The Bleating Heart

Abstract

The photographer has been sleeping for the longest time, exhausted from traveling in a windstorm. She awakes at noon and leaves the village for a walk. Seeking relief, shade, the photographer ventures into the woods. The path crumbles into a blanched gulley of dry soil and roots. Very steep. Her sandals, useless here, are pulled off. She feels the solidity and reassuring pain of the earth against her bare skin. The camera is heavy and bulky. She doubts her own intention to carry it there. Why cannot she just experience: there is no need to justify her presence there. Yet she feels that need. We did not ask to be here. We did not choose this life we have, this planet. And yet, somehow, we feel the need to justify. The goat is small. Tiny. Utterly dark. Has she seen something? In her still darkness, she is aware of something. At times, she bleats into bright silence. She is lost, maybe. Or the photographer is lost. The kid looks fragile, out of balance. Still, her bleating is firm. She knows how to be alive there. Do we? The photographer stops, takes a picture. By photographing, we can grab a moment of reality, showing what is there, enabling us to name, catalog, separate, objectify. But we can also photograph to witness the emergence of a connection: something quite mysteriously happening within ourselves, a moment of openness, an instant of awareness of our own being there, alive among other beings. In that awareness, a sudden deeper connection is felt with all there is. Look again: In the blanched earth, amid drought, we look for the tree to find water, our connection to the earth. The tree. The animal, a fellow animal, the small black bleating heart of us. Flora and fauna. And again: We lay back in the shade with the satyrs, celebrate our bodies, our profligacy, falling like Debussy into the lazy Afternoon of a Faun. We flute and dance with the old goat, Pan, oldest of the domesticated food animals, 10,000 years of uneasy marriage. In goats, we celebrate our most ancient connection to this planet, this place. We sacrifice the Yule Goat. Do we, like Thor, whose carriage was pulled by goats, who ate their meat every night and saw them rise again from their bones every morning— do we honor the bones? And again: In that most ancient of zodiacs, the Chinese, the goat and sheep commingle and return to their evolutionary unity, charming and creative, elegant and fond of nature. Who was born in the Year of the Goat? Michelangelo, Mark Twain, Thomas Alva Edison, Muhammad Ali, Rudolph Valentino, Rachel Carson, Pierre Trudeau, Barbara Walters, Orville Wright, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Amy Lee, Bruce Willis, Benicio Del Toro, Claire Danes, Jamie Lynn Spears, Matt LeBlanc, Chow Yun-Fat, Zhang Ziyi, Li Shimin (Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty 618–907), Cao Cao (King of Wei in China’s Three Kingdoms Published online: April 3, 2014