Authors: Andrei Bitov
Little cannon-smoke clouds were drifting across the sky.
Who had been shooting? The smoke had forgotten the shot; the artilleryman, his cannon. The little clouds were in pairs, like the cheeks of babes who had slid down from the laps of Madonnas to play. The trees, however, were somewhat confused about the wind in relation to which they grew. Some of them were especially submissive to it and grew away from the sea at a forty-five-degree angle. That angle then represented the constancy of the winds, as graphically as a textbook illustration
…
(The mention of the textbook is very much to the point. For, after my grade school course in “non-living nature,” I would never again see the ideal ravines, hills, and steppes of those illustrations
…
but would perpetually experience the torture of growing up, when everything proves to be not quite as portrayed: not so pure, not so exact, not so expressive of the word that names it—not a ravine but a type of ravine, not a forest but a type of forest, neither fish nor fowl, neither the word “ravine” nor the word “grove.” But here everything remained in that very state: sea, dunes, clouds, bushes, sand, wind. This unconditionality turned out to have two odd conditions; more on this a little later
…
)
…
But after smashing against the dunes the wind blew in all directions. The trees, bred to the habit and memory of the line of least resistance, became confused and didn’t know what direction to grow in, began growing every which way. They hindered the wind more than they submitted, and thereby altered their assignment. They formed a tangle of live windfalls, growing crisscross, like an anti-tank barrier—
x
’s and
y
’s in all directions—the equation was unsolved.
The bus stopped, and I got off.
First of all I should see Doctor D.
I was allowed to sit in the corner.
In front of me sat six pairs of students, the backs of their heads unintelligent.
He paced the classroom with his hands folded behind him, back and forth past the blackboard. His manner of walking made him somewhat taller and thinner than he really was. He picked his feet up slightly too high and bobbed his head slightly forward at every step, peering as if his eye were placed at the side, like a bird’s, and because of this his profile dominated his appearance. He would wheel about so swiftly that he was again presented in profile. As if running along the top of a picket fence. At last he stopped running, faced the blackboard, and drew a straight line. The sound of the chalk seemed to lag behind
…
“Let’s take
…
” he said, with that lagging
screek
(which, despite years of lessonless freedom, I instantly remembered with my whole hide), “let’s take”—
screek, screek, screek,
he drew a square—“a closed space.”
And he gave us that same sidelong look, as if he had won.
Not a spark of recognition did he read in the gaze of his audience. He retracted the animation of his own gaze, as if retracting his head into his shoulders.
“Which is to say,” he continued dryly, “a space bounded on all sides. Hermetically sealed. No access. Nothing in it.”
The square on the blackboard became slightly emptier than before. It gave off a whiff of loneliness.
“And let’s put a bird in it.”
From the severity with which he had drawn the square, I had thought him capable only of straight lines, and now suddenly, with vivacity and ease, in one flourish, he drew a little bird in the corner—in profile, naturally. A girl in the front row giggled.
That was the first assumption. The assumption, as everyone knows, is what the theory rests on. It was also the first oversight. How could the poor bird have gotten in?
“What does she need first of all, in order to continue to exist?” He waited a moment, to awaken the idea in his audience, and gave the answer himself: “Air.”
So saying, he erased a little window, with his finger, in the upper part of the square. Everyone sighed—as if the air had whistled into it. The little bird was saved.
“What next?”
And he added a tiny cup of water.
Thus he furnished the bird with everything essential, and the array became appallingly large and elaborate. He anticipated her needs like a young Creator. They were endless. By now the blackboard was covered with formulas somewhat more complex than the 0
2
and H
2
0 with which all had begun, though not yet sufficiently complex to look like the modern idea of science. The bird, however, already felt cramped in the space allotted to her: she was overgrown with paraphernalia and family. Yet this was the only spot where she could still so much as perch, because the entire space that the lecturer had furnished for her to live in (so empty and small to begin with, on the huge empty blackboard) was now pinched, squeezed, hemmed in on all sides by formulas for her existence; the area outside it was developing the negative pressure of an insufficient knowledge of life
…
and by now the joyous biblical beginning—air, water, food—had been left somewhere far behind. Science begins with that which is truly complex and impossible to grasp—the beginning—but abandons it somewhere at the bottom of grade school in the form of axioms and lemmas, and ends with merely that which can be learned by any Ph.D.
But it’s a long while since anyone has begun at the beginning. To succeed in a narrow major specialty, you must not hesitate to begin with its furthest possible continuation. I was moved by the attempt, in this lecture, to seek meaning. The lecturer himself seemed to be surprised, and to find something for himself in this rare opportunity. Specialists are inclined to suspect everyone of an interest in their own subject (the “fascination” device, long ago exhausted in novels about science)—their neurosis has a touching, pathetic nakedness. And while the men students aren’t listening to him, and the women students are mechanically writing, and I’m reflecting on his resemblance (a flattering one, from his point of view) to the subject of his study (in the banal sense that owners resemble their dogs); while we’re distracted and not listening to him, he inconspicuously crosses the border of the popular, the well known, the obvious, whose veil he was just about to lift, and enters the domain of special knowledge, the specialist’s private shell, the ecological niche of ecology itself—and by now we aren’t listening to him, not because we’re distracted, but because we no longer understand, for we have missed, once again, the long-dreamt-of giddiness of crossing from the perceptively visible to the mentally graspable. We aren’t listening to him
…
a convenient transition to a new thread of the narrative.
I could have heard and understood this as far back as grade school. How strange that humankind did not understand some of it along with me, a little schoolboy! I had finished that school, had even finished college on my second attempt, I was well past thirty before people started talking about the things that surround us and have always surrounded us—about nature, about the things we can’t live without—about air, water, and food. So what else was new? But it did turn out to be new. The conversation itself turned out to be new. Nowadays it’s so faddish that it seems recited by rote, as if even the danger of having nothing left to breathe weren’t really a danger: “They put a scare into us, but tomorrow, and the day after, we’re still breathing!” Tragedy has degenerated into loose talk, a way of leaving everything as it was. And suddenly we have the dreadful thought that it may be more promising to ban a subject than to talk it to death after the ban is lifted. Ours was a hungry era at first, we were in no mood for it, and suddenly we’ve eaten our fill, we’re alive, food is not vital.
Time passes, and unrelated things begin to fall into line
…
After the war, fish multiplied in the lakes and streams; the forests were untrampled, mushroom-rich, berry-laden; Father and I went bicycling and encountered no traffic, not a soul. Empty sandy roads and the twitter of birds. In what year did everyone start going down to the dacha, everyone start taking mushroom and berry walks, everyone start fishing? It happened gradually, of course, but also suddenly
…
I remember it by the suburban trains, the way they were suddenly overcrowded, packed—suddenly one year. We needed to live through the ten years after the war before we could stop eating the essential second plate of soup and thinking of taxis as decadence, and suddenly one year we all started going to the country—was it ’55? ’56? Why, it had always been all right to go to the country, no one forbade it—but suddenly it had
become
all right. To shoulder a wonderful little box and go ice fishing.
This happened in Russia, this I observed, but over in the West, where we hadn’t been, which we were reading about, it was all idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, high living: someone didn’t eat for six months, someone ate a car, someone crossed the ocean without food or water on a rubber raft, someone crawled into caves, someone into a crater, someone walked all the way across Germany on his hands, someone finally climbed Everest, someone set sail without rudder or sails.
But earlier, too
…
yes, a little earlier, if it hadn’t been for the war
…
The North and South Poles, the balloons, the dirigibles, ever higher and higher—it had happened earlier, too, this peculiar cocktail of adventure, sport, and science, but for some reason especially after the war. When something became understandable, when we all understood something—understood
something
, but didn’t understand what. And that “what” began to slip away, irretrievably. Time, too, is a living being; it, too, wants to live its life. Every so often there comes a time when humankind lives as one person: in some sense, this is indeed a Time. We grow old together, rejoice together, understand together. Later we don’t understand what has become of all this, where it has disappeared to. Someone realizes that the state of commonality is over, lost, beyond return, someone senses it before the rest—there is a wave of suicides, someone casts off in the emptying boat to overtake the romantically colored ideals. But that movement, too, left strange things in general use: flippers, masks, large beads, the vogue for sweaters and jeans, new forms of sport like archery and waterskiing. Some people began to tame lions, or to live among wolves or monkeys, some people began to do time studies on Stone Age work processes, after fabricating tools on Stone Age models and withdrawing from civilization (in all such exercises one is troubled by the small two-way radio in the plastic bag, and the possibility of heavenly rescue by helicopter—the umbilical cord compromises any escape). Strange people. Their behavior was puzzling. They might be suspected of publicity seeking. But your suspicion was tinged with envy: He’s broken out! Here we are, shoulder to the yoke, and he sets off to hike around the world—anyone would be glad to do the same. The strange part is that there were only a handful of these eccentrics. To earn the right, they had to be surprising. But to surprise this work-worn, stifled world is hard. In the adventures that become famous, you are struck by just one thing—their simplicity. Why didn’t anyone ever think of this before? It makes you envious. You, too, could have done it. And somehow you see all too clearly that you can no longer follow. The gap, the breach, is already cemented over and guarded. This world is hard to surprise. As the poet wrote: “It’s not easily surprised by your words, not impressed by the look on your face
…
” Yet we may well be surprised by the things that do impress this world, how simple they always are, how seemingly obvious, within reach of anyone. So here we are, living in a world more impressed by natural behavior than by the formula
mc
2
.
I maintain that this shift, rather than the long list of naturalists of all centuries, constitutes the essential history of the science of ecology.
We live in a world of people born just once. We are not witnesses to the past, not participants in the future. The instinct, memory, and program of the species have grown weak within us, as weak as the connection of the times. This very weakness (so extreme that we have lost our connection with nature) is where the human seed springs up. Man originates exactly where any other species dies out. No warm fur, no terrible teeth, no lupine morals. Trousers, the bullet, religion
…
How strange, I thought, grasping the experience with difficulty, assimilating the conclusion with ease
…
Let’s take a bird and solder it into a box
…
The trajectory of scientific thought reminded me of the chaotic flight of a moth. Clumsily conspicuous at the end of the trajectory was the conclusion that had suggested itself at the very beginning. How comical, I thought. Examining his own hands with bewilderment, man discovers that birds have wings. Opening his mouth in surprise, he finds that birds have a beak. Has he “discovered” that birds have wings and a beak—or that he himself has hands and a mouth?
Humankind, I thought, you’re incapable of comprehending any other biological existence. Each time you make the terrible effort to do so, you comprehend only your own
…
But would man comprehend even his own existence if he did not try to comprehend a different one? Man’s capacity to know another nature strikes me as catastrophically small, yet there is nothing nobler, or more necessary for human consciousness, than to spin our wheels in this effort.
Ecologists, too, have many of the accoutrements of science, of course. Laboratories, test tubes, retorts, automatic recorders, freezers—the whole Laputan environment, the background against which the white-coated scientist poses, juggling cult objects. But we don’t know what he’s pouring into what in the photograph—-or whether he’s mocking us. The priest of science is bathed in fluorescent light, he peers profoundly at something he’s supposed to have some knowledge of, while we have none. This is what makes us an enlightened society, that we revere what we don’t understand. I’m not being ironic—it really is a mark of enlightenment. But we don’t revere
nature.
We revere science.