The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: thinking

  • The chimaera

    The chimaera

    Scary Monsters III: collapsing space If you had walked into one of the princely Wunderkammern or cabinets of curiosity of seventeenth-century Europe, you would have been assailed by the wealth of objects covering walls, ceilings, shelves and probably floors; naturalia, exotica and artificialia arranged in strange juxtapositions, decorative arrays and obscure taxonomies. The visual impression…

  • The Unending Cycle

    The Unending Cycle

    For Ayesha I look into Haruki’s eyes and discover something that disturbs me profoundly. There is a familiarity. In the aftermath of The Demolition Of My Construct (my break-up), I must admit I am suffering from a fear of intimacy with anyone, anything. Even these fluffy felines, Haruki and Mowgli. What I see in his…

  • The Second Body

    The Second Body

    At 6 a.m. on a Thursday morning in November it was completely dark outside, but the butcher’s shop was strip-lit and the raw meat area was full of busy young men. It was difficult to see exactly what they were doing – the men were large and they were moving quickly in a small crowded…

  • Shopping centres, caves and the fate of us all

    Shopping centres, caves and the fate of us all

    If you leave Nottingham train station and head towards the centre of the city, you will eventually come up against a large brown wall barricading the city. Actually it is the backside, or front (it’s hard to tell), of a shopping centre called Broadmarsh. Like a museum gift shop, the only way is through. I…

  • The Cooked and the Half-Baked

    The Cooked and the Half-Baked

      “The great press baron, Lord Northcliffe, used to tell his journalists that four subjects could be relied upon for abiding public interest: crime, love, money, and food. Only the last of these is fundamental and universal. Crime is a minority interest, even in the worst-regulated societies. It is possible to imagine an economy without…

  • 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…

  • 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 –…

  • Coyote Journal

    Coyote Journal

    I was raised by a nanny for most of my life. She was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala that made it to Los Angeles, and then into my family home. She was kind and loving, and knew how to get me to be quiet when it was time for me to sleep. She would say…

  • Running with the Wolves

    Running with the Wolves

    When I was a kid I wanted to be a wolf. I think it started when I read Jack London: White Fang and Call of the Wild set loose all kinds of fantasies and imaginings in my young mind that developed into a full-blown desire to swap my human skin for a wolfish replacement. Every…

  • Apples & Other Languages

    Apples & Other Languages

    Camilla Nelson’s words bring things to life. ‘Stir this miracle to waking,’ she says, in the first poem in Apples & Other Languages, a signal of the alchemy of ideas to follow. Here, the intangible and the inanimate take on new form: windpipes ‘sound themselves furiously’, a song ‘breaks the ice we stand on’. But…

  • Significant Others

    Significant Others

      If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. – Ludwig Wittgenstein     I am animal and so are you, but where do we start and end, and could we, ever, converse as equals amongst other animals? It is as much a question about Us as about Them. As early as the…