The Wolf and the Turtle

I am staying in Paris in the 2nd arrondissement, near the boundary of the 1st, and very close to the Palais Royale. The location could not be better. I realize that I last explored this area more than twenty years ago, but prior to that visit quite often over a ten year period. Returning is already a pleasure, but last night’s jet-lag provided an opportunity to dip into a book that I had neglected for the same period - Gaston Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics of Space’ (1958). I have favorite books that cheerfully lend themselves to dipping, typically ‘Lives’ of some kind,  Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’ (1550), ‘Brief Lives’ by John Aubrey (1626-1697), but I have discovered that Bachelard (1884 - 1962) provides great material for dipping into, particularly late at night or very early in the morning, when and where small passages, tiny moments and imaginary turns invoke an exceptional world that is populated by all species of animals, insects, all varieties of plants and all manner of humans, one very deformed, others rather elegant and intelligent, another, just plain stupid.

In chapter five, part XIII, about half way down the page, actually a bit higher, Bachelard comments upon a passage from the Flemish travel notes of the Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888 - 1970), who had seen a wood-cut “depicting the fury of a wolf which, having attacked a turtle that had withdrawn into its bony carapace, went mad, without having appeased his hunger”. Confounding conventional sympathies, for Ungaretti, the artist had succeeded in rendering the wolf likable and the turtle ‘odious’. Finding this interpretation too simplistic, Bachelard elevates “the drama to a cosmic level” to meditate on world hunger; he imagines the wolf, a migrant, from a distant land suffering from drought and famine, its body wracked by thirst and hunger. Coming across a tasty turtle, implicitly a slow moving local, the wolf leaps to seize his prey, but the turtle is quick to draw its delicious soft parts, legs, head and tail into its shell… All that is left is a stone in the road.

Bachelard reflects that if he had reproductions of an engraving of this kind, he would use them to gauge people’s views and the depth of their “participation in hunger dramas throughout the world” - with the conviction that the human psyche contains nothing that is insignificant he asserts that…“By solving small problems, we teach ourselves to solve larger ones”. I like this.

DT / Paris - 08/23_2016