The Glories of the Giraffe
[“(I)f ever I could claim to have seen the face of God, it was in the colossal faces of those giraffes” (Lynda Rutledge, West With Giraffes [2021]).]
[“For (God) brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be represented by them; and because His goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided and hence the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever” (Aquinas, Súmma Theológica, q.47).]
O Lover,
Yet again the experience began improbably. My spouse, an avid bibliophile, had recently read Lynda Rutledge’s 2021 West with Giraffes. This is a work of historical fiction about two giraffes’ maritime survival in the environs of New York City amid the hurricane of 1938 and their subsequent transport via outfitted Mack truck to the famed San Diego Zoo. Not my typical reading material. Nevertheless, I noted how my wife was enamoured with the book’s description of the disposition of the two creatures: generally gentle, seemingly relational, and wondrously exotic. We found ourselves exploring numerous online images of giráffa camélopardalis noting in particular the large eyes, lavishly lashed and darkly luminous.
My ambivalence about zoos notwithstanding, one thing led to another and last week the two of us found ourselves on the South Bend zoo’s ten foot high giraffe feeding station. Kellan, a young male, an elongated outlier having seemingly just stepped out of Hicks’ “The Peaceable Kingdom,” was unaffectedly working the sizable audience while being hand-plied with hearts of romaine. Half of those doing the plying were children as was, it seems, this senior. Grand it was, this geriatric finally really experiencing a giraffe; yet again the words of T. S. Eliot: “to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
If, as has been said, the concrete particular is the door into the abstract universal, what might be the larger fruit of my modest dive into a tiny site called giráffica? Perhaps slightly more dilated eyes, and heart, so as better to receive what had long been right in front of me? Perhaps derivative of that, a less prescriptive categorizing of that perceived? And a sense of bedazzled wonder? For example, what sort of Source are You to have generated a giraffe? Experiencing eye contact with comedic Kellan triggered sundry responses to the latter query: wild, playful, humorous, whimsical, imaginative, boggling, splendorous (a la Heb 1:3). Is not all of this at least hint, intimation, glimpse of all that entropy denies? I departed the Ristoránte Romaine suspecting that coloring between the lines would have to wait until another day.
Later, wandering amid more of the zoo’s flamboyantly varied fauna, the planet’s perhaps nine million living species came to mind and I pondered Aquinas’ query: why are there so many kinds of things? His response—that creation’s wild multiplicity and diversity less inadequately depict Your goodness than could any single entity—had me viewing the menagerie via yet larger eyes of the heart. And all of this, and more, began with looking into the guileless and trusting countenance of one of Your protracted pieces of work, an inimitable one irrevocably imprimatured as “good” (Gen 1:25). Yes: “The heavens [and surely the savannah] declare Your glory” (Ps 19:1).
Could fiction, whether via single genius or committee, have ever conjured up something as bizarrely splendiferous as a giraffe?
