“Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:
The heather lies limp and dead
On the mountain, the baltering torrent
Shrunk to a soodling thread;. . . .”
Auden’s famous ‘Under Sirius’ says it all—the streams are sunk to a “soodling thread”, we wither under the Dog Star. The temperature hits triple digits, the grass hardens, the sheep nose about in the shade for something tender and must settle for blackberry leaves. Barley in the neighbor’s field grows heavy-headed, waiting for harvest. Portents gather—soon we’ll see the Perseid meteorite shower. . . . This is the season of the porch, the day trip to somewhere high in the Cascades (Browder Ridge is nice. . .), the slow drift down the Willamette. In this part of the world, August feels like a pause in the seasonal monologue.
I recently had a different sort of pause in a very different sort of place. Paris in July is famous for being noisy, crowded with tourists, and close. In fact it is simply muggy and electric, but otherwise much the same as at other times. The one day I wriggled free of work I wandered about the city. I’d been staying near the Place d’Italie in the old student quarter, eating with the Dominicans at the Saulchoir. Not far away lay the Jardin des Plantes, surely the most straitforward of names for any botanical park. A royal park since the early 17th century, it later housed the survivors of the royal menagerie of Versailles after the French Revolution, and now boasts a genetic diversity encompassing thousands of species of plants (think of it as a down-at-the-heels cousin of the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew, with better sandwiches) and an institution to catalogue and study them. And there are still animals—lonely ostriches, bewildered raccoons, an antisocial tapir. And of course, lots of statues. The one I found myself contemplating that day in July was entitled ‘Denicheur d’ Oursons’—The Bear Tracker.
It’s a particularly dramatic, larger than life depiction of a man locked in a death struggle with what seems to be a grizzly bear. The bear, standing erect, is about to bite the face of the hunter it embraces, who has driven what looks like a large screw into its neck.The artist, L. Fremiet (died 1910), often took animals for his subject, having spent time in the Jardin des Plantes dissecting their corpses. He was also the official painter for the Paris morgue. In other words, he did not paint from life, but from death. And of course his heroic view of early frontiersmen was based on his own imagination, not observation. Which is an important point. What he gives us in the form of a bear is preposterous—its arms and elbows are like a man’s, only thicker and covered with fur; its knees and hips too suggest a creature accustomed to walking upright. And the hunter, while anatomically perfect, is curiously naked save a head band and string belt from which dangles a dead cub, presumably the casus belli. Yet the cub is so small as to be practically embryonic and as for the narrative, it’s highly unlikely that a tracker could successfully poach a cub without knowing he’d instantly have to deal with the mother.
We have, in other words, a moment of supreme crisis for both the mother bear and the hunter. It is a narrative of the New World, the savage frontier. It makes a striking tableau, but Fremiet’s ‘Bear Tracker’ is a projection, a cartoon, perhaps even a morality tale. His other monumental works tell similar tales: an orang-utan strangling a naked Borneo native, a gorilla carrying off a shrieking (and, yes, naked) woman— all dramatic, all violent, and all equally implausible as a response to the way humans encounter the non-human world.
I ate my sandwich watching the pigeons leave their offerings on the bear’s head, and felt the need to animals everywhere. There’s a danger in letting our projections dictate what lessons we think nature teaches, what stories it offers. M. Fremiet seems to suggest a narrative where we’re locked in a struggle with predatory forces bent on violence. If that’s the case (and it may well be), the verdict is already in—bears and gorillas and orang-utans have already lost. We get the statues and they get extinguished.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can—and must, I think—adopt the notion, best articulated by Mary Oliver, that the natural world is “the doorway into thanks” where a blue iris is cousin to the weed. Just one generation before Fremiet, another Frenchman, dodging military conscription, came to the New World intent on pursuing a passion for birds he’s had since childhood: J. J. Audubon. His observations, drawn from years of field work under difficult conditions, often with the collaboration and support of local tribes who had an entirely different narrative to share concerning the natural world, were so detailed they drew praise and admiration from Charles Darwin. Audubon captures not only the precise detail of his subjects (both birds and mammals) but of their surroundings—the curl of a leaf, the shade of a flower.
This was nature without human overlay, nature as it deserves to be seen and respected independent of human fantasy. Gone are the dramatic moments, the writhing bodies, the sense of doom, the moment of crisis. Instead, what we see when we sit still for a long time is what has been going on, bit by bit, for a very, very long time.
As Mary Oliver says,
“For a long time
I was not even
in this world, yet
every summer
every rose
opened in perfect sweetness
and lived
in gracious repose. . .”
Perhaps our best response to the natural world is to permit, wherever we can, this ‘gracious repose.’ Even in the Dog Days, happy for a little shade.
