Sea of Intimacy keeps surprising me. Sometimes it seems to be about more than what I thought. Other times, it zeros in on something narrow, specific, which then turns out to be more than what I thought. For instance, donkeys.
I discovered the names of islands derived from donkeys in the Adriatic last summer while sailing. On that basis, I proposed a paper for the ASEEES conference in Washington, D.C., in late 2025. I thought it would be a short sketch, a little color, enough for a 15-minute presentation, and then a few questions and answers. Wrong.
The essay now seems to have at least three parts, reaching back to Ancient Roman and Greek history, religious conversion and priesthood (shamanism), film representation, animal-human relations, maritime history, and more. Here’s what I think is the first part.
Where Donkeys Go to Die
“And what occurs when one gives a name? What does one give then?”
Jacques Derrida, On the Name
Among the most conspicuous of the eastern Adriatic’s mammals is doubtless the donkey. People who grew up here invariably remember the ones in their neighborhood, often in their family, grandpa and grandma’s donkey, the ones down the street or on the other side of the island, the jenny that used to help auntie with her groceries, the ancient specimen that seemed to be Old Marko’s shadow, accompanying him everywhere, even waiting outside the door of the outhouse, the wild young jack down the road, the ones that met your eye (which was just about all of them) on your way home from school, quiet and forever patient, waiting for a treat.
Known for their steady endurance, strength, and longevity, donkeys have long been the perfect helpers for those who work the land. Sometimes also the sea, as in these parts they once regularly clambered on and off the local fishing and cargo boats, sailing with their owner-companions from the mainland to the islands and from one island to another. As Vladimir Skračić describes in his intimate lexicon of the Kornati archipelago, the open hold of a gajeta, the all-purpose vessel nearly ubiquitous throughout Dalmatia, could be configured into two levels on his native Murter. When one needed to bring a donkey, a tovar, using the upper level served perfectly, a bit like a double-decked ferry of today, except with the vehicles on the bottom. Donkeys, like people, seem to prefer a view. Indeed, as Skračić puts it, “a donkey in the hold of a gajeta, or on its prow, is a piece of Murter’s nautical iconography” (352).
As a pack animal for use by humans, the donkey is among the oldest, reaching back some 3,500 years. When the Ottomans began sidling up to the Adriatic coast in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, caravans regularly made the trek to Split from Constantinople, and donkeys met camels, though obviously not for the first time. Nevertheless, camels were quite rare in these parts, not being suited to them for just about anything except, perhaps, royal exhibitionism, as with the great “menagerie” of Frederick II of Sicily, known in his day, and in the museum dedicated to his remarkable exploits in his native Jesi across the water, as stupor mundi, “wonder of the world.” In the Adriatic of the thirteenth century, camels might very well have been seen as wonders, but they weren’t much help around the house, let alone the boat. And getting one into the hold, let alone the prow, of one’s gajeta would have been quite a trick.
No, humans in these parts were not just satisfied but actually, I want to say, happier with donkeys. Mica, Miško, and Mrki were not mere helpers. They were members of the family. You could count on them to be there when you needed them. They did not run from trouble—donkeys are known to hold their ground, confident in their ability to protect themselves. And with a person nearby, you could protect yourselves together. Nor would they eat you out of house and home or get sick from this, that, or the other like a finicky horse. They might not be fast, but they were steadfast.
Stubborn they were too, as befitting the stereotype, but most often that was the result of misunderstanding, something their human companions hadn’t yet noticed, a suspicious crack in the pavement, an unexplained sound in the brush ahead, a dangerous looking footbridge. Generally, they could be reassured, coaxed. Slow and steady.
In the ancient world, the donkey was considered the more peaceful of two modes of transport. The other, on horseback, was generally associated with active soldiering. Show up on a donkey, as Jesus had, just as many a king in his own realm, and people understood: this was about peace, a demonstration of peaceful power, security, confidence, slow and steady, just like the beast itself. The guy coming into town was riding on Mica, Miško, or Mrki, after all.
It was also in the ancient world that people seem to have first begun imagining themselves from the donkey’s perspective. Apuleius’s Golden Ass was probably a re-telling and elaboration on an earlier story, but his is the one we remember most today. It is, from its outset, a story of magic gone awry—the spell was supposed to turn Lucius into a bird but turned him into an ass instead—and then, in the end, recaptured and put back in its proper place—he becomes not a bird but a sort of shaman in the mysterious secret cult of Isis. A lot like a bird, in fact.
Authors have adored this story and its perspective, mining both for their own work over the centuries. Boccaccio took some of its raunchiness and bits of plot, Shakespeare its transformative and bestial implications (and its raunchiness), while Machiavelli tried his hand at terza rima on its basis. Henry Fielding, Franz Kafka, Walter Pater, and more have borrowed and reworked Apuleius’ story, which, his second-century original calls Metamorphoses—it was Augustine of Hippo who would refer to it as The Golden Ass (Asinus aureus), in his City of God some two hundred years later. Augustine, as one might expect, didn’t much care for it.
These plays with perspective are all rather like Jonathan Swift’s use of size and other kinds of estrangement. They tend to be focused on how people treat one another (in general badly), providing a sort of defamiliarizing lens for deep satire, maybe even a strain of misanthropy. The donkey watches, his big ears attuned, as people do what people will do—they hurt one another, lie, cheat, smuggle, seduce, steal, gossip, rape, kill. They also engage in various kinds of—often unsavory—business, travel from one place to another (often secretly), and spend nights out in the open, because inns are dangerous. They sometimes gang up, sneak, hunt, spy, sabotage, run away. Often the donkey’s just a passive witness, the exterior equivalent of a fly on the wall. Other times people might encourage, or even try to force, the donkey to help them. Often this is where violence to the donkey comes in. Mostly such depictions stem from some form of anthropomorphism: there’s a person inside the donkey, or at least a person’s perspective, with all the emotions, ideas, vulnerabilities of a human being, just with a bit more patient resilience.
But something has changed in more recent examples. The focus has shifted, it seems to me, to the animal itself. The story has become not what the animal helps us to see about us—we haven’t changed much, it turns out, still treating each other with ridiculous amounts of meanness and cruelty after all these thousands of years, so why bring it up again?—and more about our relationship with the natural world, for which the donkey stands in, as a sort of middleman, or middlebeast. As with all good stories, of course, the potential for multiple ways of understanding them was always there. It’s probably why they’ve stuck around. But for anyone reading them today, being inspired to create new works on their basis will likely mean a different kind of interrogation, not just of the cultural world but of humans and nature together, that is, of both human nature and human-nature.
I suspect the shift began in the 1960s, with the rise of a broader strain of ecological thinking. This is the context for a film such as Robert Bresson’s Au hazard Balthazar not only being conceived of and produced (though many initially turned it down) but also celebrated as a masterpiece, a status it continues to enjoy to this day. As critics have noted, Bresson largely eschews anthropomorphism in his perspectival play, with a few subtle exceptions such as when the camera focuses on the donkey’s face while people are speaking about something apparently unrelated to the donkey nearby. Mostly, however, he’s just a donkey without any person hidden inside. But the fact that he is given a name, a powerful, magical name—in popular films of more recent years, this name seems to be frequently favored for a demon or sorcerer—and the manner in which he is given it, christened and anointed with oil in a solemn ceremony performed by the household children, makes it clear that what we are seeing is a foregrounding and elevation of the animal’s unique and unrepeatable being. In the process, people’s mutual recriminations begin to look rather routine, and Balthazar’s implied perspective becomes almost a relief.
[End of the excerpt]
Where they go (donkeys, that is) in the book isn’t quite clear yet. At this point, they are in the section on “places real and imagined,” as I was thinking of the islands that have been given donkey names when I first started writing. But now I’m wondering if this is in fact part of the portion of the book on “beings real and imagined,” which is also functioning as something of a bridge between the living and the dead. This is where priesthood comes in. It could be in both, of course. The place first, the being later.
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Russell Scott Valentino 