Dioramas by Blair Austin

Author:Blair Austin
Format: epub

Amateur

On second thought I am reluctant to put the theen finch diorama back together. There are, I feel, key decisions that still have to be made. On close examination, for example, the legs of the storebought male have an undue shine; you see them and think, “Metal.” Perhaps I can introduce the dryness you often see on birds’ legs, that reptilian scaling. Or I can band the male with an aluminum number and ask Tom for advice on the grammar of band numbers. Or I could redo the backdrop, from black to a continuation of the forest floor, going out and out, disappearing in the simple distance.

Above all, I have to be careful. Things have a way of getting out of hand. When you look at dioramas where this has happened, you can glimpse someone inside the space. They’ve gotten in the way. The animals have become props. For the story, you know. Yet I am the first to admit the animal has to be doing something. It can’t just be standing there, for then it would be mere taxidermy, a sort of hunting trophy. What the animal does must be its own idea, not what it would have done but what it intends to do, on its own, as a matter of survival.

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