Dolly

DOLLY

 

The original copy.

The first cloned mammal, grown from the mammary glands of a Finn Dorset.

Now on display in a glass box at the National Museum of Scotland.

Specimen form: mounted skin and skeleton. Materials: organic material.

Looking into your tired eyes, what do I hope to see?

Nothing: an exact replica, indistinguishable from other sheep.

Or something: an exact replica, indistinguishable from other sheep.

The word sheep is both singular and plural, as if one implied many, many one.

As if one were essentially the same as any other.

The word human has separate singular and plural forms.

The word human is both a noun and an adjective.

The word humane is an adjective that means to be kind, often to animals.

As if one’s species depended on how one acted.

As if being kind defined ours.

Sheepish: like sheep, as in meekness, docility, etc.

The etc. is in the dictionary, as if even it were embarrassed.

As if even there your meaning was obvious.

Dolly: a plaything. Informal, doll: an image of a human.

I remember your picture in the paper, the photographers swarming around you like flies.

Like you were the sheep of medieval paintings: the lamb of God, adored on an altar.

Your innocence so absolute it was emblematic.

Or as farmers, less reverent, might have it: dumb as a lamb.

Meekness, docility, etc: this is the image we’ve made you in.

This is the story we’ve spun of you for thousands of years.

For thousands of years, you were our blank slates. I mean this literally.

Parchment, vellum: we made our paper from your ancestor’s guts.

We scraped your kind clean with a moon-shaped knife, a lunellum.

You were what we wrote with, wrote on.

This weighed on you: being our medium, our early technology.

You died young, at age six, from a lung cancer sheep get when they live indoors.

Your entire life, you slept indoors “for security reasons,” it says here.

If not for your security, if not for our hungry eyes, you likely would’ve lived longer.

There are animals that can’t survive captivity: great whites, swallows, certain gorillas.

Elephants kept in zoos live half as long as wild ones.

No one is certain why.

Cagey: early 20th century, originally US: of unknown origin.

Humans are a cagey species, our essential qualities uncertain, ill-defined.

Descartes thought humans were humans because we thought.

Descartes thought animals were without thought, automata, no different from machines.

Some humans once thought other humans could be exhibited like animals in zoos.

Sarah Baartman was one of several Khoi women exhibited in Britain and France.

Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman in the United States, was part of a sideshow.

These humans were presented as spectacles. I do not want them to be spectacles here.

They were presented as spectacles because humans thought they weren’t human.

Because some humans thought they were animals.

Humans are animals.

I mean that we are creatures, that we sometimes act viciously, without thought.

Cagey: perhaps one quality that defines the human animal is our aptitude for cages.

Humans are a cagey species.

To this day, we routinely confine members of our own species, often for “security reasons.”

My country confines more than any other: nearly one in one hundred.

These humans are scapegoats: sacrifices made to define our society.

The original scapegoat was not a goat, but a sheep: a ram takes Isaac’s place.

In the old saying, a wolf takes a sheep’s place, wears its clothing.

Alpha, beta, omega: the roles wolves play in their packs are well-known.

They are often applied to humans to describe relationships of power, of dominance.

Except that those roles originated in the observations of wolves in captivity.

More recent studies of wild wolves suggest these roles are a simplification, if not a fiction.

In the society of wolves, there is no “alpha dog,” no constant struggle for control.

In the society of humans, we see as humans.

We often can’t see this.

That we are confined by how we are defined, by how we define ourselves and others.

To define: to confine what can be known, to put a limit on fact.

What if we let go instead—if we let what we know wander, like sheep?

Could I see you better this way, Dolly?

Dolly: the cart the camera moves on. To dolly in: to glide towards one’s subject, one’s focus.

I’ve read that sheep can see more than humans: they literally have a wider field of vision.

I’ve read, too, that sheep can recognize faces.

That they remember them.

Which means that they can imagine: to picture what is not there.

Which means that they can mourn: to picture absence, to miss what is not there.

All those people looking at you, Dolly—did you see their faces later, after they’d left?

As the years passed, did you grieve them, your missing flock?

Or did you pity them—how they looked at you, but thought only of themselves?

Of how they might be no different than other humans, other animals, than sheep.

Of how they might be or become a copy: an image of a human.

Was it warm under the bright lights, as their shutters clicked, as they made their images?

As you saw yourself reflected in the small dark mirrors each human held up to you.

Your ancestors made us in your image: we invented writing to keep track of your numbers.

You made us in your image: the stem cells that grew you now grow us.

Civilization—if that’s not too grand, too violent a word—began with sheep.

You nursed us with your milk, your meat, your hair, your numbers.

Civilization began, too, with humans nursing lambs.

Your orphaned offspring kept alive on our milk.

I want to linger on this image, its prayer.

The small alien face held delicately to the breast.

The small alien mouth fed directly from the other’s body.

I want to be that gentle: to be that helpful, that helpless.

To give and be given to the flock.

To live so that my form is both singular and plural.