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I.
When asked once what, que diable, he was doing, the young Gautier de Metz, hard at work on some presumably tiresome corner of a new mappamundi, is said to have grumbled, "the beast has grown itself a new set of garters, and I'm stuck painting its tail." The odd combine of bestia and anthropo morphizing (perhaps presaging a possible or eventual: "bestanthropy") contained in that quip points this page (or at least sets it off lurching) in the direction I had hoped it might take -- that of "greatest combinatory possibilities"; the bestiary has, throughout its long history, manifested itself as a kind of fantastic terrain in which words (and paints) go cunningly (or candidly) to work on the "real" deal, as I hope the pieces in the ongoing construction of this one will.
II.
When it came time to sit and dream up some opening comment for this the first installment of what should eventually become an electronic beast book I found myself going in search of "that poem about that cat" (and no, in this instance I wasn't groping for Ginsberg's "The Lion for Real", though I might almost as well have been): Christopher Smart's "My Cat, Jeoffrey" from his Jubilate Agno. If you haven't yet, read it: it's a very damn good poem. Other very damn good animal poems abound. Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Herman Melville, Rainer Maria Rilke, D.H. Lawrence, etc. have all produced them. Carroll's "Jabberwocky", which I memorized in the eighth grade for a very-poorly-rendered-indeed "dramatic rendition" (my costume consisted of tucking my corduroys into my tube socks) is another. Borges wrote a book about fantastic beasts, as did (though they did not seem as fantastic to him as they do to us) Pliny the Elder. Kafka wrote animal stories and Carla Harryman has written, quite memorably, an animal play. But it is Smart's Jeoffrey that I should like to call upon to act as chief presiding spirit for this menagerie, for many reasons, among them, as Smart lets us know: because he [Jeoffrey] was a master of gravity and waggery; and because he could tread to all the measures upon the music.
L.H.
I went to the menagerie Tuesday and saw 14 pelicans, a sacred ibis, a gazelle, zebras, a capibara, ichneumon, hyena, etc. It seems to me like "visiting the spirits in prison." Yet not to "preach." There was the mystery. No word could pass from me to them. Animals have been called by some German "the dreams of Nature." I think we go to our own dreams for a conception of their consciousness...
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--Emerson (from theJournals) |
You, Armadillo
You, armadillo, the dark and stately shape of armadillo, the street the shape of armadillo, the arm of armadillo in the cask of snow, the cask of snow in armadillo in the taxi in the snow, the taxi cab of armadillo, the shape of texas like an armadillo, the snow that falls in texas in the armadillo snow, the armadillo running through the street to zoos in arm's length near the snow, the there you are where I am not an armadillo that does not light the way, who likes to draw the armadillo in the foothills of the stars, the stars of armadillo flesh on grills and acrobats who eat them, the eaten armadillos and the circus freaks and jerks of stars, the casks of snow on stars in flames, the bus boy armadillo, the snow storm armadillo, exploding armadillo in the tent of night where stars are poles of armadillos lacking fur and walking through the galleries like pansies in the rain, the simple bird of armadillo, the armadillo armadillo in the blades of grass that drift inside the armadillo dressed like stars inside the blades of night.
Lisa Jarnot
Suddenly, Last Summer
Sun worshipper I, in the absence of the sun, in the things I don't remember, the unfriendliness of night, the neon night and blue blue night, the creatures on the beach,
Suddenly, to remember the sun and all the creatures on the beach, suddenly to remember the sun and little sunstroked turtles, suddenly the neon night surrounding little turtles all surrounded by the night upon the turtles on the beach,
Sea creatures and mergansers, the blue blue night, the turtles on the beach all worshipping Apollo, suddenly I am thrown into your library, never to be what I was before, surrounded by a tiny light inside the dark and clutching little turtles,
Go back upon the beach and remember the sun, suddenly, surrounded by neon, go back, go back to the beach and worship it, go back to what I was before, a worshipper upon the beach, Apollo's, in the lavender, beside mergansers at the sea's night shore.
Lisa Jarnot