More Than Human

IT MUST HAVE been the Houyhnhnms that did it. Way back when I was a child. Back when I listened to read, looked for the pictures, and then went back especially to them.

The Houyhnhnms.

You know, those dexterous, hyper-articulate horses in the fourth voyage of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). They ended up being more memorable for me than the (over-rated) Lilliputians. Even if an illustrated edition wasn’t to hand, it wasn’t hard to conjure those philosophes in one’s mind. ¹

Illustration by Thomas Morton. In Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London, 1864-1865), 289. British Library, London, UK. Digital Store 12612.i.13.

CHILD-LIKE. THREE decades ago —shortly after the widespread adoption of email— Bill (my friend and fellow historical interpreter William B. Taylor) and I corresponded for a time about the significance of “child-like.” (For some reason I knew to keep those email messages. I printed them out, and put them in three-ring binders! How little they look like the “emails” of today; how much they resemble old-school, full-blown letters.)

Looking back over our to-and-fro, two things stand out. That “child-like” often slips into the shadow of its pejorative twin “childish.” And that, for most adults we could think of, being truly child-like was either unthinkable —a kind of regression— or a dream scenario —the way one wished to be.

The pioneering cultural historian Johan Huizinga contends in Homo Ludens that when a child is “caught up in play” —absorbed in an act of pretending, drawing a figure, following a story— “the child is quite literally ‘beside himself’ with delight, transported beyond himself to such an extent that he almost believes he actually is such and such a thing, without, however, wholly losing consciousness of ‘ordinary reality’.”²

The notion of being beside or beyond oneself is gorgeous to consider. But Huizinga’s employ of “almost,” like his final “however,” may be more interesting. Because, for him, the child is enchanted by the extra-ordinary but not completely gone, not given over. I called to mind immediately how a child, focussed on a story or an activity, will occasionally look up at their parent, or perhaps clutch at a familiar blanket or toy. Looking for reassurance? Seems likely. But just possibly the glance is also a kind of checking-in without abandoning the ship (of the amusement), the keeping of a light and deliciously-partial grip on reality. So if Huizinga’s inference about a child caught in play is even half-right, then an adult wishing to be child-like is aspiring to what we might call a capacity for “near-immersion.”³

Bohemian Woodsman Moose, painted (mostly) in Corning, NY, USA

One begins to grow up, and keeps thinking about such things as the Houyhnhnms. And their allure isn’t ultimately that they’re horses endowed with luminous wisdom, dignity and reason. It’s that they aren’t alone. They’re neither alone in Swift’s story, nor alone far more broadly.

Gossip Trout, painted (mostly) in Erie, PA, USA.

In Gulliver’s Travels, the Houyhnhnms worry our minds because they’re juxtaposed with the Yahoos. The Dubliner Swift presents the latter not only as the filthiest and most brutish creatures imaginable, but also (so troublingly and crucially) as the most recognisably “human” actors on the page.

His imaginary hall-of-mirrors world delights and amuses, while raising concerns and perhaps proffering counsel. Monster derives from monstrum, meaning not only an omen of misfortune but also indication or warning. Hence demonstrate and remonstrate and —my Webster’s confirms— even muster; a monition is a kind of alert and advice.

“Wino Sun,” painted in Northampton, MA, USA.

Thinking of human and “non-human” as vastly separated would strike some people, for example in parts of the Upper Amazon, as patently ridiculous⁴, and yet the enduring distinction for many others (who tend to have economic and political power on a global scale) persists, doing far more harm than good.

Inspired by a photograph by Tong Lam, whose visual investigations of the global Rust Belt and other stunning images are recommended

Binary thinking about human and non-human (which mixture and interdependence defies) is so tempting, so rhetorically seductive, that it’s difficult to shake.

A path (with hand rail), Curi Cancha Reserve, near Santa Elena, Costa Rica

In our case in point, what all is the reader able to think and feel when, in contrast to Swift’s transcendent horses who hold forth and reason, the human-ish beings mope about, dragging their genitals along the earth?

Did the younger me —whether consciously nudged by Swift and Morton's art in some way or not— transfer any of my child-like curiosity and sympathy to the Yahoos and their suffering? What about their possible complexities, their potential? I can’t remember. And even if I did, would this move have marked a true expansion of perspectives? Would I have stopped thinking over the Houyhnhnms, reading along the grain for their predicaments?

Caballero Pheasant, painted in Detroit, MI, and Northampton, MA, USA. (I saw my first Ring-necked Pheasant as a child, “hunting” with my father, near Brooks, Alberta, Canada, and have never forgotten the experience. Pheasants abound in my current home city, Detroit, MI, USA)

As for the traveller Gulliver, he uncovers several things for us in the Land of the Houyhnhnms, not least: that vileness is never so vile as when revealed in human form; that weakness is never more revelatory than when found at the very core of humanity;

Caballero Pheasant, detail.

and, rather less bitterly, that it’s mixture —not purity— that’s fascinating.

“Gentleman Raccoon (acknowledging the inspiration of Bill Rabon [1938-2017]).” Painted in Berea, KY, USA. (As musical cognoscenti of a certain age will see immediately my “Gentleman Raccoon” is indebted to the painting on the album cover of J. J. Cale’s debut record, Naturally (1971); (see the next image). I’m grateful to Ian Mills for encouragement on this one, and to Bob Brown and Ken Gurr: we three fairly wore out the vinyl Naturally.

The Tulsa-based Bill Rabon’s painting, on J. J. Cale’s Naturally (1971)

Swift’s blurring of species plays upon our admiration and disgust, upon our reaction to combinatory possibilities, to purported monstrosities, “the body hybrid.”⁵

It’s as if we —at least vast swathes of humans— have long been “hard-wired” to be charmed and unsettled by these creations, at once and in something like equal measure.

Remember the Minotaur, the half-man-half-bull confined to a Cretan labyrinth, condemned to hunt and devour an annual crop of Athenian youths, until Theseus arrives to best him. And what about the one-eyed Cyclops, the Griffin, the Satyr and the Centaur, the Mermen and Sirens, the Chimera, Basilisk, the Hydra, the Unicorn, the snorting and ripplingly powerful Dragon⁶, the various sea monsters, and my personal favourite (as a few readers of Dispatches might recall), the Giant.

"Debonair Fox" came together in McCarthy's Bar, Lexington, KY, USA, with Ian Mills

Plus all those “folk of diverse shape and marvellously disfigured” purportedly espied in the fourteenth century by Sir John Mandeville, and immortalised in 119 woodcut illustrations?⁷ Or the even greater gathering of the “monstrous” and “anomalous,” illustrated so meticulously for the natural scientist and collector Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605).⁸

"Moth Robbins" by Ian Mills, drawn in McCarthy's, Lexington, KY, USA

Spare a thought, too, for the merged power and energy of the famously elephant-headed Ganesha, divine son of Shiva and Parvati, and of Hanuman from the Sanskrit epic the Ramayana.

Lord Ganesha, on the campus of Somaiya Vidyavihar, Mumbai, India

Not to mention the remarkable “super-natures” born of the pre-Hispanic Andes, where sacred histories tell of cultural founders (huacas or wak’as) who —upon completing their great deeds and notably playful adventures— lithomorphised, becoming cherished earth and stone, valley and mountain, joining a dynamic human landscape.⁹

“Readerly Donkey Afloat in the Motel Pool” was painted in Erie, PA, and Detroit, MI, USA.

Closer to our own times, Swift’s Houyhnhnms gain other kinds of bedfellows. Even the limits of the Anglosphere turn up Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1902), J. R. R. Tolkein’s Hobbit (1937), C. S. Lewis’s talking beasts of Narnia (1950-1956), Arnold Lobel’s gloriously vaudevillian friends, Frog and Toad (1970-1979), and the intrepid animals of Brian Jacques’s Redwall (1986-2011), a series my sons memorably devoured.

"Emu Biker" wouldn't have existed were it not for the Bikers who converge on this bar in the Distillery District, Lexington, KY, USA

And it’s difficult to imagine quite what Disney or Pixar would do if they could not draw from the magic and mixed-up creatures of the world’s fairy tale and folk tale traditions.

                         ^^^

WHEN I SHARED my drawing of [Swedish tennis star] “Björn Borg if He’d been a Heron (on a coaster)” with my friend Jay (Jay Clark Reid) a few weeks ago, he shot back: “Absurd. I love it!”

“Björn Borg if He’d been a Heron (on a coaster),” drawn in crayola crayons. Florence, MA, USA

Perfect, I thought.

Absurdity: that’s a big part of what I am looking for in the drawings and paintings that I’ve interspersed through this dispatch.

A whimsical, lighter vein?

I had planned until this morning not to share a word of explanation, just the art. And I’m still wondering if what I’ve written —the paean to more-than-humanness, to mixedness, to humour— might (oddly enough) spoil the fun. But trying to make some sense, to articulate things, is hard to resist. I want to provoke the jolt as well as the laughter, or, as Huizinga might have put it, the jolt into laughter.

It’s hard to be child-like.

And sometimes all you really need is a capybara taxi-driver in crocs.

“Capybara Taxista in Crocs,” painted in Detroit, MI, USA

* watercolours, drawings, and photographs by Kenneth Mills, except for “Moth Robbins” by Ian Mills, the Morton Houyhnhnms, and the original “Gentleman Raccoon” on J. J. Cale’s Naturally by Bill Radon.

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1. Gulliver's Travels into several Remote Regions of the World, ed. J. F. Waller. Illustrated by T. Morten (London: Cassell & Co., [1726] 1864, 1865). <http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100037377716.0x000001> See also the Penguin Books edition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (2010).

2. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1938] 1944); I cite the Beacon Press (Boston) edition of Hull’s translation: 1955, 14. On caught-upness more broadly, see also Peter G. Stromberg, Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

3. I am still thinking over how “near-immersion” relates to “child-like,” if at all: at this moment, I imagine them proximal indeed. In another context, I’ve characterised “near-immersion” as one of my principal goals as an interpreter of history: “ ‘Immersion’ signals my attempt to enter into the world experienced by a range of . . . historical subjects. That such entry is always an unreachable aim is signalled by ‘near’. ‘Near’ immersion offers distance that also allows one to bring more information to bear than a historical subject could have done in interpreting an utterance, an action, or the context surrounding an event. The impossibility of immersing fully in a past thought-world makes me —and my enthusiasms, priorities, and judgements— an inescapable part of the puzzle.” See Kenneth Mills, “Mission and Narrative in the Early Modern Spanish World: Diego de Ocaña’s Desert in Passing,” in Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity, eds. Andrea Sterk and Nina Caputo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 115-116; 115-131. In working along these paths, I’m particularly indebted to the aforementioned William B. Taylor, and to Inga Clendinnen.

4. See Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013).

5. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 119 and Ch. 5 entirely.

6. Scott G. Bruce, “Introductions” to his edited Penguin Book of Dragons (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2021), xviii

7. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville: The Fantastic Fourteenth-Century Account of a Journey to the East (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1964 [(ca. 1357) 1499; 1900]), 132.

8. On Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum historia, within his larger collecting and encyclopedic project, see Peter Mason, Ulisse Alrovandi: Naturalist and Collector (London: Reaktion Books, 2023), esp. Ch. 5: “Anomalies.” On the lines of the monstrous and the human, broadening the scope, see also Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

9. See The Huarochirí Manuscript a Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991) edited and translated from Quechua so brilliantly by Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste; also Ch. 2, “Huacas” in my Idolatry and Its Enemies : Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640-1750 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1997], 2012, 2018).