by Andrei Bitov
The pyramid means who eats whom in what sequence. You can fail to see the structure only if you’ve climbed to the very top of it …
Food, territory, age, energy, population, birthrate, mortality … Excuse me, but what’s scientific about this, what’s new here, where’s the discovery? This we know anyway, this is just life. Exactly. Our mind-set is prideful: only if a thing is already known to us do we believe it exists. But what is already known, what is not yet known, and what will never be known constitute a single, irreducible reality, in which no one thing is essentially more important and no one thing less important. Sometimes I can’t help chuckling when I picture to myself the shapeless fragment, so randomly gnawed at by knowledge, that we keep in our heads as a vision of reality. This fragment, however, seems to us quite smooth and round, all-inclusive. To hypothesize a reality that engulfs our atom of information is a heroic scientific feat. The spiritual meaning of a scientific discovery lies not in broadening our sphere of knowledge but in overcoming its narrowness.
To look underfoot and then at the sky—that is the first scientific method. To scuff pensively at the floor and try to read the answer off the ceiling, where, as everyone knows, nothing is written. This we can understand.
In the vista of my mind I study with great empathy an Austrian man, no longer young, as he wanders down a path in a small, doubtless tidy and pretty Austrian village … He lifts his head and gazes at the Austrian sky, almost the same color as ours. He sees there a bird calling noisily, let’s say a jackdaw. What, in point of fact, is this man doing? Counting crows. This laughable pastime—proverbially synonymous, in our country, with thumb twiddling—absorbs him for long decades. Why is the crow calling, where is she going?
The sea is deep blue, the sky is sky-blue, wormwood is bitter, the wolf gray … To adopt a posture of submissiveness; that is, to bare his most vulnerable spot for the crowning mortal blow, exhibit his Achilles’ heel … Poor beast! How terrified he must be, and how humiliated, as he screws up his eyes and waits for death … But—poor winner!—that will never happen. The winner will roll on the grass, howling resentfully, cooling his white heat, sheathing his weapon … Oh, if only the loser would flee like a coward! One could interpret this as a violation and chase him from the territory, snapping insultingly at his heels. But no. That sniveler, that whelp, that freakish scoundrel is still standing with his eyes shut and his neck arched back, exposing to his enemy the temptingly pulsating carotid artery. At this moment of submission the moral prohibition is switched on, full force. Each receives his punishment: the loser for weakness, the winner for nobility. Let us note that both are professional killers, for whom death and blood are as work and sweat for us.
The doctor had just told me Lorenz’s fable about the Lion, the Crow, and the Wolf. The conversation had led us away from the sea into a thicket. Our feet kept sinking into the sand.
“Well, and what happens in the end?” I asked, truly impressed by this turnaround.
“Nothing,” said my doctor friend. “He’ll roll and wallow and snarl for a minute, and calm down. The loser will quietly leave the territory, without a backward look.”
“The territory?”
“Why, yes. I’ve told you that predators have their own hunting grounds, with strict boundaries.”
“But … ”
Truly: but … The gentlest of doves, symbols of kissy love, with palm twigs in their little beaks, birds incapable of harming anyone, armed with nothing but a beak that would hardly even peck apart a beetle and claws that don’t even dig up dirt … well, unless you separate them, they’ll peck each other to death. And the winner certainly won’t pause over his toppled, dying enemy. He’ll finish him off by hammering him with his gentle little beak. And he won’t cease his bellicosity after his enemy’s death, he’ll pluck him naked and rip him to shreds. He is feebly armed—he has feeble ethics. When dealing with individuals of his own species, he has no moral barrier.
“A dizzying idea!” I exclaimed, pouncing on the part I needed. “All my life I’ve hated doves—”
“You’ve no moral right to condemn them,” the doctor said darkly. “They’re not subject to our moral judgment.”
We were past the forest, which had hidden the dunes from view. They opened up, unexpectedly high, losing their yellowness in the distance and acquiring an alive, greenish-gray color. Their fluid outlines, too, were alive. They grazed there like a herd, lightly rubbing sides, screening each other with their round humped backs, and sticking their heads out. With my every step they swayed before my eyes like a caravan of elephants walking ahead. That alive color reminded me very much of elephant hide.
We walked through the underbrush, and as it diminished toward the boundary with the sand we kept scaring away jackrabbits. They started up from their burrows at the last moment and sprang away right under my feet. In childhood I had cherished a special fondness for them and had made a particular game of being a rabbit. I’m a city person, no hunter—I had never before had rabbits scampering underfoot. I examined my revived childhood with deep emotion. When they took off, they didn’t race away from us into the forest, for some reason, but across the open to the dunes, and I was fortunately able to follow them with my eyes. Only the swiftest creatures have that slow way of running-—the animal always seems to be dallying in his escape, looking over his shoulder as he runs. Actually, he’s flying, not running. There isn’t much commotion in his flight, it lacks the flash of paws—which is why the sequence appears to be in slow motion. The leisurely rabbits quickly disappeared from view, however, as we were to verify when we scrambled up that same dune. The rabbit would fly up the dune—grayish yellow against the yellowish gray—and on reaching the edge he would vanish in the sky.
“What about rabbits?” I asked.
“Rabbits are feebly armed. In a fight among themselves they can injure each other very seriously. You haven’t had occasion to see this?”
Yet another rabbit flew up from under my feet into the deep blue sky. The underbrush melted away, we stepped onto bare sand. Underfoot, it did not resemble elephant hide; it was bright yellow.
“Have you?”
“Yes.”
I parted with the bunnies of my childhood, I hugged them, the little stuffed creatures, and wept. This was an unnecessary disillusionment. Who would have guessed that rabbits were such beasts! But not wolves …
“Have you seen wolves fight?” I asked balefully.
“No. I haven’t seen lions fight, either.” The doctor was a sensitive man. “I did see a fight between ravens. The loser exposed the crown of his head—so the winner grabbed his own beak with his claws, as if he wanted to pull it off, lest he use it as a hammer.”
“That’s funny,” I said, picturing this very vividly. “Just grabs himself by the nose … Ha, ha.”
“By the nose is funny,” the doctor said. “By the beak is serious.”
“To sheathe his sword?”
“Most likely.”
“ ‘Crows do not pick crows’ eyes’—is that what it’s about?”
“Well, yes,” the doctor said evasively. “Maybe. I wasn’t interested in that. Although that fable is about people, of course, like all fables.”
“Well, what about people?” I asked, with burning curiosity.
“What about them?” the doctor asked, as if he hadn’t understood.
“Are people powerfully armed?”
“What do you think?”
“Far more powerfully … ”
The doctor only humphed.
“You don’t think so?”
“You see, I try not to think so,” the honest doctor said reluctantly.
“It costs you some effort?”
“It’s worth some effort. You and I just analyzed a classic example. Lorenz made his discovery by overcoming the gravitational pull of anthropomorphism.” Glancing at me with faint hope and discovering that I understood nothing, the doctor continued, “Anthropomorphism is the error we make most freq
uently in studying the animal world. Which is to say, we endow animals with our own traits and interpret their behavior on the basis of our own experience. This is why it took so long for us to gain any concept of even wolf ethics, for example. We discussed them more in human terms than in wolf terms.”
“So you’re saying—” I joined in.
“I said what I said,” the doctor retorted crossly. “Please don’t interpret me. I said it because we always have a tendency that is the reverse of anthropomorphism, so to speak. It’s not a tendency in the general public but in us, in specialists who have begun to know something in our field. It’s … what should I call it? … zoo- or biomorphism. We begin to transfer our knowledge and experience from the realm of the specialized to the realm of the universally human. You’ve just seen the errors people make when they sin through innocent anthropomorphism. The fabulist’s innocent sin, however, has inflicted incalculable harm on the animal world. Hard to calculate, but also a mistake to underestimate.”
“I notice you have something special against fables—”
“I read somewhere, and I completely agree, they’re a servile, slavish genre. And besides, I don’t find them at all funny or clever. Why contrast an ant with a dragonfly? Or rather, I do find them funny, but absolutely not the way the author would want. The more illiterate the fable biologically, I’ve noticed, the shabbier and more plebeian its moral.”
“Well!” I said. “That’s a rash remark.”
“No more so than yours on animals … Or maybe I did go too far. Again, that’s not my concern at all. Or it’s my exclusively private concern, so to speak, which comes to the same thing: for a scientist, his specialty must be sharply delimited. Nevertheless, the freer and more abstract a writer’s design, the freer it is from concrete, specialized errors. For example: ‘Once the Swan, the Crayfish, and the Pike undertook to play a quartet.’ This fable in no way contradicts—”
“It was other animals who undertook the quartet. Krylov had these pull a cart. You’ve twisted the two fables into one—a device not permitted in criticism, either, if I may say so.”
“I’m not a critic. I don’t know how the morals of these fables differ. To me, they both have the same point: the fundamental variation among biological species prevents us from transferring the characteristics of one to the characteristics of another. Beasts are not another humankind. They’re separate creatures, just as independent biologically as man. These fables even have a certain ecological nuance, which Krylov catches: the animals can’t play their cart … or can’t drive their quartet, forgive my sophomoric humor. These are fables about the absurdity of anthropomorphic transfer.”
I burst out laughing. “Well, now, Grandpa Krylov{5} will never strip Lorenz of his primacy. That’s not what he meant at all.”
“But it’s what he said. I find no other objective meaning in them.”
Once again our conversation came to a dead end. We had gone far astray. Breathlessly we scrambled up the dune. The world was painted in two pure colors, yellow and sky-blue, a surrealist’s dream. The surface of the dune was very neatly corrugated, like the sandy bottom in the tidal zone—yet another indication that we live on the bottom in a direct sense: these ripples had been made by the wind. Pitilessly we destroyed this flawless surface, on which lay no human footprint. The surface in some places was hard, as on a sandbar, and we left flat, regular, barefoot tracks. In others it suddenly sank underfoot, the sand crumbled, and instead of a footprint we left a shapeless cow hole. So from one step to the next we didn’t know which foot would land solidly and which would go through. The wind blew the sand off the crest, stinging our skin; transparent small corpses of beetles and spiders, dried and bleached by sand and sun, rolled down the slope. An occasional blade of grass stuck up, bending away from that solid yellow. A magic circle had been drawn around each—little sundials growing here and there, it seemed, and somehow the idea resonated mysteriously with the sand, perhaps from the association with an hourglass. I myself figured out the origin of these little circles before I could ask the doctor a superfluous question: the blade kept bending under the wind and striking its sharp little tip against the sand, tracing an arc. Thus, being rooted at the center, it drew an ideal circle in the course of the day, as it bent in all directions in the wind. Poignant, that private domain of the grass blade! Now and then a faint bird track, too, without destroying, as ours did, the loneliness of this surface, made some sort of geometrical contact with the grass-blade sundials. And above the yellow, against the blue, a faded butterfly unsteadily fluttered past. Little black beetles stung like the scorching sand, they looked like sand, they were sand brought to life. Ladybugs in fantastic quantity, implacable, marched across the desert toward the sea; their dried-out dead little spots rolled downhill. To say that it was quiet is to say nothing: we carried our sandals in our hands. Suddenly, sticking up from the sand even more rarely than the grass blades, there would be a low, pink-and-blue microflower, soft and delicate.
The violet poured her scent on the air,
The wolf worked his evil in the pasture.
He was ferocious, the violet dear.
Each follows his own nature.
“Yes, exactly.” The doctor’s voice sifted down to me from above, along with a fine stream of sand. “That says the same thing, more accurately and briefly.”
“It’s Pushkin,” I said. “He’s never inaccurate. A genius.”
“I didn’t know. I don’t see any evidence of genius in it. The fact is obvious. Accuracy is no merit, inaccuracy is a sin.”
“But this is humor,” I said, surprised by the doctor’s narrowness.
“What does he want with humor?” the doctor said. “It amends inaccuracy, of course. But anything stated with final exactness has no need of humor.”
“But is there such a thing—final exactness?”
“In your field, I don’t know. But in science, yes.”
“Oh, really?!” I put as much irony as I could into this retort.
“Lorenz, now, the man we were just talking about,” the doctor parried. “Which is he, serious to the point of inexactness or funny to the point of exactness? Neither. Simply exact.”
I concurred and found a gambit: “Yes, he’s exact. But then, what to do about man? You evaded giving an exact answer. Can man be exact in defining someone else’s existence, if he’s inexact in conceptualizing his own?”
I was pleased. Right on the doctor’s heels, one more step, and I stood on the summit of the dune.
I had managed to catch him with my question on the way up—a good thing, for I would have forgotten it here. To say that a view opened up is, again, to say nothing: I dropped my sandals on the sand, to free my hand for a gesture that I did not make. I looked now at one sea, now at the other, but I could also see them both at once. On this windy day (as I discovered it to be, at the summit) the western sea was sapphire, with very white, cloudlike whitecaps, apparently motionless. It was so blue that it completely robbed the sky above of color, as if draining it. So that when I looked at the western sea I felt slightly topsy-turvy, as if standing on my head and looking at sky underfoot. I looked at the eastern sea: exactly the reverse. The sky was soaking up the sea’s color. Faint, feathery whitecaps still remained, but the decolorized water, very quiet, kidskin-calm, was losing its surface and resembled a celestial haze. The western sea was real: salty and bottomless. Floating beyond the horizon was prosperous Sweden, three hundred miles away. The eastern sea was a shallow, almost fresh inlet, with the Lithuanian shore only thirty kilometers away. But neither Lithuania nor Sweden was visible from here. The two seas were equal and boundless, deep and salty-looking.
“True, I didn’t reply to your atomic bomb. That’s what you had in mind, isn’t it, when you thought of man as being so extremely powerfully armed?”
East and west, sky and sea were still spinning in my head, and I didn’t have my feet on the ground. I really didn’t, in actual fact, but I realized this only later.
I nodded.
“You see, a weapon of mass destruction can’t be considered an armament in the sense we spoke of … If we draw biological parallels, as you so tactlessly push me to do, we may discover some analogy with the weapon of mass destruction in the mechanisms that regulate the population of a species. This is a far more complicated field than the one we’ve touched on … But in general, certain phenomena which until recently have seemed mysterious receive their explanation … how shall I put it? … The genetic code contains … This will be hard for you. Briefly, certain things have been provided for in nature … But the bomb—after all, that’s a purely human phenomenon, and without your forcing me I wouldn’t begin to draw such an analogy … ”
I didn’t understand it all, for I was deafened by the vision I had gained here, but with a reporter’s assiduousness I did not retreat. “Well, all right. Let’s give up on that. But is man a biological creature?”
“In three indisputable manifestations: like an animal, he multiplies, eats, and dies.”
Oh, that phrase impressed me!
Death is somehow inherently characteristic of this place, though in every respect it’s a true paradise. I have already mentioned the extraordinary mix of soul and body peculiar to it. I don’t know whether there are many such points on our globe—I had never seen one before, and I have seen no other since. And whenever I’ve returned here (returned, not come … ), I have discovered it, in the same persistent meaning. I promised to explain this peculiar feeling of geographical non-existence, and have twice postponed it—I couldn’t explain it to myself.
I have said that everything here is the way it was in our first textbook, that here at last we resolve the almost unnoticed, childish disillusionment of disparity. What we are taught does not match what is real. This is the very point of our education, forming the first little crevice of experience, deep in the subconscious. The flow of life will erode it to the size of a ravine, itself perhaps more like the textbook ravine than a ravine in nature. Oh, that ill-printed illustration, where color crept onto color, obliterating and redoubling the line! That apocalyptic ravine had been stripped bare—it looked like a dead tree, a streak of lightning, the brain! Our youthful romantic images smashed like waves against the concrete shore of reality. When we visited an extraneous second cousin once removed in a famous port city, we saw neither ships nor sea; on the zero meridian we will discover neither a line nor a zero; we truly do not see the forest for the trees.