Onepercentsstuff - Untitled

narcissus at the pond

sometimes the only option is to bear witness

Before the 1960′s, when the TV series Flipper became popular, trained sea creatures such as dolphins were a very rare occurrence. Richard “Ric” O’Barry was a dolphin trainer at Miami Seaquarium and helped to capture five wild dolphins that would be trained to star in Flipper. He carried this on for 10 years until Kathy, who was the main dolphin to star in Flipper, died in his arms; he strongly believes she committed suicide when she didn’t resurface for air. It was this one event that completely changed his stance on what he was doing. He suddenly realised that imprisoning and training these beautiful and intelligent creatures for human entertainment was abhorrent. On Earth Day of 1970, Ric founded The Dolphin Project which is an organisation dedicated to educating people about the plight of dolphins in captivity. This organisation rescues and rehabilitates dolphins and releases them back to the wild. As well as this, Ric leads an international effort to stop the hunting of dolphins and the trafficking of dolphins to theme parks such as Sea World. He has written two books: Behind the Dolphin Smile and To Free a Dolphin, and also appeared in the documentary, The Cove.

Man o Man

“Women’s bodies are so often under the purview of men, whether it’s our reproductive organs, our sexuality, our weight, our manner of dress. There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild. I relish this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse.” - Caitlyn Doughty

“I went, as a neighbor, to a house to help lay out the corpse of an old woman who had died alone; I was helping to prepare for the home wake. I entered, familiarly, not by the front door but by the kitchen door. I was shocked and repelled as I went into the kitchen by the disorderly festival going on inside: a big muscular neighbor who worked at the cigar-factory had been called in to crank the ice-cream machine, various neighbors had sent over their scullery-girls to help out and their yard-boys bearing newspaper-wrapped flowers from their yards to decorate the house and the bier: the scullery-girls were taking advantage of the occasion to dawdle around the kitchen and flirt with the yard-boys, and they were all waiting around to have a taste of the ice cream when it was finished. It all seemed to me crude and boisterous and squalid and unfeeling in the house of the dead–all that appetite, all that concupiscence.

Then I left the sexuality and gluttony of the kitchen, and went in to the death in the bedroom. The corpse of the old woman was lying exposed on the bed. My first impulse was to find a sheet to cover the corpse; I went to the cheap old pine dresser, but it was hard to get the sheet out of it because each of the three drawers was lacking a drawer-pull; she must have been too infirm to get to the store to get new glass knobs. But I got a sheet out, noticing that she had hand-embroidered a fantail border on it; she wanted to make it beautiful, even though she was so poor that she made her own sheets, and cut them as minimally as she could so as to get as many as possible out of a length of cloth. She cut them so short, in fact, that when I pulled the sheet up far enough to cover her face, it was too short to cover her feet. It was almost worse to have to look at her old calloused feet than to look at her face; somehow her feet were more dead, more mute, than her face had been.

She is dead, and the fact cannot be hidden by any sheet. What remains after death, in the cold light of reality, is life–all of that life, with its coarse muscularity and crude hunger and greedy concupiscence, that is going on in the kitchen. The only god of this world is the cold god of persistent life and appetite; and I must look steadily at this repellent but true tableau–the animal life in the kitchen, the corpse in the back bedroom. Life offers no other tableaus of reality, once we pierce beneath appearances.”