The Tigers of Wrath

 

 “Without the breath of the tiger there will be no wind,
only clouds, and certainly no rain.” – The I Ching

 

“Currently, a poached tiger is believed to fetch between $25,000 and $50,000 for the carcass, penis and bones. Largely as a result of this lucrative, illegal trade, there are estimated to be only 3,200 tigers left in the wild – down from 100,000 a century ago.”
- Jonathan Watts, London: The Guardian, 24 November 2010

                         

 

Before William Blake wrote his poem, The Tyger,

He’d paid several visits to the Tower of London

Where three tigers were permanently confined

In England’s gloomiest state prison.

 

Blake would imagine these tigers – “burning bright

In the forests of the night” –

When from Lambeth he’d hear their unhappy sounds,

Roaring, and snarling and growling.

 

Then he saw them, pacing the cage which enclosed them,

These newly trafficked arrivals, Panthera tigris –

Each a prisoner in the British Empire’s oldest death camp

Where human threats to the State were decapitated.

 

Blake would study what the naturalist Linnaeus had called,

“The most beautiful of all wild creatures.”

Their Keeper casually accepted stray dogs as admission fee;

Blake preferred to pay a standard three-pence.

 

The tiger family had been given mildly humorous names:

Will and Phyllis and their son Dick;

But it was the animals’ anger that Blake noticed most of all

And he’d liken it to revolutionary frenzy.

 

Blake thought the tiger embodied “the fierce forces in the soul

Needed to break the bonds of experience” –

And he’d envision the tigers’ stripes as impassioned flames

Lighting up something fresh in his understanding.

 

“In what clay,” Blake asked, in an early draft of the poem,

“And in what mould,

Were thy eyes of fury rolled?” He asked this as Britain trembled

At the thought of France’s revolution spreading,

 

And as Tory statesmen railed, in their words, against a “republic of tigers”

Which they could see gathering strength across the Channel

One of them likened the eyes of the revolutionary Marat to a “tiger cat’s”

And other grandees recoiled from a foreign “tribunal of tigers”.

 

But while Parliament was decrying the French uprising as “bestial” –

The London street was viewing it quite differently:

“The time is come you plainly see,” ran a rhyme of the nineties

“The government opposed must be.”

 

So, after relating to the “wild furies from the tiger’s brain”,

Blake wrote a Valentine to this primeval terrorist

Coming from regions of uncontrolled instinct, now confined,

But who was speaking to him of unfathomable desire.

 

“What immortal hand or eye could frame

Thy fearful symmetry”, Blake wondered

While carefully etching the tiger’s flickering camouflage

That helped it move invisibly through long grasses.

 

“In what distant deeps or skies,” Blake queried,

“Burnt the fire of thine eyes?” –

Could the divine plan include such incendiary agents?

“Did he who made the lamb make thee?”

 

Blake communed with the tigers, fed on dogs and dead horses

And cruelly taunted by their visitors;

Incarcerated in a Tower full of instruments of torture

And eerily populated by headless spectres.

 

Then fixated by the lustrous blaze that still flashed from their eyes

Blake would write that “The tigers of wrath

Are wiser than the horses of instruction” – Coining a new proverb

That urged man to fight for unbridled freedom

 

 

Photo by Brian Cooke/Redferns)/getty 1972 http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/86296316/Redferns?language=en-GB&location=GBR

 

Blake meant those filled with righteous anger, following their desires,

Were wiser than those taking instruction from others’ rules

Or, as both the Grateful Dead and Joe Strummer chose to emblazon

In red letters on subversive guitars, ‘IGNORE ALIEN ORDERS.’

 

In another age of revolution Blake’s words on man’s wrathful wisdom

Would re-surface as a popular graffiti,

Being transcribed by a Situationist group called King Mob Echo

Next to, ‘ALL YOU NEED IS DYNAMITE.’

 

And nearby was written ‘RENT REVOLT’ suggesting how human beings

Might be also maddened by their social confinement:

Caged by poverty traps; unjustly hobbled, their horizons narrowed,

And snarling at those whom they held responsible.

 

In 1903, Calcutta Zoo kept a Bengali tiger behind bars;

A demonized man-eater of whom stereoscopic views

In sepia tints were sold for people to be titillated by fear,

Whilst they’d enjoy the Empire’s creature comforts.

 

 

 

This Bengali tiger had eaten over 220 human beings,

Some being mauled to death in tea plantations –

Its other victims wrenched out of hides in the jungle

From where hunters had been taking pot shots.

 

“Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Blake enquired,

Puzzled by his God devising such untrammeled wildness –

The same sabre-toothed spirit on which Shiva’s seen mounted

And which depicts the immortally, savagely irrepressible.

 

“Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Blake asked

Addressing himself to the celestial blacksmith

Who’d forged muscles that gave tigers the kind of heart

That urged them to devour deer and to snack on men;

 

And rip crocodiles’ eyes from their sockets like sweets –

What explained a creature of such unparalleled ferocity?

Why did he plan for it to tear so unrestrainedly into flesh?

Might he just relish the insolent skills he’d imagined for it? –

 

For this dread creature that’s described as having no off-switch,

And which Henry V would urge his troops to emulate

As day broke before the battle of Harfleur: “When the blast of war

Blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger:

 

“Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, then lend the eye

A terrible aspect; now set the teeth,

And stretch the nostril wide, hold hard the breath, and bend up

Every spirit to his full height!”

 

“The tiger fierce”, Blake noted, “laughs at the human form,”

And this remained true till man, threatened by its raw energy,

Determined to have the last laugh himself by slowly stealing

The tigers’ extensive lands, and then all of its talents.

 

In Blake’s time every tiger alive would have had a territory

Of some four hundred square miles in the wild,

Through which it could roam the world as nature’s free spirit

Till killing it for sport became a fashion for Royalty:

 

With tiger skins being hung in Maharajah’s palaces

And carpeting the floors of gangster potentates;

With their being laid across Hollywood movie star beds –

Its being thought they gave off an erotic charge.

 

Abattoirs full of bodies reveal this delusion’s impact,

With tiger after tiger having their private parts cut –

Male members processed into mystical versions of Viagra

With no man-made ‘Year of the Tiger’ preventing it.

 

Most of the tigers in Vietnam have been exterminated;

Those in Java and the Caspian region are extinct –

Thanks to man seeking ‘natural’ remedies for every ailment

Tigers are trapped then unnaturally commodified.

 

The medicinal process involves the animals being skinned

And their carcasses stored in freezers;

Their bones are separated then steeped in vats of rice wine –

Herbs are added, plus spurious claims.

 

A Taiwanese brewery imports 2,000 kg of tiger bones yearly, Representing the deaths of some two hundred tigers –

Who serve to manufacture 100,000 bottles of Tiger Bone Wine,

Each customer told that he can outrun any prey.

 

Then tiger whiskers “give courage”, and “protection from bullets”

And
reputedly even “prevent toothache”.

The tigers’ eyeballs are rolled into pills to prevent epilepsy

And
any other cerebral convulsions.

 

Tiger meat mixed with oil and rubbed over the body

Will “cure laziness” and also cure acne.

Its tail “removes wrinkles” and
its heart once eaten,

Will “instantly impart strength and cunning” –

 

Such superstitions spawn “speed-breeding factory farms”

Where hundreds of farm-tigresses

Are induced to cub more frequently than they do in the wild

And forced to bear up to three litters a year.

 

For the cubs are taken from their mothers before they’re weaned

Then made to suckle from other animals such as a dog

Or even a pig – both are used as a tiger’s “wet nurse surrogates”

And to accelerate the tigresses’ production of young.

 

Through the tiger’s being revered for its strength and sexual prowess

With old wives’ tales insisting that by pilfering its organs

A consumer’s persuaded to harness the tiger’s powerful stamina,

And sexual gourmets will thus pay thousands for its penis.

 

They reduce the tiger to being an economic juggernaut’s road-kill

Its body parts displayed dangling hanging from meat hooks…

In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Blake would boldly declare

That “the genitals are beauty” but couldn’t have envisaged

 

That charlatans, ever eager to exploit the sexually insecure,

And noticing the virile tiger’s orgasmic Niagara

Would then cite ‘sympathetic magic’ as scientific evidence

For marketing a tiger’s genitalia as a quack cure.

 

“Tiger King Sex Pills make the penis erect quickly,

Improve sexual intercourse quality,

Shorten the interval for a second intercourse

And they will also reduce fatigue.

 

“They remove premature ejaculation, activate kidneys

And increase secretions of testicle cells.

They contain many vigor factors required by the male.

They can increase his spirit, and essence.”

 

Thus man’s flaccid lovemaking requires a tiger be neutered –

Its organs sliced off for an aphrodisiac crutch –

The tiger’s penis, so cunningly spined to stimulate ovulation,

Is made into a pill to treat erectile dysfunction.

 

Incredibly, tigers die to provide men with enriched orgasms

Whose byproduct is an increase in human population,

Whilst the tiger’s numbers decrease in a depraved equation:

An ancient soul stolen for it to be recycled into sex aids.

 

In Taiwan captive tigers are executed and their bodies auctioned.

At which dealers stage promotional demonstrations,

Hiring prostitutes and vigorous studs to simulate sensual excess

After ostensibly sampling the products on display.

 

A seedy hawker in Taipei’s Snake Alley Night Market

Will accost a prospective customer,

“If you drink this, sir, you won’t be able to get zipper up.

You forget Viagra, this last you for ever.”

 

A Taizhong restaurant, Pu Chung Pao, serves the island’s wealthy

With $20,000 meals in the Ching Dynasty style;

These include tiger penises imported from Northeast China

Because “tigers from cold places are better”.

 

According to the staff, “we soak them for about a week,

Then when they’re soft we start to simmer them.

We add all the types of medicine that are good for men

While cooking the soup for twenty four hours.”

 

When asked if it’s popular the answer’s a firm, “Yes,

Especially among the men in Taiwan.

One tiger penis makes soup for eight people, and it costs

Around eight thousand New Taiwan Dollars.”

 

The idea that tigers may be an endangered species

Is met with an indifferent shrug

For on the black market a highly desired tiger penis

Will attract a price of £3,000.

 

A dealer says, “It must be ordered months in advance.

It tastes the same as any other penis might taste

But, you see, many people in China like to order tiger

Just to show off how much money they have.”

 

Of the white tigers that bound across Siberian wastes

There may just be ten of them left in the wild –

Ten living Viagra tablets remaining in nature’s packet

For that turbid rush of blood over in seconds.

 

In his poem, ‘Dreamtigers’, Jorge Luis Borges would remember

How he’d once been a “zealous worshipper of the animal” –

“En la infancia yo ejercí con fervor la adoración del tigre…”

And he’d remember “the striped, Asiatic, royal tiger”

 

And how as a child he’d linger near its cage in the zoo

And how he’d judge the books in the library –

The gigantic encyclopedias and natural history books,

“According to the majesty of their tigers.”

 

Then he’d grown up and the tigers, together with his passions

Grew old, but he’d notice they’d endured in his dreams:

Remarking how, in what he called “the submerged dimension” ,

That “at that level of the chaotic, they persist.”

 

“I’m aware,” Borges recounts, “that this is a dream

And that in a dream my powers are limitless:

My mind can bring a tiger into existence. I cause a tiger,

But it’s never the wild beast I remember.”

 

“Oh how couldst thou deform those beautiful proportions

Of life and person,” Blake would enquire,

Then wrote in his book of prophecy, ‘The Four Zoas’

“For as the person, so is his life proportioned.”

 

Were you to chant ‘Tiger, tiger, tiger’ a thousand times

You’d have counted each one left in the wild.

Unselfconsciously charismatic; graceful and fearless;

Defiantly independent and each close to death.

 

“When the stars,” Blake asked, “threw down their spears,

And watered heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee?”

 

He did, but Blake’s tiger wasn’t meant to be farmed or filleted;

Nor its gene pool narrowed down till it stagnated –

Nor its tigerness bred out by being pharmaceutically processed

With its stripes serving as a ready-made bar code.

 

Yet two centuries later in the Sunderbans forest in Bangladesh

The tiger god, Dakshi Ray, is competing with Blake’s –

It’s the one place left on earth where the tigers are multiplying

Thanks to the cyclones due to man-made climate change.

 

The cyclones fill the rivers with bodies for tigers to scavenge,

Meaning there are tigers which’ll now eat only human meat;

All forest visitors wear tiger masks on the backs of their heads

To stop attacks from behind, but the tactic has little effect.

 

For in the Sunderbans the tiger’s at the top of the food chain,

Biting into a man’s neck then breaking his spine –

Man can turn his back on nature, and become dead to karma

Only to find his body parts restoring a tiger’s spirits.

 

In the age of Kali Yuga, the present age of destruction,

To ‘ride the tiger’ becomes crucial in challenging it;

And to dream of ‘Flying on a tiger’s back’ renews courage –

Thoughts that will prove impotent if tigers are ghosts.

 

When Blake died, his friend George Richmond of Half Moon Street

Closed his eyes saying he was doing it, “to keep the vision in”.

His vision’s still there in the ether: that glimpse of an immortal Tiger,

Burning bright in everyone’s being and in the forests of the night.

 

 

Heathcote Williams