Bits and pieces

The house is warm and smells of animal fat. I´ve been melting and cooking birdfood of sheepfat and seeds as it´s supposed to be between -20 and -30°C in some parts of southern Finland tomorrow morning. This day was also magnificent, but I spent it in a red and white shopping-heaven that took me over a frozen sea. Watching the ice break in the bow of the boat just never stops to fascinate. Mmh... and just some months ago there were dolphins under the bow. Not breaking, though...


Let us get back to the beast. I know my upbringing has much to do with why I´m writing this. It was as recently as the day before yesterday that my father reminded me of how much I appreciate his approach to life. He had been working for days and driving hundreds of kilometres for medicine to cure a sheep that was fatally ill. Few sheepfarmers would have done anything else than slaughtered the animal at that point. But the woolly lady seems to be getting better, and there still might be a chance that she gives birth next month.
Except for parents with respect for life there has also been a number of animals that have had an especially fine way of pointing out the differences between human and other beeing by taking their space and right and living out their individuality. It´s interesting – there has been so many sheep, turkeys, cats, dogs, lizards and snakes, geese and chickens, rabbits and doves,- but one that appears in my mind now is, or was, a magpie. He came as a dirty and injured youngster, got a new 180 cm tall mother with beard, and mainly grew up on dogfood (you would be amazed to see how much sausage can fit into the tunnel of a human ear). The bird gathered golden treasures that he found in the house (and my mother was looking for them for years) and was curious about all we did with our hands (it became almost annoying to have him between the fingers nonstop or rocking on the edge of the book as one tried to read). He certainly charmed the villagers, but was also fast to judge and show it if he disliked someone or something. What was special with him was that he learned to observe us humans and adapt our behaviour to what he learned of life. He was for example clearly trying out our way to laugh, and it became comical when he used it in situations like the cats tailpulling game. Who knows what happened to him, one morning he was just gone...

There was life, but also death. On the farm the whole family used to participate in the slaughter. I didn´t enjoy it, but learned to approve it and it became a process for thoughts concerning order of precedence, metamorphose and materia. At some point the sudden kill just felt too abrupt, and I started to work with leftover skin, the knife and the camera to deal with deconstruction. It became important to feel the change that happened as the living breathing perfect creature became pieces with accurate value. The process continues, and will appear here as well.


A girl who´s name I can not recall at the moment recently reminded me through her book that our confrontations with animals lay the ground for our understanding of their moral value. For me working with skin also feels like becoming a chain in a tradition that works meaning into material. The experience is very subjective, and I´m deeply fascinated with the form that these subjective experiences take.
I haven´t managed to get rid of my curiosity, so I will ask you what circumstances and incidents have effected your relationship to animals, may it then be fish, bird, cat, frog, cow or wolf...
How did you end up here?

Me and my-day

This has been a day of recognizing much selfishness in me. It is interesting how seeing that causes a feeling of exhaustion, somehow maybe also failure. Do you share the experience? But from a different perspective, - isn´t failing in selfishness unnatural?

To break the pattern

Professor H sat by the campfire and said something like: -A place is neither beautiful or ugly before man walks into the landscape. It just is.
He didn´t continue speaking about it much, but what he meant was (as i would interpret it) that the human defines the value of things that have no value before that moment. More precisely, there is no such thing as value without a human beeing creating it.

Professor H said this a number of years ago, and I hadn´t thought about it for a long time until a couple of loud hunters made the walls shake last evening. One of the guys started the discussion by asking if the other would go sealhunting with him sometime soon. The invited one wasn´t too eager, as he felt that the way a seal resembled a dog made him feel bad. -I could never shoot a dog, he said. -Cats, ok, but not dogs. I asked him what it was that made it easier to shoot a cat. He answered: -The cats are wily (sv: lömsk, suomi: katala), while dogs are loyal like true friends. If you hit a cat real hard you´ll see that it will run away and won´t come back. If you do the same to a dog, it will forgive you and stay by your side. I asked him: -What does this example tell about you? Also, doesn´t the animal show wisdom by staying as far away from you as possible?
He was quick in replying: -Well, I wouldn´t hit an animal, but this is just how it works.

There´s a variety of ways that we form our relationship to animals every day. We have them as pets, tools, toys, stories, in our environment, in commercials and on the stuff we buy, in and on our clothes, on the sofa and in our beds, in jewellery and accesories, in cosmetics and chemicals, on the front page of the tabloids, in glue and candy etc. Every single day we take part in the enormous machinery that has tamed and reshaped rules of nature, whether we want it or not. The moral in us humans makes us emotionally react on utilisation or behaviour that doesn´t fit the conception we´ve built up. The values we´ve given to the different creatures we share this planet with are like day and night in relation to each other. It´s just agreement. In China they eat dogs, here we dress them in Burberry-coats. Cows can be holy or mad, depending on what continent they grow on. On this island they print t-shirts with ”Fuck the union” when they get orders to stop killing eider-ducks, while I´ve been told that the farmers on a distant shore in the arctic cry as if they´ve lost a child when they find a dead individual of this same species. Relativity, culture. The conception of us colours all we have around us.

Shortly before sleep

My mother suggested that it is a little unclear what I´m aiming at with all this. I´m not surprised... It´s too difficult to try to define this big lump of half thoughts at this point, so try to bear with me and my fuzziness.

I went for a walk wih 2 fine girls today, and I listened as the discussion led to a little attempt to define the value of animals in comparison to people. The girls agreed on that there is no difference, we are all of the same energy and it has the same value.
In ancient cultures the value of an animal and the relation to its soul had a somewhat different meaning than it has today. Especially the cultures around the big archetypes is intrigueing. One took responsibility of a harvested life, either the individual or the society, and that was the ground for the hole culture of ceremonys. Surely the precautions or rituals were done with the peoples profit in mind,(not to be punished, or to be favoured also in the future) but there was still a visible process. I guess I´m a little old fashioned in that way, and have difficulties accepting the way we consume in this highly developed modern life. This doesn´t mean that I would want this species to take steps backwards. I just feel it could be good to think about it. Well, I will. Good night.

Before I invite anyone in on the blog, I believe I need to explain myself. The ones of you that know me well know that I´ve been working with themes like value, waste, the animal as material and the changing relationship between beings. The reason for doing that this loud is that I´m trying to get started with my final work for UIAH. As all of you that find your way here are people with approaches to life, I´d be happy to have you as mirrors. The page will slowly be filled with (random) writings on the issue. If you have a word, a sentence, a question or an essay to participate with, don´t hesitate to do so. Any language and any style.

The image above is a drawing that can be found in Konrad Gessners Historia Animalium from 1555, an enormous bible that had a great impact on natural history when it was released. The book is written in latin, and I understand ridiculously little, -nothing, of it. The fascinating thing about the book is that it is highly scientific, but it contains drawings of seamonsters, mermaids and peculiar creatures with what seems like detailed descriptions of the animal and fantastic latin names. This particular drawing has been meaningful to me for years as it doesn´t seem to fit in any "locker", it´s difficult to define from any perspective. I´d like to use it as one illustration for the space between biology, mythology, environmental protection, utilization, economic approach and art.

Watching the vanishing winter

I went for a walk this afternoon. The rocks were slippery and the sea ice wet and making sounds of weakness. An eagle circled back and forth above the pines. Still a little snow and ice, but not much. There was this thought that kept my mind busy while I walked. My father said earlier on the phone that one of his cats mostly just sleeps day in and day out, she´s become an old lady.

Much of this obsession with animals and human power over them, that I still haven´t talked much about, has to do with how we end the lives of animals. Earlier the approach that showed respect for the soul of the living creature involved ceremonys or rituals for the soul of the dead or dying being. Those ceremonys are gone in most modern cultures today, and we tend to treat meat in the same way as we treat all other materia. Today most of the killing, in particular the kind that is done for food factorys, is something that is supposed to be as quick and easy as possible.
Now, I wonder if I can speculate about what meaning it could have that we, both animals and humans, usually die slowly when we die of age or illness. Today, during my walk, dreams as phenomenon appeared in the thought. I´ve been watching the cats and dogs dreaming many times, and sometimes (accidentally) disturbed them in the middle of the dream. The reactions are comperable to the reactions of a human when one suddenly is taken out of a dream. My experience is that our dreams become all the more confusing, bizarre and complicated when we are sick, injured or in some other way out of balance. Are the dreams a process? Do they prepare us for something? Do beings that are dying dream a lot? What happens when we, or owls, wolfs or frogs suddenly cut the life of another being? Fatal accidents also lack the preparing for death. Does it mean anything?

Background

Or no. This was not the beginning. It all started on a farm on an island in the lovely archipelago in the southwestern part of Finland. I grew up there, and my childhood was fantastic. Gardening, building, spending lots of time in the sea, exploring the woods, climbing and poking and learning about life with more animals than people. Fruitful was also doing autopsys on snakes, cremating conedummies, drying birdwings and making pearl necklaces of moose excrement. (More about this some other night...) Now, putting it like this seems as if there was also a lot of discusting stuff going on. For a child that was hardly discusting, just endlessly fascinating. The feelings and the relationship that exploring gave birth to laid the foundation for my conception of the world.

At this point I see myself in the mirror of society, and feel that I´m supposed to be house-trained and that I should stop showing interest in self-evident, commonplace or ugly issues.
So, I´ve started this page for reflecting upon things that aren´t completely house-trained. Possibly and hopefully this could be a forum for discussion, mainly for and around matters concerning animals in human culture. I will use this as a visible process that anyone can take part in. I value your opinion and comment, whoever you are. Welcome to join in shedding skin.

It all starts with and because of this.