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.

Scent-o-rama

To the best of my knowledge, the technology doesn't yet exist for blogging smells. So you'll just have to infer the scent of this lovely stuff from the photo, and more specifically from the words Rose sauvage beurre nourrissant pour les mains.

Tribal

Since the bride and Ampersand Duck between them have already provided lovely accounts, in one case lavishly illustrated, of Laura and Dorian's wedding on Saturday, I don't have much to add except to agree about the total gorgeousness of the entire affair. Highlights included a ceremony that combined a substantial amount of traditional wedding text with some carefully-chosen and beautifully-read Australian love poems by, if I remember rightly, Kevin Hart, Bruce Dawe and Lesbia Harford, plus C.P. Cavafy's classic 'Ithaka', in which a finely judged mixture of feeling, philosophy and Homer goes into the proposition that what matters most is not the arrival but the journey.

Poems were read and vows were taken to the accompaniment of a faint but symphonic soundtrack: the gentle crooning of the chooks, the distant popping of the pre-toast corks, and the occasional sniffling noises of the various female guests. The bride was radiant, the ceremony was a wonderful family affair, the garden looked gorgeous, the weather obliged, and the only real disappointment was the bridesmaids, who apparently spent most of the day underneath the house next door getting their collars, bows and faces covered in cobwebs and dust.

Once I'd decided to go to the wedding and had sent Laura my RSVP, I began to make arrangements to catch up with the various Melbourne friends I've stayed in regular touch with since I moved to Adelaide eleven years ago, and by the time I finally arrived at my Lygon Street hotel, I'd lined up three reunions around the wedding.

After a blindingly stressful day of cat-wrangling and ominous airport delays and announcements and closures and rumours of lightning-struck planes, Friday night once I'd finally arrived was homemade gourmet pizza with P and S and the kids, two of whom are now at high school and none of whom was born yet when, already old friends, their parents and I and two other friends spent a week in a villa in Tuscany in 1993. Now we sat round talking, eating and drinking in much the same spirit, except with P and S now happily surrounded by kids, cats and dogs. (Only one dog, actually, but he is so big he could make eight or nine Maltese terriers.)

Saturday night was dinner out with L, who heroically came to fetch me and then took me out for seriously good Italian food and some in-depth catching-up in matters of love and work. Sunday was lunch with J in an old Carlton haunt, after which we strolled up to Melbourne University's Ian Potter Gallery to see a wonderful exhibition of Louis Kahan's portraits of Australian, and particularly Melbourne, literati ('Let's go and look at the intelligentsia,' said J).

Many of these portraits were drawn to illustrate particular articles, poems and stories in Meanjin over several decades; both of us knew (or had known) a number of the people in the portraits and had read the work of most of the others, and I was reminded again that galleries and museums are a lot like computers in that what you get out of them depends heavily on what you put in; both of us had brought a lot of history with us to the gallery, possibly too much. (What with J a former editor, the exhibition's portraits of the two editors before her, the presence of the current editor at the wedding and a screening at the exhibition of a 1961 episode of Panorama exclusively dedicated to the magazine, it was a fairly Meanjin-themed visit altogether.)

We know ourselves by the tribes to which we belong, and I hadn't properly thought through the fact that on this weekend I would be rejoining several of mine. Still, I knew that the wedding would be a monster blogmeet and that I would catch up with bloggers of all kinds: some I'd known for years pre-blogging but mainly in professional capacities (Elsewhere, Sophie); others I'd met recently as a direct or indirect result of blogging (the Baron, and of course the bride herself); and yet others whom I'd never met at all, including two in particular whom I felt I knew very well but had never actually laid eyes on, namely the lovely Zoe and the equally lovely Ampersand Duck. If I'd been able to summon just a little more energy or will, I would have kicked on to the Standard Hotel after dinner on Friday night in order to experience the blogtribe even more extensively, and with hindsight I wish I had, but alas one is not as young as one was.

Stephanie of Humanities Researcher is the only person who is a member of all my non-Adelaide tribes (blogging, Aust lit, old-friends network), and Stephanie has thoughtlessly naffed off to Philadelphia. But there was still one point of overlap: the other S is one of the still-in-touch old Melbourne mates and, though not a blogger, is now a work colleague of Laura's and was at the wedding with her husband and their kids. They have had an extremely hairy time of it lately and the prospect of seeing them all safe and well was one of the factors that tipped the scales when I was thinking about making the trip. And for this weekend they were the hinge, for me, between one reality and another.

Mooching down Lygon Street late the next morning took me even further back, back to the first time I'd ever been on it, one day in the winter of 1980 -- my first year of living away from Adelaide, and Melbourne still a total mystery to me; Sydney was my 'other city' in early life -- when I'd travelled up from Geelong with a man to whom I was in thrall in every possible way, something that had never happened before and has never, I'm glad to say, happened since. So Melbourne-centric was he, so tightly wound and swaddled in the cocoon of his own reality at the expense of anyone else's, that he'd said to me 'I'll meet you in Tamani's' and I had desperately wandered up and down Lygon Street at least a dozen times before I thought to ask someone, and discovered that Tamani's had changed its name to Ti Amo (!) some time beforehand and he just assumed I'd know. (Nor was he apologetic afterwards. Yes yes, I know.)

And over that, layers and layers of other memories, all variously plotted along that spectrum whose bad end is the one where you want to curl up into a foetal ball in the gutter and die of shame. Ah dear me, almost thirty years of Lygon Street, as bittersweet to me as the best of its own imported gourmet wares, and a great deal older than most of them. It was a relief to spot J's familiar back in Readings, and to wander off with her to find some lunch and get each other back up to date on life's important developments since last we met. Why it should be a surprise to us here in our fifties that fate keeps on happening, and not just to us but to such of our parents as still survive, I really have no idea.

Leonard Cohen in the Southern Vales

Following the lead of Laura from Sills Bend, I am not going to say too much about the content of the concert, in order not to spoil it for people who have yet to see it. But here are some things I learned.

-- Ten musicians who can all hold the stage individually can also merge seamlessly into one breathtaking performance.

-- It is possible to perform for almost three hours, with a lot of physical activity including kneeling and effortlessly getting up again, and for some of which you have been looking straight into the setting sun, even if you are seventy-four years old.

-- It is possible to be seventy-four years old and neither decrepit nor in any other way out of date. Au contraire in spades: Cohen's knees, fingers and memory all seem to be in perfect working order, and his voice is utterly engaging and compelling -- musical and beautiful still, as well as charismatic. The ears are an erogenous zone, what can I say.

-- Rehearsal is a beautiful thing, especially when all ten of you are artists enough to inject passion and spontaneity into music that you have prepared and rehearsed to a hair's breadth.

There's one song I really do want to single out, though. 'The Partisan' was one of my favourites back in 1970. Apart from loving the song for its own virtues, I loved it that a Jewish Canadian from bilingual Montreal who had his fifth birthday a few weeks after World War 2 broke out should write such a song, with so deep a knowledge in it of war, and of western Europe, and of the French language, in which some of this song is sung, and most of all of being hunted and haunted and steadily resisting:

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
But I must go on

On the original recording, if memory serves, there's just him and his guitar, possibly plus the little chorus of angel voices he has favoured all through his long career. Last night, though, it was ten brilliant musicians whipping up a perfect storm: its dark imagery and driving beat brought to mind the word duende, about which Alison Croggon did so brilliant a post, with reference to Paul Capsis, at Sarsaparilla some time ago [will link to that as soon as Sars is contactable ... No, wait, here it is at Alison's own blog Theatre Notes]. And here's Christopher Maurer, courtesy of Wikipedia:

... at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. The duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence ... who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps him create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art. The duende is seen, in Lorca's lecture, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call 'angel'), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; he or she has to battle it skillfully, 'on the rim of the well,' in 'hand-to-hand combat.' To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca's words, 'a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience...

Landscape and weather, taken as the queue inched forward, glacierlike, at Leconfield Wines as they searched everyone's bags before they let us in. If only it had been glacierlike in other ways. You can see how hot it was from the depth of blue in that sky.



The heroic Glenn Richards from Augie March, on whom some kind punter took pity and bestowed the hat. For reasons best known to themselves, the promoters had set up the stage facing due west, and the sun went down in a white and blinding blaze of heat. 'My hair is melting,' said Richards plaintively, not long before the hat donation. They were great.



Paul Kelly had been warned to wear his cap and sunnies so came prepared. His nephew Dan Kelly did likewise, in a shirt that matched his uncle's hat and Leonard's giant muse backdrop. They were great, too.



First sighting of Leonard.



This guitarist is from Bareclona. He was sitting in a capacious and luxurious fuchsia-coloured chair. I like the way he appears here to be bumping the muse's giant but shapely and diaphanously draped breast with his head. Leonard played to, with and off him all night, often kneeling as he sang to be on eye level.

Leonard's years in a Buddhist monastery showed very clearly, in the spareness of his disciplined frame and the relaxed stillness of his body when standing back and listening to the other musicians. Obviously some of this is pure showmanship but I have never seen the Buddhist notion of 'mindfulness' acted out in such a protracted, exposed and practised way.



After performing for about an hour, Leonard and the band took a break. By now the sun was well down and there was a dishevelled, festive, heat-drunk air about the crowd that made us look like a downmarket Antipodean 21st century version of Renoir's The Luncheon of the Boating Party.



Leonard and his 'angels'.




'Famous Blue Raincoat.'

And today I expect to hear of a marriage

Last night the final email check before bed turned up two messages from friends, sent less than an hour apart.

One was a sad message from A. in Austria to say that his (very elderly) mother had died. The other was from P. at home in Adders to say that his first grandchild had been safely delivered into the world.

Two puzzles

(If you know the answer to either or both of these and decide to say so in the comments, ploise expline the answers -- ta.)


What's the next letter in this sequence?

OTTFFSSEN_



And what's this?

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