Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  But the mind meets resistance in the texture of these tales mostly, I think, because they are indeed primitive, and not only is the milieu an alien one but the habits of narration are different. The laconic closeness of event, no doubt relieved in oral rendition by pause and gesture, tests the attention of a modern reader. One can skim a paragraph by Henry James, get the general picture, and either go back for the furniture and nuance or get on with the story. Skim a paragraph of these myths, and one is lost:

  When the boys fell, the tapir went around stepping on them and burying them with his foot. The tapir, after killing and burying the boys, went a long way away. After a while the boys in the ground began to be born, some in the form of little turtles, others as real people. The one up in the tree said to the others down below, “How are you doing down there?”

  A relatively transparent passage. But this reviewer’s mind—after trying to imagine how to bury boys with a tapir’s foot, where “a long way away” is, why the dead boys so easily begin to resurrect, and why some only make it “in the form of little turtles”—is too boggled to recall that one boy, the paragraph before, had managed, despite the kicking of the wicked tapir’s foot, to stay up in the genipap tree, whence he calls down his cheery and—considering the circumstances—rather bland greeting. The story continues (in case you’ve been gripped) with the boys following their murderer by interrogating successively warmer piles of excrement and killing him when he is asleep; then, “seeing that they had come a long way, the boys decided to climb up to the sky,” where they casually turn into stars.

  A modern story, however fabulous, proceeds subject to the discipline of some reality-derived premises; these Brazilian Indian narratives seem closer to the flow of dreams, wherein nothing is questioned. The sheer authority of the narrator is justification enough for any turn of event. His own decisiveness is echoed in the decisiveness of his characters: the boys decide to climb the sky; and, in one of the more vivid openings, “There once was an old man who wanted to get married, but no woman wanted to marry him. He was very ugly. Saddened by this, he decided to die.”

  As the distinctions between animals and men, the living and the dead, earth and sky are vaguely felt, so is the opposition between the inner will and the outer world. Things happen easily; in “The Origin of the Twins Sun and Moon,” an old jaguar, “very angry, peeled a piece off her fingernail and threw it at her daughter-in-law, cutting her head off.” Beheaded by a fingernail, the daughter-in-law thrashes, is referred to as now “dead,” now “dying,” has vitality enough to give birth to twin boys, the Sun (Rit) and the Moon (Une), and, pages later, after the sons have grown and avenged her by killing their wicked grandmother, still seems to be alive, and talking. A Western reader might expect from the title (imposed, I suspect, by the anthropologists) a coherent if fanciful account of cosmic origins, but this story takes place in an already created cosmos, wherein the growth of the twin Sun and Moon is measured in moons. The twins figure in many of the stories, yet with hardly a trace of celestial grandeur; they are often victimized, sometimes impotent, and rarely luminary. The elemental connection between the Sun and daylight is curiously grasped; in one myth, day is stolen by Sun from a village of vultures. Another story is reminiscent of the Greek myth of Phaëthon. The Sun has been slain (by a bunch of coconuts!), and his widow, seeing the world lost in the ensuing darkness, persuades her three sons to don their father’s headdress of feathers. Two of them find the headdress too hot, and come down from the sky; the third manages to wear it across the firmament, but runs. When he learns to walk, he becomes the Sun, and his mother weeps, knowing he can never return home. The weeping mother is also the motif of the Xingu equivalent of the Adam myth, so brief that it can be quoted entire:

  In the beginning there was only Mavutsinim. No one lived with him. He had no wife. He had no son, nor did he have any relatives. He was all alone.

  One day he turned a shell into a woman, and he married her. When his son was born, he asked his wife, “Is it a man or a woman?”

  “It is a man.”

  “I’ll take him with me.”

  When he left, the boy’s mother cried and went back to her village, the lagoon, where she turned into a shell again.

  “We are the grandchildren of Mavutsinim’s son,” say the Indians.

  The Judaic differentiation of man and God has not yet occurred; Mavutsinim is both. Metamorphosis, in this slippery Amazon world, is no miracle but a mere matter of wishing. The heroes, animal and human, are not agonists, struggling to allocate eternally the one life that is theirs, but spirits, with something of the spirit world’s playful elasticity. The lack of final moral consequence encourages a kind of teeming nastiness absent from Biblical legends. “Kanaratê and Karanavarê” is an Abel-and-Cain story in which Abel keeps “messing around” with his brother’s wives and Cain keeps botching the attempt at murder by such tortuous methods as scarification and starvation, but Abel at last slays him, and inherits his wives. The moral: “Now it will always be this way. Husband will be jealous of wife and brother will fight with brother.” A kind act is as rare in these tales as a logical progression. If any moral principle emerges, it is that sexual relations with women interfere with a warrior’s hardness. Though there are glimmers of humor, of earthy wisdom, of a quickening sympathy with animal life, this is a low-ceilinged world, murky and mean; the myths seem drained of religion, perhaps by an unacknowledged awareness on the part of the Xinguanos that they are, as a culture if not as a population, doomed. Though presented as if timelessly isolated, they were visited by a German ethnologist as long ago as 1887 and have ever since been subject to infiltration by white adventurers, predators, missionaries, and saintly anthropologists. Xingu, as a presentation of a cultural situation, is deficient just where Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, describing not dissimilar primitive societies in the Mato Grosso, is rich: in the sense of cultural interplay. Humanity, from Lévi-Strauss’s ironical self-portrait to the half-caste adventurers living on the margins of Indian territory to the forlorn Indians themselves, presents itself as a giant weave nowhere totally broken. In one of the book’s many beautifully melancholy passages, Lévi-Strauss, emerging onto the Amazon and the outposts of white civilization, witnessed (or thought he witnessed) a tribe, the Tupi-Kawahibs, in the process of liquidating itself, in November of 1938. There, on the banks of the upper Machado, as the departing anthropologist hastened “to reconstruct from its last fragments a culture which had fascinated Europe,” the Tupi-Kawahibs prepared also to depart, and to sink the remnants of their tribe into a stronger one. At this juncture, one night, the chief, Taperahi, startled Lévi-Strauss by rising from the hammock of apathy and singing a song, a many-voiced dramatization that, in the summary, sounds like a lot of the stories collected in Xingu—the farcical adventurers of a japim bird amid talking jaguars, tapirs, lizards, and spirits. In the myth that concludes Xingu, the Godlike Sinaa (who becomes “young again each time he took a bath, pulling his skin off over his head like a sack”) shows us the forked stick that supports the sky and says, “The day our people die out entirely, I will pull this down, and the sky will collapse, and all people will disappear.”

  The forked stick in this case is the so-called Xingu National Park, set up, at the urging of the Boas brothers, by the Brazilian government in 1961 and now gnawed at, if not yet knocked aside, by the trans-Amazon highway. Of course, honor is due the effort of human preservation—by legislation as long as the needs of the powerful allow it, and by museums and literature afterward. One regrets of this book that the fragments were not given a context to enhance their value. Much that seems incongruous or unintelligible must allude to circumstantial details that could have been specified. Parallels with other myths and fables, especially those of other American Indians, might have highlighted the seldom memorable flux of incident. How many primitive peoples, for instance, have, like the Xinguanos, coined myths to explain the invention of the anus and the origins of toothache? Beneath th
e muddy surface of these tales, the deeper significances swim unfished-for, while on the surface dance wonderfully spindly and clear-eyed drawings of animals and artifacts by Wacupiá, a Waura tribesman who had never before put pen to paper. Including them as illustrations was a happy editorial stroke; they bring one Xinguano as close to us as Picasso and Klee, and brighten an otherwise rather tristful volume.

  A New Meliorism

  THE LIVES OF A CELL: Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas. 153 pp. Viking, 1974.

  Who dares now doubt that empirical science is the only legally licensed hunter of truth and the one legitimate dispenser of information about reality? Yet who but the scientists themselves can comprehend what science is saying? So a class of essayists has grown up—they are almost the only surviving specimens of that delicate breed—that seeks to acquaint us with the astonishing facts revealed by research and to place them in a perspective that we might call philosophical, did not the word itself embarrass us. Loren Eiseley, Desmond Morris, Annie Dillard, Joseph Wood Krutch, H. G. Wells—each of these, with his own special tone and own field of specialized knowledge, makes “sense” of the surreal scientific facts that loom beyond our lives like Oz, a benevolent kingdom ever receding into strangeness, but one that now and then deigns to send us, in whimsical emission, a new immunity, or photographs of other planets. Dr. Lewis Thomas, whose essays for The New England Journal of Medicine have been collected as The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, is by profession a pathologist, by position the president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and by avocation a lively, thoughtful writer. His field of expert knowledge, and of meditation, is the microcosm within the cell, but he also draws thoughts from entomology and etymology, and believes that the best thing about the human race so far is Johann Sebastian Bach. Writing for his fellow physicians and researchers, Dr. Thomas does not trouble to spare them hard words like “haptene,” “eukaryotic,” and “myxotricha.” In several essays he deals candidly with the practice of medicine. (“The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internists’ wives, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves.”) In other essays, he twits the anthropologist C. M. Turnbull’s dire report on the Ik, ruminates about computers, dotes with a hobbyist’s fervor on the intricacies of word derivations, and pays tribute to the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. But the collection as a whole is by no means random; it has a voice—awed yet optimistic, with little of Loren Eiseley’s melancholy sense of inhuman vastness—and a theme. The theme is, in a word, symbiosis.

  The first essay states, and several others remark upon, the fact that has impressed Dr. Thomas most:

  At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans.

  Similarly, chloroplasts in plants are “independent and self-replicating lodgers”; the flagellae that propel myxotricha turn out to be fully formed spirochetes that have tidily attached themselves; the enzyme-producing colonies in the digestive tracts of many animals illustrate “meticulously symmetrical symbiosis”; giant clams possess small lenses in their tissue that focus sunlight for the engulfed, symbiotic algae. The moral seems plain: “There is a tendency for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside each other, return to earlier arrangements, get along, whenever possible. This is the way of the world.” Most diseases result from overreaction on the part of the body’s defenders, “a biologic misinterpretation of borders.” Apparently malevolent microörganisms “turn out on close examination to be rather more like bystanders.” “Pathogenicity is not the rule.… There is nothing to be gained, in an evolutionary sense, by the capacity to cause illness or death.” What a benevolent world the microscope reveals! “Most bacteria are totally preoccupied with browsing,” just like cows. Subtle and harmonious arrangements abound: insects, harboring beneficent bacteria in their tissues, coöperate to build cathedral-like anthills and beehives; apparent adversaries among living things are “usually [in] a standoff relation, with one party issuing signals, warnings, flagging the other off”; animals and human beings are interconnected by codes of sound and odors and “chemotactic” “vibes”; the very atmosphere of our Earth, the sky, is “the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature.” Benevolent coöperation reigns from top to bottom of at least this terrestrial sphere; “nature red in tooth and claw” has been transfigured by the “something intrinsically good-natured about all symbiotic relations.” Small wonder that Dr. Thomas’ perky, compact essays usually end on the upbeat—even his pages on death, which bid us take comfort “in the recognition of synchrony, in the information that we all go down together, in the best of company.”

  The marvels of symbiotic interconnection intoxicate this scientist and lead him into flights of what must be fantasy: “Any word you speak this afternoon will radiate out in all directions, around town before tomorrow, out and around the world before Tuesday, accelerating to the speed of light, modulating as it goes, shaping new and unexpected messages, emerging at the end as an enormously funny Hungarian joke, a fluctuation in the money market, a poem, or simply a long pause in someone’s conversation in Brazil.” Is this meant literally? The image of the joke returns later: “Maybe the thoughts we generate today and flick around from mind to mind, like the jokes that turn up simultaneously at dinner parties in Hong Kong and Boston … are the primitive precursors of more complicated, polymerized structures that will come later, analogous to the prokaryotic cells that drifted through shallow pools in the early days of biological evolution. Later, when the time is right, there may be fusion and symbiosis among the bits.” Such identity between molecules and ideas seems more mystical than demonstrable. Dr. Thomas has the mystic’s urge toward total unity. He views the Earth as a single cell in its membrane of atmosphere. He quotes approvingly the 14th-century hermitess Julian of Norwich, who saw “all that is made” in “a little thing, the quantity of an hazelnut.” He rejoices, in good mystic fashion, in the dissolution of the Self: “The whole dear notion of one’s own Self—marvellous old free-willed, free-enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self—is a myth.” Not that he professes any use for old-fashioned supernaturalistic religion. Yet his doctrine of universal symbiosis soars with an evangelical exaltation, and it is interesting that even his careful prose lapses into the grammar of teleology:

  There is an underlying force that drives together the several creatures comprising myxotricha, and then drives the assemblage into union with the termite.

  [Dying] is, after all, the most ancient and fundamental of biologic functions, with its mechanisms worked out with the same attention to detail, the same provision for the advantage of the organism … that we have long since become accustomed to finding in all the crucial acts of living.

  To assure themselves the longest possible run, [mitochondria] got themselves inside all the rest of us.

  A framework for meaning is somehow built into our minds at birth.

  Whence the underlying force? Why the attentive “provision for the advantage of the organism”? What do mindless mitochondria care about the “longest possible run”? How the “somehow”? Not that Dr. Thomas is obliged to solve all biological riddles, or that the teleological fallacy (as, say, Jacques Monod would view it) can be easily erased from language attempting to describe intricate phenomena. But Dr. Thomas’ celebration of symbiotic relationships does seem tinged by the antique notion of Providence, rechristened “luck”: “Th
ere may have been elements of luck in the emergence of chloroplasts.” “It is another illustration of our fantastic luck that oxygen filters out the very bands of ultraviolet light that are most devastating for nucleic acids and proteins.” Without exactly stating that this is the best of all possible worlds, Dr. Thomas approaches a kind of biochemical Leibnizism. His willingness to see possibility where others see only doom is, like McLuhan’s, tonic and welcome. Yet his announcement that the adversary system is obsolete in nature feels premature. Every day, my well-fed cat brings as tribute to my back porch the mauled body of a field mouse or baby rabbit; one wonders how complacently the little corpses submitted to their part in our triune symbiosis. One does not have to live very close to nature to cringe at all the carnage and waste it contains. That our cells harbor useful aliens, that ants perform miracles of coöperation, that we are all more sensitive and permeable than we know—this is sheer observed fact, and provocative as such. On the other hand, Dr. Thomas’ shimmering vision of a “fusion around the earth” that will spring from “more crowding, more unrestrained and obsessive communication” seems less a prognosis than a hope defiant of much we can observe about our increasingly crowded, irritable, depleted, de-institutionalized, and cannibalistic world.