The majority of figures of speech that make the abstract concrete and imaginable are drawn from animals, human bodies, and spaces, from the wolf at the door to the arms of chairs and shoulders of roads to the excavation of buried memories. It’s the animal world that makes being human—catty, dogged, sheepish—imaginable, and the spatial realm that makes action and achievement—career plateaus, rough spots, marshy areas—describable. Sometimes it mixes: along the Cork–Kerry coast are the jutting formations Lamb’s Head, Hog’s Head, Cod’s Head, Crow Head, and Sheep’s Head. But most of the discussion about nature and the environment emphasizes a purely physical or spiritual need for it, not its imaginative role. Not long ago, I noticed an art magazine misspelling the bridle reins of the phrase on a tight rein as reign, because although they understood royalty, they had no clue about horses and their harnesses—so even the world of domestic animals was lost to them as a way of describing the human and the phrase was becoming meaningless on its way to becoming extinct. (More recently, I found myself going to ride a horse with a few carrots and a stick as aids, and the phrase became resonantly literal again.) I wonder if generations of being without contact with such spaces and beings will eventually strip down English into a kind of newspeak. After all, how many people now know how a mule kicks, or have seen bees make beelines? And when speech goes blank, imagination will have preceded it. The Natural History Museum is a museum of language, symbol, metaphor, and imagination, of the creatures that once inhabited our lives and are now fading even from our speech.
The complete development of the world as a human-only zone—the paving over and flattening of the landscape and the elimination of all creatures but food animals sequestered in factory production sites—threatens to take away not only the imaginative solace of a world beyond us, but the very language of the mind. Metaphor is a Greek word that literally means to transport something from one place to another; and in Athens the public transit system is called the Metaphor. There one can literally take the Metaphor to work, or take the last Metaphor home, though in the rest of the world metaphors serve only as a medium of imaginative travel. They are, in fact, the transportation system of the mind, the way we make connections between disparate things, and because the connections are intuitive and aesthetic, they are the essence of the ways in which we think that machines cannot. Metaphors navigate the way things span both difference and similarity; they describe a world of both dizzying variety and intricate relationships. Without metaphor the world will seem threateningly amorphous, both boringly identical with ourselves and utterly incomprehensible. Animals, with their inherent resemblances and differences, are where metaphor begins.
The essayist John Berger writes, “The first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was blood. Prior to that, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal. Rousseau, in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, maintained that language itself began with metaphor: ‘As emotions were the first motives which induced man to speak, his first utterances were tropes (metaphors). Figurative language was the first language to be born, proper meanings were the last to be found.’ If the first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relationship between man and animal was metaphoric . . . What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.” Language is humankind’s principal creation, a pale shadow of Creation, and one that needs to come back again and again to the nonhuman world to renew itself, to draw strength and color. It requires contact with the natural worlds of the landscape, the body and the animal kingdom to connect its creations to Creation, and makes contact by metaphor.
The last display in this inanimate animal kingdom brought me back to Swift and his speculations on the human animal and its place on earth, or lack thereof. In the very back of the Natural History Museum in Dublin, the last case you’d come to, were four skeletons: a chimpanzee, an “Orang Utan,” a gorilla, and a man. It was not a display on evolution but on comparative anatomy, a plaque hastened to clarify: “It is not to be inferred from this display that man has been derived from an anthropoid ape like those here.” After all, we were still in Catholic Ireland, though the apes were from afar. Perhaps it’s only that if one establishes being human as the norm, the divergences are bound to look bad by comparison, but they seemed slouching and rough here with their long pelvises and flaring bell-like ribcages beside the straight sapling of Homo sapiens with his pelvis like a butterfly. The apes were propped up by black rods attached to their spines and bolted to the floor, but the man was suspended from the ceiling by a golden chain attached to his skull with a wing nut. The installation seemed to propose that human and ape anatomies are analogous, but their essences are utterly different, that animals rise from the earth, but humans dangle from the heavens like God’s puppets, touching the ground but disconnected from it, strangers on the earth. The installation conveyed beautifully the dissociation that distinguishes humans from animals, that causes us to create rather than inhabit Creation. On a little glass shelf above the chimp, the lacy bones of a tiny white-handed gibbon’s upright and humanlike skeleton presided, like a fanged angel with arms that reached its ankles.
The suspension of the human skeleton gave visible form to what perhaps changed when the creatures who were no longer apes left the trees and began to walk upright across the land in the tenuous balance of bipedalism, their eyes focused on the distances that hardly exist in forests, their hands hanging at their sides waiting for someone or something to grasp, their voices crying across the open space. The skeleton dangled as though it belonged to the sky and needed to grow the wings most bipeds have, to lift further from the ground of its origins; or it dangled with its feet just scraping the floor of the case as though it needed to come back to earth, as though with its straight treelike body it needed to put down roots, to solidify. It seemed to me as I stood there before the glass case, grubby and jetlagged, that human beings when they became upright aspired to two conditions: becoming birds or becoming trees, wanderers or settlers, oscillating between their roots and their wings, exiled whichever way they turned.
4
The Butterfly Collector
Afterwards I ate a sandwich in St. Stephen’s Green and tried to digest the museum. The green was as mild and civilized a place as a park can be, all gracefully massed shrubbery and close-cropped lawns and tranquil waters. This place too had a violent, unimaginable history, most recently as a center for the insurgents in the Easter Rising of 1916, with the troops commanded by Countess Markievicz. She was sentenced to die for her part in the uprising, was pardoned, and became the first woman elected to the English House of Commons, though she was in jail again when she was elected. The poet James Stephens describes how on Easter Monday 1916, he came out from a quiet morning at his desk in the National Gallery to find small groups of people standing about the streets. “These people were regarding steadfastly in the direction of St. Stephen’s Green Park, and they spoke occasionally to one another with that detached confidence which proved they were mutually unknown.” Finally a man with a red moustache “stared at me as at a person from a different country” and explained: “ ‘The Sinn Feiners have seized the city this morning . . . They seized the city at eleven o’clock this morning. The green there is full of them. They have captured the Castle. They have taken the Post Office.’
“ ‘My God!’ said I, staring at him, and instantly I turned and went running towards the Green.
“In a few seconds I banished astonishment and began to walk. As I drew near the Green rifle fire began like sharply cracking whips. It was from the further side. I saw that the gates were closed and men were standing inside with guns on their shoulders . . . In the center of this side of the Park a rough barricade
of carts and motor cars had been stretched. It was still full of gaps. Behind it was a halted tram, and along the vistas of the Green one saw other trams derelict, untenanted.” Easter Monday had been set aside for leisure by everyone but the small army of rebels: Stephens was teaching himself to read music.
While I ate my sandwich of egg and marvelous bread in St. Stephen’s, flocks of chickens and the usual ducks of city parks hunted for crumbs along the banks of the pond. People sat in the weak sun or strolled, themselves so mild and civil it was as hard to imagine them kin to the tough fighters of the time as to picture the lush trees and lawns of this park interspersed with barricades and desperados, punctuated by gunfire. I had found something else in the Natural History Museum I had been looking for outside. I’d come to Ireland fascinated and impressed by Roger Casement, who had been instrumental in the Easter Rising and who was hanged for treason a few months later. He was among the most thoughtful of Ireland’s heroes, and so complex a character that I was foolish to expect some bronze or marble tribute to him in the streets. Instead I found what seems to be his only monument, in a glass case on the ground floor of the museum, protected from light by a soft imitation-leather cover, so the case had to be opened like a book. In this case, at the beginning of a row of similar covered insect cases, was a huge tropical butterfly all alone, surrounded by poetry on the subject of butterflies. With its deep orange wings bordered in black, a white spot at their upper ends, and a pin through its heart, it hardly looked the worse for age. “A South American butterfly collected for the Natural History Museum by Sir Roger Casement circa 1911,” read the inscription on this frail monument.
The reasons why Casement was in South America in 1910 and 1911 have everything to do with his eventual involvement in the uprising, though only circuitously, for Casement’s was a circuitous life, one that opened up meanings and histories with which England and Ireland still haven’t come to terms (and most of his biographers have openly disliked him in a way almost unique in the genre). Casement dangled between two worlds for most of his life, two countries, two churches, two philosophies, between the respectable and the revolutionary in both his private and political lives, exiled no matter which he chose. It seems built into his name, for a casement is a window, something that itself mediates between two realms and is contained by neither. His biography is the tale of the evolution of a good imperialist into a great anti-imperialist, of a man rewarded and then terribly punished for following his principles to their logical conclusion, a tale scrawled across four continents and half a century. Yet for all the reach of his life, from Ireland to Africa and the Amazon, around Europe and the US and back, his real territory of exploration was closer to home, or closer than home. The Empire of the Body, of Pain and then of Pleasure, was the true subject of his reports back to his culture, the body as the greatest unknown, the region of taboo and mystery, the darkest continent only beginning to be explored and mapped.
The most illuminating of the few stories about his childhood describes how his father would swim out to sea with one of his three sons on his back and then leave the child to his own resources. Roger Casement, the youngest son, was the first to learn to swim and remained a strong and enthusiastic swimmer all his life, swimming even in the crocodile-infested tributaries of the Congo. And perhaps his father’s aquatics prepared him for all the other abrupt drops into unfamiliar and foreign places that would make up his adult life, a life in which he was always somehow out to sea, finding his bearings in dangerous surroundings, perhaps even choosing to live where he would be no more out of place than the other Europeans and uprooted locals.
Nominally an Irish Protestant from the northern county of Antrim (which includes Belfast), born into a tradition of Casements who served the British Empire as soldiers, Casement had an Irish Catholic mother and was secretly baptized a Catholic as a small child. She died in 1873, when he was nine, and his father followed suit four years later, leaving the four children penniless dependents of their cousins. Not much else is known about his childhood, though he did leave us a glimpse of his education in a letter responding to his old school’s request for donations. “I was taught nothing about Ireland at Ballymena School. I don’t think the word was ever mentioned in a single class of the school and all I know of my country I learnt outside the school. I do not think that is a good or healthy state of mind in which to bring up the youth of any country—and while it endures, as it unhappily does, in so many of the schools in Ireland—which are in but not of Ireland—we shall see our country possessing inhabitants fit to succeed and prosper in every country but their own—citizens of the world, maybe, but not of Ireland.”
Casement himself went on to become a citizen of the world first. At seventeen, he went to work as a clerk in a Liverpool shipping company dealing mostly in West Africa goods, and when he was twenty, he got to Africa. The great waves of invasion, conquest, and colonization that had swept over the Americas and Asia had turned to Africa later, and when Casement came in 1884, the most powerful nations of Europe were dividing up the continent like greedy children tearing apart a cake. The explorations which were to become so fixed an element of boyish adventure stories began largely as surveys into what could be claimed; Casement joined one and seems to have traveled and grown familiar with the terrain and indigenous populations of Africa. But little is known of these early years either. Joseph Conrad, in the course of his adventures which would become the novella Heart of Darkness, met him in the Congo, and they spent three weeks together. As Conrad recalled later, with a novelist’s disregard for strict fact, “I have seen him start off into an unspeakable wilderness swinging a crookhandled stick for all weapon . . . A few months afterward it so happened that I saw him come out again, a little leaner, a little browner, with his stick, dogs, and Loanda boy, and quietly serene as though he had been for a stroll in the park . . . I always thought some part of Las Casas’ soul had found refuge in his indomitable body . . . He could tell you things! Things I have tried to forget, things I never did know.” And Conrad was right; he never did know them, for the exiled Pole who became a patriotic Englishman never understood imperialism as Casement did, or as did Father Bartolomé de las Casas, the great champion of indigenous people’s humanity and rights in sixteenth-century Latin America.
After knocking about as an elephant hunter, traveling to the United States, and revisiting Ireland, Casement returned to Africa in 1892 as a representative of the British government in what was then called the Oil Rivers Protectorate and is now known as Nigeria. For two decades, with interruptions for reasons of health and conscience, Casement was in the foreign service. A tall, slender, dark-haired man with a melodious voice, neat beard, and, in nearly all his photographs, air of noble melancholy, he was immensely handsome in the way that is usually called distinguished. Casement had an enormous tenderness for the powerless and suffering and a more private tendency to resent and suspect the authorities with which he worked—sometimes with good reason. Alternately brilliant and obtuse, a writer of poetry and prose that could be turgid, florid, and sentimental, an occasional concocter of harebrained schemes, he yet perceived things few others could at the time. “Thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic,” Conrad had noted in his diary upon meeting Casement. Courage and kindness were the most unwavering elements of his character.
Sometime around the turn of the century, Africa began to change his ideas. In the Boer War, Casement played a role as a watchdog in a nearby region, and though he discovered no arms shipments taking the roundabout route through Portuguese East Africa, he found doubts about the government he served. “I had been away from Ireland for years, out of touch with everything native to my heart and mind, trying hard to do my duty and every fresh act of duty made me appreciably nearer to the ideal of the Englishman,” he wrote in one of those retrospective letters that shed what little light there is on his life before 1903. “I had accepted Imperialism. British rule was to be extended at all costs, because it was the best
for everyone under the sun, and those who opposed that extension ought rightly to be ‘smashed.’ I was on the high road to being a regular Imperialist Jingo . . . Well the war gave me qualms at the end, and finally when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold, I found also myself, the incorrigible Irishman.”
What hadn’t been apparent to Casement in Ireland itself became evident by proxy in the other colonies of the British Empire, and when he became an Irish nationalist, he was unique in his evolution. Most of the Irish revolutionaries became so through a passionate devotion to their own homeland as distinct from all others, a provincial love rather than a general matter of principle. There are two bases for a struggle for liberation. One proposes that there are universal human rights that bear on the situation but extend beyond it; the other, that the oppressors have made a simple error in targeting a particular group with the otherwise legitimate tools of repression or extermination, rather than recognizing that group’s merit. The latter belief can lead to movements of self-liberation that don’t proceed by analogy to the larger population, the general principle. The great Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone, for example, both before and after his failed uprising in 1796, fondly promoted a scheme for England to establish a military colony in the South Seas to “put a bridle on Spain in times of peace, and to annoy her grievously in times of war.” Casement was perhaps the first to see Ireland as a colony much like the farther-flung and more recent colonies, and he came to understand his own country’s situation by analogy with that of the Congo and the Putumayo of Peru. To identify Ireland with other European conquests rather than other European nations was, at the time, a great leap of unprejudiced insight. Casement later wrote, “It was only because I was an Irishman that I could understand fully, I think, the whole scheme of wrong-doing at work on the Congo,” but the sequence of events suggests it was only because he witnessed the excesses of empire-building in the latter that he could see Ireland the way he did.
A Book of Migrations Page 5