It doesn’t seem right that such great & graceful wings should bear such a small & ugly head. From underneath, at least, you can’t see its nakedness, backlit as it is by the far more naked sun.
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[...] Since the air was now so clear, the light didn’t change much as the sun neared the horizon. The steady wind filtered out most valley noise except train whistles. As I watched the bird, I began to regret what I wrote a week ago about the ugliness of vultures. The wind lifted the feathers of its breast and nape, and the sun tinged them with gold. I saw its head from all angles as it looked about, and it came to seem as appropriate as punctuation at the end of a line of fine, dark calligraphy. [...]
This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
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"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
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Among the most beautiful fliers… with phenomenally disgusting habits. A curiousity to my mind.
I’ll bet the female vulture finds him quite the handsome fellow.
Experimenting here to see if this gets through. . . .
Did you take the picture?
Thanks for the comments.
True, but then many of the most beautiful and delicate butterflies eat things we don’t want to think about, through a process that involves throwing up on it so their stomach acids can begin digesting it, then reinjesting the resultant mess.
No doubt! Which suggests — to me at least — the whole folly of this animal fable business: we might think we learn something about what it means to be human, but in the process we rob the animal of its own identity. Still, I happen to believe that anthropomorphism is inescapable. (Hence yesterday’s post.)
Hey, Jo — your first blog comment! Congrats, and welcome! Yes, all the images on the site are mine, with rare exceptions that i always clearly identify. This image is a heavily Photoshopped version of a photo of a turkey vulture I took the other day. If you click on it, it will take you to another site (Flickr) where I store my photos, and which gives you more info about the photos than you’d probably care to know (date taken, type of camera, etc.).
To many indiginous people of South America, condors symolize the spiritual plane; they serve as messengers of the gods and reminders of our connection to that realm.
It makes so much sense to me, that these creatures, who dive fearless and headfirst into the bodies of the dead, would represent a connection to the divine. Small and ugly or sharp, pointed, and wizened? What is it about nakedness that makes us uncomfortable?
I don’t know. I’ve been pondering the origins of prudishness a lot lately — in fact, I’ll probably return to this theme in tomorrow’s post.
Speaking of South America, Pablo Neruda depicted the condor as an utterly irredeemable symbol of the parasitical elite in his otherwise marvelous book, Arte de Pajaros.