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.
The Practice of Obscurity
PART I
In these passes long ago I saw lions, I was afraid and I lifted my eyes to the moon
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.