Thoughts on the Ovine Gaze

For Shugetsu
Originally uploaded by Robby Garbett.

Sheep are underestimated. They do not accommodate; they do not pretend to understand.

This ewe faces a bizarre sight: before her, a man on an otherwise perfectly satisfactory ride home from work has stopped his car. He stands before her, a strange contraption raised before his face. Whatever he’s doing, he’s not stopping. For this man is an artist obsessed with texture and color. He might have stood there all evening, snapping away with no consideration for dignity—the lengthening shadows might have engulfed him entirely—had not the wise ewe decided to declare the photo session ended. Northern Ireland’s rusty cranes and collapsing cottages will hold still forever. But a ewe with two lambs occupies the slightest sliver of time.

By now, those lambs’ wrinkly little skins have filled out; their bellies are growing round; they’re venturing further from the teat to play and nibble grass. The moment is truly gone—not like paint blistering or rust peeling, one layer giving way to another—but like fire that consumes the world.

This photos is posted on Flickr, and so there are comments on this photo. They encompass a whole range of levels of coarseness. Commenters claim to see dinner, or a suggestive look—as if a sheep has ever suggested anything to anybody!

Through the camera, we see something that is not yet dinner: we look, and the sheep turn around and looks unblinkingly back. This is not “stupid” facing us: this is consciousness, awareness, a gaze that meets your own and forces some questions. Do I eat something that looks back at me. Is this meat, or a life? Can I face the life that I destroy in order to live? Can I face meet the life that I destroy—not so much in order to live, as to have the satisfaction and comfort I’ve become used to? Seeing and being seen like this: there is no red meat without a mind.

Much easier to make a joke.

When I say that a sheep has never suggested anything to anybody, I mean this: sheep don’t relate to us, and they don't want to. Dogs want something cats require it. But sheep just don't care. They are not pets; their job is not to connect, but to look. By nature, they are grazers— prey. You are barely relevant, and sheep are in no hurry to ingratiate themselves with you.

We mistake this dignity, this remove, with stupidity. We imagine that animals who relate to us are “smart”; animals that could care less, are not. But perhaps the sheep are the wise ones. They do not enter our dramas with us; they stand apart. And when it is time to move, they move in the wisest way: as a body, en masse. Perhaps we are the ones who should relate to sheep, we who fling ourselves after the latest promise of respite from reality. We who butt heads, and drop lambs, and head for home at the end of the day.

We who stop then, as the shadows draw long, and wonder just what—really—is going on.