taiga lycanthrope The taiga, the snow forest – the high northern latitudes – wizened white flocked bearded trees, larches sway in the soundless wind near the still glass of a lake, pines in frost – stoic sentinels of the soft secrets of dense growth. The Holecene epoch, entirely new, spread in green over mammoth steppes, history is layered on all past efforts to shoot upward into the sky. Kamchatka brown bears rub their scent on trees, layers on layers of sense impressions and life. Russia issued 500 hunting permits for them in 2005, at $10,000 a piece to remove everything but their scent from the quiet corners of the earth. The Russian bear, the ambling groundskeeper of the boreal forest, has been depicted in wet newspapers and film reels as clumsy, enduring, noble in its discursive foraging, in its hunger that feeds. In Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4, lurking behind the dumb swordfights of petty kings, is the “rugged Russian bear,” realer than but adjacent to ghosts, to memories, to the endless foraging hunger of history, of families huddled in caves, families huddled in brutalist housing towers - history - its revolutions and its collapses. The Slavs, the Sami, the Nivkh, the Ainu, the Basques, the Germanic pagans in their hidden pockets of the unmapped expanses of empire, worshipped in bear cults the digging snout, the brusque huff, and the sudden rise to standing power. Gulags and overthrows and eternal revolution passed like scents upon the trees. The empire still ambles on, diminished in power, diminished in numbers. In a gift shop in the Bolshoi Academy,you can buy stuffed bears in ballet shoes. The poems of Akhmatova, the unhinged prayers of Dostoevsky, taken away from the purple haze of the factories and war machines are approximations of the chuffing bear -every human expression, like a stranger standing stark against a field of snow - taken together they are birdsongs spread thin across the taiga as markers of the distance that can never be reached, the center that always eludes, the old forest you can erase, but never fully enter. His history, the history that will remain when we make our offering and lay down as soil finally, is just the scent of hunger rubbing against trees. 260313 what's it to you? who go blather from