Moo Deng’s Life Inside the Panopticon
Notes on nonhuman subjectivity.
When we encounter a nonhuman character in literature, if this character is granted interiority then its perspective is necessarily characterized through an anthropomorphic lens. Nonhuman life cannot be a fictional subject while remaining itself. Every plant and animal in a fictive universe becomes a cartoon from The Lion King, enacting Shakespearean archetypes and voiced by James Earl Jones or Matthew Broderick.
I watch Moo Deng the baby pygmy hippo raise her fat precious neck to lip at bent leaves. Imitating her mother, who eats more capably. I watch her give up the task, for she has not yet developed teeth, and her slippery rotund body takes arhythmic steps to the pond. She does not drink. After a second or two, she waddles back to her mother.
The pinkness of her fat rolls and her overreactions to mundane facts of life–sprays of water, human hands–has turned Moo Deng into an internet celebrity. Artists draw her cradled in the arms of Jesus. Her likeness has been crocheted, embroidered, and 3D-printed. I am part of the Moo Deng fandom. I have seen each available image of her multiple times, and still, when she pops up on Instagram I pause my scrolling to soften, to smile, to coo.
*
If I could paint, my only subject would be my dog, staring out of windows. I would be happy with fifty iterations of this image, seventy, one hundred. Today she watches rain falling on our backyard, her chin on the sill, her thoughts my own projection. A neighbor told me yesterday, as I walked her, that she looked like “a very good friend.” I melted at this phrase, even as I yanked her away from eating a chicken bone. I doubt she understands that my controlling behavior also keeps her alive. Her love for me exists, but in a shape beyond my full comprehension.
It is not a love that might waver if the beloved became cruel or neglectful. I do not have to extend any kindness nor allow her freedom in order to receive her love. I therefore have no motivation to give her a good life, save for my own selfish, human love. Our two devotions can meet only through touch and through action, with language hardly mattering.
*
I accidentally un-muted the video, so now I can hear the crowd that surrounds Moo Deng and her mother. The noise of humanity finding you entertaining. I do not know her zoo’s hours of operation. It might not matter. When the crowds leave, the cameras remain.
I have certain metaphysical beliefs. When I am on a high dose of mushrooms, and sometimes sober in the ocean or among very tall trees, I feel connected to an infinite web outside of my usual senses. A network of interdependency that binds humans to each other and to all other species, that crosses boundaries of living and non-living. I believe this connectivity is real even though I can’t always feel it, that it is a frequency not yet measured by science. This connectivity, as it encompasses everything, includes the millions of Instagram reels, TikToks, tweets, skeets, Facebook posts, WhatsApp memes, Group Chat-renames, of Moo Deng. Certainly her image has been shared with the swipe of a thumb more times than any current bestselling novel has been printed.
I learned recently that dogs’ sense of smell is so advanced, so finely attuned, that smell is a three-dimensional sense for them. Smell is to dogs what sight is to humans, allowing them to make sense of any space they enter. This, I suspect, is what my dog is doing with her chin on the windowsill, her nose twitching while raindrop sprays flit into the room through the screen. Rain changes how the world smells. I am watching her expand her vision of the universe, the interconnected web that she feels more concretely than I do. Perhaps this is my anthropocentric point of view, but I strongly suspect that modern, globalized, late-stage capitalized, fossil-fuel-addicted humans might be the only species who need psychedelics, nature walks, meditation, prayer, near-death experiences, live music, communal dance, etc, to feel connected to other life forms. I believe my dog has more immediate access, smelling these connections any time the window is open.
Although Moo Deng is cute, and chubby-cheeked, and full of protest, and makes meme-able faces, and bites the knees of her keepers most adorably, she is not so different from my dog at her most studious. Moo Deng is part of the network, connected to me and to my dog, and can we, should we, take for granted that she knows nothing of the connections that surround her?
And if she is plugged in to the main frame, what then of her iconic status within the web? What of her image, catapulting across every continent, making her beloved in every human language to be found online?
*
Evolution continues within our current wave of extinction. I do not know what adaptation will yet be expressed to allow an animal to accept the adoration of billions. I do not know what happens to photos of my dog once I post them online. Those that I don’t post are stored in the cloud, mysterious technology that I don’t understand, some magic that I have made with her or upon her, magic that may be black or white or might have no color, only a smell.
I have such affection for Moo Deng that some part of me believes we have interacted beyond images, like I have touched her, fed her, stared into her furious eyes. We have no further connection beyond that of any random two life forms, and she does not know my face, my voice, my scent, my projections.
Human philosophy: A watched subject will always be changed by the watcher’s gaze.
I decided that instead of dealing with the submission process to try and place the above piece of writing in a lit mag somewhere, I wanted to put it out into the universe while Moo Deng’s internet celebrity might still be relevant. Thus it goes here. Now I have outed myself as a hippie who believes in the interconnectedness of all life, my Unitarian upbringing rearing its head.
For me, January 2024 feels like it happened at least five years ago, not one. I don’t know how to make sense of 2024 as a whole because it could not possibly all have been one year. Personally speaking, this “year” was a pretty good one, all things considered. Some bets I made on myself paid off. I met a lot of wonderful people. I’m no longer at the job that was driving me mad when the year started. I wrote many words I’m quite proud of. The chronic pain mostly didn’t get me down. I have a lot to be grateful for.
Beyond the personal, this year was a car wreck, but you don’t need me to tell you that. It feels trite to go into 2025 with best wishes for the new year, because we all know that the best case scenarios aren’t very good. But I have managed to cling to some optimism. I hope that 2025 will be nothing but roadblocks for my political enemies and that my political allies will take advantage of every chip and crack in the fascist project. I hope my loved ones will flourish. I hope my seasonal depression won’t hit me too hard. I hope that I will continue with my recent weightlifting habit. I hope that the first 20,000 words of the novel I am writing will grow into many thousands of words more.
Happy New Year.
You have a fantastic gift of expression...may 2025 see you continue to grow as a writer.
I am so moved. Oh my heart.