There were other instances of synchronicity that lasted into the night. I am only recalling this to warn everyone: Stay away from noticing too many connections in the real world. They lead to riches and good looks for some, but the vast majority simply goes mad.
While writing this I heard a mockingbird in the magnolia outside the window making typing sounds identical to mine.
Collecting
I was strolling with the novelist Robert Olen Butler on Royal Street looking in antique shop windows when Butler leaned close and whispered: “Do you collect anything?” There was something shocking about the way he said it, almost as if he were asking me to reveal something sexually intimate. It reminded me of a coworker at the 8th Street Bookstore in New York who asked me years ago in a whisper: “Are you Athenian?,” which I couldn’t, for the longest time, figure out. Until one day I asked him, “What’s an Athenian?” “Queer,” he said. Oh.
Anyway, Butler is a collector of the illustrated cards that used to come inside cigarette packages early in the century. He may collect other things, too, but I didn’t ask. The subject of collecting makes me feel awkward and guilty. I have always been prey to a conflict between collecting things and getting rid of them. When I was a kid I was very taken with my stamp collection. Then one day I got in a fight with my stepfather, and the bastard sold my stamps. At age thirteen I started reading and collecting poetry books. I had a glass case full of books by poets and I dusted and alphabetized them every week until I got so many the case overflowed and I had to stack them on top of everything else, including my school desk. When my room, which was more like a closet, filled up with books by Romanian poets, I started doing my homework in the kitchen. The stepfather was gone by then, but the books got sold anyway because we left the country forever. Back then, when you left a country, you left it forever.
Collectors are possessed by a kind of creative pride. A collection is like a novel, it tells the story of a certain attention, exercised over time. Things have very little intrinsic value. They have to be plucked out of the great sea of objects out there and made to shine by their election, and then they have to be loved to yield any kind of pleasure. Not to mention dusted. I don’t think that many collectors actually contemplate their objects a great deal. The rush of having them, adding to them, and knowing that one is the creator of the story they tell is quite sufficient. I know that I didn’t read many of the books I owned. Reading them messed up their perfect jackets, cracked their snappy spines. There is something innocent and childlike about collecting, an imaginative sweetness made of greed, curiosity, and the desire to be Linnaeus. There is also something sexual and criminal about it, a kind of pervert thrill that will make you do anything to get the stuff you need, which explains Butler’s furtiveness.
Grave robbing is the world’s second oldest profession. The pyramids were looted as soon as the overseers left the area. The Spanish robbed all the graves of meso-America. Ancient Greece is in the British Museum. There are countless collectors in America. At one point, early in the twentieth century, rich American tourists almost collected all of Europe and Latin America. I guess that if you don’t have a long history you can always collect one. What good is being rich if you don’t have a family history? Or, conversely, what good is being poor even if you descend from Charlemagne?
The end of my collections came about because of circumstances. Moving around hasn’t made it easy to keep things. “Every move is like a fire,” say the people from U-Haul, and they should know. Still, I was greatly relieved each time, even as I indulged in a certain regret. Having no things means freedom. Most people are held hostage by their stuff, even just junk. Most things collect by themselves, without much creative will behind them. If a random accretion of objects can make one stationary, imagine what a collection can do. It can pin you to the wall of your abode like a butterfly in a lepidopterium.
I have always prized freedom over everything else, but now and then I sigh.
The Strangeness of Languages
I had five years of Russian in high school and not a word of it stuck to me. For years I blamed it on my Russian teacher, Comrade Papadapolou, who wore the first miniskirt in Eastern Europe and prevented me from concentrating properly. Later I blamed the politics: No self-respecting Romanian should learn the language of the oppressor. But years have passed and now I have a new theory. I was in the Czech Republic for a month and not a word of that Slavic language stuck to me long enough to make use of it. Not even dak-oui (thank you) or prosim (please), which everyone says. The reason, I now believe, is that there are certain sounds that are unnatural to my brain or at least find the passages blocked. Give me any Latin-based language and I’ll be holding forth with the natives on the subtler aspects of garlic usage. But the Slavic meets a shiny, mirrorlike surface that sends the words right back. Linguists say that everybody has receptors for all the languages because all of them are derived from an Ur-language that was broken up by God in Babylon because we chattered too much about irrelevant matters. Babylonian chatter has multiplied since then a few billion times, especially since the advent of cellular phones, but that’s another story.
The reason my receptors for Slavic are missing is that my ancestors had lived in these parts and were being constantly attacked by people speaking Slav dialects. One Cossack too many shut down something in the universal receptor. The other thing, of course, is that different languages issue from different parts of the body. English comes from the middle of the chest, French from the throat, Italian from the cheeks, and Slav languages from the belly. For the One-Cossack-Too-Many reason, I cannot speak from my belly, which is the chief concern of people who like to drink a lot of beer. The Czech Republic leads the world in beer consumption. Because I cannot speak from my belly and my receptors are blocked, I have to regretfully conclude that I’ll never be able to contact the natives. I even tried speaking in tongues by making lots of shshsh sounds, but it came out sounding like pidgin Latin. Damn history will never leave you alone, even if all you want to do is say, “Hi, it’s a beautiful day. Do you have any food without bread dumplings?” Babylon was a disaster, and I pay the price.
Animals: The Thin Furry Line Between Us and the Devil
I’ve heard it said, all too often, that human beings differ from animals by their ability to laugh. This, like most things repeated more than three times, isn’t true. I see animals laughing all the time. Their merriment spans the range from the smile of the Cheshire cat to the foolish grin of this horse I once caught looking at my date when we went out for a “walk in the country.”
More to the point, one should ask what the animals are laughing at. The answer, I’m sorry to say, is: they are laughing at us. Since most animals don’t speak human (some of them do but prefer not to) they have delegated humorists to articulate what exactly they are laughing at. I am one of those delegated by the animals to speak, so I’ll get to it right away.
Animals laugh at humans, but not all animals laugh at the same humans and not at the same things even when they do. Some humans are hard to laugh at, and only predatory cats like the leopard are able to laugh at such humans as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, for instance. Animals also find it hard to laugh at humorists per se and are most seriously attentive when one is speaking on their behalf. Still, a few general raisons-de-rire are common among animals, and I will list them in order of animal importance:
First, humans use money. This is the source of much merriment among vertebrates and invertebrates alike. They are amused by our constantly trying to find money to get what we need and then to find more money to get what we don’t need. It really breaks them up to see us surrounded by junk we can’t eat. Animals get what they need without any money and they eat it all on the spot. Some animals laugh only halfheartedly at this human folly, however, because they realize that our pursuit threatens their existence directly. Humans have destroyed the animals’ homes and they eat the animals, too. Most animals stop laughing while they are being cooked,
but some animals, such as the lowly chicken and the pig, are known to laugh in our mouth while they are being eaten. This, I know, is hard to believe, and I can only explain it by dint of the fact that the animal sense of humor tends to be generous and self-effacing.
Second, animals laugh at our mating habits. To them, we look ridiculous scurrying to charm one another with inedible things (most animals consider chocolates inedible) and then, after we conquer each other, sneaking out and conquering others behind the backs of our first conquests. They are mightily tickled too by all the elaborate care we take in our mating rituals and the ridiculous positions some of us assume when performing the physics of coupling. Animals giggle incontrollably when they see people spraying their bodies with flower stinks and consulting books on how to please their partners. Many animals like to roll in flowers, too, but they certainly don’t stop to read books about mating.
Third, wearing furs that come off and don’t belong to us in any case. This again, is occasion only for halfhearted amusement because it’s hard to laugh while bleeding to death after your pelt has been ripped from your body. There have been animals who advocated revenge for this sort of thing, but lack of money and weaponry has so far prevented effective action. So they laugh instead.
Fourth, wearing clothes, in general.
Fifth, our biological ignorance. No animals, no matter how weird their behaviors, ever keep themselves ignorant of their own death. They know it’s going to happen. Watching people strutting about as if there was no tomorrow makes beasts laugh, but, once again, it worries some of them because this attitude leads many human beings to mistreat animals as well as their own kind. Creatures who think themselves immortal get easily bored. In order to alleviate their boredom they seek better and stronger entertainments and, quite often, they get pleasure from the suffering of others. This worrisome tendency toward cruelty keeps some animals from laughing at all. Some of them remember as far back as the Roman Colosseum and are not pleased at all.
Sixth, animals crack up when they see humans imagining themselves living after death in all kinds of perfect places that resemble luxury hotels, or, on the contrary, roasting forever in fires of pitch and guilt. Animals watch people go into big, empty buildings called churches and talk to themselves in there, until they are so impressed with themselves that they try to convince others to come to their building. When others refuse to follow them, they sometimes kill them.
Not all animals are convinced that people should know that they are being laughed at about this. Some of them cautioned me against mentioning anything about this matter, but I reassured them that a humorist named Mark Twain, among many others, had already carried this message to humans. This Twain, you see, was speaking mostly for his cat, but he also represented frogs and mules part of the time.
Seventh, animals are amused but not very much by the reasons humans have for killing each other. Humans rarely fight over territory or mates but go to great lengths to extinguish each other over matters of words and habits. People who get along reasonably well for a long time discover suddenly that they are consuming different cheeses and like to sing different songs. For this reason, they attack each other and fight unto death. Animals like to fight over cheese, too, but only if there isn’t enough.
These are only a few of the reasons why animals have a hoot over us. In the book-length version of this brief essay, I enumerate all the five hundred reasons and provide the reader with a complete scale of animal laughter as well. Animal laughter spans the range from Subtle-Smirking-with-Whisker-Twitch to Rolling-Wildly-with-Exposed-Belly-Down-Steep-Hillside. Personally, I think that this last type of merriment is exaggerated. We are not that funny.
Walking Bear
A 350-pound black bear named No Neck walked all the way from the Florida Panhandle across Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana until he got to Baton Rouge. That’s the longest walk any recorded bear ever took, and he would have kept walking on to the Atchafalaya Basin where about three hundred black bears live. No Neck was apparently looking for a mate, and the word must have been out among Florida bears that the Atchafalaya Basin community had possibilities. There are so few bears left, they must sense each other in the empty air: The bear frequency must ring with the poignant signals of their dying. No Neck himself had been living in relative contentment in the Apalachicola National Forest until he was caught raiding beehives, arrested, and moved to the Eglin Air Force Base. Now why would anyone arrest a bear for eating honey? That’s like arresting a bird for flying. So No Neck, finding himself under arrest, lonely, and distressed by the silence on the once-crowded bear frequency, decided to take off for the Atchafalaya. He walked past shopping malls, where there were once forests, he walked through suburbs where once there were bears, he passed by houses, highways, McDonald’ses, gas stations, and TV towers. He was spotted along the way by people amazed to see him walking like that. He stopped for nothing, accepted no rides, and kept on going. If he had any doubts about his purpose or his eventual destination, we will never know. The wildllife authorities tracking him were ready to help him cross Highway 55, but in the end they decided to bring him down near Baton Rouge. They shot him with a tranquilizer dart and took him back to the Apalachicola National Forest where he’d been arrested in the first place. He might have been allowed to make it to the black bear community in Atchafalaya, but it was feared that the heavily industrial and populated shore of the Mississippi would bring him in conflict with rifle-toting humans. No Neck knew where he was going but so did we: his ear was tagged, his lip tattooed, and he had an electronic collar. Back in his forest, No Neck may be too dispirited to raid hives. He probably doesn’t care that he set a bear-walking record. He’s still lonely, and at night he dreams of strange towering shapes that broadcast to humans in frequencies he cannot and doesn’t care to access. But that’s how we heard his story and that’s all that we will ever know. His bear frequency is inaccessible to us.
Small devils wear horns of garlic and, as they grow older, they learn to love food and drama. In Still Life with Mozzarella, the immortal garlic performs in a Garlic Farce. (Amy Weiskopf)
Botero’s devil, growing with tenderness, revels in the glories of the flesh right over our housetops, which, magically bewitched, have turned into slices of cheesecake.
(Fernando Botero, Devil and Woman. Art Resource, NY)
Actors in a sexual drama involving a complex and amused Cabala—the oranges of Jerusalem meet the swamp actors of New Orleans.
(Amy Weiskopf, Merlitans and Satsumi)
The skull authorized any debauches, whether intellectual or carnal, because it was a reminder of the transitory nature of life. Drinking from a skull was de rigueur for bonvivants, and using skulls for candleholders was a cliché of student life that persists to this day. The Devil is fond of tradition.
(Amy Weiskopf, Vanitas with Skull)
Poor St. Anthony! Swollen from his hallucinations like a madman from drugs, he must suffer the full repertoire of the pagan monsters that once walked the earth in freedom, but which are now mere tools of the Christian Devil.
(Matthias Gruenewald, The Temptation of St. Anthony. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
The Devil wears glasses to better study God’s creation in order to enslave and destroy it. Children, beware: excessive reading, excessive study, excessive curiosity, and excessive gazing lead to excessive interiority, which leads downward to Hell, not upward to the simplicity of Heaven. In Cambodia, people wearing glasses were killed because they were suspected of being teachers, polyglots, and readers or, in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge, Devils.
(Joseph Thaddaeus Stammel, A Devil Wearing Eyeglasses. Erich Lessing /Art Resource, NY)
The poet sleeps because he has put in a full nightshift of delighted and wicked work. In the light of day, he is saved from the wrath of Judgment only by the loving brush of his mate.
(Alice Henderson, Poet Sleeping)
The Devil’s favorite bar in New Orleans has hours as rich as those of the D
uc de Berry. Working the night shift here, the author has accumulated a number of indulgences good for the better sections of Hell (see Fra Angelico).
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 15
