The Physics of Sorrow (21 page)

They let him go.

My father was proud that he had managed to convince them with anatomy and Plutarch. While they had probably decided he wasn’t worth the trouble, figuring he was slightly nuts, but ideologically harmless.

A
NTI
-A
NTHROPOCENTRIC
N
OTES

During World War II, in the period between 1940 and 1944, in air raids on European museums, seventeen dinosaur skeletons were destroyed. I can clearly picture these double murders, the crushed dead bones, the toppling of these Eiffel Towers of ribs and vertebrae. No animal would do that. To kill someone who had already been dead for millions of years all over again, to reawaken that prehistoric horror in the black box of its skull.

Actually, has anyone ever counted the bodies of animals killed during wartime? Millions of sparrows, ravens, robins, field mice, torn-apart foxes, scorched partridges, rats, the moles’ ruined bomb shelters, the lightly armored turtles crushed by heavily armored tanks—their giant likenesses . . . No one anywhere has ever made an inventory of such deaths. We’ve never really stopped to think of the suffering we cause to animals during wartime, during air raids. Where do they hide, what happens in the “wild” brains of our “fellow brethren in pain,” as Darwin called them in his notes.

I love natural history, but not its museums. I don’t see anything natural in them. In the end, they are more like mausoleums. What else could we call a place with gutted antelopes, Tibetan yaks, badgers, does, and rhinoceroses? I’ve never experienced pure, unadulterated
joy from zoos, either. But everyone is always forced to visit them once, as a child, since parents are convinced that you’re dying to see the elephant listlessly flapping its trunk or the wolf pacing anxiously in its cage, which stinks of carcass.

I’ll never forget the elephant’s heavy sorrow, which almost crushed me (yet another one of my fits), then the melancholy of the black panther stretched out on the dirty cement, or the undisguised tedium with which the tiger met and saw off its guests. On the way out, I recall, I was filled with animalistic sorrow. I can attest that this sorrow is far denser than human sorrow, it’s wild, unfiltered by language, inexpressible and unexpressed, since language nevertheless soothes and calms sorrow, disarms it, bleeds it, just as my grandfather would bleed a sick animal. When they took me to the Museum of Natural History the next day, I had the feeling that the whole zoo had been slaughtered in a single night, stuffed and brought there. I’ve never gone into such tombs since.

N
EGLIGENT
M
URDERS

Whole columns of ants, over all these years, which I’ve stepped on without noticing it. I have big feet, size 12, which increases their destructive power. And my guilt.

M
IRIAM, OR
O
N THE
R
IGHT TO
K
ILL

We were talking, or actually, I was talking about the need for an anti-Copernican revolution, how important it was—and I mean vitally important—to oust man from the center of the universe, about death, and animals . . .

“I lived with a Buddhist for three years,” Miriam said, splitting open a large mussel with her long fingers.

I love such beginnings, with no preface, raw, hard.

“It was a long time ago,” she added, heading off my unasked questions. “Know what the most unbearable thing about living with a Buddhist is?” The mussel sank into her mouth, strong white teeth, pearls and the grains of sand between them, seconds until this magnificent meat grinder had made short work of the flesh. “The vow not to kill. That’s the most brutal part . . .” Another mussel.

By the end of the second year, the whole house was swarming with cockroaches. Miriam watched the smug hordes creeping by only centimeters away from her. She had no right to lay a finger on them. She was in love and thus magnanimous. She held out for a whole year. In the evening, she would slip into her sleeping bag and pull the zipper up over her head, leaving only a small hole for air. One night she woke up and saw two cockroaches nestled in the beard of her Buddhist-lover who was sleeping soundly beside her. That was too much. The next day, while the Buddhist was at work (I was amazed that Buddhists work), she bought the strongest spray against such varmints and fumigated the whole apartment herself. It was true mass murder. Genocide! Miriam imitated the infuriated Buddhist, who had come back that evening, stood in the middle of the room, looking around at the dead cockroaches, their stiff little legs turned up toward the ceiling, he had stood there like the last survivor amid an apocalypse.

“Have you ever seen a Buddhist scream?” Miriam asked. “It’s worth seeing. He screamed that I had shattered the whole chain of life, that the world would never be the same, that the karmic . . . He slammed the door and left. Actually, he already had a mistress.”

For several minutes, the only sound was the cracking of shells and the cold rain outside. I was thinking about that last line and an inexplicable rage was building up inside me against that working Buddhist with his mistress, that shepherd of cockroaches.

“Anyway, the right to kill is inviolable,” Miriam said slowly. Then she carefully placed the last mussel shell on the rocky mountains in front of her.

I will put Miriam’s story in the green box, too, for balance. So we have one of every kind.

T
HROUGH A
L
AMB’S
E
AR

Man needs to shut up for a while and in the ensuing pause to hear the voice of some other storyteller—a fish, dragonfly, weasel, or bamboo, cat, orchid, or pebble. How do we know, for instance, that bees don’t write novels? Have we deciphered even a single honeycomb? Or should we start with fish? What a huge part of evolution remains locked up in the fish’s silence, what knowledge have fish accumulated over all those millennia before us! The deep, cold storehouses of that silence. Untouched by language. Because language channels and drains deposits of knowledge like a drill.

And so, the only storytelling creature, man, shuts up and steps back, yielding the floor to the organic and inorganic ones that have stored up silences until now. Actually, they’ve been telling their tales, but their muted, suppressed narrative has turned into mica and lichen, seaweed, moss, honey, the tearing apart of other’s bodies and the torn-apartness of their own.

I have no idea how to make this happen. Maybe we just need to take the first step. All the world’s classics, retold by animals for animals.

For example, we could retell
The Old Man and the Sea
through the eyes of the fish, that marlin. Now that’s what I call anti-anthropocentrism. Its battle with the gaunt old man and the sea is no less dramatic. When it comes down to it, the fish is the character
locked in a life-and-death struggle throughout the whole story. The old man’s story is a story about the battle against aging. While the fish’s is a story about death. The whole story through the voice of a fish, bleeding, gnawed clean to the bone, yet resisting to the very last.

A marlin can be destroyed but not defeated.

. . .

Muria (that’s how she spelled her name, with a “u”), a fishing fanatic:

“In the morning, when I get up, I imagine what I’d like to eat if I were a fish, and that’s how I sense what’ll make them bite during the day. The whole trick is to turn yourself into a fish for a while. And you’ll get hungry. Sometimes you’re hungry for a worm, sometimes for corn, sometimes for a fly. And when I figure out what it wants to eat, what I want to eat that day, I stick it on the hook, cast it out into the water and start reeling them in like crazy. To the horror of the other fishermen, who had been laughing at me just a few minutes earlier. Then I toss the fish back right in front of their eyes. Which makes them all the more furious.”

“Ugh, do you really feel like eating a worm first thing in the morning?”

“When I’m a fish, a worm is not to be missed.”

. . .

“The history of the world can be written from the viewpoint of a cat, an orchid, or a pebble. Or lamb’s ear.”

“What’s lamb’s ear?”

“A plant.”

“And do you think we would figure in a history of the world written by lamb’s ear?”

“I don’t know. Do you think lamb’s ear figures in the history of the world written by people?”

B
UFFALO
S
HIT, OR
T
HE
S
UBLIME
I
S
E
VERYWHERE

I remember how we walked through a historical town famous for its Revival Period architecture, uprising, fires, cannons made from cherry-tree trunks, history rolled down the narrow streets but my father was impressed mainly by the geraniums on the window sills, praising aloud those who had grown such flowers. Suddenly he stopped in a street and started hovering over something on the ground. I went to see what he had discovered. A pile of buffalo shit. It was standing there like a miniature cathedral, a church’s cupola or a mosque’s dome, may all religions forgive me. A fly was circling above it like an angel. It is very rare to see buffalo shit nowadays, my father said. No one breeds buffalos here anymore. And he spoke with such delight about how one could fertilize pumpkins with it, plaster a wall, daub a bee hive (of the old wicker type), how one could use it to cure an earache—you should warm it well and apply it to the ear. At that moment I would have agreed that the Revival-Era houses we were touring and the pyramids of Giza were something much less important than the architecture, physics, and metaphysics of buffalo (bull?) shit.

Even if you weren’t born in Versailles, Athens, Rome, or Paris, the sublime will always find a form in which to appear before you. If you haven’t read Pseudo Longinus, haven’t heard of Kant, or if you inhabit the eternal, illiterate fields of anonymous villages and towns, of empty days and nights, the sublime will reveal itself to you in your own language. As smoke from a chimney on a winter morning, as a slice of blue sky, as a cloud that reminds you of something from another world, as a pile of buffalo shit. The sublime is everywhere.

S
OCRATES ON THE
T
RAIN

                
If everything lasted forever, nothing would be valuable.

—Gaustine

The world is set up in such as way that it looks obvious and irrefutable. But what would happen if for a moment we turned the whole system upside down and instead of the enduring, the constant, the eternal, and the dead, we decided to revere that which is fleeting, changeable, transitory, yet alive?

The train was passing through the hot stubble fields in late August, where they still use that barbaric method of stubble burning. The fields had been reaped and to make for easier plowing afterward, someone had set a match to them. I imagined the meadow birds’ scorched wings, the running and squealing mice and rats, the burned up lizards and snakes. Storks were anxiously circling above the burning fields—we’ve got to get out of here ASAP, ASAP . . . Everyone wanted to run away, the world was heading toward autumn. At the same time, I was returning to the town of T.

In the end, man, if we still insist on seeing him as the measure of all things, is closer to the parameters of the fleeting—he is changeable, inclined toward death, alive, but mortal, perishable, constantly perishing.

I sensed that my imagination was running wild, I needed an opponent. I invented an opponent, clever, with a sharp rhetorical bite, I generously endowed him with qualities and gave myself over to my favorite pastime, Socratic spats.

“So, my dear sir, you propose that we replace the lasting with the fleeting,” my opponent began.

“I suggest that we examine this possibility.”

“Very wellll . . . Just say it aloud and you will hear how absurd it
sounds—to replace the lasting with the fleeting. Illustrate it with a concrete example, isn’t that what you always love to say, my dear fellow? Now then, imagine a nice, sturdy house on the one hand, and a tumbledown hut on the other. Would you exchange the house for the hut? In one hand, I’m holding gold, in the other straw. Which would you choose? Won’t the straw grow moldy after the first rain?”

“Wait, wait, my most noble opponent . . . You speak wisely and take shameless advantage of your right to peek into my own misgivings. Yet let us look at the other side as well. Imagine a world, in which everyone agrees to a new hierarchy. In which the Fleeting and the Living are more valuable than the Eternal and the Dead. The opposite of the usual world, which we share today. And so, let us imagine what consequences this might have. Immediately many of the reasons for war and theft fall away. That which entices one to theft is that which is eternal or at least lasting, like a bar of gold, for example, or sturdy houses, cities, palaces, land . . . That is what’s ripe for the taking. No one goes to war over a pile of apples or lays siege to a city for its fragrant, blossoming cherry trees. By the time the siege is over, the cherry trees will have lost their blossoms, and the apples will have rotted.

“And since gold will have lost all of its agreed-upon value (because that’s exactly what it is, a contract value), it’ll just be rolling around on the ground and no one will think to up and go on a crusade for it.

“And speaking of crusades, let’s look at that side of the question as well. The religions that stand behind every crusade or holy war will suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them. The old gods were the Gods of the Eternal in all of its aspects. Is there a God of the Ephemeral? If there are Gods in the new constellation—and why not?—they will be exactly that: Gods of the Ephemeral. Gods of the Fragile and the Perishable. And hence fragile and
perishable gods. Sensitive, feeling, empathizing. What more can we say? Mortality raises the price and opens our eyes.”