Natural Science: The eagle and the weasel

Someone had told me a story about an eagle that was hunted and killed somewhere in the United States. Annie Dillard wrote this story with intention obviously other than talking about natural science. Nothing too strange, because we know that humans sometimes kill animals for eating, defending their houses, for sport, for the sheer masturbation of it. We know that sometimes humans kill humans, not only sometimes, but every minute, in an industrial scale that will soon parallel (if not exceed) the slaughter industry of animals for food.

What was really strange about the captured eagle was a necklace it was wearing: a skull of a weasel, which was captured by the eagle and in the nervousness of the moment bit the eagle on the neck. The tension petrified the weasel's bite, binding it to the eagle's neck forever. What wasn't eaten soon started rotting, giving the eagle a fresh experience it would never forget. The episode and Dillard's text are comented by Laurie Anderson.

So are some of my clients. Hanging on like the weasel; the same violence on the bite, the fatal bite that has to die to kill, that has to bring heavens down to build hell. I extract the stories, fear, panic, confusion in small tidbits. It's not easy to make them talk at times. When they do, the emphasis in misinformation about what's really going on is highly visible. In all of them you'll find the axe signs of the past, hammered on their heads, still hammering them continually, in a loop they got stuck to, old vinyl record, following a no-way-out track.

I'm sitting at the computer wondering where my husband would go. I know I shouldn't have let him go out to buy cigarettes. The story is much too old and battered, but I couldn't have chained him to the sofa, could I? I used to appal my husband with my professional life. And he disappeared forever, after trying to talk me out of working with psychology. Because I get the cases no one else would. People might be afraid to work on these things, and so am I. But in my case, the curiosity and fascination for a new threshold always wins. And it's going to win forever, I suppose. Paulo disappeared from my life in 1994. Ten years ago. 1994 is a year I don't like to remember. Because it was too bad, the worse in my living memory.

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