatch inside her body and eat their way out. My favorite is the social aphid. After she is finished reproducing, this tiny she-warrior pulls off her wings and sets herself up to guard the mouth of her nest, where her daughters now breed. When an intruder tries to break in, like the flailing ladybug larva I watched on YouTube, the post-reproductive female throws herself at the predator and, using wax she secretes from her abdomen, latches her small self to the larva’s mouth.

Studies concerning the later-life fertility of elephants and gorillas are ongoing. Their fecundity diminishes with age, but unlike that of killer whales and human women, their fertility does not cease completely and is not followed by many years of post-reproductive life. Menopause remains one of the great mysteries of biology. It goes against the theory of natural selection—that a creature’s main focus must be having as many offspring as possible. Menopause is an enigma, a physical characteristic that should, according to Darwin’s theory, have been selected against.

At the zoo, Galloway tells me, they take no chances on their inhabitants’ fertility. All the other female elephants, except for Ambika, are on birth control. At sixty-eight she could technically still be cycling. In the wild, elephants as old as sixty have been known to give birth, after a gestation period that lasts twenty-two months, and most live six to twelve years after their last baby was born. Their post-reproductive life is short but rich. They not only lead the greater herd but also help their individual offspring. A recent study found that the older the matriarch, the longer her daughters lived and the higher their reproductive rates.

Ambika’s reproductive history is straightforward. She has never had a calf. When she turned fifty, blood clots were found in her uterus—a condition similar to endometriosis in women. Her keepers decided to use hormone blockers to shut down her reproductive organs. My questions about Ambika’s sex life are answered frankly. Maybe it’s the trauma of captivity, Galloway says, but Ambika has never been mounted by a bull. Never even shown signs, as some of the other females have, of masturbating.

Ambika, like any creature who has lived into her sixties, has a long emotional history to go along with her biological one. While there is no way to know exactly how Ambika feels, Galloway has written about what she has witnessed. Elephants bond for companionship and emotional support. These friendships can last a lifetime. When her current bond mate Shanthi’s calf died, Ambika remained constantly by the grieving mother’s side. When Toni, another elephant friend, died, she spent time with the body, caressing Toni’s head with her trunk. Most heart-wrenching was Ambika’s fit of grief over the dead body of her first bond mate, Shanti (without an h), as she was cut up with a chain saw and removed piece by piece from an adjoining stall. “Ambika became very distressed,” Galloway writes in a zookeepers’ newsletter. “She acted out to the point keepers thought she was not safe and needed to be moved. They had to walk her past Shanti’s body to get her to another place further away. For many years after, Ambika refused to walk into a stall unless another elephant walked in front of her.”

“A lot of people ask,” the primate researcher Sue Margulis tells me, “if the post-reproductive gorillas are grumpy.” While she and her team can check hormone levels, there is no way for them to assess if the older gorillas are physically uncomfortable, no way to tell if they endure menopausal symptoms like moodiness or hot flashes. “At one point we thought of aiming a laser gun at them to see if their temperature was fluctuating.” The technology for this experiment was never perfected.

Margulis, who teaches at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, and spends mornings studying gorillas, tells me there is still considerable controversy surrounding the question of menopause in nonhuman primates. She and her research partner, over the past twenty years, tested the hormone levels in thirty older female gorillas living in zoos across North America.

Several times a month, keepers collected fecal matter, packed it in dry ice, and mailed it to Margulis, who tested the waste for hormone levels. Most of the females were living in potential breeding situations with their silverback, a sexually mature male with a thick coat of silver-gray back hair. In the wild, gorillas live in harems with one silverback male to several females. Their menstrual cycle is much like humans’, lasting about thirty days. Estrus, or the time during which females can become pregnant, lasts two to three days. During that fertile time, keepers also took note of when the females masturbated, inspected their genitals, or gave their silverback what is known as “the look,” the one that says in no uncertain terms, I want sex.

What Margulis found was that “menopause” in gorillas, while slightly more pronounced than in elephants, is not as clear-cut as menopause in humans. Hormone levels do drop, and, like women, gorillas also become less fertile with age. Margulis tells me that part of the reason it’s so hard to be certain about primate menopause is that in the wild, most females die before they stop cycling. Quality of life for the older females is grim. Female dominance depends on having babies, so once a female stops reproducing, she falls to the lowest rung of the social ladder. “They lose interest in the silverback,” Margulis says, “and the silverback loses interest in them.” Just like humans, gorillas suffer from arthritis and osteoporosis, but the thing that often kills them is starvation. Once their teeth rot and they can no longer chew, they starve.

Dian Fossey writes in her book Gorillas in the Mist about a few older females she studied in the forests of Rwanda. Near the end of shy Idanno’s life, her silverback, Beethoven, slows his group’s pace to keep up with her, and in the last days of her life, though his group has younger females, he carefully builds his night nest of leaves and branches and invites the elderly female to sleep beside him. Even more compelling is the partnership of silverback Rafiki and Coco. Coco is Rafiki’s only female. Coco, Fossey writes, has deep wrinkles on her face, a balding head and rump, a graying muzzle, and flabby, hairless upper arms. She is missing many teeth. One day, while Fossey watches, Rafiki notices that Coco has fallen behind. He stops his group and waits. When Coco approaches, they gaze deeply into each other’s eyes before throwing their arms around each other’s backs and walking together up the slope. The two also share a night nest and “resemble a gracefully aging old married couple.”

While Ambika is the oldest living elephant in captivity, and Lolita is the second-oldest orca, Colo, at age fifty-nine, is the oldest captive gorilla. Audra Meinelt, the assistant primate curator of the Columbus Zoo, believes that Colo is no longer cycling. She does not give “the look” to her silverback or to her male keepers. Neither Meinelt nor her coworkers have ever seen a gorilla menstruate. There is no labia swelling, like there is with other primates, and blood is absorbed and hidden by the animals’ thick, dark fur.

Colo, as the first gorilla born in captivity, had a long and celebrated life at the zoo before, at age forty-five, she started to distance herself from her family. In the mornings when the family left their private sleeping quarters, Colo held back, signaling to her keepers she wanted to be alone. Colo’s new enclosure is next to her family’s, and she still makes clear, by vocalizing and running back and forth, when she disapproves of something the silverback does. Meinelt feels that Colo may have gotten tired of her silverback’s “theatrics.”

These days Colo moves a little slower. The steps to her habitat have been changed to ramps, and along with her regular diet, she is given cranberry juice for urinary tract infections and whole grains to battle constipation. On her fifty-ninth birthday, while spectators sing to her, Colo runs a finger through her birthday cake’s frosting, brings it to her nose, and sniffs. Under her deep-set brown eyes, the skin is wrinkled, and the hair on her head is silvered. Her fans want her to open her presents, but it’s clear, as Colo pulls down the colorful paper chains and drapes them around her neck, that she isn’t going to rush for anyone.

Even though menopause has pushed me back onto my animal frame, I don’t kid myself that now I am one with them. In the presence of animals, I am thrilled by their physicality. But I also feel their deep inscrutability. “Nothing, as a matter of fact,” Georges Bataille writes, “is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended.” He felt the only way to speak of it overtly was through a poetry that slips toward the unknown. The writer Lydia Millet also warns against shallow interspecies enlightenment and claims that the fact we cannot fathom animals is a great and precious gift: “I cherish the reality that other animals are us, in that they have sentience and are not us, in that the nature of that sentience is an eternal mystery.”

In Break of Day, Colette’s 1928 novel, the main character, also named Colette, agrees that no matter how much time goes by, animals remain mysterious. “The passage of the centuries never bridges the chasm which yawns between them and man.” As she ages, though, and moves into menopause, her sympathy with animals increases. “When I enter a room where you’re alone with your animals,” her former husband tells her, “I feel I’m being indiscreet. One of these days you’ll retire to a jungle.” She is attuned to animal emotion: “The tragedies of birds in the air, the subterranean combats of rodents, the suddenly increased sound of a swan on the warpath, the hopeless look of horses and donkeys are so many messages addressed to me.” Colette claims, at the age of fifty-four, that she no longer wants to marry a man. “But I still dream that I am marrying a very big cat.”

On my fifty-fourth birthday I get up early and drive through the Bronx, past Westchester, to Lucky Orphans Horse Rescue in Dover Plains, New York. Winter is sliding into spring; the trees are in first bud. Once I turn onto Route 22, tulips bob in yards, and tiny white petals, like confetti, float down over the road.

I’ve come to meet yet another post-reproductive creature, less exotic than elephants or gorillas. A horse. A thoroughbred, no less, with the official name of Overdue Number. Her sanctuary name is Willow. To my eye, she’s the prettiest horse in her all-female herd—a half dozen mares in a field standing around a small barn with a tin roof. Many of her herdmates have far more horrific stories than Willow’s. Cadbury was rescued from a summer camp. Her owners never took off her bridle, so it grew into her snout. The foal Tulla has scars all over her body from a mountain lion attack.

Willow isn’t the oldest horse at the sanctuary, but her biological predicament is closest to my own. She is here because she is no longer a viable breeder. Born in 2002 in Virginia, Willow raced only once before being sold in 2007 as a broodmare. Broodmares are bred each year and, like Premarin mares, whose urine is used to make hormone supplements, are kept continuously pregnant. Willow’s offspring included Penalty Due, Celestial Number, Vision and Prayer, Noon Shadow 3, and Thunder Thief.

In February 2016, Willow miscarried, and her owners decided her body was no longer viable for reproduction. When horse owners decide their horses are no longer useful, either for riding, racing, or breeding, they send them to auction. But it’s a fantasy that older horses are cared for after their usefulness has passed. Most are not bought at auction and are sold to the slaughterhouse.

Death is the hardest part of feeling animal. “In every calm and reasonable person,” Philip Roth writes, “there is a hidden second person scared witless about death.” As a human, I view myself as a significant being who will persist, at least symbolically, after I am gone, but to be animal is to die a forgettable death. Animals look particularly dead splayed along the highway, lumps of fur in puddles of inky blood. Menopause has aggravated my sense of entrapment and death, uncovering what, for so long, I have struggled to deny.

Deanna Mancuso, the founder of the sanctuary, says that Willow was depressed when she first arrived. Her ears, alert in healthy horses, had flipped over. She wasn’t eating and had no interest in people or other horses. An article in Reiner magazine, the publication of the National Reining Horse Association, lays out the criteria for reproduction at broodmare farms. A mare is culled if one of her foals is not easily trainable, if she has trouble in labor, if the money from the sale of her foals does not equal her upkeep, or if, like Willow, she becomes subfertile and requires too much medical care. The article sneers at “welfare programs” that crop up when owners become emotionally connected to their older mares.

Before I leave Lucky Orphans, Willow lowers her head and presses her warm check to my face. Her eyelashes brush my forehead, and I see, like a tiny rain cloud, the milky cataract floating in her eye. Mancuso tells me how, surrounded by mares her own age, Willow seems to be getting over her miscarriage and adjusting to life at the sanctuary. She’s become a surrogate mother to Tulla, the foal attacked by a mountain lion. She lets her dry nurse and shows her disapproval, by whinnying and stomping, when the foal misbehaves.

Lolita. Ambika. Colo. Willow. Their animal spirits reside in their animal bodies and my animal spirit resides in mine. I have tried to understand what their post-reproductive life is actually like. I have mostly failed. I read book after book about animals, studying their habits and wishing I could be wilder. But I also struggle to accept that I too am a biological creature no different from a whale or a horse. I long to comprehend animals just as much as my ancestors did, the first humans who crawled into the earth and painted animal-human creatures on cave walls. “There is every indication that the first men were closer than we are to the animal world,” writes Georges Bataille. “They distinguished the animals from themselves perhaps, but not without a feeling of doubt mixed with terror and longing.”