The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Category: Wolf Crossing

  • Wolf yollez

    Wolf yollez

      ‘We’re not far from wolves.’ – Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’   Human-canine relationships are some of the most conceptually disordered and uncertain of interspecies relationships, precisely because the history of domestication is so long and so complex. The type of canine perspective offered by contemporary writers such as Donna Haraway…

  • Shadow Sisters

    Shadow Sisters

    A pack of dogs, a suggestion of a transformation, a woman in a wild place. A wolf. In the analogue photography of Joanna Pallaris, the time, as Hamlet had it, is out of joint. Double exposures make visible the formation of a rock face through the head of a dog. A woman’s face – the…

  • A Wolf, Crossing

    A Wolf, Crossing

    When night falls in the Charente, the inhabitants of its rural villages retreat to their homes. They lock their doors and pull iron-hinged timber shutters over every window. Pale sandstone walls, grey with age, cracked and pitted, their seams of lime mortar dried to dust, become as impenetrable as medieval keeps. In the dark, you…

  • Things She Doesn’t Know

    Things She Doesn’t Know

    When she was growing up, Lily kept a list of things that she didn’t know. She was big on lists then – she liked knowing the top ten most valuable beanie babies, or the five most destructive earthquakes in history. She liked knowing things, and she liked not knowing things, and she wanted to keep…

  • Blood Ties

    Blood Ties

    There was a girl who met up with a wolf, back in Distant Time, when wolves were human. The wolf wanted her for his wife, even though he had two wives already. When he took her home, his two wives smelled her and knew she was human. After a while she had a child –…

  • Cae’r Blaidd, or Field of the Wolf

    Cae’r Blaidd, or Field of the Wolf

      The last wolf died in this place but the hour of the wolf remains and the wolves call for us, call for you calling haunting us with their calling calling for us over and over again It is the time when we cross over as some people say of the passing away in the…

  • Charmed

    Charmed

      She calls him from a thousand miles distance – sends forth an invisible cord from her edge of cliff to his edge of existence. She calls him in autumn storms, in summer stillness, grooves a new migration route, moons him towards her for tide after tide. Some claim, with disdain, that she practised with…

  • Wolf

    Wolf

      Snow covered the town, and murmurs. Unease, downcast eyes, a rumour you were back in the holding where the song thrush is mute, where a path spills like yarn to the clearing. The fetid black leaf and the bracken. The crackle underfoot. The weird cabin. It gaped from the white like a lunatic’s face….

  • Hamrammr

    Hamrammr

      Úlfhéðnar in my wolf-skin, I am smuggled beneath this fearsome hide. Sneaksome, bristlepad varúlfur, I must stay concealed, keep my woman-ness below the scenting of the men. They would smell my sex and think me weak, think me there for the mating, the taking, the ruling, the putting me in my place. Bottom of…

  • Phenomenology of the Feral

    Phenomenology of the Feral

      After the Meat Tree   I Man’s best friend, woman’s best friend are has a jay, and mere has an add. I flower mere and he follows me that was made of wood and flowers and see, it is pronounced mer as the french for sea not mere lie down you are drunk. Remember…

  • The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner

    The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner

      – adapted from SJ Fowler If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be? Black banana, fruit flies, les ananas ne parlent pas, (a little song of two children learning french on Canadian TV). In middle school, the chair in the crypt. The stack of cryptic poems high enough to use as a…