Wild Animus includes a novel, three original music CDsâThe Ram, The Wolves and Animusâand primal Art Brut art. Experienced as a whole, the music expresses the emotional core of the story and the novel serves as its narrative shell.
Wild Animus tracks the reckless quest of Ransom Altman, a young Berkeley graduate whoâroused by his literary heroes and love for his girlfriend, Lindyâresolves to live in a new world of âinexhaustible desire.â Ransomâs deepening identification with the wild mountain ram, whose passion and wisdom he seeks, drives the young lovers northâfirst to Seattle, then to the remote Alaskan wilderness. Alone on the unforgiving ridges of Mt. Wrangell, his imagination increasingly unhinged, Ransom begins to devise and act out a dangerous animal mythos, which he documents in a first-person manuscript, and in songs or âchantsâ that detail his transformation and pursuit by a pack of strangely familiar wolves.
The feverish hunt leads from the wilds to civilization and back again. And when the lovers return to brave the perilous mountain together, the truth behind Ransomâs imagined transformation emerges. What they discover in those frozen heights threatens their love as well as their sanity and their lives.
Is Ransom inspired by a transcendent truth, or prey to a misguided fantasy? As his grip on reality weakens, the reader shares Ransomâs fears, his hopes, and his extraordinary discoveries.
Wild Animus is a search for the primordial and a journey to the breaking point. It is a story of love and surrender, of monomaniaâof striving, at all costs, for a bliss beyond fear.
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