CHILA WOYCHIK

CW – brief mentions of human consensual sex and sex between animals

Topography

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What’s up top? Where’s that lake? Who’s on first? The ancients first defined topography as “place writing,” but it’s more than that. “Place-based human experience” is what’s inferred, or how people function in relation to everything around them, including environment. How I wake to perpetual quiet, the air I breathe, the sky I see, and a world awash in blue and green is probably the question, and how each directs our days.

Like a mountain. Here at the crest, it’s always blustery. We don’t have true mountains, but large bumps, breasts of plenty feeding the multitudes. Here we range cattle because a tractor might topple over on grades this steep. Once while raking hay on a hill my tractor stalled and began its backward descent. A quick jerk of the steering wheel sent the rake sprawling sideways and stopped me a few feet short of the pasture fence. Call it raw or piercing or country, but at least it’s not monotonous. The grains we plant, the stretches of view. The ferals roaming in packs or alone, howling and yipping on their rendezvous to find fresh meat. These strains are the morning stars that sing for joy, the clearest bells on our otherwise soundless days. We climb these mountains as if they were.

Winter. Ankle-deep snow isn’t a surprise, and barely an inconvenience. Plowed white mounds slumber head-high and, beyond, a northwesterly wind scatters a few loose ghosts. My farmer knows his duty. A big Deutz tractor, its testosterone-laden-like blade wide and impressive, rumbles across the frozen pasture toward the driveway. It’s overkill for so few acres, but the burned out shell and engine were free for the taking; the cost was in the repairs (is anything really ever free?). It’s the only brute on this farm I’ve yet to learn to wrangle, so he manhandles it, giddy to scrape up the scant remaining dregs that the neighbor left behind while he was “passing by anyway,” as if their machines are little Matchbox toys rolling around a yard of possibilities.

Pleasure, with a side order of pillage. Scruples have nothing to do with it. We shamelessly watch the beasts of the field and the birds of the air engaged in the dance of ages, mating rituals, and the act of coitus. Cattle getting it on. Bird humping bird on a wire overhead. Copulation in midair, on the lake, in the bushes. Or maybe a roll in the hay, in fields of gold, behind the tractor. Hey, wait. That last one’s me and my farmer, so close your eyes and wait on the front porch, please. (And lest we get distracted by the seventeen inch penis of the Argentine Lake Duck, we’ll move on….)

A lion will eat a quarter of its weight in food at one meal. This may sound like dissipation, but the animal may not eat for another week, so let’s call it survival. A domesticated cat, on the other hand, will overdo because the preformed chunks are there and don’t need to be caught. She’s been shortchanged on exercise, our pampered and plump little friend. I try to translate this scenario into recognizable English for my two house males, a son and a husband languishing in the lap of food aplenty yet never quite content to go a week until their next meal. “There is food here,” I say. “Give me ideas on what to make with it, how to construct it into something palatable.” Silence from them; I’m a tree falling in an uninhabited forest. “Am I the sole cook and bottle washer?” I ask. Again, silence, and barely a look. So I open a can of soup and we eat and I envision plump little felines basking in a noonday sun.

In mapping the human erogenous zones, we often forget about the topside topography of desire: ears, neck, face. This lioness stalks fitfully. From the Greek, hedonism means pleasure or sweetness, the way of the blissfully content. In Deuteronomy, Moses talks about honey coming from a rock; from a hive in hiding, they found sweetness. The old hedonist, Aristotle, said that happiness was the aim of existence. Talk about the Australian brown antechinus’ two week mating season where sex can last for five or ten hours at a time after which the male drops dead, or the bonobo ape – their insatiable desires and pre-feast orgies – and the topic turns to debauchery, but pleasure, too, is simply the lay of the land.

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Art by Rachel Singel