Our animal selves and man's best friend

 Man and his pets is an apparent theme on this wonderful mailing from Herman. As I type, our 12 year old lurcher jumps to her chair in the studio after coming in from 'hunting' in the long grass of the field. I don't know what she was really doing but in the past she absconded to chase rabbits and hares. Now as an elderly dog she was probably just been sunning herself. 

I look a little like my dog. Mostly just that she has dark hair with a lot of grey in it.  I don't have dreadlocks like she does, and her legs are really skinny. Herman captures human actions carried out by animals,  we are much more like our pets than we even realise.  I shouldn't be dwelling on the message, though. Herman's envelope (uncovered this time) uses, tone, colour and line (music scores turned this way and that) - the elipsis of margins - to create his own kind of meaning.

This King of Thule looks like the life an soul of the party and he is certainly post elixer of youth and his Marguerite looks well and quite in love… (From Faust Opera) 

'There was a king in Thule,

Was faithful till the grave,

To whom his mistress, dying,

A golden goblet gave.

Nought was to him more precious;

He drained it at every bout;

His eyes with tears ran over,

As oft as he drank thereout.

When came his time of dying,

The towns in his land he told,

Nought else to his heir denying

Except the goblet of gold.

He sat at the royal banquet

With his knights of high degree,

In the lofty hall of his father

In the castle by the sea.

There stood the old carouser,

And drank the last life-glow;

And hurled the hallowed goblet

Into the tide below.

He saw it plunging and filling,

And sinking deep in the sea:

Then fell his eyelids for ever,

And never more drank he!^[1]

Marguerite and her bouquet?

And the pièce de résistance….Herman's doodles: part human, part animal, part machine.  Love it all! and mortified that it has taken me a month to blog it. Thank you Herman!