Animal Animal Animal Animal

ϰύνα γὰϱ οὐϰ ɛ̓́στιν ϰαταϱɛ́ξαι δὶς τòν αὐτòν ϰαθ̕ ̔Hϱάϰλɛιτν· One cannot pet the same dog twice.

Heraclitus DK 91 Alt. (Plutarch, De defectu Oraculorum)¹

1. Extinction-Being

It’s always the same. And now it’s the same again.

I dream of her, thin ears flat against the white of her head, the pale skin inside them like old onion paper with something typed in a foreign language, smudged, telling her how to withstand life, telling her more than I ever knew. That long head pointed down, full of her. Clumps of fur come out, burr-thick, as I run my fingers along her back and toward her tail. It is the summer before she died. She is, perhaps, fourteen—no one knew for sure; she had had a feral litter in the woods before being picked up to be put to death, before we adopted her—and I am barely half that age. The dream repeats. She looks at me, forgiving when it is unwarranted, and we are both there under the sun and the willow trees, and it is the season before she is hit by a pick-up, put on a plywood board, and driven to the vet for no reason, stretched out and unmoving. Here she is alive again, and the flies are eating her ears. Early in the summer, without money, we took her to the doctor who held her head still and pulled her ears out and read on them the story of flies eating her alive, laying their eggs in the fusty wounds. She was decomposing a year before she died, ear-first, and he gave us a balm. My mother left for work all day. (She is gone again in real life, but now she is dead.) And in the dream it plays over: no money for any of us. I run out of salve and spread Vaseline over the ears, afraid both to touch them and to do nothing as the white turns to red and then yellow-black. The Vaseline looks like the doctor’s medicine, but it does nothing. And she whimpers in pain while I do nothing. She is dead the next summer; my mother is dead 37 years later. Each time it resets like a season, but instead of starting up fresh, it merely happens again. I am to blame. Each time she dies it is an extinction: not some singular death but everything ending, the whole world turned over to the flies. This world we inhabited together and everything in it, gone. I dream it again.

If being-toward-death is human-being, then Dasein is always in danger of being Daussterben—a there-extinction. In English, this relationship is harder to see. “Extinction” comes from the Latin extinguere, which in turn is from tingo, meaning “wet or moisten.” To extinguish is to move out of immersion, out of wetness: to dry up completely. We are all mostly liquid, it is true, so getting too dry is never a good idea. But the real danger in extinguishing is the ex part of the act. Ex finds its own damp subterranean roots in the Greek: “out of.” As with most prepositions, there is little common sense to be found in thinking through what it means to dry up or to dry out. The key is that one is not merely drying. One is drying in some direction, drying on a path toward permanency.

The German Aussterben comes to mean “extinction” from the roots of aus (out) and sterben (to die). An extinction, too, is not merely a dying, but a dying out. An individual, it is said, cannot go extinct. The concept marks a movement outside the individual. A dying out is a nod toward the way in which everything is interconnected—we must think beyond ourselves. Our languages and our cultures tend to downplay all of this enmeshment, the sense in which we are all in this together. It is, perhaps, ironic that only in the end are we willing to acknowledge that our fate has always been collective. Whether drying or dying, we are all eventually headed there...