On a bright afternoon in early summer a few years ago, my wife and I took our tiny new daughter out on a picnic. The air was so clear that everything seemed like a hyper-real version of itself. We sat down next to a bubbling stream on grass that glowed in the sunlight. After a feed our daughter fell asleep. I turned to a bag of books, magazines and papers which I tended to carry about in those pre-tablet days and which always contained far more than I had time to read on topics like ecological degradation, nuclear proliferation and the latest concessions made to torturers and criminals: the funnies.
Also in the bag that day was a copy of The Book of Imaginary Beings – a bestiary, or book of beasts, by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, first published in 1967. I had last looked at it almost twenty years before and had thrown it in as an afterthought. But as soon as I started to read I was riveted. There’s Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest in Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest known poem, who is described as having the paws of a lion, a body covered with horny scales, the claws of a vulture, the horns of a wild bull and a tail and penis both ending in snake’s heads. There’s an animal imagined by Franz Kafka which has a body like that of a kangaroo but a flat, almost human face; only its teeth have the power of expression and Kafka has the feeling it is trying to tame him. There is the Strong Toad of Chilean folklore, which has a shell like a turtle, glows in the dark like a firefly and is so tough that the only way to kill it is to reduce it to ashes; the great power of its stare attracts or repels whatever is in its range. Each of these – and many others from myths and fables from all over the world as well as several from the author’s own imagination – is described in vignettes that are charming, weird, disturbing or comic, and sometimes all four. The book is a bravura display of human imagination responding to and remaking reality. As I say, I was riveted – until I dozed off in the sunshine.
I woke with the thought that many real animals are stranger than imaginary ones, and it is our knowledge and understanding that are too cramped and fragmentary to accommodate them: we have barely imagined them. And in a time that we are now learning to call the Anthropocene, a time of extinctions and transformations as momentous as any in the history of life, this needs attention. I should, said this niggling thought, look more deeply into unfamiliar ways of being in the world of which I had only an inkling. And I should map those explorations in a Book of Barely Imagined Beings.
Normally I would shrug off such a half-formed idea pretty quickly. But this one refused to go away, and over the months that followed it became an obsession to the point where I could no longer avoid doing some actual work. The result is what you are holding in your hands: explorations and sketches towards a twenty-first-century bestiary.
We typically think of bestiaries, if we think of them at all, as creations of the medieval mind: delightful for their bizarre and beautiful images illuminated in gold and precious pigments from far-off lands. The Ashmole Bestiary, a thirteenth-century manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is a good example. In one picture, a man dressed in red is watching a pot on a fire he has made on a small island in the sea, unaware that the island is actually the back of a huge whale. Meanwhile, a high-castled ship sails by, silhouetted against a sky entirely of gold. In another picture, barnacle geese, depicted in black, hang by their beaks from what look like green, red and blue Art Deco trumpets but are supposed to be flowers on a tree. The text is often as entrancing as the pictures. The asp is an animal that blocks its ear with its tail so as not to hear the snake charmer. The panther is a gentle, multicoloured beast whose only enemy is the dragon. And the swordfish uses its pointed beak to sink ships.
But there is more to bestiaries than this. Along with zany pictures, bizarre zoology and religious parables, they contain gems of acute observation: attempts to understand and convey how things actually are. Undaunted by (and unaware of ) the limits of the knowledge of their time, they celebrate the beauty of being and of beings.
A full account of the inspirations and origins of the great illuminated bestiaries of the High Middle Ages would refer to the great scientific works of the ancients, especially Aristotle’s History of Animals written in the fourth century BC and Pliny’s Natural History of 77 AD. And it would record how, via a text called The Physiologus and through the turbulent years after the sack of Rome (which included a plague that may have killed as much as half the population of Europe), extracts from these and other sources were combined with Bible stories and Christian teaching and shoehorned into compendia of natural history and spiritual teaching. (It might, along the way, allude to masterpieces of the Dark Ages such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, decorated on the Northumbrian coast around 700 AD with braided animal figures from the pagan north as well as mandala-like designs from the sunlit eastern Mediterranean.) But I want to trace something else: an older and more enduring phenomenon – one that predates even images such as the scenes of abundant bird life and dancing dolphins painted in, respectively, Egypt and Crete more than a thousand years before Aristotle was born.
At around 30,000 years old, the paintings in Chauvet Cave in France are among the oldest known. These images of bison, stags, lions, rhinos, ibex, horses, mammoths and other animals were made by artists as skilful as any working today. We will never know exactly what they meant for their creators, but we can see that these artists had studied their subjects with great care. They knew, for instance, how the animals changed over the seasons of the year. As the paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall writes, ‘depictions sometimes show bison in summer molting pelage, stags baying in the autumn rut, woolly rhinoceroses displaying the skin fold that was visible only in summer, or salmon with the curious spur on the lower jaw that males develop in the spawning season. Indeed, we know things about the anatomy of now-extinct animals that we could only know through [their] art.’ And we know from handprints stamped or silhouetted on the cave walls that people of both sexes and all ages, including babies, took some part in at least some of whatever took place here. We can see that the animals mattered to these people. The same species recur, but there are no images of landscape; no clouds, earth, sun, moon, rivers or plant life, and only rarely is there a horizon or a human or partly human figure.
All this points to something obvious but which is, I think, so important that it is hard to overstate. And that is that for much of human history attempts to understand and define ourselves have been closely linked to how we see and represent other animals. Methods of representation may change but a fascination with other modes of being remains. The cabinets of curiosities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, are in obvious respects quite different from the bestiaries of the medieval period. Bringing together actual specimens and fragments of exotic animals, plants and rocks, they helped pave the way for more systematic study of the natural world in the eighteenth century when the taxonomic system that we still use today came into being. But, like the bestiaries, these cabinets still had the power to enchant, as their German name, Wunderkammern (‘cabinets of wonders’), attests. Today our fondness for curiosities and wonders is no less. From the Wunderkammer to the Internet is a small step, and the latter – containing virtually everything – is both the servant of science and an everyday electronic bestiary. From giant squid to two-faced cats, what we know about animals and what we don’t, the amazing things they can do and the things they can’t, the ways they never stop being strange or surprising, feature constantly among the most shared articles and video clips on the web.
The following seems to be true: our attention is often momentary or disorganized, but fascination with other ways of being, including that of animals, is seldom far from our minds, and gushes up like spring water from within dark rock in every human culture. We may be shameless voyeurs, passionate conservationists or simply curious, but we are seldom indifferent. Like our ancestors, we are continually asking ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, ‘what has this got to do with me, my physical existence, the things I hope for and the things I fear?’
The selection of animals in these pages is not intended to be representative of what there is in the world. Still less is this book an attempt at a comprehensive work of natural history. And while I have made every attempt to get the facts right, I have not tried to produce a systematic overview of each animal but have, rather, focused on aspects that are (to my mind, at least) beautiful and intriguing about them, and the qualities, phenomena and issues that they embody, reflect or raise. In some respects, the arrangement resembles the one in a Chinese encyclopedia called the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge imagined by Borges:
In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.
This book is envisaged as an ‘aletheiagoria’ – a new coinage so far as I know, which alludes to phantasmagoria (a light-projected ghost show from the era before cinema) but uses the word ‘aletheia’, the Greek for ‘truth’ or ‘revealing’. It suggests (to me, at least) flickering ‘real’ images of a greater reality. I have tried to look at a few ways of being from different angles and, through ‘a wealth of unexpected juxtapositions’, explore both how they are like and unlike humans (or how we imagine ourselves to be) and also how their differences from and similarities to us cast light on human capabilities and human concerns. The results are a little strange in places and, indeed, a little strained. Some of the analogies and digressions I have followed have little to do with the animals themselves. They are deliberate attempts to use the animals to think with, but not to think only about the animals. And, for all the digression, there are themes or strands that weave the book together.
One theme of the book is how evolutionary biology (and the scientific method of which it is part) give us a richer and more rewarding sense of the nature of existence than a view informed by myth and tradition alone. Not only is it the case that, in Theodosius Dobzhansky’s phrase, ‘nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution’; it’s also true that astonishment and celebration flourish when rooted in an appreciation of what can be explained. As Robert Pogue Harrison puts it, ‘imagination discovers its real freedom in the measured finitude of what is the case’; it was Henry David Thoreau, a radical political activist as well as environmental visionary, who actually measured the depth of Walden Pond with a plumb line, not the ‘practical’ folk around him who said the pond was bottomless. In the words of Richard Feynman, ‘Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.’ Thanks to evolutionary theory, the world becomes a transparent surface through which one can see the whole history of life.
Another theme is the sea. About two-thirds of the creatures headlining the chapters are marine. There are several reasons why this is so. For one, the world ocean is our distant origin and by far the largest environment on Earth, covering more than seven-tenths of its surface and comprising more than 95 per cent of its habitable zone. (Recall Ambrose Bierce’s definition: ‘Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for Man – who has no gills.’) And yet this great realm is far less known to us than is the land. It is our ‘job’ to know it better. As Bill Bryson has observed, nothing speaks more clearly of our psychological remoteness from the seas, at least until comparatively recently, than that the main expressed goal of oceanographers during the International Geophysical Year of 1957–8 was to study ‘the use of the ocean depths as the dumping ground of radioactive wastes.’ Only quite recently have we gone from seeing the world ocean as peripheral to beginning to understand that it plays a central role in the Earth system, including its climate and biodiversity, and so in our fate. And only recently have we begun to learn that the seas are rich with real rather than mythical beings that are strange and sometimes delightful in ways we would never have imagined – that there are, for example, creatures as tall as men which have no internal organs and thrive in waters that would scald us to death in moments, that there is a vast world of cold darkness in which almost all creatures glow with light, or that there are intelligent, aware animals that can squeeze their bodies through a space the width of one of their eyeballs.
Yet another strand running through the book concerns consequences of human behaviour. A few years ago I found myself in a snowstorm on a beach in the Arctic staring at a pile of fat, farting walruses. I was an afterthought, almost a stowaway, on an expedition of artists, musicians and scientists come by sailboat to the Svalbard archipelago (commonly known in English as Spitsbergen) to see for ourselves some signs of the momentous changes under way in the region, and to contemplate what’s at stake. (The Arctic is warming more rapidly than anywhere else on Earth. The evidence overwhelmingly points to human activity as the cause.)
Walruses – bulky and comical on land but exquisitely agile and sensitive in the water – are among my favourite animals. Indeed, my daughter may owe them her existence because it was with a drawing of a walrus on a napkin that I first beguiled her mother. I am not alone in my inordinate fondness for these beasts if the many films on the Internet of walruses performing aerobic manoeuvres in synchrony with trainers, playing the tuba and making very rude sounds are anything to go by. Nor is delight at walrus appreciation especially new. In 1611 a young one was displayed at the English court,
where the kinge and many honourable personages beheld it with admiration for the strangenesse of the same, the like whereof had never been seene alive in England. As the beast in shape is very strange, so it is of a strange docilitie, and apt to be taught.
But all this amusement hides an uglier reality. For most of the last four hundred years Europeans laughed at walruses and then killed them – for fun, but mainly for profit – driving many populations (though not the species as a whole) to extinction. In their first encounter, in 1604, English sailors quickly learnt that walruses were not only harmless but rich in oil and furnished with splendid tusks, and both fetched good money. In 1605 ships of the London Muscovy Company returned to Spitsbergen to spend the entire summer killing walruses, boiling down the blubber for soap and extracting tusks. By the 1606 season they were so experienced that they killed between 600 and 700 full-grown animals within six hours of landing.
We twenty-first-century visitors, prancing about with caring-sharing environmental sensitivity, meant no harm, we most truly did not. But we had to get photos, so photos we got. And in our excitement, each wanting to get closer, we panicked the animals and sent them tumbling for the sea. The ship’s captain was furious: walruses need their rest, and we were ruining it. Individually well-meaning (or so we believed), we were, collectively, small-time vandals. Writing in 1575, Michel de Montaigne asked:
Who hath perswaded [man] that this admirable moving of heavens vaults, that the eternal light of these lampes so fiercely rowling over his head, that the horror-moving and continuall motion of this infinite vaste ocean were established, and continue so many ages for his commoditie and service? Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much as master of himselfe, exposed and subject to offences of all things, and yet dareth call himselfe Master and Emperour of this Universe?
This passage, which clearly influenced Hamlet, often comes to mind when I think of our experience with the walruses and other expeditions and experiments I have seen and participated in. It is a reminder of how thoughtless we can be of the consequences of our actions, but it also relates to another strand in the book.
Humans have much more powerful senses than we often realize. A young, healthy person can see a candle flame in the dark thirty miles away, and the human ear can hear down to the threshold of Brownian motion, which is caused by the movement of individual molecules. Still, other creatures have powers of perception – vision, hearing, smell and so on – that vastly exceed our own. In some ways their awareness of the world is superior to ours. And yet in at least one respect – consciousness – all (or virtually all) other animals seem to be greatly our inferiors. Not surprisingly we make a big deal out of human consciousness and identity. But a greater appreciation of the evolutionary inheritance and capacities we share with other animals – and of how, in some ways they surpass us – can contribute to better ways of thinking about the nature of being human and being otherwise.
All these strands mentioned here, and others, including the question of how we perceive time and value over time, connect to a central question: what are our responsibilities as citizens of the Anthropocene to present and future generations? Medieval bestiaries described both real and what we now know to be imaginary animals. They were full of allegory and symbol because for the medieval mind every creature was a manifestation of a religious or moral lesson. Since at least Hume and Darwin many of us no longer believe this. But as we increasingly reshape Creation through science and technology, not to mention our sheer numbers, the creatures that do thrive and evolve are, increasingly, corollaries of our values and concerns. The Enlightenment and the scientific method will, therefore, have made possible the creation of a world that really will be allegorical because we will have remade it in the shadow of our values and priorities. Perhaps the philosopher John Gray is right when he says that the only genuine historical law is a law of irony. This book – a stab at a bestiary for the Anthropocene, in which all the animals are real, evolving and in many cases threatened with imminent extinction – asks what we should value, why we fail to value and how we might change.
In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges describes the A Bao A Qu, a creature something like a squid or cuttlefish, which only stirs each time a human enters the dark tower in which it lives with the intention of making the arduous climb to the top:
. . . only when it starts up the spiral stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor’s heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps where they are most worn by generations of pilgrims. At each level the creature’s colour become more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish light it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows. Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralysed, its body incomplete, its blue growing pale, its glow hesitant. The creature suffers when it cannot come to completion, and its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk. Its span of life is brief, since as soon as the traveler climbs down, the A Bao A Qu wheels and tumbles to the first steps, where, worn out and almost shapeless, it waits for the next visitor.
One can interpret Borges’s strange story in many ways or not at all. Here I’ll call it an allegory, and stick my own crude meaning on it: unless we enlarge our imaginations to better take account of the realities of other forms of being as well as our own, we miss our main task.
