4th of January: animalistic qualities in inanimate objects

Ascribing an animalistic quality to something that doesn’t breathe is the prompt for day four of the year. Look this is not an easy one. When I was a kid everyone always said that Tolkien describes every single detail of his work. I almost fell asleep reading “Lord of the Rings” the first few times. I did not like it nor found the details the people said were clearly in there. I do love “The Hobbit” though and did read that a couple of times.

In my teens, I was heavily into Metal- and Gothic-Culture. Listening to “Wolfsheim” at night, talking about philosophy, staring at the night sky and trying the first sips of wine back then. One time we decided to walk through the graveyard at night. The shadows devoured every all the light and the autumn leaves rustled beneath our feet. They made our steps sound disturbingly unnatural. Something moved and startled us running between the graves. Something small. Probably a mouse, but we bolted out of there immediately helping our unsteadily fast steps with some pushes against the walls of the cemetery. These walls felt disgusting, the sweating moss left our hands cold and damp and helped made the scenery darker than it needed to be. We laughed about it later and it wasn’t scary at all in retrospect, but these places have something about it. Inanimate objects seemingly come to life. Objects squint at you, stalking you out and preying on our senses, playing tricks on us.

I am not the tree-hugging esoteric type, but I do love the one or two times a year I walk with my friends through the woods. Talk about life and nature and things long lost but not forgotten. And there is a quality to nature when things develop the way they should. When everything talks to you. Constantly changing, growing, dying and resurrecting from the dead and breathing out oxygen again. Compare that to a city. In Shanghai, there were days when overnight a shop closed and was emptied out. Forever changing your way to work, because you used to get tea eggs there in the morning. One of my friends there can’t point at places that had an impact on him. They are simply not there anymore. Replaced by another slab of concrete with new humans being pumped through the corridors that may or may not resemble the walls that have been there before.

For the readers here that understand German or French, there was a fantastic documentary on the German-French TV channel Arte named “A man and his duck” where a dude set out to live a year or so on a raft somewhere in Southeast Asia. He had a duck there with him. Some equipment to grow what you need and some needful helpers. Spoiler: at one point he lets the duck go for a swim and she doesn’t return for days. She comes back. He tried to go against nature and follow every step of the material he read. Constantly fighting off mosquitos, weeds and other potential food killers or annoyances. He basically had to give in a little and substitute the maximum yield for an ecosystem that works and provides for everyone. If you find that somewhere then please watch it. I can’t find it anymore. What I want to say is let nature have its way and use what you learned. Find meaning in what surrounds you and objects might become more than they appear. That’s not esoteric. That’s just great and words help to describe the world as you and only you uniquely live through it.