Rhinocrisy

Doomu went to the trouble of translating a “message in a bottle” from Le Monolecte, in La France, to the people of Iran, expressing the sentiment that we are not our governments, that “these conflicts they are trying to seed in our minds are not our conflicts.” The least I can do, I think, is help it along on its way. Possibly this is the wrong direction to reach Iran from France, but long journeys are strange ones.

There’s nothing to shrink the concerns of the world like a near-death experience. Nature red in tooth and claw, facing down the angry beasts of the wood, prevailing over mortality and renewing, however briefly, one’s time in this world. I have returned from Yosemite. The quotidian concerns of homo sapien urbanis seem tiny. For I have done battle with the sooty grouse, and I have lived to tell.
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Since everyone’s been asking about where I’ve been for the past couple months, let me fill you in. First of all, my Civil War wound started flaring up again and they didn’t have room at Walter Reed, calling the gangrene in my thigh a “cosmetic” issue that would “clear” up with “time.” So I went and lived with family for a while and let them pour fine scotch into the old hole — not a bullethole as some have claimed but actually a nest hole for a family of finches. They pecked it out when I was hiding in a tree before I got killed at Shiloh.

Anyway I wasn’t too worried that my absence (nor my abscess) would cause anyone trouble because I had long since outsourced all my bloggy needs to Jonathan. The guy is preternatural at posting the stuff I was just thinking about. Or would have been thinking about if I were smarter.

Many moons ago, when YouTube was still young and green, one of my favorite video posters was a guy named MadV, a dude in a Guy Fawkes mask who posted short videos consisting of simple but stunning illusions. After producing five or six such videos, he announced his retirement and skived off to lands unknown and distant. Recently he returned with a pair of videos - the first an invitation, and the second the compendium of the 2,250 responses he received. I was moved.

One World:

Do wolves have religion? When they congregate under the light of the moon, is it for midnight mass? When they send their howls up into the clear, dark sky, are they singing ancient hymns, passed down from one generation to the next?

        "Hail, silver goddess, on your circuit of the sky.
                We make ourselves your supplicants.
       Bless us, o goddess,
                that we may carry your pale light in our eyes."

When dogs howl at the moon, is it memory that provokes them?

        "Hail, pale one! We have not forgotten.
                Though our ways have changed, our hearts, our eyes,
        Our voices belong to you alone."

Or do only humans contemplate mystery, and feel the movement of stars and the tug of the breeze in the depths of their being?

Howl at the moon tonight.