Father knew this to be the response of one raised without pets. Against the Professor’s romanticism of the dog and its infelicities, Father had projected his own theory of the mind, based on observation.
“Did you know,” Scipio, the Professor had said proudly one day, prying open Wolf’s jaws, “that there are less bacteria in this lout’s mouth than ours?”
Father did know, but he knew something else as well. He knew it most when the Professor discoursed upon the center of the brain, its hidden problems and purposes, a space in which everything important in the world was essentially left unexplained. He knew it from dogs who had been eviscerated, died on him, or been split open by a bear, and it was this: at the center of the brain lies not a knot of history or chemistry, but an empty cavern, and none the less mysterious for that. In this echoing sinus, laced with veins and covered by the dome of the hippocampus, there exists no idea or thought, only emotional energies which eventually find their way into thought to be filed under “Useless Suffering.” The dog retains two arteries from the nose directly into this cavity, men do not, which is why our first reflex is to deny reality and complicate associations. The female of our species does not use her nose, or rather she uses it differently. Her nose is connected to her ear, while in men it is to the eye, a most savage degradation.
This was the basis of the friendship: the Professor couldn’t understand how Scipio, far more darkly pessimistic than he, could act so cheerfully and not project panic. And my father admired in Berganza the fact that he had developed an intellectual method to make up for his lack of nose, his poor judge of character.
Both may have underestimated me. For the dog gets our admiration because he is sniffing every moment of the day and does not confuse devotion with romance, which is why he is always emergent. His senses are attuned to snuffing out evidence of betrayal, and he transforms his deep cynicism into requests for constant attention. The dog is the only true detective, just as he is the only survivor without guilt. Men never get over the fact that the mind seems superior to the experiences presented to it. This basic misconception arises not because their mind is superior but because their sense apparatus is fooled.
One day after an exhausting ramble they returned to Father’s den for some serious libation, and while Father was pouring single-malt whiskeys, the Professor snuck up behind him and slipped the collar of Dresden rings about his neck.
“Easy, Scipio,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”
Father didn’t move a muscle.
“You know there are few men whose society I can tolerate with equanimity, Berganza.” Handing a whisky to the Professor, the collar closing only slightly, he proceeded to unlock a vitrine and take an artifact from the glass shelves. “The Oriental snaffle bit,” he announced. “The swivel action allowed the barbarians to outmaneuver the Western centurions, and was the single most important accouterment in their success. Here, try it on.” As he went round behind him, the leash went slack. He slipped the bit between Berganza’s beard and mustache, holding the delicate reins of amaranthine leather above his head. As they wolfed down their Scotches Russian-style, the Professor’s jaw jutted out, and a light appeared in the black eyes as he dropped to all fours.
“Does it hurt?” Father inquired.
The Professor shook his head defiantly.
“It’s supposed to hurt a little. Observe then, this smallest pressure,” and Father pulled the bit slightly to the right, pulling back the Professor’s lips and exposing the slightly yellowed incisors.
“Very good, Berganza.” Then he pulled on the left rein, and the Professor’s mouth was drawn into a quite uncharacteristic but not unattractive grin. The Professor wrapped the end of the chain’s leash around his own neck, singing, “Let’s go, heigh-ho, mount up, Scipio!” and the Professor obligingly sauntered around the room with Father astride, careful to keep his weight on the balls of his feet, as his yolk-fellow gave him slack. And so they played around with each other as they would permit no other mortal, not even a woman. The library rang with their shouts, and soon damp splotches appeared in the armpits of their suit coats.
“You were born to pull at the traces, Berganza,” Father exclaimed.
“And you, dear Scipio, know just how hard to pull!”
But the Professor was soon winded, and they fell into a heap in the corner howling for joy like animals.
Father was fascinated by leaks. He spent his boyhood building dams of every conceivable material across every creek, rivulet, and runnel, observing how long and in what manner they eroded and unraveled. To him this seemed the basic principle on which nature and science had collaborated: the inevitability of life randomly breaking through its forms. He applied the principle to his breeding, respecting above all the genes which leaked—in error, wisdom, or divine plan was unimportant—while judging the desirability of the mutation, then determining how it might be fixed. The mind was not to be judged on the quality of the ideas it had, but on how it dealt with ideas broken down and dispersed—ideas which broke their own membrane, as it were. In short, where most men would have identified with the dam or the water, having faith in river gods or whoever watches over engineers, my father’s concern was with the banks of the stream. The nature of the problem, as opposed to the essence, could then be put in an entirely different light. If, as was often said in those days, man encounters an abyss, it behooved him to know its depth and general topography, and it should make a difference whether this declivity was chasm or pond, brook or gorge, mudflat or rushing torrent. The river’s origins in his high backyard, or the muddy and boring delta where it slithered into the sea, did not concern him. It was what to do with the damn thing as it crossed one’s property. If one could not ignore the river’s disruptive powers, one could at least manage change at an acceptable rate. In this as in most things, he was ahead of his time, as velocity was to become the primary subject of the century.
I mention this only to explain that Father’s den was largely a collection of leaks and holes, the artifacts of obdurate and inexplicable pressures. He thought of books as dams—marvels of engineering which nevertheless eroded at different rates as they aged. He had a preference not for those which stood the test of time, which he considered simply a matter of luck, but for those which self-destructed before they were finished. For what defined a book was not whether you read or wrote it, but the honest notice that just at the very moment as you were adding the last of its blockages, they were eroding as fast as they were built. In his library the catalogue was predictable: a section of history which expended all its energy in mastering secondary sources so as to never render judgment; philosophy with the glaring contradictions in logic; science based on untestable hypotheses; a series of collected fiction lacking an odd volume, which brought its market value to nil; several roped-off sections of “unreadable masterpieces,” novels written by cowards in heroic tone; poetry whose complete surrender to loftiness finally impoverished it. He specialized in collecting books that neither petered out nor went awry, being fundamentally misconceived from the start. There was also a collection of incunabulae whose value was the precise inverse of their contents, books which appreciated to the exact extent they could no longer be read, or had became too valuable to read. The only complete set in the library was Cardinal de Baussets’s Histoire de Fénelon. His favorite book, he often said, was Volume Four, a tome whose pages had been carefully glued together, forming a solid rectangle which had then been hollowed out so that it could conceal a small dagger and some stamps.
The books were interspersed among jars with imperfect seals in which the fruits had turned as white as crustaceans in formaldehyde, as well as some bottles of wine improperly corked, with an inch of tar residue at the bottom, and some canned goods with wrinkled, misspelled labels imperfectly glued. Other curiosities included architectural drawings of unbuilt follies, failed sluicegates from the lower reaches of the Mze, imaginary tributaries of inaccurate mapmakers, collapsed waterworks, failed bridges
, and a large collection of ebonite boxes exhibiting every valve which had failed on the property, every engine part which had given way, pieces of shrubs which had not made it through a severe winter, masonry from cracked foundations, snapped ropes, short-circuited wire, seeds which had not come true, cracked bricks, split joints, busted coils, and broken couplings—all clearly dated and labeled with speculations as to the nature of the stress and fatigue, as well as the consequences.
Of special interest to the Professor was a grid of empty cubbyholes, each with a small gilt frame. Here and there inside was a conventional trilobite, and to its left a cousin stoically bearing scars of some future organism, while to the right, coiled in shame, resided other relations, which had departed history through their imperfections. Unlike the vitrines holding the guns in the dining room, which were on display to show their contents’ beauty, their appreciation in value, and the acumen of the collector, this was a collection of vulnerability, inexplicability, and terror. First was an empty hole signifying the initial colonization never explained, followed by all the smug forms of life incapable of getting where they had been found, the ones who couldn’t swim but crossed the sea, the snails too big to be carried by birds and without the means to cling to driftwood. At the very center was a large hole with a small handkerchief for a curtain, making a kind of funerary to memorialize the gap between reptiles and birds, and containing a long, dry pectoral fin of a flying fish, which, frightened by an oar, had leapt ten feet into the air and dropped into Father’s boat.
“It is a long way from fright to utility, Berganza,” said Father. “And yet”—he beamed as he said this—“the exhibit shows, if not explains, life from the nonliving, does it not?”
The Professor complimented him on the professionalism.
“Yes, yes, you’ve set up the collapse just like Ptolemy, step by step.”
The empty holes were there to be stared into, a diorama dramatizing what happens when you are forced to abandon every theory which explains succession. The entire study was an antidote to the bourgeois dining room, a chamber of imponderables dedicated to the awesome persistence of the unfit. It portrayed not a struggle for life carried on by the best-adapted individuals, but laws of which we are totally ignorant, forms endowed with a novel character either annihilated or reverted to a standard of mediocrity, and organisms which, in the face of all good things, nevertheless moved toward destruction. The display was devoted to the theory of natural selection in order to show how it shrugged off the problem of evil, and how an enfeebled constitution might be passed on. Of our species, the only motive and characteristic seemed to be persistent exaggeration, like orchids or butterflies, whose enhanced singularity is simply incomprehensible.
In one of the boxes were two jars of Hippodamia beetles, one all dead, the other swarming.
“I defy you, Berganza, to describe the difference between those who perished and those who yet crawl. Did those who survive exhibit purpose? If a blow of fate were good for a species, would we not then knock all our breeding animals in the head?”
The cornices of Father’s den were black with the tubes of rolled-up charts. The greatest attention was given to a German one, “The Scale of Being,” across which various preening species gamboled in ingenious movable cutouts with tacks, eyelets, and tiny golden cords sewn in their backs. Father and the Professor spent many pleasant Sundays arguing the order of the warm-blooded hierarchy, being careful to distinguish between the merely peculiar and those who were clearly victims of fate. The candidates moved up and down the chart, one day favoring the Professor’s inexplicable choice, the duck, and another Father’s, the underrated pig. (“Neither so nasty nor lazy as depicted.”) Both animals had soon vaulted the poor horse, whose only act of intelligence, they posited, was to run away, a kind of continual emigration akin to fish and birds, but without their drama and regularity.
Of course, the dog and the ape vied for the topmost slots on “The Scale of Being,” the two men agreeing in a spirit of comity that while the ape had a higher intellect, the emotions of the noble dog were more developed. Once this was ascertained, they turned to a chart of French manufacture, “The Tree of Life,” a lovely bit of evolutionary metaphor with each species named in a venous leaf sprouting from its family branch. Scipio and Berganza began by drawing new branches connecting the main limbs, which wavered oddly, as if a child had drawn them in, for it was possible to rank emotional classifications as well as intellectual categories by drawing new leaves on the new branches. In these leaves, the ape was clearly the winner in self-esteem, self-control, cautiousness, and powers of imitation. Man was ahead in matters of hope, ideality, deceit, and sense of the marvelous. The dog excelled in adhesiveness, benevolence, conscientiousness, and veneration. While all three seemed equal in amativeness, homesickness, and love of approbation, only the dog shared with man the capacities of shame, remorse, indefinite morality, and, above all, the sense of the ludicrous. They added to this perhaps the most elevated sense of all, the dog’s superior dread of the police. For a time, the dog’s rich emotional life and preternatural sagacity vaulted him to the very topmost branches of “The Tree of Life,” and there these qualities perched in the topmost branches like a clumsy, frightened cat, holding on for dear life as the remaining categories fluttered down like so many autumnal reflections.
In these rankings of nobility, thirteen Sundays were allotted to the horse, fourteen to the ox, seventeen to the sheep, eleven to the goat, five to the duck, seven to the pig, and thirty-nine to the dog, with occasional forays into the elephant and the whale, and one interminable session on marsupials. Anecdotal as well as scientific evidence was submitted: a bull who nuzzled a man who had saved him from lightning; cats who knocked telephones out of their owner’s hands; a dog who bit a lesion out of his owner’s leg which turned out to be cancerous; creatures that warned of epileptic fits, earthquakes, hurricanes, and air-raids, in which none of the five senses could have been involved. There were also spirited defenses of those at which the charge of stupidity had been leveled, digressions into the savage species which had been eliminated (unaware of the services man could render them), not to mention the pointlessly destructive fox, the disgusting guinea pig (so indifferent to his surroundings), the tendency of carnivores to butcher more than they could possibly eat, cats which appealed only to the lowest grade of portrait artists, and the tendency of the elephant to bear a grudge. It was clear that one could be elevated either by useful service or courageous threat to authority—only the dog was elevated by its power of spontaneous love—and in all these discussions, the highest position man achieved out of a ranking of fifty was in the low teens, just ahead of livestock, on the grounds that very little is required to talk, and even less to think.
“It was our beloved Spinoza,” the Professor summed up, “who pointed out that while all animals are excusable, it does not follow that all men are blessed.”
On occasion they even entered the true domain of philosophy, putting aside questions of category, of how thoughts might arise without recourse to thinking, of whether one could stop thinking without a thought, and if “The Tree of Life” forks at the top, whether its roots are thus a mirror of the crown. The Professor confessed he had never seen a tree’s roots, and Father took him that very afternoon into the Marchlands, where trees were uprooted from the swampy soil with every storm—great elms on their sides, roots inscribing an arc as wide as the branches, some still growing along the ground. Father pointed out that of all trees, a fallen one is most useful, gathering more flora and fauna than the most majestic, isolated example. The fallen tree which still lives and thus multiplies other forms of life—not awesome-appearing, worthless to gather, and fallen out of the frame of beauty and providence, but functional to its final molecule and “worth even worship,” was how Father left it.
They returned to the den, there to contemplate in silence a fact of which they were always partially aware but had not taken sufficiently into account, namely that �
�The Tree of Life” and “The Scale of Being” had apparently nothing to do with one another. They had embarked on that long journey of adding zeros to the numeral of themselves, for only the most courageous of men could admit that as their knowledge increased by infinite magnitudes, their basic ignorance had scarcely diminished.
But in Cannonia, where time flows back and forth, and observers are always linked to the observed, it was difficult to deny that distant feeling that everything is morphically interconnected and resonates.
I had the distinct apprehension that given just the slightest excuse—another glass of whiskey or another chart—these two men would have sauntered out the door and left their families in their great houses, renouncing their life insurance and wealthy clientele for the road, leashed and snaffled together as oft-erring vagabond folk, diligently scrutinizing men, loving women in haste, reveling in animal and gustatory marvels, and traversing the humming plains of Flanders, or the mellow gardens of France, or the desolate Spanish uplands, playing jokes on prime ministers, kings, and potentates, and finally traveling east to the most Byzantine of nations to give the reigning pasha a hot foot.
IN DARKEST CANNONIA
(Rufus)
On our return to Semper Vero, I was given a rough inventory of the many classical statues. Each time Iulus’s parents had wanted to modernize the bathrooms, they had decided instead upon yet another piece of garden sculpture. We circled a huge zinc figure of a winged woman from the design of an unknown Parisian sculptor. Her wings were quite small for her body and she held her right breast with her left hand as the dogs urinated merrily on her feet. Further on sat a cast-iron statue of an Eastern knight in need of immediate repair, a huge knotted sash barely covering his feverish groin, his big-balled horse rearing precipitously upon a millstone so that he might be turned toward an enemy like a weathervane. Then a rather nervous bronze Buddha with extraordinary earlobes, (“Not a copy,” it was pointed out), and finally a cluster of three negro boys, one in breechcloths with a snake in his hands, another in pharaonic headdress with a vessel on his shoulders, and a third in rather elegant and modern tennis shorts, holding a sphere in one hand and a handle of something which had been broken off in the other.
In Partial Disgrace Page 21