"Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way" - John Muir

My friends and I have this game that we play that I find very amusing. I find myself playing constantly during boring lectures, while building study models, and studying in the library. It is the association game. There are several different types of associations, whether you try colors, shapes, songs, food, whatever it is you compare it to what traits that you have that closely resemble the traits found within these. I’ll start.

[Let me preface the game by saying that it is not usually up to the individual to chose there associations, but for a lack of a fellow gamer, I shall try and use the sympathetic imagination on myself as an outsider.]

If I were a color, I would be… GREEN. It is a very simplistic choice to chose blue, even though it is one of my favorites, however green I feel best represents me. Green is not as safe as some (blue), and speaks of quirkiness and has a little more depth than others, and is aided by not being one of the primaries. I am a caring, sensitive, determined, intelligent, inventive person, and thus I find green to best accompany that personality.

Now, granted that was a very rudimentary introduction to the game, you can apply a plethora of character traits to an individual, and experiment and find out a lot about someone. One of the most difficult variations on this game is to try and associate human to animal, but is also incredibly intriguing. There will always be the questions of “is the comparison of human beings to animals venal? Or patronizing? Or a necessary mediation”1, and I say NAY! It is no mediation, but a fundamental meditation, and a good way to evaluate yourself, and the ways other perceive you. Humans are born out of animal instincts, and all animals have certain connotations, therefore when someone says “YOU ARE A FLAMINGO”, you know what to think.

There is still a photo album on facebook that my friend, Kaylee, created comparing many of our fellow theater peers to certain animals though the similarities stop short of anything more than physical attributes. ((http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/album.php?aid=2002783&id=1515390552 )2) Here is where the game gets tricky – trying to find the animal that most accurately displays what it means to be you. I can assert a few examples that I have created on my own, and hope that this does not come across as creepy for those of you who do not know these people… maybe worse if you actually do.

The prime example I have is my friend, Kenyon. She is probably one of the most regal, in posture, of people that I have ever met. Every day in Latin she sat prim and proper. She wore very clean lines in her clothing choices, and at the end of my junior year, she cut her hair really short – a very bold move for a girl in high school. She was very soft-spoken for the majority of the class periods, but the times that she added to the conversation her thoughts were concise and thought provoking. For this reason, I declared that her animal be a swan. I realize that I “free choose many aspects of how she will relate to”3 a swan, but as I say that, you are already coming up with all of your preconceived thoughts about what it means to see a swan, and I invite you to try and understand what it means to BE a swan.

The game can work positively and negatively. At the beginning of the semester, we played this game with Harry Potter Characters and people in the architecture first-years, and everybody dreaded being chosen as Draco Malfoy, for there are still those ghastly implications of such an association. “There are still animals we hate. Rats, for instance.”4 Rodents in general are a tough connection. Rabbits maybe not so much, but to call someone a mouse can never really be a good thing if you think about it.

I like to think that if I were compared to an animal it would be something unique. Like a stag, or a Gorilla, or even a Lion… if only I were so lucky to have someone betroth me to thy name.

The association game is demonstrative of a lot of things, and when compared to animals, we allow ourselves to use that sympathetic imagination in order to grasp the humanity we find within animals, and allow that to become apart of ourselves for an instance. Animals are the basis, and clearly demonstrate the characteristics that describe a person. In Elizabeth Costello, there is the assertion of the man looking “at a jaguar, and [he] is possessed with that individual jaguar life” 5.

I encourage people to explore the endless possibilities of an elementary game like the associations of animal attributes to humans, and find out what one can learn about themselves, or their own realization about the understandings of species different from our own.

1.Marjorie Garber. 740.
2. Kaylee's Facebook.
3. Barbara Smuts. 759.
4. Coetzee. 105.
5. Coetzee. 98.