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