This is taken from PBS.org. The photograph features Lobo the legendary leader of a band of cattle-killing wolves that had been terrorizing cattle ranchers and their livestock. Click to see the story.
My time was recently spent with wolves. I wish I could say that the experience was real and wild, but it was largely a literary one. Still wild, though.
There are many ways of looking at the animal. Biblically, wolves are sly and destructive creatures. In nature, they share an ancestry with dogs and are seen as the more majestic cousin. In other mythologies and folklore, they are highly revered.
But the past few days were spent looking at wolves through the eyes of Jiang Rong, a Chinese novelist (whose real name is Lu Jiamin and was once a political scientist). Jiang Rong wrote Wolf Totem, an ambitious tale of Mongolians in the 1960s, as a critic to his own culture — that of the Han Chinese.
Because the Mongolians’ lifestyle is so much interweaved with that of the grassland wolf, Jiang Rong uses the animal as a metaphor to symbolise them. As opposed to the wolf-like nature of the Mongolians, the Han Chinese are seen as sheep with a muted, emotionless herd-like mentality borne from the Cultural Revolution.
I used to think that wolves are sly creatures — and they are. But Jiang Rong redeems them by emphasizing their loyal character and ability to display human-like emotions. They feel sad when one of them dies. They avenge. They protect. These are the traits of the Mongolians. Though the wolves destroy the horse herds of the people, the Mongolians never form a naive deduction to render them as mere attackers. This is because wolves are also guardians of the environment and Mongolian livelihood — they hunt for gazelles who eat away or destroy the grasslands.
For the Mongolians, the wolf becomes both friend and foe. The Mongolians’ ability to understand nature’s intelligence, power and cyclical renewals means that wolves are meant to be respected as part of nature’s plan. In this light, the Mongolians never wear a dead wolf’s hide or hunt them meaninglessly (the Han Chinese do, according to Jiang Rong) — if they do, they think only for themselves and disrespect the bigger picture, that is, the ecology of the grassland.
All these ideas are told through the tale of Chen Zhen, a Han Chinese student from Beijing who obeys Chairman Mao’s urging to go to the countryside. Chen chooses to live in the Mongolian grasslands with nomadic herders. As he becomes a part of them, he grows fascinated with their lifestyle and especially with the cleverness of wolves. And hence the whole novel’s fascination with the creature (it sometimes reads like a never-ending National Geographic article, though).
Halfway through the novel, I am reminded of Cai Guo-Qiang’s glorious piece, Head On. This larger-than-life installation sculpture carves 99 wolves where, in a ferocious force of herd mentality, they crash into a glass wall. Cai, a prominent artist also from China, certainly has a very different conclusion about wolves.
He describes his work: “I tried to find an animal that represents a collective heroism, an animal that likes company, that lives in a pack. I wanted to portray the universal human tragedy resulting from this blind urge to press forward, the way we try to attain our goals without compromise. This is something that keeps repeating itself all throughout human history. In Zen philosophy, there is this idea of tragic beauty based on the notion that most of what happens has no meaning whatsoever.”
I wonder what Jiang Rong would think about that. Certainly, for the author, wolves are not blind followers but are in fact, clever planners that move in perfect unity.
It is simplistic to relate both Jiang Rong and Cai Guo-Qiang’s work to each other just because both feature the wolf as centrepiece. Yet, in spite of this and the different views of both artists, there are obvious similarities in lessons from their ideas.
For one, people, like animals, exist as a collective whether we like it or not. Therein lies a fine line in balancing this collectivism — how much of each other can we protect or avenge before it becomes blind support or group-think that is eventually dangerous? And as part of a collective, each of our actions ultimately impacts one another no matter how modern society alienates us or endorses individualism.
Here’s how I look at wolves these days — they’re just like us humans, complex in nature, both prey and predator, no lesser a warm-blooded creature than what we are, capable of both crime and compassion. To understand wolves is to understand men, and vice-versa. Man and nature are irrevocably interdependent, a reflection of each other. Jiang Rong writes: “That must mean that if there’d been no wolves, those great war counselors and leaders, there’d have been no Genghis Khan, no golden tribe, and of course no wise and brave Mongol fighting horsemen.”
