Lee Deigaard

When working with or in proximity to living animals, the ethics I foreground are their comfort, interest, autonomy, ability to opt in or out, thresholds of impact or what my presence might keep them from. Beyond this, which is basic consideration and an approach centered in equality, is to think improvisationally, collaboratively, reciprocally, in being animal with animals. Inherent is submitting to their input, their creativity, their work as artists.

How do you do this when they are missing or they exist only in memory?

If, in this scenario, we are the holders of memory, how are we not foregrounded as messenger or vehicle, as protagonists of longing? Nothing we do matters to the dead. How and what we do could matter to the living, to the ongoingly vulnerable, to the threatened.

Imaginations (particularly in art contexts) to a certain extent need to trespass in order to probe and discover, to learn. How can we create under restraint? But also how can we create when we cause constraint? If our presumption only serves to encase or attempt to summarize another?

Approaching as a sharing rather than a claiming or a declaring opens up against classification (even as the very nature of a list (to be delisted) classifies). Names can be inclusions, a celebrating of, rather than a separation from. To recognize another is part of being seen in turn.

Those who have been lost remain nonetheless; they are part of the known world. Existence has nothing really to do with verb tense.

Working from a position of learning a memory into its “first” existence (what we didn’t know of or about them before) and into its “ongoing” existence (as memory, tribute, a different kind of continuance) one must never forget the value, the fealty inherent to loving even when it is too late.

Is it therefore pointless to remember, to live in memory, to create in memoriam? I do not think so.

It is not restitution nor is it restoration. What then?

Those of us who do this work must hold each other up.

If our work comes from us, how are we therefore not part of the work? And if we are part of it, how is it therefore not also about us? It will be. This is enmeshment.

Loving those we have lost does not consign us to the past. It holds space for what they have taught, for what they were that we have never known. It holds us to a continuance, past and future.

We are not executors of their estates; their legacy is beyond our ken. We are not mediums who conduct seances, channelings, or projections.

As artists and writers, we can model ways to be, we can show how to hold space, how to learn anew, how to not know and search further. Can we make work that does not preach but shares and enlarges, opens what can seem closed to others? Can our work contribute to a mesh of sensitivities to deepen interconnectivity and awarenesses?

But also we are artists; the work needs to be good.

It cannot be only a wail of pain. Or only tenderness. It needs to hold the life and the death. The crime. And what comes after. But also the origin and the ongoing, the renewing.

What does this look like?

We do not know. The artist suggests and asks, commits to abiding with the painful and uncomfortable over the declarative or summary.

We are not claiming the “last word”. We are doing whatever is the opposite of closing the chapter or the book. We are reading, best we can, through the page, into the benthos.

A coming to understand the vanished admittedly makes an opportunity of sorts for centering our own subjective experiences of grief and loss.

Witnessing, in the context of activism or of active caretaking, can seem like a passive position. But in the case of extinction, of catastrophic loss, deep witnessing comes close to abiding with, to aligning, to being present for, in holding stamina, in recognizing through emotion to know better, if always only in part. Clearsightedness is not always clinical. It can be an act of love.

Witnessing in porosity, then, can mean immersing ourselves (without intrusion) into the sensory world and abiding there without goal or plan.

It can be like meditating. It is an opening to as well as a consideration of our own smallness. That every life matters. Every living entity holds to life as best she can, generally, though not always, for as long as she can.

It can mean listening, as if to an empty shell, listening in silence as if for echoes. Listening to the absence.

In pondering all we don’t know is the immensity of abutting umwelts. Each of us regardless of species holds a part of the whole not held by any other. Each of us holds more in common, perhaps, than we can perceive.

Empathy and love begin in the imagination. The imagination is not solipsistic by nature (or does not have to be).

Holding in mind and memory, the activation of the imagination, cues an empathetic enlarging, which is not presumption of knowledge, but porosity.

What does this look like in practice? One considers one’s process and methods.
It’s not trophy claiming or flag planting or assertion of special insights.
Not making work to scold or shame but to make space for viewers to encounter and probe their own consciousness with respect to other consciousnesses.
To not try only foregrounds our human despair, our anthropogenic primogeniture.

The species that go extinct are vanishings along a continuum. All matter. All are grieved. We, with them, and they with us, are a constellation. All of us are stardust.

We are learning against and after our losses. This is not absolution (an anthropocentrism).

I say “our” not to center human animals, but to include us within a greater whole. If we allow always for our own unknowing, if we proceed in service and in love within a clustering of beings, voices, roles and senses, each of us holds pieces of and in part, we amplify and grow empathy collectively, we hold stamina and encourage courage. We work within immensities far beyond any scope we can measure. We work, we make work, however small, to show what matters.