The Bewildered

This is the second installment in my series of poems for the Zoo show. This piece, entitled Leviathan and Behemoth, responds to several of Jacqui Oakley‘s paintings. I was drawn to the sense of violent entanglement she captures in a series of amazing animal battles: octopus versus crab, lizard versus rooster, baboon troupe versus guar herd… To me, these pieces evoke epic, even Biblical, reckonings, so I took the liberty of using some particularly vivid bits from Job chapter 41 that describe the supernatural beasts Leviathan and Behemoth, a sea monster and a land-monster, respectively (the italicized verses).

While krakens and cyclopes aren’t your typical zoo inhabitants, I wanted to draw attention to the way animal violence becomes almost mythical in the zoo context. One of the key differences between the zoo and “the wild” is the utter lack of violence in the former: a lion and zebra shacked up next to each other, and yet never shall the lion’s jaws meet the zebra’s throat… While we’re at the zoo, the violence that’s so apparent in a lion’s jaw, for instance, exists only in our own minds, fueled, of course, by all the “kill shots” we’ve seen in nature documentaries over the years.  That said, were the lion to actually take down her prey in front of a gaggle of school-children, well, let’s just say, controversy would ensue. So, perhaps animal violence is necessarily mythologized when animals live their lives among us, but I think that just makes it more compelling, particularly when illustrated in as lovely a fashion as it is in Jacqui’s pieces.

The photos below are courtesy of Jacqui Oakley, and show some of her pieces in situ at Loose Cannon gallery as well as a few close-up details.

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A group of amazing artist friends put together a show called Zoo as part of the July Art Crawl this past Friday here in Hamilton. I was psyched when they asked me to produce work to respond to the show, particularly as it was based on the old-timey notion of zoos—the kinds of places where animals lived in pathetically small cages, but audiences were welcomed to put their fingers through the bars, feed the animals and gaze in wonderment at specimens from places they had only just learned existed at all.

I didn’t have time or inspiration enough to produce a piece for each artwork, but I did manage to do three that I’m pretty happy with in the end. You’ll notice I’ve been calling them “pieces,” but, really, they are poems. I don’t think of myself as a poet. I do write, and sometimes I even write in verse-form, but, way back when I was the Arts Editor for the McMaster Silhouette, I wrote an embarrassing column declaring the end of poetry, so to say now that I’ve written these poems feels a bit like eating salad for a day and claiming oneself a vegetarian. That said, I do like animals, probably too much. (I waste a fair bit of time on the internet clicking links to videos and images of strange or cute animals.) I’m fascinated by their odd closeness to yet apartness from humans. We can’t ever really know what a cat thinks, what a dog sees, and yet they’re some of our nearest companions, even sharing our beds. Weird. So, I jumped at the chance to try and capture some of my own wonderment in these, well, poems.

In this and the next two posts, I want to share my pieces alongside the artworks they responded to from the show. The opening itself was a huge success. Massive, even. I’ll tell you what, you miss a few Art Crawls in this town and suddenly the attendance has blossomed exponentially—I hear more than 1000 people turned out this month. I’m sure my mind will be further blown with this September’s SuperCrawl, seeing that it will be headlined by Broken Social Scene, J. Mascis and Frank Black… but, first, Rhinoceros.

Dushan Milic did an amazing large-scale pen and ink drawing of a rhinoceros for the Zoo show, as well as a smaller study of a rhino skull. The first image is a close-up of the head from the larger piece. I’ve also included one of his studies in preparation for the final drawing, just because the line and ink work is so gorgeous. The piece I wrote in response draws on my memories of the rhino at the Toronto Zoo, who always looks so still and sad, tucked out of the way in a tiny enclosure that seems far too small for such a huge animal. Let’s see if you can figure out some of my other influences. I hope you like it.

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Disclaimers: First, I am a feminist. I do not in any way condone patriarchal structures that give women little voice, lesser pay and judge them on the quality of their derrières, rather than the content of their characters. As a woman, frankly, I don’t think it’s much of a question. I owe the fact that I’m in graduate school, unmarried, relatively financially stable (ahem, personal disclosures) to generations of women who fought hard for these realities. The least I can do is identify myself with them by declaring my own feminism, even if my struggles have shifted (and in many ways, they haven’t shifted that far, but that’s the stuff of another post.) Second disclaimer, another disclosure perhaps, I’ve recently started watching Mad Men, finally, slowly and without tremendous enthusiasm, but nonetheless with curiosity. I’m sure that something of Betty Draper’s confounding existence has seeped into these ramblings.

So, with that said, when faced with the kinds of impossible decisions adulthood brings, I sometimes find myself wondering what it would be like to live in a world in which someone else made decisions on my behalf.

Housewife cleaning a TV set with a feather-brush. From: Collectie Spaarnestad

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