The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: nature

  • 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…

  • Corbel Stone Press: On Translation

    Corbel Stone Press: On Translation

    Run by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, Corbel Stone Press is one of the most distinctive small presses around today, whose work spans books and journals, pamphlets, booklets and music. Their focus is on landscape, nature, and ideas of place – mostly through poetry, but also across painting and drawing, botanical illustration, sound and song….

  • Foxing

    Foxing

    Slip like quiet fire through woods on velvet feet (bad fairies gave foxes their foxgloves to transform them into silent hunters)i. I hear a mouse think under a foot of snow, and making a springing high-dive pounce to catch it, such that my tail waves vertically, joyfully, ludicrously, in the air above me.    …

  • The Light Comes in the Name of the Voice

    The Light Comes in the Name of the Voice

      “The light comes in the name of the voice.” – Jeanne d’Arc, as quoted by Anne Carson in Variations on the Right to Remain Silent   And in the end, only this moment. First the ash-pile, white, fine wood-ash, grimy ice, a grey noon. The pigs. Frost lacing the leaves. The girl with itchy…

  • Popular Astronomy

    Popular Astronomy

      Agnes Mary Clerke (1842-1907) was not a practical astronomer, but wrote a number of important books and articles that explained existing astronomical research to the general public.   Winter, the ghosts of fuchsias sigh; in the frost, the fox chews mouse-tails. I step in each of my father’s foot-prints as we carry the telescope…

  • The World Without Us

    The World Without Us

    Deborah Westmancoat is a British contemporary painter based in Somerset, UK. She has a long term interest in alchemy and the philosophical sciences and how they help us to understand landscape and our place within it, particularly how the traditionally held metaphysical stages of alchemy: nigredo (blackness), albedo (whiteness), citrinitas (yellowing) and rubredo (redness) might…

  • In Bocca al Lupo: Three Mountain Walks

    In Bocca al Lupo: Three Mountain Walks

        28th February 2013         1st March 2014 I slid across the leather seats as the car swung around the obstacles on the track; pulled forwards and pushed back as the steep slopes were tackled. The headlights carved tunnels of green from the forest, the keys rattled against themselves and the…

  • Stone Ghosts

    Stone Ghosts

    On Mount Mitsumine in Oku-Chichibu, some 1,000 metres above sea level and surrounded by forest, is Mitsumine-Jinja – the most famous wolf shrine in Japan. The wolf in Japanese folklore is a powerful presence but, unlike in traditions elsewhere, it is a benign figure revered as a messenger of the spirits, a protector of crops…

  • Furry Attractions: Polar Bears in the Zoo

    Furry Attractions: Polar Bears in the Zoo

    In the western hemisphere, polar bears have lived in our midst since the Middle Ages, a result of our fascination with these charismatic carnivores. Already in 1252, Henry III of England kept a muzzled and chained polar bear, which was allowed to catch fish and frolic about in the Thames. The first unequivocally identifiable polar…

  • Great and Small Mythologies

    Great and Small Mythologies

    Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, released last year in a posthumously published translation by Seamus Heaney, is concerned, amongst other things, with the inadequacies of art. In it, Virgil describes a mural painted by Daedalus, the mythological artist, which fails in its attempts to represent the death of his son, Icarus. In Heaney’s translation: ……………………………………………………………….Twice…

  • A New Map of Berlin

    A New Map of Berlin

    I had no intention of bicycling in the snow, this winter. I started riding just seven months ago to stave off the inevitable corrosion of old age. I have no tolerance of cold. I grew up on the beaches of Sydney, where anything below 15ºC is thought of as gelid. In Berlin, the average winter…