excerpts from the conversation between James Hillman and Margot McLean that comprises the preface of their book (_Animal Dreams_, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997, ISBN: 0-8118-1327-4, $21.95), and from which they read Sept 18th in the Bay Area.

[begin excerpts]

. . jh: The inivisible is as important as the visible. And I see your paintings as also about what I call the invisible. The invisibles that have been forgotten and passed by. Perhaps we are learning what happens to our environment when we pass by the invisibles. If only we could look at the present-day situation from a completely different place. Perhaps the invisibles are doing exactly what is called for in the here and now, in this year of animal emergency. Perhaps there is intention in their vanishing. Perhaps there is a holocaust going on, or an animal sacrifice. Where have all the frogs gone, and why? The monarch butterflies? Perhaps they are withdrawing as the ancient Gods withdrew from an inhospitable, irreverent world. Are the reasons only scientific, environmental? Are they sharing a planetary misery, carrying more than their share of it?

mm: Well, the odds are certainly against them. I think they'd want us, above all else, to reach beyond the human as far as we can possibly go. Not just watch them on TV for entertainment, but respect them by allowing them their rightful "place."

jh: That's why our inside animals are not like those on TV, where they are put into human stories. You don't see a leopard just as leopard. It is put into a story of predators, of extinction, or "the wonders of mating." Or you are taught a lesson about motherhood, about how risky animal life is and how everything has to hide in camoflauge; or it's about big bucks competing for females. All _human_ stories. Moreover, those wonderful shows--and the photography is really amazing--keep the animal out there, in nature, more and more visible, even at night, when our cameras invade their privacy. We are astounded by those close-ups such as you can never see in life.

mm: I question our ability to remember that these animals really do exist, living on the earth, and not just on TV. It's odd, the shows that are supposed to bring us closer to animals by raising consciousness about their extinction are strangely making the actual animals unnecessary. There they are, right in our own living rooms, virtual icons with enhanced lighting, magnification, and detail. While they are over exposed and proliferating on TV, the are rapidly and silently disappearing from the planet.

jh: I don't think we will be able to rid ourselves of the inside animal. The animal spirit will not be eclipsed by TV. And it may come into our dreams in unforeseeable ways.

mm: Unforeseeable, like invisible?

jh: I meant unpredictable--animals as archetypal eternal images, as inhabitants of imagination, may die but not go away. All this fascination with dinosaurs and extinct or legendary species shows how animal images continue to breed in imagination. So what they do in the psyche is unforeseeable.

mm: You mean by keeping them only partly visible, we are allowing them their freedom to be outside human control. Unpredictable.

jh: I think it's easier to depict the vanishing animal than it is to write about this elusiveness. In your images the animals emerge or recede, they seem to be there and not there. They belong to both nature and imagination at the same time. I can't get that same presence or absence when I write about a pig or a polar bear.

mm: I'm not so sure. You hint at what the animal means, but you keep from saying it. You describe the nature of the giraffe or a mouse at the same time you somehow let the animals stay half-hidden . . .

jh: as metaphors, as they are in dreams. It's very hard to hold back the desire to interpret, to capture the animal into a meaning. [Hillman then introjected here, "If we know what an animal means, we don't need the animal anymore."]

*************

mm: Scientific thought doesn't necessarily mean Cartesian thought. It depends on how you use science--"do science." The problem is we get obsessed with the literal facts that can block the imagination.

jh: Scientific method was designed for that very purpose--to reign in fantasy, and to correct the "fictions" of imagination with observed facts. But I think there are no objective facts without subjective fiction. Observation alone takes up only one half: the now-you-see-them half. Imagination involves that other half: the now-you-don't. In the nineteenth century wild animals were studied, hunted, collected as natural phenomena, facts.

mm: They were mostly painted that way too, and cast into bronzes; very detailed and naturalistic. You know, it's rare to see an animal in a painting during the great hundred years of modern art, from 1860 to 1960, say from Monet and Cezanne through Rothko. You see little dogs, carriage horses, and hunting scenes--and there are always major exceptions like Picasso and Franz Marc--but it's interesting how much animals have been left out.

jh: And now as they are disappearing, they have found their way back into the imagination. The secret of the imagination is the disappearance of the actual. So, what I am saying is their actual death is bringing them back to life, and depciting that "death," that absence, may be the best way to do "enough" for them. Gathering facts, symbols, fables, photographs, fossils, toys, slogans, carvings, the animal art books and bestiaries--all of it together can't do enough, can't fill that curious sense of obligation we feel toward them. We still feel something is left out.

mm: Something is left out, human humility.

jh: I envy you for painting. No matter how hard it is, at least you don't need to bring in all this material, all these references, to try to do justice to the animals.

mm: I try to escape from references. I want somehow to clear out all the junk about the animal. I want the mind to be quite quiet and not caught up by all that information. Once the animal has found its place in the painting it seems to take care of itself and one doesn't need all those references.

jh: Your backgrounds are very important, too. They both let the animal stand out from it and disappear into it. Again, it's so much like dream country: usually only bits of a dream stand out against a vague screen. Your vague backgrounds . . .

mm: Edward S. Casey, the philosopher, wrote: "Landscape painting not only locates things; it also _relocates_ them. It gives to things--concrete or abstract as they may be--_somewhere else to be_. Somewhere else than the natural world (if they are physical things) and somewhere else than the ethereal world (if they are objects of cerebration or contemplation). Somewhere else, in other hands, than the simple location in which they are 'originally' or 'appropriately' or 'for the most part' located. Another place means another life--a second life. Thus things (including experiences of things) are not merely represented or remembered in paintings; they 'sur-vive' there in the sense of living on, literally living _over_ their first, proper life. 'La vraie vie,' said Rimbaud, 'est ailleurs.'"

jh: A "somewhere else" for them to live on and over.

mm: But then I ask myself, is that enough--a "somewhere else"? What about an actual ecological benefit? Then I answer: The ecological benefit can happen only when our usual perceptions are challenged and we begin to "see" things differently, imagine things differently.

jh: That's right--if it changes our usual perceptions, frees them even a little from our interpretations, if it brings us to feel into the animals with more kinship. When you know that the tigers are going, are leaving the planet forever, and the elephants and the frogs, you begin to mourn and to look around you with a different eye. I see your paintings as ritual objects, asif you are mourning the animals' leaving by eliminating their full-bodied presence.

mm: That's half of it, yes. The other half is that in order to fully appreciate something, does it have to be fully exposed?

jh: Dreams do this all the time. That's why I speak of dream animals. I'm not doing a dream-book of animals, any more than you are doing naturalist paintings of animals. We are both struggling with the ghosts of the animal. Gaston Bachelard said the imagination requires absence and deformation. So I am always struggling with writing as much as I can about the dream and the animal and yet at the same time keeping it unclear, enigmatic, mysterious. I try to get them on the page and then encourage them to go away.

mm: Ha! I coax them into the painting and then encourage them to stay.

[end excerpts]

Trisha Lamb Feuerstein
http://www.dreamgate.com/asd-13/4r30.htm

If you would like to correspond about a cetacean dream or a cetacean encounter you've had, or make suggestions for additions to the bibliographies, audiography, or videography, please mail to me (Trisha Lamb Feuerstein) at dolphintlf@aol.com. Books written in languages other than English are welcome; just let me know if a title is fiction or nonfiction, and please provide a rough translation of the title and a brief description of the contents. I also have a special interest in descriptions of eye contact with cetaceans and in images associating cetaceans with the yin-yang symbol and would be grateful for references to either.