CREATIVE NONFICTION 9it does something to human minds that
nothing else can do.”
People practice deep empathy in sur-
prising ways. The immersive writer and
performance artist Thomas Thwaites
tried to turn himself into an animal.
As Joshua Rothman tells the story in
the New Yorker, in 2013 Thwaites “was
semi-employed and living with his dad.”
He thought about how much simpler it
would be to be an animal. He got a grant
and he headed off to determine what
animal he would like to become. After
dismissing many options—including
elephants because they were too smart,
big, and strong—he visited a shaman.
There, Thwaites remembered that as a
child he had tried to eat a houseplant.
The shaman told him that in a cave in
France, there was a thirty-thousand-year-
old painting of a human-bison hybrid.
But he eventually settled on a goat. As
Thwaites writes in GoatMan: How I Took
a Holiday from Being Human: “Really, to
want to become a goat is pretty standard.
In fact, historically speaking, it’s almost
odder to not want to become a goat.”
Thwaites began reading Heidegger
and became convinced that to really
live the life of a goat, he would need to
goatishly interact with the world around
him. He had protheses built so he could
walk on all fours, and he decided to eat
grass—though since humans can’t digest
grass, he stewed it over a campfire with
a pressure cooker at night after chewing
it and spitting it into a receptacle during
the day.
As Thwaites began to eat the grass, he
noticed “the subtleties of the different
types of grass: the blue-green patches
of grass are bitter, whereas the greener-
green grass is sweet and much prefer-
able.” He was a goat for three days.
Even during such a brief immersion, he
started to forget himself. He hung out
with the other goats. They all did some
sniffing. Apparently goat No. 18 took a
shine to him. The goat farmer believed
Thwaites was “accepted by the herd.”
Leo Tolstoy and James Joyce and
Mary Oliver and Percival Everett. All
to a greater or lesser degree tried to get
into what an animal is—its essence—in
order to explore greater emotional
complexities of humans. Writers live
on the streets or take on different
occupations or ride along in police cars
so they can experience the world from
a new perspective—be changed—and
then relay that emotional and physical
experience onto the page.
In 1931, the Brazilian architect and
artist Flávio de Carvalho donned a
green velvet hat and walked against the
flow of a Corpus Christi procession in
São Paulo. It was a kind of wandering
with purpose, which caused an uproar
because the crowd perceived the hat-
wearing, upstream act as irreverent. He
called it “Experiencia N.2”—simultane-
ously a performance and a sacrilegious
revolutionary act.
What he did—walking against the
flow of people while wearing a forbid-
den hat—became something larger.
His provocative multi-disciplinary art
projects created a conversation with
other Brazilian artists interested in
creative revolutionary acts. Together
they became the Brazilian modern
movement and influenced group art
actions in Brazil and the United States.
More recently, a student named
Emma Sulkowicz carried her mattress
around Columbia University in 2014
and 2015. The action, which she called
“Mattress Performance (Carry That
Weight),” served as her senior thesis and
as a protest against rape on campus. It
stemmed from what Sulkowicz alleges
was her own rape by a fellow student,
whom a university disciplinary panel
ultimately declared “not responsible.”
Her walking with her mattress created
a kind of extended empathy, something
that expanded beyond her to greater
issues. The act itself seems mundane, butwhen put into a context is charged and
draws in others who feel oppressed or
harmed in a similar way. The act became
contagious: other students joined in the
effort by helping Sulkowicz carry her
mattress, and students carried mattresses
across campuses nationwide in solidarity.
We can see this same sort of extended
empathy with the Black Lives Matter
movement when groups of people
put their hands up in a “don’t shoot”
gesture. It’s a simple physical move-
ment, but when put into the context of
our time it becomes charged and opens
up physical expression. When others
repeat it, they feel the moment of the
falsely accused, as well as the existence
of the revolutionary movement.
As large groups not connected to a
specific inciting event become infected
by the event, a kind of contagious
empathy arises, and a larger understand-
ing of what it means to be human right
now forms.
It’s our job as writers to mine such
moments and events for meaning and
cultural context. It’s our job to radically
empathize with these symbolic gestures
and understand them better than the
next person.
As we do this, our empathy becomes
more sophisticated and more effective,
and it’s contagious, too—it spreads to
our readers. It’s a circular phenomenon.
We need to practice empathizing in order
to understand empathy in order to write
so that our readers experience empathy
on the page. It can’t be imitated. It needs
to be experienced and practiced, physi-
cally, like walking. It’s all connected.
We need to walk around in and
observe and reflect and write about
the world around us. Let’s become the
flâneurs of our time. In doing so we will
redefine our creative process, inside and
out. It is time to put down our phones
and cultivate a fresh new creativity that
involves the body, the mind, and—only
then—our computer keyboards.