......................................................................................................................................................... I am on a bus, heading toward home. We arrive at an intersection where the driver suddenly makes a u-turn. To my inquiry, he says that the route has changed, and this is as far as it goes. I get off and see a parked bus. The driver agrees to take me and other passengers along the original route, so that I am heading home again. On a mild December day I sit by a fountain watching small birds alight and, still thirsty, fly back up into the trees. Must I become something like a moving line without boundaries or points along the way, a pure difference without structure or definition—whence "a man of hopeless feathers" for these birds not to be wary of me? We are so enchanted with the human face of our gods that only in dreams do we recall “kinfolk and ancestors in the larger sense." What strange matter mated and continues to breed in the shadows of our being, so that we no longer trace forms of life along branches of the Tree of Life, but in drops of deoxyribonucleic acid. Yet: "For Dr. (Tal) Dagan (at the University of Düsseldorf), evolution is still shaped like a tree. 'Most of the evolution is still going on in the branches,' she said. 'But over billions of years, thousands of genes have shuttled among the branches.'" [C. Zimmer, "Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life." The New York Times, 10 Feb. 2009.] I stand and stroll to a secluded grove where stone cherubs smile in a clearing and frown behind bushes. Knowing where you're going is not knowing that you're lost. Thus all scholars are tricksters hiding in the thicket of ambiguous directions. ......................................................................................................................................................... something like: G.L. Bruns, “Becoming-Animal (Some Simple Ways)” New Literary History, Vol. 38, 2007. "a man of hopeless feathers." T. Hughes. From, "Kafka." "kinfolk and ancestors." P. Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Washington, D.C., 1996.