The Deep Zoo

A Memoir in the Form of a Manifesto

When I was a child of seven, I spent the week alone with my mother’s parents, Frances and Charlie. They lived in Miami, in a house that smelled of boiled carrots. Frances’s conversation was featureless, and I could never, for as long as I knew her, grow accustomed to the static condition of her mind.

A Russian immigrant who came to this country at the age of twelve, Charlie had one good story. He told it slyly and with dash: the moment his family had debarked in New York City he had run away, and before the day was over had snagged a job with the Barnum & Bailey Circus shoveling elephant shit.

Charlie’s vivid evocation of elephant shit in all its prodigious redundancy did much to alleviate my grandmother’s self-righteous banality. If Charlie was entertaining — and he also had enlightening things to say about the Fat Lady (in those days a rarity) and had witnessed an acrobat’s fatal mistake — Frances was not. She thought of herself as a worldly realist, yet she feared the world unreasonably, poisoning the ants on her slice of lawn with a fixity of purpose. She boiled our suppers with such ferocity that everything we ate tasted like wet laundry. It was during this visit that I came to privately call her Old Piano Legs.

Suppertimes, Charlie, mostly mute, and sucking the interminable sourballs that would give him stomach cancer, thought of the lady across the way who — or so I learned from a bitter Frances at his funeral some years down the line — made a mean lamb stew with dumplings.

“He’d go across the way to eat her stew!” she had blustered. “Can you imagine that?” I could.

I had brought with me a library book devoted to van Leeuwenhoek. In the deep solitude of Miami nights, I would lose myself beneath the Dutchman’s magic lens, and swim among the minute creatures he described gyrating in gutter water and tears. The splendid conjunction in my mind of elephants and animals too small to be seen with the naked eye caused me to shudder with secret laughter, for I knew it was best not to disturb Frances’s mortal certitude with any extravagance of mind. (Her own mind was made of sandbags that, whenever she would speak, tumbled forth in such quantity one feared, one risked, suffocation.) In this way her conversation had a family likeness to the inescapable redundancies of so much so-called “realistic” fiction. (This brings to mind my mother’s response to my first “real” story: “Some nightmares are best kept to oneself.” She died soon after this exchange; it was, as it turned out, the last time she advised me.)

Charlie’s fond recollections informed my own tendency to scatologize, and decades later, made for an immediate affinity with Angela Carter, whose dinner conversation was outrageously fecal and funny. Angela, like Jonathan Swift and Robert Coover and Rabelais, was unafraid of frass. Which has me wondering if the acknowledgment of materiality goes part and parcel with the unfettered imagination, a healthy dislike of pomposity and the sort of dogmatic thinking that insists the body is both fallen and vile. (I was about to write a healthy acknowledgment of materiality, but then, like the divine Marquis’s, Swift’s interest in dung was, need I say it, morbid.)

Back to Miami: on the one hand there was Frances, who, if she’d had the choice, would have shat chalk. Whereas Charlie proposed a vision of excrement transcendent, intuiting — for this he could not have known — how in Old Tibet the Dali Lama’s turds were kept in silver and worn as amulets — a true story, if anomalous. But there is more. Like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa or Bruno Schulz’s paterfamilias thrashing in aspic, that week the fantastic claimed Miami with a suddenness that suggested the miraculous. For three days land crabs by the tens of thousands overswarmed lawns, sidewalks, driveways, carports, and Grandma’s rockery. As agile as hands, they were stunning in their sheer exuberance. Agitating in the dew of early morning and at night beneath the glazed lunes of porch lights, they could not have unraveled Frances more had they been communist transvestites herding penguins. Wildness had claimed Miami — irresistible, irreverent, infidelic, profane! Frances, who until that moment had tirelessly elbowed her way through life, was shut down. After a few minutes of ineffectual sweeping, she took to her bed with an ice pack. I recall how Charlie and I stood on the backporch and marveled at the unprecedented event; how from across the way the lady who had a knack with dumplings gaily waved.

We are told that within the decade global warming will slap us silly, and that within forty years or so, one third of all living things will have perished irretrievably. A criminal lack of imagination is making of our fragile world a flatland. We are told that flat, like fear, is good for us, somehow suitable; fear and boredom fit us better, like those mass-produced and outgassing polyesters that cover the nakedness of our presidents and late-night hosts and bankers with a doleful inevitability. But I will have none of it. And I decry the rise of plastic and the decline of fur; the confusion of capitalism and democracy; the tyranny of religion and the dereliction of moral vision; the lethally misguided notion that like suitable ideas, the creative impulse must know and keep its place; that art and literature, like trousers and radishes, are no more than commodities.

A world worth wanting cherishes the risks of wildness, and this includes not only the lavish elephants and meteoric crabs, but the stars we can no longer see; the whales hemorrhaging on our beaches; the serene mollusks and coral reaches; Gilgamesh as filmed by the Brothers Quay; the eroticized Martians imagined by Clarice Lispector; the Amazon’s poison frogs; the Sahara’s thick-coming locusts; the vociferous parrots; William Gass’s Omensetter; the worms in their legions and the yellow boas; Rosamond Purcell’s and van Leeuwenhoek’s third eyes and Borges’s Aleph; the oracle at Delphi and Gaudí’s dream of an unbounded architecture; the necessary nightmares of David Lynch; Borges’s incandescent blindness; Prince Genji’s amorous encounters; the unstoppable mulattas of Latin American literature; the collages of Max Ernst, his loplop, and, above all, the salutary tradition of a tusked and savage — and, need I say it: subversive storytelling in which the world is reinvented, rein-vigorated, and restored to us in all its sprawling splendor, over and over again.