8      WHAT KIND
OF ANIMAL ARE YOU?

What did I find due to
my incapability?

8.1    THE CIRCLE OF
MY ANIMUS(ES)

8.2   ENCOUNTER

Able to orientate itself transversely in space only at the bright night, even tho the moon which reflects the light of day is just a dot above it, even tho the celestial glow is only a distant map. Thanks to it, I sit in places where awareness seems clearer.

The gloom of adulthood, the desire to understand and acknowledge are what the night glow offers to my Moth. I’ve found a piece of Moth in me. The one that allowed me to experience my first metamorphosis, seeing I was born as a larva that didn’t know for so long when it will change, that its significance would soon disappear. It longed to sew a cocoon and spun the knowledge, it was hardworking, learning, fooling around during the day, then for several years, it desired the time when it would become a butterfly that would unconsciously chase after the light, whether natural or artificial. The Moth was the animus of my youth, it’s my maturing. That’s why it represents for me an awareness of the essence of childhood. Still, as the larva it spun a silk cocoon by herself, it was developing itself for silk, as well as the threads that represent its dress. When it reached the phase of the pupa, the transformation from immature to mature followed, its pupae in a dug hole in the ground is a moment of enlightenment for me, it was ready to sense living in flight. After the conversion a sharp fall, the reality of the larva is naive and at some point ridiculous, at that certain moment it felt for the first time a constructed and purifying thought. It joyfully immersed into the deepest darkness, where one can find only oblivion, where it became only a disoriented insect. Then at dusk, its black hair stood on its shoulders, the receptors that picked up the signal of departure, out love for the understanding it has decomposed into the dust, which was blown away by the fast wind. The grime of the Moth of my own newness which is no longer here for me.

Performing activities, it likes to walk on the well‑ trodden paths, it usually walks with periodic and spatial regularity, but be careful not under all given circumstances. In bad weather, it prefers not to go anywhere at all, alternatively, it often changes its direction without consequences in uncanny way, it takes its forever toleave its lair, it looks around here and there.

Automation that is based on obstinacy, scheduling, and simple settlement. The badger is my second animal, my Animus that executes, assures, that is careful of its body. That clearly thinks twice and decides purely rationally. It often shuffles nervously around its lair, so once it has no trajectories, it succumbs to the previous ones. On the other hand, when it returns home, it goes quite slowly, calmly. Thanks to you, badger, I’ve been passively lying in bed all days, I don’t bother to finish my sentences, my actions acquire mechanical precision. Yet, sometimes it stabs me I won’t see the world! You pant for breath with every effort, you try to squeeze where you shouldn’t for no explicit reason, and you even stomp all the time, you stomp outside, you stomp at home, spinning in the circle, you nap in the sun. Ye, in the sun, however only in front of your lair. There you lie then on your back or roll in the dust and sand, you don’t even mind the snow. You move quite minimally accordingly to surrounding objects, for your orientation you only use the hair and after each action, you like to shake off. You want to shake off everything you have collected beyond. I like that like a moth, you love to go out at late dusk, but on the contrary, on moonlit nights you reveal yourself less, you can’t sleep, you are an adult. You also have no problem accepting challenges, although you live in a badger world, still, you can surprise with your roughness, you are not shy, and you look twice as big when you bristle up the hair on your back. For you it doesn’t mean death, it’s just Self‑defense, a reaction to the danger of the world of other animals.

It’s under way against the ground, it likes to fly in the opposite direction than the earth is spinning. Its sharp elbows can always be recognized from a distance, it frequently whistles so softly, but in fact, it’s so quiet. It doesn’t like to hang around one place, it needs to pay attention to the environment in which its located. It takes pleasure in watching the human swarming around beneath, it’s openly a voyeur.

You are my greatest narcissist, a symbol of strength and courage, you, my Animus, termed Eagle. Everywhere you look, you find your own floating attractiveness, self-confidence, as well as almost sexual impatience. You are clearly more straightforward than my Moth, or more adventurous than my Badger. You quickly and cautiously take off from the cliffs, concurrently feeling the flow of your own blood, but in my own heart chambers. Especially when you spread your wings, when you cover up to two meters of my own Self, you seem quite pathetic compared to your size. Maybe that’s why you’re quite happy to be alone. At my age I lost friends because of you, some of them died and others could not cross the road, and you watched it all from the mountainous areas. Wherewith your so quiet, weak, high pitched, and so damn, piercing voice, you weren’t able to tell me anything during it. You are an illusion to me, an idealization, you are my icon of dreams and your ambitious goals, however, you moult little by little, from the front to your back, remember. You know very well that you need 6-8 deep strikes to fly, thereafter the rest in form of 2-3 seconds of gliding. I’m looking forward to the winter season when we sleep together, whereas we spend the summer alone. Yet in separation you hunt twice a day for me, you hold our territories, you browse the scenery with your eagle eye, you are my guarantee of longevity. I know you’ll be here for a long time, even tho you’re a partial migrant, you keep your areas. When anyone sees you return in a wavy flight with exaggerated dips, it freezes one and your feathers on the neck straighten up, with your beak open you intensely stare your eyes, you’re here, I know!

Barely able to see the outlines and shadows of others, it follows those who have already crawled here, awakens, and tastes what lies ahead. It’s being nothing, it’s often delirious and gets lost in its being.

Deafness and blindness are equivalents of an inability to determine a goal. You are my own mindlessness, the flatness of my confusion, the mere slug I found at the bottom of my Animuses. A long time is not a farce for you. It occurs to me if you find in someone what you have in you, for hours just getting hands-on experience with known, for hours you’re just sniffing around, for hours finding the same slime. You fall in love rashly, you don’t care if it’s him or her, even tho you know that the fight might come. One of you stabs the other with its defensive arrow of thoughtlessness. You call it the love dart. You turn my stomach, or rather I should say all my internal organs upside down. You don’t want to become a mother in fact neither the father. Simply you just exchange what you already have, you are a form of insignificance. Intensively being immersed in snacks, exaggerating inexplicably, you lack importance. You are neither diurnal nor nocturnal, you always show up naked, in perpetuum in wet weather, on meadows, in fields, on facades, anywhere. You are boldly old and unhappy, just because you are covered in the wrinkles of your obscenity, you have no idea how much I don’t want you unless you love, your life will flash by, unless I love you, my life will flash by even faster.

It likes to go to the land of the plains, to the sea, and to redeem itself. It has no ambition, the violence disgusts it, it lets itself be carried away by flatness and peace, the world is like a meadow without flowers for it, it doesn’t let itself to be guided by a general urge, it does not look into each of the flowers, the surface of its mind slides, like the easiest gestures of attention.

Although I absorb all perceptions, the formal ones as well as the hidden, unwelcomed ones. I’m not able to remember what prompted me to live so parched, I’m not able to recall my own past, not even my eye color, much as my own beliefs, or which of the toes I have the longest, perhaps even my personal opinion of myself. I’m your empty shell, you, the Animus of the dry beetle. You’re a mental blankness to me, impartially absorbing the outside hustle, then reflecting it in yourself, although probably in a moment of danger, you still feel quite overwhelmed by the desire to preserve our own organism, the thing that holds the body and the mind together. At that moment, I am struck by the feeling of life-sustaining happiness, that I and my body insist on life. You are my sentimentality and disinterest to it, touchingly impartial actions, ordinary gestures, frontside and frontside, indistinguishable faces and moments. What is this moment in time for me? Life poses pass by in a shape of a curve, endlessly I survive the same day, trapped in its dreaming, trapped in your torso, I’m rejecting the perceptions of curiosity, lust, requests, and my own desires. I can’t deny that the taste of reconciliation has always been pleasant to you and that now and here you don’t feel a certain extension of your era, life is not measured in its length, but also not in its volume, I enjoy formlessness or signs of eternity. But I am not part of your landscape, I am just an observer, and for you, both land and sea, are not and will not be your home.

Analyzing emptiness is more pleasant than experiencing it, I am not myself, nor an animal or any of my Animuses. Because when my Self thinks only of mySelf, nothing happens. Therefore, all I have left is an explanation, quite unplanned conclusion. Perhaps I am a river that flows constantly around the rocks, perhaps I am a fish in it, which enjoyes the softness of the sand, that is carried by the water itself, perhaps I am a bare foot that has impudently entered that exact environment. Either way, I feel, I know that I am an essence, whether alive or not, I am a reflection in the surface into which you unknowingly stare at, the same flat surface, that is my own no-answer. Dead sure I’m my own design.