The Convocation of Animals

 

Photo courtesy of Suki Edwards

Some of us gathered at a computer, adding names to the guest list for Jane’s memorial celebration.

Some of us had just finished writing her obituary.

One of us had arranged on her bed an embroidered gold, red and white kimono with a medicine necklace, both gifts sent to Jane.

Some of us felt her death as so strange that our cells would be rearranged.

Some of us went to a dumb film and drank too much one night.

Some nights some of us dreamed of Jane.

Some nights some of us couldn’t sleep.

One of us made long lists of things to do.

One of us saw images of Jane’s sculptures in cloud shapes.

One of us had a massage and the masseuse touched her back above her heart and released the rain.

Some of us went to the market and bought Gerber daisies and sunflowers to honor her innocent spirit.

Some of us went shopping for candles, and found white lotus blossoms that lit up the moment they touched water.

One of us passed an empty frame in the store, and was seized by the knowledge that she was gone.

Some of us were soothed by calls and messages from family and friends.

Some of us talked one night about how impossible it seemed to write a eulogy, our feelings for her too large to fit into three minutes.

One night one of us said, All I want to do is stand up and howl.

Photo courtesy of Hank Kitchell

One of us said, we could make different animal sounds, and began to hee-haw like a donkey.

One of us said, we could find animal masks and perform a chorus of animals to honor her, since many of her sculptures were of animals.

One of us laughed and said, But wouldn’t it seem too weird?

Some of us went to look for masks, but couldn’t find Owl, Fox, Bear, Cat, Monkey, Donkey.

One evening the ceremony was held at the farm of friends, a sweep of lawn sloping down to a lake fringed by tall pines.

Some of us who owned the farm lost a brother days before Jane’s memorial, but still wanted to host the event.

Some of us came early to set up tables under open tents like sails.

Some of us created a slide show of Jane’s life that was shown on a giant screen.

Some of us gathered songs she loved, and one of us played them throughout the evening.

Some of us opened boxes of candles and placed them on a table at the edge of the lake.

Some of us fanned open paper flowers for the tables.

One of us gave food from his own bakery.

Some of us, the first guests to arrive, were followed down the hill by a hawk.

Some of us had travelled many miles across the ocean.

One of us bicycled there from Victoria, British Columbia.

Some of us had known her since childhood.

Some of us had been her husbands, including her first and last.

Some of us had been caring for her for years.

One of us had moved to Seattle from New Zealand to be by her side the last months of her life.

Some of us saw sea gulls and thought of Jane.

Some of us saw whales.

One of us saw a sparrow hawk flying with another hawk through the desert.

One of us saw a turquoise dragonfly dart across the lake.

Some of us gave eulogies and some of us wept.

One of us heard a wise woman say that in certain African funeral services, hecklers in the back of the room balance the gravitas with irreverence.

Photo courtesy of Hank Kitchell

Some of us, after the eulogies, put on masks—of Horse, Squirrel, Cardinal, Rat, Pigeon, Chicken, Unicorn and Duck—and danced and called out to Jane through the voices of the animals.

Some of us sat with old friends telling stories of Jane all night.

Some of us gathered around the campfire at lake’s edge listening to stories about animal visitations after death.

Photo courtesy Suki Edwards

Some of us wrote messages to Jane on the candles, and floated them on the lake after dark, like fireflies under a three-quarters full moon.

One of us wrote, “I’m still in love with you, Jane.”

One of us heard the Rodriguez song, “I think of you,” and wept in the darkness.

One of us had cold ankles as the night grew deeper, and a white dog named Lily came and sat backwards so that her hind fur warmed those ankles. 

Some of us human creatures felt the grief lift because we had joined together to celebrate our love for Jane.

Photo courtesy Hank Kitchell

Ruminating on Ruminating

So we've been feeling a little pressure.

Self-imposed deadlines, but still, they should be honored. We had a Paris Play due today, but we'd also had an apartment full of flu.

But more importantly, we've been thinking about what to write and how to put it, and that takes time, too.

The world looks too often only at the final results, and ignores the fact that the incubation process, the rumination stage of creativity, is probably the longest and deepest stage. As artists, we do go into the creative trance, and we love to talk about "the flow" when we're in it, but that romanticizes those later stages, to the detriment of the rumination.

So, to regain perspective, and to test our post-flu stamina, we popped into the Metro and popped out at the 50th Annual Salon International de l'Agriculture, the Paris Agriculture Fair, specifically to visit some of our favorite animals, the ruminants--cows, sheep, goats--cud-chewers all.

We also found probably a hundred-and-fifty-thousand Parisians (the four-day fair drew six-hundred-and-fifty-thousand people last year), wall-to-wall with their children and their strollers, since it was Sunday, and the last day of the fair, and because the French are still quite deeply connected to agriculture. Have we mentioned they are foodies? And where does food come from? Voila!

More than 1.1 million people work in agriculture in France, about six percent of the population. France is second only to the U.S as the world's largest agricultural exporter, and is the Eurozone's breadbasket, its top cereals producer.

There were various livestock pavilions, with lots of pigs, and even dogs and cats in abundance (the latter were non-food items). Horses were segregated in their own pavilion, which probably happens all the time, but it made us think of the recent Eurozone scandal involving the lack of horseflesh segregation, an embarrassing glitch in the system. Not that people don't want to eat horse meat here, they just want it labeled. (And, no small favor, the French don't stupidly append the suffix "-gate" to every scandal here, so we haven't had to sit through news reports about Horsemeat-gate.)

There were vast halls full of wine, the 365 different varieties of cheese that DeGaulle famously noted, sausages enough to string to la lune and back, Breton dancers, Basque horsemen, Provence donkeys--and everybody was eating something, since samples were abundant.

And the ruminants? In stalls or paddocks, standing around or lying down, calmly tolerating the massive number of humans uniformly ignoring the massive number of "please don't touch the animals" signs, they had their usual message for us: Hey, chill out. Remember that rumination precedes the fever-heat of productivity. All in good time. All in good time.

As we headed back to the Metro, reminded again of the order of things, we came across the usual demonstration. At the Auto Show, it was Greenpeace; today, it was the good folks from L124, an animal rights organization dedicated to the welfare of farm animals here in France. The name comes from rural law 124, which states (in our rough translation): "Every animal is a sentient being and must be placed by the owner in a manner consistent with the biological requirements of the species."

We don't do the "eat-me-or-don't-eat-me" debate with animals, since we know they return the favor with pleasure when given the chance, but we respect our friends of all stripes who respect animals, and we welcome their nuanced debate. We're just glad that our ruminant advisers were in town, and we were allowed their counsel.

And as a grace note, our Berkeley food critic friend John Harris told us about a fine documentary by the director Judith Lit featuring the family farmers of the Périgord region of southwest France, a rural community faced with the economic and cultural changes that have come in the world's shift to agribusiness. John saw it, and raved, at the last Mill Valley Film Festival.

Queer Things, Great and Small

"For if the world is like a dark jungle and a garden of delight for all wild hunters, it strikes me even more, and so I prefer to think of it, as an abysmal, rich sea--a sea full of colorful fish and crabs, which even gods might covet, that for their sakes they would wish to become fishermen and net-throwers, so rich is the world in queer things, great and small. Especially the human world, the human sea: that is where I now cast my golden fishing rod and say: Open up, you human abyss!"

That's Friedrich Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Four.

And that is what Richard and I are doing now, fishing in the depths. We'll be back with you in several weeks.

As 2012 dawns, we wish you a year of wild hunting and fruitful fishing!

Surrealist Café Two: La Vie Avec Les Animaux

On today's menu, the results of our second Surrealist Café community collage. Readers will recall that we asked you to walk into a cafe (or a spot that animals frequent) precisely at 1 p.m. on Saturday, October 29, and record, in whatever medium you chose (poetry, prose, drawing, photography, etc.), your interchange with an animal. We suspect most of you didn't follow the rules about time and space, but nonetheless, these contributors seized the time, and amazed us with their devotion to les animaux. All contributions are (c) 2011 by their individual creators.

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Suki Kitchell Edwards, passing through New Orleans, USA:

 

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Scott MacFarlane, near LaConner, WA, USA:

“Bear Box”

Can replica serve as artifact?  The Northwest Indian bentwood box––with stylized bear design wrapped around four sides––hides in the clutter beside the register at the Rexville Grocery.  Those pens sticking out the top were not native but reinforce how functionality was a trait of this rich art form.

Down the road from the Swinomish tribal casino, this is the prehistoric land of the Northwest Coast Indian.  The red-and-black design with tertiary ovoids portrays a bear.  The little ears differentiate it from an Orca design that would display stylized flukes. 

A half-dozen miles from here as raven flies, killer whales swim.  However, this totemized design––Tlingit perhaps––derives not from here, but from the tribal turf we now call Southeast Alaska.  This design style was more formalized than local Salish art.

When I entered the Rexville, three aging hippies sitting at the counter glanced up and resumed talking.  The pencil holder had caught my eye.  Thirty-three years earlier at the Burke Museum on the UW campus, I had helped touch up these boxes, really a diminutive replica of a native bentwood artifact.  Clear cedar had been silk-screened, notched, bent and assembled just down the hall from Bill Holm’s office in the basement.  Holm was the non-native who devoted years codifying the principles behind Northwest Coastal Indian Art.  He wrote the book. 

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Stuart Balcomb, Venice, CA, USA: 

Gaynia

The vet allowed me to hold her
during the injection.
She was deaf, blind, very much in pain.
 
I know she could sense my heart beating,
her nose against my chest
as her last few pulses faded into memory.
 
Wife and child couldn't bear to attend,
so I did the deed,
then carried the lifeless cargo back home
 
where I laid her to rest, deep in the yard,
and toasted her eternal gifts
with a teary glass of Beaujolais Nouveau.

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Joanne Warfield, "Birds, Flights of Fantasy," Venice, CA, USA:  

 

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Jennifer Genest, Long Beach, CA, USA:

The Foal

 

You were part of an outline when I was trying to understand something called, “character need.” Back then, your birth was merely a point in the plot, the thing all the characters moved toward.

 

I was taught that an animal couldn’t carry a story—not as a character. But you’ve been underneath this one, gestating, being my little ticking clock. I admit it, you were used; the situation of your impending birth provided a way for characters to do and feel all sorts of things. Things, maybe, that horses don’t care anything about.

 

You arrive at last on page 268, dark and wet in the straw, and I am overwhelmed with affection for you. But once again it is a human character that takes the stage, trying to breathe life into your still, newborn body. 

 

And here I am, greedy in this tender moment, using the opportunity to move the story forward, trying to decide whether you will stand to nurse or never stand at all, and what that means for each human involved, and I am hopelessly stuck, at least for now, in mourning every possibility, in honoring you, in trying to pull off a story that only unfolds when I feel all of this at once.

 

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Walt Calahan, Westminster, Maryland, USA:

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Bruce Moody, Crockett, CA, USA:

     Les Animaux

 (for Amanda Sidonie Moody on her birthday)

There are always animals about.

Here, there, up, down,

always about. Wild.

Beetles.

Butterflies mating in front of everybody.

The squirrel taking over the roof.

The bird you failed to notice

or identify if you did

overreaching all expectations in the sky.

Consider their quiet absolute presence

like a fur you wear and have become accustomed to.

Consider the tortoiseshell cat next door

and the grey one.

and the other.

They are as impervious to us

as we to them.

We live in concourse with them

as we make our ways

cooperatively like folks on crowded streets

Neighbors we never notice.

Neither talking to one another nor to you.

They are indifferent to us as a species

to our names and souls,

dismissive of our wishes,

as we of theirs.

But they abound,

they abound all around us.

In the walls.

Underground as worms.

In the fields as unseen moles.

Ambitious for and seeking, ever seeking,

as we,

Survival.

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Amy Waddell, Santa Monica, CA, USA:

Walk Lobster

Gérard de Nerval died on January 26, 1855 at the age of 46. That's not to say he did not enjoy a full life. A man who befriends a lobster, names that lobster and has the patience to walk said lobster every day has reaped life's riches in my book. Every day Thibault the lobster and Gérard the poet took air, as it were, in the gardens of Palais Royal in Paris. Sometimes their walks found them skirting the edges of the Seine. It is not clear if the blue silk ribbon that extended from Thibault's craw to Gérard's was necessary, or whether lobster or man determined the course of the walks. It is only sure that man and lobster walked together, sans pincer or boiling water-induced screams, for some years in old Paris.

"I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gnaw upon one's monadic privacy like dogs do." 

--Gérard de Nerval.

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Edith Sorel, "Day of the Iguana," Key Largo, Florida, USA:

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Richard Beban, Aquarium Tropical de la Porte Dorée, Paris, France:

Surrealist Café #2, Les Animaux

He stands on the chair beside me, nuzzling my writing arm. He is so glad to be released from his overnight stay in the kitchen. In spite of his soft bed, fresh water and food, his litter box in the petit coin, he’d much rather sleep on our faces. But we need sleep, too.

He sounds like a little fire. I put down my pen, pick up the pink brush, and comb his white and gold fur. He lifts his face so I can get at the thick Elizabethan ruff beneath his chin. Marley, Marley.

When he’s happy, the fur puffs up around his face, and he reminds me of a bumblebee, drunk on pollen.

It’s too cold now in Paris to leave the windows open. And anyway, Marley’s not as interested in prowling on the ledge since the Tourterelles were evicted.

<http://parisplay.squarespace.com/journal/2011/9/16/conversation-entre-les-tourterelles.html>

One morning, shortly after the first egg was hatched, we opened the curtains to see if their second egg had hatched. The older chick had been gobbling food for days.

The nest was gone. Gone. Our neighbors’ grimy window had been “cleaned,” that is, someone had opened it and rubbed a rag in careless circles, leaving swirls of dirt on the glass.

What had they done with the nest? Swept it out of the geranium box? Madame and Monsieur Tourterelle might have flown away, but the three-day-old chick could not have survived, and the egg would surely have smashed.

This was the first and only video we had of that chick.

We wanted to go down to their apartment and bang on the door. But the building is one adjacent to us, and we don’t have the entry code.

What kind of people, we wondered, cannot wait two weeks for two baby doves to gain the strength to fly, before sweeping aside a nest?

Had they seen Richard’s camera pointed at their window, and felt paranoid? No, he’d made sure there were no humans around when he photographed the doves.

So hard-hearted; they were hard-hearted. Can anyone be callous towards animals and birds, and tender towards humans?

What do you think?

To celebrate the life of the Tourterelles, and to kick off a second Surrealist Café event, in which you readers participate in Paris Play, we ask the following: 

On Saturday, October 29^th, at 1 p.m. in your time zone, go to your favorite café, and write or photograph or draw or compose a tune about an animal, or fish, or bird you see that day, or one who is dear to you, or an imaginary beast, or your totem animal. Write or photograph or paint from a human perspective, or from the animal’s point of view. Don’t be intimidated if you’re not an artist. Last Surrealist Café, every contribution was imaginative.

Send it to us by e-mail the following Wednesday, November 2 (absolute drop-dead deadline), and we’ll post the best work on Paris Play Saturday, November 5^th.

Marley just leapt back on the chair, nudged my arm, and started purring like a bonfire, like a champion Swiss yodeler.