dugong

If anyone has a dugong photo to share here that would be great. They are beautiful undersea cows who graze on seagrass. In Australian waters they are under threat - especially from developments like unnecessary marinas - plans for which are forever cropping up along the coast.

what Queenie says about the philosophy cow (1)

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-philosphicus.

what is a cow?
an animal
a symbol
a statue
a vocalic
a smooth surface with all the hair going the same way?

an economy
a religion
a politics
a mysticism
an experiment: erste die Kuh, dann Du?

a love object
a lesbian motif
a good meal
a mother
a milkmaid’s best and only friend?

a danger
a lover
a droning sound
a-um
an ocean of milk for all?

a cloud
a constellation
a herd of stars
a word
a voice heard?


is the cow at the limits of my thinking?
what sort of cow am I seeking?
the native cow?
the underwater cow?
the marine cow?
the unseen cow?
the sea-grass eating dugong?
is the dugong a cow because of its shape and size?
or because it is a herbivore?
what happens to dugong dung?


what of intersecting worlds?
the moment when I see the centipede
pulling its hundred legs
over the rim of the wall above my line of sight
ein Blick of another world

the moment when I hear
unspoken histories
genocides
eliminations of the unwanted
every rewriting of history continues that erasure



Ludwig Wittgenstein. 1974. Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.