Invisible Beasts (23 page)

Which leaves me with tragedy: the hidden, the untold, the painful part of Aristophanes's fable . . . As a naturalist I see it coming, because, if the two comic parts smiled at our bodies and our loves, these things are also the stuff of terror. In our bodies, inside our cells, are bits of live . . . things . . . that our cells once tried to eat when they were small gobbling ameboids, millions of years before they formed our bodies. Our bodies consist of former ameboids with indigestible prey inside them.
These little Jonah-bits of gobbled but undigested former critters give my finger muscles the energy to move this page. Then there is sex. What is sex? “Thwarted cannibalism,” says a famous biologist. You can say that again.

And I do. Thwarted cannibalism, I mutter. I smooth the paper lying across my quilt-covered knees, and as though the action of my palm brought invisible ink to light, it says:
I want to eat you up
.

He proposes to consume my time—which is the same thing—in the rites of the jealous domestic god who must be tirelessly satiated. Not that again. I will fail to locate in any of the kitchen cabinets the bottle of the special steak sauce, or the box of the special unsalted biscuits, that he must have, and there will be that catechism beginning, “How many times?” Or “How much intelligence?” Or maybe my misplaced binoculars—that I need
when
I need them—will be the excuse for his telling me, in detail stretching over an afternoon, how selfish I am. To such uses come the glorious human egg, and the font of life on the ocean floor. Is there a married woman who by the age of sixty hasn't acquired the stoicism of a gastrolith? To be fair, for every jaw-jutting Jove there's a jarring Juno. I don't care. To be frank, it's terrifying, this state of half-absorption into the gullet of another life.

Thwarted cannibalism and terror: is that the true name of this love? Of love itself? But tragedy is more than terror. It is pity, too, and ultimately it is mystery.

Muuuuuaaaaaaagh
, moans my dog, opening his eyes
out of a dream in which he tried to bark, and could only squeak. Such a good dog, with those turret ears, now swiveling, silky as catkins, veined like rose petals, inside which the cartilage gyres downward in a smooth, ancient path. He loves a rub inside his ear. He'll press down on my thumb with his heavy head, eyes narrowed, like someone whose itch is a shade short of being scratched. Within the ear, it feels like touching a riddle, something sphinxlike, alive but inaccessible to my normal understanding; it makes me feel a discomfort that is the lowest grade of awe. Also, a rending pity for us both, frail animals, dependent on a touch here, a mercy there, and on the strange arrangement of kinship and killing that maintains us without our choice. I feel, now, the same pity for the author of the letter mutely insistent under the light of my bedside lamp.

What is love? Aristophanes said aloud, “Love is the name for the desire and pursuit of wholeness.” But what he left unspoken, his words' tragic shadow, is a mystery that does not round off into wholeness, the happy marriage wrapping up a comedy. The desire and pursuit of wholeness lead us to embrace, in the form of a lover, our human birthright (that egg's promise), our heritage as living beings (those smith-gods' legacy), and—something more. Finally, we are led to embrace a mystery too great to encompass, as unending as nature because it is nature, the endlessness of the universe itself—that ultimate, unimaginable, ungraspable wholeness in which we
are born and die, that haunts every intimacy. And that is why the letter I've read and reread cannot possibly hold, much less reveal, all it means. I cannot know. Love remains unknowable. In spite of all the nights spent together, in spite of the flavors that tongue and brain have cast in sensual bronze, in spite, even, of being each other's best friends. Love remains unknowable. Knowing that, the smile of Cupid deepens . . . and a naturalist, having sought truth, is satisfied with observation and hypothesis.

Acknowledgments

T
HIS BOOK BEGAN AS AN EXPERIMENT
, so I am truly grateful to my mother, Marilyn Bentov, for encouraging its early stages, contributing her time, literary instincts, and critical faculties—and most importantly, her faith in my work. Thanks also go to Dr. Nancy Milburn for her kind and generous assistance with many fascinating sources, especially on the love lives of fireflies; and to Dr. Moira van Staaden and her family for her many helpful conversations. Susan Krueger provided inspiration with her Gulf War–themed quilt entitled
Pro Patria
. The Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, at Bowling Green State University, gave this book the time it sorely needed. My husband, Tom Muir, who calls screech owls out of the woods, showed me so much of what I have tried to put into words here.

I would also like to acknowledge the publications in which many of these stories originally appeared:

“The Antarctic Glass Kraken”

in
Stand

“The Golden Egg”

in
The Kenyon Review

“The Spiders of Theodora,” as “Monumental City,”

in
Orion

“The Naturalist Reads a Love Letter with Plato and a Dog”

in
Michigan Quarterly Review
, reprinted in
ISLE

“The Couch Conch”

in
Michigan Quarterly Review

“The Oormz”

in
Michigan Quarterly Review

“Think Monkey”

in
Michigan Quarterly Review

“Feral Parfumier Bees”

in
Ancora Imparo

“Air Liners”

in
Unstuck

“The Wild Rubber Jack”

in
Jewish Women's Literary Annual

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