I had a dream
A strange dream. I sat on a chair with a child standing in front of me. He was small, seven years old or so. I was removing a layer of hair from his shoulders, with a pair of nail scissors, working slowly downward with great precision because I was afraid of hurting him. The hair came off like a very fine, nearly invisible, shirt, all in one piece, and the skin beneath was perfectly smooth, though I was afraid at the beginning it might appear bloody like the meat of a farm rabbit readied for cooking . The me outside the dream was surprised, the one inside not at all. I knew nothing of the place and time which were not defined in the dream, as I slept on. Perhaps it was normal, where I was dreaming, that children should have gossamer-like fur covering their whole body, normal that adults – mother, grandmother, aunt – should remove it when they reached a certain age - the age of reason? Somehow I had the sense that this was a traditional custom, in the dream world where I was, like the tightly wrapped feet of little girls in Japan to impede their growth, or the scars on the cheeks of certain African tribesmen, or the deformed skulls of noblemen in Peru or in Yucatan before the Spanish conquest. Such social habits are usually tolerated within and without their place of origin, though not necessarily approved by all. In the dream, I had a good feeling about what I was doing, not that it was harmful to the child, but still I felt a certain sadness, perhaps only I was ending his childhood.
But I also wondered as I slept, or the real me wondered why, I was doing it. Why remove this reminder of a distant past when humans were an indistinct and integral part of the animal world? Was it a habit, a ritual, a statement, a justification, or all these things in one? I don’t remember whether these queries came later, when I woke up, or were implicit even as I slept. Did a form of rationalization take place at the end-tip of my dream, at the limit of consciousness? Later, when I woke up, I tried, piece by piece, to put the puzzle together. This is what came of it, nothing scientific, a sort of coverage of my dream:
Instinct is presided by rigid and specific rules insuring the survival of the species. No species will suppress its kind or other species, or its environment, because it would only destroy its own means of survival. There is no gratuitous reason for death or destruction, in nature, madness is involved but rarely. Lions will not cancel the whole deer population or wreak havoc to the savannah just for the fun of it. Fun is related exclusively to specific acts of learning by playing in youngsters, of sustenance and mating, but it is a collateral effect, not the cause and most species are unaware of it. Fun is not part of the animal world, humans excepted.
At a certain point – fifty thousand years ago? - the human mind came into the picture. It was not only governed by the rules of nature and instinct, but also by an urge to investigate the environment that was completely new and, to this day, remains a mystery. By trial and error, randomly sought and erratically productive, with time and future looming ahead and constantly re-arranging the options, the alternatives offered by human intelligence to the natural order had - and still have- the stamp of uncertainty. They were difficult to handle, brought about never-ending sequels that were elating but also difficult to understand, sometimes dangerous: God, fire, tools, the wheel, war. They produced the necessity both of domination and progress.
The survival of the fittest has always been a question of adaptability which, at this point, depends mainly on mankind. The human mind has fashioned the environment to the image of man who now dominates it, dynamic, disruptive, unreliable. Basically , the survival of the fittest does not apply to all species anymore – except, perhaps, unicellular forms of life - now that man is an overwhelming presence on the planet.
So where does that dream come in?
Lately, I have been thinking of how fragile the human species has become, such as it is now, entirely dependent on technology, cut of from its roots, and from the laws of nature. This revolutionary trend has affirmed itself in the last two hundred years, which is nil compared to the millions of years of evolution preceding the appearance of man on earth. Time is suddenly spinning at vertiginous speed, and the only explanation is that the minimal sums of knowledge that the human mind silently accumulated for eons and ages have for some reason sparked into an elaboration that feeds upon itself endlessly, changing the very position of man within nature as it was, estranging him from it . Nature has always been and often is merciless – earthquakes, tsunamis, meteorites, eruptions – blindly changing the course of evolution and history. The human being of all times has had no defense against it, except the hardiness to survive and, and diversely from certain animal species, to start again from scratch. Add to this the complete self-reliance of man nowadays , the capacity to rule out anything that goes against it , the incapacity to live in osmosis with nature as his forefathers did: all this opens a rather frightening scenario. Mankind is on its own, it is depriving itself and other species of adaptability because it is changing the raw and vital configuration of the natural world. None can be considered the fittest anymore in an environment that is ruled by uncertainty and requires the corrective interference of technology . So, yes, perhaps the dream had a meaning. Perhaps, as I dreamed it, I knew I was doing no physical harm to the child, but I felt a certain sadness at removing this last trace of the animal in him and uncovering this new vulnerability.
