From Fish to Philosopher

From Fish to Philosopher by Homer William Smith

"Urine is the stuff of philosophy," says Homer Smith.  And if you read him, you'll agree.  In fact, I believe every person who wants to understand fully what a living thing is, what a human being is, should read this book.

Published in the 1950s and reissued in 1961 by the American Museum of Natural History in New York--now a very rare book--this is the best treatise I know on the development of life on earth.  It's a physiologist's history of the evolution of the organs, with special attention to the kidney, and if you read it you'll understand why the kidney gets top billing.  (The kidney is the principal organ of homeostasis--look it up.)   While this is biology in the form of a thrilling odyssey through time, I'll also warn you that Smith doesn't shy away from full explanation and detail; that may make parts of it daunting or in some cases inaccessible without certain ancillary studies in physiology.  (But do those popular simplifications ever make any sense anyway?)  That said, it's nothing like those arrogant tracts in wall-to-wall math symbols I get through those Scientific American deals.  I think Smith works in an ideal middle ground, where he doesn't condescend to his readers by imagining that they can't understand what he does, and yet writes clearly and comprehensibly.  He writes well-enough not to have to pretend that the English language is insufficient to convey all he knows.  His style influenced me in the writing of my physiology text.

Called "a broad epic of life" by George Gaylord Simpson, a Harvard paleontologist who is by now likely a fossil himself, From Fish to Philosopher explains how we got the way we are, how our bodies and our minds too, derive from and record a long, long history of adaptation to the conditions of this crust of earth we call home.

You can download it for free or read it online here: http://www.archive.org/details/fromfisht...

Weird Science

Frankenstein (Signet Classics) by Mary Shelley

This question hovers over the novel’s outrageous plot: why would Victor Frankenstein abandon his creation?  It doesn’t really make much sense unless you appeal to the open secrets of Mary Shelley’s biography.  Her mother died of puerperal sickness (i.e., after childbirth), abandoning her daughter Mary to a lifetime without her.  The monster’s undiminished rage at his absent creator seems to me obviously to parallel Shelley’s childhood situation and what she could be expected to feel.  And yet Shelley’s sympathies are neatly divided between the monster and its creator.  She knew the monster’s loneliness and sense of exile but also knew Victor Frankenstein’s longing to resurrect; her first child Clara died in infancy and, according to editor of the Signet edition Walter James Miller, she had recurrent dreams of reviving the child.  She knew Victor Frankenstein’s hatred for his own creation as well.  Clara died—cause enough for fury—but her second child, William, survived, and as any honest parent knows, that’s problematic too.  It’s no coincidence, is it, that the monster’s first act of violence is to strangle to death a little boy named … William?

The novel Frankenstein is the child of generational tension just as Hamlet is, but Frankenstein is a child of more extreme and premature abandonment, of an infant‘s rage against her absent mother and a mother’s rage at her infant’s hounding, stalking needs (rage at “the murderer of my peace” as Frankenstein puts it on p. 147).  Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about Frankenstein is its focus on infancy and its psychological residua.  Miller tells us that prior to writing Frankenstein, Shelley read John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding—an important precursor to modern notions of child development according to which experience shapes the naïve, plastic tissues of the infant brain and leaves a permanent imprint on a person’s identity.

Explicit references to infancy and its relation to later life bestrew the pages of Frankenstein.  From the beginning, as Captain Walton recounts the tale of his “earlier years” (p. 13) and Victor Frankenstein tells the tale of his, Shelley asserts that the past ruthlessly determines the future.  “[N]othing can alter my destiny,” Frankenstein says on p. 15, “listen to my history, and you will perceive how irrevocably it is determined.”  The personal histories of such importance to Shelley also return again and again to certain themes—of orphanhood, abandonment, death in childbirth, etc., and consequent insecurity and loneliness.  The monster’s inquiry into his early life is the most affecting of all.  On p. 84 he says, “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being….”  On p. 101 the monster says, “No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses.”

Early impressionability and want of love lead directly to the two other major motives of the novel: rage and guilt, tormenting guilt and unrelieved rage.  When the monster realizes he is alone in the world without a single friend, he says (on p. 116), “[F]rom that moment I declared everlasting war … against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.”

Mary Shelley attacks these unusual themes with unparalleled intellect and imagination.  Some of her descriptions, particularly of the Swiss Alps, are divine, but on the whole her prose does not serve her well.  It could be argued that the prose of the entire era was in general spoiled with twee Wordsworthian excess, but whatever the cause—the era or Shelley’s youth or whatever—there are long tracts of Frankenstein written in butter cream fondant.  Here’s a passage, for example, that goes on and on and says little.  Frankenstein wants to tell his father that he’s going to London as a tourist, as opposed to going there on a secret mission to create a woman, in hopes of compelling his male creation to stop murdering his relatives.  He says:

I expressed a wish to visit England, but concealing the true reasons of this request, I clothed my desires under a guise which excited no suspicion, while I urged my desire with an earnestness that easily induced my father to comply. After so long a period of an absorbing melancholy that resembled madness in its intensity and effects, he was glad to find that I was capable of taking pleasure in the idea of such a journey, and he hoped that change of scene and varied amusement would, before my return, have restored me entirely to myself. pp. 131-132

I’m forced to conclude that at that early stage of novel-writing, authors didn’t fully appreciate the uses of dialogue.  Wouldn’t that wordy, explanatory paragraph have been improved by something like this:

“I’m going to England,” I said.  “It’s Bonfire Night approaching.  Clerval says it’s not to be missed.”

“By all means,” my father said.  “Absolutely, you should go.  It will do you good!”

“They have marvelous fireworks on the Thames, Clerval says.”

“Yes, yes, go!”

And I went on behalf of the monster, and I saw no fireworks.

With much of the prose so painfully verbose and frequently irrelevant, I find it all the more amazing how well Shelley succeeds with the parts focused on the monster himself, especially what Harold Bloom calls “the novel’s extraordinary conclusion, with its scenes of obsessional pursuit through the Arctic wastes….”  Her nameless monster is one of the most moving, pitiable, unsettling, and unique characters in all literature, a character to make you weep like the Elephant Man, like no Shakespeare character makes you weep, except perhaps Othello.  And Shelley’s “demonic conclusion in a world of ice,” as Harold Bloom puts it, is a picture of crucifixion by total loneliness, helplessness, guilt, and rage, more tragic than anything else I’ve read in a work of fiction.

Winnie the Pooh

Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

Many books and movies for children are also entertaining to adults.  A.A. Milne's work, conversely, is profoundly absorbing (and hilarious) for adults, and also, secondarily, diverting to kids.  It also scrupulously safeguards a G-rating by omitting direct reference to death, sex, and other nether body functions--though every child wonders, at least in passing, how grown-ups in polite company can call a bear "Poo," and why they would want to.

Milne's characters are so real that you never cease to believe in them even when the frame story apparatus frankly proclaims them inventions concocted by a father for his son--even when, over pancakes in Orlando, you confront a totally mute man in a giant Tigger costume at a Disneyworld "character breakfast."

Pooh, Piglet, Owl, Rabbit, and Eeyore busy themselves in systematically misunderstanding the world in the charming way that children do, and in such a way that only an adult is in on the joke.  They're stories about children, and about the childlike nature that endures inside of adults, more than they're stories for children, I think.  And in that, they're somewhat radical and unique.  But then again, I didn't read them as a child.

My older one never got into these much, not even the Disney version.  My younger one will listen contentedly for long stretches but misunderstands them in the same way that Piglet might.  I read him the chapter "In Which Christopher Robin Leads an Expotition to the North Pole" and I laughed when they find the Pole (a tree branch) and Eeyore says, "Oh! Well, anyhow--it didn't rain," rating the mission a success therefore according to the dim lights of low expectation.  My four-year-old son heard me laugh and said wisely, "That's funny because it doesn't rain at the North Pole, it snows."

All that said, the deep-seated wholesomeness of the Hundred Acre Wood is somehow just right for some kids, like my four-year-old, even if he doesn't understand all the jokes.  And once I explained some of the humor in chapter IV ("In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One")--such as Owl and Pooh's argument over whether or not Owl sneezed, and Pooh's asking Owl for help and then not listening and thinking to himself that he'd like a lick of honey--once I explained why I was laughing, we had a good hearty laugh over it together.

A Postcard from Nietzsche's Haus

My blog this week, on Nietzsche, savagery, self-destruction, Lake Sils, Anne Frank, and stones in umbrellas, appears here, at writershouses.com.  This is one of my best essays, on one of the best essayists of all time.

Ten Days of War and Peace

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

"I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and illness," Prince Andrei says to Pierre in War and Peace.  Life torments from within and without, according to Tolstoy, who, like the writers of the Hebrew bible, compasses the innermost human thoughts adrift in the chaos and cosmic rancor of history.

I'm not a quick reader but I read War and Peace in ten days the February of my sophomore year of college.  I had to write a paper on it, due shortly after the end of spring break, and left it to the last minute.  Each morning I crawled into the nubby gray womb chair in my parents' living room, by a plate-glass window where mammoth icicles hung and birds occasionally broke their necks.  (Poems come to mind: "barbaric glass" and "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.")  I made it my job to read 120 pages a day, pen in hand, and if it took me six hours or even more (it seems to me my pace could really slump dangerously), then I stayed in the chair till it was done.  But it wasn't lonely, because I had Pierre and Andrei with me and all the others who lived in the felled forest of pages of War and Peace.

Biographer Ernest Simmons says "Tolstoy" means fat.  Considering that W&P is 1200 pages, this reminds me of a mason I know who happens to be named Brickley.

That Old Nerd Magic

The Lord of the Rings Box Set by J.R.R. Tolkien

As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker in 2001, “The work of Tolkien is infamously, almost scandalously, bereft of sex.”  Lane says he read it at 11 and 12 years old, exactly when I did--an age when a pretty girl was scarier than an orc.  Lane says that Tolkien's epic particularly suits "those who stand on the crumbling brink of puberty and gaze both forward and back. Tolkien’s characters, like teen-agers, feel at once lonely and sociable ... prey to private fears, and the book itself, though dazzled by innocence, is also hungry to know the worst—to confront all varieties of darkness and dereliction."

I was interested to learn from Lane’s article, written in his characteristic style (plush, jaded, yet sensitive), that Tolkien lost his father when he was three years old.  This lends an added poignance, Lane observes, to Tolkien's idea of "The Return of the King" and I think to the books' whole darkly romantic rationale.

"[A]nd yet to give in to it," Lane writes, "to cave in to it, as most of us did on a first reading—betrays a certain nerdishness, a reluctance to face the finer shades of life, that verges on the cowardly.”  There's clearly partial truth in this, as some Tolkien fans attest with their near-pathological level of absorption with the pretend, with the sexless, latency world of Middle-earth.  On the other hand, Tolkien's power of conjuration derives from his own immersion in reality, if a bookish level of it.  Wizards are not born but made, by long study of their spell books.

Tolkien was a linguist and mythographer who in some cases borrowed names directly from existing traditions, such as the dwarves from the Icelandic Poetic Edda.  And if you compare Tolkien’s description of “Smeagol” in The Fellowship of the Ring to John Milton’s description of fallen angel Mammon in Paradise Lost, it’s obvious that Tolkien consciously fashioned Gollum after Milton’s gold-digging devil (which Milton had in turn borrowed from tradition in the first place).  That’s allusion and artistic theft of the most creative and delicious sort.  The result is that Tolkien, like Milton, like Mammon, taps a vein of ancient gold, treasure refined over many centuries in the alembic of human imaginations, and then of course Tolkien refines and orders it further in his own imagination.  What Lane rightly calls the “outlandish plenitude of Middle-earth” reflects the outlandish plenitude of the big and rangy reality of the human mind and the long human experience on earth.

On looking into The Lord of the Rings again, I find they hold up better than any of my sci-fi favorites from childhood and adolescence (with the possible exception of Douglas Adams).  The scene at the entrance to the Mines of Moria is a wonder.  The little band of travelers confronts a secret entrance to the Mines, and Gandalf says, “these doors are probably governed by words,” meaning that there is an Elvish password—but he might as well be speaking for the books themselves, since they are themselves words that open a secret entrance to a vast and unknown land.

Tolkien insinuates the menace and the vastness of the Mines with great sleight of hand.  He has Gandalf tell of paths ahead that a pony can’t walk because too narrow or too steep, wells and pools that you shouldn’t drink from, and shows us the steps leading up into total darkness and a passageway, but nothing beyond.  When Gandalf magically lights the way, he does so with a light that’s only bright enough to show the floor one step in front of him.  We hear the sounds of Bill the Pony being killed outside the closed doors to the Mines, but don’t get to see it.

The Peter Jackson movie versions, incidentally, employ very different, and to my mind inferior, techniques.  Tolkien hinted where Jackson tries to show everything by the light of noon.  By doing so Jackson restricts the territory available to the imagination, which does a better job than his computer animators ever could.  But Tolkien is thankfully a strong enough writer to purge from memory, after a little rereading, Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood’s painfully uncomplicated, unmagical, uninviting performances and that score that seems to parrot the trumpets of medieval heraldry more than to evoke them.

Moria—a byzantine underground complex of passages, chambers, mansions, bridges, mines, and fire pits resembling Dante’s Hell—was constructed underneath the Misty Mountains thousands of years ago, in “a happier time,” by dwarves that have long since abandoned it to who knows what—the things that live under mountains.  By sending the fellowship to revisit someone else’s creation, now abandoned, it seems to me that Tolkien has set before them his own task: to explore the mysterious, byzantine works created in bygone ages, to open the chasms of darkness within.  This sort of nostalgia mixed with curiosity is in so many ways what characterizes plain old English Romanticism.  Wouldn’t Samuel Taylor Coleridge get Middle-earth?

The Burrower

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl is the burrowing fox of children's literature.  His mind burrows deeper and deeper into a story possibility and discovers within it a world of miniature wonders.  He takes you on a voyage into mental and physical inner space--inside the labyrinth-like chocolate factory, into the underground tunnels of the fantastic Mr. Fox, inside a giant peach (in James and the Giant Peach) through a tunnel, one notes, that looks to James like a foxhole.

Willy Wonka, the fictional proprietor of the chocolate factory, is like Walt Disney a curious mixture of showman, pied piper, puritan, capitalist, and wish-granting genie--a distinctly Anglo-American figure.  The four spoiled children in the book--Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregard, Veruca Salt, and Mike Teavee--inspire Wonka and his creator, Roald Dahl, to an ecstasy of conscientious judgment.  At the same time, Wonka is himself a captain of the childhood obesity industry, an owner of a massive sweatshop of non-union Oompa-Loompas, and a celebrant of treats, goodies, excess, and culinary delight!  The moral miscalibration of the factory is creepier in the Gene Wilder movie than in the book, especially accompanied by Quentin Blake's innocuous illustrations.  But the harsh punishments of the "bad" children always make me a little nervous.  In short, Roald Dahl seems never to have gotten around to that psychoanalysis he needed.  But who has?

Or maybe it's just that he's so good at thinking like children do, in unbridled wishes and dark prophecies, in subterfuges, feints, and magical associations.  Whatever his life-story, his imaginary tales are the best--he always knows when to show and when to tell, he's very sure at the rudder.  They're entertainments of consummate craftsmanship and I don't think it can be held against him that they speak both to children's dreams and to their nightmares as well.  A parent must get his own mind straight if he's to help guide a child through Dahl's moral quandaries: it's good indeed to wait your turn, be grateful for what you get, etc., but the consequence of breaking these rules isn't being sucked up a pipe or shrunk to 2 inches tall; it's good to like the sweet taste of life, and there's no real punishment for that either; and maturity is not avoidance of punishment, as the Taliban would have it, but doing what you yourself think is happy, just, and good.

But even if you're not a vigilant interpreter of the tale, because you're tired or you forgot or you yourself don't know the answer or you don't care (like Pierre), it really doesn't matter, because Dahl's protagonists are always centers of moral calm, a perfectly safe and inviting vehicle for a child to climb into for a journey into the rabbit hole.