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France Antarctique

Dordogne River

Two maps (click for full size) created as part of a project to create a new presentation of Michel de Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals. The first is a map of France Antarctique, located for a time around the bay of present day Rio de Janeiro. This colony’s brief life provided Europe with a lasting image of the new world’s native inhabitants and plays an important role in the early portion of the essay. The second is set of four adapted maps showing our changing perception of topography. Montaigne discusses the natural changes that affect the Dordogne river and these take that idea and extend it over the centuries since the essay’s creation, looking at how our understanding of the river has changed. This same interest is in play on the France Antarctique map as well, being adapted from an early explorer’s map of South America.

The entire essay is available via the Charles Cotton translation at Project Gutenberg, and send a note if there are other portions that you feel could be well presented (map or otherwise).

Discuss

He lashes desperately against the glass. After two weeks of mild entomophobia, I’ve established dominion over the living room. He first came to my attention at this precise hour, two weeks previous. I was in the same place then; on the couch, watching a film, drifting sleepily. Unprepared for the unexpected intrusion of any among the beasts with an excess of legs. He has thirty. Not that I counted, mind you. Our previous encounter set the score at 0 – 1. He ran from beneath the couch and I dashed towards the kitchen. The procurement of a suitable trap presented a dilemma, for not just any glass would do. It should be one I don’t use regularly, it had to be sturdy. Largely clear, that I might inspect my intended prisoner. Indecision begat failure. When I returned to the villain’s last known position he had disappeared. The remainder of the film observed with one eye towards the ground. I mis-identified him as a silverfish, too lazy to reach for the laptop. Part of me knew this was wrong, but the next best option was a centipede, and images of the thick brown s-curved demons from Naked Lunch colored this less likely.

By this hour, most humans have ceded domestic administration to those possessing of compound and sensitive eyes. For silverfish to emerge and chew untidy edges into curtains. For House Centipedes (the correct taxonomy, we’ll soon learn) to hunt the silverfish. Both species offer enthralling evolutionary profiles, more so when studied at a distance more considerate than what we now share.

Silverfish can go a year without eating. The mating ritual: Following an hour of antennal foreplay, the male darts off at great speed. Her esteem intact, the female gives chase and commits him to the happy congress. His reaction seems measured as regards an affair soon involving words like ‘spermatophore’ and ‘ovipositor’ and a carpet begging for the mercy only a vacuum and wet sponge can provide. When not engaged in this ribaldry, the silverfish distinguishes itself by dining on polaroids, love letters, and other concrete memories.

Years earlier, I watched these barbarians climb the walls of my parent’s basement. I cringe at the memory of extinguishing them, though karmic self interest, this is not. It is their transformation to dust and grime against a white wall. The crippled abdomen limping from the violence wrought by paper towel. But fifty eggs per mating yields execrable odds on the merciful escaping of a repeat palpitation, so like Michael against Sennacherib, I would don my epaulets and prepared for war.

Summoning the spirit of Borges, I create a Chinese Encyclopedia of these minor beasts. Each nesting in one of the following categories: 1. Creepy and having of many legs. 2. Unidentified and flying. 3. Those requiring of a pin through the thorax. 4. Not creepy, tartish and afraid of me. 5. Pollinating and organized. 6. Intimating of an infestation to come. 7. Spiders.

Back to the scene at hand. The centipede rushes from beneath the couch to the dim shadow beneath the coffee table. The deep crevices of my R-complex begin ringing alarms. The neo-cortex involves itself and associates the event with the that last encounter. Their collaboration begets a plan. I hop to the kitchen and select a small printed glass from the cabinet. Back in a dash, I scan the lower regions for my nemesis. In the dim glow from the television, his compound eyes are more adept than mine, adjusted to the interpretation of ultraviolet light. I catch his outline beneath the coffee table and adapt my tactics to the stage. The unforeseen displacement of this oasis will force him to attempt a retreat towards the couch. The rout will blind him to the approaching chamber. My first attempt is poorly aimed and traps his aft, leaving two long and trembling antennae exposed. My options: lift of push. The former permits the contingency of an escape. The latter guarantees a messy stain. I lift, he runs, I pounce. Victorious.

He is displeased with this imprisonment. The interior is nearly frictionless and none among his various tarsi can find a suitable grip. Undeterred, he rebels again and again; flailing his upper regions against the inner wall. I face another crisis. To kill or not to kill. And if to kill, the means of execution. For the time being, the threat is contained so I retire to the porch in contemplation of his fate. It is dark and it is late, so the street is quiet. I’d spent a portion of the afternoon trimming back the Ivy that reaches horizontally from the fence. “Trimming back” is an understatement. My methods were brutal and generations of Ivy yet unborn will recall the fateful pogrom that cut short so many leaves still in their prime. But life has returned to this minor eden. A spider stealts across a newly exposed leaf. An unidentified and flying pauses, mesmerized by the heavenly glow cutting through the sliding glass door. Unseen, hundreds of larvae have begun sawing or bashing or chewing their way through the sticky membrane of recently matured eggs. Emerging into an unfamiliar world of sustained metamorphosis, reproduction and death. Should any among them find a glimmer of consciousness, the transformative stage should seem quite confusing, as demonstrated my the Phylophaga Beetle.

Life began in a simple ovoid. She emerges to find six legs oddly off balance with the lengthly abdomen and hind-section that trails as she crawls. “Ah, some sort of liminal hybrid, like the centaur of legend.” And thusly she grows for a time. Her casing hardens and the aft recedes. These changes come as a shock, but they are mirrored in the reflection of her countless siblings. “Oh, I’m a pupa! Not as cool, but I’ll go with it.” The placement of these legs making quite a bit more sense now. But more change is to come, and she finally emerges as an adult. “And wings? Amazing!” Her back is a slick hard shell, her legs and feet darkened. Ready now, to adorn herself in the latest pheromonal styles and move the species one step forward.

Overwhelmed by this miraculous bounty, I return to the couch. The prisoner has grown accepting his fate. Occasionally gathering energy for one more fitful push against the glass. I try going back to the film, but the scene on the floor gnaws at my conscience. I find a rugged paper, nudge him onto it and flip the glass. I head for the door. Clemency.

Discuss

Looking around my apartment for something to read on Wednesday, I found a copy of “The End of the Affair” by Graham Greene. This after a brief review of some Raymond Carver from “Where I’m Calling From”. My mother included “The End of the Affair” in a miscellaneous delivery some time ago and I do not recall setting it on the shelf. In fact I had no recollection of having it whatever until stumbling across it. I was looking for something because I’d become frustrated with Carver.

Carver was my first favorite ‘serious’ writer. I got turned onto his stories, very indirectly, by the soundtrack to the Robert Altman film Short Cuts. I must have seen a poster for the film, which seemed interesting, and this led me to pick up the soundtrack at the Library sometime thereafter. The album only stays in my mind for a particularly passionate performance of “I’m gonna go fishin’”. Itself a theme written by Duke Ellington for Anatomy of a Murder. Somehow, all of this got me into the fiction section of the library where I found one of the Carver fiction collections. There is no denying that the man had a knack for book titles. A New Path to the Waterfall. Where Water Comes Together with Other Water. Always the titles are a complete universe to themselves. And this was part of the seduction. His natural gift for minute elegance. I don’t recall which collection I read first, but I moved through them quickly and had read all of his prose within a few months. Various among them became staple gifts to girlfriends over the following years. Some quality that he captured formed a real and powerful connection with my teenage self. Reading the first half of “Nobody Said Anything” reminded me of what it was with great precision. Like no other author I had yet encountered, Carver provided a diverse mix of complicated people. People who were not ashamed to share their less pleasant thoughts and actions. The secrets that they kept found harmonic symmetries in my troubled mind. Here was a collection of discreet individuals who encountered life’s persistent chain of minor tragedies and channeled passage to some other water. I liked that they were not remarkable people. They provided a framework for understanding the lives of people I encountered on a daily basis. Taken as a whole, his work remains for me a testament to the sympathy we should feel towards all of those around us. Their capsulized isolation is key to this perspective. Each narrator exists for as long as we share their world, and when the story stops we’re returned to our own lives and they continue theirs in privacy. Rarely were the described events transformative, but they were always significant. Each a small rendition of some larger pattern contributing to the shape their lives had taken. Or would take.

This provides some background on why, when I finally saw Short Cuts, I found it so entirely revolting. Altman’s big idea was to take these stories and weave them together into a pastiche of false synchronicity. To attempt to graft significance onto these characters by binding them together. But their independence was essential to their value. Binding them all together creates a false image of significance that may provide narrative comfort, but is thin and useless. Carver characters are so internal anyway that I don’t think it would be possible to really do them much justice on screen. You can mime their actions, but you lose their observation. Lyle Lovett was the only one among the ensemble of Hollywood sophisticates to even get close.

And so Carver has held a prominent place in my mind ever since. One that was, until earlier this week, rather entirely untested. I don’t remember the previous time I’d read anything other than an occasional poem, particularly one about domestic life that I’m unable to track down at the moment. I decided to pull him out because I’d mentioned him in my writing class earlier in the week, and as I was mentioned some aspect of his characterization I felt that I had no idea what I was talking about. And in that moment I realized how little of him actually remained. His name had, over the years, become a placeholder in my mind. Filling the address I’d access when needing to compile a list of favorite authors in conversation. And so he took his place, soon to be joined by Borges as co-favorite author. Carver dealing directly with the human and the emotional. Borges constructing intricate Kunstkammern to illustrate the power of ideas. I liked that both worked exclusively in short fiction and poetry, and the two together formed an elegant pair.

I noticed, in my brief return, that Carver employs the passive tense with fervor. I’d become sensitive to this following a note in writing class about a similar enthusiasm in my first assignment. So, at least I’ve got good company in my poor tense selection. I don’t exactly know why I couldn’t make it through that story. It is fairly short, but I guess it did not fill me with the same emotional connection I remembered. I don’t suppose it really could. Or, for that matter ever should. Best, perhaps, to leave the past to itself and find some new Waterfall. And maybe this is why I reached for the Greene so quickly. There I found quite a different writer. Some years earlier, I’d struggled to make it halfway through one of his other books, and I’m finding the same response to this one. It is fairly short though, so I feel that I should slog through. And the thing is that I like it. That is what I find so frustrating. I’m involved in spite of everything about it. I must admit to an occasional affinity with Bendrix’s state of mind. What frustrates is Greene’s (via Bendrix) persistent commentary on all that transpires. Neither Sarah nor Henry can get a word in without a paragraph of commentary. This has the double frustration of making each scene endless and robbing the reader of an opportunity to make independent conclusions. Additionally, his perspective is so monotonous, that I simply find myself tuning him out. This is frustrating because Greene is such an exceptionally talented writer, and it is demonstrated on every single page. And not just in craft, but also characterization and storytelling. So, another hundred pages to go. We will see.

I wanted to end this with that particular Carver poem that stuck out in my mind, but I still can’t find it, so I’ll go with another one instead.

Postscript:
The sum of all of this is that I’m feeling it is time to move into some new (to me, not necessarily recent) material. There is a lot that I have not read, and I’d like to get through more books this year than I did last. If you have any particularly glowing suggestions, please feel free to leave them as a comment on the Buzz post. I’ll only take your first suggestion though, so don’t go crazy.