"Man's maturity: To have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play."
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Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 94
For the most part it's been a tumultuous, stir-fried year, full of sound and fury signifying nada; not much swimming with the endorphins and finding new porpoise this year. Mostly just politics, white noise in blackface, wringing its hands, with PC soul bells, each time a Black man fell, then back to dogma-eat-dogma in our kennelized democracy. Woof!
But, as I spend a lot of my time reviewing books, the last year has also presented some amazing revelations that have served to remind me of how, like Socrates, little I know, when removed from the web of information that I am connected to every day. When I take the inter out of my texting, what am I left with but a pocketful of emojis? Against a background of multiverses, quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg principle, the imminent Singularity, a pandemic, and the Climate Change crisis -- and the Trump phenomenon -- I found time for new Ezekielizations of my human experience.
I read and reviewed The Mosquito by Timothy C. Winegard. It's an intriguing book of rising and falling empires, with the mosquito calling the shots throughout history, the question of European colonization of the New World solved when an effective bug remedy (chloroquine) was discovered, and the nasty sickle-cell was shown to deter malaria and make Africans ideal slaves for sweaty cotton fields back home. Winegard posited that mosquitoes were humankind's worst enemy, and, while my skeptical mind was reeling, he offered up: "almost half of the people who have ever lived have died of mosquito-vectored disease." Nyuh. (See Curly shuffle.)
Against that frightful conceptual background previously described, I waded on, reading and reviewing another book that Woke me in a new way, The Age of Intoxication by Benjamin Breen. I came out of the black-and-white Hank Williams era (and drank like him, even had a car crash (think icy road, too much wine) I barely survived) and made my way through the 60s and 70s occasionally tokin' weed, hashish -- sometimes laced with opium, meeting El Cid halfway; the 80s getting a taste of the sugar shack, cocaine (the little shovel, no Tony Montana snuff); and then the 90s came, I watched Midnight Express, got scared straight, and found myself teaching English in Istanbul; no drugs since: I totally missed out on the oxycontin rage. Oh, well. Anyway, Breen convinced me that addict Columbus was high on opium when he sailed the seas and it was all the West Indies (I mean, East) to him. Breen's subtitle says it all: Origins of the Global Drug Trade. The roots of Big Pharma. An eye-opener.
And then against that said-same background, I had to go and read and review consciousness, two books about, that is, titled Dialogues on Consciousness by Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks, and Galileo's Error by Philip Goff, and, damn, did my head go for a spin and almost come off its axis. The mind-body conundrum that I solved years ago with an essay for an undergraduate philosophy course came back to bite me big time. I had cosmology coming out the yinyang. The gist is that Goff convinced me I should be a panpsychist and commune with everything. Luckily, I was already a phenomenologist (I majored in the stuff) who believed in the interpenetrability of all things, so I was prepared, more than most, for proposed communings with things that sing their being. I'm serious. I don't mean Walt Whitman; I mean molecules, baby.
But, to paraphrase some lines by the great German lyric poet Heinrich Heine, malarial mozzies, Columbus' globe-tripping, and melding with molecules, no matter how wonderfully cerebral all this stuff is, it's far from being the whole picture. Not only that, there's no emotional hook or spirituality (even in the books on consciousness) to make one care beyond the temporary engaging exercise of reading. What I needed, and got plenty of in the end, was poetry and naturalism, and I finally hit the jackpot with World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. (The short illustrated book (Fumi Mini Nakamura) combines pictures of flora and fauna with often-superb lyrical descriptions, appeals to our naturally subliminatory instincts, and subtle reminders of our primeval, if oft-forgotten place in the natural world.
World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil was just published by Milkwood Editions, a nonprofit literary press, founded in Minneapolis in 1980, that puts out high quality literary fiction, nonfiction and poetry. It has the feel of a memoir or developmental notebook, and contains stories filled with archly casual, sharp and humorous observations. Its first person 'seeings' begin in childhood and end with the busy jotting of a mother on-the-go, creating a marvelous symmetry. In the beginning it felt at times as if I were on an outdoors show-and-tell journey with a really precocious Dorothy the Explorer or Harriet the Spy, and ended with Margaret Mead (with similar conclusions about the lives of children: existence precedes essence).
It's a beautiful world, truly filled with wonders, if you bother to look, but Nezhukumatathil is always aware of predatory shadows that may lurk, then spring; it's a theme carried throughout the book -- how you can be in the glory of light one minute, and kidnapped by darkness the next. The world is beautiful, but there's evil, and ever so gradually over time, beauty is receding and the shadows are growing for our species. In "Cactus Wren," Aimee, notes her fear, "How I wanted a sentinel of my own-- to watch out for us if, say, someone in a windowless van followed us home." Part of this is driven by her anxiety of being a vulnerable "latchkey" child of color in a white, sometimes hostile Phoenix community, just she and her sister home alone after school, Dad at work, Mom away in Kansas. But still, you're thinking, a windowless van?
But, it's not just in Arizona that she feels the heebie jeebies; a little later, in a family move to Kansas, an anthropomorphized natural force seems to have unnatural designs on humans, "The only things I knew of Kansas were Dorothy and the Wizard and tornados pointing their creepy fingers all over the state." In Kansas, Aimee lives on the grounds of a state hospital, and aside from the eyeballs she attracts getting on the school bus in the morning, there is a sense of chaos, of things getting out of control. In "Narwhal," she effortlessly paints a scene: "But back then, in sixth grade, all I could see was the dirty snow kicked up in the street by hospital security patrolling for escapees." For a moment, I remembered my childhood fear in Boston the day the radio announced that Albert DeSalvo (aka, The Boston Strangler), who'd taken so long to get captured, had somehow escaped from a state mental hospital, and was now on the loose.
The predatory threats to childhood and its adventures and curiosities, especially for children like Aimee and her sister who spent lots of time outdoors exploring their environment, are lyrically sprinkled throughout the book, like a leitmotif, a thread that says there's a force out there that takes away beauty for no reason, or, as poet Jim Carroll put it cryptically (the crypt ajar), "Beauty is one part of terror." (Full Disclosure: Jim was a poppy (Papaver somniferum) addict, so").
When Aimee grows up and is a mom and a teacher and watcher of her own kids in the beautiful but sometimes terrifying environment, her fear connects back to childhood and seems reasonable, having been processed through her higher education, full of balanced rationality rather than magical thinking. Now, a university-aged teen, she worries,
We'd hear stories of a girl who never made it home. I thought that was just the nineties. Before cellphones to check in and to call for backup from your friends, or to call the police with a few buttons.
Aimee recalls these times as a mature mom, and adds, "I'm now a professor...I still look over my shoulder in a dark parking lot." It really is a jungle out there.
World of Wonders opens and closes with entries on Photinus pyralis -- "The Firefly": In her first entry, Aimee tells us, "When the first glimmer-pop of firefly light appears on a summer night, I always want to call my mother just to say hello." This is typical of the tone and register of her work. For some people, myself included, the firefly can seem mystical, a bringer of light to darkness, but what Nezhukumatathil offers up is so much more unconstrained by old fart visions:
In flight, it is like a loud laugh, the kind that only appears in summer, with the stink of meats sizzling somewhere down the street, and the mouths of neighborhood children stained with popsicle juice and hinging open with the excitement of a ball game or tag.
The emphasis here is not on darkness or light, but the simple joy the firefly brings to the play of outdoor children. For Aimee and her sister "the erratic flashes of light blurring past us" was inseparable from their phenomenological being.
The firefly's evocation here reifies these memories, the wonder of childhood, and connect to further evoked memories of Mom putting her to bed: "Her gorgeous, dark and wavy hair tickled when she leaned over to kiss me good-night, smelling of Oil of Olay and spearmint gum." In her later entry, "Firefly (Redux)," living in Oxford, Mississippi, home of William Faulkner, Aimee, now a visiting professor at a local college, finds that she's meeting people, principally students, who have never even heard of fireflies. When her own children gleefully beg her to stay outdoors to hang out with the fireflies, she asks rhetorically, "How can I say No?" She ponders how modern humans have escaped indoors and left behind the outdoors, at the peril of never seeing the world's delights, trading in an engagement with nature for the collective narcissism of the Internet.
She can't believe what her students are missing. She writes worriedly,
It was indeed a sad day when I had to bring up a video online to prove that fireflies do indeed exist and to show what a field of them looks like at night. Seventeen students of twenty-two had never seen a firefly. Never even heard of them. Never caught one to slide into an empty jam jar, never had one glow in their sweaty hands. This was in a suburban town where fireflies regularly crowd the edges of less-frequented roads.
While critical thinking skills are (and should be) an important focus of a contemporary syllabus, particularly in the humanities where some rigor has grown paunchy, Aimee is saddened by our progressive inward movement away from nature and the outdoors toward a largely mental presence, machine thinking, and our bodies no longer at home in nature.
The ecocidal threat of Climate Change is one outcome of such movement inward toward hivemindedness. The firefly is disappearing, or, at least, not lighting up as often. Aimee writes,
Scientists still don't know how, when, or why fireflies decide to stay visually silent. And even though a field of tall grass might be teeming with fireflies, the space and time between flashes have grown longer over the years.
With her childhood memories of an outdoor life, it scares her that she has to prove the existence of fireflies by showing students a YouTube video. She asks a series of questions 'aloud', beginning with, "Where does one start to take care of these living things amid the dire and daily news of climate change, and reports of another animal or plant vanishing from the planet?" Where, indeed.
World of Wonders is a cheerful, lively, linguistic romp through the literal and literary underbrush of our shared culture, full of sweet surprises, plain old ungollified goodness, and not so much (that bird has flown) but connection with what's left, which is still plenty, even if Aimee has you seeing a day when you think your leg is being pulled when someone asks if you've ever seen a Monarch butterfly. There are lots of sunny visions of flora and fauna conjured up, in unexpected ways.
Returning to her story "Narwhal," Nezhukumatathil serves up some delicious verbiage when describing this creature of icy undersea climes. She writes, "The narwhal's 'horn' is actually a tooth with about 10 million nerve endings-- a loooong helix-spiraled tooth that pokes through the upper left 'lip' into the chilly arctic ocean." In Canada and Greenland the Inuit peoples hunt these predators for their meat and ivory. According to one account, not Aimee's, "At times, a bull narwhal may rub its tusk with another bull, a display known as "tusking," which can have ramifications and result in the narwhal getting a one way ticket to belugaville. In World of Wonders, however, Aimee goes for innocence. She asks us to imagine:
The tooth is surrounded by a soft and porous outer layer and filled with a dense inner core packed with delicate nerve endings connected to the brain. Imagine how your teeth would feel after nibbling two or three popsicles in a row, then bowl after bowl of ice cream-- imagine a perpetual state of "brain freeze" in your mouth.
Damn, who would want to go through life as a brain freeze? Just thinking about it hurts.
Aimee works more magic in "Superb Bird of Paradise," with this description:
When the superb hoists up its long black nape feathers, it looks like it's swooshing an elliptical cape around its neck; it's one of the showiest displays in the entire animal kingdom. Iridescent blue feathers on the superb's head flash extra blue as they catch the sun, little eyes against the black oval of its nape.
I lived in Papua New Guinea for a year, went to Sing Sings in the Highlands, ran from perceived wild-eyed rascals ejecting red betel nut juice, and went on a 'walkabout' in a rainforest where we came across a male Bird of Paradise (national symbol, on its excellent export beer, too), fiddling in a clearing.
Aimee wasn't there in the clearing with me, but she describes what happened next:
Perhaps my favorite detail about these birds is that the male actually clears a "dance floor" before he gets his groove on, laying down leaves or scraps of paper to mark the boundaries.
Sounds like a Kenmore Square nightclub, but I can't vouch for the scraps of paper -- although, that said, women have been known to throw money at some of the show-offs. Aimee then brings this activity around to an observation on the overexposed dance craze, the Macarena, with too colorfully dressed dancers:
I know it's the worst earworm. I know the video is obnoxious with glee. I know the song is now banned from most weddings. But didn't your foot tap ever so slightly when I first mentioned the song?
I'm tapping now.
"Vampire Squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis)" is another fun fauna read:
Way down deep, in the perpetual electric night of the water column-- a place where sunlight doesn't register time or silver filament-- the vampire squid glides in search of a meal of marine snow.
Now that's just beautiful. But she's not done; she goes ahead and describes its fiendish way of warding off predators, hoiking at them "a luminescent cloud of mucus instead of ink." Them suspended there like bank robbers discovering red dye bombs for the first time (you a bank clerk, laughing your ass off). She asks us to imagine "[I]f you were chasing someone and they stopped, turned, and tossed a bucketful of large, gooey, green sequins at your face." And, she adds, "I wished I was a vampire squid the most when I was the new girl in high school." Funny stuff.
The levity of gravity continues in her exploration of flora. "Cara Cara Oranges" are described with such succulence, it was the first time I ever longed to live in Florida: "What sets cara caras apart from other oranges, what makes me love them, is their cherry and rose petal smell, the kind you can almost taste after your first juicy bite." Well, live there until the orange was finished anyway. And "Dragon Fruit" aches for company:
The flowers bloom in full for just one evening. That means they have one precious night to be pollinated by a bat or bee, and turn the flower into a dragon fruit. Otherwise the six-inch, greenish-white bloom wilts by sunrise-- a whisper of heat and bat wing rattling the crumpled, pale blossom.
Yep, she's a card alright. It was about this time that I wanted to marry Aimee, but settled for downloading a book of her poetry.
But one of her best tales among the flora comes with her telling of the strange properties of "Corpse Flower (Amorphophallus titanum)," including its anti-aphrodisiac wonders: "When I was single, the corpse flower was a way to help clear out the sleaze, the unsavory, the unpleasant-- the weeds-- of the dating world." At first, I conjured up Jack Nicholson in The Little Shop of Horrors or A Few Good Men, flowering and deflowering like some mercurial FTD Romeo, but that's not where Aimee goes with her story. She tells of a highly popular Corpse Flower exhibit at the University of Wisconsin, lines around the block "longer than the line to buy Dave Matthews Band tickets in town."
She explains that "The corpse flower has the largest inflorescence in the world, with its total height averaging eight to ten feet tall." There were a lot of people waiting to get a whiff of the corpse. Think: Finnegan's Wake. Which turns out to be a strange-seeming thing to do, once Aimee dishes on what the smell is like:
This smell is basically what I imagine emanates from the bottom of a used diaper pail left out in the late August sun, after someone has also emptied a tin of sardines and a bottle of blue cheese salad dressing on top and left it there to sit for a day or three.
Hmph, I just switched to the Dave Matthews line. What if I'd thrown up and spoiled the smell people had paid good money to snort?
Among its many engaging features, World of Wonders not only describes flora and fauna lyrically and often with great wit, but also is gently, if insistently, ecologically-minded. It wants us to get back to the Garden, like that ancient song from the 60s. A really arch synthesis of the work's wares comes in "Questions While Searching For Birds With My Half-White Sons Six and Nine, National Audubon Bird Count Day, Oxford, MS," the story near the end, when Aimee's with her children at a national park and the multiple page set of nature questions tellingly begins:
If we are going to look for birds all day, is anyone going to be looking for us if we get lost?
I thought you said God has his eye on every sparrow, so why are we counting if He already knows?
Is there a bathroom nearby?
The last question repeated at regular intervals. It's a beautiful day though.
World of Wonders is full of all kinds of 'modern family' touches. The author is of Filipina and Malayali Indian background. The busy, well-traveled pursuits of her parents saw her moving all over the country -- Arizona, Kansas, upper state New York, Ohio, and Mississippi. Her chapter titles, English and Latin, are often suggestive delights in themselves -- Comb Jelly, Touch-Me-Nots, Dancing Frog, Calendars Poetica, Ribbon Eel, and the Southern Cassowary (nickname: The Living Dinosaur).
Because Nezhukumatathil is a teacher as well as a poet, she's keen on being didactic and not allowing the reader to drift away, like one of her fireflyless students no wiser for the lesson, and reminds us more and more as the book closes out that we not only need to save and savor nature (and the outdoors), but end the reign of the predatory figures in windowless white vans that have hitherto called the shots throughout history.
He's not always good for much these days but selling death and bourbon (still waters run deep in Kentucky), but Dylan nicely summed up the vibe of this book with a song off New Morning, "Three Angels":
The angels play on their horns all day,
The whole earth in progression seems to pass by.
But does anyone hear the music they play,
Does anyone even try?
We'll have to try harder, while we still can.
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Milkweed Announcement:
We are thrilled to announce an exclusive virtual event thanks to a new partnership with the National Park Foundation! Open only to supporters of either Milkweed Editions or National Park Foundation, please join us in reading (or re-reading!) World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and then joining us for a live virtual event with the author on July 30!
Inside the Parks: World of Wonders
Featuring Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Wednesday, July 30
12:00 p.m. (CT) via Zoom
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