Beasting – by Heather Taylor-Johnson
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Frida Kahlo was broken and bedridden when she began painting. A trolley-car had crashed into her bus and she was speared by an iron handrail, puncturing her abdomen and uterus. Her spinal column was wrecked, her collarbone, ribs and pelvis a disaster, and she had eleven fractures in one leg, already shrunken from childhood polio. Frida’s mother had given her plaster-casted, immobile daughter a lap easel and hung a mirror from the bed’s canopy so that the eighteen-year-old might paint her own face to pass the many painful hours. Mí amor pequeña, Frida’s mother might have thought while looking down on her daughter, bandaged and bondaged, unaware of the fierce and revolutionary paintings that lay ahead: My little love.
Frida with flowers in her hair. Frida with ribbons on her neck. Frida with lace around her head. Frida wearing astounding earrings. Frida wearing a man’s suit. Frida sitting on a chair. Frida sitting in a wheelchair. Frida with a parrot, with monkeys, with thorns, with her lover Diego Rivera tattooed on her forehead. Frida bleeding, Frida holding her other self’s hand, Frida miscarrying, Frida crying. Frida as a deer.
In ‘The Wounded Deer’, Frida has antlers and large pointed furry ears that sit just above her human ones, which match her human face. Her body is all buck, wounded by nine arrows. Captured in a copse of dead trees, the bleeding Frida-deer is more dramatic than the lightning that takes over the square of sky just beyond her reach. She is beasting, and there’s little in the world more dramatic than that.
Half-deer, half-human creatures have been called satyrs, centaurs and fauns. In our present-day world, we understand there is no such thing as something half-deer, half-human, but not everyone subscribes to living in the real world, and some people’s definition of real is different from others. Those who believe they change into animal form or possess non-human animal traits are said to suffer from clinical lycanthropy: lycos from the Greek ‘wolf’ and anthropos from the Latin ‘human’. Translated, then, as ‘wolfman’, clinical lycanthropy is an umbrella term that covers specific mental disorders such as cynanthropy (dog/human), ailuranthropy (feline/human) and musoanthropy (mouse/human). If you follow the Greek-to-Latin naming of the animal-to-human conditions, then those who take on deer formations would be arktosanthropormorphs, but that is quite a complicated word to pronounce, just as it would be a complicated way to know oneself.
If we take the psychiatry out of the equation and focus on the spiritual, there is therianthropy – therion being Greek for ‘wild animal’. Therianthropes are people who believe they have an inherent relationship to a specific animal that is private, fundamental and embodied, which doesn’t sound too dissimilar from the beliefs of some Indigenous peoples. But therians differ from, say, a Mexican Native American like Kahlo’s mother, in that they don’t come at their animal relationship from a deep connection to nature; rather through species dysphoria. Their belief that they either share their body with an animal or that they literally are that animal in human form can be, and has been, likened to genderfluidity and trans identity. Though they tend to undergo shapeshifting in an emotional landscape, there is only a controversial minority who believe in physical shapeshifting, as those with clinical lycanthropy might, meaning therians do not display themselves as deer; they simply feel deer.
Deer are often seen as graceful, as evidenced by their gait and agility, but also in their nature, presenting both strength and vulnerability. It’s said to be good luck if you see a deer in the wild, that you will find your way through difficulty and prosper. I have seen many deer, and each time I have felt very lucky.
I hold an early memory of a deer, reaching back to my time living temporarily in New Jersey, when I was five years old. Our backyard verged on a thicket of nature, in which trees bordered the edges of a small creek. I remember a turtle wandering up from the creek and trying to keep it in our plastic pool, but the second I went inside our house, it took off. There was a pond near us that froze in the winter and I remember playing hockey with my older brother and his friends. For some reason I always had to be the goalie, though now that I think about it, being five years old I probably didn’t skate very well, so what choice did my team have? These are strong, image-based memories unborrowed from a photograph. They’re from my secret stash – no one else has ever spoken of them. Another is of the deer, which isn’t so much relived in the brain, as the other memories are. It’s felt in the body, a gut-level sensation.
I remember the deer used to come to our back door in the mornings because we were placing food on a plate or maybe water in a dish and leaving it on the step. It’s fuzzy in detail, but I clearly recall the deer’s eyes catching mine when I opened the door, mine catching the deer’s, the moment itself catching in my throat, in my chest, and then settling into such a calmness that the moment was no longer strange, but something I’d somehow always known.
‘The Wounded Deer’ was painted in 1946, the same year Kahlo underwent spinal surgery in New York, which did not take away her excruciating pain as she’d hoped. As a self-portrait, there’s a likeness in the face, and there’s recognition of Kahlo’s body in the deer’s state of seemingly acquiescent distress. When the poet André Breton discovered the works of Kahlo, he famously claimed she was a surrealist, something Kahlo denied, replying that she did not paint her dreams, only her reality, which may be why in the bottom left-hand corner of ‘The Wounded Deer’, Kahlo painted the word ‘Carma’, meaning ‘Destiny’ or ‘Fate’. There are interpretations of the painting that do not include pain, but why would anyone discount the pain theory, given her tumultuous history with it? At her home in La Casa Azul in Coyoacán, Mexico, Kahlo kept an eagle named Gertrudis Caca Blanca (Gertrude White Shit) and two monkeys called Fulang Chang and Caimito de Guayaba; she alsohad a fawn named Granizo, and some say that’s why she’s a deer in the painting, but I don’t understand how anyone could not view ‘The Wounded Deer’ as Kahlo grieving for her body in its state of supreme agony, a situation that would have plagued her every day, but especially on the worst days.
People grieve in their own unique ways. I’d been planning on getting a tattoo of my dog’s paw on the inside of my wrist once he’d died, as a way to keep him close to me, and only after my family and I had buried him under a gumtree and packed the dirt on top of him did I remember I’d forgotten to get his print. This somehow made my grieving bigger, like I’d failed him because now we’d slip away from one another. It made me think of people who have their beloved, deceased dogs stuffed and sewn back together. Perhaps someone might set their dog’s former body, with all its previous bulk and preserved fur, next to a chair, which I’m imagining to be by a fireplace in a reading-room, so that they can keep the dog close to them, so that they can keep the memory of the dog alive. It’s a bit off, in my opinion, but who am I to judge?
Not always about grieving, sometimes taxidermy’s a show of one-upmanship, as in the case of a big kill: the head of an elephant mounted on a wall, the head of a leopard, the head of a deer. The first time I visited the home of a friend, I was at a loss for words, seeing three deer heads hung like artwork on his living room walls. I might have said Oh, which is far from what was going through my mind, because I take things personally and the glass black eyes were calling out to me, dead though they were, and there went that exquisite moment of gut-level recognition again, as if the unreal deer’s eyes could see into mine. It’s true I did not have a relationship with any of the deer, as my friend most definitely did, but while viewing their heads on the wall, I couldn’t accept their dying. For what? Mere decoration and flaunting rights? It’s like a little part of me had died, too, and since I love that friend, it’s best I just stop thinking about his walls right now.
Kate Clark’s craft begins with taxidermy, a sewing together of the outer layers of an animal’s corpse to create a true-to-life beast. Because she’s ultimately a sculptor, she works with clay too, and with the clay she moulds human faces that she then intricately covers with patches of the animal’s skin and fur, which she pins together. Surrealism meeting hyperrealism, these sculptures work from an animal-rights concept of empathy, or a Darwinistic one, in which the viewer is meant to see themselves inside the skin of a lion, of a zebra, a wolf, a deer, since once we were beasts before we were human. It’s shocking to many viewers, yet tough to look away.
The thing about hybrid forms is that they unsettle the status quo. What’s abhorrent is their obvious differences amidst such similar attributes, or perhaps the other way around. The writer Claudia Rankin, who mixes poetry with essay in masterful and complex hybrid works, includes a photograph of Clark’s sculpture Little Girl in her book Citizen, without any explanation, leaving her readers to make the connection. The sculpture is of a caribou’s body with a human face that’s covered in caribou fur, resting and looking evenly ahead at something in the distance. Rankin’s book is about daily encounters of racism she’s sustained or witnessed as a Black American woman. She writes:
A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. Yes, and you want it to stop, you want the child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself. (17)
Little Girl is not the first time Clark has sculpted a type of deer. Gallant is her leaping deer, suspended from the gallery ground by string. It’s possibly the representation of deer Kahlo would have preferred in a self-portrait had her life circumstances been different. In the case of Kahlo, in the case of Rankin, in the case of Clark, the arktosanthrope is telling those around it to stop simultaneously gawking and ignoring and finally start seeing.
In 2010, my partner and I lived in the American Rockies for a year when our children were small, my daughter only learning to walk. It was a chance for me to gift my family the best of American life through cold, swift rivers and mountain snow, through highway diners and street parades, through tie-dyes, potlucks and the ubiquity of ‘awesome’. We lived closer with nature there than ever before, having random morning bear sightings in our front lawn, squirrel ascents and descents in our periphery, and deer – so many deer. Deer eating in the forest, deer lazing in a field, deer standing, deer leaping, deer leery, deer patient, deer staring directly at you. In that small town of Salida, Colorado, during the year of my husband’s job-swap and my return to homeland, did our children even think it odd that I sometimes stopped the car in the middle of the road to let a herd of six to twelve deer amble across? Were they too young and inexperienced to realise that when I idled the car for as long as it took for those deer to pass – and it took time; they stopped often to find our eyes – that it was a unique situation in the world and one unlike any they’d expect to see upon returning to Australia?
My daughter doesn’t remember the deer-crossings, nor the many deer resting in the golf course by our house, nor those that found the melted patches of snow in our yard and nosed around in them for hours of an afternoon, nor the time we surprised one in the forest while the others were stocking up firewood. Though she wanted to toddle wherever we went, I was holding her in my arms, probably because it was cold and I felt the need to keep her warm. I stopped and stood very still, and my daughter did not point or make a sound, just looked at the deer in the same way I did. It was as if the space between us and the deer had suddenly become so wildly simple that the world – and us in it – made sense. I want to believe that my daughter experienced it, too: that impossible sense of peace as our pair of eyes met the deer’s eyes, as our twinned breath met its.
Deer teach us to yield respectfully. They encourage wordless communion and communication through some innately tender sense of familiarity. Deer are – in the etymological way of defining the word – awesome.
My daughter is thirteen years older now and has grown into a fierce ninja warrior. She swings from bars and navigates slacklines and climbs up warped walls. This freedom – it’s a real thing and it’s her sport. What a joy to be her parent and watch her compete with other elite ninjas, these durable adult children who want to conquer the world. She’s basically a monkey, a close relative to Fulang Chang and Caimito de Guayaba. I’ve got such pride in her drive and determination, but strong and supple as she is, she takes awkward steps through these volatile adolescent years. Her new body keeps pulling her down as she tries to rise, which is basically what all bodies do, but it frustrates her to the point of experiencing real fear and an ever-growing self-doubt. She wants to win so badly that she would be all body if she could, but she’s emotional and thinks no one sees her unless she’s winning. It’s her age, her hormones, but diagnosing competition-anxiety as such doesn’t make it any lesser. Oh, little one, I think as she sits next to me on the bleachers, afraid to talk because she might cry and then the other ninjas might think her weak, how can I, the person who loves you and knows you better than anyone else in this life, grant you the ability to go back to those woods in Colorado when you were so little in my arms and we stumbled upon the deer? It was Rocky Mountain late autumn, the air thin, crisp and so clean. Is there such a thing as breathing in clean? That’s what we were doing, it’s what that deer was doing, but then breath suddenly had no place, just eyes, just body, and I’d like to think it was the same with my daughter and the same with the deer because the moment necessitated vigilance. And then we settled, as if all of us had said okay and goodbye and then thank you, the deer lightly bounding back into the trees, my daughter and I stunned into watching it until it disappeared. Even though she can’t remember it, is it still inside of her? On a gut-level? That impossible peace? Because winning or losing, I need her to feel seen: by all the ninjas and all their parents, by her friends and her teachers, by every member of her extended family and by all the people walking past her at the train station who might never see her face again, just as I had felt seen that first time at my back door in New Jersey, when, for only a moment – part-Heather, part-deer – I had beasted. ▼
Image: Scott Carroll
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