Cat And God: Rat Scabies

Had communiqué about “Nudes in the Lambscape”. Had I seen "the cat in the bottle?" No. Furthermore. Did I know that cats come high amongst the most photographed subject matter of all time? And did I realise there were not cat photographs on my blog and this was my first albeit it accidental, word, of a cat? No. No.

But I do know cats are good climbers (“He climbs like a pussy-cat”); and cats catch rats; and lambs and sheep suffer from scabies (sheep’s babies – lamb-scabies?); and that I’m still sore from falling off a climb called Rat Scabies.

Rat Scabies (Christopher Millar, b.1957) was the drummer of The Dammed (a punk band back in the 1970’s, contemporaries of The Clash). And you have to (as I did) place a Crash Pad (a portable mattress for bouldering) beneath Rat Scabies to protect your landing (it’s a funny route: too short to require a rope but too high to fall from unprotected).  I flew off the mantelshelf and crashed down onto my carpet (flying carpet?) no less than eighteen times before I hobbled away.

Consider the route-description of Rat Scabies again: "Up a flake... move R to a mantleshelf (sic)." It’s interesting to note that mantelshelves collect dust (dead skin), and that scabies is 'the flaking-off of skin'. But am I going to write a letter to the route’s first ascensionist, one, Gabriel Regan, enquiring if he saw the linguistic/gymnastic connection when he first climbed and named the route back in 1975? No. But wasn’t there an Angel Gabriel? And although the phrase of “the lion shall lie down with the lamb” is one of the more popular quotes from the Bible, it’s really misquoted. In the King James Version, it’s the wolf that dwells with the lamb, and it’s a leopard that lies down with a kid, and “the calf and the young lion and the fatling together”. (Isaiah 11:6).

It’s God spelt backwards - God von hinten, God coming from behind that puts the ‘fear of dog' into sheep. But cat spelt backwards is tac, and TAC is the Transport Accident Commission (in the State of Victoria, Australia). TAC is involved with promoting transport safety and in improving Victoria’s trauma system. It has an excellent ‘crash data-base’ (crash-landing site?).

Forget cats, the real threat to sheep is picnic mats. The lamb may lie with the lion and dogs are a worry to sheep, but this flying picnic mat - this bastardization of a flying carpet - would really put 'the fear of God' into sheep. A farmer once told me, the shock of the sound caused when hot-air-balloons suddenly ‘fire-up’ over cows and sheep grazing often traumatizes them into aborting. Odd. With us balloons prevent the need for abortions. And at one time (in the 1500’s) weren’t sheep’s stomach’s used as condoms?

For further reading about both incarnations of Rat Scabies, see Christopher Dawes’s excellent, ‘Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail’, Sceptre Books, London, 2005: and, On Peak Rock, Carl Dawson (ed), BMC Guide Book, 1993.   

Nudes In The Lambscape

Note: You really need to read “A Mugging In The Country” first, or this will sound absurd.

So I was mugged in the country whilst in the act of photographing a sheep. But say the sheep I’d been trying to snap had been carrying a camera - had taken a snap of me getting mugged? Why not? Sheep are always being fleeced; they’d be sympathetic to the plight of ‘the mugged’. But would a mugger shot by a sheep (a mug shot?), stand-up as evidence in court? Could that balloon ever really have been caught, even if it were caught-on-camera by a sheep? Switzerland’s a law-abiding land where the cows have bells strapped around their necks; so what’s wrong with sheep, carrying cameras?

Photographs often furnish nourishing evidence, but nourishing evidence of what? Ambiguity can be hard to swallow"

Sheep form flocks: Camera Clubs. Sheep are ‘dipped’ in chemical baths: development. And every Camera Club veteran knows lambing is excellent (staple) photographic subject matter. Where would we be without lambing photographs? Think about it. From Emerson to Brandt to Raymond Moore and Fay Godwin: for a century and a half the cannon of British landscape photography (all city dwellers, I might add) has shot sheep as camera- fodder. Perhaps it’s about time the ‘fodder’ became the photographer.

Yes, but whose tea? As a young child, whose mother I was secretly seeing, once said, “Eating animals is wrong. It spoils their futures”.

Picture a nude of Little Bo-Peep - seen through the eyes of a sheep - legs spread, in a bathtub of sheep-dip, (it wouldn’t require a “Do you want to dip me?” caption). Like that Annie Leibovitz photograph of Whoopi Goldberg, knees akimbo, in a bathtub of milk. It’s doable-dipping just dripping to be done; you’re always coming across old bathtubs in fields where sheep are grazing. Or a shot of Little Bo-Peep and a ram; I’ll leave you to imagine this composition (position?) for yourself.  No, but sheep are natural landscape photographers, black and white lambscape photographers, through and through. Sheep are even equipped with natural lens-caps: you pull the wool over their eyes. Sheep graze, so why shouldn’t sheep gaze? ‘The Gaze of the Sheep: A Self-Portrait in the Lambscape’, (a tome: monochrome images by sheep, gazing, at sheep grazing).

But if the tables were turned - sheep turned their lenses on humans -, say sheep started shooting nudes: would they portray us the way we portray lambs and sheep in photographs; as soft, fluffy, cuddly, lovable pet-like creatures, a million miles from the dinner table? I don’t think so.

Consider this illustration and accompanying text, from, “The Look Of The Lamb: A Young Sheep’s Guide To Nude Photography”.

“Lately we have witnessed the birth (lambing) of a new photographic formula for realism in the depiction of the human nude, which we may describe as Cold Cuts (as appose to lamb chops). This formula consists in the presentation of selected tidbits from the human carcass – a breast, an elbow, a bit of buttock: they are simply cuts of meat.”