(Canon Vargas’s Lecture)
GENTLEMEN,
Before informing you of a new discovery, which I consider will bring some luster to our nation, please allow me to thank you for your prompt response to my invitation. I know that only the loftiest of interests have brought you here today, but I am also aware—and it would be ungrateful on my part not to be—that your entirely legitimate sense of scientific curiosity is mingled with a modicum of affection. I very much hope that I may prove worthy of both.
My discovery is not a recent one; it dates from the latter part of 1876. I did not reveal it then for a reason you will easily comprehend, and if it weren’t for Globo, surely our capital’s most interesting newspaper, I would not be revealing it now. The work I have come here to discuss with you still lacks a few final touches, verifications, and complementary experiments. However, when Globo reported that an English expert has discovered the phonetic language of insects, citing a study undertaken with flies, I immediately wrote to colleagues in Europe, and keenly await their responses. Since it is undoubtedly the case that, in the field of aerial navigation, so ably invented by our very own Father Bartolomeu, the names of foreigners have taken all the glory, while that of our compatriot is scarcely remembered even by his own people, I was determined to avoid the fate of that eminent Flying Priest, and so have come to this rostrum to proclaim loud and clear, to the entire universe, that long before that English expert, and far beyond the British Isles, I, a humble naturalist, discovered exactly the same thing, and made a much better job of it.
Gentlemen, I am about to astonish you, as I would have astonished Aristotle had I asked him: “Do you believe that a social order could ever be imposed upon spiders?” Aristotle would have replied in the negative, as will all of you, because it is simply impossible to believe that such a shy and solitary arthropod made for work alone and not for love, could ever be inducted into some form of social organization. Well, I have achieved the impossible.
I hear some laughter among the other curious murmurings. One must always strive to overcome one’s prejudices, gentlemen. Spiders may strike you as inferior precisely because you do not know them. You love your dogs and hold cats and hens in high esteem, and yet you fail to notice that the humble spider neither jumps nor barks like a dog, nor meows like a cat, nor clucks like a hen. Nor does it buzz or bite like a mosquito, or rob us of our blood and sleep the way fleas do. All these creatures are the very model of vagrant parasites. Even the ant, so praised for certain qualities, preys upon our sugar and our crops, and builds its home by stealing someone else’s. The spider, gentlemen, neither troubles nor defrauds us; indeed, it catches flies, our sworn enemies. The spider spins, weaves, works, and dies. What better example could there be of patience, order, foresight, respect, and, dare I say it, humanity? As for its talents, there can be no doubt. From Pliny to Darwin, naturalists the world over speak as one in praise of this tiny bug, whose marvelous web is destroyed in less than a minute by your servant’s thoughtless broom. And if time permitted, I would now repeat all of these men’s wise opinions; however, I have a lot to get through and so must be brief. I have them here, not quite all of them, but almost; I have, for example, this excellent monograph by Büchner, who studied the psychological lives of animals with such perspicacity. In citing Darwin and Büchner, I am, of course, merely paying due respect to two geniuses of the first order, without (as my vestments attest) in any way absolving them of the unfounded and erroneous theories of materialism.
Yes, gentlemen, I have discovered a species of spider that has the gift of speech. Initially I collected just a few of these new arthropods, then many more, and set about imposing a social order on them. The first of these marvelous specimens came to my attention on December 15, 1876. It was so large, so brightly colored, with a red dorsal patch and blue transversal stripes, so swift in its movements and at times so cheerful, that it completely captured my attention. The next day, three more appeared, and the four of them took possession of a suitable corner in my country house. I studied them at length, and was full of admiration. Nothing, however, could compare to my surprise upon discovering the arachnid language; for it is, gentlemen, a rich and varied tongue, with its own syntactical structure, verbs, conjugations, declensions, Latin cases, and onomatopoeia. I am currently engaged in meticulously compiling its grammar for use in schools and universities, based on the initial summary I prepared for my own use. It has, as you can imagine, taken extraordinary patience to overcome this most testing of challenges. I often lost heart, but my love of science gave me the strength to press ahead with a task that, I can tell you now, no man could hope to accomplish twice in his lifetime.
I will keep the technical descriptions and linguistic analysis for another time and place. The purpose of this lecture is, as I said, to safeguard the rights of Brazilian science with this timely protest, and, having done so, to tell you about the ways in which I consider my own work superior to that of that English expert. I will need to demonstrate this, and for that reason I ask for your close attention.
Within one month, I had collected twenty spiders; the following month, there were fifty-five and, by March 1877, four hundred and ninety. The two main factors involved in collecting them were: using their language as soon as I began to discern something of it, together with the sheer terror I instilled in them. My height, my flowing vestments, and my mastery of their language all made them believe that I was the god of spiders, and, from that point on, they worshipped me. And behold the benefits of their delusion. I followed their every action with great attention and detail, jotting down all my observations in a notebook, which they believed to be a record of their sins, thus reinforcing still further their virtuous behavior. My flute was also of great assistance. As you know, or should know, spiders are quite mad about music.
Mere association was not enough; I needed to give them a suitable form of government. I hesitated in my choice of system; many of the current forms seemed to me adequate, some even excellent, but they all had the disadvantage of already existing. Let me explain. Any current form of government would expose them to comparisons that might be used to belittle them. I needed either to find a brand-new system, or to reintroduce one that had long since been abandoned. Naturally, I chose the latter, and nothing seemed more fitting than a republic in the Venetian mold; I even adopted the same epithet. This obsolete system, which was, in general terms, unlike any other current system of government, had the added advantage of all complicated mechanisms, namely, it would put my young society’s political skills to the test.
There was another motive behind my choice. Among the various electoral methods once used in the Venice of old was the bag and ball, which is how the sons of the nobility were initiated into matters of state. Balls bearing the candidates’ names were placed in the bag, and every year a certain number were taken out, with the chosen few being deemed suitable for public service. Such a system will provoke laughter among experts in electoral suffrage, but that is not the case with me. For it precludes the follies of passion, the errors of ineptitude, and the commingling of corruption and greed. This was not my only reason for choosing it; I felt that a community so skilled in the spinning of webs would find the use of the electoral bag easy to adapt to, indeed almost second nature.
My proposal was accepted. “The Most Serene Republic” struck them as a magnificent title: high-sounding and generous, and suitably aggrandizing of their work as a collective.
I would not say, gentlemen, that my work has reached perfection, nor that it will do so in the near future. My pupils are not Campanella’s solarians or More’s utopians; they are a new people, who cannot in a single bound o’erleap our most venerable nations. And time is not a workman who willingly hands his tools to another; it will, though, serve far better than any paper theories, which look good on paper, but prove lame in practice. What I will say is that, notwithstanding the uncertainties of the age, the spiders continue to make progress, having at their disposal some of the virtues which I believe essential for a state to endure. One of those virtues, as I have already mentioned and as I will now demonstrate, is perseverance, the long-suffering patience of Penelope.
In effect, ever since they first grasped that the electoral act was the fundamental basis of public life, they set out to exercise it with the utmost punctiliousness. Weaving the bag was itself a national undertaking. It was five inches long, three inches wide, and woven from the finest threads into a solid, sturdy piece of work. To make it, ten ladies of the very highest rank were selected by acclamation, and given the title “mothers of the republic” along with various other privileges and perquisites. A real masterpiece, of that you can be sure. The electoral process itself is quite simple. The names of the candidates, each of whom must fulfill certain conditions, are inscribed on the balls by a public official known as the Inscriptions Officer. On election day, the balls are placed in the bag and then picked out by the Withdrawals Officer, until the required number of candidates has been chosen. What was simply an initiation ceremony in the Venice of old, here serves to fill all public positions.
At first the election passed off without incident. But soon afterward, one of the legislators declared that the election had been tainted, because the bag contained two balls each inscribed with the name of the same candidate. The assembly verified the truth of the allegation, and declared that the bag would henceforth be only two inches wide, not three, thus restricting the bag’s capacity and limiting (which was as good as eliminating) the scope for fraud. However, in the following election, it transpired that the name of one of the candidates had not been inscribed on the relevant ball; whether this was due to carelessness or willful omission on the part of the public official is not known. The official insisted that he had no recollection of seeing the illustrious candidate, but nobly added that it was not impossible that he had been given the name, in which case it had not been a matter of deliberate exclusion, but of forgetfulness on his part. Faced with so ineluctable a psychological phenomenon as forgetfulness, the assembly could not bring itself to punish the official; however, in the belief that the narrowness of the bag could give rise to nefarious exclusions, it revoked the previous law and restored the bag to its full three inches.
Meanwhile, gentlemen, the first magistrate passed away and three citizens presented themselves as candidates for the position. Only two of them were important: Hazeroth and Magog, the respective leaders of the rectilinear party and the curvilinear party. I should explain these names to you. Since arachnids are masters of geometry, it is geometry that divides them politically. Some are convinced that spiders should always spin their webs with straight threads, and they adhere to the rectilinear party. Others, however, think that webs should be spun using curved threads, and they form the curvilinear party. There is a third party, which occupies the middle ground with the proposition that webs should be woven with both straight and curved threads, and is therefore called the recto-curvilinear party. Finally, there is a fourth political grouping, the anti-recto-curvilinear party, which sweeps away all such principles and proposes the use of webs woven from thin air, resulting in an entirely transparent and lightweight structure with no lines of any sort. Since geometry could only divide them, without inflaming their passions, they have adopted a purely symbolic geometry. For some, the straight line represents noble sentiments: justice, probity, integrity, and perseverance, while base or inferior sentiments such as flattery, fraud, betrayal, and perfidy are quite clearly curved. Their adversaries disagree, saying that the curved line is the line of virtue and wisdom, because it is the expression of modesty and humility, whereas ignorance, arrogance, foolishness, and boasting are straight, indeed rigidly so. The third party, less angular, less exclusive, has trimmed away the exaggerations of both sides and combined their contrasting positions, proclaiming the simultaneous nature of lines to be the exact representation of the physical and moral world. The fourth grouping simply repudiates everything.
Neither Hazeroth nor Magog was elected. The relevant balls were drawn from the bag, but were deemed invalid—Hazaroth’s because the first letter of his name was missing, and Magog’s because his lacked the last letter. The remaining, triumphant name was that of an ambitious millionaire of obscure political opinions, who promptly ascended the ducal throne to the general amazement of the republic. However, the defeated candidates were not content to rest on the winner’s laurels; they called for an official inquiry. The inquiry showed that the Inscriptions Officer had intentionally misspelled their names. The officer confessed to both the error and the intention, explaining that it had been nothing more than a simple ellipsis; a purely literary misdemeanor, if that. Since it was not possible to prosecute someone for errors of spelling or rhetoric, it seemed sensible to review the law once again. That very same day, it was decreed that the bag would henceforth be made from a fine gauze, through which the balls could be read by the public, and ipso facto by the candidates themselves, who would thus have the opportunity to correct any misspellings.
Unfortunately, gentlemen, fiddling with the law brings nothing but trouble. That same door flung wide to honesty also served the cunning of a certain Nabiga, who connived with the Withdrawals Officer to get himself a seat on the assembly. There was one vacancy to be filled and three candidates; the officer selected the balls with his eyes fixed on his accomplice, who only stopped shaking his head when the ball in question was his own. That was all it took to put paid to the idea of a gauze bag. With exemplary patience, the assembly restored the thick fabric of the previous regime, but, to avoid any further ellipses, literary or otherwise, it decreed that balls with incorrect inscriptions could henceforth be validated if five persons swore an oath that the name inscribed was indeed that of the candidate in question.
This new statute gave rise to a new and unforeseen issue, as you will see. It concerned the election of a Donations Collector, a public servant charged with raising public revenue in the form of voluntary donations. Among the candidates were one called Caneca and another called Nebraska. The ball drawn from the bag was Nebraska’s. There was, however, a mistake, in that the last letter was missing, but five witnesses swore an oath in accordance with the law that the duly elected candidate was the republic’s one and only Nebraska. Everything seemed to be settled, until the candidate Caneca sought leave to prove that the name on the ball in question was not Nebraska’s, but his own. The justice of the peace granted the hearing. As this point, they summoned a great philologist—perhaps the greatest in the republic, as well as being a good metaphysician and a rather fine mathematician—who proved the matter as follows:
“First of all,” he said, “you should note that the absence of the last letter of the name ‘Nebraska’ is no accident. Why was it left incomplete? Not through fatigue or love of brevity, since only the final letter, a mere a, is missing. Lack of space? Not that, either; look closely and you will see that there is still space for another two or three syllables. Hence the omission is intentional, and the intention could only be to draw the reader’s eye to the letter k, being the last one written, hanging there abandoned and alone, devoid of purpose. Now, then, the brain has a tendency, which no law can override, to reproduce letters in two ways: the graphic form k, and the sonic form, which could equally be written ca. Thus, by drawing the eyes to the final letter written, the spelling defect instantly embeds it in the brain as the first syllable: Ca. Once so embedded, the natural impulse of the brain is then to read the whole name, and thus returns to the beginning of the word, to the initial ne of Nebrask, giving us Ca-ne. There remains the middle syllable, bras, and it is the easiest thing in the world to demonstrate how that can be reduced to another ca. I will not, however, demonstrate precisely how, since you lack the necessary preparation for a proper understanding of the spiritual or philosophical meaning of such a syllable, along with its origins and effects, its phases, modifications, logical and syntactical consequences, both deductive and inductive, as well as symbolic, and so forth. But taking that as read, we are faced with the final and incontrovertible proof of my initial assertion that the syllable ca is indeed joined to the first two, Ca-ne, giving us the name Caneca.”
The law was amended, gentlemen, abolishing both sworn testimonials and textual interpretations, and introducing another innovation, this time the simultaneous reduction, by half an inch, of both the length and width of the bag. The modification did not, however, avoid a minor abuse in the election of bailiffs, and the bag was restored to its original dimensions, but this time in triangular form. You will readily comprehend that such a form brings with it an inevitable consequence: many of the balls remained in the bottom of the bag. From this came the adoption of a cylindrical bag, which, later, evolved into an hourglass, which was recognized as having the same inconveniences as the triangle, and thus gave way to a crescent, and so on. Most abuses, oversights, and lacunae tend to disappear, and the rest will share the same fate, not entirely, perhaps, for perfection is not of this world, but to the degree advised by one of the most circumspect citizens of my republic, Erasmus—whose last speech I only wish I could give to you here in its entirety. Tasked with notifying the final legislative modification to the ten worthy ladies responsible for weaving the electoral bag, Erasmus recounted to them the tale of Penelope, who wove and unwove her famous web while awaiting the return of her husband Ulysses.
“You, ladies, are the Penelopes of our republic,” he said in conclusion. “Aim to be as chaste, patient, and talented as she. Weave the bag again, ladies, weave it again, until Ulysses, weary of wandering, comes back to take his rightful place among us. Ulysses is Wisdom.”