Sheep!

Besides the private dectectives and the funeral home director from a million years ago, this is one of my favorite interviews ever. The gentlemen speaks from the authority of one who has grown up on a sheep farm. Thank you, kind sir.

ME: What would be the most accurate way to spell "baaaaa”:"B-aaaahhhhh" "Ba!" "Bhaaaaaaaa"? etc. etc.

HIM: That depends on the particular sheep, I suppose. Some of them have long drawn out "baa-aeaea", almost squeaky toward the end, others a strong, confidant "baa." To me, the sound sheep make often sounds like it begins with an "m." Lambs of course have a much cuter baby-animal sort of "maaa-a!," complete with gangly hoppings and a large eye-to-head ratio.

But I usually just write "baa" or "bleat" myself.


I think there are few animals that can more look like a field of rocks or boulders from a distance than sheep. Agree? Disagree?

I'm not sure that I've ever mistaken sheep for rocks. I probably have a better than average eye for sheep, so maybe that's why. I imagine that a herd of sleeping hippos might seem very boulder-like to me.


Having grown up around them do you ever feel like you see sheep that aren’t there?

Not exactly. But it does perhaps make me a bit more conscious of the unseen presence of sheep. For example, the institution where I work has quite a few sheep that are used for research purposes, yet I have never seen one and have no precise idea of where they are housed. Presumably this secrecy is to dissuade ALF guerrillas from staging an action to liberate lab animals. Nevertheless, I'm often conscious that there are sheep somewhere around me. I feel pretty bad for them, too, never getting to go outside.


Ever have a moment where you felt like you had a moment of perfect understanding/communion with a sheep?

I’m can't really say that I have. Not perfect understanding, anyway. As a kid I'd sometimes go sit in a pasture and read in the shade while the sheep chewed their cud and took an afternoon nap. That always gave me a nice contented feeling. I've had moments that felt like a sort of deep, shocking mutual recognition with wild animals, but never with domestic ones. I suppose the sheep and I were never all that surprised to encounter one another.


Do you think sheep would agree with the Buddha: life is suffering?

I think sheep mostly live in accordance with the Buddha's teachings of non-attachment. I don't know if they approach this intellectually, though (not to say that sheep are dumb, I don't think that they are, they’re just not very philosophically inclined). I think that sheep might have something of the Buddha-nature from birth. Actually, I think this is true of most animals, with the exception of some small, excitable dogs. Sheep have their share of suffering, but they seem to accept it in a way that most people don’t. On the other hand, they do clearly demonstrate attachment and expectation when they realize that they are about to be fed, so perhaps they aren’t completely enlightened.


I'm imagining growing up close to the animals and nature afforded some idyllic, Wordsworth moments—lambs gamboling in the spring grass, watching the sun set over the profiles of a hundred peacefully chewing sheep, etc.—but I also would think it exposed you to the "red tooth and claw" aspect as well—ugly fence entanglements, prolapsed uteruses, wolf attacks, bad leg breaks, etc. Any thoughts on how it affected your ideas of nature?

I suppose this is true. I think the main effect that it had on me was that I learned to accept both aspects as normal. I think a lot of folks understand that life has these two sides, but when you grow up in the country it’s more a everyday part of your life, not just a segment on a nature show when the lion eats the gazelle. There are a lot of idyllic moments, but also difficult and sad ones. Sometimes animals you know and are attached to get sick and die. Sometimes you kill them.

A couple of years ago my mother told me about the first time she and my father butchered a sheep. I was probably about four years old or so. My parents had tried to do the whole thing away from my view, but since they had to divide their attention between watching a kid and learning a new skill, keeping me away from the work was difficult. Inevitably, I came across them gutting and skinning a sheep, the carcass hanging upside down from a tree. I don’t remember the incident at all, but my mother told me that she feared I had been psychologically scarred for life. My parents were both city kids, and I think the experience was really troubling for them. I was still learning about the world then, and butchering animals got classed as “normal” in my mind.

Occasionally these experiences get me into trouble; I don’t always know what stories are “too much.” It’s funny that you mention uterine prolapses. Once, as a guest in my cousin’s church, I was asked in Sunday school to describe what it was like to live on a sheep farm. Somehow I ended up discussing types of prolapses and their treatment, much to the horror and confusion of the teacher. I’m able to gauge situations a bit better now, but it can still be a little hard sometimes.


Secondly, I'm interested to know if your exposure to the life cycle makes you feel like in any sort of better position for the reality of reality in life. I guess I think of all the creepy pathology shows or alarmist photos of celebrity cellulite and sometimes it seems like therein lies proof of a profound disconnection of what life actually looks like vs. what we like/want/can bear to think it looks like. Any thoughts?

Yeah, I think you’re right about this, at least to a certain extent. Like I said before, growing up on a farm might have made me more used to the idea that living has a messy side. I think sometimes people use the things that you mention to remind themselves of that messiness, or at least to remind themselves that they themselves are normal, cellulite and all. As city-dwellers we live in a super-sanitized environment, and maybe people need to see that somehow. Or perhaps I’m just making unwarranted excuses for trash journalism.


Obviously sheep are often mentioned in a pejorative context of sameness. Any memories of really specific sheep personalities? A difficult sheep? A funny sheep? Nutball sheep?

Sheep are a lot more distinct than people assume. Some are friendly, others shy, or cantankerous, avaricious, adventurous, dull, clever, you name it. While she was alive, “63” was always a favorite of my family, she was very affectionate and pretty smart. We had a wether (an ovine eunuch) named “Sancho Panza,” who was a very level-headed, laid back guy. He had a beautiful fleece and he lived with the rams most of the year (originally he had been a companion to a wild burro named “Donkey Xoté,” but that didn’t quite work out as planned). On the other hand we had a young ram named “McGee” who was always butting people from behind or picking fights with other rams. He was a little fellow, two-thirds the size of his comrades. Eventually, he was killed in a fight. We usually separated the rams during breeding season so that they wouldn’t fight, but one year he hopped a couple of fences and challenged a much heavier ram, who broke his neck.

Any action-adventure movie screenplay ideas out of your shepherding you can think of?

I’m sure I could come up with something eventually. I grew up on a farm, though, and to be honest, I feel like there might be better action stories involving nomadic shepherds. I guess that’s why there are lots of cowboy Western films, but not very many movies about poultry growers. There are plenty of moments for exciting action in animal husbandry, consider fairy tales or Biblical stories like those of Samson or David. But stories involving farmers don’t seem to also feature dramatic action-adventure plots. Movie farmers tend to be involved in much slower plots involving drought or bank foreclosure. That’s probably for a reason, but I’m not saying it would be impossible to work out some sort of action screenplay.

One of the most dramatic moments I remember is when a drunken neighbor tried to burn his trash on a very windy day. We very nearly lost our house that day, but thanks to my father with a garden hose, the volunteer fire department, and five or six rams it ended up okay. When the grassfire reached the fenceline of their pasture, these rams started stamping it out instead of running away. I’m not sure why they did that, I’ve never heard of other animals behaving that way, but it was a good thing that they did. Exciting as it was, I don’t know that there is a whole movie in there, though.


Do you have a favorite artistic representation of sheep?

No. I’ve searched around a bit, and I’m dissapointed to say that I’ve come up with nothing. There are a lot of really bad, corny religious depictions of sheep, but nothing that I’d care to mention here. If the artistic representation doesn’t have to be visual, I might mention J.S. Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” which was a favorite of my dad’s while I was growing up.


Would you say sheep have addictive personalities?

No, although they do seem to prefer routines.


Did your extensive exposure to sheep make you feel like you understand what the Bible was trying to make you feel/understand/see about Jesus (and all the shepherd/flock talk) any better than you might have otherwise?

Probably. Of course, Biblical shepherds were nomadic pastoralists, so their specific circumstances were a bit different than mine. I didn’t spend a lot of time seeking out lost lambs or driving off marauding lions, but my understanding of sheep behavior is probably much closer to that of the ancient Hebrews than most Americans.


Do you feel being around all that wool and yarn made more attuned to texture? Fluffiness?

Yes, definitely. My mother is a spinner and weaver, so wool and fibers generally were all around me when I was growing up. I think I’m more aware of fibers and textiles than most people, certainly more so than most of the men I know. It’s not so fluffiness that I notice as it is the feel of wool yarn or clothing. The smell of wool is also something that catches me unexpectedly. It might be a hand lotion with lanolin or a friend’s wet sweater, but the smell always reminds me of the farm.

Some Thoughts After Listening to Mr. Joseph Campbell's "The Eastern Way" and "The Power of Myth"

Old World/Myths: Muddled. Great acumen and cruel wrong-headedness at completely unpredictable intervals.
New World - Old Myths + New World Advancements (clarifications/technologies, i.e., how Black Plague is spread/being able to switch on a light): no less muddled.
New World + Reintegration of Old Myths + New World Advancements=maybe slightly less muddled, but I don’t know, not by much.
Is there any quantifiable way to gauge the average amount of confusion per human being in any particular place and or era? Probably not. That would be interesting experiment.
I sort of wish I could know what creation myth I might have kicked out if I had been alone on Easter Island for the first twenty years of my life, but then again, maybe I don’t.
Minus my fixation with the Luke Skywalker/Yoda training scenes in the paperback version of The Return of the Jedi as a fitness-obsessed twelve year old girl (ah, that summer I was constantly in a handstand), I’m just not that into “Star Wars.” Found references a bit oh quotidian? dull? especially after Hindu, Scandinavian myths.
Better, more god-esque sounding name for god than Odin? Personally, I don’t think so.
I wish Kurosawa had made a movie about bison, pre-European invasion. And the Native Americans who hunted them. Maybe it’s all that long grass waving hypnotically in “Seven Samurai”—have you ever seen anything more beautiful? Plus that improbable hunched outline of the bison—well, I think if anyone could have done it, it is him.
How did I manage to entirely miss the story of the Buddha in my mad love affair and bad breakup with Zen Buddhism? Maybe because I was so scrupulously avoiding the movie with Keanu Reeves. Geezits. Anyway, pretty much explains everything.
I wonder if Joseph Campbell ever read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927). About a missionary adjusting to hypocrisy of being missionary, dry as a martini, very funny. Well, creepy, but funny.
(Please note: this listening was undertaken while drawing a comix of a little grey fox and may have influenced the author’s opinions)

Weeping Giant Clam Over the Farm

Flying Buttresses

Is there a flying buttress tour of Europe I might take? I want to see every one.

N-n-n-ovels and suchlike

Yesterday I was thinking how I’d like to see at least three of these four words—“undulate” “ungulate” “unguent” and “ululate”—used in a sentence with (important part) complete naturalness, as an innately necessary part to whatever is being communicated. You might have to write an entire book just to roll out that sentence in a reasonable context. Perhaps a novel set on the Serengeti plains? But I’ve heard apocryphal tales of books getting started around a lone sentence, “Ted tucked the last strands of wispy hair behind his ears and headed for India,” and what ho, 98,000 words later a novel has come into being. However, I’m not sure I want to read the u/u/u/u book, just the sentence, please.

(Yesterday I was also thinking, as I occasionally do when feeling troubled, about a great long line of lobsters marching along the ocean floor in single-file. There is some combination therein of spectacle, industry, cooperation, single-mindedness and secrecy that I find pleasing. This led to an internal discussion of what constitutes a comforting vs. a merely pleasing thought, introspections I may or mayn’t share later. Mmmmm.)

Anyway, speaking of novels, when someone asked the over the weekend if I was writing one, I apparently hollered “YES! Yes I am!” as if accused of a crime I could no longer deny. Poor fellow! It was merely a polite question.

Please note: for the first time in about 15 years I am wearing a necklace today. I’m not sure anyone will recognize me.

A Third Weekend in January on a Northeast Coast of the United States of America: (yes, the) weather, books, praise for Mr. Sasha B. Cohen

The weather, moody brute, has rained and gloomed and moped and sighed, rather like me, really, this weekend, but, unlike myself, abruptly turned artic yesterday afternoon, blasts of freezing air racing up and down streets like, I don’t know, they had somewhere to go. Even simple things like schlepping home groceries starts to seem a little dire and Jack Londonish when deep winter takes back the upper hand. Happily, my apartment radiators are like big bombs of hot air going off at all times and the indoors felt something blissful, like in a Hindu myth where one winds up on a lotus, finally free of your worldly discomforts and human stupidity. It is nice to be warm. But those self-same radiators drive my Canadian roommate to overheated distraction, poor lamb. She likes the tip of her nose to be cold.

To wit: I finally finished Max Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite, the virtues of which only serve to remind me that if I find on my deathbed I never did finish Zuleika Dobson, I will feel silly. V. drole, that Mr. Beerbohm.
Also completed No Bed of Roses, by Faith Baldwin, a novel from 1974 I found among many other such enticingly forgotten-looking books at the library. The story follows a young couple in small New England village discovering the difference between what it is to be snug and what it is to be smothered. An interesting book for a woman of eighty to write, I think. There is a feel of the romance writer aspiring to realism, but my sense is most of her effort seems to have been on yanking the Old World (all that came before) up to the New (Aquarius age—much reference to women’s libbers, etc.) and stitching them together, thereby making sense out of both vis-à-vis the institution of marriage. I’m not sure she succeeds but I like that she tried.
Now trying my hand at The Poems of Catullus, in a new translation by Peter Green, who, god bless him, is wearing an ascot in his photo. So far the poems are pettish and funny and beautiful and obscene, just as was promised on the book jacket although oops, now that I look at it again, I see that isn’t true, not really. Must be something about the typeface? Well, anyway, I’m liking it just fine, and wouldn’t mind if the words kind of go ahead and germinate deep in the dirt of my brain. I could use them.

A moment of recognition for Sasha Cohen, one of those human beings whose undertakings makes me glad to call myself one too. And I haven’t even seen the Ali G interview with Noam Chomsky yet. Ah, me.