DÜRER’S RHINOCEROS
The identity of the person who found the rhinoceros washed ashore in Liguria in the winter of 1516 is not known. What he or she thought the hulking creature might be, where it had come from—none of this has been recorded. We do know that, like Zarafa, when very young, it had successfully traveled from its home in Goa, southern India, to Lisbon as a gift to the king of Portugal. When it was fully grown, the king, familiar with bullfights, proposed a contest to pit the rhino in a fight against an elephant.* At the sight of the horned creature, the elephant had other ideas, bolting and crashing through the arena, requiring many people to recapture it beyond the broken gates. Since it was considered unable or unwilling to perform, the king planned to send the rhinoceros to the pope as a gift. Would it have wandered around St. Peter’s, toppling statues, terrifying supplicants, cooling off in the Tiber? Whatever plans were made to accommodate the rhino in its new home, they were never realized. The ship carrying the animal sank in the Mediterranean. Despite the confusion and horror of those who found the carcass on a beach, it was gutted, stuffed, and sent on to the Vatican anyway.
Albrecht Dürer never saw the rhinoceros himself, but he did see a drawing of it that had been posted to Germany by a Portuguese artist, and from this sketch he made his own rendition in a woodblock print. In Dürer’s version, the animal’s body armor was closer to that of a triceratops than a rhino, but it was considered an accurate representation, often copied and disseminated widely, until actual rhinos were brought to Europe over two hundred years later.
Dürer lived in a land of no photographic images and very few printing presses. Even up to Kipling and Verne’s time, a percentage of nineteenth-century readers of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea or The Jungle Book might never have seen even illustrations of elephants, tigers, and monkeys and could only imagine what a narwhale might look like. As a citizen of the opposite kingdom, that of an infinite number of images, I’m fascinated by clips of an actual giant deepwater squid as it brushes by a submersible tasked with filming the Pacific floor or a mongoose beheading a boa constrictor in a courtyard. I confess I watch these clips from time to time, from cats driving Pontiacs to the possibly gruesome and extreme, but what’s fascinating about stories that introduce the wild into man-made environments: pythons on the subway, a leopard in a Bronx apartment, a boxing kangaroo escaped from its thuggish keepers, elephants walking through the Holland Tunnel at 3:00 a.m.? It would be a fairy tale to believe some of these scenarios end well for the animals, but there is another way to look at these stories: as portents of animals saying, We’re not extinct yet, and someday this will all be ours again.
* Watching Game of Thrones, my son and I observe brutality to animals signals a character is thoroughly evil and probably beyond salvation, whatever his past, whatever his reasons. When Cersei Lannister orders the execution of an innocent wolf or Ser Gregor Clegane summarily beheads his horse, that’s it for them. As characters, they’re done for the next thousands of pages or hours of viewing. With the fall of the sword there will be no redemption for them. They are the kings of Portugal, the executioners of Le Jardin des Plantes.
Impersonal Affairs
Henri Michaux
—Translated from French by Gillian Conoley
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Henri Michaux (1899–1984), known for his forays into human perception, published over thirty books of poems, narratives, essays, travelogues, journals, and drawings. Throughout the almost sixty years of his creative life, he explored the darker, shadowy realms of human consciousness while concurrently searching for an adequate tool or medium of communication—language, drawing, paint—up to the difficulty of his task. Within his work one can trace the struggle for, and his disappointment in not finding, a universal language through gesture, mark, sign, and the word.
Michaux gave himself over to adopted or induced consciousnesses that would wrest him from his own: travel, mescaline, imagined worlds full of creatures or beasts, Western and Eastern spirituality. This goal is relentlessly explored from his first book to his last, including the early My Properties (1929), the half-imaginary travel journals of A Barbarian in Asia (1933), the invented lands and mythical animals of Elsewhere (1948), and the multiple textual columns and dislocated drawings of Miserable Miracle (1956), written during Michaux’s eleven-year experiment with mescaline. A teetotaler until he was fifty-seven, Michaux had a neurologist friend who encouraged him to try the drug. Michaux was drawn to mescaline precisely for its capacity to enhance a division in consciousness he was already encountering in his art, an experience in which one part of the mind remained excruciatingly unillusioned and lucid during vision, fantasy, or hallucination.
Watchtowers on Targets (Vigies sur Cibles), the book from which this excerpt is taken, was written in 1959, two years after L’Infini Turbulent, and three years after Miserable Miracle. Considered one of Michaux’s mescaline texts, Watchtowers on Targets is unusual in his oeuvre, in that characters, beasts, and animals appear unannounced, and without the narrative link we usually see in Michaux.
Waking up, he felt a small belly in the palm of his hand. Whose belly? He didn’t want to disturb it. Reflect first. While reflecting, he fell asleep again. When he woke up, no more belly. No more anyone.
There, as a prime example, one of the many disadvantages of reflection.
*
Around the violated shelter, there was hurried activity. Everyone wanted to attend the apoplexy of the swan.
*
How sad it would be, filled with rage, with phlegm, with weakness, to suffocate, a twisted body, in the bottom of a gourd.
*
In the white of the cry, the crime betrayed itself, threw itself, terrible in the consciousness of all those living in the neighborhood. It was necessary to open the shutters, the eyes and the languishing rest of the almost finished day. The criminal himself, pierced by the cry, stops and does not make a move. The red liquid with the minute stammering, called “blood,” elsewhere blut, or blood, and even proudly sangre, the blade of the knife, the marks and the fingerprints will soon testify against he who now flees, but in whom, motionless, a vertical cathedral erected in one moment, the unexpected cry dwells and does not fade.
*
Coming from the forest, the flying larvae appear in spring. Large, larger than the largest birds, and in great numbers, they darken the sky, they darken the countryside and the villages, nestling together in the hollow of the small valleys, and wanting to nestle even more.
The counting of the monsters occurs once a year or every ninth moon. Fate is called to decide. Many perish, but enough survive so that the Haw monsters can monstrously gather again.
*
The fly is so well organized that it has been able to frequent man diligently for thousands of years, without being kicked out, or put to work. It has done all of this without interfering and without looking around stupidly like a cat pretending to be tamed. Going as far as to settle itself on the rim of one’s eyes and drawing out from the admirably salted tears the exact chloride missing from its diet. With the same ease it frequents the comforts of the biggest mammals’ eyes, no doubt dreaming of more perfect eyes yet, like saucers, sunken in rather than bulging out.
Here is the creature that every man should have studied in the slave era, instead of eagles, lions, horses, or … marshals who will never teach him what is most important: “How to live together without serving?”
*
“Me too, said Varisi, I would need sovereignty to cross countries and places, or at least to significantly settle there. But I do not have the bearing and height of the tree, I do not have the royalty and concentration of the tiger, I do not have the mass and the majesty of the mountain.
“What was the reason for this triple lack in my organism, I ask myself.”
*
Telepathy from one star to another. It’s on another planet that Christ would have been crucified! Ah! Ah! This would perhaps acco
unt for that which seemed so false, so true, so false …
*
By the hair of the soul, he held it while she waved herself in vain attempts of resistance, while she struggled in vain movements, in vain returns, in vain un-lacings, slipping despite it all, slipping almost entirely suspended, with no support above the pit of shared desire.
*
There is in me, Raha said, a worm-like movement. I would utter stupidities in wanting to situate it better and not touch it more. Many other movements, it’s still in me, holding me far from the action, far from the attention expected of me, and from which I could never become sober. Idiots who insist on inviting me. They do not know. Raha must be underground. How would he want to dig? … I have my borders near the center. I have to be quick, very quick, to ensure my confidence. One minute later and I’m abroad. But I know, I know in advance and guide myself according to its geography. Know its geography, Raha said …
*
“The mirror of the soul,” said Agrigibi, “sometimes sends me back as a dog, sometimes a crab, sometimes an ant, sometimes a spider, sometimes a weasel caught in a trap, sometimes a young hedgehog with soft prickles, sometimes a wounded mosquito with its wings torn off, in short my willingness is mocked, defeated like a creased note in a prostitute’s stocking.”
The jagged being, who then will speak in its name?
How many times does Agrigibi not meet tornadic beings! Strange? Hardly. It’s with a continual thunder of triumph that the healthy advance everywhere, brother of the lion and the steamroller. With force he throws, through his skin, through his eyes, a carousel of forks, to force, to pierce, to break weak points established tenuously themselves, which cannot bend the mechanism of the gust of wind that feels human and that is only spin, that whirlwind, that crushing, that persecution, that explosion, that ceaseless threat of explosion.
How to resist?
How to advance against the wall of trumpets?
*
So then, like a decoy greyhound, like a mad greyhound that begins to run inside itself, to run, to run in itself tirelessly, Agrigibi, helpless, animated by futile vibrations, “rushes backward,” getting lost with dizziness in the unending hallways of his being.
*
Here the hours of the Mna rule.
At the nth hour, the orders are centaurs, half thoughts, half on foot. How? Its impulses are between revolt and dream.
The complication arose with reveille. While the bugles sound, which is my camp? What is my territory? Behind me (or to the side) I begin my pursuit, object of excitement and delirium.
With such ardor I wait for the windows to burst open.
Desires and turgescence listen to the octaves climbing. The large migration of small boats has begun, however. An even larger one is being prepared. A very, very large one, in fact.
*
He who loves will be like the river. Is this, really, what he wanted? Is that right, tomorrow that drives him, tomorrow a building on the ground, tomorrow dazed, tomorrow like a crushed tomato?
*
The phases of the view are these: First, there are four gray zones where columns of a darker gray are formed and intertwined: It’s the morning of the eye, which may not coincide at all with the morning of the solar day, and can even happen at night.
Depending on the situation, there is a pleasing view, becoming more delightful little by little, or simply a small tickle can occur and will not be noticed.
Following next through flexible passages is a light that grows until the noon of the eye, after which there is a progressive darkening until the night of the eye.
The night of the eye doesn’t come every day. Some are set to have it just once a year at best. Others, although rare, have never known it at all. But if it ever comes to them, there will be an exhibition that lasts for months, and, they, clearly obliged, will come, previously hidden and drawn away, like the crippled and degraded.
Such is the eye that doesn’t follow life, such is the life that doesn’t follow the eye.
—1959
Leviathan
Wil Weitzel
None is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.
—Job 41
THE HOUSE WAS SMALL and got you used to bird life. There were mynahs most of all, common mynahs, roosting in mating pairs in the winter and in large flocks in the springs and summers on the beach. They had bright yellow beaks with banded white tails showing smartly from behind when they were on the wing. In addition, the honu, or Hawaiian green turtle, would draw itself out of the sea and gradually turn the color of lava that had cooled and sat for years beneath the sun. A brown color once black that became, in the brightness of noon, hard to see at all.
Whole lives had been lived like this, for all Cal knew. The aromatic calm formed an unwavering picture in his mind, and since he’d been a child on family visits to the island, roaming the inlets of lava on the beach, he had understood the ocean in only one way, as something slow and warm with enduring comforts. Occasionally it occurred to Cal that in winter, while he was on the mainland, there were storms. But he pushed this knowledge away.
Now he crept quietly off the lanai, or grand Hawaiian porch, onto the beach. The sand, even at this late hour, was hot and the heat seeped into the pads of his feet and made him hasten toward the water. He stood perched on the lava looking not at the ocean but toward the house, toward Harold, who was round at the belly and lay back asleep, his head lolling with the startled fury of the beard gushing massive and wild, until it was the thing most conspicuous from the tide line.
Harold was new to the sea, comparatively, though they’d been coming to the house Cal had inherited from his mother, a rich San Diego dowager of the 1960s, for twenty years together now. The sea still seemed to mesmerize Harold, who hailed from Ohio and belonged to lakes and ponds. Warm summer ponds you could approach via long wooden jetties and, as Harold told it, you could splash into, with gaping strides through the air, in your youth. Cal had the impression when Harold spoke of these things that it was still possible to be young, that it was a place rather than a time, and one, moreover, you could still travel toward if you sought ardently the desires that had lived there.
In any case, Harold had never swum in the water in Hawaii. He’d dipped his toes, sure; he’d responded to coaxing by laying his considerable bulk in the tide pools, yes; he’d been nibbled by tiny, carnivorous glass shrimp, nearly translucent, and by juvenile raccoon butterfly fish. But he had never swum out with Cal to the drop-off where occasionally you glimpsed large pelagics, a spotted eagle ray flying with her calf, a pod of spinner dolphins swallowing long circles of rest, or, very rarely, a white-tip reef shark cruising the bottom structures, seeking then finding a ledge of coral under which to pause and drowse.
Nonetheless, Harold was clearly intrigued by large predators and sea mammals. Dolphins intrigued him. It was rare that dolphins visited the bay in their languorous sweeps of the shoreline but occasionally Cal would hear Harold exclaim. Then his lover would point vigorously, eyes squinting with the brush line of his brows buckling. “Spinners,” he’d mutter a second time, collecting himself, in a voice that was calm and flat, belying his excitement.
“In that case, why don’t we take the kayak?” Cal would watch Harold carefully in such moments, wondering if he was tempted, knowing him to be unwilling to don a mask and sink his broad body into the ocean.
“Oh, they’ll be long gone,” Harold would say quickly. Or “No need to disturb their rest.”
Even so, Harold had clearly become a student of spinners, of the way they hunted at night and rested and bonded in their long circles during the days. They were smaller than bottlenose dolphins, more athletic, and Harold would watch them spin out of the sea, then crash back down with resounding slaps of what seemed to Cal like pure joy.
“Status and power,” Harold would correct him. “They’re either hunting or making displays.” Then Harold would drone on in a dry monotone about impressing mates, territorial war
, and bachelor factions shaking the structures of dolphin authority. He was really quite knowledgeable, Cal thought, for a man who never ventured into the water. Cal himself knew only what it was to swim beside a pod of spinners thirty feet down, to look them in the large eye that was deeply far from the end of the nose, to see the bright-white gleam beneath the gray of their flesh, and to feel them slow and patient beside him, as though awaiting the long, curving strokes of his fins. The dolphins, with calves gliding silently beneath mothers’ bellies, with the thickness of their bodies slimming to thread whitely into broad tails, were the muscles of the sea, their gazes entering you through water and growing inside your lungs until you were forced to turn up for air.
Cal turned at last from Harold toward the water and scanned the bay. It was choppy with a seaward breeze that pushed at the incoming tide and made humps like the backs of things. This whole expanse, the ocean, would not make sense without the lanai and the stand of coconut palms he and his mother had planted and that now tilted and rattled in the wind. Nor would the placid bay live at all for him without the old man snoring in his chair. How could that be? Harold who never went into the sea. If it were up to Cal, after all, one would hardly get out of the ocean—
“Shark,” yelled Harold from behind him.
“What?” Cal turned to face the lanai and Harold was standing, staggering, then descending unsteadily onto the beach.
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