The Deep Zoo

Books of Natural and Unnatural Nature

SEED — I

Once the world was seeded with sympathies, a Book of Nature informing everything from the dreams of the living to the wistful expectations of the dreamless dead. Like all great books, Nature’s Book was cherished for its risks, its contrarieties, wonders, and mutabilities, and for the sanctuary it offered, just as it imposed a perilous journey. If the laws of change, set in motion “from the earliest of beginnings”¹ were embodied within each one of us, so were the seeds of myth. When Ovid opens his Metamorphoses with the words, “My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind,”² it could be Darwin speaking. And when the Rig Veda challenges, “I ask you about the uttermost ends of the earth; I ask you where is the navel of the earth; I ask you about the seed of the stallion; I ask you, where is the highest place of speech,”³ it poses questions still waiting to be answered.

Ovid describes the birth of a universe that is both ordered and boundless:

Stars and divine forms occupy the heavens, the earth harbors wild beasts and the yielding air welcomes the birds. When man appears, he, and of (his) own accord, maintains good faith and does what is right [how times change. .]; without compulsion [without compulsion!] the earth produces things spontaneously.⁴ [In Ovid’s world, Monsanto, the unimaginable, was not yet imagined.]

What if. . what if just as the traces of our earlier forms persist, encoded in our genes, a golden age persists deep within the mind, the human mind that produces a multitude of things spontaneously? And, like the “waters desirous of truth, never at any time ceases?”⁵

Years ago, a gift of a magic mushroom revealed to me, metaphorically at least, the origins of everything. But before that could happen, I needed to confront an infinitesimally small blue baboon (whom I later recognized as the associate of Egypt’s Thoth — the one who guards Death’s Portal, and who authored certain chapters of the Book of the Dead). He was exacting, malicious, and incontournable. But because I stood my ground he vanished; no trace of his acute gravity, nor his malevolence, haunted my first and last visit to. . I have no idea where! After all, there was no there there. And yet I returned from virtuality to here — which is also a dubious place, its sands very quick, its Amazons shrinking, its gleaming fish and yielding air sorely compromised — with a marvelous vision of a universe seeded with an infinite capacity to name things—and so begin to understand them with the mind.

This is what I saw: every atom of air was comprised of a Hindu god balancing in each of many palms and fists, a seminal thing. An infinity of hands was poised to seed the universe with meaning. The Blue Baboon had yielded his finite holdings to boundlessness. Then, in an instant, all this dissolved and was replaced by letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Every atom of air was now a letter inked in black. They had been hanging there forever, waiting for a breath, an intention, a receptive mind to catch fire.

(Very recently, when I saw Karl Sims’s marvelous hyperanimation Panspermia, it seemed familiar, an inevitable extension of the mushroom’s conjuration of a universe seeded with possibility.)

If this happened many years ago, I wonder even now that an agnostic and a skeptic can, within her mind’s eye, see a cosmos seeded with letters, and so: voices. But, then again, it stands to reason. Butterflies have voices. Enamored mice, bats, and whales sing to the beloved; bees write upon the air; recently I heard a deer buzz to her fawn, and having eavesdropped on them only yesterday (the local marine center has a hydrophone), I know that out at sea, the orcas are symphonic. And, by the way, they call to one another by name. Each orca has a distinctive name.

Just as a good book is poised to leap into our lives and change us, in nature every seed is poised to quicken. (There are seeds, found in ancient tombs and planted, that have leapt to life after several thousands of years in limbo.) When you look at seeds up close, you appreciate that they are as various as glyphs, and that their forms evoke a multitude of familiar — and not so familiar — things. The seed of the cornflower, say, looks like a squid from another solar system. Instead of tentacles, it has feathers; its body is hairy, and it wears its teeth like feet. Purslane could be a high-fashion evening purse of quilted raspberry silk with a gilded clasp; the seed of the yellow floating heart — and it is dispersed in water — is very like a version of a distant ancestor, a one-celled animal, its many arms (or are they legs?) orbiting its body like the beams that emanate from the solar disc during an eclipse. In fact, these are bristles that catch to the feathers of waterbirds and so assure the seed’s dispersal.

There are seeds that look like the noses of certain apes, the bottoms of apes, or parrot beaks, tortoise shells, machines of war, the crowns of pontiffs, caricatures of wags and luminaries drawn by Max Beerbohm.

Imagine with me a book that, like a seed held in the reader’s hands, under her gaze, effloresces. A book that contains not only other books, a library, the world’s library — a pleasure already almost ours — but a book that, like a living organism, evolves in unique and unexpected ways. A book whose every mutation persists in space and rides the air. That, like the chrysalis, explodes on the scene in new and dynamic forms with each reading. It is thought that whales sing their world into visibility and so: meaning, stereoptically. Let us acknowledge how their songs extend and enliven our own. Imagine with me a book that, like those gardens of Osiris and Adonis once so beloved of the Egyptians and the Greeks, is the place where Eros sleeps and dreams, and awakens again and again. A book that, as it surfaces, respires. .

NAKHT — II

Once, in Egypt, the word for scribe was nakht. It means: Observer of the Hours of the Night.⁶

The god of the interstices, Thoth, guards the truth and the portals of the palaces of deepest night. He is the god of the scribes; to appease him, one offers him a palette, brushes, and ink. Thoth heals the moon’s wounded eye and calculates its course through the sky. He inscribes the pharaoh’s name “on the fruits of the tree of history,”⁷ a tree that, as does the tree of life, suffers as we pass these brief moments.

In an ancient rock tomb of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, there is a luminous painting of a marsh. Thickets of papyrus riot with birds, and everywhere nests brim with eggs. A fertile world in which geese and falcon, ibis, and butterfly fly together. Knowingly painted, the butterflies are African monarchs.

Within this tomb that can be read like a book, the wings of the butterflies propose a secondary text with which the birds are conversant. The text, clearly visible, informs the birds of the butterflies’ toxicity. In the face of death, the butterflies flourish. What’s more, the text is not contained within the painting, but unspools into the tomb. The pharaoh’s gilded beard, so evident on the sarcophagus, his bound corpse within, are both made to evoke a monarch’s chrysalis; the pharaoh’s linens are studded with amulets in the form of butterflies.

Back to the painting. Here the space between the fertile marsh and the upper sky suggests a divine intersection, a fluid boundary between a wealth of life we can only imagine and the sacred impulse of generation. The sun itself is a fertile seed; it is an egg. Within the Book of the Dead, one reads: “If the Egg flourishes, then shall I flourish; if it lives, I shall live; if it breathes the air, I shall breathe the air; if it does not flourish, nor live, nor breathe the air, then I shall do none of these and die.”⁸

Special attention has been given to the painting of the monarch’s organs of courtship. The male’s pencil hairs, and the gland tucked within his hind wing where his pheromones are kept, is clearly visible. When a male monarch encounters a female, he will use his pencil hairs to reach for a fragrant powder of crystals, and dust her antennae. Enthralled, she will let him enter her body in a dust storm of fragrance. (The monarch butterfly’s egg looks like a grain of rice stitched with threads of mica.)

The writing on the monarch’s wings, the nests and eggs balancing among the reeds, the creatures soaring in the interstices of marsh and upper sky, the pharaoh’s beard and shroud — all speak of the breath of life. Sewn among the linens, close to the pharaoh’s body, is the ankh — that symbol of life, of living, of “the life that cannot die.”⁹

All the gods carry the ankh in their right hands; it is the oldest of the amuletic signs. And it should come as no surprise that the ankh is nothing more than a slight variation of the butterfly glyph. Or that the children who perished in the Nazi death camps chalked the walls with butterflies. Or that the face of the pharaoh on the sarcophagus rises from the chrysalis-beard like a sun. The sun, which in the Book of the Dead is called both eternal and incomprehensible, and also: joyous. Creator of eternity, the sun is born of water.

A pharaoh’s tomb is a symbol of the word — perhaps it was a vowel (in the sacred texts of Islam, it is said to be a small sequence of vowels) — that sets the world of things in motion. Steeped in gum, surrounded by jars of tripes and wine, the pharaoh is poised at the world’s edge, waiting in expectation of dissolution and the acquisition of a new orientation and identity. In other words, the tomb is an ever-evolving text, a form of dynamic earth and skywriting, an act of magic and a place of knowledge. Everything within it conspires to unbind the spirit from its husk and assure its release. (In Arabic, the verb to release is synonymous with the verb to write.)¹⁰

A final reading: the fruit of the calotrope — the toxic plant the monarch’s caterpillar feeds upon — is doubled; it looks like a pair of testicles. When the poet says to his lover, “Your balls are the fruit of the calotrope,”¹¹ he speaks to his desire, to the lover’s life force; he speaks to death, the risk of love’s death, the death of life — but also: he evokes regeneration. All these are among the mutable forms Eros takes. And, the lover embodies Eros. Like the god, he possesses “the fluid of life.”¹² Imagine with me a book that, like the heartbeat of a lover, pulses to the rhythm of the reader’s heart. The heart that, for the Egyptians, was the place where memory was safely kept, memory and the imagination.

EYE — III

In his Origin of Species, Darwin lists the qualities that give the animal a selective advantage in the struggle for life: fecundity, vigor, agility — but rarely speaks of perception. . To see or be seen: Darwin neglects the mechanisms of animal vision and focuses instead on the strategies of visibility, camouflage. . mimetism.¹³

And what of the ways in which the human animal perceives (or does not perceive) the other animals? If our eye was long ago enchanted, one could say glamorized by the beasts, it is also an unknowing eye, famished and reductive. To lethal effect, it faults and punishes the world for its mutabilities, its sprawl of forms, the ephemerality of experience, the enigmatic nature of creatures each day more incomprehensible in their gathering solitude and fragmentation — as we rush to pave the planet over with graves and extinguish the stars.

Examples of our shortsightedness abound of course, but here is one among the many that struck me for its eccentricity. Throughout the islands of the Caribbean,

the cucuju [firefly] [was] worn by the ladies as a most fashionable ornament. As many as fifty or a hundred are sometimes worn on a single ballroom dress. . the insect [was] fastened to the dress by a pin that pierces its body, and is worn only while it is still alive, for it no longer emits light after it dies.¹⁴

An insect pinned to a bodice is emblematic of a terrible loss. Because it is the hidden significance of things that both explains and propels us forward with an eager intelligence. The paradox of hidden knowledge is that it recognizes — in ways that are wordless and intimate — an embrace as old as time, older than language. And yet it is also the force that leads to the impulse of word-making. I am thinking of the appearance of written language in the Nile Valley, the seed-glyphs that encased not only the name of a thing, but its sacred and medicinal value, as well as its affinities to the proximate world. And I am thinking of the wondrous, even more ancient cuneiform of the Mesopotamians, the origins of which were secular, born of economic and administrative necessity — but which also allowed for the naming and organizing of all things perceptible: trees and the things made of wood, reeds, thatch, and basketry; the human face, its expressions, moles, and hair — and all contained in a vast number of lists. So you see, we in the West were from the start blessed or cursed with a grocer’s eye. An eye in evidence several thousand years later in one of the world’s most beautiful Books of Nature, imagined and made real by an eighteenth-century pharmacist named Albertus Seba.

Seba lived in Amsterdam at a time when the city was a center for international maritime travel. He attended to the returning sailors’ afflictions, often trading rare and exotic specimens for medicines. Over time he formed an extraordinary collection including snakes, shells, centipedes, a fetal elephant, corals, butterflies, porcupines, and squid. He commissioned artists to produce a vast series of hand-tinted copperplate engravings, which were published from 1734 to 1765.

The study of natural history free from erroneous correspondences was in its beginnings, so that the stunning plates offer a jumble of forms as inscrutable as the alphabets of unknown languages. Tantalizing, they are like the rattle that, held before the infant’s eye, exists in the mind only as long as it is visible; they imply so much yet withhold more, and once the page is turned, vanish. Seba’s insects — katydids, grasshoppers, walking sticks, and crickets — are posed in rows as stiff as toys of tin. (And they all hold their upper front legs open wide as if to greet us with an embrace.) Already there is a paucity of bees.

And yet. If naming and listing leads to a certain disarticulation of the world, it also articulates the experience of the ineffable; it allows us to consider and articulate causes and effects and even to cherish the anomalous, because when known patterns are disrupted, we are forced to consider (and to reconsider) the meanings of things. Says Jean Bottéro: “Mesopotamians, in accordance with their vision of the world, always seem to have devoted a lot of attention to mirabilia, to portenta.”¹⁵

Sometime in the first half of the second millennium, the Mesopotamians’ seminal lists evolved into a majestic encyclopedia of nearly ten thousand entries.

Our delight in taxonomy takes many forms. Recently I came upon a reference to a palace in China said to have been built by a prince named Wan-Ming. If I bring this up now, it is because Wan-Ming’s palace was — or so it seems to me — Mesopotamian in character. And it causes me to consider the real possibility that, if Nature loves order, the beautiful, and the anomalous, Wan-Ming’s impulse is not only Mesopotamian and profoundly human, but akin to the bowerbird’s delight in building his bower, the bower that, like a palace, is also a place of ordered delight.

The palace was filled with numberless and identical rooms, joined by identical passageways. One found one’s way by smelling distinctly fragrant things that filled large basins set out in each room. The first sort were made of aromatic gums such as camphor, frankincense, myrrh, and euphorbium. The second offered the scents of plants: roots, blossoms, and leaves; the bark of certain trees and perfumed oils: santal, cedar, patchouli, aloeswood, clove, pine, attar of rose. There were also plants brought from the sea. The third sort were the penetrating scents of animals: musk, civet, and ambergris — which, fabricated by the bodies of whales, can be found (according to the ancients) after the passage of thunderstorms. The children who lived in Wan-Ming’s palace never tired of inventing and navigating new itineraries blindfolded.

Imagine with me, if you will, a book of fragrances to be read with eyes closed on moonless nights, a book that in the silence of the darkest hours dispels the reader’s stubborn certitudes, banishes lies, and offers in exchange an experience of the world’s hidden coherence, the vitalities of first and last things, the strings that make up everything, those active principles in which the reader’s own dream plays its part.

SPECULATIVE METAPHYSICS — IV

Like Wan-Ming’s palace, the current and unfolding manifestations of speculative metaphysics — hyperanimation and virtual reality — offer luminous and palpable pages in a Book of Nature unlike any seen before, such as the virtual chimeras of Karl Sims, whose wondrous Galápagos offers stunningly imagined organic forms that evoke and subvert known physical bodies. In Sims’s version of Eden, offered to the public on twelve concurrent computer screens, it is not the fittest that survive but the most beautiful.

“Perhaps,” Sims says, “someday the value of simulated examples of evolution. . will be comparable to the value that Darwin found in the mystical creatures of the Galápagos Islands.”¹⁶ An idea extended further by John McCormack, whose work also provides insight into the nature of mutability, a world restlessly sparked by organic process, Eros in all its manifestations. McCormack’s chimeras are “created through simple algorithmic rules. These rules might be thought of as the artificial life equivalent of DNA.”¹⁷ He continues — and what he says is extraordinary—“A central tenet of artificial life theory holds that we are one individual instance of life—‘life as we know it’—and that there are more general mechanisms that define life—‘life as it could be.’”¹⁸ Says Robert Russett, the visionary scholar of virtuality: “As science and digital processes converge. . new systems — like human biological systems — would potentially. . adapt, learn and evolve, re-directing the(ir) design. . toward the organic.”¹⁹

Imagine with me an Absolute Book of Unnatural Nature, fully immersive, polysensory, eloquent, in which everything is reactive, self-replicating; a mutable, complex, and functioning system with which the reader — who is now far more than reader — may interact as she does with the real. Will such an artifice allow us to be more fully alive? More fully human? Will we be less fearful of the palpable dissimulations of our own imaginations than we are of the real itself? When we dissolve into and interact with fully embodied avatars, will we cease to fear our own bodies and bodies other than our own? When the things of the world are all of our own invention, will we finally allow ourselves to cherish them? Will our worlds be sparked with the Breath of Eros, or will Eros vanish? When our tigers are striped to fit our fancy, and the ruined ocean is replaced by an apparition in which phantom orcas call out to one another in Klingon — will the world finally take on real significance?

In the ancient Buddhist caves of Ajanta in India, men, women, children, and animals are painted gazing at one another in adoration. And I cannot help but wonder: as we navigate the realms of our own manufacture, will we remember how to cherish one another, or will these realms turn out to be far too self-referential, a kind of beautifully furnished tomb, a mind loop, a mirror reflecting a mirror — offering a vista that can only induce dizziness, longing, and loneliness?

And if our virtual Edens do provide a wealth of profound experience, what of those other virtualities we still need to contend with? The Books of Rage, of Tyranny and War, those persistent Books of Endings?

BREATH — V

There is a small mollusk the size of a baby’s fingernail. Over time, its foot has transformed to wings with which it navigates the oceans. A pteropod, it is fondly called a sea butterfly. Essential to the food chain, it feeds the fish that penguins and polar bears depend upon.

The sea butterfly is protected by its shell. But because of the precipitous acidification of the oceans, this shell is compromised. Within forty years, the sea butterfly will have vanished.

A perfect thing, always identical to itself, primordial, and, until now, imperishable, I think the sea butterfly is like the sacred vowels of Islamic mysticism alluded to at the beginning of this essay: the i, the a, and the u—said to spell the world. Their essential virtues are encapsulated by a consonant that protects the vowel from the eyes of the profane just as it signals its presence to the initiated. In this way the i becomes Mîm, the a: Wâw, and the u: Nûn. These extensions secure the vowels’ power.

Unlike any other science, Islam’s Science of Letters is a metascience, said to precede words and ideas, even the names of things. It is the science of the sacred breath made manifest, the breath that animates a world and assures its survival.

Imagine a Book of Nature that acknowledges, assures, and embraces the entire ecology of the planet as it respires. A world-book that, like the songlines of the whales and the Australian Aborigines, both reveals and precipitates meanings in the singing. A Book of Nature that — as do the songs of the Efe Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest — fuses the voices of insects, animals, and birds, even the sounds of thunder, lightning, and rain — making for an acoustic ecology. Imagine the book — as Borges describes it — that you and I are writing, embracing a world in which everything is given voice — the creatures and the plants, the waters within their cells, the alphabets coiled tightly within those waters, ready to unspool and quicken — a book in which everything is sparking, everything breathes.

Because our appreciation of plenitude, of the extraordinary, the unanticipated, the unknown, the ineffable — is essential to our natures. It is embodied. It makes us wise. Because Eros is sparked by Sympathies — not just between ideas, objective hazards, and leaps of mind, but encounters with mystery — the mystery of otherness and also — and evolution assures this — of likenesses. I am thinking of those instances over which we have no control, that surpass our wildest imaginings: here aesthetic intuition lies in ambush — fertile and dynamic, invigorated by delight.

Like the sea, the moment — and it is forever — is upon us; the moment spills open. And we are here to receive it and bear witness.