Lust

Posted by Dave Bonta on August 14, 2006 (last modified at 5:31 pm, 8/14/06)

hunger bird

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.

Filed in Epigrams and Conundrums, Photos. Bookmark the permalink. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.Print Print

8 Responses to Lust

  1. zhoen says:
    August 14, 2006 at 6:11 pm

    (o)

    Reply
  2. MB says:
    August 14, 2006 at 7:43 pm

    Among the most beautiful fliers… with phenomenally disgusting habits. A curiousity to my mind.

    Reply
  3. Karen says:
    August 14, 2006 at 8:16 pm

    I’ll bet the female vulture finds him quite the handsome fellow.

    Reply
  4. jo says:
    August 14, 2006 at 10:17 pm

    Experimenting here to see if this gets through. . . .
    Did you take the picture?

    Reply
  5. Dave says:
    August 15, 2006 at 7:26 am

    Thanks for the comments.

    phenomenally disgusting habits

    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.

    I’ll bet the female vulture finds him quite the handsome fellow.

    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.)

    Experimenting here to see if this gets through. . . .
    Did you take the picture?

    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.).

    Reply
  6. Siona says:
    August 15, 2006 at 12:02 pm

    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?

    Reply
  7. Dave says:
    August 15, 2006 at 12:18 pm

    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.

    Reply
  8. Via Negativa » Blog Archive » Enigmatic says:
    August 21, 2006 at 9:00 pm

    [...] 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. [...]

    Reply

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