Badger

 
Human botany is about wilderness. It's not about humans, but plants, animals and land. The notion extends from the childhood of consciousness, to yourself alone on the trail on a hill covered with trees, to  learn to follow even when faint. We followed that trail in the Mazatals that wound through draws and sides of hills over rocks, marked by cairns pretty far apart and falling down, you could just see with the peripheral eye. I was carrying our first son on my shoulders when a yellow rattler popped from the rocks. 

Seeing a man as a plant, a nation as a forest takes on meaning when "we are in the middle of a mass extinction," the sixth. Wilderness questions a man that he seeks to destroy it even if he destroys himself. This admits several justifications, the commercial taking dominion in every resource exploitation, denying the manner in which it is done, so that after every excuse the psychology that makes him destructive to the outer world, because he is threatened within, threatens him, whether he imposes religious terms on it or purely pecuniary ones.

I don't want to be a hawk or cat. I want to be a groundhog or rat, maybe a wolverine, badger or fox, feel the earth house with walls of flesh. To be comfort in a body and meditate, store nuts, build a home with entrances and exists, sharpen the faculties, feel peace in the bairn. Attracted to piles of rock. I collect them in memory. Texas Canyon, Enchanted Rock, Old Sarum, caer sites, forts, Cromlechs, berms out  of dirt and stone. Building caerns for this new guy.

 Piles of it right now, river silt with gold traces, children climb. With berms are as high as anybody's, and river rock smooth as basket balls to lift around the yard, I build walls, love a wheel barrow. Sometimes a badger unawares out of his den below the rosemary in the hill, good sized, but not often appears. Porcupines are more naive, but then they can be. This all has to do with the meaning of sleep. The badger works hard all day on the burrow, the mouse, the rat labor day and night. Sleep is not confined to one or the other. It is a respite of orientation, dreaming a burrow, dreams that come together in the work. What's going on is brooding, no matter what the occupant, not that hawks don't brood  at the tops of dead trees where we see one eye open.Then they arpeggio. The cat is also always brooding with wit.

Physiologus heaps all occult myth and fancy on animals.

Science heaps on them our health. 

Hazards have to go somewhere. 

Prester and the asps founded fast food. 

"Anybody that gets struck by this animal swells to a prodigious size and is destroyed by corpulence"  (White, The Book of Beasts 175).

The Sirens founded media, television  (Conversation IV), seductresses who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island  “entice poor chaps by a wonderful sweetness of rhythm, and put them to sleep…pounce upon them and tear them to bits” (White, 134). 

Don't be like the tiger. 

Do be like the ant. 

Each species a morality play, not a thing itself. 

This is the attitude of science. What use is the thing, what experiments can be run, will it make a good paper, improve human kind? Such morality plays will be running when the polar ice extincts. This in the cliched pattern that English songbirds are good, but hawks are bad. This divided state of the fallen world where every perceived threat in the outer world is projected upon an animal includes all nature. Nature mirrors human fear back upon the human. The savagery of the tiger, or cruelty in any exterior form is his own internal state, as is his spiritual despondency,  greed, etc.

 And this comment from Maimonides on the mixing of species:

"when one species is grafted upon another, the branch which is to be grafted must be in the hand of a beautiful damsel, whilst a male person has disgraceful and unnatural sexual intercourse with her; during that intercourse the woman grafts the branch into the tree...The Law, therefore, prohibits us to mix different species together, ie., to graft one tree into another, because we must keep away from the opinions of idolaters and the abominations of their unnatural sexual intercourse. In order to guard against the grafting of trees, we are forbidden to sow any two kinds of seed together or near each other" (Guide of the Perplexed, III, 180).

Now we know what all those scientists are doing in their laboratories.

Bestaries have slandered the animal as philsophers have done. The last paragraph of MaCaffery's interview "distingushes an animal voice (a voice of soniccontinuum) from a human voice (a voice of sonic articulation)...The animal voice, Hegel claims, is pure sound, empty and grounded in negativity. In Hegel’s scheme “every animal finds its voice in its violent death; it expresses itself as a removed self” (45-46). By intercepting this animal voice of death and subjecting it to articulation, human language emerges with two decisive characteristics: (1) it retains within it the voice of death; (2) it becomes the voice of consciousness thereby converting negativity into being. To me this signals a fundamentally poetic quality in Hegel’s thinking, establishing as it does its mythogeme of “voice” on the codification of vowel and consonant as respectively animal and human.." (46)

I'm not a worthy enough citizen to criticize these high figures, only following a trail, but it seems to me if this is representative that it is the problem of extinction translated from the commercial to the philosophical, as if Hegel never left his house to walk in the woods for it is not the voice of death in the song bird or elk, it is the joy of life. So it says somewhere that everything that has breath praises. This praise is the tongue of animal speech and it is the tongue of life not death. You can see though why I'm drawn to the notion of the two voices, considering another trail I follow of the Inner Voice maybe we can call it, or at least of the in and the out language of Boehme, but McCaffery says, "This idea, already implicit in Aristotle’s description of the two voices (articulate and inarticulate) obtains almost a’pataphysical excellence!" On the same page he says "Voice is a tangled mythogeme." "Poetry’s primal scene as that of inspiration involves at its base a fundamental “other” voice, a voice speaking through one. This image of the poet as a passive, possessed mouthpiece of an alien voice runs from Plato’s Ion through to Jack Spicer’s poetics of dictation.

And if the poet is passive it is not from speaking the voice of death, but of the transfiguring life which you should know in its essence and if not email me. If voice is "the originary place of negativity" that "...language is a negativity, the unsayable and the ungraspable" (Agamben) and cannot but be negativity unless it never existed, the thought goes, then "only if language no longer refers to any voice...is it possible for man to experience a language that is not marked by negativity and death" (Dillon, Politics of Security, 115). The language of the universe, as if to say become the thought or failing that be language itself. The Word of God! Voice here means author. The death of the author (Barthes) of all this forfeit is the anvil of simple speech. To speak as a bear, fly like a bird, leap like a cat the philosophers would write bestiaries of themselves.

In Mysterium Magnum Boehme calls the primal "Image" corrupted, which became "a Beast of all Beasts," manifesting outwardly the inward negative properties of man. Medieval bestiaries were portrayals of this man. You name them, moralities of  "Fox, Wolf, Ear, Lion, Dog, Bull, Cat." Go around the zodiac and to every cave art  see the divided image projected onto walls. It's not the outward form of the animals the man assumes, but the supposed inward ravening, the sloth, the seven deadly sins, that "the Man must bear such a Beast in the Body."  This is the motive of his reabsorption of projected outer fears.

This  theory of correspondence says the inside is the outside, "for as the Essence is in the Body, so the Spirit figures and forms itself internally”  (Boehme),  but if in the end the beasts are a picture of the fall in man their removal does not auger his redemption. The motive of the  reabsorption outer fears back in is his supposed redemption. All external nature reflects the man. It puts a different light on all bestiaries as well as the shrines and anti-shrines of the Faerie Queene such as the Bower of Bliss. All landscape is morality, all astronomy, all science were it but seen.

Stated simply this sounds like some form of idealism or fantasy that holds that all forms of life were originally part of man himself. These have been separated out like Plato says the woman was taken from the man. In Jerusalem, Blake says "You have a tradition, that Man anciently contained in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth" (To the Jews). It's not like he makes a systematic exposition. In the Four Zoas he says:

"So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scatterd portions of his immortal body"

... where ever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds The Eternal Man is seen is heard is felt
And all his Sorrows till he reassumes his ancient bliss"(Four Zoas, 110)

This reassumption is his restoration of all that was separated back into himself.

"As man falls from vision, he objectifies into separate existence more and more aspects of himself. He stands in awe and horror, wondering where a beast like the tiger comes from, for he does not see in it a portion of his own fallen, divided self" (The Scattered Portions, Baine, 7).

This rehumanization reabsorbs all that was separated out back into the man, then the horrific becomes beatific, the tygers and lions "sing they seize the instruments of harmony" (FZ 124.17). We shall have pop  Singing Tigers, remetamorphosis, "further up and in," says C.S. Lewis in The Last Battle. Blake's reunification reads like a migration of salmon upstream, from division into unity not to separate again. As the animals shed their skins of the human projection of limitation, "they enter upon a new life; as all forms of life rejoin Albion they reject the Selfhood which has separated man from man and man from nature" ( Baine, 8).

The mutation implicit in the loose ends of two or more species put together.
2) Things, not beings' patched up parts, not wholes constructed. No knowledge of collateral effect.
3) garbage patches, of monsterism. Multiple sociopathic murder and dementia inflicted on the social politic.
4) Obesities. Sexual confusion.Pesticides in runoff cause an increase in stress hormones that leads to immuno-suppression in frogs. Atrazine (Hayes), a common agricultural chemical, causes genetically male frogs to develop as females and produce eggs.
5) Reproductive abnormalities, sex reversing, the loss of the genetic male and elimination of the female chromosome.

People who are overweight w long hair and other accouterments use them as defense mechanisms to deflect their hurts which they internalize.

These are substitutes in the body for the loss of  spirit covering.

If  Blake was the first to celebrate the toll of industrialization in his chimney sweep, and if he is the prophet we seek, we resort to him to explain the man's fear of animals, his fear of the tree, his fear of the woman, all which sums in the fear of himself.  Blake's portrayal of animals is like the bestaries, a picture of the negative states as an antinominaism of creation, a heresy compared with Psalms and Job.