Clouds of Life

When the goblins approach the Lonely Mountain towards the end of The Hobbit, Gandalf warns “the bats are above his army like a sea of locusts.”  This “bat-cloud” even blocked the light of the sun.  Early observers in North America likewise noted a super-abundance of animals.  In their famous journals, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark noted “innumerable herds of living anamals” and “miriads of the feathered tribes”  Particularly in the past, and still in some places today, we see examples of life in reckless abundance.

No one wants to fight an army of goblins heralded by swarms of bats, but there is something marvelous about a world so suffused with life that even the solemn, stony mountains – the dark abodes of fluttering bats – are brimming and bursting with life.  Perhaps Henry David Thoreau put it most provocatively in Walden, writing, “I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey upon one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp – tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! … The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence.” 

 

 

Image: Edmund Dulac, “The Entomologist’s Dream”

http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/2448

The Friendship of Animals

“It is a hundred years and three and fifty since I came out of the egg.”
- Roäc, son of Carc

Roäc the raven has some good advice for the dwarves in the mountain: “If you will listen to my counsel, you will not trust the Master of the Lake-men, but rather him that shot the dragon with his bow… he is a grim man but true.”  Thorin’s greed and pride will get the better of him – he should have paid more heed to the bird.

Humans and animals may see the world differently, but we may find that we have much to learn from them…

Nova: Animal Odd Couples

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg5YcEBUGz4

“It’s time to challenge the notion that only humans form lasting friendships.” 

There may come a time when humanity – amidst its endless, wild dervish-dance of decadence – will be grateful for the simple, if enigmatic, friendship of animals. 

Image: John Bauer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Julbocken_1912.jpg

 

The Bears and the Bees

“He is not the sort of person to ask questions of.”

Despite his impressive strength and imposing physique, Beorn doesn’t eat animals.  Instead, “He keeps hives and hives of great fierce bees, and lives most on cream and honey.”  It’s a wonderful portrayal of a powerful vegetarian and brings to mind Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.  In that book, Thoreau challenges a farmer who mocked the viability of vegetarianism by noting that the man relied upon “his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.”

 

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan describes Johnny Appleseed as a liminal figure, crossing the boundaries of civilization and wilderness.  Beorn is that and more, shifting as he does between the form of a human and the form of a bear.

Gandalf speaks of bears “dancing outside from dark to nearly dawn.”  Maybe they had drunk some wild, magic honey – the sweet witchcraft of sharp-bodied bees.

Image: adapted from a photograph by AnnaLee Pauls.