Tigers in Literature and Popular Culture

For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.

For he is of the tribe of Tiger.

For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.

-- Christopher Smart, from 'Jubilate Agno', 1759-63

***

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

-- William Blake, ‘The Tyger’, from Songs of Experience, 1794

***

   "The Wolves are a free people," said Father Wolf. "They take orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from any striped cattle-killer. The man's cub is ours—to kill if we choose."

    "Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog's den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak!"

    The tiger's roar filled the cave with thunder.

-- Rudyard Kipling, 'Mowgli's Brothers', 1893

***

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder

-- Herbert Kretzmer’s English adaptation of French lyrics (J’avais revé) by Alain Boublil, Les Misérables, 1980. 

***

Warfield lifted a great paw and put it in her hand. She felt the roughness of the pads and smelt faintly the cage floor. He pressed a toe to make the claw slide out. The heavy, supple muscles of the shoulders filled her hands.

            

She felt the tiger’s ears, the width of its head, and, carefully, the veterinarian guiding her, touched the roughness of its tongue. Hot breath stirred the hair on her forearms.

Last, Dr Warfield put the stethoscope in her ears. Her hands on the rhythmic chest, her face upturned, she was filled with the tiger heart’s bright thunder.

-- Thomas Harris, Red Dragon, 1981

***

But I couldn’t completely shake the idea that there really was something out there. I gathered my courage and tried to open myself, to extend my senses out into the night, to feel the tiger as it burned. It was nearby, I could tell, breathing softly, waiting. Somehow knowing me, knowing all of us, hungrily accepting the touch of my thoughts, purring like distant thunder with anticipation.

-- Tom Wright, What Dies in Summer, 2012

Which I am just this minute reading. I guess the softness and the brightness and the night and the burning and the thunder just go on and on and on.

Welcoming our new feline overlords

Desperate for them to come again

Read this.

Here's a taste.

It is no small thing though, to be in water with such large creatures, face to face. For they are huge, muscled and dark: they are like water made solid, they are silent and full of purpose. 

Go on, off you go, just do it.

'A fine and fancy ramble to the zoo ...'

He thought a little and then said:

　　`I have found the Zoological Gardens of service to many of my patients. I should prescribe for Mr Pontifex a course of the larger mammals. Don't let him think he is taking them medicinally ...'

-- Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh


Back in my days as an academic, my office doorway would be darkened now and then by a student at the end of his or her tether, stressed beyond endurance by -- most usually -- some combination of study pressures and personal life, complicated occasionally but more frequently as the 1990s wore on by a third source of strain, job pressure. Sometimes it would be even worse, some nightmare scenario involving an eating disorder or triggered memories of childhood sexual abuse or even mortal illness, and in those cases I'd send the students straight to counselling, but for common or garden mental exhaustion or depression or strain I'd send them, as per Samuel Butler's Mr Pontifex, to the Zoo.

I don't know how many of them went. Only one actually reported back to say she'd done what I suggested and it'd worked a treat, but, as so often in teaching, one was enough.

And I was thinking last week that I needed a break myself and that furthermore I'd not been to the zoo since I bought a digital camera, and then the orang-utan (see previous post) made her inventive bid for freedom yesterday




and rain was forecast for tomorrow, so I took the afternoon off to walk round Adelaide's beautiful zoo on a brief but glorious autumn afternoon.






Some of my fellow-creatures were just hanging around in the sun.






Some were relaxed;






others, not so much.






The hippo was sulking,






and the ring-tailed lemurs were showing off.






I don't know whether it was because I was planning a blog post as I strolled about taking pictures, but for some reason the zoo kept reminding me of the blogosphere.






Every time I go there, the Adelaide Zoo has improved yet again in this respect: there are now beautiful little settings, calming and welcoming, at almost every turn in every path.





On the walk back to the car I noticed a drama unfolding in the distance, as this picnicking couple on the riverbank remained oblivious to the fact that they were being staked out and stalked:





Even when the sneak thief was practically on top of them, they still remained unaware:





Sprung at last. I could almost hear the screams from the road.

'Perhaps they should let her run the country'

This story was on the news last night. They had to evacuate and close the Adelaide Zoo. Hundreds of Mothers' Day outings were derailed.

I was in a few traps myself when I was 27, and I didn't tackle them as intelligently as this. I wish I'd known her then; I would have called her on her mobile and asked for some advice.

One commenter here suggests that if she were preselected for NSW Labor it might boost their credibility.

Not safe for arachnophobes

Going out the back door late tonight to put some stuff away in the shed, I noticed that the pet patio spider into the remnants of whose web I blunder one morning out of two seemed to have called it a year, as they do around this time when April winds down and the nights close in and the cold snap snaps and the rain buckets down and floods the un-cleaned-out gutters. Again.

No sign of spider, nor yet of web.

Then I looked up.




You might be able to see one or two tiny white dots on the black background. They're stars.

Gecko Central: life keeps on happening

Last night late I went outside with the big torch to see if my frantic watering of the lemon tree (after falling into an exhausted early-evening sleep under the aircon in my bedroom and waking just in time to do what my father calls 'throwing some water around' in the tiny window the water restrictions allow, just before dark) had revived it at all. As I'd peered at it in the half-light of dusk (crepuscular, it was) I could half-see that many leaves had been burned to a crisp and feared for the actual life of the tree.

Here's what I found a few hours later, lolloping about in whatever moisture remained, six or seven feet off the ground:

Baby animals!

As Pav's IQ drops to a single digit in the face of intelligence-erasing adorabilification, we bring you Zooborns. And thanks to the Bookface Friend who alerted me to this site, shortly available in Blogroll.

Because too much critter content is never enough.

LOLcat of the week