ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a performance of Hamlet in a Madrid theater converted from what was once the city’s most important slaughterhouse, juxtaposed with the experience of a bullfight and the myth of the Minotaur. Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain, a book which interrogates religious and political dogma, is brought into the conversation in order to ask what it means to be human, what it means to be animal, and how those categories sit in relation to the narratives which have traveled across generations of human evolution. How, in other words, has matter been organized into an umwelt, into distinct philosophical, political, linguistic, and moral patterns? And how has this aided us in psychologically isolating ourselves from the other beings with whom we share the planet? Ultimately, the chapter is a meditation on consciousness, where it emerges, and how it becomes definitional of where compassion is merited. How do complex systems lead to meaning making that seems to be above and beyond their material sum? Do the semiotic processes at work at all levels of biological experience, and their kinship to our own linguistic reality, demand our empathy? Does the bull deserve compassion? How do such radically different perspectives arise within the human umwelt, and how can these sorts of impasses, based around such fundamental questions as which beings deserve our consideration, begin to be addressed?
