The Monkey Link

by Andrei Bitov

  We live in a world of people born just once. We are not witnesses to the past, not participants in the future. The instinct, memory, and program of the species have grown weak within us, as weak as the connection of the times. This very weakness (so extreme that we have lost our connection with nature) is where the human seed springs up. Man originates exactly where any other species dies out. No warm fur, no terrible teeth, no lupine morals. Trousers, the bullet, religion …

  How strange, I thought, grasping the experience with difficulty, assimilating the conclusion with ease … Let’s take a bird and solder it into a box … The trajectory of scientific thought reminded me of the chaotic flight of a moth. Clumsily conspicuous at the end of the trajectory was the conclusion that had suggested itself at the very beginning. How comical, I thought. Examining his own hands with bewilderment, man discovers that birds have wings. Opening his mouth in surprise, he finds that birds have a beak. Has he “discovered” that birds have wings and a beak—or that he himself has hands and a mouth?

  Humankind, I thought, you’re incapable of comprehending any other biological existence. Each time you make the terrible effort to do so, you comprehend only your own … But would man comprehend even his own existence if he did not try to comprehend a different one? Man’s capacity to know another nature strikes me as catastrophically small, yet there is nothing nobler, or more necessary for human consciousness, than to spin our wheels in this effort.

  Ecologists, too, have many of the accoutrements of science, of course. Laboratories, test tubes, retorts, automatic recorders, freezers—the whole Laputan environment, the background against which the white-coated scientist poses, juggling cult objects. But we don’t know what he’s pouring into what in the photograph—-or whether he’s mocking us. The priest of science is bathed in fluorescent light, he peers profoundly at something he’s supposed to have some knowledge of, while we have none. This is what makes us an enlightened society, that we revere what we don’t understand. I’m not being ironic—it really is a mark of enlightenment. But we don’t revere nature. We revere science.

  At last we have an emerging anti-science that reveres nature.

  And really, why does he wear such a knowing expression in the universal photo on the magazine cover? A true scientist’s expression (in my naive conception) should be frightened, shocked, confused. For, in his field, he knows everything ever known up to now, up to this day, up to this second—but beyond this he knows nothing. No one does. He is at the cutting edge of science, where knowledge stops. The world’s top specialist, if he truly seeks something beyond this, is the very man who knows nothing. Everyone else will have to study and study to catch up before they know as much as he does—they know a few things, but he knows all. He alone has some idea of the extent to which we know nothing. Then why does he stand frozen in the photograph, looking as if he had some idea what was there, beyond, in the next moment? Smug, brightly illumined among the sparkling vessels and mad blinking indicators—but, after all, he’s in the dark, he’s supposed to have the inspired face of a blind man, a Bruegelesque blind man falling into a hole … Every second he lowers his hands into the magical black box—what velvety, absolute darkness! No one even knows whether he can pull his hands out of there, out of his vent hood. But he plunges them in and pulls them out, though he is ignorant of what’s in there. Sharper than a razor is the edge between his mind and what occupies his hands, as they putter about so boldly there in the dark of luciferin light.

  What certainty makes him so certain?

  This tale has both its heroine and its hint of a love story. Clara. No, this wasn’t a commonplace, business-trip affair—it was tenderness, a kind of pure love—and its steady glow relieved my loneliness as a journalist. Clara was young, clever, and beautiful. She loved sparkly things and tobacco and could count to five. She loved another man. Valerian Innokentievich was elegant and young. She snuggled up to him like a cat. (The simile is very much out of place: cats weren’t allowed within gunshot. Ornithology.) I suppose it’s already obvious to the uncorrupted reader that Clara … (Ah, Clara! Parentheses in prose are a written form of whispering.)

  I remember an exercise in the sixth grade, in a grammar that bore Academician Shcherba’s name: something about a girl and her beloved parrot, how she woke up in the morning and he greeted her. It was an exercise on something, say, the pronouns “he” and “she,” but to us, by then, all exercises were about the same thing—the quadratic trinomial. We all covered up the word “parrot,” I remember, and had a remarkable amount of fun with the resulting text.

  Many years later I am presented with an opportunity to write a composition on this topic.

  Certainly this was a kind of jealousy, when I was too shy to touch her but she kept plucking Valerian Innokentievich’s sleeve to make him stroke her again and again. No, the secret of the feminine disposition is indeed a secret: the seriousness of our intentions is our weakest trump. Valerian Innokentievich was pliant and indulgent. He belonged to a younger generation than ours and scrutinized us with sharp, clever eyes, exploiting the advantage of his birth as if we had followed rather than preceded him.

  But enough about my rival. I brought Clara sweet tidbits, gave her cigarettes to peck apart. Crooning, insinuating myself into her trust, I moved a step closer every day. Even the cat loves a kind word … (The cat again. Why does this word keep sneaking up on my Clara!) My constancy was appreciated—by now she marked my arrival with a glance. No, her heart still belonged to another, but as a woman she found my devotion flattering. She condescended. By now she might have been angry and upset if I had failed to appear someday at dinnertime. I held this sly device in reserve for a crisis in our relationship.

  But enough about myself. Love is knowledge. I came to know three things with Clara’s help. If it weren’t for these, it wouldn’t be worth telling about our relationship here.

  Clara was tame; that is, sufficiently unafraid of man to allow him within arm’s length. But she wasn’t just tame, she was also a crow; that is, a creature wild and cautious, different, not man. For this reason she was finicky in relationships, and at arm’s length there was a qualitative boundary (to give her time to recoil, fly away) which only the initiate could violate. One day …

  … she was sitting on the rung of a stepladder propped against our kitchen wall. It was a convenient rung for socializing: Clara’s eyes were at the level of a man’s. She gutted my cigarette, I reached out my hand … She flinched, threw me a sidelong look, sized me up, and decided not to jerk away, not to take off—just stepped lightly along the rung. My hand fell on bare wood.

  I experienced a heartrendingly childish emotion—I so wanted to touch her. I suddenly realized that I had never in my life touched a bird. In one instant, a host of propitiatory thoughts flashed through my mind: how man needed animals, how I’d never had an animal of my own when I was a child (my childhood suddenly appeared more pathetic and impoverished than it had been), I recalled the one baby mouse who had lived with me for a week and then escaped after I’d almost taught him to walk on a knitting needle (he escaped from his glass prison over that same knitting needle), I remembered my dusty knees when I crawled out from under the wardrobe and realized that he had escaped forever … I decided that this time, without fail, I would bring my daughter a puppy … Offering all these prayers, unctuously repeating “Pretty Clara, clever Clara,” I lightly touched her claw. She didn’t move.

  “Clever Clara, pretty Clara,” I murmured, stroking her claws more and more boldly. She paid scant attention but permitted me. Cautiously I lifted my hand to stroke her where she might feel it better—she recoiled, sidestepping away. I was allowed only to kiss her hand.

  “Stroke her beak, not her head.” Doctor D. was standing behind me. How long had he been watching?

  “Her beak, you say?” I was embarrassed to be caught. “She’ll grab me!”

  “No, she won’t. Not if you stroke her beak. She’s a predator. With a predator, you have t
o caress its weapon. Then it’s not afraid. Now, you did start out the right way—the claws are also a weapon.”

  A thought, if it is a thought, enters the mind instantaneously, as though it had always been there, as though a place had been vacated for it. It doesn’t need to be understood. It provokes no doubt.

  “Good Clarra, nice Clarra … ” I stroked her beak. This was a much more substantial caress than on the claw. She liked it. She narrowed her eyes, rubbed against it. A crow’s expression does not incline you to sympathy. By nature, a crow looks angry. The Creator had not provided Clara with any means of showing joy, tenderness, love. She could not smile or purr or wag her tail. All the more touching, then, was the stern maiden’s helpless effort at cordiality. Like the crow in Krylov’s fable, she had almost dropped the cheese … And the delighted thought that Krylov was as accurate as Lorenz flew through my mind with the sweep of Clara’s wing—Krylov’s name means “wing” in Russian—and flew away. It was true: what Clara seemed to like best was “Pretty Clara.” Though I no longer understood why she wasn’t pretty. It didn’t strike me as funny, I said it quite sincerely: Pretty Clara. Flattery would be impossible if the flatterer himself didn’t enjoy it—it wouldn’t be worth his while.

  Now the doctor added, “Do you remember, I was telling you about the ethics of animals? Well, man’s original, animal ethics apparently included an injunction against harming those who trusted him. The dog, and then cats, pigeons, storks, swallows—all of them, in varying degree, became intimate with man through this peculiarity of human ethics, without being purposely domesticated. Notice that man feels no instinctive love for the truly domesticated animals—chickens, pigs, goats.”

  I was delighted. “You mean, only trust evokes love?”

  “Did I say that?” the doctor asked doubtfully.

  Clara was clever, of course, but the doctor wasn’t stupid, either. To tell me such things was to stroke my beak. How gratifying it is to have a human conviction given back to us in the form of a scientific law! This means we don’t trust ourselves. We need science to convince us of what is native to us. At the very least it’s strange, this split between the human and the universally natural. From this crack grows ecology, and fills it.

  “Good,” I said. “We love those who trust us. But the most impressive fact about this trust is that it’s displayed by a creature with a completely different nature. This touches us. We don’t forget for a moment that we’re people and they’re animals. We look down from above. What about them? Who do they think we are, if they trust us?”

  “That’s a complicated question. I hold to the viewpoint that when they live with us they think of us as different creatures, but exclude their own master from our species.”

  “Who do they think he is?”

  “Probably a leader of their own species.”

  “What, can’t they see?” I said indignantly. “Clara thinks I’m a crow, you mean?” I flapped my arms like wings, and Clara shied angrily. I recollected myself immediately and tried to stroke her beak again. She turned away. As if hurt.

  “Not you, of course. But Valerian Innokentievich—quite possibly she does see him as a crow.”

  “A man-crow?”

  “No question,” the doctor said. “Precisely. A male crow.”

  “Well, excuse me”—I grinned—“but nature can’t be that blind! How could he be a male—sorry, I mean a crow?”

  “Well, picture to yourself … ” the doctor said.

  Arguing, we moved off into the dunes.

  (Clara died, but not because of a cat. She was pecked to death by ravens. Not crows, but ravens.)

  … A thought, if it is a thought, enters the mind instantaneously, as if it had always been there … This, too, is a thought. “One thought after another! Pity the artist of the word … ”{4}

  Thoughts in ecology are satisfying primarily for this feature: they are obvious. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean they’ve occurred to you of themselves. Though you may well think so. I don’t know why, but this characteristic of a thought strikes me as its most appealing virtue. Russian is rather a clever language, admittedly more inclined to witticism than to thought, until now. Again—Pushkin alone … For him, to think is natural; he has no need to shout “Eureka!” every time. The zeal and splendor of an upstart thought, as it strives in isolation to rise above the surface of reality, are evidence, first and foremost, of how rarely a thought enters its triumphant possessor’s mind (where every notion has necessarily been immobilized and named). Paradoxically, showiness, and sophistication begin to emerge as all but independent features—the thought’s desire to be recognized and accepted supplants its function, the brilliance of its secondary characteristics dazzles its meaning. This is a general tendency in our country. Even the writing of poems, for example, has become so technical that poesy yearns for an inspired amateur, while the ability to say anything new is incompatible with skill, it’s akin to ignorance. In sum, only if we begin from the beginning, over and over again, can we say something new. It cannot be learned, it has to be unlearned. Who is that, looming there on the horizon, never getting any closer? That windblown ecstatic with glowing eye and pounding heart, forgetful of everything we’ve all been memorizing since infancy? … The amateur. The amateur waves the white flag of ignorance at us: Come here, here I am! On the flag, a haphazard rag knotted to a branch, is the inscription I love the alive. In our world so ceaselessly in motion, spinning its wheels in its constant development—progressing—if there is anything with the power to regain its own meaning, which has been complicated to the point of loss, it is amateurism: the distance from Lamarck to Lorenz is bare of cover, the two centuries between them have been trampled flat by the dizzying development of science. The only absolute genius was a monk who sowed two beds of peas … the amateur gardener Mendel.

  There is a happy regularity in the fact that the truth recedes as you draw near to it, and if you are really dying to get at it, you will have to content yourself with assorted litter picked up along the road. Truth, like the Muse, is a woman—she herself yields, and it’s the wrong man every time. Her choice is hard to analyze. You’ll scarcely get anywhere with her by calculation—you must have feeling. Force rules out knowledge. How rapidly we come to know the non-essential! The essential, even now, is almost as remote and as close as it ever was. Goodness only knows what contraptions are flying around in the sky, but as for birds, we hardly guess that they exist. Clever machines grind away, supposedly liberating our minds—and we begin to construct for ourselves, in parallel with the super-bomb, facts which the primitive mind assumed without proof: that everything alive can at least feel something …

  Twentieth-century science has badly scared the truths. They have flown away, like the birds that people are so clumsily trying to trap here on the Kurish Spit. Man was never so scornful of the monkey as when he came to believe in his own origin from it. Intolerable arrogance. Modern ecology, I think, isn’t even a science, but rather a reaction to science. A natural, normal reaction (in this respect, too, it’s a natural science). The handwriting of this science awakens within us a concept of style, in the same sense as in art. In studying life, ecology itself is alive; in researching behavior, ecology itself acquires behavior. This science has behavior, an unavoidable ethical aspect. Its limitation is an ethical limitation. Not everything is permitted. Not everything is worth thinking, not everything is worth understanding. Amateurism teaches a lesson by casting its natural and seemingly uneducated—enlightened—glance on the alive only when in immediate contact with it. And then easily finds words for its concepts. Niche, geographic range, pyramid …