Aporia

Nick noted this excellent line from Grizzly Man in response to Distorte’s posted clip of Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. As surely as we are prone to anthropomorphize nature or perceive -and thereby construct- within it ethical or merciful qualities, we will at times see it as a terrible blankness: without human time, without memory, without narrative meaning, a nightmare void.

I am reminded, tangentially, of the feelings the civilized ape in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” has about his captive, wild chimpanzee consort: “I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it.”