Mid-December Poetry

Discovered at the End

of Time’s Expression

There they were, exactly as Marcel saw them,

Swimming in a spiral bowl, like clowns in a circus,

each older than the other, phlegm

As they spoke, trembling hands, a caucus

Race to unconsciousness, skin blotched,

Eyes occluded, then thought: “Do they mock us

With their superannuated breath, with their wretched

Parody of health and youth?” Feeble crocus

In the filthy snow, blossom blasted bed,

Under a lightening flash, hocus-pocus

Illusion of what once they were, led

Beyond the boundaries of persuasion, hushed

In shadows of distortion, like the red

Thread of a lost horizon, and pushed

Over the cliff of death, held in suspension,

Unable or (worse) unwilling to go beyond question.

Stay Tuned for an 

Important Announcement

We wondered what  « by proxy » meant when the big

deep voice came on of J. Edgar Hoover to enlist

our aid in fighting crime, racketeers

and enemies of the state, and then Bulldog

Drummond and sirens and shots in the dark, our ears

deep under the blankets, with only a thin orange light

of the tube shining through: Only the Shadow knows,

said Lamont Cranston, sending shivers of delight

up and down our spines, and those cackles and chuckles

that blended through the darkness with Andy, Amos

and the Kingfish himself, until we forgot Sergent

Prescott of the Northwest Mounted Police, yahoo!

through the forests of an unknown northern land

and then Silver and Champion to the south, a posse of

hombres, outlaws and vigilantes clashed and then

as each fifteen minute segment closed with Ovaltine

or Carter’s Little Liver Pills, the Green

Hornet or some other crime-buster rescued

our imagination from itself, and it

was time to click the dial to off and sleep

in another realm of dreams, as only eleven-

year-old children can, unaware this

was the end of infancy, the final show,

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

would begin another era, after radio.

Already Too Soon

The Bitterness that Bites the Sky

What brings out the bitterness that bites into the sky

So that when I roll over, stare furtively through the grass,

There are shards flung about, holes near the planets, high

Over my head a shadow, not some stray dog with his ass

On my nose, or an unquiet infant, but the empty dark

Matter everyone talks of now-a-days:

Things unknown grasp me from down below,

The biomass at the ocean’s floor, more life

Than anywhere else on earth, or the ebb and flow

Of the fungal web that binds all plants, strife

And coexistence tempered, and the slow

Bemusement of swarming starlings, the heavens rife

With their mesmeric antics between cloud and tree,

Inhabiting ditches and shivering sands, like grief

Expounded, expanded and expended for a simple fee.

Poem out of Madness

Truth is on the March Double-Quick

Now that we know, because we have seen it, filmed

underwater and on the telly, that fish use tools,

and that some others leap up to capture birds,

what do we make of all the old adages, homo

faber, creature that talks? Boundaries break,

so that home truths become uncanny. Truth

be damned, or some other cliché, you might say:

if news is fake, then why not science or maths?

Planets are not planets, moons not moons, the sky’s

Mysteries are more mysterious than ever, words

Absurd that try to capture them in thought.

Time perhaps to lay Galileo to rest

And send old Newton packing to an asylum,

Picking apples as they fall. Silence the dumb.

Super-powered micro-cosmology or sport

Of nature, music of the spheres—what ought

We think today that we could not ponder then?

I am of the old school, believe Attenborough

And Sagan were elected from a rotten borough.

What comes together now in rhyme, Mugabe

Gone with the wind, don’t give a damn, maybe?

Maybe not.  Gabby Hays knew best, buckaroo.

Always did, always will, one, two, buckle my shoe.

mid-November poem

Straight to the Point

I can never get stalactites and stalagmites straight in my head

Nor the difference between port and lee, let alone aft and fore,

Even in times of stress, left and right—but before

You call me an idiot, remember how long I have been dead.

There was a time in my youth when I thought the red

Light meant the cars had to stop and I could walk, the green

Signalled it was a dangerous road to cross—for

Crimson was a positive colour, verdant sad.  A screen

In the cinema did not exist: images were real.

Nor were there actors and scripts—things just were.

Back in the streets, late afternoon, all a whirr,

We rolled and fought over what was best, steel

Or cellophane for heroes to wear in battle, blur

Of colours through the sun, sparkle to blind

The enemy, transparency, invisible powers stir

To courage, protection from dreams, and thus all wind

Their way homewards after the film in the cave of hopes,

Ideas tied to our imaginary ropes.

My Two Latest Books

My Two Latest Books: An Intimate View

Norman Simms

Jews in the Illusion of Paradise: Dust and Ashes, Volume I, “Comedians and Catastrophes”.  Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.  426 pp.

Jews in the Illusion of Paradise: Dust and Ashes, Volume II, Falling out of Place and into History

Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 553 pp.

Jews in an Illusion of Paradise is not the title I chose for my book, the second volume of which is scheduled to appear in November of 2017, but that which an editor at Cambridge Scholars Press suggested, afraid for some reason that potential purchasers of the study would not be able to understand what it was about.  The name of the book, now standing as a sub-title, Dust & Ashes, comes from my wife who wished to give the book a snappy cachet, after admonishing me for always giving obscure and overly ironic titles. The last three studies of Dreyfus are a case in point.

Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash.  Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012.

In the Context of his Times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet and Jew.   Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013. 

Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus: In the Phantasmagoria.  Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,   2013.

Obviously it was too difficult for reviewers to work out by these names that the books were not about the Dreyfus Affair in all its legalistic, social and political aspects about which the number of studies are legion.  I did not write the book they wanted to read.

When I thought the new manuscript was completed enough to send off, it had a very long and complicated name, something like “The Four who Entered Paradise and didn’t all come back, along with modern instances drawn from nineteenth- and twentieth-century French, German and other European Cultures, who similarly thought they had entered Paradise but actually found themselves in Sheol, the ancient Jewish afterlife of Shadows.”  Admittedly a mouthful, but surely part of the joke: the terrible Jewish joke played by God or the Fates or their own Self-Images on a group of intellectuals, artists and other critics and theatrical people. 

While of the original Talmudic Four who Entered Paradise (or PaRDeS, the acronym for four kinds of exegetical games they played—pshat, the common meaning; remez, the analogies to be drawn; drash, the meanings expounded in conversation and applied in social situations; and sod, the secrets created by delving into the unconscious of textual and visual traditions), one died of fright as soon as he crossed over to the other side of textual life; the second went mad because it was too much for his traditionally-trained mind to take in; the third suffered a different kind of shock so that when he returned to the Land of Israel in the days of the Second Temple he became a cynic, a sceptic and thus a heretic, the very embodiment of otherness to his former rabbinical colleagues; as for the fourth, his future career and reputation was shaped by a distrust of speculative innovations and hence a guardian of a very conservative school of exegetical commentary.  My book thus conceived, so I thought, would find examples and analogues among various once famous journalists (Marcel Schwob), actors (Sarah Bernhardt), novelists (Thomas Mann), art historians (Bernard Berenson and Arthur Meyer), literary critics (Georg Brandes) and so forth, most of them recognizably Jewish, others less so, and a few mistakenly so identified.  Despite their achievements and influence, they ended up dead or forgotten—or at least some of them—in the ultimate Sheol of the Shoah.  The most problematic, of course, are women such as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and their neighbour’s daughter Rose (who is a Rose is a Rose).

In what is now the first volume of Jews in an Illusion of Paradise: Dust & Ashes, the sub-title “Comedians and Catastrophes” signals the emphasis on certain key images, themes and rhetorical tricks.  Since there is nothing new about the notion that Jewish reputations suffered because of anti-Semitism and that the importance of Judaism has been neglected, denied or challenged, with the consequence that much of European historiography not framed by explicit Jewish interests simply ignores that influence, my book does not present itself as a part of that major school of thought.  In fact, it is neither history proper, social science or philosophy; if anything, it is a midrash, a witty commentary in the rabbinical way on the careers and works of a small group of Jewish intellectuals and artists.  The discussions, usually sparked by seemingly irrelevant episodes (including dreams and infantile memories) or remarks (casual or later contradicted), weave in and around one another, always coming back to the story of the Four Ancient Sages who Entered PaRDeS.

If the first volume stresses themes and images, the second, whose subtitle is “Falling Out of Place and into History,” pays more attention to the personalities and artistic style of the main Jewish exemplars.  The place they fell out of can be seen to be at least double (in all sorts of complicated and complex ways indicated in nineteenth-century novels, such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, The Picture of Dorian Grey), in that after liberation and assimilation Jews no longer had a traditional place to hide in or offer protection or, if they believed they had actually passed over into a tolerant, secular bourgeois society, they duped themselves; in another sense, too, when they felt themselves finally comfortable and safe in their reputations as successful writers, scholars and theatrical people, they were usually wrong, although they didn’t always realize it.  When they fell into “proper” history, that is, found themselves subject to and interested in the social and cultural life, the academic and scientific institutions they had often helped found, the political and military actions of their age—places they had been excluded from by law and custom—they eventually, if they lived long enough, were persecuted, expelled and murdered; otherwise their names were erased and their achievements forgotten or assigned to “real Europeans.”  Who now can recall the names Catulle Mendès, André Suarès or Marcel Schwob, let alone see them as representatives of pre-Holocaust Sephardic cosmopolitanism?

But not only are the life stories—dreams, letters, diaries, memoirs and other private texts—of each of the dozen or so Jewish subjects wound in and around one another to bring into focus aspects of their Jewishness hidden for strategic purposes, but these key details are saturated in the popular literature, dramatic entertainments and artistic images of the period, with the effect, often quite surprising and psychologically shocking, of revealing qualities in the host society that were then and now too unconscious.  Some of these key moments thrown up by the midrashic method are an account of Sarah Bernhardt being lowered down a cliff into the swirling sea and imagining she was seeing ghosts and monsters or newspaper reports of Catulle Mendès’s death in an accident in a railway tunnel when he mistakenly opened the carriage door while the train was still moving or of an evening with Bernard Berenson amongst sophisticated Jewish friends whom he swore he and they waxed nostalgic for their mommas’ kosher cooking and joked in Yiddish to one another, something the others later vehemently denied ever happened. 

Since these two volumes, like the three books on Alfred Dreyfus, his wife Lucie and their respective families, were written after my retirement, long after my struggle for promotion and professional recognition abandoned with great relief,  and therefore any need to conform to academic protocols, these new kind of exercises in the history of mentalities, psychohistory and rabbinical explorations of the other side of assimilation, they handle sources, paradigms of proof and scholarly objectivity in ways that will, I hope, entertain as well as instruct the reader.  Given two other factors in the current world of letters, on the one hand, the supercilious seriousness of post-modernism and its political correctness, on the other, the snobbish belittlement of Judaism’s refusal to kowtow to hierarchical authority as well as the fashionable anti-Zionism that demonizes Israel and its achievements, these bizarre books (as one critic called them) may also poke fun at self-righteousness and the arrogance of worldly power.  Here I rely on, though don’t always cite, José Faur, Jonathan Sacks and David Shasha, as well as my own deepest memories and feelings.

Two Springtime Poems

Yom Kippur 2017

Another year passes without our knowing when to fast

But not when to feel a deep sense of guilt and shame,

Aware that some time in this season the day will pass

And even if the evening prayer forgets my name

There is no way to stand with others when the blast

Of the ancient horn is blown—no one to blame

For this negligence, this silent blasphemy.

In my mind there is somewhere a chicken’s neck

To twist and cast away misgivings, my

Little crumbs of lost belief, the wreck

Of memories from ancient nights when I

Stood next to my father, listened to the chant

Of a chazzan, felt the warmth of piety,

Unaware that this would be the last

Time we stood together man to man.

The Victory of Old Night

As if that weren’t enough, with the celestial clashes

Causing havoc across the Milky Way, the jungle

Animals that had been tamed in circuses

Decided as of one accord to give out lashes

To anyone who thwarted their desires. Bungle

This, shouted the creator of the universe, once again

And all the starry girders will be retracted, all enacted

Legislation made null and void.  No one listened.

No one understood.  No one cared.  The tangle

Of traffic, the snarl of pedagogy, and kids reacted

In obscene adult rage.  Yet neither chaos

Ensued nor anarchy broke out in places

You would most expect, where snakes snuggle

Up to elephants or in kindergarten fortresses

Constructed out of Lincoln Logs. Happy faces

Lapsed into growling masks, and thus all traces

Of reason disappeared, like puppy faeces

After a lovely summer’s rain, without a struggle.

Poetry for October 2017

Swimming on a Lake in 1955

Never one for speed, I swim across the lake

Slowly and full of heavy dreams, assuming

Somewhere at the back of my mind that a boat

Is following, and so stroke after stroke I swim

In the hot summer afternoon, time

Languid, and then I feel and smell the slime

Over the other shore, my feet entwine

In the weeds, only then noticing no one

At my back. The further shore is dense with bush,

So I turn back again to the lake and begin

Slowly my languid strokes, my dreams no longer dull

But alert to how far the journey is, how soon

The sun will be in decline, and wishing then

I would be one for speed.  My feet do not reach

The mud and slimy weeds.  My arms reach out

For the distant shore all too slowly and make

A signal to the unseen boat, the sleepy rower

Who must be somewhere floating on the lake.

Shadows begin to float past me heavily,

The horizon a silhouette of darkening hills,

As stroke by stroke I cross the water, no

Longer silent but heavy splashing, myself

A shadow of darkness creeping through the night.

Available on 1 November 2017

Norman Simms

Jews in an Illusion of Paradise

Volume Two

FALLING OUT OF PLACE

AND INTO HISTORY

These further six chapters of Jews in an Illusion of Paradise  now focus on individual exemplary figures and clusters of poets, dramatists, critics, journalists, art historians—Jews whose achievements were once celebrated but now are almost all but forgotten, not because of changes in aesthetic taste or style but because of social, political and other ideological issues.  We continue to examine the clash between their conscious and unconscious self-presentation as Jews into a culture that wilfully or inadvertently misunderstood or rejected this aspect of “otherness” the men and women represented from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.  Whereas the first volume concentrated on the themes, images and rhetorical motifs of this awkward status of Jewish intellectuals and artists, here the ambiguous personalities and repressed anxieties of the exemplary figures are stressed.  For millennia Jews were considered part, out of normal history, passive victims of persecution; then suddenly, with Emancipation, they fell into history and out of their mythical place in the scheme of things.   Everything seemed to crumble into dust and ashes.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

Copyright © 2017 by Norman Simms

Glancing Obliquely into the Future

Even now that tomorrow has become bent

Out of shape and the hours do not run smoothly

But flutter by unevenly and sometimes

Disappear into the shadows or the corners,

The birds still clamour for their breakfast, peck

At the kitchen door, and the tui couple swoop

Down from their perch, admonishing the one

Who scatters crumbs and crusts; and thus next week

Seems a million years from now, although it taps

On the window and demands its due: “Put the rubbish

Out, pile up the papers, sweep the entrance,

There is no time to dillydally, you silly fool.”

When I awake it is always yesterday’s

Today, the crack of dawn before the storm

Is blown away, the time of doubtful dreams,

Waiting for the siren to shout: “All Clear. Come home.”

Have I already passed this way before?

Has someone left a parcel on the stoop

But it has been wafted by the winds into the night?

Can anyone untwist the threads of fate?

A cat is lurking in the corner of the garden, ready

To pounce, so that my sparrows will not feed,

The white eyes scatter nervously, the black

Birds hop insanely under bushes, who fear

The end of the world, and the tui screams “Beware”

To its mate, who already has flown away too far

To hear, back, it seems, into the season

Of its birth, in the night of potentialities.

We two speak to each other in our loneliness

In a jargon only we understand,

Mimicking the feelings we cannot otherwise express,

Caring nothing for tomorrow’s empty aspirations.

Time is bent out of shape forever.

Time is nothing in itself. Nothing.

Between the Seasons

There are times when the mountains stand out sharp against the sky,

When the blackened clouds relax their heavy hold and drift,

When rivers untwist themselves into powerful  streams,

But not today, when there is no difference between the mist

And the force of the rain,  not even when the sun thrusts

Its poisoned arrows in my eyes: everything is flat

And dull, pointless; and the watercourses disappear

In invisible underground caverns of muddy sludge.

Such moments are not rare between the seasons: spring

Takes ages to know itself and cast off winter’s

Pall, as autumn will do when it feels ashamed

Of drooping, dropping foliage, and dares in vain

To wrap itself in crisp white snow. 

Between one thing and another, straddled precariously,

My identity, that plaything of destiny,

Will soon be splayed and split, one soul asunder,

Made useless and meaningless, like a thread swept

Across a vast abyss by a befuddled spider,

Unable to manipulate the system or toss aside

The whole endeavour, so hoping against hope

With a thousand subterfuges, dream against dream,

Waiting for what it knows is impossible, the calm

Interlude between opposing forces of nature.

The other soul, no less wan but wrinkled,

Worn with age not pride, will no longer hold

In silence that which must be said: the world

Is not with us, against our deepest essences,

And that my voice cannot articulate—

So what is heard now will never be understood.

When the pleasant, eager agent asks me for my name,

What can I answer that is not absurd, that it is all

I have and yet no longer my own, and if she

Goes off with it, what is left for me; or should

I say, return it to me when you are done,

But, please, if you can, enhance its status, grant

The integrity it once might have had, or wipe it clean,

A tabula rasa, a new beginning, even if

After all we have gone through together (I speak

To the fading shades) metaphors no longer work

And metonyms disengage from reality: Farewell!

Archaeological Poem

A Viking Woman Speaks Out of the Grave

For more than a century, you looked at me, that is,

My remains, and you assumed, fools that you are,

I was a Viking warrior.  Why? Some weapons,

Some pieces of armour, a figure that was quite spare,

And that must mean a male, a hero, a sepulchre,

All attributes of patriarchy—what is

This prejudice that came into the world? Not here

In the shadows I have left around me, high-born woman,

Raised to hunt and sail, protect and conquer when needed.

Bear children? Of course, I did, more than ever man

Concerned himself with, foolish being, beaded

Up with rings of steel, long-haired louts, who ran

Away from battles. I cut a swathe, as I breeded ,

Lived to the utmost, a full and glorious span.

Looking for Help for Publishing Project

Do you know that Mentalities/Mentalités was resurrected a couple of years ago, thanks to some friends in Australia, and now comes out as an online journal?[1]  Among other things we have been able to do, aside from [printing articles and reviews as we have always done, is to publish proceedings from various scholarly conferences in Europe and the USA, collections of essays that the "regular" commercial and academic journals and presses won't touch without subsidization. There are important names and well-known authors involved.  

There are still a few of us with scholarly standards and principles still left, so we have to help one another.  In a sense, things are easier than they were when Outrigger Publishers began various series such as Ocean Monographs,[2] Crosscurrents and Rim These days, thanks to the internet, we can get a wider circulation than before--though hardly one that registers on the radar of those who do statistics--and more like the 18th century circulating system of formal letters between academic societies and isolated individuals. Or even like the passing of midrashic commentaries and responsa among rabbis in pre- and early-modern Europe.

If anyone wants to start up a series of separate publications, books and monographs, the kind that have “fit audience though few”, as Milton said, let us know your interests, talents and experience.  This is an invitation not only to independent scholars and poets, novelists and writers of essays, translators and critics, but also to people with skills and experience in business, publishing and online communications.

The purpose will be not commercial but cultural, not to enhance academic careers but to enjoy the intellectual and aesthetic pleasures that a cruel and hard world make ever more difficult to achieve.

---

[1] http://mentalitiesjournal.com

[2] http://www.worldcat.org/title/ocean-monograph/oclc/173331649

Poem for mid August

 O Brave New World: 

Barcelona, Charlotteville, Jerusalem....

Certain moments are excruciating : they twist all time

Against itself, and fling part of ourselves

Into the very origins of space—a crime

Against common sense; and yet life revolves

Back into our chance to make decisions—the loss

Of which we were unaware, like babies born

In caves without music or dance.  They toss

Old ideas out the window, treat with scorn

Our deepest passions and anxieties.  Torn

Apart, our heart and mind stare and wonder,

Unable to move, silent, stuck in the lime,

Frightened by stability and tempted by the blunder.

Rhythm disrupted, vision occluded, the teeth of wolves

Bite into us, the horns of giant stags,

The pounding hoofs and drums, primeval hums,

Until the canopy of heaven sags,

Our golden city now nothing more than slums.

When Words Fail Try Shadows

When Words Fail, Try Shadows

The child and her grandfather…passed through a dirty lane into a crowded street, and stood, amid its din and tumult, and in the pouring rain, as strange, bewildered and confused as if they had lived a thousand years before, and were raised from the dead and placed there by a miracle.

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop

All things considered, in the course of time, dreams

whenever collected in the museum of memories,

such as clichés and storage speech, whole reams

of evidence that lies can be like trees,

leaf up, root down, bark round and round, what seems

absurd is only what has been heard too often

and misunderstood, old tears and broken screams,

once strong enough to hold back fate and soften

lava flows from deep within the soul;

yet now, alas, and woe betide, the gleams

grow dim, the candles flicker, so awful ghoul

and turgid ghost can only vanish into silence,

unsuspected remnant of the nameless science:

afterthought and passion’s form, thus and hence.

Poem for the end of July

Superfluous Sonnetina

for Serena Celestina Constantina,

My Erstwhile Muse

Should a poem surprise us, like a riddle given away in its title,

Or a truism almost twisted enough to come as a shock,

It would be something worth thinking about, as spittle

On my shoe or bird plop on the shoulder: mock

Me if you will, versifier, call yourself troubadour,

And me crusty old critic.  Summon me to the dock,

If you will, and make me walk the plank, or bore

Me to death with your pseudo rhymes.  What a stock

Of commonplaces you have in your brain, what a store

Of lumber pretending to be toys and tittle-tattle,

That is, nonsense gossip and unfounded rumour,

Recollected and collected out of classical cattle,

Museums become barns and putti bairns of no account,

Metaphorical monstrosities, cud-chewing  chattel,

Europa ravished, Persephone trapped on Mount

Erebus, and a Nymph drowned in the Fount,

And all for what, to flatter the feathers off someone’s whore

And reap the whirlwind at ancient Poësie’s core?

Another Prehistorical Voice is Sounded

The Neanderthal Man Wakes Up

after 45,000 Years

I don’t understand what happened.  I don’t have the words still,

Or even know for sure what is meant by words.  My people sing.

The man and the woman try to tell me I had been asleep for a very long time.

Everything is strange.  It is blurry and unclear as in a dream.

But I know enough to want to resist knowing too many words and ideas.

What I can remember from the time before the great sleep is different.

We did not speak much back then.  We danced and sang

And sometimes we drew lines on our tools and weapons,

Lines and circles  that were part of the dances and the songs.

If I learn too much I will forget what I knew and how I knew what I knew.

Already the memories fade and when I tell the strangers who woke me

And try to teach me their language, everything changes and makes no sense.

All I can do, meanwhile, is laugh, for laughter is what

I miss most of all, the chuckle, the tickle, the gentle smile.

Everything else is dead and dark, an endless, dreamless night

Mysterious Illuminated Manuscript

Meditations on a Page of the Voynich Manuscript

Eight of them, women of various ages and shapes,

Three above and five below, in a wooden tub,

Naked, each one with her hand on her butt,

All looking to the left, not very happy.

Italian Jewesses at a mikvah, it has been suggested,

Not some pornographic image of the stews,

Not Graces dancing in a Florentine festival,

Yet it seems they are processing as they soak.

Someone is bound to understand what they are looking at

Out there beyond the velum and the ink,

though the manuscript is indecipherable

and the drawing is rather crude, a dream in sketches.

And though its provenance is unknown, it is no joke

To imagine something mysterious and deep—

If not in the women themselves or in the aquatic ceremony,

Then perhaps after all these years, in the fears we sense

In ourselves, our dread of discovery as naïve fools

Whose role in the world is to float between life and death.

Speculative Essay on Animal Aesthetrics

The Puffer Fish, Manakin Birds and Palm Cockatoos: Nature’s Artists and Aesthetic Animals

 [Unfortunately the images that accompany this essay 

cannot be reproduced on the Blog] 

Puffer Fish Nesting Construction:

A Work of Art

The puffer fish[1] seems to have some sort of aesthetic sense (the experience a non-practical measure of pleasurable sensations) that is not easily and simplistically equated with genetics or hard-wiring of its little fish brain but rather some more playful expression and response to its environment, its desire for a mate—and a female who must swim about the home grounds of the species observing and judging the creative efforts of the males; he thus requires and acquires a sensitive and appreciative audience.  But it is not enough to say that the creating of the circles is a mating ritual to arouse and entice the female puffer fish to accept the male’s desire to copulate; nor to reduce the carefully constructed circles, made of refined sand, constantly cleaned grooves, and general guardianship of the area in which eggs will be laid and fertilized by the pair. There seems to be something more than show-off gestures and sexual attraction.  Whereas Darwin distinguished between the survival features that enhanced the likelihood of individual members of the species to achieve maturity and pass on its germ plasma to subsequent generations and the sexual features that aroused, attracted and ensured copulatory acts, as well as those characteristics that ensured protection, care and nurturing of offspring, so we must insert the idea—whatever we may choose to call it, pleasure principle, risk aversion, sensory pleasures—that for some creatures at least there is also an appreciation of form, design, completeness of design, satisfaction with the attraction and admiration of others.  But does this involve consciousness or self-consciousness, let alone forethought or any thought at all?

Not all the one hundred and twenty members of the puffer fish within the tetraodontidae family do this elaborate performance, let alone all deep sea creatures, just as not all spiders spin elaborate webs with formal patterns.  Some birds, perhaps a very few, like the manakin bird, exhibit complex and lengthy dances in ways that can only be observed by the use of high-speed cameras—and by appreciative female judges.  These creatures seem to turn themselves and portions of their environment into works of art.  Yet is this conceptualization of design, form, and performance only in the eyes of the modern human observer or does it have some real presence or correlate in the physiognomy or psychology of the creatures engaged in the making of these shaped experiences, with or without relatively permanent changes to the physical environment?[2]

What these puffer fish, manakin bird, Palm Cockatoos and other creatures fashion goes beyond tool-use and tool-making as a defining quality of the human species as homo faber.  They may also be included in a category of homo ludens, man the game-playing animal.  With the notion that mankind uniquely engages in symbolic thought and hence able to create a language based on spoken words that does more than name names or signal distress, fear or joy, and hence fills an evolutionary place as homo sapiens, there is another displacement by the behaviours and the feelings and thoughts that lie behind them with this example of the puffer fish.  This displacement, we suggest—and it is a very speculative suggestion—means there is a place in nature that lies beneath or around the human species where animals play, and out of which or upon which human consciousness, language and art are built.  The distinction between human consciousness, language and art and animal consciousness, language and art is not absolute: some fish, some birds, and some other creatures approach in refinement, if not in reflexive self-awareness and the ability to articulate their feelings in ways they can recall, what early human species—Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon—gradually began to perfect as their defining quality as thoughtful and pleasure-enjoying beings.

For a week or ten days the male puffer fish works night and day to clear an area on the seafloor in its home territory, swimming back and forth on the surface with his fins and especially dorsal fin shaping ridges, trenches and curved lines to form something that looks like a flower as a mating and nesting place.  In addition to the symmetrical design and the carefully-measured depth of the grooves, the male also decorates the mating grounds with small shells, objects chosen for their colour and size.  Some scientists believe the females watch and judge these final stages of the construction more than others during the week-long ritual.[3]  It also indicates that the females of the species are more than sexually attracted by the finished product as an indication of the male’s prowess, persistence and determination.  While they are not observed to be constantly swimming nearby and judging the efforts of the male puffer fish, the females often survey a larger area to compare and contrast the shaped space of other would-be fathers to her fry.[4]  After the eggs are laid out in the hollowed out grooves of the playground, the male fertilizes them externally, with the pair hovering over the area for six to seven days to protect the brood.

Not only the week-long expenditure of energy by persistent motions performed by the male, shaping and keeping clear of debris or random shells from the love nest, but the completed structure itself is created as a signifying object, something that at once stands out from the surrounding territory as an unnatural feature and, at the same time, something  which distinguishes this particular physical conceit from those produced by other males in her immediate experience, memory or creative conceptualization.  Though scientific discourse seems to preclude any consideration of intentional creation of a place which gives pleasure to the builder and his potential mate, the evidence seems to suggest that this is precisely what lies behind the phenomena associated with reproduction.

The Male Puffer Fish at Work and Play

There is something here that puts in question all easy solutions. It could throw out of the window all our preconceptions about the nature of instinctive play or ritual or even hysterical, obsessive repetition compulsion; as well as the idea of found art in nature, inherited animal consciousness and constructed social and domestic relationships.  This uncanny phenomenon also brings up, by extension into the human sphere, the question of whether or not all children grow up, no matter in what time or place, no matter superficially distinct their cultures are, so that they learn to see with the same rule-based logical apparatus of the mind as Noam Chomsky argues lies behind the development of language as a basic and defining  human quality, something “hard-wired” into the anatomy of the brain or encoded into the genetic structures of the mind.  Since all humans share the same basic genetic make-up, and since also as humans we all share a very large proportion of our genetic code with other living things throughout the animal kingdom, then it might not be too far a stretch to see in the puffer fish’s architectural achievement or the manakin bird’s dance routines something that may tell us important things about our own mind and its aesthetic development.  However, there are significant faults with this argument. But first let us look at the similarities between what the puffer fish builds for its love-making and what has been postulated as the “ripple effect” in human perception.

Ripples and Rule-Based Logic in Vision as well as Language

Donald Hoffmann…has created an example of our ability to use simplified physics to re-create what we see in a work of art.  He calls this paradigm the “ripple”.. The ripple is a drawing on a flat, two-dimensional surface, but it appears to be undulating in space like waves in a pond.[5]

There is a remarkable similarity between the lines and flowery ridges drawn in the sand by the puffer fish and the illustration by Donald Hoffman to show how all children come to see the same way, no matter how differently various cultures interpret the significance of those perceptions. Eric Kandel cites Hoffman and makes his own more eloquent argument to relate the neuro-anatomical findings relevant to the history of art, especially German Expressionism in Vienna 1900.

Donald Hoffman’s Model of a “Ripple”.

Here's where I need to hold back and think through what Hoffman is doing, however—if he comes out with this approval of  Noam Chomsky's rules of universal grammar: an idealism right out of a Jansenist mentality with Port-Royal thinking, and thus against the dynamics and creative chaos of the real Darwinian world.  This is determinism, rule-based logic (the error I think Eric Kandel makes with his over-emphasis on Gestalt psychology) and the epistemological error of teleological, Lamarckian biology—that there are already innate logical paradigms towards which all evolution aims.  We have to resist the urge to read back into the animal behaviour a rule-based and goal-orientated programme.  At the same time, we need to avoid an easy slide towards   anthropomorphism—to see Nature as theatre of Walt Disney sentimentality or a bourgeois allegory of individual expression as a way of possessing and transforming the environment.

Nor can we accept that anyone, let alone any kind of living beast or bird or insect or fish, is driven by selfish genes out to reproduce themselves at any cost, even of their own lives.  The biological processes and organs may indeed function as Kandel and his sources claim, but the molecules and tissues were not destined to have that configuration in the human mind.  They are not qualities hard-wired into our brains from the very beginning, as though the metaphor of the computer had anything more than temporary heuristic value, no more than DNA encodes thoughts and feelings, reactions to environmental factors only very recently encountered in the world.  Evolution occurs at times very much quicker and in more quirky ways than nineteenth-century biologists could image, as well as sporadically in “punctuated” periods of crisis.  In fact, just as what counts is less the particular genes one inherits, than the way the internal and external environment triggers the expression of those factors.  The paradigm of evolutionary development, progressive improvements and useful adaptations now seems too old-fashioned to work with, perhaps a mere secularized version of intelligent design or the clock-work universe.

We are all born in a neotenic state of incomplete development, having to journey into the real world of our experiences under various, often hostile conditions.  In fact, as individuals and as a species, we do much better precisely because we are not firmly fixed (“hard-wired”) into our final state of being but rather fluid, flexible and alive to the possibilities of change.  We thrive—when we are not stricken by disaster, disease, or political catastrophes--by creative chaos, not by rule-based logic, language or image recognition.  Yet some cultures and periods are more dysfunctional than others, more susceptible to negative and nefarious ways of relating to one another and the world around us.  This means more than that there are cultures and ways of living quite distinct from our own but which at certain points of contact between them and us disgust us physically and morally by their disregard for the very principles of sanitation and sanity, as well as making it impossible for us to sustain our philosophical, ethical and aesthetic ideals by which we structure out lives.  They are not merely or only to be seen as our inferiors or necessary others in our conceptualization of who we are, and thus fit in some mythical fantasy we have created through our history; but they can actually be hostile to us and actively threaten our very well-being, security and existence: and in fact, they regard our sense of justice, love and beauty as incompatible with their own. 

Manakan Bird Performing

The male manakan birds do strange line dances, zipping back and forth on long twigs, showing off their colours and tricks to an audience of females. Sometimes one or more of the hens gather to observe the performances.[6]  In some instances, it is one cock struts his stuff before the jury of females, and in others there is a whole line-up of males each doing their own thing in front of the critical assembly of hens.  After the performance, several minutes pass by while the females of the species make up their minds.  In another variation of the mating dance, among manakans in Costa Rica, “males employ a wingman to help them find a mate.  To attract females, the pair of rivals perform an elaborate song-and-dance-routine, even though only the more dominant male ever gets to mate.[7]   In due course, the assistant bird grows up and takes on the role of dominant performer, the intervening five years providing opportunity for him to learn the choreography and make his own variations.  The whole production cannot be explained by saying that it is a way for males to prove their virility and virtuosity and for females to judge the potentialities of the cocks as vigorous breeding stock to father and subsequently protect her chicks.  It is doubtful that any creatures gear their lives towards genetic proliferation and survival into future generations.  A more immediate purpose for the vigorous dance routine would surely be to self-arouse the mating instinct among the most acrobatic of the males and then to awaken a sexual arousal among the females, both gaining a physiological pleasure in the expenditure of energy and the flow of hormones. 

When we look at the example of the palm cockatoo (Probosciger aterrimus) of northern Australia, the performing cock, after breaking off and shaping a proper drumstick or seedpod (of approx. 20 cms.), begins to bang on the branch where he stands, with an interested hen joining him,[8] not only watching the way he manufactures the instrument and then listening to his solo drumming, but approving of his rhythm[9] and nodding her head in time to the beat.[10]  Some fieldworkers have registered more than 130 separate rhythmic patterns, ranging from twenty-seven to ninety-two beats long.[11]  It has been suggested that the birds, the female of which lays only one egg every two years,[12] so that mates must ensure they are strongly attracted to one another and willing to commit to long-term care of their offspring, the drumming performance being, as it were, the final test of compatibility following the “normal” screeching and whistling that mark the announcement of readiness to copulate and constituting physical foreplay.[13]  These half-hour-long drumming sessions go beyond normal dance riffs and feather-ruffling to provide carefully articulated activities and mutual interaction concerned with the performance itself.  No other male palm cockatoos were present to observe the performance and only one female at a time attends to the drumming, thus leaving open the question of whether or not young birds learn from their elders in this matter,[14] one thing is clear: something more than other than the blind passion of selfish genes getting together. 

Palm Cockatoo Pair

How do we account for the pleasure in performance and observation of the skilled performer in these relatively rare instances of animal display?  Without trying to impose a self-conscious artistic urge on to our colourfully-feathered or agile finny friends, we do need to consider that non-human animals take some sort of delight in what they do during these lengthy bouts of foreplay  and not only in the copulatory act itself, which seems brief enough to have a minimal raison d’être.  As Heinsohn and his associates put it in regard to the palm cockatoo drumming,

In particular drumming rates do not appear to be determined by mechanical constraints, such as the limb acting as a pendulum. The swing and thump on the tree trunk is not a suspension from above.  Instead, the drumming is more like the action in a human drummer where the trunk is hit from above or the side.  This makes a purely mechanical action unlikely because the bird has to lift and release the stick regularly.[15]

Similarly, contrary to mechanical operations or instinctive expectations. the puffer fish can spend a week or more preparing his love-nest arena, clearing and cleansing the grounds, but hardly a moment in the actual consummation of his amatory climax.  The female puffer inspects the construction and either approves or rejects his efforts, appreciating in some way his planning and execution as pleasurable in themselves, in some way enjoying vicariously the many hours and days expended on her behalf.  She must know what she likes, not only whom she can trust to inseminate her eggs.  Or in the other example we are referring to, the manakan chorus line of male dancers not only seek to grab the attention of a probable female partner from the loge in which the hens observe and judge, this testing of one another’s skills of dancing but also take pleasure in their own activity.  In addition, the very act of discernment by performers and audience lifts the occasion above the instinctual display in analogous species. 

What is it that the creatures rehearse and induces their young comrades occasionally to witness and, in some instances, help control the situation on the playground?   In other words, what is it that the gathering of the females are comparing between the enthusiastic performers they observe?  If not blind instinct or socially-directed constructs, what are these creatures playing at?  Something is being learned, perfected and enjoyed for its own sake, enough so, it would seem, to replace a general orgiastic flutter of sexual energy.  Few of the fish and birds within the general mating zone of each of these species takes part in the actual copulation, so that the non-participants must receive something else to compensate for not having their own individual genes passed on.  Since they know as little of their genetic constitutions as they do of their evolutionary functions within the great scheme of things, something is created which satisfies both participants and observers alike.

Play is More and Other than a Children’s Game or Adult Recreation

Concepts such as symbolic language, volitional consciousness, storage patterns of memory, performative actions and gestures in ritual art and varieties of game-making and play have to be discussed, each of them having various cultural meanings at different times and places, and certainly not fixed in western modern bourgeois societies.  Above all, we need to think of the brain-mind as part of an organic bodily whole—a growing, developing and self-correcting neuronal system, a hormonal process of stimulating emotional and intellectual activities, a dynamic response to the external and internal environment that triggers the expression of genetic potentialities in shorter and long term periods, expressions that are reversible and multi-valent. 

Rather than seeing play as the antithesis of work, meaning productive labour, or as distinct from serious and deliberate activities, and thus relegated to children’s games which exercise their minds and bodies in preparation for adult roles, we now understand the term in a much wider and deeper series of ways, so much so that one Dutch historian concluded that game-playing was the very essence of what differentiated mankind from all other creatures,  Johann Huizinga thus renamed our species Homo Ludens, man the game-playing animal.[16]  For Huizinga, play is at the heart of religion, civilization, culture, art and industry. As well as formalized human relationships at all levels, from child-parent bonding through all aspects of domestic politics, social structures, as well as religious and intellectual thoughts and institutions.  With the further discussions of French philosopher, Roger Caillois in his Man, Play and Games,[17] the sub-categories could be set forth as variations on free-flowing and even vertiginous activities that lie outside of formal structures and rules through precisely those modes which not only require definite rules and regulations, measured space and time, and which yet may form patterns around the play of chance, fate or fortune; and further just as we watch carefully scripted and rehearsed plays in the theatre concluding in unrepeatable tragic acts or self-effacing comic reductions of apparent tensions and misunderstandings or we may listen to well-regulated expressions of organized emotions in musical concerts when a symphony is played by expert professional performers who at once follow the strict directions of a conductor and express their own  artistic insights, we also can enjoy hyper-structured activities in marching bands, circus acrobats and synchronized swimmers.  In other words, as the Wikipedia entry sets forth these four categories of play:

1.      Agon, or competition. It’s the form of play in which a specific set of skills is put to the test among players (strength, intelligence, memory). The winner is who proves to have mastery of said skill through the game, for example a quiz game is a competition of intelligence, the winner proves that it’s more intelligent than the other players. E.g. chess

2.      Alea, or chance, the opposite of Agon, Caillois describes Alea as “the resignation of will, An abandonment to destiny”. If Agon used the skills of players to determinate a victor Alea leaves that to luck, an external agent decides who the victor is. E.g. playing a slot machine

3.      Mimicry, or mimesis, or role playing Caillois defines it as “When the individual plays to believe, to make himself or others believe that he is different from himself”. E.g. playing an online role-playing game

4.      Ilinx (Greek for “whirlpool”), or vertigo, in the sense of altering perception by experiencing a strong emotion (panic, fear, ecstasy) the stronger the emotion is, the stronger the sense of excitement and fun becomes. E.g. taking hallucinogens, riding roller coasters, children spinning until they fall down.

Put another way, the game-playing creatures, as well as humans, require at some periods of their lives to engage in various form of play, and therefore to find or construct a play-ground and to gather during a play-time; and sometimes to prepare in advance instruments or tools to play with.  The play may move from a point of stasis through more or less elaborate activity and then back to stasis or pass on to a newly defined relationship between the players—from neutral actor to favoured mate, for example.  The play may begin, however, with disorderly or even hostile relations and actions and then achieve a configuration of order, harmony and establishment of future long-term (seasonal or life-time) relationships.  Thus the male puffer fish begins a set of actions that separate him normal non-play time and organizes an area as a play-ground into which the female will join him in copulation, insemination and nesting.  The manakin birds gather to perform at a set time and to be seen in a fixed space, their activities, including observation and approval or rejection, re-organize the virtually random relations that first obtain into a nesting pairs and non-reproducing outsiders.  Seemingly self-absorbed with his own skilful performance of trimming and using his sticks to drum in a solo performance for his own delight, the male palm cockatoo establishes both time and space for the display—an activity that emerges from the more natural and instinctive gestures and sounds of foreplay and which then slides back into the ruffled and noisy encounter which is mating itself.  The female bird may be first drawn to the same time and place by recognition of the preparatory signs of the drumming to follow or, if they have already mated and set up a relationship, now turns her attention to the performance she knows from past experience she will enjoy, an enjoyment, however, that is in addition to if not separate from the copulatory discharge of sexual energy.

---

[1] Usually all we know about the puffer fish is how they are used as food, test the courage of Japanese consumers, and serve therefore as markers of a peculiar gourmet taste in a culture radically different than our own. But if they are poisonous to humans unless carefully prepared for eating, the puffer fish have a very different meaning to themselves. 

[2] Hiroshi Kawase, Yoji Okata and Kimiaki Ito, “Reproduction of a Martine Pufferfish” Scientific Reports, Article number 2106 (2013) online at http://www.nature.com/articles/srep0206.

[3] Douglas Main, “Pufferfish Love Explains Mysterious Underwater Circles” Science Newsletter (2 October 2013) online at http://www.livesceicne.com/40132-underwater-mystery-circles.

[4] Hiroshi Kawase, Yoji Okata and Kimiaki Ito suggest that normally only two males work within an observable area, thus the females have only one of two choices to make in each mating period.  Once mating is completed, the female lays her eggs, and when they have hatched, the nesting site is abandoned.  In other words, not all puffer fish in the region partake of the ritual construction or choose to make use of the site.  Different individuals may move to the centre of the playground and engage in its activities at the next season.  As with the manakin bird dancers, only a few mature and accomplished performers may ensure the reproduction of their species during their lifetimes. 

[5] Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012) pp. 278-279.

[6] “Male Blue Manakins wait in Line to Impress a Female” online at http://wwthekidsshouldseethis. com/post/male-blue-manakins-wait-in-line-to-impress-a female.

[7] Ian Sanple, “Male Birds Pair Up to Attract Female” The Guardian (23 February 2009) online at http://www.theg uardian.com/science/2009/feb/13/bird-dance.

[8] Robert Heinsohn, Christina N. Zdenek, Ross B. Cunningham, John A. Endler, Naomi E. Langmore, “Tool-Assisted Rhythmic Drumming in Palm Cockatoos Shares Key Elements of Human Instrumental Music” Science Advances 3:e1602399  (28 June 2017)

[9] Laura Geggel. “Cockatoos Drop Sick Beats to Charm Mates”  Live Science online at https://www.livescience. com/59646-rhthmic-cockatoos-drum-to-the-beat.

[10] Shaena Montanari, “In a First, Bird uses Tools to Make Sweet Music” National Geographic (28 June 2017) online at http:/news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/06/cockadoos-drumming-music-birds-australia.

[11] Ian Sample, “Cockatoos Impress Opposite Sex with Phil Collins-style Drum Solos” The Guardian (28 June 2017) online at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/28/cockatoos-impresspopposite-sex-phil-collins-drum-solos.

[12] Heinsohn et al, “Tool-Assisted Rhythmc Drumming”.

[13] Geggel, “Cockatoo drops Sick Beats”.

[14] Heinsohn et al, “Tool-Assisted Rhythmc Drumming”.

[15] Heinsohn et al, “Tool-Assisted Rhythmc Drumming”.

[16] Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: Proeve Ener Bepaling Van Het Spelelement Der Cultuur. Groningen, Wolters-Noordhoff cop. 1985; original Dutch edition, 1938.  English translation: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.

[17] Roger Caillois, Les Jeux et les Hommes (1958), translated into English by Meyer Barash in 1961 as Man, Play and Games.