A manatee is a creature it would be hard to conjure in imagination if you never had seen one.
Perhaps we go to the zoo to be reminded of the untold possibilities that life affords. The Shang (ancient Chinese) kept exotic animals believing that they revealed hidden powers in the world.
Kept behind barriers, the zoo creatures are dreams which entertain and disquiet. Young boys jeer at the captives; reveling in their freedom and the creature’s confinement. They are unaware of how they too are destined for confinement: in office cubicles and suburban houses. Perhaps, subliminally, some have taken in the hidden despair of their mothers and fathers, and need to pretend there is no common fate.
Zoo goers miss the hopeful, disquieting, wonder which these creatures can convey because they do not take in the strangeness of their own form, nor the strange captivity in time which they endure.
The zoo animals look at us. We at them. Neither see the other. -If we did see them perhaps there would be no zoos, or of an entirely different kind. -Maybe there would be a homecoming, freeing some part of ourselves, which is “lost in thought.”