The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Presentations

Why do they come to us, the animals? What do they want, inhabiting our dreams?

Are they the ‘animal guardians’ as other, totemic cultures would say? Are they coming to remind us of our affinity with them, to keep their presence before us? To guard against extinction, both theirs and ours? They may be coming to us so that the creation itself may perpetuate. If so, then they claim close attention such as Adam gave them at the beginning of the story of the world, now at what might be the ending of the story of the world. They require us to find again Adam’s eye.

James Hillman, Dream Animals, 13.

Animals, including dream animals, provide us a theme and a cluster of images for this issue of The Grapevine. My poem is the result of reading Hillman and dreaming my way toward an idea. Meanwhile, Ravi Kumar convinced me that the humor surrounding the notion of buzzards that we are so familiar with in the South is quite a different matter in India, where vultures not only preside over but sometimes cause death, specifically of pilots who meet them in their own airy ambiance. Bill Kennedy's piece on the vicissitudes of owning an alligator got finished about the time news reached us of a python that swallowed an alligator and exploded. Nancy Law's take on getting stung put her at one more remove from the marriage she is detaching from. And Anne Lovett joins us again, this time to present her horsey self. Finally, Cynthia Daughtrey's reminiscence about her father's death last year reminds us of our animal mortality and of our peculiarly human style of awareness.