The Deep Zoo

Eros Breathing

The creative impulse, Eros breathing and dreaming within us, is radical to the core. Driven by inconstancy, restless, dynamic — it evolves. And like biological processes, it thrives on spontaneity, the necessary anomaly. A shape-shifter wired to subversion and beauty, it is also sublimely rational. Intuitive intelligence cultivates features that assure success: thorn, horn, scales, and fur; flamboyant courtship and postures; the love poem; mythmaking; the asking of riddles. The human imagination poses searching riddles, and the moment it does, poetry and science, philosophy and cosmology are born:

How does the wind not cease, nor the spirit rest? Why do the waters, desirous of truth, never at any time cease?

— Rig Veda

“The Riddle,” Hans Jonas proposes, “is a sacred thing.” One cannot help but think at once of Lewis Carroll, whose Alice is forever on the front line of the subversive and the avant-garde. Born of intuition and a deep and fearless seeing, Carroll’s inspired nonsense does a devastating job of unmasking the contradictions, presumptions, and perils of Empire. When Humpty Dumpty brags:

I took a corkscrew from the shelf;

I went to wake them up myself.

Dick Cheney could be speaking. (“The Snark was a Boojum, you see.”) As when certain other uninitiated Republicans succumb to an overspill of egg and explain their words were misspoken— spoken without their awareness. (This could be true.)

Eros (and the Alice books brim with it) and Empire are incompatible; we can easily exchange Eros for Truth (and the proof of this pudding is Bradley Manning, thrust into the treacle well for rending the veil). Empire fears and resents rational discourse, the tested intuitions, the bare facts that offer us the means to approach, unmask, and unriddle the enigmatic and vertiginous world. Writes George Steiner, “In the Gestapo cellars, stenographers (usually women) took down carefully the noises of fear and agony wrenched, burned or beaten out of the human voice.” Steiner goes on to speak of “a language being used to run hell, getting the habit of hell into its syntax.”

If the domain of Eros and Truth is the creative imagination — an ascendant irrational — and the child of clairvoyance and perception (and so: compassion), Humpty Dumpty and his ubiquitous tribe exemplify the abyssal irrational: reductive, determined by paranoia, shortsighted if not downright lethal. If the children of the ascendant irrational are poetry and science, the abyssal irrational suffers a deep-seated distrust of both.

But despite the fact of their ongoing abuse, ideas and the words that convey them continue to matter — profoundly so. When on September 11, 1973, Victor Jara, the great Chilean guitarist and singer, was taken to Chile Stadium and brutally beaten, the bones of his hands broken, then dared by his captors to sing. He raised his voice and sang “Venceramos” to the five thousand others who would perish as well, and whose voices joined his own. In a poem Jara managed to write that was hidden in a friend’s shoe, are the lines,

We are ten thousand hands

Which can produce nothing

Yet in that moment in hell,

One dead, another beaten,

As I could never have believed

A human being could be beaten.

Eros, its tree of life and serpent, triumphed — the serpent, that tireless emblem of inquiry and indignation; Jara wrote:

What I see, I have never seen before.

What I felt and what I feel,

Will give birth to the moment.

We are keepers, you and I, of a special gift: if the creative impulse is to remain vital and resurgent, “The book we begin tomorrow must be as if there had been none before, new and outrageous as the morning sun,” (Ernst Block). Says Borges, “You raise your eyes and look.”