Monthly Archives: April 2008

Animal Cruelty

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In a comment to the previous post, Chris Robinson makes reference to a poem from my book Magical Thinking. We bear a special responsibility, greater perhaps than the responsibility we bear toward each other, to care for animals. Whichever philosopher said that we reveal our character through our treatment of those weaker than ourselves was right, I think. Here is the poem.

Abandoned Bluetick Bitch

Numbed with self-loathing,
we abandon the emissaries
of grace. Chained to a tree

beside the empty rental
she hollowed out a den
for herself & her young.

By the time we found her
the water they’d left her
was a couple of days gone.

When the water was gone
she would have slept, not dreaming,
letting the pups nurse

her sparse milk & when
the smallest died she ate it to keep
her strength & cleanse the den,

depriving coy dogs & foxes
an expedient scent.
It’s likely there were two more

before we found her.
Ribs covered by a tissue of dry skin,
she was nothing-a shadow

on the dirt & was just able
to raise her head & take
a little water from my hand

before turning to nose
her three live pups awake.
Reader, it is true, there is

horror everywhere worse
than this & cruelty that beggars
imagination, but this

is local & particular; these were
my neighbors did this,
who, without even the excuse

of psychosis, committed this wrong.
Who live in this same light
& shadow I live in.

Let us kill one another
with heedless abandon-we deserve it-
but not these poor relations

whose lives are without malice
& whose motives are transparent.
Let us kill one another.

Guillermo Vargas Habacuc

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I’m not going to link to the photos / video of artist Habacuc’s work. If you want to see a dog starving to death as an art installation, you can search on the name.

Proposal for funding: An art installation: Guillermo Vargas Habacuc comes to my house & we tie him to a tree out back without food or water. My dogs & I watch from the deck as he starves to death. They bark at him & I jeer, but soon we grow bored & he dies in loneliness & terror. Certainly the authorities would have no objections since this would be an art installation.

Note: Looking around a bit more, I see that the artist has issued a series of statements defending his work. It’s hard to know what to make of them, but even the most recent in which he says he is trying to call attention to the plight of stray dogs makes no logical, aesthetic, or moral sense. Why not a street urchin with AIDS? Why not a torture victim? You want to call attention to the plight of stray dogs in Costa Rica? Go rescue one, provide veterinary care, and if it is “going to die anyway,” comfort it as you have it put down. Photograph & videotape tape the process & show that work in the gallery. Any real art — even the ugliest & most painful — must spring from some source of compassion; otherwise, it is merely egotism, voyeurism, exploitation, sensationalism, stupidity in various mixtures & combinations. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1).

Leafing Out

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There ought to be a name for the day, in temperate climates, that the trees leaf out. (It would not be the same date each year & it would come earlier the further south one went.) Here in St. Lawrence County, that day was yesterday. The world went from shades of gray & brown to shades of green. The birches are & willows are an intense yellow-green, the maples a kind of dusky green, except for the species that leafs out first bright red, then goes green as chlorophyll  pumps into the leaves. The roadsides have gone from dust & plow gravel to grass overnight. As I say, there ought to be a name for this particular day of each year.

The Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes

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When the last pope first came to this country, I was in graduate school in Iowa. People that I actually knew — people I would never have suspected of such impulses — drove to Chicago to attend a mass presided over by John Paul II. Perhaps it was because John Paul & the poet Czeslaw Milosz had been boyhood friends & we were poets in wanting, after all. But I’m not sure my friends even knew enough to know about the pope’s connection to the poet. I only learned about it later. But I stood mystified. Even then, I would have been reluctant to subject myself to a stadium-sized crowd to see, say, the Rolling Stones. (Maybe Dylan.) But the pope? The man who stood for a politics I couldn’t imagine subscribing to? It was the ceremony, they told me. And the personality. I’ll grant that John Paul had personality, that he was a sort of intellectual, though of a distinctly medieval sort. But Benedict the whatever? The man sounds like Peter Sellers doing a prissy German accent. The gushing coverage on NPR as I was driving to work was simply too much. I turned off the radio & listened to my rotten muffler. I have a protestant detestation of ceremony that extends  even into my academic life. I got drafted last year to go as my department’s representative to the university’s awards event. The fucking thing is three hours of endless high-minded blather & made-up tradition. I think it was the most boring three hours of my life. The Catholic Church, despite its liberals & liberationists, stands for a politics of prejudice. Sure there are sincere Catholics who believe in social justice. Good for them. But what the hell would Jesus say? Jesus who hung out with hookers & queers & the poor, for God’s sake! Did you know that the pope wears $600 shoes? Sell all that you have & give it to the poor. Commercial spiritual gush. Advertising. Power. The rhetoric of peace without the least sense of responsibility. The rhetoric of compassion riding in a white Mercedes. American Catholics themselves have doubts about the “rigorous” religious faith this pope demands of the faithful. The oppression of women & the exclusion of gay persons, that’s rigor. And yet the secular media falls all over itself to be respectful. It is a measure of our own depravity that we do not hoot this man from the stage, that we do not ignore him as the dangerous anachronism that he is. And, sure, this is an anti-Catholic rant. I was raised among right-wing protestant fundamentalists they’re even worse. Coming soon: why the hardcore “rationalist” atheists are just as stupid.

Spring Birds Again

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Came home today after teaching & sat on the deck looking at the river. First really warm day of the year, though there are still patches of snow in the deep hollows in the woods. Just at dusk, the blackbirds & grackles began arriving, perching in the high branches of the maples to catch the last of the sun. A few of them swooped down to pick at the seeds the chickadees had let fall under the feeders, but it was mostly a social call. At the suggestion of one of my best students, I was reading American Gods — the black birds & the black river: appropriate imagery, not so much because they are sinister, but because they are numinous.