I had an encounter with a big boa constrictor, which poked its head through the chicken wire surrounding its wooden cage and looked at me fearlessly in the eye for a long time. Stubbornly confronting each other. we were pondering the relatedness of the species. Both of us, since the relatedness was slight, felt sad and turned away from each other.
A drunk spat at a beautiful monkey, black, with limbs that go on forever. He looks very intelligent. He is sitting with his tail wrapped around his buttocks, his knees under his chin and his arms around his knees. I realized I was sitting the same way. Does the monkey dream my dreams in the branches above me?
Next to a surfboard, a cormorant popped up from the water, looking so out of place and artificial that for a moment I thought it was plastic, like the fake ducks that hunters put out on ponds as decoys, but then it suddenly dived so elegantly that I gained confidence in cormorants.
Flesh-eating flowers oozing oily invitations lure insects to their death. On rotting wood, slimy fungi brood poison. The jungle, existing exclusively in the present, is certainly subject to time, but remains forever ageless. Any concept of justice would be antithetical to all this.
Why do these animal dramas preoccupy me so? Because i do not want to look inside myself…and would prefer to observe the jungle revel in its debauched lewdness.
Excerpts from Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless.
