This script for oral performance (here disguised as argumentative prose) is preceded by showing a scene from the 1961 film The Music Man in which Robert Preston, playing the huckster Professor Harold Hill, conjures up fear that the young men of River City, Iowa, are going to hell in a hand-basket unless they stop playing pool and join the big brass street band, which Dr Hill proposes to lead despite his abysmal musical ignorance.

A young woman asks the poet, environmentalist and Buddhist Gary Snyder: “If we have made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them, and dreaming about them, what do they get back from us?”

“An excellent question”, replies Snyder, “directly on the point of etiquette and propriety, and putting it from the animals’ side. The Ainu say that the deer, salmon, and bear like our music and are fascinated by our languages. So”, continues Snyder, “we sing to the fish or the game, speak words to them, say grace. Periodically, we dance for them. A song for your supper: performance is currency in the deep world's gift economy” (1990: 75).

This line is the torah fragment I fence, the plenary axis I circumambulate. When I first read it, I scribbled questions in the margin: What? Animals care about performances? What kind of performances? Currency? Performance has cash value? Deep world? What's that – a place below this one? And, what do you mean, gift economy? This is a dog-eat-dog, country- eat- country global economy.