After the Meeting, a Red Fox | Lisa Russ Spaar

If ever more ravened, junked, numb-sconced
I could not recall it, sopping in aftermath
dusk’s blossom bock, ink-musk ale
at rusted window screen, the annual carnival
a neon embolism blurring the horizon’s black seam
that from the brine of my dispirits
struck me as the portajohn & ticket-littered
portal of hypocrisy and the soul’s mojo shutting down.
Then you, scrabble in the bamboo,
fluent rapacious pelt, burnt, elegant-booted streak
flecking the despond no longer just mine
with a shiver estival that –  even as language cages
it now, a loping scriptural and starving –
every word of it I winged to you then a barbarous traveling.

“Aphorism 314” from The Gay Science | Friedrich Nietzsche

New Domestic Animals: I want my lion and eagle around so that I can always have hints and forebodings to know how great or small my strength is. Must I look down on them today and fear them? And will the hour return when they look up at me—in fear?

from The Woman in the Dunes | Kōbō Abe

Animal smell is beyond philosophy.

from The Practice of the Wild | Gary Snyder

The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now.

– | Dylan Menges

Murmuration | a video by Sophie Windsor Clive

I don’t know who sent this to me, but I am grateful.

12/7/11 Edit:

photos by Nich Hance McElroy

http://nhmcelroy.com/
and
flickr.com/lawns
and
iceberger interview

from “Blood Winter” | Charles Bowden

“Sometimes when he moves through the woods he finds a bear. Then he will stand beside him.

“The bear will get up on its hind legs and softly go huff, huff, huff.”

— published in The Mountain Gazette, Jan. 2011

Blue/dog | Stuart Gibson

dead deer in Loch Ness | —

Elephant With Exploding Dust | Nick Brandt

Cheetah in Tree | Nick Brandt

two by flickr user Peter ツ

Click photos to link to Peter ツ’s extraordinary photostream.

Storybook wolf | José Luis Rodriguez

horse fetus

— | —

from The Solitude of Ravens | Masahisa Fukase

Erimo Cape, 1976

from “A Mammal Gallery” | Micheal McClure

 

 

"I stand in front of the cyclone wire cage  containing the female snow leopard. My friend  has a tape recorder. We have been taping  sounds of animals before the zoo opens. I step  over the guardrail where the snow leopardess is  watching us. She is indifferent to humans when  they keep at a distance. Her task is to fight the  physical psychosis of encagement and  madness. Most of her waking is spent pacing  the constricted outlines of her cage. But now it is  early morning and she is resting. When I step  over the guard rail she growls in anger without  moving – except her head, which swivels to  watch me.

 "No part of her can reach through the mesh of  the cyclone wire. I put my face almost to the wire  and nearly to her face. There are only a few  inches between her mouth and my face. She is  enraged, and her face, which seems divine in  such proximity, twists into feline lines of rage.  The anger and rage are clearer than the  conflicting human expressions on the daily streets. She knows the uselessness of pawing or clawing at me.

"She puts her face within an inch of the wire and SPEAKS to me. The growl begins instantly and almost without musical attack. It begins gutturally. It grows in volume and it expands till I can feel the interior of her body from whence the energy of the growl extends itself as it gains full volume of fury. It extends itself, vibrating and looping. Then, still with the full capacity of untapped energy, the growl drops in volume and changes in pitch to a hiss. The flecks of her saliva spatter my face. I feel not smirched but cleansed. Her eyes are fixed on me. The growl, without a freshly drawn breath, begins again. It is a language that I understand more clearly than any other. I hear rage, anger, anguish, warning, pain, even humor, fury all bound into one statement.

"I am surrounded by the physicality of her speech. It is a real thing in the air. It absorbs me and I can hear and feel and see nothing else. Her face and features disappear, becoming one entity with her speech. The speech is the purest, most perfect music I have ever heard, and I know that I am touched by the divine, on my cheeks, and on my brow, and on the tympanums of my ears, and the vibrations on my chest, and on the inner organs of perception.

"It is music-speech. It is like the music one hears when he places his head on the stomach of his beloved. The gurglings, the drips, the rumblings, the heart, and the pulsebeats in the interior of the body are perfect music. It is the meat speaking and moving – as the testicles move and twist and writhe within the sac making their own motility and pursuing their ends. I am overcome with the universality of the experience. I hope that the drops of leopard saliva will never dry on my face.

"We play back the several minutes of this growl and it is more beautiful than any composition of Mozart. Three-quarters of the way into the tape is the clear piercing crow of a bantam rooster making his reply to the mise-en-scène about him-to the calls of his ladies, to the sparrows, to the sounds of traffic, to the growling of the leopardess, to the morning sun, to the needs of his own being to vocally establish his territory. The crow of the tiny rooster is smaller but no less perfect or monumental or meaningful than the statement of the leopardess-they make a gestalt. The tape is a work of art as we listen. But we have no desire to add it to the universe of media and plastic artifacts. We see, hear, feel through the veil. WE are translated. "

( more )

the hazards of Yellowstone