Matter Lent: The Photographs of Sally Mann

From Erika Ritter’s The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath:

Early in the twenty-first century, American photographer Sally Mann disinterred the year-old remains of her beloved pet greyhound, Eva, salvaged what fragments she could, and took them back to her studio to reassemble and photograph. Eventually, those photographic studies of Eva’s hide and bones became part of a larger exhibition Mann called “What Remains”.

That 2004 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery was subtitled “Matter Lent”. As art critic and scholar Alice Kuzniar points out, “Lent” conveys a sense of gravity, similar to the forty-day period of mourning called Lent that precedes the resurrection of Christ.

What Remains is a five-part series that explores the ineffable divide between body and soul, life and death, earth and spirit. The project visually depicts the eternal cycle of life, death, and regeneration. What Remains draws upon the artist’s personal experiences as inspiration for a haunting series about the one subject that affects us all: the loss of life and what remains.

The subtitle also serves to evoke the fleeting way in which pet animals – espeically in view of their comparatively short lifespans – are “lent” to us, only to be taken away too soon by mishap, disease, or decrepitude. The bleakness of that little pile of bones and hair that Eva has dwindled down to in her posthumous photos strikes Kuzniar as “suggesting an unutterable, choking grief that can only put on display but not verbally express what essentially is a void.”

The text Sally Mann wrote to accompany the imaes of Eva’s remains documents her wanting to find out what had “finally become of that head I had stroked, oh ten thousand times, those paws she so delicately crossed as she lay by my desk, rock-hard nails emerging from the finest white hairs.”

Never one to shy away from challenging subject matter, Mann asks us in What Remains to contemplate the beauty and efficiency with which nature assimilates the body once life is over. Here she seamlessly connects the landscape of the earth to the topography of the body and examines how both are tightly interwoven. Yet she creates tension between the two. As the exhibition progresses, portrait faces of her children emerge from the darkness of the alchemical photographic process, surrounded by murky images of the landscape, as if struggling to become free of the earth that inevitably reclaims the body.

For humans in general, the extent to which we summarize animals in terms of their physical essence may cause us to treat their remains either as enormously significant or as completely inconsequential. On one end of the spectrum, there are pet cemeteries and Sally Mann’s photographed remains of her beloved Eva’s bones. On the other end, there’s the commodified carcass hung in the utcher’s window or the meaningless tuft of fur on the roadshide that once was a chipmunk.

Discussion of the exhibition at Artnet.

Image: Sally Mann, Untitled #17, 2003.

Pilgrimage to St. Guinefort’s Wood

Earlier, we wrote about Guinefort, the dog saint, the inspiration for the Welsh story of the hound, Gelert. Both dogs, having killed a serpent threatening the infant son of the lord of the castle, had been killed in anger just before said lord discovered his son safe beneath the cradle and the serpent dead.

Some of us make pilgrimages. For me, it is to Beautiful Joe Park, resting place of Marshall Saunders’ canine hero. Beautiful Joe was a real dog and he really lived in Meaford, Ontario. In addition to his cairn, the park boasts shrines to service dogs, including Sirius, the 9-11 rescue dog, and there is an annual garden party.

I’m heartened that author Erika Ritter is another pilgrim. She writes about her visit to the little town of Chatillon-sur-Charonne in France, in search of the woods and burial place of Guinefort, dog saint and children’s protector.

Here is an excerpt from her wonderful new book, The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath, about the paradoxes of human-animal relationships.

“Not far to the northwest is … Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne. That’s the same Chalaronne River which, a few kilometres beyond the vollage, runs alongside the grove of trees where tens of generations of mothers gathered, to immerse their children in the water as part of a superstitious healing ritual.”

“Before coming here, I inured myself to the very real possibility that modern Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne might be a hideous strip of cheesy malls. Or perhaps a zone industrielle paved over the holy greyhound’s one-time burial place. At the very least, I was braced for souvenir shops hawking t-shirts declaring ‘J’ai Survecu le Bois de Guignefort.’”

“But St. Guinefort was nowhere to be seen in Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne, and nobody in town seemed to have any idea he was the heart and soul of the local tourist industry… In an overcrowded pizzeria, a kindly couple offered to share their table, and ultimately their fellowship with us. What were foreign tourists doing here in the off-season?”

“‘Nous cherchons le Bois de Guignefort,’” we answered.”

“‘Le bois de … quoi?’”

“Well, like, duh. C’est evident, n’est-ce pas? The holy greyhound?”

“For by no means the first time in my long, inglorious history of failing to locate dog-related markers, monuments and memorials, I experienced a sinking sensation. I ducked into a nearby stationer, thinking that, at this point, even to blunder upon a small souvenir greyhound would be better than nothing.”

“Inside Le Papier Rouge, a shelf of tourism books caught my eye. I went over to investigate – and came face to face with a glossy brown-and-off-white pamphlet entitled Saint Guignefort Legende, Archaeologie, Histoire.”

“Good dog, Guinefort, I thought as I carried the monograph to the cash.”

“A Nancy Drew moment is what I prefer to call my surprising stumble upon a salient clue. The worst kind of Nancy Drew moment. I went into that shop looking for some sort of kitschy little dog figurine.”

From Ritter’s book. Read it.

St. Guinefort, the Dog Saint

From De Supersticione, by inquisitor Stephen de Bourbon:

The sixth thing to say is about insulting superstitions, some of which are insulting to God, others to man. The superstitions which attribute divine honors to demons or any other creature insult God. Idolatry is one example, or when wretched women sorcerers seek salvation through the adoration of saddles (sambuca) to which they make offerings, through the condemnation of churches and relics of the saints, through carrying their children to ant-hills or other places in search of healing.

This is what they did recently in the diocese of Lyons. When preaching there against sorcery and hearing confessions, I heard many women confess that they had carried their children to St. Guinefort. I thought he was some saint. I made inquiries and at last heard that he was a certain greyhound killed in the following way. In the diocese of Lyons, close to the vill of the nuns called Villeneuve, on the land belonging to the lord of Villars-en-Dombe, there was a certain castle whose lord had a baby son from his wife. But when the lord and lady and the nurse too had left the house, leaving the child alone in his cradle, a very large snake entered the house and made for the child’s cradle. The greyhound, who had remained there, saw this, dashed swiftly under the cradle in pursuit, knocking it over, and attacked the snake with its fangs and answering bite with bite. In the end the dog killed it and threw it far away from the child’s cradle which he left all bloodied as was his mouth and head, with the snake’s blood, and stood there by the cradle all beaten about by the snake. When the nurse came back and saw this, she thought the child had been killed and eaten by the dog and so gave out an almighty scream. The child’s mother heard this, rushed in, saw and thought the same and she too screamed. Then the knight similarly once he got there believed the same, and drawing his sword killed the dog. Only then did they approach the child and find him unharmed, sleeping sweetly in fact. On further investigation, they discovered the snake torn up by the dog’s bites and dead. Now that they had learned the truth of the matter, they were embarrassed (dolentes) that they had so unjustly killed a dog so useful to them and threw his body into a well in front of the castle gate, and placing over it a very large heap of stones they planted trees nearby as a memorial of the deed.

But the castle was in due course destroyed by divine will, and the land reduced to a desert abandoned by its inhabitants. The local peasants hearing of the dog’s noble deed and innocent death, began to visit the place and honor the dog as a martyr in quest of help for their sicknesses and other needs. They were seduced and often cheated by the Devil so that he might in this way lead men into error. Women especially, with sick or poorly children, carried them to the place, and went off a league to another nearby castle where an old woman could teach them a ritual for making offerings and invocations to the demons and lead them to the right spot. When they got there, they offered salt and certain other things, hung the child’s little clothes (diapers?) on the bramble bushes around, fixing them on the thorns. They then put the naked baby through the opening between the trunks of two trees, the mother standing on one side and throwing her child nine times to the old woman on the other side, while invoking the demons to adjure the fauns in the wood of “Rimite” to take the sick and failing child which they said belonged to them (the fauns) and return to them their own child big, plump, live and healthy. Once this was done, the killer mothers took the baby and placed it naked at the foot of the tree on the straws of a cradle, lit at both ends two candles a thumbsbreadth thick with fire they had brought with them and fastened them on the trunk above. Then, while the candles were consumed, they went far enough away that they could neither hear nor see the child. In this way the burning candles burned up and killed a number of babies, as we have heard from others in the same place.

One woman told me that after she had invoked the fauns and left, she saw a wolf leaving the wood and going to the child and the wolf (or the devil in wolf’s form, so she said) would have devoured it had she not been moved by her maternal feelings and prevented it. On the other hand, if when they returned they found the child alive, they picked it up and carried it to a swiftly flowing river nearby, called the Chalaronne [tributary of the Saône], and immersed it nine times, to the point where if it escaped dying on the spot or soon after, it must have had very tough innards.

We went to the place and assembled the people and preached against the practice. We then had the dead dog dug up and the grove of trees cut down and burned along with the dog’s bones. Then we had an edict enacted by the lords of the land threatening the spoliation and fining of any people who gathered there for such a purpose in future.

Source: Paul Hansall, Internet Medieval Source Book.

More on dog saints at Dissident Editions.

The Spell of the Sensuous

For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by machines – a world of textures, tastes and sounds other than those that we have engineered – our task is that of taking up the written word, with all its potency, and patiently, carefully writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves – to the green uttering-forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again, sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page to inhabit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that place us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland, or onto the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs – letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.

The rain surrounded the cabin…with a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside…Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen.
~~ Thomas Merton

Our strictly human heavens and hells have only recently been abstracted from the sensuous world that surrounds us, from this more-than-human realm that abounds in its own winged intelligences and cloven-hoofed powers. For almost all oral cultures, the enveloping and sensuous earth remains the dwelling place of both the living and the dead. The “body” – whether human or otherwise – is not yet a mechanical object in such cultures, but is a magical entity, the mind’s own sensuous aspect, and at death the body’s decomposition into soil, worms and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born.

This cycling of the human back into the larger world ensures that the other forms of experience that we encounter – whether ants, or willow trees, or clouds – are never absolutely alien to ourselves. It is, paradoxically, this perceived kinship that renders the difference, or otherness, so eerily potent.

Gradually, then, our senses awaken to the world. We become aware of the thoughts that are thinking all around us – in the bushes, under the tumbled stones. As we watch the crows, our own limbs begin to feel the intelligence of feathered muscles adjusting to the wind. Our toes listen to roots sending capillaries in search of water, and our skin replies to the lichens radiating in slow waves across the surface of the upthrust bones of the hill. Walking along the pebbled beach, we notice the ground itself responding to our footfalls – the hermit crabs all diving for cover – and sense the many-voiced forest listening to us as we speak. And so we adjust our own speaking, taking new care with our gestures and actions…

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner – what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming
~~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Excerpted from The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram.

A brief summary of animism at Anthropik.

Eating Animals

A good read for anyone interested in the travesty that is factory farming is Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book: Eating Animals.  Here’s an excerpt:

We have let the factory farm replace farming for the same reasons our cultures have relegated minorities to being second-class members of society and kept women under the power of men. We treat animals as we do because we want to and can. (Does anyone really wish to deny this anymore?)

At the end of the day, factory farming isn’t about feeding people; it’s about money. Whether or not it’s right to kill animals for food, we know that in today’s dominant systems, it’s impossible to kill them without at least inflicting occasional torture. That is why some farmers apologize to their animals as they are sent off to slaughter. They’ve made a compromise rather than cut a fair deal.

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to centre our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war.

The everyday horrors of factory farming are evoked so vividly, and the case against the people who run the system presented so convincingly, that anyone who, after reading Foer’s book, continues to consume the industry’s products must be without a heart, or impervious to reason, or both.

~ J.M. Coetzee

It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what’s cruel and what’s kind, what’s environmentally destructive and what’s sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don’t need the option of buying children’s toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabelled side effects. And we don’t need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln. that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, “I could not have slept tonight if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.” He observed, quite simply, that once those suffering birds came into his view, a moral burden had been assumed. He could not be himself if he walked away.

Whether I sit at the global table, with my family or with my conscience, the factory farm … feels inhuman. To accept the factory farm…to feed the food it produces to my family, to support it with my money — would make me less myself, less my grandmother’s grandson, less my son’s father.

This is what my grandmother meant when she said, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.

Image: Christopher Rogers.

Exotic Fights

About three weeks ago, the Toronto office of the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) launched an education campaign to raise awareness of the cruelty to animals inherent in blood sports such as bullfighting, bear baiting and cockfighting. One of their eye-popping print ads showed up today in Metro news, the favourite free paper of transit riders.

The smart campaign materials are designed to mimic the old-style circus event posters. At first glance these posters and advertisements seemingly publicize bullfighting, bear baiting and cockfighting events; however on closer inspection they contain clever messaging that indicates these activities are cruel and barbaric.

Created largely pro-bono by award-winning Toronto advertising agency TBWA, the campaign is designed to pique the interest of those individuals who might be attracted to attend these kinds of events with an aim to show them what truthfully happens at these events – hundreds of thousands of animals suffer unnecessarily and die solely for human entertainment.

Exotic Fights dot com.

More about the campaign.

More about the blood sports .

There’s a Dog in my Church

Montreal is one step closer to being North America’s Paris: it’s gaining on the City of Lights — a famously pooch-friendly place — by offering a monthly communion church service for dogs.

Paws and Pray was recently inaugurated at Christ Church Beaurepaire, an Anglican church in Beaconsfield on Montreal’s west island, to coincide with the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. The communion service features bread and wine, as well as doggie treats and bowls of water for the four-legged parishioners.

The church’s minister, Michael Johnson, said he has always enjoyed doing a pet blessing once a year.

Johanne Tassé, president of Companion Animal Adoption Centres of Quebec, who suggested the idea to Johnson, said she believes the idea can have a profound impact.

“Animals deserve our care and respect,” said Tassé. “If we can bring dogs to church, how can we turn around and abuse them?”

She believes that the “deplorable” state of animal welfare in Quebec requires people take a closer look at how animals impact our lives.

“There are search-and-rescue dogs, search-and-recovery dogs, dogs to help the disabled, dogs that go into hospitals,” said Tassé. “Dogs help us so much and we need to recognize them as being part of our lives.”

She believes that by welcoming dogs into a house of worship, people will be less likely to neglect their dogs and the service can help effect a change of attitude.

“We’ve lost a little bit of our humanity,” said Tassé. “The time is right to elevate (animals’) significance in our lives.”

Full story at The Province and The Chronicle Herald.

Le French Connection/Highway of Hope.

Voyage to the Spirit Mountains

Author and musician, Paul Quarrington, diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, eloquently describes his plans to live each day as though it is his last, connecting with singing and the Canadian landscape.

“As we journeyed through the Torngat Mountains, I finally realized what this trip was all about, for me. First of all, let me get a little scientific on you. The Torngats-comprised of Precambrian gneisses-are amongst the oldest mountains in the world, almost four billions years old. They rise out of the water with enchanted austerity. Sitting well above the tree line, the Torngats are stark naked and make no apology about it. Torngat is an Inuktitut word meaning Place of Spirits, and it very clearly is. The mountaintops are usually shrouded in cloud, and it’s easy enough to imagine the Spirits assembling there, going through the itinerary for another year.  In short, the Torngat Mountains took what little breath I have away from me. The thought occurred that I was on another planet, and that’s when I realized, no, I’m on this planet, I’m just none too clear on what it actually looks like. I realized that what I wanted to do was spend a little time getting to know the third stone from the sun; it has been my home for 56 years, but I have spent much of it confined in the settlements. I wanted to explore and examine, I wanted to interact – yes, in the broadest, most spiritual sense.”

“So there, basically, you have the two main components of my plan for (what remains of) my future: singing and (spiritual) mountain climbing. For example, I think I’ll go fishing this week, getting to know Mother Ship Earth a bit better. I think I’ll go stand in a river just a few degrees above freezing and toss a yarn-fly into the current, over and over again, in the hopes of convincing some chromium-silver steelhead that the thing is edible. Or, I may simply go walkabout, kicking stones and major rock formations. I will build inuksuit (did you know that was the plural? I learned a lot on my voyages…) and I will try to build them across as much of the landscape as I can. In the meantime, I will be singing, all manner of songs. I will sing in Porkbelly Futures, I will sing with fiddlers and button accordionists, I will sing in Gospel choirs and Glee Clubs.”

Inuit mythology tells of the Torngait, the spirits that a Shaman or spiritual leader looks to for wisdom and power. Torngat comes from this Inuit name and the legends which hold that in this region the spirit world overlaps our own. White people have called this area the Ghost Coast and have commented how the sounds of the winds whistling through the rugged mountains bring forth the feeling that one is in another realm. If the earth is home to ancient spirits they would seek out this land where the rocks are among the oldest on the planet and the landforms hold an otherworldly appearance. Perhaps this truly is a place of spirits.

The Torngat Mountains National Park Reserve is the new name for this ancient place. It is the northern portion of the Inuit homeland of Nunatsiavut, located in northern Labrador. (Nunatsiavut means “Our beautiful land” in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit.) The park reserve encompasses roughly 10,000 km2 and extends from the deep waters of Saglek Fjord in the south, to the very northern tip of Labrador; and from the boundary with Quebec in the west, to the waters of the Labrador Sea in the east.

The human history of the park is rich and ancient. Within the park there are hundreds of archaeological sites including tent rings, stone caribou fences, caches, and ancient graves, all of which tell the story of the peoples and cultures, particularly the Inuit, who have made this special landscape their home.

South of Nachvak Fjord is Ramah Bay, home to a unique translucent stone called Ramah chert. This mineral holds an edge that is sharper than surgical steel. It was so prized by the ancient peoples of Labrador that prior to contact with the Europeans, some used this mineral almost exclusively in their arrows and blades.

Paul Quarrington: Each Day Like It’s My Last at National Post.

More at Wanderbird Expedition Cruises.

Ramah Chert.

For Sydney, and for Linda Gordon who loves the landscape.

Raven Steals the Sun

This is an ancient story told on the Queen Charlotte Islands about how Raven helped to bring the Sun, Moon, Stars, Fresh Water and Fire to the world.

Long ago, near the beginning of the world, Gray Eagle was the
guardian of the Sun, Moon and Stars, of fresh water, and of fire.
Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden.
People lived in darkness, without fire and without fresh water.

Gray Eagle had a beautiful daughter, and Raven fell in love with her.
In the beginning, Raven was a snow-white bird, and as a such, he
pleased Gray Eagle’s daughter. She invited him to her father’s
longhouse.

When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and stars, and fresh water hanging on the sides of Eagle’s lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and a brand of fire also, and flew out of the longhouse through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got outside he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made so much light that he was able to fly far out to an island in the middle of the ocean. When the Sun set, he fastened the Moon up in the sky and hung the stars around in different places. By this new light he kept on flying, carrying with him the fresh water and the brand of fire he had stolen.

He flew back over the land. When he had reached the right place, he
dropped all the water he had stolen. It fell to the ground and there
became the source of all the fresh-water streams and lakes in the
world. Then Raven flew on, holding the brand of fire in his bill. The
smoke from the fire blew back over his white feathers and made them
black. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the firebrand. It
struck rocks and hid itself within them. That is why, if you strike
two stones together, sparks of fire will drop out.

Raven’s feathers never became white again after they were blackened
by the smoke from the firebrand. That is why Raven is now a black bird.

Ravens symbolize many things in different cultures. Native American tradition honors the raven as a symbol of courage and of magical guidance. The Arab culture calls the raven Abu Zajir which means “Father of Omens.” They are seen as oracular birds, used in divination. They are seen as symbols of death, life, the sun, magic, shapeshifting, and tricksters.

Legend from Ella E. Clark: Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, University
of California Press, 1953.

Image:  Raven Stealing Sun, by Ken Mowatt.

Andrew Thornton, jewellery artist, discusses inspiration at Flight of the Raven King. The necklace shown is The Raven Queen.

Raven Frees the Moon, an argillite pendant by Haida artist P.J. Ellis, from Spirits of the West Coast dot com, soon to be part of a Canuck version of The Raven Queen…

Hachiko Meets Richard Gere

Earlier we recounted the tale of Hachiko, the Japanese akita, revered for his fierce loyalty to his master, Professor Ueno. A Japanese Greyfriars Bobby… The children’s book, written by Lesléa Newman and illustrated by Machiyo Kodaira, won the ASPCA Children’s Book Honor in 2004.

A joyously tearful 1987 Japanese movie, Hachiko Monogatari, followed. Hachiko’s legend featured in David Wroblewski’s , first book, The Sawtelle Dogs.

Now, Hachiko: A Dog’s Tale, is being released in American theatres on December 18, 2009. It stars Richard Gere as the professor, Forest as Hachiko, and a couple of shiba inu puppies as the young Hachiko. It is set in Bristol, Rhode Island, and everyone speaks American.

According to one of the movie’s producers: “Something about this dog’s simple act of unwavering loyalty, of waiting, is so profoundly moving…People seem to identify with Hachiko. He symbolizes so many different things to different people. Hachiko represents innocence, fear, hope, joy, loss and loneliness.”

In May 1994, Japan’s Culture Broadcasting Network played a recording of Hachiko barking which had been made from a broken record repaired with laser surgery. Millions of people tuned in to listen to Hachiko barking, 59 years after his death. Each April, tens of thousands visit the dog’s statue at the Shibuya train station, during a festival in which food offerings are left at the base of the dog’s statue, in hopes that his loyal spirit will visit all humans.

Go see the movie, and take lots of Kleenex. But please don’t hit the pet shop after and buy an akita or shiba inu. As Harry Haller noted, these steppenwolves are magic theatre and not for everyone…

For more on the akita and its recovery from near-extinction during World War II, read The Man Who Saved Akitas.

Image: Hachiko, stuffed, at the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo.