Lamarck’s animals are out of fables. They adapt themselves to the conditions of life. In the manner of La Fontaine. The legs of the heron, the neck of the duck and the swan, the tongue of the anteater, the asymmetrical or symmetrical structure of the eyes in certain fish.
It was La Fontaine, if you wish, who prepared the way for Lamarck’s doctrine. His overly clever, moralizing, judicious beasts made splendid living material for evolution. They had already apportioned its mandates among themselves.
The artiodactylous reasoning of the mammals clothes their fingers with rounded horn.
The kangaroo moves with the leaps of his logic.
This marsupial in Lamarck’s description of weak forelimbs (i.e., limbs that have reconciled themselves to their own uselessness); strongly developed hind extremities (i.e., convinced of their own importance); and a powerful thesis called the tail.
Children have already settled down to play in the sand at the pedestal of the evolutionary theory of Grandfather Krylov, that is, so to speak, Lamarck-La Fontaine. Once having found a refuge in the Luxembourg Gardens, Lamarck’s theory grew cluttered with balls and shuttlecocks.
And I love it when Lamarck deigns to be angry and smashes to smithereens all that Swiss pedagogical boredom. Into the concept of “nature” there bursts the Marseillaise!
Male ruminants butt foreheads. They have no horns as yet.
But an inner feeling, born of anger, directs “fluids” to the forehead, which aid in forming a substance of horn and bone.
I take off my hat. I let the teacher go first. May the youthful thunder of his eloquence never fade!
“Still” and “already” are the two bright points of Lamarckian thought, the throbbings of evolutionary glory and emblazoning, the signalmen and advance scouts of morphology. He was one of that breed of old piano-tuners who jingle with bony fingers in other people’s mansions. He was permitted only chromatic notes and childish arpeggios.
Napoleon allowed him to tune up nature, because he regarded it as imperial property.
In Linnaeus’ zoological descriptions, one can’t miss the successive relationship to, and a certain dependence on, the menagerie of the county fair. The proprietor of the wandering show booth or the hired barker tried to show their merchandise at its best. These barkers never dreamed they would play a certain role in the origin of the style of classical natural science. There they were, lying all out, talking rot on an empty stomach; yet at the same time they couldn’t resist being carried away by their own art. Some demon would save them, but also their professional experience, and the lasting tradition of their craft.
As a child in small-town Uppsala, Linnaeus could not have failed to visit the fair or listen with delight to the line of patter offered in the wandering menagerie. Like boys everywhere, he went numb and melted before the savvy bloke with the jackboots and whip, that doctor of fabulous zoology, who would shower praises on the puma as he brandished his huge red fists.
In linking the important accomplishments of the Swedish naturalist to the eloquence of the carnival loudmouth, I have not the least intention of belittling Linnaeus. I wish only to remind my reader that the naturalist, too, was a professional storyteller, a public demonstrator of new and interesting species.
The colorful portraits of animals in Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae might well hang beside pictures of the Seven Years’ War or an oleograph of the Prodigal Son.
Linnaeus painted his monkeys in the tenderest colonial colors. He would dip his brush in Chinese lacquers, and he would paint with brown and red pepper, with saffron, olive oil, and cherry juice. And he managed his task with dexterity and gaiety, like a barber shaving the Bürgermeister, or a Dutch housewife grinding coffee on her lap in a big-bellied coffee mill.
Delightful—the Christopher-Columbus brilliance of Linnaeus’ monkey house.
It is Adam passing out certificates of merit to the mammals, aided by a Baghdad magician and a monk from China.
The Persian miniature has a slanted, frightened, graceful almond eye.
Sensual without sin, it convinces one like nothing else that life is a precious gift, inalienable.
I love the Moslem enamels and cameos!
Pursuing my simile, I would say: the beauty’s burning, equine eye descends to the reader, gracious and aslant. The charred cabbage-stumps of the manuscripts crunch like Sukhum tobacco.
How much blood has been spilt on account of these touch-me-nots!16 How conquerors enjoyed them!
Leopards have the sly ears of punished schoolboys.
The weeping willow, having rolled itself up into a globe, flows and swims.
Adam and Eve hold counsel, dressed in the latest paradisial fashion.
The horizon has been abolished. There is no perspective. A charming slowness of wit. The vixen’s noble ascent of the stairs, and the feeling that the gardener is leaning against the landscape and the architecture.
Yesterday I was reading Firdousi and it seemed to me that a bumblebee was sitting on the book sucking it.
In Persian poetry ambassadorial winds blow out of China bearing gifts.
It scoops up longevity with a silver ladle and endows whoever might desire it with millennia by threes and fives. That is why the rulers of the Djemdjid dynasty are as long-lived as parrots.
After having been good for an incredibly long time, Firdousi’s favorites suddenly for no reason at all become scoundrels, solely in obedience to the author’s luxuriously arbitrary fancy.
The earth and the sky in the book of Shahnama are afflicted with goiter—they are delightfully exophthalmic.
I got the Firdousi from the State Librarian of Armenia, Mamikon Artemevich Gevorkian. I was brought a whole stack of little blue volumes—eight, I think. The words of the noble prose translation—it was the French version of Von Mohl—breathed a fragrance of attar of roses. Chewing his drooping gubernatorial lip, with the unpleasant voice of a camel, Mamikon sang me a few lines in Persian.
Gevorkian is eloquent, clever, and courteous, but his erudition is altogether loud and pushy, and his speech fat, like a lawyer’s.
Readers are forced to satisfy their curiosity right there in the director’s office, under his personal supervision, and books that are placed on that satrap’s table take on a taste of pink pheasant’s meat, bitter quails, musky venison, and cunning hare.
ASHTARAK17
I managed to observe the clouds performing their devotions to Ararat.
It was the descending-ascending motion of cream poured into a glass of ruddy tea, dispersing in all directions like curly-puffed tubers.
And yet the sky in the land of Ararat gives little pleasure to the Lord of Sabaoth; it was invented by a titmouse in the spirit of most ancient atheism.
Coachman’s Mountain,18 glittering with snow, a small field, sown as if for some mocking purpose with stone teeth, the numbered barracks of construction sites and a tin can jammed with passengers—there you have the outskirts of Erevan.
And suddenly—a violin, divided up into gardens and houses, broken up into a system of terraced shelves, with crossbars, interceptors, dowels, and bridges.
The village of Ashtarak hung on the purling of the water as on a wire frame. The little stone baskets that were its gardens would make the finest gift for a coloratura at a charity performance.
A place to spend the night was found in a large four-bedroom house that had belonged to some dispossessed kulaks. The collective farm administration had scattered its furniture and set it up as the village guesthouse. On a terrace that might have given refuge to all the seed of Abraham a milky washstand was grieving.
The orchard was a dancing class for trees. The schoolgirl shyness of the apple trees, the vermilion competence of the cherries . . . Look at their quadrilles, their ritornelli and rondeaux.