The Deep Zoo
If I have chosen to open this essay with an evocation of an ancient world and its sympathies, it is because the urgencies concealed within the maze of the mind that animate our imaginations, provoke incandescence on the page. I am not calling for magical thinking, obscurity or preciousness, but for an eager access to memory, revery and the unconscious—its powers, beauties, terrors and, perhaps above all, its rule-breaking intuitions, and to celebrate with you the mind’s longing to become lighter, free of the weight of received ideas and gravity-bound redundancies. If we were scientists and not writers, we would not waste our time re-inventing gravity. Speaking of a poet he especially admires, Calvino says:
The miraculous thing about his poetry is that he simply takes the weight out of language to the point that it resembles moonlight.
—Six Memos for the Next Millenium
And Bachelard:
For things as for souls, the mystery is inside. A revery of intimacy—of an intimacy which is always human—opens up for the (one) who enters into the mysteries of matter.
—The Poetics of Revery
The mysteries of matter are the potencies that in the shapes of dreams, landscapes, exemplary instants and so on inform our imagining minds; they are potencies; they are powers. For Bachelard they take the form of shells, a bird’s nest, an attic; for Borges a maze, mirrors, the tiger, for Calvino moonlight, the flame and the crystal; for Cortázar ants on the march and the cry of the rooster.
Potencies are never static but in constant flux within our minds and what’s more, they fall in sympathy with one another. For example, for Borges there is an evident sympathy between the tiger’s stripes, the world’s maze, language and the maze of the mind; for Calvino between moonlight and the lucent transparency of clear thinking; for Bachelard between attics and a love of solitude; for Cortázar between the cock’s cry and the knowledge of mortality, of finitude.
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Revery
The world of animals is an ocean of sympathies from which we drink only drops whereas we could drain torrents from it.
—Lamartine (as quoted by Giovanni Mariotti in his essay on Aloys Zötl, F.M.R. #1)
One evening years ago, a family circus set up its shabby tent in the park of a French village–Le Puy Notre Dame in the Val de Loire—I called home. As I approached the park I heard the sound of a powerful motor and searched the sky for an airplane—a rarity at that time in that place. The sky was empty of everything, even clouds, and the thrumming I heard was the purring of tigers. An instant later I saw the cage and two exquisite tigers, surely drugged; their contentment in such small quarters was uncanny. If I recall this distant evening, its circus and its tigers for you now, it is in guise of an introduction to potencies in the shape of beasts.
For the first issue of Franco Maria Ricci’s magazine F.M.R., Julio Cortázar was asked to write an essay on the bestiary of a little know and eccentric 19th century painter from the foothills of the Bohemian mountains whose name is Aloys Zötl. From 1832 to 1887—the year of his death—Zötl painted 170 achingly beautiful water-colors of animals inhabiting the ideal landscapes of his imagination. Years were kingdoms: 1832 ruled by fish, 1835 by reptiles, 1837 by the gentle tyranny of birds. André Breton called his bestiary “the most sumptuous ever seen.”
Instead of describing Zötl’s bestiary, Cortázar chooses to walk us through his own Deep Zoo. His essay is titled “A Stroll Among the Cages” and it is a parallel journey on a path “burning like alcohol” that generously leads straight to Cortázar’s own holding ground of totems, just as it prepares our eyes for the sight to come: Zötl’s lucent tigeries and tigered lucencies:
“In the beginning it was a cock,” Cortázar tells us; “before that there was no memory;” our journey with Cortázar is announced by the crowing of the cock.
“And then a cock crowed, if there is a memory it is because of that, but there was no notion of what a cock was, no tranquilizing name, how was I to know that was a cock, that horrible rending of the silence into a thousand pieces, that shattering of space throwing its tinkling glass down on me, a first and frightful Roc.”
