Place in Nature

Saint Paul, 1 July 2007

What does Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man tell us?

For thirteen Summers on the Katmai coast of Alaska

an emotionally disturbed dreamer named Timothy Treadwell

comes to lovingly know bears as Rowdy and Mr. Chocolate

Werner Herzog invites us to the unforgiving harmony of nature

lures us with primordial innocence then paw-slaps us back into

the impractical abyss of Timothy Treadwell’s anguished mind

A coroner’s interview is overdubbed on to frantic footage

of Treadwell screaming to his girlfriend to GO AWAY

seconds before a bear decapitates him

In what should have been the final scene - the mauling is botched

film is rolling, but the lens cap is on so we don’t see the corpus delicti

of Tim’s head, partial backbone, and wrist watch bearing arm

There is no moral to this story, except to say that some of us

fancy ourselves escaping the confinements of humanness

in particular, those of us feeling shunned by the pack