Shane Malone - Eureka Street

Spread out in flat baskets large as
cartwheels are all the varieties of
fish which go into ziminu, the
Sardinian version of fish soup: fat ,
sca ly little silver fish streaked with
Lime green; enormous octopus, blue,
sepia, mauve, and turquoise, curled
and coiled and petalled like some
heavily embroidered marine flower;
the pescatrice again, that ugly
hooked angler fish; cold stony little
clams, here ca lled arselle; tartufi di
mare; silvery slippery sardines; rosered
mullets in every possible size,
some small as sprats, like doll'shouse
fish; the fine lobsters for
which Sardinia is famous.
I think, too, that the whole
mercurial affair of Lim e is always to
the point when we attend to our
alien comrades. Edwin Muir, in a
splendid poem called 'The Animals',
begins it by saying, 'They do not live
in the world,/ And not in time and
space.' This is manifestly, though
perplexingly, true.
Leaving space out of it, our being
keyed to temporality is one of our
great defining dimensions. When we
try to have 'the creatures' impinge
upon us as more than the machines
for which Descartes took them, we
find ourselves together in a partlybarred
concourse. And all speaking
of them which steeps them in our
temporality-which Darwin's passage
does as truly as the others dohas
an innate pathos, in that it
underlines our own radical
'creatureliness', our inability ever to
command the condition in which
we are immersed. If the past is
another country, we have no name
for the 'present' country of dog, horse,
or jaguar.
'Jaguar' makes its lea p here because
it does so evocatively at several
points in the OBC. One of these is in
a South An1erican fire m yth relayed
creatures' have been, from Aesop's
hour at least until our own, the
bearers of that fiery meaning which
we call myth. This, surely, is one of
the animating principles behind a
volume like the present one-the
justified hunch that the beasts are
not just mobilised sticks and stones,
but carry significances for us, as, in
the tale, the inarticulate St
Christopher had the world's
embodied meaning slung on his
shoulder.
That 'their' country and ours
abut on each other is a persuasion
which goes on being reworked. Sometimes
(as with the jaguar) the sense
is that the border is fraught with
tension. Sometimes, while extravagance
is kept to a minimum, the
dividing membrane is pierced-as
when Sylvia Townsend Warner says
in a letter,
Last night I heard a screech-owl in
the garden, taking her little owls for
a moonlight flit. Her maternal voice
was extraordinarily gentle and
solicitous, and they expressed themsci
ves in brief tinny exclamations,
very much as if they were striking
small cheap triangles.
consciousn esses which,
as with Canetti's and
White's, are half turned
away, in-furled for private cogitation.
Enthusiasts for one posture or other
often proclaim that only thi one or
that will serve an understanding of
'the creatures' very well; but surely,
with them a with ourselves, the
mind needs as large a repertoire as it
ca n ge t. Human portraiture is
endlessly m ysterious, eluding as it
does any accounting for in term s of
device :the portraying of what might
be called the hauntingly inhumanles
autres, with four legs or four
dozen- is not a game which should
lean to austerity.
which, after an array of violent encounters,
Indians take fire from its
sole possessor, the jaguar. The fire is
a boon to them:
The jaguar on the other hand
became their enemy for ever. Ever
since men stole hi s weapon and his
fire he has used onl y his claws for
hunting, he rends his prey with hi s
teeth as soon as he has caught it,
eats it raw just as it is; and the only
fire that remains to him is the fire
that shines re(lected in his eyes.
Whatever of a ll that, ' the
'watching' th e bird is
based on the fact that
birds, like men, sleep by
night. White, standing
in the barn with Gos on
his fist, patiently replacing
him when he bated,
whistling to him or repeating poems
or stroking his talons with a
feat her or offering a bit of freshlykilled
rabbit, always attentive to
him yet always scrupulously aloof,
patiently and unyieldingly and
sleeplessly keeping him awake for
three night running until the wild
bird abdi ca ted from its fera l state
and fell asleep on the gloved hand,
was as much a figure out of the past
as the ghost of a ballad falcon er
would have been.
'The ghost of a ballad falconer'
finds other work nowadays, as
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