Animals Class Creative – Page 3 – The Medieval Kingfisher

CREATIVE PROJECT BY TAMANE HARATA (’24)

Deer
Visual Art / Literary Art
Creative Bestiary Entry
Real and Imagined Animals in Medieval Literature (YHU2330)
2023

^{THE MEDIEVAL KINGFISHER BESTIARY}
^{FOLIO II}

There is an animal that is called deer, known for its swiftness, the delicacy of its limbs, and especially its marvelous horns, for so the Greeks named it keraós. While it is commonly assumed that deer are fearful prey, they are extremely keen observers from both close and long distances. Deer can be found camouflaging themselves amongst the naked branches of autumn and winter, or even proudly making appearances in the middle of one’s backyard. Deer seem fearful, yet through both camouflage and public appearance, their gaze will be directed towards us, in other words, Mankind.

No matter how well they hide themselves amongst the woods in one’s garden and no matter how far away they may be, Man feels exposed under those black eyes. Man might be tempted to draw the curtains to avoid their gaze, yet their appearances in his own territory fascinates him enough to forget such an option. The sight of their horns and delicate body provokes Man’s inexplicable desire to keep looking at them, while being tormented that he is under watch. The immense glass window of his living room separating his world from their fluctuating territory appears nonexistent in such turmoiled truth. This is especially a constant reminder for a Buddhist Man that no matter how well concealed his evil deeds seem, the Heavens are looking over what he does.

There is a saying in Japanese Buddhist traditions, that when Man hides himself in the shade for a long time and hopes to remain in darkness forever, it is only a matter of time until the sun will eradicate the entirety of the shade and expose this Man to the world. This is because the Heavens see through the shade and know the right time to expose him. When one walks around an immense statue of the Buddha in Nara, he will realize the statue’s gaze always follows wherever he goes. The gaze of the deer resembles this. Whether Man encounters deer in a backyard, or within the peripheries of the Buddhist temples in Nara where they follow humans around, their silent gaze will reinforce Man’s awareness of being watched by the Heavens and of the consequences of his attempt to get away with whatever scheme he plans to do. That is perhaps the reason why Man feels tormented under the watch of those deer, becoming overly conscious of what he is doing even if it is not necessarily a bad deed. Man may sometimes wonder why he questions the judgements in the deer’s eyes, for they may only be blankly gazing at him without the knowledge of right and wrong. However, the Buddhist reminder and saying are so powerful that Man cannot make himself indifferent towards the deer looking at him, nor even prevent himself from looking at them in return.

Artist’s Remarks

This is a modern reimagination of a bestiary entry regarding deer from a 21^st-century teenager’s perspective. It aims to follow the basic structure of the bestiary, starting from a very brief overview of the animal and the etymology of its name, then elaborating on certain possible tales involving the animal, and finally diving into the religious and moral implications of the animal’s characteristics that are in focus within the entry. In this entry, I chose to develop the underlying concept of the gaze from my own experience with deer. I often encountered them as a teenager inside the backyard garden of our house in Ithaca, New York, as well as in every corner of the city of Nara in Japan. The adolescent perspective of this bestiary entry derives not only from the fact that I was twelve or thirteen when making these observations about deer, but also because I wished to shrink the gap between medieval bestiary entries and my own by refraining from conceptualizing deer in a scientific manner, and instead elaborating on genuine observations the way medieval records seem to convey.

Here, because the most striking thing I noticed about deer in the garden and in Nara was the way they would intensely gaze at humans, I aimed to entangle Derrida’s notion of the “consciousness of being naked” and the knowledge of “[being] seen and seen naked, before even seeing [oneself] seen by [an animal]” (11) with Buddhist sayings about Buddha’s constant gaze. I specifically chose the Buddhist perspective mainly because my teenage self was a Buddhist and the deer found in Nara mostly spend their time inside the confines of Buddhist temples. I have modified the nakedness portion of Derrida’s arguments into a more moral concept because I thought that the preoccupation with Buddha’s gaze strongly resembles the pattern of Derrida’s description of shame and preoccupation with being gazed at by an animal and seeing oneself being seen by that animal. As the latter resonates with “Man’s awareness of being watched by the Heavens” mentioned in my entry, I shall also point out that deer found in Nara’s temples tend to stare at and interact with passers-by very frequently. It is thus said that they serve Buddha in watching over the visitors’ deeds. With this connection between animal gaze (deer gaze) and Buddha’s gaze, I believed this seemed to fit the medieval bestiary entry’s pattern of elaborating on the religious and moral implications or symbolisms of the animal being described. This is where I decided to make a more contemporary entry and transcend European boundaries by shifting to the viewpoint of Buddhist morals rather than merely reiterating the religious and moral connotations of deer in a medieval European context.

For instance, I was able to relate with Derrida’s description of shame under an animal gaze: I felt ashamed to be seen by a deer when I was playing video games rather than doing homework and also ashamed of being ashamed. At that time, because I obviously had not read the Derrida piece, I connected this experience of shame with the Buddhist saying in my bestiary that my family often refers to (especially when I hide the fact that I was avoiding studying…).

As for the visual image, this photograph consists of a picture I took myself in the backyard from our home in Ithaca. Rather than drawing a deer, I chose to incorporate this photograph as I wanted to preserve the medium of photography that connotes a more modern approach to a bestiary entry. Moreover, I found that the deer’s brown color fuses especially well into the color of the branches and the dead leaves, so much so that its black eyes stand out quite strikingly and draw our attention straight towards those eyes. This led me to think of the line “Man’s inexplicable desire to keep looking at them” in my entry and the following paradox that had left me disturbed for a long time: despite the shame and awkwardness in being stared at so intensely for a prolonged period, their wildness and alterity still urge us to meet their gaze and find ourselves in wonder, as though calling forth Derrida’s questioning of “Who was born first, before the names? Which one saw the other come to this place, so long ago?” (18).

_REFERENCES

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I am. 2006

CREATIVE PROJECT BY TOH HONG JIN (’23)

Capricornus-Xuanwu
Visual Art / Literary Art
Creative Bestiary Entry
Real and Imagined Animals in Medieval Literature (YHU2330)
2023

^{THE MEDIEVAL KINGFISHER BESTIARY}
^{FOLIO I}

The Capricornus-Xuanwu is a hybrid celestial beast of the northern summer skies and southern winter skies. Beheld in the west, it takes the shape of a goat with fish tail, coiling as a serpent round the form of a black monstrous turtle beheld in the east. The Xuanwu turtle is half-lion, half-dragon, half-snake, a fierce and mysterious guardian of the north with the power of water. The sea-goat shares this affinity, but it is also endowed with the abundance of earth, of which the infant Zeus once suckled upon through the horns. It is a confused creature at war with itself always, but alas, such is also the nature of the world.

Artist’s Remarks

Having encountered many fantastic creatures in various medieval manuscripts, I endeavoured to look beyond to the illusory beasts in the heavens for this creative bestiary entry. Completed with pencil and ink on Bristol paper, the Capricornus-Xuanwu is an imaginary composite creature comprised of the Capricorn from Mesopotamian and Western cultures, and the Xuanwu (玄武) from East Asian culture. The main reason for bringing these existing creatures together into one is their shared position in the night sky—both are represented as constellations with some common stars, and while the bestial forms which these stars have gone on to take may initially seem extremely different, a closer look at some of the tales and accounts of their traits and symbolism reveals surprising parallels between them. This is also an exercise after the medieval bestiary’s tradition of including animals and creatures from drastically distinct cultures and locales, including attempting to synthesise accounts from their place of origin with prevalent medieval beliefs and doctrines.

The Capricornus, or Capricorn, is well-known as an earth-affiliated, cardinal zodiac sign in astrology and as a triangular-shaped constellation in astronomy since classical antiquity and is most represented as a sea-goat, or a goat and fish hybrid creature. The Babylonians saw it as a symbol of Enki (later known as Ea), the Sumerian god of water, knowledge, crafts, fertility, magic, and creation, who has been depicted with long-horned water buffaloes, a horned crown, and sometimes as a man covered with fish scales. In the Greek and Roman imagination of a sea-goat figure, Capricornus was sometimes confused with Amalthea, the female goat that suckled the infant Zeus after he was saved from his Titan father, and her horn was notably transformed into the cornucopia, or “horn of plenty”; the sea-goat was also sometimes identified as the Greek god Pan, a satyr-like figure that escaped the monster Typhon by diving into the river, causing the bottom half of his body to turn into a fish tail.

In this bestiary entry, the Capricornus is represented faithfully on the bottom left of the framed drawing, with a notable change only in the positioning of its tail. Instead of having it spiral downward and its tail emerge from the back (as seen in Fig. 1), I have decided to draw it such that the entire creature bears closer resemblance to the symbol that denotes it, which I have also included on the top left corner. The symbol has always looked like a pictogram of Capricornus to me, with its “V” shape resembling the sea-goat’s horns and the twirled “S”-like segment resembling its fish tail. The single major change to Capricornus in this depiction is in its tail, which does not end anywhere near its body, nor does its literal end look like a fish’s. Instead, I chose to conflate its scaly tail with the equally scaly body of a serpent, which extends and wraps around the Xuanwu turtle, tying the two creatures together, the reason for which I shall return to shortly. Following the tradition of the medieval bestiary’s inclusion of geometric shapes in their visuals, I have drawn some of the stars that make up the Capricornus constellation in the background. In addition, to emulate the medieval bestiary’s tendency to bring in both divine and strangely contradictory accounts, I have incorporated in the text Capricornus’ mistaken relation with Amalthea and located its astrological elemental affinity of earth in Amalthea’s cornucopia.

_{Fig. 1: Capricornus. Image taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica.}

The Xuanwu turtle, also known as Genbu in Japanese, Hyeon-mu in Korean, and Huyền Vũ in Vietnamese, is both a god in Chinese religion and, as Black Turtle / Tortoise, one of the Four Symbols of Chinese constellations. The Black Turtle is also one of the Four Auspicious Beasts in Chinese culture, alongside the Azure Dragon, Vermillion Bird, and White Tiger, and it represents the element of water, the cardinal direction north, and the season of winter. Its name literally translates into “Black / Dark / Mysterious Warrior”. The Xuanwu turtle is associated with longevity, as are many other turtle-like creatures in Chinese mythology that then blur together into a single entity, such as Ao—a giant turtle whose legs were used by the Chinese mother goddess Nüwa as pillars to support the skies, and Bixi—a dragon with a turtle shell that tends to be used a decorative plinth for commemorative and funeral steles. This figure is frequently depicted not just as the Black Turtle but also one entwined by a snake, both of which represent the god Xuanwu’s stomach and intestines respectively, which according to legend, were dug out by him to be washed free of sins. After Xuanwu became a deity, his stomach and intestines turned into the aforementioned creatures. These demonic beasts caused such widespread harm that the god Xuanwu had to subdue them, and upon doing so they turned into the god’s subordinates and in a way, his iconography as well.

In the bestiary entry, Xuanwu’s name in Chinese characters is included on the top left corner of the framed drawing as well, oriented from right to left and written in the style of the Chinese seal script. The creature itself is portrayed on the right portion of the frame, upright and interlocked with a serpent, now a part of the Capricornus’ fish tail. The reason for this is to highlight their common hybrid nature and elemental affinity. The Black Turtle itself is drawn with a great degree of artistic license, since it has often been a hybrid of the turtle with various monstrous animals like the dragon and snake. The choice of making it half-lion is in large part due to my being inspired by the lion turtle creature (see Fig. 2) in a popular animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was itself inspired by the Xuanwu and likely its physical proximity as a stone statue and guardian to the stone lions also found protecting ancient Chinese temples and palaces. The regal and divine fusion of the dragon, lion, snake, and turtle also seeks to invoke the distant but nonetheless interesting resemblance to the French mythological creature of Tarasque, said to have been tamed by Saint Martha, which would geographically draw the Xuanwu closer to the cultures that inspired its astronomical counterpart of Capricornus.

_{Fig. 2: Lion Turtle. Image taken from Avatar: The Last Airbender Wiki.}

Overall, this bestiary entry manuscript page presents a juxtaposition of Western and Eastern cultures through their two fantastic beasts and associated legends and symbolisms, based upon how they gazed, imagined, and projected their values and beliefs onto the same part of the night sky. Yet this juxtaposition only reveals that the opposition between the West and East is in fact much more unstable than it seems, with many parallels and similarities amidst their apparent differences. This unsettling of binaries is also prominently invoked through the similar hybridity inherent to these beasts. They may ultimately just be illusory creatures, but taken as one, their boundary-transgressing natures very much highlight the limits and transience of human meaning-making and categorisations.