The Fly Trap (16 page)

There’s a story still told today about how Malaise came sauntering in after lunch one afternoon, unquestionably late, and there by the lift stood Lundblad in a rage, staring pointedly at his wristwatch. Whereupon Malaise remarked, casually, “Timing an egg?”

Anyway, Odhner had worked out a whole theory of his own about how the earth came to look the way it does. This intellectual construct, which came to be called the constriction theory, was, if we’re to believe Malaise, ingenious in its simplicity. And it explained everything. In rough outline, constriction theory maintains that high mountains and deep valleys, both on land and under the seas, are created when the planet’s skin develops folds under the pressures that arise from differences in temperature, not from mystical currents in the earth’s interior. In short, climate, or at least temperature, controls the whole process. It’s true that even in Odhner’s model, the earth’s crust is divided into plates, separated by unstable zones with earthquakes and volcanoes, but in contrast to Wegener’s more mobile entities, Odhner’s do not move laterally to any marked degree. They just expand or shrink depending on temperature. The continents lie where they lie, and if the climate is warm, the plates expand, whereupon mountain chains crumple upwards and ocean trenches fold down. More or less like corrugated sheet-metal.

I’m reluctant to go into all of this in greater depth. Constriction theory is not exactly crystal clear, and my knowledge of geology is not striking. On top of which I don’t think we need to know so much more than that—from this moment on—René Malaise was fully invested in an idea that almost no one else took seriously. The sawflies had been nothing but a conveyance. Now he had arrived. That he would soon land out in the cold was something understood by everyone but Malaise himself.

He made a great mistake. Instead of using Odhner’s theory as a resource in addressing his zoogeographic questions, which would have been an honourable position in other people’s eyes, he dropped the sawflies abruptly and threw himself headfirst into the tangle of legends and essentially fruitless speculation that begins with Plato’s story of the sunken Atlantis. His enthusiasm was as boundless as always. He seems to have been utterly unaffected by the laughter behind his back. For all I know, he was remembering his trap. That too had been dismissed as wishful thinking. But perseverance carried the day that time. Why not now again? Although what’s more likely is that he didn’t think about it at all, at least not about what other people thought. He had endured inhospitable climates before. Loneliness too, for that matter.

With his popularly written book
Atlantis, a Geological Reality,
which appeared in Swedish in 1951, Malaise burned his last bridge to serious science. The situation could still have been rescued, and his reputation saved for posterity, if he had only restrained himself a bit. Odhner’s ideas about plate tectonics were a theory as good as any other, and its originator possessed impressive knowledge about the dispersion of the planet’s fauna. A sunken continent in the Atlantic, perhaps at about the latitude of the Azores, was not such a big deal. It was a wild hypothesis, of course, but still only a hypothesis, supported by facts from solid research in many disciplines. He might have got away with it.

But no. Why limit yourself?

Sometimes I think it was his experiences as a young man that led him astray. The memory of earthquakes and devastating tsunamis. There was probably no other scientist on earth who had felt the power released when the sea bottom suddenly falls several hundred metres—not the way he had, in his very bones. A hundred thousand people had died in the Japanese catastrophe in 1923. He was there.

The catastrophe that legend tells us did away with Atlantis could very well have had its equivalent in reality. The principal settlement could have experienced a sudden drop with subsequent flooding, caused by an abrupt settling of the bedrock as the result of marginal constriction. We have examples from Japan of the way large areas have suddenly sunk in connection with an earthquake. As noted earlier, parts of Sagami Bay outside Tokyo sank by as much as 400 metres. If the narrow, culture-bearing coastal belt with its principal settlements was subjected to this kind of widespread destruction, it could very well have meant ruin for the entire nation and its culture. The tsunami waves that followed in the wake of the disaster could have contributed to the elimination of the coastal populations. Once the coastal inhabitants and cultural centres were gone, the remaining people may have emigrated or gradually gone under.

So ends the final chapter of the Atlantis book of 1951. It is not long, just ten pages, but long enough to upset the entire apple cart. The chapter’s title is “Atlantis’s Significance for Human Culture.” The man holding the pen does not say in so many words that human beings lived on Atlantis, nor that they had contact with the Egyptians, nor that they were the globe’s most daring and powerful seafarers. Not explicitly. And he does not say that he knows for certain that these Atlanteans built Stonehenge in England, nor that they provided all the bronze we find in the earth from our own Bronze Age, nor that it is their ships we find depicted on innumerable Swedish rock carvings from the same period.

And yet the whole book radiates a belief that these things are true.

A long time later, in 1969, the book came out in English, now under the trickier title
A New Deal in Geography, Geology and Related Sciences
. He had to publish it at his own expense. Much had happened during those years. The continental drift theory had emerged victorious, Odhner was more anonymous than ever, and Malaise himself must have seemed a living fossil. Fifty years had passed since he went to Kamchatka. Who had ever heard of that expedition? Maybe it’s not so strange that, in the English edition, the chapter about the culture of Atlantis had grown to almost sixty pages.

Atlantis was now the cradle of human culture, the very pulsing heart of a vanished golden age. Reading it today, I find it all touching and rather exhilarating. After all, René is my friend. That his narrative can be seen as a treasure trove for New Age fantasists doesn’t bother me in the least.

On the other hand, I was particularly struck by something he wrote in his preface. It gave me an idea.

Scientists of to-day, be it geologists, geophysicists, or oceanographers, are so overspecialized that they master only a limited sector of their own branch. Outside this sector they hardly dare to express an opinion. The fundamental theories on which, for instance, geology is based have mostly been in use for generations and have in their mind ceased to be theories and have attained almost the standing of axioms.

…

I managed with some difficulty to get my hands on a copy of this book about Atlantis, and the same day it arrived in the mail I sent it off to a geologist I know who lives in Madrid and whose expertise I trust—ever since we crossed the Ural Mountains together. That was towards the end of the 1980s. We were on our way to a large gas field on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia for reasons that were anything but clear, and we were taking the train east from Moscow with some energetic Russians. We sat up all night drinking and singing the way you do in Russian train compartments, and when morning dawned without our even having noticed our passage through the mountains, my friend the geologist said, “I wonder if maybe the Urals are a fraud.”

Of even greater importance for his credibility and temperament is the fact that he has been working in the oil industry for a long time. Self-interest doesn’t lie. Academic prestige and sloppy thinking vanish quickly in a world where a single wrong guess about where the oil is can cost hundreds of millions. Now I was asking him to comment on Malaise and the long-forgotten constriction theory.

Weeks passed, and then came a long letter, written in Hassi Messaoud, a remote hole in eastern Algeria where my friend was stationed for the moment in order to assess an especially promising oil field.

Because he lived and worked in French-speaking countries for many years, he began by lamenting Malaise’s unfortunate name (which can refer to everything from nausea to economic difficulties) but quickly moved on to some informal reflections on the various theories about the earth’s history. Very true, he wrote, Wegener’s good old continental drift should be considered axiomatic. Everyone buys it. The theory now explains everything in geology—lock, stock and barrel. We can even measure the speed of the drift. My friend wrote that Europe and North America are gliding apart about as rapidly as fingernails grow. That is to say, about two centimetres a year. Although on the other hand, he added, it is impossible to determine whether these measurements are accurate.

The same is true of the theory as a whole. It’s not possible to say definitively that it describes reality, only that it fits well enough with what we can observe. But to dismiss it as false is even less plausible. “With its help we find oil again and again, but despite that, we probably can’t exclude the possibility that it contains defects, or that one day it won’t have to be discarded.”

Who knows? When everything is said and done, the days of really revolutionary breakthroughs are perhaps not over. Maybe, sooner or later, someone will sweep Wegener right out of the door. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, for the sake of René, my friend.

Chapter 15

The Legible Landscape

They say you can’t be a really good geologist without an exceptional feeling for time. A feeling, not knowledge. Empirical knowledge is different; it’s a thing you can acquire with hard work and patient effort. But a feeling for time is inborn, an aptitude, like musicality, that can only rarely be developed from scratch, and it is said to be the secret behind the very best geologists. I don’t know if this is true. But it makes sense.

For what is ten thousand years, actually? Or three million? In relation to a billion? The rest of us have no idea. We can understand the figures, like lines on a scale, and it may be that we can to some extent grasp the metaphor in which the history of the earth is represented as an hour, while humanity’s time on its surface is reckoned only in seconds. But our feeling for temporal space is absent.

My own grasp of temporal spaces so great that they border on eternity is always dependent on that kind of mental prosthesis—clumsy synthetic rulers as a substitute for the deeper understanding I lack. Even the time stretching out beyond the lives of people now living can be hard to get a grip on except as numbers and anecdotes. An inborn feeling for time is presumably the same gift that makes a really good evolutionary biologist or any other kind of historian. I sometimes wish I were one of them, and I have tried, but my downfall is always precisely that sense of time. A couple of hundred years, fine, but then the exhaustion of insufficiency comes creeping in.

That’s why I go collecting with my net in the here and now and read my landscape in the present tense. Believe me, even that narrative is rich and full of surprises, however nearsighted you happen to be.

When you get right down to it, my whole history with hoverflies is also a question of comprehension—we might call it language-oriented. Why flies? I realize that I haven’t been entirely honest in describing my motives. I’ve answered the question badly. I was so full of my determination not to lie about some hypothetical benefit that I presented my proclivity for catching flies as a matter of cheap anaesthesia and the simple pleasures of the hunt, an outlet for the vanity of a poor man and the eternal longing to be best. And that may be true, but there is something else too, maybe not greater but anyway prettier. More honourable. It shouldn’t be so—an ambitious person’s path to the perfection of God-knows-what should be worthy of all honour, if only because a world full of highly personal mastery without petty rivalry would be a nice place to live.

In any case, learning a language is never wrong.

So for a moment let us consider the ability to read the landscape as if it were a language, how to understand nature almost as if it were literature, experience it in the same way that we experience art or music. It’s all a question of landscape literacy. Now you may object that all of us, regardless of education and custom, can appreciate beauty in various works of art and pieces of music. That’s true. But it’s equally true that the untrained sensibility is easily captivated by what is sweetly charming and romantic, which can of course be good but which is nevertheless only a first impression and does not lead very far. Art has a language to be learned; music too has hidden subtleties.

The necessary conditions are more distinct in literature. If you can’t read, you can’t read. And when I say that the landscape can provide a kind of literary experience at different depths I mean just exactly that—to begin with, you have to know the language. In a vocabulary of nothing but animals and plants, the flies can thus be seen as glosses, telling stories of every kind within the framework of the grammatical laws set down by evolution and ecology.

To recognize a
Chrysotoxum vernale
when you see it, to know why it’s flying in just this place and at just this moment, is a source of satisfaction not all that easy to account for. I’m afraid that our path to what is beautiful must first pass through what is meaningful. Which is the more important will remain a matter of taste.

Chrysotoxum vernale
is very handsome and, in the manner of hoverflies, it looks like a wasp. Anyone who can see the difference can already read, but it gets really exciting only when you can distinguish it from
Chrysotoxum arcuatum
. And by my soul, that’s not easy. In years of training, you have to catch both of the twins and examine them on pins, because what is decisive in identifying the species is primarily the colour of the inner quarter of the front legs.

Therefore I have collected several specimens over the years. In fact, I have fussed with the
Chrysotoxum
to such an extent that I believe I can tell them apart in the field without even having to catch them in my net. And so I know that
arcuatum
is common, while
vernale
is a rarity. And why is that the case? The question is as open as a half-read novel.