The Deep Zoo

PART I

One cannot speak of obscurity without considering the shadows that accumulate with growing intensity around us. Not the animating shadows Gaston Bachelard evokes, which offer a place in which to dream (although I would engage these and other marvelous exemplars of the Beautiful Obscure: the lacquerware Jun’ichir Tanizaki describes, whose gilded enhancements surge into view at the lick of a flame; Roger Caillois’s Brazilian onyxes — those rich, dark surfaces that, steeped in the eternal fog of a mineralogy museum, catch an errant beam of light and are suddenly transformed into Books of Nature), but the lethal opacities of Sade’s Silling — that bloody castle rising above a blasted world; the stubborn weather of La Bêtise Goya mastered in ink; the night at noon, when a man is made to stand beneath the sun with his head tied in a sack; the Sadean nights of Abu Ghraib; the midnight body of Matthew Shephard hanging from a fence; a night in which Blake’s torch of a tiger is extinguished, and Borges, that other tireless dreamer of tigers, is deprived of sleep; those redundant terrestrial shadows in which night after night, hour after hour, Chronos devours his son in the vanished shade of the cedars, among the vanished shadows of the feral creatures that illuminate or fail to illuminate our defective dreams.

To snatch away from us even the darkness beneath trees that stand deep in the forest is the most heartless of crimes.

— JUN’ICHIR TANIZAKI, In Praise of Shadows²

When I was a small child, our nearest neighbor — and he was a poultry farmer — candled eggs for me. One by one the eggs surrendered their opacity and, should they have one, revealed their secret. In this way the farmer knew when the yolks were doubled, and it would have pleased him to hand me a box of twelve such prodigies. Sometimes the candle revealed a spot of blood or a nascent chick rooted to the yolk like a tiny fiddle-head fern rolled up upon itself. In this way, I saw how in the beginning an animal is a kind of plant.

My first childhood room — and its floor was covered in deep blue linoleum — looked out on the meadow where our neighbor’s chickens meandered and sometimes managed to perch in the low-growing trees. Stretched out on the linoleum, I contemplated another mystery, which protracted the delicious experience of candling: a hollow Easter egg made of hard white sugar and provided with a thimble-sized diorama. I recall gazing for hours with longing at an idealized version of my window view: a miniature meadow in which a hen sat with her chicks in what seemed to be perfect silence and kindness. The paradise contained within the sugar egg cast a spell within the room and extended to the chicken yard across the street; it too was silent and ordered in my mind. Even now, and although I know it is impossible, the chicken yard is as still as a museum diorama, and as mysterious. Mysterious because it is the first landscape I pondered. Mysterious as the little wood behind the house rife with sumac and garter snakes and skunkweed and red foxes. And there was a song I loved then about a fox who goes out on a dark and stormy night to raid a chicken coop and bring a chicken dinner back to his family, who wait for him in the lair. The refrain went something like this:

And the little ones gnawed on the bones, O!

The bones O, the bones O!

And the little ones chewed on the bones!

The meadow, its hundreds of white birds, the sumac, the foxes, the neighbor’s kitchen, his gentle hand holding up a candled egg for me to see — all of these are held in thrall behind the glass of memory. And like a magic lantern image projected within a darkened room, they appear in isolation from everything else. One’s childhood is like that dark room, illuminated by the most precious, the most incongruous things!

One morning the neighbor showed me his treasure: a twoheaded chick kept in a jelly jar and floating in alcohol. This memory is dynamic and allows me to recall what it was to be six years old, fully alive and sparked by something strange and terrifying and beautiful. The two-headed chick is perpetually stimulating because it is the first event in a series of events that sparked my imagination in a novel, an unsettling, and so, salutary manner. As did the linoleum I have mentioned, which, in the shadows of evening, became an unfathomable sea of indigo water studded with yellow islands barely large enough to stand on. Tiptoeing across that linoleum, I risked my life. I knew that the thread that anchored me to the world was as delicate as the thread that anchored the forming chick to its yolk. And I had seen how the monstrous could surge forth unexpectedly from a thing as prosaic as an egg. The two-headed chick was the indication of questions I could not even begin to ask, and like the shadow games I played each evening on the linoleum, it offered a sprawl of fantasy and a troublous delight. I think it trained me in a certain kind of looking.

To look at the anomalous chick was to be given access to something precious, which, in the half-light of evening, took on a kind of substance and immediacy. This something precious had all to do with reverie, a restless imagining. The yellow islands were all the islands of the mind burning brightly in the safety of my own private darkness. They were places of essential and dangerous beauty — dangerous because they were somehow forbidden, anomalous, maybe truly monstrous. The linoleum games offered also a taste of infinity because they disrupted categories and suggested new ones. In the shadows of my room, I lived in the land of conjecture.

When one is six, many questions cannot be asked because they cannot be formulated let alone intimated.

Two years pass; it is summer and there are eight of us. We play pirates, Clue, cops and robbers, Old Maid, games of Goose, poker, cowboys and Indians, and the games of our own invention. We play at hide-and-seek, and I pride myself on the fact that I am hard to find. The year is 1951, and Senator McCarthy’s brand of obscurification is packing steam. Our fathers are college professors, and we are aware that the lethalities of the moment might possibly reach us, as might the fallout from Russian nuclear devices. There is the threat of Martians and, to a lesser degree, vampires. The brother of a classmate has been crippled by polio, and another child has drowned. Shadows, then, of one kind and another. Our knowledge of the world is both intimate — the campus where our fathers teach, the woods, the Hudson River — and vastly incomplete. But as I am about to discover, the essential things that are kept from children will manage to surge into the day. And it may even be that the darkness is a place of safekeeping.

So. The game is hide-and-seek, and the afternoon is on the wane. We scatter and I run into a vacant lecture hall — which is surely cheating — and up three flights of stairs. At the end of a dim corridor is an unlocked door, and suddenly I find myself standing in a beautiful room, spacious, its ceiling impossibly high — so high it seems the room has its own atmosphere. In fact, the air in that room smells strange, not familiar at all; not quite terrestrial. Recently I came upon an obscure reference to a room where the angels — and I don’t believe in angels — were said to receive their instructions. In my memory, this room seems a likely place. Because I am about to find what I have, unaware, been seeking. It is the one thing each child — the child who has only recently left her tail, her gills behind — seeks. The human child who is always as eager to encounter a turtle as she is a tiger or a triceratops — because she knows (and her knowledge is innate and intimate) that they are all her tribe.

Imagine a vast rectangular room, its west wall taken up with vertiginous windows. In the east the sun hangs high above the roof, and the room is heavy with shadows. The entire east wall is taken up with cabinets fronted with glass; glass spills to the floor like heavy water. The cabinets are old and pocked with bubbles; the glass is of uneven thickness. Like the restless objects of desire that elude Alice’s eyes in the sheep’s shop in Wonderland, the things in the cabinet are both appealing and enigmatic.

The sun slides down a notch and then another. And like an animated ink, the shadows within the cabinet begin to leak; they recede. The sun slides down another notch. Light floods the room and in that white air the objects within the cabinet catch fire. They twinkle.

Now imagine that you see sideral space clearly chartered. It is as if peering down a black hole you see your own face reflected in a pool. The most essential knowledge, until then glimpsed within the candled egg and the jelly jar, perceived but never before truly considered, hangs suspended in an ordered sequence — star after luminous star.

Look: here is the modular chicken, the entire progress of its gestation bared to the eye, and here: a fetal cat in levitation. To the left a single natal lizard, and above, one preliminary lamb. All this announces the greatest treasure of all: the dizzying itinerary of the human fetus; it rides the afternoon across an entire shelf. Each and every one of its gestures is expressive and luminous. And we are privileged; we are looking at the alphabet of sparks that spell the world. Some are as mute as water, some hiss like fire, some respire: this is the breath that reconciles water and fire. Here are all the points of departure: an alphabet of eyes, of the organs of speech, the five places of the human mouth, the 231 formations made tangible out of the intangible air. The one name, the one flame that cannot stand still; clairvoyance, the small intestines like seaweed floating toward the beach; the child’s face cut from fresh clay with a knife of green leaves; the lotus flower upon which Buddha sits; a serpent at the world’s edge, the embodiment of time’s passage, the twelve constellations, the twelve organs of the body. All that had been baffling, hermetic, unfolds, exquisitely palpable. And we know, without a doubt, that the ark is contained within each of us.

Like the things in the cabinet, the experience of that afternoon is not static but mutable. It is active and provides for infinite permutations. Effortless, it propels itself into the future, informing, precipitating what is to come. It is a potency that, ever after, heightens a certain kind of experience, a way of seeing and so of being. The lucent cabinet of wonders is emblematic of all optical delight — the cinema, for example, where, if the film is a good one, one shares an experience of profound intimacy in the dark with perfect strangers. And those antique pleasures that — should one be of a certain temperament — persist: the wistful stereopticon with its sepia views of vanished cities, the magic lantern, whose evening projections on the kitchen wall offer recollections of a planet as green as a freshly hatched garden snake. Need I mention objective hazards: the anamorphoses that suddenly ignite a shop window in the rain, and this just after one has been introduced to them in Baltrušaitis’s magical book. And I recall one unforgettable and consummately Parisian day in which four museums offered a seemingly inexhaustible bouquet of consecutive hasards objectifs: first, at the Jardin botanique, plants that look like minerals; then in the Galerie de Minéralogie, minerals behaving like trees; after, across the street, in the Galerie de Zoologie, animals imitating flowers; and finally, in the Louvre, a pharaonic planter in the shape of Osiris, in which the god, greening, is made eternal.

Recently I returned to the Natural History Museum in New York City to roam through the halls I have loved since infancy. The museum’s theaters of nature are famous for their rigorous beauty and because they conjure the dynamic and even thoughtful intimacy of creatures within their worlds. Carefully assembled, they convey a palpable tenderness for their subjects and offer, as if seized in clear ice, a glimpse of Eden, that rich domain. They remind us that our supposed separateness from nature is the most impoverished of illusions. These days, the visit evokes the morgue because so many of these marvelous creatures have been pushed over the edge into oblivion. And even if we manage to clone them and bring their bodies back, still they will be nothing more than the living dead, burglarized out of context, of substance, of meaning.

One could say that it is a human practice to obscure the things one loves. Consider the Dutchman Van Heurnis, who depleted entire countries of moles. He was — and the words belong to Stephen Jay Gould—“a hyperacquisitive finder” and “a meticulous keeper.” His collections of small mammals could be mistaken for stashes of rundown bedroom slippers, but apparently they satisfied Van Heurnis’s unbridled curiosity — which was admirable, his very human delight in order, the mammal’s need for satiety; in other words: a full larder.

There is another aspect to this collection: those things Van Heurnis had no time to catalog, like this uncurated jar. Here the photographer has prodded the anomalous apple so that it bobs besides the serpent’s ravening mouth. The ravening mouth is essential. After all, the salutary serpent will not allow us to settle into the dotage of complacency and demands that we question the necessity of our proliferating body bags and bloody chambers. In other words, he continues to infect us with the salutary venom of disobedience.

In Rosamond Purcell’s photograph, each element is the child of shadow and light; the jar offers a glimpse of the terrestrial stew, an emblematic and cosmological cookery: a fetal pig, moles, mice, a snake, a doubled apple, cat guts, a slug, a frog, a toad. . The jar is a celebration not only of subversion, but its snake and its apple have all to do with domesticity. For if Eve broke the rules, her other intention was to keep a garden. And if the apple is the one she bakes into a pie, it is also the one that poisons Snow White and renders her comatose. Here in this jar, roiling with things and the shadows of things, is the theater of our private dilemma: how to sip the salutary venom that inspires an unfettered individuality, a fearless vitality and sexuality, yet aspire to domestic bliss, the larder replete with bread and beasts, the bedroom secure?

The household? Or the dance of light and shade? The apple not for cookery but witchery? Purcell’s doubled apple mirrors our inherent duality; the light and shadow within us is as closely joined as this kitchen monster in its keeping medium is twinned.

PART II

In the distant past, there was the idea that all things gave and received energy. This exchange was vital and it was essential. It was thought that a very real correspondence existed between all creatures and things — minerals, the living soil, the living waters, plants. Much as a letter is sent and awaits an answer, these gave and received from one another.

And there was the magical idea that the structure of a thing was connected with its name; that to change the name was to change its inherent qualities. Such as Adam, who is formed of clay: adamah. Adamah is an active principle; it refers to the tilled soil and the earth with which one builds an altar. And, its color is red. Dam is the word for blood.

Adam’s nature is also volcanic. He is made in darkness, in secret, deep within the earth, and he is red with fire. The early stage of his creation is called the glowing. There is an ancient book written in Syriac in which Adam’s face is described as being as beautiful as the sun. His body and his face, his eyes — all glow mightily like the sun. So you see, Adam cannot be disassociated from his name. He is red hot, volcanic, earthly, magnetic.

Plato tells us that every living thing is hot and has a flame residing within it. When in the darkness God breathes into Adam’s nostril and brings him to life, this breath is called nefach: the breath that kindles fire.

Once, a person had two names: a secret name that assured his safety and potency, and a serviceable, everyday name. Creatures and plants — like the owls and lotus blossoms and willow trees of Egypt — had names whose very sounds were the instruments of spiritual energy. But when Adam gives names to things of fire and breath, his singular power, his privilege, and his alienation, are openly declared, and Eden’s capacity to inspire and regenerate is compromised.

Moral complexity is not Adam’s forte, nor is clairvoyance. He is the son of Yahweh after all, and domination is to his taste. Like a grocer, he parcels out the animals: those that creep upon their bellies and thrive in confusion — the venomous scorpion, the snake — these he despises. The docile cattle he enthralls, and in envy, fear, and ignorance, demonizes the wild beast. The intuition that all forms surge from the same flame, the same breath, and that all living things are siblings — Adam obscures.

Which brings us to another seminal myth that persists not only because of its tragic beauty, but its psychological acuity: the story of Enkidu, that other man-as-he-was-in-the-beginning, and Gilgamesh his king. The story of Enkidu and Gilgamesh is, above all, one of alienation and guilt, of notoriety confused with and exchanged for eschatological salvation, and an ecstatic journey devolving into a progression of violent and self-defeating acts that lead to an apocalypse — the very apocalypse we face: the obscuration of Nature. In this way it can be read as a parable of our own age in crisis.

Gilgamesh the king is above all a builder of cities, and the story opens with a walk through Uruk, a great city masterfully built of oven-fired brick. One third of Uruk is given over to quarries of clay, and close at hand the forests provide fuel for the kilns. This is how Gilgamesh makes his mark upon the world, in brick. And he is like a brick wall. A tyrant and a rapist, he is unyielding and incontournable. So abusive has he become, the gods are called upon to intervene. And so, in silence, “The goddess conceives an image in her mind; she dip[s] her hands in water and pinche[s] off clay which she let[s] fall in the wilderness.”⁴ A falling star, Enkidu blazes to Earth.

Like Adam, Enkidu is made of clay; like Adam, he glows. Born of fire and breath, I think he is like the sacred vowels of the Arabs, which open the door to sublime understanding. Vowels like the Mîm, the Wâw, and the Nûn that Ibn ‘Arabî describes so passionately — that have no beginning and no end and contain the infinite possibilities of the created, the imagined world. Such is Enkidu’s promise: a lucent world of infinite possibility. A savage man, he lives in perfect understanding among the creatures of the forest. It is significant that before he is made he is dreamed. Above all, the epic of Gilgamesh is a revelation of the profound significance of dreaming.

Word of Enkidu’s strength and beauty reaches the king. But before they meet, Enkidu blazes into Gilgamesh’s dreams, first as a meteor too heavy to be lifted and then as a gleaming axe fallen to the street. When he asks his mother the meaning of his dreams, she tells him Enkidu is “the brave companion who rescues his friend in necessity.”⁵ Yet the only thing Gilgamesh needs to be rescued from is himself. The great builder of Uruk has gone terribly astray. Like a bright blade in the mind, Enkidu has been made not only to stop him, but to transform him.

A spark that dissolves the night, a fallen star, and also Gilgamesh’s twin, his mirror, the revelation of his entombment — the meteor’s terrible weight exemplifies the king’s affection, his leaden soul. His name obscured, Gilgamesh’s agony will become his own.

As you will recall, a temple whore is sent into the forest to seduce Enkidu and weaken him. His match in sexual vitality, they come together like forces of nature. Enkidu gluts on her richness and abandons his innocence for her own brand of wildness — an artful and deceitful sexuality. First she exhausts him, then she makes a man of him, a bread-eater and a killer. He is now ready, like any thug, to wrestle with the king and lose. He is reduced to Gilgamesh’s hireling, his “axe” and his shadow. “I am weak,” Enkidu laments. “My arms have lost their strength, the cry of sorrow sticks in my throat.”⁶ Debased, robbed of selfhood, Enkidu is prepared to destroy everything he loves. When he dies, it will be in shame. He will say, “Once I ran for the water of life, and now I have nothing.”⁷ The luminous dreaming of the story’s beginning collapses into nightmare.

Enkidu and Gilgamesh set off together to destroy the cedar forest, its tree of life — which Gilgamesh will have made into a door — and Humbaba, the forest’s ferocious protector. Like the rich domains Herodotus describes weeping incense and rife with beasts, the forest grows on a mountain. The cedar mountain is not only home to all the gods, but it stands above the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness. The place of all our darkest fears and greatest potencies, it exemplifies the unconscious mind. It is, the text tells us, the place from which dreams are sent to men, and on their journey, Gilgamesh will not cease to dream. These dreams will never encourage both men but will always be warnings of the mortal damage they are about to inflict upon themselves and their world. And it is no accident that once the forest has been destroyed, torn up by its roots, Gilgamesh will fall speechless to the ground, weighted down in the terrible dark of nightmare. He tells Enkidu,

I seized hold of a wild bull in the wilderness, it bellowed and beat up the dust till the whole sky was dark, my arm was seized and my tongue bitten. .

I dreamed again. We stood in a deep gorge of the mountain, and beside it we two were like the smallest of swamp flies; and suddenly the mountain fell, it struck me.⁸

Driven by the fear of his own eclipse, Gilgamesh pushes on, eager when Enkidu — now nothing more than the embodiment of the king’s worst instincts, his demon—reassures him. In his youth, Gilgamesh had seen dead bodies floating in the swollen rivers. He is aware that his glory is nothing more than a “breath of wind.” And he knows that if he destroys Humbaba, even if he dies in the attempt, his name will persist. This is what fatally drives Gilgamesh: the idea of an interminable name. And there is something else, a kind of helpless rage and fearfulness. Gilgamesh can do nothing to evade the underworld. Only the gods have access to heaven. Here, as Enkidu dreams it, is the underworld of Mesopotamia: submerged in darkness, the dead sit together like blind and flightless ravens, with only their wings to hide their nakedness. The dead sit in silence in the dust and the shadows and they eat clay. This is how Gilgamesh and Enkidu will spend eternity: lamenting in obscurity, incapable of dreaming.

Perhaps this is the Real’s greatest paradox: it must be dreamed in order to be lived. After all, to dream the Other is to dispel the shadows of distrust and prepare for the initial encounter. Before he falls into the world, the child is dreamed. As is the lover, embraced in a reverie that is the gift of clairvoyance. Or the city one imagines, before walking its streets — Paris, Oaxaca, San Cristobal, Baghdad. When it is dreamed, the real flourishes like a garden. But one must, as Italo Calvino says, dare dream very high dreams.

When he was a child of three, Jorge Luis Borges saw a tiger at the zoo; a delightful little drawing of the tiger, Borges’s Aleph, his Zahir, survives. Borges’s biographer suggests that the tiger seized his imagination because, like Borges’s own father, it was beautiful, impossible to approach, powerful, and enigmatic; dangerous, perhaps. This tiger became the primary potency that animated that necessary writer’s imagination. Which was the tiger that enabled Borges to become Borges? Was it the Javanese, the Balinese, the Caspian? Three tigers that are now extinct. Three tigers that have been obscured forever.

In the jail at Nighur, the governor showed him a cell whose floor and vaulted ceiling were covered by a drawing (in barbaric colors that time, before obliterating, had refined) of an infinite tiger. It was a tiger composed of many tigers, in the most dizzying of ways; it was crisscrossed with tigers, striped tigers, and contained seas and himalayas and armies of what resembled other tigers.⁹

[The] animals race by. .¹⁰

— Once upon a time there was a parrot whose entire body trembled with passion when it sang.

Friends, it will be lonely.

— There was once an owl who called out to its companions telling of rain, and who cherished accordion music.

There are lonely times ahead.

— Once a macaw the color of lapis lazuli.

Our children will be wistful for those things that tell them who they are. .

— A giant sea tortoise whose flesh, according to Pliny, was an excellent remedy for the bites of salamanders.

The marvelous lineage of the living.

— A fish who cautiously carried her young in her mouth.

Wistful, they will want to see the vanished lions.

— Like the lion that continues to prowl the alchemical manuscripts, sometimes with the sun held in his teeth.

And if our limits are determined by the opacity of others, the obscurity of our own intentions and desires, the hidden neurosis that saps our energy and capacity for lucency. .

— Once birds flew in such numbers their bodies obscured the sun. They made a sound “like a hard gale at sea passing through the riggings of a close-reefed vessel” (Audubon). They made a sound like the rattling of many thousands of small bells in the fists of as many children.

— Once there was a country rich in moles; and a large bird whose skin was used for lining boots.

Flocks of butterflies,

Waves breaking upon waves.¹¹

In this sea of enigmas.¹²

— Once upon a time there was a bird — I think I said this — whose wings made a sound like a hard gale at sea. .

O merveille, un jardin parmi les flammes!¹³