That afternoon I looked for Leif, but instead ran into Sam on the inn"s porch.
"Leif"s got the gator bug," Sam informed me, pulling items from his various pockets-a penlight, a calculator, a tube of antibiotic, a chocolate bar-and rearranging them into other pockets. "He"s gone to look at them. I was just heading down there." He beckoned, circling with his arm, the way a big dog looks around and dips his head in a circle, for you to follow. I liked Sam-nothing seemed to bother him much, except for the misuse of national parklands. We strolled through the moist sunshine to the spot where my nephew lay, beside the fenced enclosure. What made a little boy go belly-down on concrete, propped on his elbows, sneakers b.u.t.terflied to left and right, showing us the crabapples of his tonsils?
"Leif, what are you doing?" Leif"s mouth was a clear pink O rimmed with milk teeth. "Leif, aren"t you going to tell me?" I knelt beside him and tweaked his nose. He bit my hand. "Hey!"
"I"m gaping," he explained with dignity. "Gators gape to cool off."
"Maybe," Sam demurred. "We don"t really know why they do that." Leif gaped again and I found I had to yawn. "Now I"m gonna yawn," said Sam and did. "Yawns are infectious and so is scratching. That"s primate behavior, monkey see, monkey do. Tell you what, Leif-when a monkey sees another monkey grab something, the same cells light up in his brain as if he grabbed it himself, did you know that? Primates are hardwired to imitate others. We pick up the feelings of others by imitation, too. That"s called empathy." He pitched his voice for my ear. "Women are supposed to be better at it than men." I glanced up and felt my body send a telegram-and looked hastily down again.
Leif snapped his jaws, turned red, and bawled through his tears, "Ow, my tongue! Auntie Sopheeee! I bit my tongue and it huuuurts!" I hugged Leif with more than due diligence while Sam a.s.sumed a stance of scientific detachment, hands in pockets, and watched the alligators gape, their creamy throats working below immobile, open jaws.
THAT NIGHT, I FRETTED and tossed, tugged one way by an impression that if I got close to Sam he would smell like warm sand, and the other way by the need to spend my time wisely. How many invisible alligators would I have the chance to observe, back home, versus how many human males? And supposing Sam were unique, a heart-find, what good would it do when he discovered that my house, my car, all my activities, were arranged around invisible beasts? Sam was a devoted naturalist. He lived in a parallel, nonintersecting universe, waiting for a woman who loved visible nature as much as he did. But I tossed and turned, until Toto disengaged from my pillow and plastered itself to the ceiling. Humans love drama. An Oormz wants peace.
WE HAD TWO DAYS LEFT on the island, and I spent the morning behind binoculars, crouched in the scrub, my notepad on one knee. Rain had stormed through the night, and the ground before the gator hole had liquefied into clay-red puddles, reflecting palmetto fronds. They looked like blades in blood. My gator was having a slow day, since the island"s animals were drinking rainfall. I had to search for its black nostrils, their rims exactly even with the water. This tactic spelled hunger. A gator"s head is covered with sensors that detect the slightest shimmy of the water"s surface; clearly, my gator was maximizing its sensor use. The twin eyes looked a little bleary, I thought. Of course an alligator wouldn"t mind lying in water up to its eyelids, for hours, for a meal, would it? By noon it had caught nothing, while cricket frogs visited the puddles like muddy raindrops. To a ten-foot-long reptile, they meant about as much as a sprinkling of jimmies to a hungry man-and in any case, they weren"t jumping into the lair. They were just rubbing it in.
I went back for lunch and looked for my family. Erik wasn"t on the porch swing. I strode over the lawn, calling for Leif, and heard my name shouted by a chef at the kitchen entrance, a spike-haired youth in a white ap.r.o.n, calling through cupped hands; and when I pelted up he repeated that Leif had been missing since early morning and a search party had gone out, in Sam"s jeep. He apologized for hollering at me, and the kitchen crew gathered, flour paste on their fronts, sweat on their hairlines. I thanked everybody, then went and stood still under the live oaks as pure alarm drained down my muscles and out my soles. Obsession ran in our family. Leif had the gator bug. The missing factor in the equation came to me, the thing my body was trying to tell me. It was what Leif had said, yesterday, when I"d tucked him in for his nap.
"Auntie Sophie," he"d asked, "could a gator eat a velociraptor?"
"Nope." But his eyebrows drew together in a miniature version of his father"s bristling shelves.
"Could a gator come in a house?" I"d stroked his cheek.
"Nope. We have special alligator alarms that go off, special alligator barriers, electronic barriers that keep them out." My nephew flung himself on his back and stared at the ceiling.
"Where"s the alarm? Is it on the ceiling?"
"It"s invisible. The technology is invisible so it won"t spoil the pretty rooms. Now go to sleep," I"d said firmly, and went into the bathroom to put on my makeup for dinner. Leif was murmuring to himself; I"d been pleased that he was finally drifting off. Now I heard the words that I"d ignored. Leif had murmured, "Safe . . . on the ceiling . . . nice velociraptor."
It wasn"t nonsense, after all. Leif had been rea.s.suring Toto, a creature on the ceiling, who reminded him of a velociraptor. That could only mean one thing. My nephew could see invisible beasts. And for the last two evenings, over dinner, he"d heard the adults chaffing Aunt Sophie about the alligator she thought she"d seen on the trail. And alligators were Leif"s pa.s.sion, his obsession, and I began to move toward the forest as a runner heads into a collapsing tunnel . . .
AFTER WHAT I WITNESSED and experienced at the alligator lair, sleep was out of the question. That night, sleep was a quaint custom belonging to a remote era. I seized a candlestick, wrapped myself in a terry-cloth robe, and crept down four flights, pa.s.sing closed doors, hearing snores, feeling the wooden weight of the early hours, rubbing my palm over the round banister finial at each landing to make sure I was awake. My candle flickered. I paused until it regained its composure. The inn, at this hour, felt like the backstage of something, a dream maybe, in which a person without gender or identifying complexities drifts, vaguely lit, toward no known end. I froze before crossing the ray that shone from underneath the door to Evie and Erik"s room. My sister and her husband were awake, and no wonder. They surely had much to discuss.
I skated on my toes past that tense ray, and finally, with a sense of dubious triumph, stood in the parlor before the leather armchair where I"d promised myself, a long time ago and several flights up, to spend the wee hours thinking. I set the candle on a mahogany table corner, which it glorified, and got into the armchair, which had unforeseen b.u.mps and angles. But it was good. My thinking, however, was swamped by frog song, the loudest, highest, densest, most vibrant frog song in the universe at that hour. Gradually I grew used to the smudges around the room, reminiscent of their daylight shapes, lyrebacked chairs and ball-footed tables, and the glimmer of windows whose drapes were pinned back to admit the intangible glow of night clouds. Then there was a shadow moving toward me on human feet.
"h.e.l.lo," said a voice. Someone bent over me and rested two long, reddened, creased hands on the ends of my armrests. I raised the candle to see, from underneath, its slightly alarming synopsis of Sam"s face. We talked in near whispers. He"d seen my light from outside; he kept late hours.
"Usually if I see a light, it"s kids getting up to trouble. I"m glad it"s you," he said, and paused. "It was kind of rough, out there at the gator hole. I don"t mind fixing a drink, if you"d care for one. Help you sleep," he added, conscientiously. So Sam fixed us gin and tonics, working with a flashlight and surprisingly few clinks and clatters. Our gla.s.ses touched in the candlelight; Sam sat in a twin armchair, on the other side of the illuminated table. We couldn"t see each other, but it didn"t matter. He wanted me to explain things he didn"t understand about the gator hole affaire. I tried, flushed with alcoholic frankness, but it was difficult. You don"t keep a secret like invisible beasts your whole life, and then casually confess to the first gin-slinging naturalist who comes along. Also my memories were so muddled that Sam tried to straighten them out with his own version.
"When Erik and I drove up," he commenced, "there you were on all fours, clutching the boy and yelling, and he looked like he was trying to crawl away from you, and you were both covered in mud." He paused. "It sounds funny now, but at the time you sounded-I"m sorry, but you sounded like the devil was after you. I honked the horn but you went right on yelling and trying to hold on to Leif. Then your brother-in-law jumped out of the jeep and pulled up a tree. Never seen anything like it. He pulled up a pine sapling and flung it at the gator hole. And he was whooping and hollering like a-well. Remember that?"
"I don"t remember anything till I, sort of came to, in the jeep. I"m sorry I was acting so crazy." Sam laughed slightly.
"There"s another thing-how you got in the jeep. Erik slung you under one arm, and the kid under the other, like it was nothing. Threw you both in together. Never saw such a guy. Was he ever in pro wrestling? I don"t mean to pry. Look," Sam urged, in a low voice, "I"ve really enjoyed meeting you, Sophie, and your folks. I"m just a bit puzzled what to make of you all." I stretched my feet into the darkness, toed the leather piping on the footrest, sighed, and said, "We were hypnotized. Leif and I."
"Hypnotized? By what?"
"By the alligator. No, listen. It had strange eyes. It blinked in a strange way-"
"Bli-inked?" Southern incredulity. I tried again. I shut my eyes and did my best to describe the awful picture behind them. It was why I"d given up sleep: when I shut my eyes, the cold, ugly, glowing stones appeared. They blinked, left, left, right, I couldn"t stop my mind from following their code, the code to confusion. I remembered that I"d locked onto Leif"s kicking body, but a mental mist-like the one when you"re about to black out-had kept me from knowing, except in glimpses, if I was still holding on, or if my nephew was gone, crawling to that dreadful pool, summoned. There wasn"t even an "I"-just a mosaic of terrors and struggles, the precious glimpses of Leif still with me, still kicking, trying to crawl toward the monster; and through it all those d.a.m.ned eyes, drilling away, blink by blink. Left right right left. Trying to convey this to Sam, I lost courage and drained my gla.s.s; it occurred to me that I looked drunk and red-nosed, in a bathrobe, and was grateful for the dark, and for the frogs" singing as the words stumbled out. Sam uttered a soft snort. And the frogs kept singing.
"Tell you what," Sam said at last, "I hear a lot of ghost stories, on this island. Elf lights. One summer it was all elf lights. Some family had left their dog toys behind, those b.a.l.l.s that glow in the dark? Don"t be mad at me because that"s not what I think your story is. I don"t think so because I did some poking around. I"ve seen tracks, which proves nothing because gators move around; could be any gator"s tracks. But I also found cached prey, stuck in the roots right beside that hole-"
"A baby racc.o.o.n." I sniffled into a c.o.c.ktail napkin. "I saw it die."
"Yes, that"s right," Sam said slowly. "There are clear signs of a gator in that hole. You got lucky, seeing him, or unlucky, and maybe he wouldn"t have scared you so much if your nephew hadn"t tried to get friendly with him. That would scare anybody. Fear does strange things. If you say the animal blinked, well, maybe he did, but there"s always a reason for these things. His eyes may be injured." Suddenly I wanted to look at Sam, not his shadow. I took the candle and slid forward to hold the small light nearer to that voice in the dark. To my surprise, Sam was leaning forward too, elbows on knees, and I startled, having expected air where his face was blooming out, his brow grooved deeply above the smiling eyes. "Don"t you feel a little sorry for the fellow, Sophie? Having some sort of, what, ocular discomfort, and no doctor around?" This point of view, the squinting Hypnogator"s, hadn"t occurred to me, but it did now with an odd soft intensity. I thought about it. Sam"s fingers were laced; the heels of his palms met and parted, met and parted like a question-trust her, don"t trust her? I put my hand in his. After that, there was nothing but to go upstairs together.
That night, Sam showed me how alligators make love. It wasn"t toothy. They slide against each other, slowly, to their full length. We did a lot of m.u.f.fled laughing. When I fell asleep, I saw my alligator sliding through the salt marsh, and beside him another, a female, gliding along. Their two armored noses just cleared the water in the moonlight, crisscrossed by sighing rushes. Then I started to laugh in my dream, because instead of cold, hypnotic eyes, I saw two pairs of tortoisesh.e.l.l eyegla.s.ses, one with rhinestone corners, perched on those saurian snouts! What happens to their gla.s.ses when the gators dive?-I wondered and awoke. The bed was covered in moonlight. I spread my fingers in it, and lightly patted the blankets mounded over Sam. The explanation for the alligator"s behavior spilled out of my dream and into thought.
My alligator was nearsighted! It squinted and blinked because it was trying to see. At some point in the past eighty million years or so, evolution began to favor invisible alligators who squinted in a particular pattern that had the effect of hypnotizing-not visible prey, who couldn"t see its shiny eyes-but invisible prey, who could. My gator probably didn"t realize its effect on invisible creatures like that poor Poltergeist Possum: it just squinted at them, perplexed, trying to see why they didn"t come closer to its water hole. Not diabolical: myopic! I hugged myself with glee. A gator hypnotist! I dubbed it the Hypnogator. I whispered its name in the moonlight, which had a swimming feel, as if it flowed from the dream marshes. Impossible to share this with Sam, but something told me that without our night together, I would never have solved the mystery. I slid back under the blankets and into warmth, double-personed, magical; and with it the thought that all rare creatures were happy accidents, and that included the Hypnogator, myself, my Oormz, my Oormz-seeing nephew, my valiant brother-in-law, my indomitable baby sister . . . and my lover, fellow-being, this curled, radiant person whose rough toes I found with my own. There. Who could not love a process that refined raw accidents into rare advantages? Evolution was luck in slow motion, luck abiding by purely formal rules that lent it the helpless beauty of swan songs and the energy of good jokes. Perhaps, if Sam could understand as much as that, I"d find a way to tell him more. And I listened to the tree frogs keep on singing, wave after wave of them, perpetually on key.
3.
Nothing is more American than the study of b.u.t.terflies. We proudly number many b.u.t.terfly savants in our history, like Samuel Scudder, chronicler of the monarch. Indeed, our Declaration of Independence says that happiness is to be pursued, as one chases b.u.t.terflies with nets. As a patriotic citizen, I duly add this note concerning invisible b.u.t.terflies.
Grand Tour b.u.t.terflies I CALL THE INVISIBLE b.u.t.tERFLIES "Grand Tours" because of their extensive travels. Monarch b.u.t.terflies travel three thousand miles in their brief, nine-month lives, but invisible b.u.t.terflies outdistance them. There are three varieties, of which one is the rarest. You cannot chase it. Once, it chased me-scared the daylights out of me, too, though I adored every minute. That"s how unusual it is. Each variety of Grand Tour defends itself with its wing display, designed to discourage predators (that is, invisible predators, which can see Grand Tours, and are quite as deadly as their more conspicuous counterparts). This is hard to do, because very few animals-whether frogs, mantises, spiders, snakes, wasps, rats, ants, or birds-would not like to eat a tasty, helpless b.u.t.terfly. Of the three Grand Tour varieties, only one really succeeds in defending itself well; that is the one I can"t catch. The one that came after me. Here they are, in order of their wing patterns.
1. Aposematically patterned These Grand Tours are globe-trotters. They travel in search of food and they"re not picky; liquefied yak dung or Nile mud slurry are fine. They don"t starve, but they do get tired. When thousands of them subside all at once onto a single North American lilac bush, that"s a good time to come creeping up behind the bush, brandishing a net. Some will be picking their way, like women in stiletto heels, over lilac cl.u.s.ters to nose into a blossom. But others will be sunning, spreading their wings. And what do the wings of Grand Tours display? Travel pictures. On one wing appears a tan thumbprint; looking closer, you"ll see a deserted limestone amphitheater in the glare of noon. Another shows on each wing a steep forest, and on the thorax between them a blue river, and reflected in the river, a bra.s.s-colored train climbing deeper and deeper into the sky, among snow-covered Alps. Another shows moonlit sand dunes, pocked with thousands of rust-colored meteors, each in its own sickle of shadow, that have fallen over the course of eons and never been viewed by a human eye. How lucky you are that Grand Tours fly over the Sahara and then perch on your lilacs.
You can thank their unusual scaling. All b.u.t.terflies have scales consisting of the flat, hard ends of tiny fibers, arranged like a mosaic. On Grand Tours, instead of a flat mosaic, the fiber ends stack up in a three-dimensional pattern, much like the patterns that produce the 3-D image in the corner of your credit card. Grand Tours, essentially, are flying holograms. This variety depends on aposematic patterning, i.e., colorful patterns that warn predators away. Most b.u.t.terflies" colors tell the predator, "You can"t eat me because I taste awful, may be poisonous, and you"re really not that desperate." The Grand Tour"s travel pictures tell predators, "You can"t eat me because I"m far away in a foreign country."
But when you"re in big trouble, pretending that you"re not really here fools n.o.body. It"s a feeble defense. Most of this type gets eaten.
2. Aposematically patterned crepuscular The crepuscular Grand Tours are seen toward dusk on flowers that stay open all night, like peonies. They have pictures of the universe on their wings, and you can easily spot them if you know a little astronomy. On one pair of black wings, tawny veins depict the brown, boiling dust pillars out of which stars form. Another b.u.t.terfly exhibits spiral galaxies, one per wing, colliding like squashed, vaporous Ionic capitals. Another is spotted with planets crowned with electric auroras. An uncommon variety, harder to spot in the dimness, shows concentric bands of molecular sludge sloshing away from a diabolical black hole, located on the dorsal abdomen. These planetarium-like displays are perfectly natural; corals and snails also resemble gaseous formations and spiral galaxies, because nature"s physical laws tend to mult.i.task her forms. The defense of the crepuscular Grand Tour b.u.t.terfly lies in telling the predator, "You can"t eat me because I"m in outer s.p.a.ce."
This merely makes the predator bemused. It prevents nothing, and isn"t a good defense.
3. Cryptically patterned chimerical Crypsis is camouflage. These Grand Tours made a single summer memorable; since then, I have not seen them-though that might point more to my gullibility than to their absence. They use a social defense by swarming together to produce camouflaging illusions, composed, like jigsaw puzzles, out of many individual b.u.t.terflies. One of their illusions tells a predator, "You can"t eat us because we"re just a big rock." I was a victim of this trick. One warm day in July, I brought a book and a cold beer up to my pond, to sit on a boulder in the shadiest spot overlooking the water. I was about to set the beer bottle, nicely sweated, by my feet, as I pressed the book open with my thumb and lowered my backside onto a boulder. It was a big, sun-warmed, striated boulder, complete with lichen. Or so it seemed. I fell in the pond, b.u.mped against a ba.s.s, and came up snorting water out of my sinuses while my book drowned, and the rocky bank foamed with good Belgian beer, attracting ants, bees, and wasps precisely where I had to scramble up. Around my head danced-as if in mocking solicitude-a cloud of Grand Tours flashing partial images of weathered striations and lichen. Since then I"ve been as cautious as a dog about where I seat myself. But it was a fair price to pay for seeing the Grand Tours mount a social defense, using the excellent principle of strength in numbers.
The reason I call this variety "chimerical," however, has to do with their most striking use of the social defense, by which, once, I was rendered stupid with astonishment. And if they can do that to a h.o.m.o sapiens, they can probably stupefy smarter animals too. You might call it the jaw-dropping defense-makes biting much harder for predators . . .
This defense consists of the Grand Tours ma.s.sing together in the shape of large, fabulous creatures, too big and too weird to tangle with. On a normal spring afternoon, as you leaf through junk mail before entering the house, you hear a stir overhead, and looking up, you stagger backward onto the porch and collapse against the front door, feeling behind your back for the latch with a nerveless hand from which the junk mail has dropped. A snow-white stallion is charging down your yard at the level of the treetops, in the air. On its back, seated between its sky-blue wings, leans a knight. He is clad in armor so bright it sizzles your retinas. He is aiming his lance straight at you. You are numb with fright, flabbergasted, and singing loudly-no, that comes afterward, after a few drinks. Right now, your jaw is dropping at the sight of the stallion"s streaming white mane-and the violently lashing lion"s tale that sprouts from its equine rump. You can almost hear the b.u.t.terflies bellowing, "Take that, frogs, mantises, spiders, snakes, wasps, rats, ants, and birds. Take that, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!" You slump onto your threshold, cross your arms over your knees, and give a deep, deep sigh.
It"s the best defense. Take courage from this. Nothing beats imagination on the wing.
Invisible Beasts in Print
1.
The command of symbolic language is what divides humanity from other animals-so goes the common idea, to which there is some truth. But from the sheep whose tanned hides became the bearers of inked words, to the symbols organizing our thoughts today, other species loom large in language. None more so than Think Monkey.
Think Monkey SOME BEASTS ARE GOOD TO EAT, some are good to live with, but all are indispensable for thinking with. We think about ourselves with the help of other animals-we are mulish, catty, busy as bees, cold fish, small fry, dogs in the manger, doves, hawks, bearish, bullish, sheepish, cowed, elephantine; we ferret or worm things out; we horse around, clam up, get crabby; some of us are paid moles, and I, personally, am a real b.i.t.c.h. Lacking a beast that precisely suits the purpose, sometimes we have to invent one. Such is Think Monkey.
Think Monkey is the reason why we are not conscious of our inmost thoughts; and why genius, as a poet said, is a secret to itself. She is known to neuroscience by the name of homunculus, or "little person." I have reason to believe she is a ho-monkey-lus, or more concisely, Think Monkey.
Hey!-you might object-I am conscious of my inmost thoughts.
Well, no. Think it over. Am I conscious of my basic sensory activity, even? Do I feel a hundred billion calcium concentrations dropping inside my neurons, a hundred million sparks merging in wave fronts? No. What I get, as a result of all that frantic activity, is a banana. My banana is yellow and freckled, smells terrific, tastes the way I remember from my last banana, and that"s what I"m conscious of. My conscious mind is a representation of the brain"s activity. This representation exists so that I can handle the unexpected, which always comes along to threaten a life-form. Handling the unexpected is what nerve cells doing automatic processing jobs can"t do. They can"t reflect on what they"re doing. But I, being conscious, can.
I can do all sorts of things with my beautiful conscious mind: I can deliberately tear off two more bananas and juggle them-well, no, I can"t juggle them. But it was a conscious act while it lasted. Now, these notions pa.s.sing through my mind are not my inmost thoughts. Those are inaccessible to my conscious mind. My inmost thoughts are ma.s.sive computations performed by gelatinous giant molecules like alien s.p.a.ceships b.u.mping and docking and linking with other kinky, s...o...b..ry, organic molecules, inside billions of neurons, all of them simultaneously hammering at trillions of specialized, cross-indexed, and crisscross-indexed, and you"ll-never-live-through-it-indexed, sorts of jobs. That, thankfully, is not what I"m conscious of when I think.
I am conscious of my self. I can sit here humming cogito ergo sum and peeling this yellow, ripe banana, enjoying the creamy ribbed texture where the peel strips off, mmm . . . and when I"ve taken a resilient, not mushy, first bite, I consciously look forward to seeing whether the banana"s cross-section shows the lucky brown Y or the unlucky three brown dots because I am superst.i.tious. . . Oh, I do love my banana thoughts! Three cheers for the representation! That"s what it is, you know. I am not conscious of my inmost thoughts-and who the h.e.l.l wants to be? Slimy neurons, yech. Computational functions, brrr. I experience a glorious representation of my inmost thoughts. I experience this- BANANA!.
Anyway.
Now, somebody, some agency or other, must be arranging and taking care of my inmost thoughts, since I certainly can"t, I"m totally in the dark about them. Some agency certainly operates my frontal lobe which is responsible for various higher-or more frontal-mental functions. That agency is Think Monkey. Here"s what the brain scientists say about her: . . . somewhere in the confines of the frontal lobe are neuronal networks that act to all intents and purposes like a homunculus. This is a non-conscious homunculus . . . Our homunculus acts more like a computational ent.i.ty . . . it is responsible for many complex operations, such as thoughts, concept formations, intentions, and so on . . .*
Think Monkey creates my intentions, my concepts, and all the treasures of my human intellect. Now, don"t go objecting that Think Monkey has to have its own Think Monkey, because as the scientist says, Think Monkey is not conscious, so does not require a counterpart. Think Monkey makes thoughts, but does not think. My Think Monkey sleeps, while her dark clever fingers, toes, and prehensile tail operate, at frantic speed, the jungle-c.o.c.kpit of neuronal computations. She does everything in a sleep that lasts my whole life long. Not even death will wake her; death, least of all. It seems so unfair. Poor Think Monkey! For an entire lifetime she performs such important work, round the clock, without once being able to reflect and say to herself, "I adore bananas."
Maybe I"ll have another one, just in case.
AS I SAID EARLIER, THINK MONKEY has no conscious thoughts: she only makes conscious thoughts, but-paradoxically-she makes conscious thoughts about herself. This is one of the spookier aspects of a human mind. I once read a haunting story about an animal researcher who studied cotton-top tamarin monkeys, a cute species the size of squirrels, with amber-eyed, squashed, grave little mugs, feverish hands, and fluffy white manes. One female tamarin liked the researcher very much, and always cooed at him. We don"t know why. Sometimes that worried him. One night, he dreamed that his little friend skipped over and offered him, in her needling fingers, a book. It was a clothbound textbook, t.i.tled Dictionary of the Tamarin Language. This was the Holy Grail of his research-a key to primate communication!-so he was very happy to see it. But when he opened it, it was blank.
Think Monkey, the sleeping simian in our brains who performs our higher mental functions, is also responsible for our dreams. It"s a strange thing to imagine. Think Monkey, in her dreamless sleep, without a flicker of consciousness, like a shut-eyed Buddha enthroned among a billion exploding lotus blossoms and lilies of perception and computation, sends down to us a dream, through the long, weird chute that travels between the actual inaccessible and the conscious (although slumbering) mind. People used to think that G.o.ds visited them in dreams, taking the form of their lost friends or loves to get their attention, saying: Gather your maidservants and wash the laundry in the river, or, Sacrifice a snow-white bull immediately. It would have been blasphemy to suggest that these dear ones, so precious to dreaming eyes, were the handiwork of a monkey perched inside the brain. But in Think Monkey"s sleep, our thinking is woven, and when its representation comes in dream images, we had better pay attention.
The animal researcher"s dream tells the most intimate of truths. Think Monkey-i.e., his conceptual process-weighed his knowledge of cotton-top tamarins and communication, and made a prediction: he would write a book. But Think Monkey also weighed the concept of consciousness itself, which was inevitably part of this researcher"s questions. And in answer, Think Monkey sent an image of herself: a monkey holding up a blank dictionary-a representation of the very fact that she has nothing to say. Only our conscious minds speak, though our thoughts come straight from the monkey"s hands. I can think of no more eerie paradox . . . rather, my Think Monkey can create no more eerie paradox, for me to become conscious of, and speak of . . .
No image captures more surely the intermediate place of our conscious minds, looking around with wonderment between the superb blank of our inmost thought activity, and the stupendous blank of our sensory activity. Is there anything quite like the amazing and paradoxical Think Monkey?
There is. The neuroscientist whom I quoted in the last section yearns for new experiments. Neuroscience is so new! Great discoveries await the experimenter who can decode the chattering of a hundred thousand neurons instead of the few used in most experiments. He urges more experimentation on animals in a duly humane manner, using modern anesthetic technology that permits the monkey to be rapidly and reversibly put to sleep while the electrode stays in place.*
I can see them now, all those sleeping primates: the limp chimps and conked-out macaques, the gibbons" faces fringed in pale fur like ash-encircled coals. All our cousins getting their beauty sleep, sprouting electrodes for our benefit. A bit pathetic, a bit clownish-but mostly eerie, because Think Monkey"s functions also include human creativity. We know that the creative thought process is hidden from the conscious mind. Genius is a secret to itself. Out of nowhere, an idea pops into your head, or makes you sit bolt upright at four in the morning. The procedure that evolved it is hidden; that"s the monkey"s job. Think Monkey, the universal Muse, creates the flash in which a scientist sees the light. So it is at her prompting that we fill our laboratories with unconscious primates, the living images of Think Monkey herself, as we struggle to fulfill that darkly humorous imperative, Know Thyself.
*The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, Christof Koch, (Geenwood Village, CO: Roberts & Company Publishers, 2004) p. 298.
*Koch, p. 312.
2.
Because of Fine-Print Rotifers, I used to believe in going paperless-in creating and storing all doc.u.ments digitally. Then I learned Silicon Valley"s best-kept secret, namely, that the bugs, viruses, and worms infesting the Web are by no means as metaphorical as one tends to a.s.sume . . . but that"s another story.
Fine-Print Rotifers FINE PRINT IS HARD TO READ not only because of its painful smallness and dry subject matter. It is also the grazing ground of Fine-Print Rotifers. These microscopic animals are highly destructive. Had humanity never developed ink, then the FPRs, as I"ll call them, would not have become pandemic; they would have remained a minor symbiont in plants, and the United States might never have reaped the grim results of the securitization of mortgages. As it is, a plague of protozoa thrives on our need to spell out everything in writing.
Lignin, the most abundant organic material on earth, comes from plants and contains pigments. We see these pigments in paper as it yellows over time. Plants use pigments for many purposes. But since too much of a good thing is always a bad thing, FPRs make themselves useful by ridding plants of surplus lignin pigments. They also kill harmful bacteria-in effect, marinating and cooking them. It is a simple life but elegantly arranged.
Rotifers, under magnification, look like wiggly electric razors: they have one or two hairy, wheel-shaped organs that whirl food into their gullets. Imagine a wheel hung with fishing lines over a barrel full of fish. An FPR"s wheel-hairs act just like that, hooking "fish"-tasty pigment molecules-which they yank off the lignin and drop into the rotifer"s gullet, neat and sweet, and I"m sparing you much technical detail. As a by-product, FPRs also excrete a mild acid that softens up bacteria, as a marinade tenderizes meat, and, being slightly heated, cooks them as well. In their natural home on a plant, the rotifers wriggle along cooking and gobbling up any bacteria in their way, while they munch lignin pigments. I suspect that the pigment is a cherished condiment, and FPRs are eaters of the type who upend a bottle of mustard or ranch dressing over everything, and will even guzzle their favorite sauce unaccompanied, like those of us who privately eat maple syrup with a spoon. Be that as it may, plants and FPRs together are the picture of a perfect symbiosis . . . but paper and ink change everything.
PAPER CONTAINS FPR SPORES, in the lignin. FPRs hibernate through hard times in spore form, reemerging when they sense the presence of plenty. As soon as ink hits the paper-zap! Invisible rotifers are all over every serif. The abundance of scrumptious pigment drives them wild with appet.i.te, for synthetic ink is vastly more concentrated than lignin pigment-it"s like fudge, sirloin steak, and triple creme Brie rolled into one. I don"t use the word swarm, however, since the rotifers don"t move in loose swarms. Far from it. The most spectacular trait of this species is the deliberate route it takes while feeding-in other words, its foraging route.
WE ARE TALKING OPTIMAL foraging theory, which applies to all animal foraging, including your own shopping route. For instance: if you can"t buy all your groceries at one store, you try to figure out the most efficient route between stores. This is your foraging route. All predators have one, because for most predators, the stores they patronize try to run away and hide. Think about it. What if you never knew which store would be open, or when? You would search your past experiences for the most common open times, and create a route based on that. Your route would take the shape of the optimal supply of open grocery stores. And where do FPRs find their tasty ink molecules? In letters and words. So they develop foraging routes in the shapes of letters and words.
THIS IS HOW AN INNOCENT BEAST causes us misery in varying degrees from the nagging to the catastrophic. Not because the rotifers strip the ink off paper-though they do-but because, at the same time that FPRs remove the original printed words, they also wriggle over the paper in their foraging routes, excreting a mild acid, slightly heated, as mentioned. Now, it just so happens that putting mild acid on paper, and then heating it, is the cla.s.sic recipe for invisible ink. You can easily imitate the foraging routes of FPRs yourself. Just write a few words using lemon juice for ink, then heat the paper you"ve written on. Gradually, on the blank-looking sheet, you will see your handwriting appear. Now you can understand why, when fine print makes absolutely no sense whatever, in nine cases out of ten, it is because instead of the original words, we are reading the foraging routes of Fine-Print Rotifers.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT FPRs are writing to us. It would be fun if their routes spelled out "Wa.s.sup?" or "Go Mets!," but that doesn"t happen. They"re eating, not writing. What"s more, since the early nineteenth century (for reasons I"ll explain) their foraging routes have become rigidly stereotyped, consisting of repeated groups of syllables. A typical example is one that I encountered during a dispute with my HMO. I"d had a operation on my eyes, and the HMO had denied my claim for the left eye. I called them and was told that they didn"t pay for the same operation twice. I explained that it wasn"t the same operation twice, but operations on two different eyes. I also explained that I used these two different eyes, "right" and "left," for my bicameral sense of vision. No go. I hung up the phone. I laid my head on the paperwork, then raised my head again, and tried to read page 12, section B, subsection B6.11, of my health insurance contract. Neither reading gla.s.ses, nor artificial tears, nor real tears, clarified page 12, section B, subsection B6.11, and in desperation I called my employer"s benefits office.
"There"s something wrong with my contract," I told the clerk, who said there could not be anything wrong with an individual contract as everyone was sent the same contract. "But," I told her, "I"m reading the terms of coverage right here, on page 12, section B, subsection B6.11, right at the bottom of the page?"
"I know where it is," she said.
"Well, on my contract, it says ashnoo shnoo shnoo shnoo shnoo shnoo.""
"If that"s what it says, that"s what you"re covered for," said the gal in benefits.
CONSIDER, NOW, THE RECENT subprime mortgage bubble in this context. Defaulting homeowners are blamed for signing contracts that they shouldn"t have. Yet when people don"t suspect that invisible rotifers have infested their mortgage contracts, how likely are they to question the fine print? Imagine a young couple, not well off, striving to impress a loan officer at a bank. Let"s say they look at their contract before signing and try to understand it. Are they really going to mention the foraging route that I call "flock of ducks"? In such circ.u.mstances, would you feel comfortable saying to your banker, "Could you please explain what is meant by agegg egg wakwak gegg egg wakwak gegg egg wakwak?"" Wouldn"t you rather just sign? Consider, too, the scandal of robo-signing, so-called, which has swept the country in the wake of the housing crisis. Think of the millions of foreclosure cases in court, their files stuffed with mortgage a.s.signments, satisfactions, affidavits, and other printed matter used to evict people from their homes-those potent papers which we have discovered to bear the same relation to reality as dark grimoires, invoking fantastical transactions signed by phantasmal bank officials never born of woman. This is not the work of human beings. This is the work of Fine-Print Rotifers, making themselves fat.
WHY DO FPRS EAT ONLY FINE PRINT? Tight-packed print affords them easier grazing, of course. But natural selection pressures, in the past, have also influenced their choice.
Long ago, FPRs grazed on many kinds of print and even ink blots. I have seen, in the library of my cousin who collects incunabula, an ancient Greek text emended by the great Renaissance scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who believed that all humans were foolish and therefore should be loved, because even Christ was a fool-a holy one. In this fragile old book, Erasmus"s name was inked out, wherever it appeared, by church officials who had disapproved of him, especially his notorious wedding of philosophy and religion in the prayer O Sancte Socrate, ora pro n.o.bis! Over and over, Erasmus"s name was blotted with a thick black stroke, so that future generations would not consider Socrates to be any kind of saint. But when I saw the book, those strokes had all but vanished, leaving only faint stains around the clear, sharp letters of Erasmus"s name. It was wonderful to deduce, from this, the greed with which the Fine-Print Rotifers of the Renaissance had fallen on the censor"s rich, thick ink. That they hadn"t eaten Erasmus"s name under the blots suggests that, by the time it appeared, the rotifers were gorged and glutted to the point where dessert excites only stifled moans. Through the next two centuries, FPRs continued to graze in the pastures of early modern print. Torrents of inked words in unpredictable spellings gave the rotifers an endless variety of specialized foraging routes. One has only to skim sixteenth- and seventeenth-century doc.u.ments to hear, in imagination, the contented burps of rotifers finding treats around every y and e. I suspect that Fine-Print Rotifers even lent a hand, or cilium, to Shakespeare-hey nonny nonny sounds just like them.
But nothing lasts forever, and in the nineteenth century, the standardization of English spelling put a halt to that orgy of nourishment by severely restricting the rotifers" foraging routes. FPRs went through a decimation of all subspecies that had acquired orthographically messy routes as bad spelling was tossed into fireplaces, and hordes of English-eating rotifers suffered, for the sake of lunch, the fate of heretics. Natural selection favored those that consumed print less likely to draw critical attention-and what draws less critical attention than legal fine print? The Darwinian die was cast: evolution ensured the dominance of our modern FPRs.
They can also be found, though rarely, in books printed with double columns and small fonts. I have in my possession a double-column, Everyman"s Library edition of Gibbon"s Decline and Fall that exhibits FPR activity, shown below, in chapter XV.
Such is the const.i.tution of civil society, that, whilst a few persons are distinguished by riches, by honours, and by knowledge, the body of the people is condemned to obscurity, ignorance, and shnoo shnoo shnoo shnoo shnoo -which spoils Gibbon"s eloquence, but unwittingly underscores his somber point.
Cyclically Invisible Beasts
1.
It"s common knowledge that primates have an imitative streak. More surprisingly, so do fireflies. This is the only instance for which I can vouch of cyclical invisibility in the animal world: a case of invisibility proving to be so mixed a blessing that it is eventually abandoned for lesser evils, which, over time, become greater evils than invisibility"s drawbacks, and so on. It is a bracing tale to ponder the next time you discover the light within yourself that nature put there to be seen.
Beacon Bugs "HAIL, HOLY LIGHT!" sang Milton. Who doesn"t welcome light into a darksome world? Beacon Bugs, that"s who. This native firefly species exhibits a unique feature: cyclical invisibility. They are invisible over periods of twenty-nine years; like cicadas, their cycle revolves around a prime number, the better to elude predators. (Beacon Bugs have a doozy of a predator to elude.) Then they produce one generation that outshines every other firefly species. For a few weeks, they are a glory, a far-flung, bedazzling beacon, a revelation of radiance, reminding themselves and all creation that an invisible firefly is a contradiction in terms and that if you make light, you should be seen. Humanity becomes aware of them at this point, and suffers the consequences.
All fireflies are creatures of incandescent romance. They cannot be bred in laboratories any more than love can. During courtship, the male offers his mate a gift of something nutritious-this isn"t an entomology textbook, so let"s call it chocolate. The happy couple deposits their eggs on the ground (not troubling with nest construction, free spirits that they are) and the larvae burrow, becoming glowworms, carrying the torch of firefly heritage almost from the moment when they were gleams in their parents" abdomens. And nothing, to a human eye, seems as dreamily romantic as the fireflies" mating flight.