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“Minotaur
Surprised while Eating”
by Maggi Hambling, 1986-7 |
I held the small catbird gently but firmly—gently
enough to avoid breaking any of its tiny, airy bones, but not quite firmly
enough to keep it from wriggling a wing free of my grasp once or twice. I felt
its pulmonary energy, its life-beat and bellows expanding against the underside
of my fingers and the curve of my palm. The rate seemed less distraught than I
had imagined it might, the bird’s dark brown head relatively still in the
morning sunlight, its black eyes seemingly pausing to take in my face. I returned
the gaze, standing still in the meadow. For a moment, I felt special as if I
had achieved a kinship or bond, as if I had a new friend, as if the natural
world were patting me on the back. “You’re a kind soul,” I thought I heard.
In Walden,
Thoreau tells us: “I once had a sparrow light on my shoulder for a moment while
I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by
that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.” Later
Thoreau watches an owl in flight and notices the bird “[felt]
his twilight way as it were with his sensitive pinions, [and] found a new
perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day.” Thoreau, the
observer.
The Minotaur of Crete, half man, half bull, born
from the coupling of King Minos’s white bull and Queen Pasiphae, ate human
flesh—sometimes boys and girls, fed to him from outside of his labyrinthine prison.
In Hambling’s painting, the beast, startled, checks his behavior, caught during
a monstrous meal. Asterion (“starry one”), the name given him by his mother, had
been conceived by a deception, his father having mounted what he thought was a
cow. Now, Asterion is himself, the child of an unnatural interference.
