Invisible Beasts

by Sharona Muir

  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 gods 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 documents 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 assume . . . 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 appetite, for synthetic ink is vastly more concentrated than lignin pigment—it’s like fudge, sirloin steak, and triple crème 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 classic 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 “Wassup?” 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 e
xplain) 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 glasses, 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 ‘shnoo 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 circumstances, would you feel comfortable saying to your banker, “Could you please explain what is meant by ‘gegg 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 assignments, 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 nobis! 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 documents 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 constitution 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.

  The mating flight is a North American custom. Old World firefly courtships are sedate and communal: males fill up a tree and put on a light show, all together, to attract females (for some reason, one recalls the Red Army Chorus). On our shores, however, each male firefly goes for a solo evening cruise, flashing his tail lights over lawns, at dusk. You see glimmer-ribbons of fireflies hovering in a lovely layer, a few feet above the grass; you follow the floating sparks, living love letters scribbled on the dusk, begging, importuning a mate whose body, delicious, burning ripe, is hidden in the dimness. It’s dark, you’re still looking at the fireflies, you’re thinking about how nice romance is and how the fireflies are all getting some, and being—forgive me—oblivious to the nightmare taking place under your
nose.

  A male firefly wafts over the tips of towering grasses, working his lights, flashing the code signal engrained in him for the sake of the rapturous moment when a female, receptive, eager, illumines herself in response. After a scintillating exchange, he tumbles from the air. He meets his bride. She flips him on his back, pinning him down with six pretty feet—she’s bigger than he is—and proceeds to rip into his soft belly, tugging at his flesh, chewing with the steely mandibles of the predator genus Photuris. Her antennae vibrate with voracity; rude smackings echo through the grass roots. Poor lovelorn bug! He hasn’t mated, he hasn’t reproduced; he dies. She was the wrong kind. To her, he was just a piece of meat.

  This scary proceeding is called “aggressive mimicry.” Female Photuris fireflies mimic the mating flashes of other species’ females, to trap and eat unwary males. Photuris is a real horror, a remorseless insecticide, a gothic subfamily curse, and the fatalest of femme fatales. To woo a female of his species, the Photuris male must trick her by imitating the flashes of another species’ male—then, as the Photuris lady is getting out her (figurative) sushi knives, he drops his disguise and starts flashing dirty firefly talk. From a safe distance. If he’s even sneakier, he imitates the female of another species. This draws the poor suckers of unwary males as well as the greedy Photuris girl, whetting her (figurative) kebab skewers. What happens? The Photuris male-in-drag ambushes the other males, opportunistically eats them, and then, taking every precaution . . . How tasteless.