“Does anyone know where exactly we’re going?” asked a woman, breaking the silence.
We all edged forward, squinting at the map. It was July. But cold enough to wear my puffy jacket.
“ Somewhere south of Port Heiden.” someone ventured…"
“M'amour, m'amour
what do I love and
where are you?
That I lost my center
fighting the world
The Dreams clash
and are shattered-
and that I tried to make a paradiso
terrestre.
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.”
― Ezra Pound, The Cantos
Early in the pandemic, I had a dream that I was in Alaska walking across tundra. Looking down at my feet, I saw a wondrous tangle of green and yellow lichen; of moss and red berries; and a variety of dwarf willow and rhododendron, none more than an inch tall. It created a beautiful pattern, like a Persian carpet. Enchanted, I wanted to take off my shoes and feel the spongy earth between my toes.
Removing my shoes, dozens of blue butterflies flew out of my sneakers.
The next morning, I wondered how it was possible that I had not walked barefoot in so long. Even at the beach, I usually keep my shoes on. And not only that, but I had never in my life walked off-trail, much less traipsed across tundra. When I was young, I once camped along the Indus River, in India, but that was so long ago.
How had I become so alienated from wild things?
Even my fascination with walruses –a childhood favorite animal—had never got me closer to the animal than in a work of art. Albrecht Dürer’s Head of a Walrus had made a great impact on me, along with several of his other pictures of animals, which some people consider to be “better than a trip to the zoo” for the insight they provide into the natural world.
Despite the fact that walruses are rarely seen outside the arctic, some four hundred years before Tolkien struggled with his entry for “walrus” in the OED, Dürer had somehow managed to have an encounter with a walrus. Fascinated with the natural world, the artist had made a special trip to the Zeeland region of the Netherlands after hearing about a whale that had washed ashore.
He was, it should be added, also trying to outrun the plague back home in Germany.
Poor Dürer. Not only was he unable to see the dead leviathan, but in the process of traveling to the region, he caught an unknown disease, which scholars now think was probably malaria. But Dürer being Dürer, he managed to draw an extraordinary picture of a walrus that remains a much-loved work in the British Museum. It is incredible to think that the lush eyelashes framing the creature’s alert eyes, and those thick bristles flanking its brilliant white tusks came solely from his imagination, since he probably never saw a walrus alive.
Walruses in Wonderland. Would they have eyelashes like Dürer drew them?
How had he done it? Perhaps he saw the preserved head of a walrus—and based his drawing from that. Or maybe he studied someone else’s picture? Or had he managed to somehow see a living specimen? We will never know.