Aesthetic Humility in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa”

Of all the great American Modernists, the poetry of Marianne Moore is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, even the most radical, of them all—no small feat in a group of friends and admirers that included Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and HD. Moore’s preferred form was a syllabic stanza bespoke to each poetic occasion, like the unique shell of each individual snail or paper nautilus, and often containing rhyme. In these stanzas, Moore hid behind her virtuosic performance of deflection and difficulty and, of course, revealed herself in it, much as one of her pet-subjects, the exotic animal-portrait, contained a self-portrait at its heart. In her poem on the jerboa, Moore contrasts the desert mouse’s decorousness with the decadence of empire, and in so doing, distinguishes her ideal of true artistry—a vigorous, humble, and ultimately liberated response to one’s natural and formal limitations—with a false art which oppresses the natural in service of the powerful. Wes & Erin discuss Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Jerboa,” first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity. Upcoming Episodes: M*A*S*H, Rilke, Dickinson. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Of all the great American modernists, Marianne Moore is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, even the most radical of them all. No small feat. In a group of friends and admirers that included Ezra Pound, T.S. eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, E.E. cummings and H.D. moore's preferred form was a syllabic stanza bespoke to each poetic occasion, like the unique shell of each individual snail or paper nautilus, and often containing rhyme. In these stanzas, Moore hid behind her virtuosic performance of deflection and difficulty and, of course, revealed herself in it. Much as one of her pet subjects, the exotic animal portrait contained a self portrait at its heart. In her poem on the Jerboa, Moore contrasts the desert mouse's decorousness with the decadence of empire and in so doing, distinguishes her ideal of true artistry, a vigorous, humble, and ultimately liberated response to one's natural and formal limitations, with a false art which oppresses the natural in service of the powerful. Today we're discussing Marianne Moore's poem the Jerboa, first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. 1:49 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. 1:51 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I'm curious. Before I suggested this poem, did you know what the Jerboa was? 2:03 Wes: I thought you were going to ask me if I knew who Marianne Moore was. 2:06 Erin: Marianne Moore was. Well, that's asking the same thing. 2:10 Wes: And I was preparing to say no, and no, I didn't know no. 2:15 Erin: Really? 2:15 Wes: Yeah. I didn't know her and I didn't know this animal. I mean, I knew of the animal. It's in Dune, right? Some version of it. Did you see that? 2:23 Erin: Okay. That's why someone made a Dune joke to me yesterday. 2:27 Wes: Muad'Dib or something. I can't remember what it's called, but anyway, I know what it's called. On the planet Arrakis, On the planet Earth. Not so much. Too much fantasy, Too little biology. When I was a kid, should I 2:48 Erin: have watched Dune in preparation for this episode? Because now I'm concerned that I'm going To be speaking out of ignorance. 2:54 Wes: You would have learned a lot. 2:55 Erin: Yeah. 2:56 Wes: But no. Yeah, I hadn't heard of her or this poem or the animal. Except I think I'd seen, you know, pictures and video of a desert mouse or desert rat. But, no, I didn't know. 3:08 Erin: Well, they're very cute. 3:09 Wes: I didn't know it under this name. Yeah. 3:11 Erin: Yeah. You know, probably. Oh, I'm gonna wanna take this back as soon as I say it. Probably. She's my favorite poet. She's certainly the poet that's had the greatest influence on my own work. 3:22 Wes: Yeah, I can see that, by the way. 3:24 Erin: Oh, really? 3:24 Wes: I noticed that. 3:25 Erin: Y. Yeah, it's my love of rats. No, her nickname was Rat from Wind in the Willows. 3:33 Wes: So. 3:33 Erin: I love Marianne Moore. Her book, which this poem is not from, but her book, Observations, is worth getting. It's one of the landmarks of modernism on par with Harmonium, Spring and all, you know, I guess. What was Eliot's book? Prufrock and Other Poems. Was that what it was called? It's in that league. I mean, I think it's just one of the landmark, foundational landmarks of modernist poetry. And since American modernism is also my favorite time period in poetry, she's tops for me. It's important for me to pitch her a little bit because I think most people don't know who she is, and then when they read the poems, they find her to be very difficult at first. And she also gets accused often of being impersonal, which I think is completely untrue. I think these are such fascinatingly personal poems because she reveals so much of the way that she thinks in them. They're so idiosyncratic and interesting and strange. You know, I think maybe Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop, who was kind of a protege of Moore's, said, you know, she's the kind of person that you would want to walk through a museum with. It's like you could. You could hear her, like, in the Natural History Museum, sort of commenting on things in your ear as you go through. And I think that that kind of reveals a lot more about a person than a poem in which someone is maybe being confessional and, you know, discussing their inner life, usually with, you know, a lot more fabulism than they want to admit. So how did you find the poem and her style? 4:57 Wes: There's a lot of allusions that I don't necessarily immediately get. Like, what the pine cone was, that I have to look up and find out, okay, that's at the Vatican and other things. I'm not sure I Get. Although at a certain point I'm like, okay, yeah, that's the Egyptians. I know that I've been to a museum. I feel like I'm familiar with some of these things. And then syntactically, some of the lines took me a few reads and puzzling over it to make sure I've got everything. Even syntactically, it's not easily comprehensible, I find that. But yeah, my general impression is positive. And just looking at some of the other poems I immediately struck. But yeah, this didn't immediately strike me in the same way as some of the other poems that I glanced at. So I can understand that the extreme amount of detail turns some people off. Is that what you were saying? 5:56 Erin: And the syntax and the allusion, the things you're talking about. 5:59 Wes: But overall I find it a very interesting poem. Once I felt like I understood it, I think it will have to marinate for longer before I. I can't say that it has a strong, immediate emotional impact on me, which is not to say that it wouldn't happen after longer time for marination, but. Or if I were more familiar with other parts of her work or something 6:20 Erin: like that, maybe this is projection on my part. But what I often detect in the emotion of the poem is not in the effect that it produces in me, but often in her poems, I feel this sort of underlying rage simmering beneath the surface. Not necessarily in this poem. There's a great deal of appreciation as well. And she really loves these animals that she writes about. I could feel that the images themselves are just so beautiful. I mean, I don't know of a better image in 20th century American poetry than the baboons on the necks of the giraffes picking fruit from the trees. You know, there's just so many, and sonically it's so, so incredibly beautiful. I think it's a bit of an odd choice, I think, for a Marianne Moore poem to talk about on the podcast. Maybe, you know, her two most anthologized poems are probably poetry, which begins famously with I too dislike it. You know, famous ill used opening line. And I don't really like that poem that much. I think just because of that line, it's gotten a lot. It has some great images in it, but it's not something I think we could discuss in a sustained way over two parts. And the other is the fish, which I have taught so much that I didn't think I would have anything fresh to say about it at this point, because it's like my go to poem to teach. So I was a little worried about that. And then, you know, her two great poems that are real landmarks of 20th century Poetry, the Octopus and Marriage, are both incredibly long and it would take many, many parts to get through just to read through them. And so I settled on this because she's known for these animal poems. Pangolin, the Frigate pelican, the paper Nautilus. And this is probably my favorite of them, maybe because I think the jerboa is so cute. But also I love the fact that it has these two uneven parts. There's sort of like theme and counter theme. It's very musical. I don't know. They're so winningly named, these two parts. You know, this is unusual for her to have two parts and have a subtitle for each. Too much. And Abundance is, you know, just like such a typical little witty joke. And I just. I love the descriptions of art in it and of these real. Which. Which we'll have to. Which we'll have to. To talk about these really loving, incredibly detailed, beautiful descriptions of things that she's condemning, you know, which are a little bit strange and maybe self defeating, but. Yeah. And it has the syllabics and the rhyme. So I should just point out that this is a poem of. I think the first section is 17 stanzas and the second section is nine stanzas. And the stanzas are six lines long. And they're written in syllabics. So very often the break in the line will be a bit jarring. And that's because she's just counting. She's not doing meter. So English, of course, is an accentual syllabic language. For those of our listeners who are familiar with a term like iambic, pentameter. Iambic refers to the accent and pentameter to the syllabics, the number of syllables basically in the line. So iambic is the dun, dun, you know, the. 9:11 Wes: The. 9:11 Erin: The two. Two beat foot. And pentameter means that there are five of those. So ten syllables total in a line. Other languages are not necessarily accentual syllabic. So French doesn't have really any strong accents. They can't count their accents very well. So they don't have meter as we would think of it. They just count the syllables. And one of Moore's greatest and most ingenious innovations in poetry is to apply that French way of counting just the syllables and transpose that into English. So that's why so much of the music in this sounds so fresh and strange and interesting. So she's just counting syllables. So the pattern is 5, 5, 6, 11, 10, 7. So she starts with a 5 and ends with a 7, which will come back in fifths and sevenths later in the poem. 10:01 Wes: Interesting. 10:01 Erin: And then the rhyme scheme is something like a, A and then xx for sort of no rhyme. BB Sometimes that shifts slightly, but for the most part she holds to that. Yeah. So it produces this bespoke little object because in each one of her poems she has a different little system. And one can imagine that maybe she wrote the first couple of stanzas and liked the shape of them and then counted the syllables and said, okay, I'm just gonna stick to this for the next. You know, like a cookie cutter kind of applied it to the rest of the poem or something. I'm just imagining that's the way that it went. I could be wrong there. Okay, so I'll start reading it and I think we'll just go a chunk at a time, if that sounds good to you. The too much. A Roman had an artist, a freedman, contrive a cone, pine cone or fir cone, with holes for a fountain placed on the prison of Sant Angelo. This cone of the Pompeys, which is known now as the Pope's passed for art, a huge cast bronze dwarfing the peacock statue in the garden of the Vatican. It looks like a work of art made to give to a Pompey or native of Thebes. Maybe we should stop there, just talk about the pine cone. 11:16 Wes: Yeah, that's true. That's the conceptual break. So, yeah, tell us about the pinecone. This is a fountain that you can still see. I've been to the Vatican, so I suppose I've seen it in person, but it was so long ago that I didn't. 11:30 Erin: Yeah, I vaguely remember seeing it. I don't know. I didn't have any pictures of it that I could find, but I found a picture online and it's quite strange and sort of ugly. It's very strange. 11:41 Wes: It's got the peacocks next to it now, which is just kind of odd looking. But. 11:45 Erin: Yeah, yeah, the little tiny peacocks. Yeah. So it's a pinecone fountain, which is a bit strange. So we begin with this Roman, who's unnamed, and he had an artist, a Freedman, contrive a cone. We're sort of getting, I think from the way in which this is cast that she thinks negatively about this pine cone. We're not really getting a negative description of the pinecone itself, though. I think the fact that it's A pinecone fountain implies that there's something wrong about this, in Moore's view, wrong in terms of it's not natural. It doesn't make any sense to have a pine cone that is a fountain. 12:23 Wes: The word contrive seems to suggest something negative. 12:26 Erin: Definitely. 12:27 Wes: It's a contrivance. And then pinecone or fir cone suggests a lack of precision. 12:33 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 12:34 Wes: Which I know. I know this has been oft repeated by critics because I looked a little bit on secondary literature, but. Yeah, for a poet like her, who's very precise, that by itself suggests a certain criticism of this object. 12:47 Erin: Yeah. And so, you know, this freedman is pressed into service, you know, so his level of freedom is up for debate here because Roman had him do it. It seems he didn't have a choice. And, of course, this pinecone's original location is on a prison, which I think contributes to the sense of the lack of freedom in this artist, you know, constructing this pine cone. And, like, why a pine cone? It doesn't. You know, I thought a lot about. About the pinecone and what that might suggest. The pinecone's purpose is for seed dispersal. Here it's dispersing water, and only for aesthetic reasons, not practical ones. I mean, not anymore, because it's no longer a fountain, but originally it was constructed as a fountain. So the pine cone's form is divorced from its function, which is always a negative thing, I think, in life and in Marianne Moore. And it's comically large. So I was thinking about, like, if a pine cone is that big, you know, based on what I was trying to figure out in terms of how big it was just from a picture and, like, how big would be the trees that it would produce? You know, they would be gargantuan. Right. So there's this subversion of the natural for what it seems for the sake of mere monumentality, like merely having things that are big for their own sake. And I think since the poem, there's a bit of the David and Goliath story in this idea of the Jerboa being pitted against, you know, the mighty Egyptian empire or something. Things that are too big when they don't need to be big in order to function properly, I think, in themselves are a bit suspect. And so this idea of bigness, I think, is something we might track in the poem. 14:22 Wes: Yeah. So it's monumental in size. You know, if you're going to create a monument, it should be honoring something. You would think of it as a statue. Right. Or Something like that. Or something that glorifies a Roman conquest or something like that. She talks. Later on she'll talk about Africanus. Right. So a general who had conquered some part of Africa could give themselves that name. Right. Often that's what you are creating monuments to not just particular figures, but to figures engaged in conquest and to the idea of conquest in general. Which is not to say that this fountain is intended as a monument. Exactly. But its size connotes that it runs on the same logic of excess, maybe. Yeah. So she really surpasses past for art, you know, that's another dis. Obviously not fond of the pinecone. There's no straightforward, detailed aesthetic critique here. A huge cast bronze, except for the. Perhaps the hugeness of it. Puzzling hugeness of it. The unmotivated hugeness of it. Except as a boast, maybe. Except as a kind of way of physically boasting. Look, I'm rich. I can commission this huge thing that will be visible to everyone and potentially awe inspiring, even though it's a trivial, playful subject. 15:47 Erin: Right. I do like pine cones. I think they're nice. Yeah, it dwarfs the peacock. Right. So it even dwarfs, like this symbol, the symbol of vanity, which makes me think there's something a little bit more complex going on there. There's a strange alliterative logic, I think, that's working its way through these first two stanzas, where she has, you know, the prison of San Angelo, Pompey, popes and pinecone and peacock. I mean, I guess it has to be a pine cone to work in this system. It can't be a fur cone. So all of these things I think of as being the authority figure, whether it's a Pompey or a pope, These are symbols of empire for her. And by the way, Moore is famously devoutly Presbyterian, another P word, but she doesn't think so negatively about that one. And so she's not fond, shall we say, of what the Pope represents, that kind of authority. I think it's comparing it here to the authority of a Roman emperor and of the state. So, you know, the prison is, I think, for her, the expression of what the Pompey and the Pope represent, which is the authority to press other people into service, to imprison them, to make them do your bidding. And I wonder if this authority that the pinecone seems to represent, because it dwarfs the peacock, it's almost implying, not only that it's an even greater symbol, maybe a vanity, than the peacock is, but something about the authority of the state being even Bigger than personal vanity or being able to adopt an authority that makes you scarier and more threatening even than mere vanity would. Would have you. It's just sort of a half baked thought, but I don't know what you think about that. 17:25 Wes: Yeah, that's. Makes sense. 17:27 Erin: Well, because I think later, you know, not to get ahead, but I think later the pharaoh, another P word, though not as percussive. The pharaoh, I think is a victim of his own power. I don't know if. If you would agree with that. I mean, we'll talk about it when we get to it. But I think that there's something here about the power that monarchy or the state or what, whatever the system is, bestows upon the person at the top that oppresses everyone, including that person, and which is therefore, I think, bigger than mere personal failing, which seems to be the representative of this peacock idea. 18:01 Wes: Just one more thing. So the reference to Pompey, she's referring to the Roman erstwhile friend of Caesar and then not friend of Caesar. Right. Just looking a little in the background. So he conquered part of Africa at a certain point, or Numidia. And he was a big fan of Alexander the Great and was called. I think he was. After that success, he was called Magnus. In the end, he tried to flee after losing the civil war to Caesar. I think he fled to Egypt and was immediately executed on arrival. But I'm just wondering why the reference to Pompey except as a. It's the type of work of art meant to be a monument to someone who has conquered or something like that. And it allows her. In this poem, she's often free associating. So we get Pompey or native of Thebes, and so ultimately we get this association from Rome to Egypt. It's not completely random that she moves on now to the subject of Egypt, but there's an association and Pompeii is kind of the. Pompey is the kind of middle term. 19:07 Erin: Oh, I like that. Yeah, yeah, because she could as easily say Caesar. Right. But also like Pompey has. I mean, it has the P thing and it also has like the word pomp in it and pompous and. But I like this. This historical stuff, which I didn't look up. I was also looking at a native of Thebes and I was like, oh, I didn't realize what she was saying with that either. There's so much detail in here that it's easy to like. I have so much written in the margins. I don't know if you can See, it's very, very light that I think sometimes things get crowded out and it's. I miss some of the fine grained stuff. 19:39 Wes: There's a Thebes in Greece and a Thebes in Egypt. 19:43 Erin: That's funny. 19:44 Wes: Yeah, that's another point of crossover between those two worlds, you know, I don't know. Otherwise. Yeah. What to a native of Thebes? I don't know, is it a native of Egyptian Thebes or a native of ancient Greek Thebes? Well, maybe it's both in a sense. Right. So the monuments that we're going to get in ancient Egypt, of course, are quite different now than the ones that we're getting in Rome. And there are going to be more. Or are they? We'll see. 20:10 Erin: Yeah. I mean the obelisk is the thing I think of as being the, the import from Egyptian monumental statuary or architecture. I'm not sure which one it qualifies as. Yeah, but because of that, that discourse between Rome and Egypt. Discourse is what a word for it. But you know, because of that, you know, I think there's, there's actually quite a bit of. I mean, I think the argument here is that it doesn't really. That all empires share a certain kind of sensibility which is about themselves, which is this grandiosity, oppression, and that all empires have a similar life cycle. And she's looking at Egypt and Rome, I think, at the same point in their life cycle, which is decline, decadence, being overly self referential, doing things like creating a giant statue of a pine cone for no apparent reason. They've lost the plot. These empires have lost the plot at this point. 21:02 Wes: And yeah, I think at this juncture we're going Pompey fled the Ptolemaic Egypt, modern Egypt. 21:10 Erin: Right. 21:11 Wes: For those times. And now we're about to go much farther backward in time into a more ancient Egypt where I assume that's what she's talking about, where there's this particular aesthetic relationship to animals. Or more than aesthetic, but exploitative as well. 21:28 Erin: Okay, I'll keep reading. Others could build and understood making colossi and how to use slaves and kept crocodiles and put baboons on the necks of giraffes to pick fruit and used serpent magic. They had their men tie hippopotami and bring out dappled dog cats to course antelopes, dikdik and ibex or used small eagles. They looked on as theirs impalas and onagers, the wild ostrich herd with hard feet and bird necks rearing back in the dust. Like a serpent preparing to strike. Cranes, mongooses, storks, anoas, Nile geese. And there were gardens for these, combining planes, dates, limes and pomegranates in avenues with square pools of pink flowers, tame fish and small frogs. Besides yarns dyed with indigo and red cotton, they had a flax, which they spun into fine linen cordage for yachtsmen. So the others are Egyptians. It does take a long time to figure that out. 22:31 Wes: Right. 22:32 Erin: You have to trace them through their animals. You know, everyone, all the Empire people, the people in these robust civilizations have to be tracked through their objects, which I think is a great feature. 22:44 Wes: So it's a good clue that, yeah, others could build and understood making colossi and how to use slaves. So that seems like a reference to the pyramids. So from Thebes to colossi, and then, yeah, crocodiles and baboons on the necks of giraffes. How does she know they did that? 23:03 Erin: Is that in a. I have no idea. 23:04 Wes: Is that on someone's tomb or is she making that up? 23:08 Erin: What this poem lacks is one of the great features of a Moore poem. She often includes quotations from books. You know, she works in collage quite a bit. And it's been, I guess, a monumental task for her editors to go back and find the places where she lifted these quotations because she's not very good at documenting them. So she must have read this somewhere. Usually in a Moore poem, it would just be thrown in with quotation marks around it. 23:35 Wes: Well, just now, I just found one of the pictures. 23:39 Erin: Oh, yeah. 23:39 Wes: So there's one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So you can see a baboon climbing up the neck of a giraffe. 23:46 Erin: And this is a photograph from 3000 B.C. yeah, it must be in black and white. 23:53 Wes: Egyptians were more. More advanced. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bad photograph. So I assume that there's something that you could find in a museum for every one of these references, and maybe more than one. Is she conjecturing about the picking of fruit? I'm not sure. 24:11 Erin: But anyway, it seems difficult to train baboons to do this and expect them, for instance, to just not eat the fruit immediately. But it's such a lovely image, I don't want to question it. You know what I love about that making colossi and how to use slaves is it sends us back, of course, to the pinecone, but also to the freedman. So she's sort of being now more honest about what the freed man really was, which was someone who was a Slave, you know, he was nominally a freed man, but of course he was not free in his selection of his subject or anything having to do with, you know, his own self determination. And so I love the fact that by the time we get down past that anecdote, it reflects back up, you know, a more. A different gloss on what she's just said. She's tweaking herself a little bit or almost like kind of teasing us like, yeah, of course, that guy really wasn't free. Right. 25:03 Wes: Also, if you have them create a pine cone, that's a misuse of slaves. They knew how to use slaves. You use a slave properly, you should be able to produce a pyramid. 25:13 Erin: Oh, yes. Yeah, great. 25:15 Wes: More grand, right? Yeah. 25:17 Erin: Am I wrong to think that just mentally I just put this pine cone next to a pyramid and there are some similarities? No. 25:23 Wes: Yeah. It's a more frivolous attempt at connoting dominance. Is that the way to put it? 25:30 Erin: Yeah. You mean which is the more frivolous? The pine cone. 25:32 Wes: The pine cone. So the pine cone. Yeah. Right. It's less effort, involves one slave, not tons and tons of slaves, many of whom will die in its creation. It's not a. For the Egyptians. Right. There's a religious motivation. It's about the afterlife. You can entomb someone in this pyramid and I mean, I suppose, I assume colossi can refer to pyramid. I know there are other statues you would call colossi as well, but I think that the use of slaves, plural, the pyramids, were the biggest undertakings for that. And by the time you get to Pompey's Rome, which is just about the point of transition from republic to empire. Right. So it's not Rome in its ultimate decline, the decline of the empire, but it's the decline of the republic. That's the point that we're at. And if the pine cone is dated from that time, is it? I assume it is. Then you can see it as a representation of that decline. Of course, it's a decline into something more grandiose, which is the Roman Empire. And the types of. I think what happens aesthetically under the Roman Empire, not that I know, huge amount of, hey, art of the Roman Republic versus art of the Roman Empire. I couldn't tell you much about that. But it's a grander period overall, more pompous. 26:57 Erin: And I think the decline from Republicanism into Empire, I think is more morally fraught, probably for someone like Moore, who is very American in her sensibility and obviously cares quite a bit about freedom in this Poem which makes me think about the difference between the pine cone and the pyramid. Because I've been thinking so much because of my. I'm still in the middle of my fragment. Been thinking so much about the urn. The urn is an image. And reading an essay recently about the urn as being like the womb of death in the way that the actual womb is the womb of life. That these two things are very, you know, the mirrors of each other. And I could say a lot about that, but I won't. But the pyramid being a kind of an urn, a giant. Giant urn. It seems slightly more logical and closer to some truth about the way that humans memorialize each other in death than something like a pine cone would. It's a matter of degrees, of course, but I think there's something much worse about the pinecone anyway. Really interesting. Structurally similar. And, you know, in the gradations of the way that the pine cone looks, of course, in the pyramid, both being not fluted. I can't think of the right word. 28:12 Wes: But anyway, yeah, I get what you're saying. 28:15 Erin: Yeah. The layered quality and the. Yeah, and it's. They're both sort of slightly armored images. So serpent magic is something that is just kind of tossed off here. It'll come back a little bit later. But the idea of tying hippopotami so they're domesticating these fearsome animals. 28:36 Wes: You can't domesticate them. Yeah, they're being owned and controlled and. 28:40 Erin: Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And. And then they're also using, like, the baboons. And then the. The coursing of the antelopes and so on with the dog, cats. They're using animals, it seems, as their proxies. So they're sort of forcing the animals into a kind of slave relationship to them. And then the slaves are probably doing this. So there's a sort of mise en abyme slavery going on where, you know, the people are enslaving other people and then those slaves are enslaving the animals, et cetera. 29:10 Wes: Baboons on giraffes. 29:11 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. And so on and so forth. And the fleas on the baboon are 29:16 Wes: enslaving cats and dogs living together. Sorry. 29:20 Erin: That's good. 29:21 Wes: So, yeah, so the had their men tie hippopotami again. I don't know, though. You know, I'm sure this is being represented somewhere, and it's in a museum. And I think the use of serpent magic, you know, this is, again, something I had to look up. And it Comes up again later in the poem. But apparently anti snake spells were common in Egyptian texts. And there's a wand in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that's shaped like a two headed cobra. So serpents were. Had this role. At least representations of serpents had a role in magic rites. I'm not sure if serpent magic means actual snakes were used or if it's just representations of snakes. Right. And the kind of the line gets blurred as we go forward because of course part of this is about the Egyptian domination of animals and use of animals and ownership of animals. The assertion of human superiority over animals and the use of animal products, right. Like the goose cream or whatever later on. But it's also in a animal shaped box, right. So the, it's animal, all animals all the way down. Everything's going to look like an animal and then we're going to use what animals have to offer us and, and put animals on top of animals, whatever you can do with animals. 30:33 Erin: Right. 30:34 Wes: So I find that very interesting and it's not something I have ever thought very much about. I was always interested in Egyptian, I mean in Egypt as a kid and Egyptian archeology and I think it's the type of thing, it's one of those things like dinosaurs that kids are naturally attracted to. My grandmother was into it, she had books around. It's like, wow. And I think this has something to do with it. The way animals feature in Egyptian symbology. Is that the right word in Egyptian representations is part of the visceral appeal. It's closer to some deep part of our psychology. But it also points to this exploitative origin to culture. Right. Because domestication, I mean, cats, I think, arguably, I think the Egyptians did domesticate cats. And dogs haven't been domesticated for that long at this point in history. But whatever the case, and then the Neolithic revolution I think was 9,000 BC. So the actual use of cattle, domesticated cattle and the culture is built on the backs of animals. This exploitative relationship to nature obviously, and to animals in particular is not accidental to the development of civilization and culture. So it's a weird sort of crime to be associated with our advances in human civilization, if you see what I mean. There's a dark underbelly to becoming civilized. 31:59 Erin: Definitely quote, unquote. Well, let me, I want to talk about that. Let me, let me read just the next, the next couple of stanzas so that we can get these boxes here. Here we go. These people liked small things. They gave to boys, little paired playthings such as Nests of eggs, ichneumon and snake, paddle and raft, badger and camel and made toys for themselves. The royal totem and toilet boxes marked with the contents Lords and ladies put goose grease paint in round bone boxes. The pivoting lid incised with a duckwing or reverted duck head kept in a buck or rhinoceros horn. The ground horn and locust oil in stone locusts. Yeah. So what you're talking about with being deep in our psychology, I think it is this, like, relationship to childhood and to toys. You know, I think of the. I mean, the fact that the gods often have animal are animals or have animal heads. One of the first things I think of that attracted me to Egypt when I was a little kid were the canopic jars. So the jars that have the heads of animals, which is because they're the heads of gods. Right. But they look like just little jars with animal heads on them, like, you know, the world's sickest cookie jar or something. 33:12 Wes: I mean, this is sometimes my experience in a museum is, you know, and there's a. What is it in this? It's a wing. A duckwing on the lid to your face cream. And yeah, we don't have nice face cream. A box made of bone. Why don't we have that anymore? That's sometimes the feeling I get in a museum. Whereas my duckwing bone box instead, I'm getting it out of a plastic jar. 33:38 Erin: So anyway, yeah, the pivoting lid incised with a duckwing, it too almost seems as though the pivoting lid, that technology is related. Right, to the way that a wing exactly works. And so they're learning from the animals and then building off of them. I. I describe it in my note that I have here. I say case made of animal with product made from animal reconstitution via consumption. So there's something about like they're. They're taking the animal apart, taking what they want from it and then reconstituting it in some way after the fact that. And that includes taking from it its power, whether that be. It's like its technology, you know, so the long giraffe neck to be able to get up to where you can't reach. It's appropriating its evolutionary traits under sort of false pretenses, maybe. And I think evolution is going to become a really key theme in this poem. Right. So it's exploiting the evolutionary traits of things to which it has no ownership. 34:38 Wes: So animals as tools. Right. We're used to thinking of tool use in terms of, yeah, I made my adze. I chipped away and turned this rock into an adze or something like that. 34:48 Erin: Oh, I thought you meant podcast ads. 34:50 Wes: Yeah, I get it, yeah. adze, adze. And so, yeah, animals are, I think, very clearly. She's highlighting the way in which animals are used here as tools. And so you could think of them as early forms of technology. And yeah, here we have the imitation, right. If the pivoting lid is an imitation of a duckwing and therefore incised with a duckwing. Hey, look, the lid comes out and looks like a wing or something like that. Two things are happening at once, right? We've taken goose grease. We're actually murdering these animals, stealing their ideas. Yeah, yeah, we're not only murdering them, we're taking their inventions and patenting them for ourselves. But we are to actually eat an animal or turn it into grease or whatever that we can use on our faces. It's paint, I guess. Maybe it's not skin cream. Is it makeup? Maybe it's makeup, but in any case, that's one thing. And then these art objects, which are also, in this case useful, right? Just everyday items, they seem to honor the animal in a sense. They seem to suggest a certain amount of reverence for these animals, which I think we know that the Egyptians had and they represented their gods in that way. And it's a bit of a self contradiction. 36:07 Erin: Is it honoring them or sort of fearing them like a begrudging respect? I think it is honoring partly. But, you know, the most consequential image for what it connects up with later in the poem is the royal totem, which is, of course, the. I think it's pronounced uraeus. It's the cobra, you know, on the head of the pharaoh. So the cobra was the symbol of royal power. And, you know, later we're told that the pharaoh, you know, famously feared snakes. And we have this again, you know, snake magic kind of running through this Egyptian anecdotes. So what's that about? It's not killing the snake and using it for its technology, but the technology that the snake has or the evolutionary advantage it has, which is a form of technology. Right. Is getting other things to fear it and therefore leave it alone. Being scary in some way. That's a bit of a strange way of putting it, right. Because maybe other animals aren't scared of the snake. Well, maybe they are. I mean, we're afraid of snakes because they're slimy and they have no legs and they're gross and they're strange and we know they're dangerous. The extent to which we can attribute fear to the prey of the snake is maybe up for debate. Right. But there's something scary about them and we're trying to appropriate that as a form of. Or the pharaohs are as a way of saying, you should fear me as the pharaoh. And I think that that's related to the way that the snake evolved. What makes it scary to its prey, I think might be what makes it scary to us. And that's the thing that's being. That sort of like emotional component is here. What's being appropriated in the totem, I think, which is a bit different from like the way a wing works, you know, much more technological. 37:48 Wes: Yeah. Apparently that fear of snakes is hardwired into the brain evolutionarily. It's completely instinctual. Non learned. And we share that with. Though they're animals for good reason. But. Yeah. So it sounds like you're saying we try to appropriate that fearsomeness and that power symbolically. Right. Wearing the snake on the forehead or something like that. And to be able to. I'm thinking of the rime of the Ancient Mariner here where the. In a way, casually killing albatross is a protest against our dependence on nature. And I've been thinking about this because this comes up. We're doing young Hegelians and Marx and this whole crew of people at a certain time in philosophical history and who are. There's a lot of talk about human dependence on the natural world. In this case, you could see these symbolic appropriations as protests against that dependency. Right. We depend on animals for food and, you know, animals and plants. And there's a humiliation in that. And I mean, at the very least, there's a lot of anxiety and. Right. If the food goes away, we die if we can't get that sustenance. So we might want to engage in magic rites and rituals that ensure a good crop or ensure a good hunt or something like that. And those rituals will often involve, I assume, imitating the animals and taking on the powers of the animals. But as more is representing it here, there's kind of an impulse to be demeaning or to humiliate in turn, to humiliate and conquer the natural world. And animals, including animals, as a kind of revenge for that dependency. So, you know, we hunt them. The list of things that she's given us, we hunt them, we use them for hunting, use them as tools. We own them, we put them on display in gardens. Right. As you know, here they are just for decoration, these living things. And we're doing the same thing with Flora, Right. We're using cotton and other plants for linen products. And then worst of all, playthings, we're giving them to our children. I assume these are representations, though. These people like small things they gave to boys. Little paired playthings, such as nests of eggs. So the pair there would be nest and eggs. I assume it's just recalling what I've seen in museums. You see, in the Ancient Egypt section, there's always little toys, right? Animals and other representation. So ichneumon and snake, which I think is wasp. Ichneumon is a wasp paddle. 40:22 Erin: And how you say it, you're showing me up today. I think I said, 40:28 Wes: you're probably right. It's just how confidently you say it's 40:33 Erin: Shinna Berry all over again. 40:36 Wes: Yeah, right, exactly. Badger and camel. So I assume these are little pairs of toys that she's talking about. Again, the type of things that I 40:44 Erin: thought the eggs were. I thought this was a mixture of toys and real, you know, like the eggs would be maybe if they just found a nest of eggs and gave it to the kid. I don't know how a kid would play with these things anyway, but whatever. I guess they didn't have eyeballs. 40:59 Wes: Yeah, that's my confusion here. Like the wasp and snake, they're not literally giving them actual wasps. And so here you go, kids. Go. 41:09 Erin: Maybe they did. 41:10 Wes: I told you to play with your wasps. Okay, well, maybe they did. Maybe it's dangerous. Go play with your wasps and snakes. 41:18 Erin: Well, I'm assuming that. I mean, I think this is a little sicker than. Than you seem to think it is. I mean, maybe they really gave. They were like, oh, here, this is the thing it likes to eat. Go, go. 41:27 Wes: Yeah, it's possible. 41:28 Erin: Put this wasp in front of the snake and see what happens. Like the way that you would give a cat a little cat toy, you know, and watch it destroy it and go nuts. 41:36 Wes: Yeah, it's completely possible. I was confused about it. Yeah, it could be. 41:40 Erin: But I think you're right. I mean, I think there's a slippage here between what actually is a toy, you know, it's not. They're not being literally given badgers and camels, of course, so those must be toyified. Right? But the other stuff. 41:52 Wes: Or maybe you do get the camel, you know, and the way the little girl gets the pony and you get the badger to put on the back of the camel. 42:01 Erin: Right to. 42:05 Wes: And they're not picking fruit. 42:06 Erin: Badger, the birds and the trees races 42:08 Wes: with them and the Badgers are little jockeys. You dress them up as jockeys. The rich, the ancient Egyptian elite, the effete. 42:31 Erin: Oh, my gosh. That is the funniest image. The little caps. Okay, that's like. Oh, man, that is so funny. 42:43 Wes: Sorry. They would make good looking little jockeys. And they got a little hands. They'd be easy to trim. They can hold them. They can hold the reins. 42:58 Erin: Oh, my God. 42:59 Wes: All right, on that note, I think we run out of time for the first part. 43:04 Erin: That was fast. All right, so in part two, we'll get through the rest of the poem, I think. I hope we'll go a little faster, as we usually promise to do. In part two, we'll finally get to the jerboa, which makes its grand entrance at the end of too much and at the beginning of abundance. And we'll delineate that line. Thank you, Wesley. 43:25 Wes: Thank you. 43:29 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. 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