(Very recently, when I saw Karl Sims’s marvelous hyperanimation Panspermia, it seemed familiar, an inevitable extension of the mushroom’s conjuration of a universe seeded with possibility.)
If this happened many years ago, I wonder even now that an agnostic and a skeptic can, within her mind’s eye, see a cosmos seeded with letters, and so: voices. But, then again, it stands to reason. Butterflies have voices. Enamored mice, bats, and whales sing to the beloved; bees write upon the air; recently I heard a deer buzz to her fawn, and having eavesdropped on them only yesterday (the local marine center has a hydrophone), I know that out at sea, the orcas are symphonic. And, by the way, they call to one another by name. Each orca has a distinctive name.
Just as a good book is poised to leap into our lives and change us, in nature every seed is poised to quicken. (There are seeds, found in ancient tombs and planted, that have leapt to life after several thousands of years in limbo.) When you look at seeds up close, you appreciate that they are as various as glyphs, and that their forms evoke a multitude of familiar — and not so familiar — things. The seed of the cornflower, say, looks like a squid from another solar system. Instead of tentacles, it has feathers; its body is hairy, and it wears its teeth like feet. Purslane could be a high-fashion evening purse of quilted raspberry silk with a gilded clasp; the seed of the yellow floating heart — and it is dispersed in water — is very like a version of a distant ancestor, a one-celled animal, its many arms (or are they legs?) orbiting its body like the beams that emanate from the solar disc during an eclipse. In fact, these are bristles that catch to the feathers of waterbirds and so assure the seed’s dispersal.
There are seeds that look like the noses of certain apes, the bottoms of apes, or parrot beaks, tortoise shells, machines of war, the crowns of pontiffs, caricatures of wags and luminaries drawn by Max Beerbohm.
Imagine with me a book that, like a seed held in the reader’s hands, under her gaze, effloresces. A book that contains not only other books, a library, the world’s library — a pleasure already almost ours — but a book that, like a living organism, evolves in unique and unexpected ways. A book whose every mutation persists in space and rides the air. That, like the chrysalis, explodes on the scene in new and dynamic forms with each reading. It is thought that whales sing their world into visibility and so: meaning, stereoptically. Let us acknowledge how their songs extend and enliven our own. Imagine with me a book that, like those gardens of Osiris and Adonis once so beloved of the Egyptians and the Greeks, is the place where Eros sleeps and dreams, and awakens again and again. A book that, as it surfaces, respires. .
NAKHT — II
Once, in Egypt, the word for scribe was nakht. It means: Observer of the Hours of the Night.6
The god of the interstices, Thoth, guards the truth and the portals of the palaces of deepest night. He is the god of the scribes; to appease him, one offers him a palette, brushes, and ink. Thoth heals the moon’s wounded eye and calculates its course through the sky. He inscribes the pharaoh’s name “on the fruits of the tree of history,”7 a tree that, as does the tree of life, suffers as we pass these brief moments.
In an ancient rock tomb of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, there is a luminous painting of a marsh. Thickets of papyrus riot with birds, and everywhere nests brim with eggs. A fertile world in which geese and falcon, ibis, and butterfly fly together. Knowingly painted, the butterflies are African monarchs.
Within this tomb that can be read like a book, the wings of the butterflies propose a secondary text with which the birds are conversant. The text, clearly visible, informs the birds of the butterflies’ toxicity. In the face of death, the butterflies flourish. What’s more, the text is not contained within the painting, but unspools into the tomb. The pharaoh’s gilded beard, so evident on the sarcophagus, his bound corpse within, are both made to evoke a monarch’s chrysalis; the pharaoh’s linens are studded with amulets in the form of butterflies.
Back to the painting. Here the space between the fertile marsh and the upper sky suggests a divine intersection, a fluid boundary between a wealth of life we can only imagine and the sacred impulse of generation. The sun itself is a fertile seed; it is an egg. Within the Book of the Dead, one reads: “If the Egg flourishes, then shall I flourish; if it lives, I shall live; if it breathes the air, I shall breathe the air; if it does not flourish, nor live, nor breathe the air, then I shall do none of these and die.”8
Special attention has been given to the painting of the monarch’s organs of courtship. The male’s pencil hairs, and the gland tucked within his hind wing where his pheromones are kept, is clearly visible. When a male monarch encounters a female, he will use his pencil hairs to reach for a fragrant powder of crystals, and dust her antennae. Enthralled, she will let him enter her body in a dust storm of fragrance. (The monarch butterfly’s egg looks like a grain of rice stitched with threads of mica.)
The writing on the monarch’s wings, the nests and eggs balancing among the reeds, the creatures soaring in the interstices of marsh and upper sky, the pharaoh’s beard and shroud — all speak of the breath of life. Sewn among the linens, close to the pharaoh’s body, is the ankh — that symbol of life, of living, of “the life that cannot die.”9
All the gods carry the ankh in their right hands; it is the oldest of the amuletic signs. And it should come as no surprise that the ankh is nothing more than a slight variation of the butterfly glyph. Or that the children who perished in the Nazi death camps chalked the walls with butterflies. Or that the face of the pharaoh on the sarcophagus rises from the chrysalis-beard like a sun. The sun, which in the Book of the Dead is called both eternal and incomprehensible, and also: joyous. Creator of eternity, the sun is born of water.
A pharaoh’s tomb is a symbol of the word — perhaps it was a vowel (in the sacred texts of Islam, it is said to be a small sequence of vowels) — that sets the world of things in motion. Steeped in gum, surrounded by jars of tripes and wine, the pharaoh is poised at the world’s edge, waiting in expectation of dissolution and the acquisition of a new orientation and identity. In other words, the tomb is an ever-evolving text, a form of dynamic earth and skywriting, an act of magic and a place of knowledge. Everything within it conspires to unbind the spirit from its husk and assure its release. (In Arabic, the verb to release is synonymous with the verb to write.)10
A final reading: the fruit of the calotrope — the toxic plant the monarch’s caterpillar feeds upon — is doubled; it looks like a pair of testicles. When the poet says to his lover, “Your balls are the fruit of the calotrope,”11 he speaks to his desire, to the lover’s life force; he speaks to death, the risk of love’s death, the death of life — but also: he evokes regeneration. All these are among the mutable forms Eros takes. And, the lover embodies Eros. Like the god, he possesses “the fluid of life.”12 Imagine with me a book that, like the heartbeat of a lover, pulses to the rhythm of the reader’s heart. The heart that, for the Egyptians, was the place where memory was safely kept, memory and the imagination.