beasts of the earth
i was supposed to give a talk on saturday morning at tim houston’s school, on the topic of “fucked entrepreneurism and the CSMF model” (my title). jim gave me a ride and agreed to be “my sen dog”. well, it was an hour away, we were a little late getting started, then we got so lost and so so late that we eventually just turned tail and came home- not something i like to do but sometimes it’s what needs to be done. sorry tim, regina, jim, everyone, let’s re-plan, maybe i can come down friday and sleep over and we can watch ghostbusters or something.
saturday night there was a big party for the new stone soup building. i personally think that “stone soup” is too clichéd a name, and that they should use the address (4 king st) and call it “forking paths”, but maybe “forking” is too close to “fucking”, so what do i know anyway?. anyway there was tons of people there, it ruled.
doing some research about tigers the other day and then talking about bestiaries with james mcshane and kate schapira. bestiaries are books, classically from the middle ages, of drawings of animals of the world, often used to illustrate biblical or societal beliefs. they were drawn often with the only guidelines being physical descriptions and/or previous bestiaries, a system in which artistic idiosyncrasies and poetic turns become rapidly telephone-gamed and retranslated, then reworked into strident examples of god’s word made flesh. some gems:
- elks eat snakes by sucking them out of holes in the ground
- lions are born lifeless, life is breathed into them by other lions
- all tigers are female, and copulate with the wind
- bear cubs are born as a shapeless and eyeless lump of flesh, which the mother bear shapes into its proper form by licking it (the origin of the expression “to lick into shape”)
- as a test of the worthiness of its young, the eagle holds them up facing the sun– the birds that cannot stare into the sun and turn their eyes away are cast out of the nest.
additionally, there are a number of animals in old bestiaries whose names have been reused for modern animals, like the salamander (which lives exclusively in fire), and the basilisk (which can kill by odor, sound, or sight). the salamander is of particular importance, as it filled in a necessary gap, being the only creature to live in the element fire (animals of the earth, air and water being well spoke for). one way to look at all this is to view ancient reporters as wrong about a variety of things. another way is to say that these animals have lost a bit of their splendor, or in strictest defense of the bestiarists, that the beasts of the earth are but a reflection of man and god, and as one or both of these things change, so do the beasts of the earth.
pictured above, the cheetah, as drawn by one of my favorite artists, ben houston.
hey, i painted the background. and i think i took this picture.