The Deep Zoo
It is the shell that tigers Bachelard—that lover of intimacy and solitude. A creature with a shell is a “mixed creature;” it reveals and conceals itself simultaneously. You will recall that in ancient times a fossil shell acquired the potencies of the moon. Stones of unusual shapes were empowered by Osiris also; they evoked the myth of his dismemberment and his own scattered limbs. In the myth, Isis gathers the pieces of her husband’s broken body and makes him whole; she revives him. For Bachelard, “the fossil is not merely a being that once lived but one that is still asleep in its form.” He is speaking of the “spaces of our intimacy, the centers of (our) fate;” he is speaking of our memories, those powers that, “securely fixed in space,” remain coiled within us ready to spring and inform our lives with immediacy and our thoughts with urgency.
In his Poetics of Space Bachelard writes:
We have the impression that by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds of being.
And in The Poetics of Revery:
The passionate being prepares his explosions and his exploits in… solitude.
The shell, the yellow tiger, the crowing cock, the moon—these are among the potencies in which time is compressed in the form of memories. To write is to engage a waking dream, to, in solitude, prepare a whirlwind. Says Bachelard:
...daydreams illuminate the synthesis of immemorial and recollected. In this remote region, memory and imagination remain associated, each one working for their mutual deepening.
For Bachelard, Time has but one reality—that of the instant. The instant is our solitude stripped bare, stripped down to its essential potencies—its Deep Zoo.
When I was a child, I came upon the dead body of a red fox in the woods; it was early summer and the fox’s belly was burning brightly with yellow bees. A species of animal calligraphy, the bees rose and fell in a swarm that revealed, then concealed, the corpse. Yellow and black they tigered it and they glamorized it, too—transforming what otherwise might have seemed horrible into a thing of rare beauty. It is no accident that my first novel opens with the death of a creature in a wood.
If I have, throughout this essay, dwelled on the potencies of what I’ve been calling the Deep Zoo, it is because it is the work of the writer to move beyond the simple definitions or descriptions of things—which is of limited interest after all—and to bring a dream to life through the alchemy of language; to move from the street—the place of received ideas—into the forest—the place of the unknown.
But the Deep Zoo’s attraction is not sufficient. We must take care that our books do not resemble those 17th century wonder-rooms or 19th century parlors with their meaningless jumbles of stuffed bears, kayaks, giant lobsters and assorted stools. In other words, just as the museum of Natural History has contributed to, perhaps enabled our practical knowledge of the phenomenal world—and do not forget that the development of the museum coincides with the exclusion of Christian orthodoxy from the process of scientific inquiry—so must the books we write be free of those restraints that impede aesthetic invention; so must they be enabled by the rigors of intellectual coherence. Again, if we are to be quickened by the prime qualities of the Deep Zoo, we cannot, nevertheless, allow our books to be determined by excess or arbitrariness. Ideas and language deserve our chronic, our acute attention. After all, a book is above all a place to think, and the lightness of thoughtfulness our way of approaching the truth.
It is our capacity for moral understanding that enables us to interpret the world and to act thoughtfully and with autonomy. As psychoanalysis demonstrates, knowledge of ourselves and the world allow s us to heal, to transcend the moral darkness that suffocates and blinds us. The process of writing a book is similar as it reveals to the writer what is hidden within her: Writing is a reading of the self and of the world. It is a process of knowledge. This is why the lost roads and unchartered territories of the world’s maze deserve our interest. If a book is a place to think, it is a pragmatic place, a place of experiment and discovery, a battleground (Calvino’s word) where the orthodoxies—religious, political, neurotic—that interfere with clairvoyance, are dismantled and replaced by a new order. In other words, to write in the light of childhood’s burning alcohol, with the irresistible ink of tigers and the cautious uncaging of our own Deep Zoo, we need to be attentive and fearless—above all very curious—and all at the same time.
