Apologia For All Beings in Distress

"You never know, I said [Barry Lopez], the ones you give some semblance of burial, to whom you offer an apology, may have been like seers in a parallel culture. It is an act of respect, a technique of awareness." 

For Barry Lopez the wolverine enlivens the force of natural wilderness as the bear does for Momaday. We know we are less human by the loss of the wilderness contrast. Forests of the north, coyote and elk in storm, dead fall fires in yarrow meadows, armed men, dogs, tent, truck, prevent the hunger of the bear. But this is small stuff to the scapegoated  puritan fear of the spirit. It has a name in Leviticus that Barry Lopez does not mention because the names of the gods depend on who uses them. Once above the outbuildings of a flour mill near ASU was the proud declaration "Ashtaroth" written high above. This was not a misspelling of Ashcroft. The ambiguity of the world of spirits to a people who have no gods is that power and money mix up an argument about consequence and cause and make a literature out of it. There is a group of new pietists, newscasters and reporters who proclaim this morality of disconnect from the comfort of their desks. They have the compassion of a war reporter living off amputees while pretending to be a conscience, like an English puritan living off smallpox, or an el exterminador and a monetizer of home mortgages living off public consumption. When these fail they express the greatest compassion for the failed it is for themselves. Surely no one expects to end this discussion with a conclusion. They are all gone out of the way, there is none that does good. One of four mammals will become extinct.

When I was an arborist for Crockett Tree Service we sometimes dumped the day's wood chips at the dump, backed up the big truck to the edge, raised the back and it all slid out down the hill. Sometime it seems I had been warned not to look around the site, home of the Katonah Animal Shelter. The road to the dump wound around a little and then the truck had to backed up and in, so I didn't look on the way in. This day was a Friday. On the way out I glanced to the right and saw maybe the most disturbing image ever, but there are others, a pile of dog and cat bodies that had just been gassed, eight feet high. The thing grows over time. It is gargantuan. It was about three pm. They had just cleaned out their ovens for the week. I'd never spoken this before this morning when I was telling my spouse, in order to explain what I am doing with all the ceramic bodies in my mind, piling them up. These will actually be photographed some time, with blanket shreds in between to prevent them from chipping. There is fox, bear, seal, hawk, coyote, horse. What animal has not been annihilated? From the start, for  years, quadrupeds, glued back together, either came apart in the making or in the glazing or firing, torn skins, beaded shino ridges, marred as if they were nameless. One called Boxcar Named Desire, to be exhibited this fall, hard to look at the faces; one called Apologia above. Some so large as to diminish their own perspective. All creation groans together toward its redemption. I don't think there is or ever has been one scientist who felt or grasped this pain.

Animal Spirits

Poets wrote of the coming biological extinction, prophetic celebrations of the natural before the industrial revolution. We find ourselves determining extinction’s cause.  Beasts first go extinct. The pain of the bestiaries is they compare the animal to the human to the detriment of both. Humans adopt some negative animal trait. Yale professor Robert Shiller says Animal Spirits are a forecasting tool, that the business world has discovered irrationality as a means to wealth. But he did not learn that animal spirits involve the reality of hunger and laying low, to love the sun and love night. When Bunyan says "poor silly Mole, that thou shouldst love to be, / Where thou, nor Sun, nor Moon, nor Stars can see," Bunyan can't see.

Physiologus heaps all occult myth and fancy on animals. Science heaps our health hazards.The asps founded fast food. Prester is the asp that  anybody who gets “struck by this animal swells to a prodigious size and is destroyed by corpulence” (T. H.White. The Book of Beasts. 175). Media heaps on our loss of identity and confusion of soul. The sirens founded media, television  (Conversation IV), “entice poor chaps by a wonderful sweetness of rhythm, and put them to sleep…pounce upon them and tear them to bits” (White, 134). In this Coercion of the Senses Odysseus is tied to the mast, tie open the eyes gates to violence as in Clockwork Orange. If they will not see they will not sleep.

If Mr. Blake were the first to celebrate the toll of industrialization in his chimney sweep, and if he were the prophet of the week, we’d resort to him to explain the man's fear of animals, fear of the tree, fear of the woman which sums the fear of himself.  Blake's portrayal of animals is like the bestiaries, a picture of the negative states as an gnostic creation, a heresy compared with Psalms and Job. Don't be like the tiger. Do be like the ant (Proverbs). Each species becomes a morality play, not a thing in itself of wonder, which attitude translates to science. What use is the thing, what experiments can be run, will it make a good paper, improve human lot? This morality play will be running when polar ice extincts. Thus in the cliched pattern of English folklore songbirds are good, hawks are bad.

In this divided state  every threat perceived in the outer world from animals, which includes all nature, is a human fear caused by division and mirrored back. That is, the savagery of the tiger, or cruelty in any exterior form is a human internal state, a spiritual despondency.  In Mysterium Magnum Boehme calls the primal "Image" corrupted, which became "a Beast of all Beasts" manifesting outwardly the inward negative properties of the man. Thus medieval bestiaries were moralities of man, you name them: "Fox, Wolf, Ear, Lion, Dog, Bull, Cat." Go around the zodiac and to every cave art to see the divided image projected upon the animal. It's not the outward form the man assumes, but the inward projected by him upon the beast. A supposed ravening, or sloth in the seven deadly sins at least is that "the Man must bear such a Beast in the Body."  This is the motive of reabsorbing these projected fears.

Reabsorb

A theory of correspondence says the inside is the out: "for as the Essence is in the Body, so the Spirit figures and forms itself internally”  (Boehme),  but if the beasts are a picture of the human their removal does not redeem him. He is redeemed by the reabsorption of projected fears. Imagine a winch of the spirit where first lust and greed, then fear and hate are pulled back! That all external nature reflects the in cast out, bestiaries unmasked.

It sounds like  fantasy to hold that all forms of life were originally part of the human, then projected 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). In the Four Zoas he says:

"So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scattered 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)

"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 of all that was separated out back into the man becomes beatific. The tygers and lions "sing they seize the instruments of harmony" (FZ 124.17). As the animals shed their skins of the human projection, "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).