Animal Fables and Claws of Calamity

“The hand of destiny drew down before the eye of my vision also the curtain of carelessness; and clear-sighted reason, and far-seeing prudence kept me behind the dark screen of ignorance and folly, and thus the whole of us were all at once overtaken with the hand of trouble and the claw of calamity.”

-  Anvar-I-Suhali, or The Lights of Canopus, Being the Persian Version of The Fables of Pilpay; or the book “Lalilah And Damnah”, Chapter III, On the Agreement of Friends and the Advantages of Their Mutually Aiding One Another.

What do you think of when you think of animal fables? Do you think about the tortoise and the hare, and the moral that slow and steady once won the race? An animal fable is a story with a moral conveyed by animals that personify various moral characteristics. Perhaps fables were concocted by teachers to provide moral guidance to students who couldn’t read or write. We don’t need fables these depraved days, and not only because we (allegedly) can read. Fables might have been helpful in the days when we didn’t worry only about what was strictly legal, but also considered moral values like integrity, honesty and compassion. You don’t need Aesop today if you have a lawyer who can interpret tax codes, locate offshore shelters, and crawl through sewers of legal loopholes that serve to enrich hares at the expense of tortoises.

Fables are intended to illustrate such moral lessons as: pride goes before a fall; or how if you’re natural prey, you should be careful before befriending a predator; or how you should never order the meatloaf at a place called Mom’s.  Apart from the fact that most of us don’t know much about the moral characteristics of lions and mice, many traditional animal fables have no moral traction these days. Some fables have been worn into smooth clichés while retaining the animal characters in the underlying story: don’t count your chickens before they hatch; don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Most of the simplistic stories attributed to Aesop include only two characters like an ant and a grasshopper. Possibly, the simple cast of characters was intended to explain the lessons at their most fundamental and un-misunderstand-able level. I have always liked animal fables, and I wondered how I could make animal fables more appealing to contemporary students.

Perhaps if I updated the characters and the settings, the fables would have more of an impact. A professor at the place I once worked has done that here.  For example, check out a contemporary interpretation of the fable ant and the grasshopper. The problem is that it’s no longer an animal fable – it’s a college student fable.

Or, perhaps animal fables have fallen out of favor these days because life is more complicated. Suppose we just need more drama and interest in our stories than old-fashioned Aesop preached? What about catchy names and places? For example, at least Ambrose Bierce’s fables included politicians, and intriguing proper place names like the City of Prosperous Obscurity. But here again, we’ve lost the animals.

So what if we kept the animals and just threw in more plot twists and complexity? The ancient Persian Lights of Canopus is a good source of more elaborate fables, for example the one about  the Crow, and the Mouse, and the Pigeon, and the Tortoise, and the Stag. There's another bonus apart from having a bigger cast. These animal fables include some of the most awesome metaphors ever, and like the example above, they mix more than a bartender in the Fox corporate suite at a Republican Party Convention. Here’s an example: “…the vessel of my life has fallen into a whirlpool, such that the mariner of deliberation is unable to set me free; and the cord of my existence is broken in such wise, that the finger-tip of thought is baffled in attempting to unite it.”  That really resonates with me although I confess I've always had a soft spot for fingertips scratching my brain.

So, then I got to thinking how about fables with more contemporary characters? I wonder what kind of moral can I make out of the fable of the Flash Drive, the Smart Card and how despite the boasts implied in their names they are outsmarted by the Spambot.  Or how about one where a woman marries a corporation? Upon consideration, this would risk offending those who consider valid marriage to be only between a man and a woman, (including between a 12-year-old girl and her rapist – a marriage that many men in Afghanistan consider to be completely reasonable). Besides, the moral of such a fable depresses me because we’ve all been screwed by a corporation at one time or another so technically, we’re already married, and we know how that one plays out. Besides, no animals.

So, what if I created my own animal fable, but make it even more spectacular by using animals whose very existence is questionable? How about a fable about involving a Squonk Hunting a Snark? Or maybe the Snark should hunt the Squonk?  According to Wikipedia (which is always 100% true) a Squonk (aka, Lacrimacorpus dissolvens) comes from Latin words meaning "tear", "body", and "dissolve". A Squonk is hard to catch. “Hunters who have attempted to catch Squonks have found that the creature is capable of evading capture by dissolving completely into a pool of tears and bubbles when cornered” - which I totally get. And only Lewis Carroll knows what a Snark is. All I have to do is figure out what moral I want these characters to illustrate. But then how could I ever top this? It’s a “fun with fables” site that is structures like a “choose your own adventure” story where you can select for the type of animal, the character trait or the moral of the story.

So, for now, I think I’m out of the animal fables business. Besides, I have to master the mixed metaphor first.  

You Think You've Got Problems

"There’s no suffering,
 no shame, no ruin—not one dishonour—
 which I have not seen in all the trouble  you and I go through."

Sophocles, Antigone

The lovely illustration here is Walters manuscript leaf W.692, is from a Mughal manuscript copy of Anvar-i Suhayli (The lights of Canopus), a collection of fables by Husayn ibn 'Ali Va'iz Kashifi (died 910 AH/AD 1504-1505). It dates to the late 10th century AH/AD 16th or early 11th century AH/AD 17th. It depicts "the fate of a man who, escaping from a wild camel, jumps into a well. There his predicament grows even more precarious when he lands on the heads of 4 snakes, grasps in desperation at a bush gnawed by two rats, and looks down to see dragon waiting to devour him should he fall".

He's having a bad day. To which I say, big deal. Except for the rats, I’ve suffered worse.

My complaint du jour is about jam recipes. This is the season for fresh fruit that begs to be drowned in sugar and cooked down to sticky mush and put into jars to savor during the cold dark winters we experience for fifteen minutes each year here in San Diego. Having sampled a number of jam recipe books, I’ve found I especially like the recipes in Rachel Saunders Blue Chair Jam Cookbook, particularly for her combinations of fruit and spices.

Possessing the whiney entitlement of any aging American on Social Security; plus an inborn sense of outrage I modestly claim to be superlative; and compounded by a temperament best described as being a bitch, I have found much to complain about nonetheless.

I recently attempted my holy grail of jam: a sour cherry conserve that includes alcohol. A conserve is a jam that includes a mix of fresh and dried fruit, as Rachel explains, “often with the addition of liquor, spices and nuts.” What’s not to love? But before I begin my complaining: a disclaimer. I’ve never met a recipe I followed religiously: the fun is to use the same general proportions and customize.

I used Rachel’s recipe called “Italian Prune & Cardamom Conserve”. I started with farmer’s market plums that made no pretense about being Italian. I have no idea what their provenance was except that they were grown in California. But I didn’t have enough, so I had to cut the recipe in half, and then still add enough fresh cherries to get to the right measure of fresh fruit. Then I substituted dried sour cherries for the boring white currents which are, IMHO nothing more than albino raisins. Then, instead of using slivovitz “or other dry plum brandy” all I had was blackberry brandy. The added benefit here was that it turns out I had enough surplus brandy to sip while cooking.

Here’s my beef with this woman. She eschews precision. Example:

“To test the conserve for doneness, carefully transfer a small representative half-spoonful of conserve to one of your frozen spoons. Replace the spoon in the freezer for 3 to 4 minutes, then remove and carefully feel the underside of the spoon. It should be neither warm nor cold; if still warm, return it to the freezer for a moment. Nudge the conserve gently with your finger; if it seems thickened and gloppy when you nudge it, it is either done or nearly done. Tilt the spoon vertically to see how quickly the conserve runs; if it runs very slowly, and if it has thickened to a gloppy consistency, it is done. If it runs very quickly or appears watery, cook it for another few minutes, stirring, and test again as needed.”

I’ve always had a lot of trouble dealing with clarity and specific detail. I’m all like, can you maybe vague this shit up a bit for me? The scientific terms like “thickened and gloppy” and “for a moment” are bad enough, but “done or nearly done” kills me. It’s done or it’s not done. One would assume that the person who wrote the recipe would be able to provide more than general clues wrt/doneness. But, my favorite (not) part of the above is when she gets all existential and tells you what the jam should not be like: “it should be neither warm nor cold”.  This kind of specificity would be slightly more helpful if one was searching for an albino cat in a blizzard. (I have no idea why I seem to be fixated on albinos in this post.)

I keep a cookbook/notebook in which I meticulously write down the actual ingredients and proportions of what I'm cooking, so in the unlikely event that I ever stumble on jam recipe perfection I will be able to reproduce my success. After listing my ingredients and specific amounts, I decided to attempt to out-obfuscate Rachel’s instructions:

When the conserve has cooked down for anywhere from 20 minutes to three days, test it for doneness by balancing a smallish smidgen on the head of a pin. The angels on the tip of the jam-encrusted pin should neither stick too tightly together to perform a musical dance number to Michael Jackson’s Killer better than inmates in a Korean prison, nor should the angels slide off in large-ish clumps into the aether while screaming “Noooo!” in tiny angel chorus as they drop to the sticky floor. Did I mention you should make sure your floor is sticky by this point? Do so now. If at least 17 - but not more than 7,856  - angels can do the polka decently in the jam (and by decently, I mean the quality of their polka-ing, not the decency of the gangsta hand signs they make while dancing) then the jam is done. Maybe. Or, perhaps the jam would be better used as spackle to repair nail holes in plaster walls; or to dye an albino gerbil pink; or alternatively, to sweeten and flavor a vanilla Vicoden martini. You decide.

The final product was, by the way, the best jam ever.