Well, Dr. Theresa gave me a sculpture of a fox (seen here with the cat who picks lottery numbers) for Valentine's Day! I found it bewitching, as did the cats, who first approached it with extreme caution as if it were a living thing. This is why I say animals can understand metaphors. Ha ha! Do I say that? Or symbols! Which is what Dr. Theresa and I started talking about... symbols, that is. Like, what is a fox, symbolically? So I rushed to Cirlot's handy DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS, which had exactly one sentence about foxes in it. ONE SENTENCE! Come on! You're better than that, J.E. Cirlot! And it wasn't a very encouraging sentence: "A common symbol for the devil during the Middle Ages, expressive of base attitudes and of the wiles of the adversary." And honestly, that's a sentence fragment, with an implied subject and verb ("The fox is"), I guess. There's probably a word for that. Anyway, I was like, don't worry, I have a million dictionaries of symbols around here, I'll grab another one! So this other book of symbols, called THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS, had a much more expansive and satisfying view of foxes. But that's not what I want to talk about, and neither is this: as I was putting together this "post," I noticed that Hans Biedermann's dictionary of symbolism, called DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLISM, has been mistitled on my big long list of books with owls in them since the very first day I established it! Anyway, I'm going to fix that. So get off my back! I hate you! Now, what did I really want to say? Well, I'll tell you. When I got out THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS and turned to the animal section, I accidentally opened right to a page about owls. Now, listen. Nothing in this book tells us anything that you and I haven't already discussed about owls. But now that I know it has owls in it, I have to add it to my list. More work for me! What a life. What makes it all worth it is that no one cares.
