I’m in love with Richard Parker

Richard Parker is magnificent. I’m in love with his body, his eyes; the way he got thin; the way he walked into the jungle without a backward glance. Richard Parker is the adult Bengal tiger that shares a life-raft with Pi in Life of Pi. I saw the movie just after lunch today. I went out still strung up with post-surgical tubes and hand-grenade shaped plastic receptacles hanging out of my abdomen. I was feeling bodily challenged. It was beautiful to watch a movie about an animal with a magnificent body, a body at one with its personality and material needs. Earlier today I was reading a chapter called Tawny Grammar in Gary Snyder’s Practice of the Wild. In it, Snyder talks about the dirt in baby Krishna‘s mouth. He mother looks into the mouth and sees the whole universe. And there at the beginning of Life of Pi, there’s a scene in which an Indian mother is reading to her children. She’s telling them about baby Krishna’s mouthful of dirt, and the mother looking into a baby’s mouth and seeing the universe. My own day today is about the dreary reality of drainage tubes, itchiness, fluid-stained dressings, having a shower and washing my hair with the aid of plastic shopping bags; but Snyder and Krishna and Life of Pi have taken me out into the bigness of the universe.

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