Jan and John

While waiting for the mechanic to install my new battery, I sat in the waiting room and read the book I had grabbed on my way out the door – Still Life With a Bridle, by Zbigniew Herbert. For times such as this – enforced waiting, especially when a television is present – I favor books I already know well. In one of her poems, Bishop captures the peculiar dolor and discomfort of such times and places, describing herself as a little girl, almost 7, waiting while the dentist worked on her aunt. She read National Geographic, a magazine of horrors and delights for children. At the garage, the only reading matter was Motor Trend (a poet of Bishop’s generation, Randall Jarrell, a subscribed) and other automotive magazines. The alternative was the television, with the volume turned loud enough to drown the electric wrench and other sounds from the garage.

I reread “The Hell of Insects,” one of the short essays Herbert calls “apocrypha,” devoted to Jan Swammerdam, a pioneering entomologist in 17th-century Amsterdam. By Herbert’s account, Swammerdam was a man without a gift for happiness, and I thought of an old friend with a similar temperamental absence. In John’s case, the diagnosis might have been some idiosyncratic strain of melancholia. Herbert tells us Swammerdam had been “frail and sickly since birth.” His father was a well-off pharmacist, whose drug store stood beside the town hall in Amsterdam, and when Jan decided he wished to study medicine, he attended the University of Leyden:

“He succumbed to the charms of knowledge, and in an exaggerated way – he studied everything . He attended lectures on mathematics, theology, and astronomy; he did not neglect seminars where they read texts of ancient authors; he was also enthusiastic about Oriental languages. He gave the least attention to his chosen domain of knowledge, medicine.”

That is John, my friend, who is now about 50 and has spent most of his life in school. He earned two Ph.D.s – one in philosophy, one in English, both when he was already in his thirties. He is one of only three people I have known who seem to have read everything, but he always lived in squalor. His apartments and clothes stunk of his chain-smoked cigarettes. John had played in a punk band in the late seventies, and even performed at the late CBGB’s in Manhattan, and those memories sometimes made him smile. I remember when he had coffee with Robert Creeley, a poet whose work he professed to love, and found the meeting tiresome and disillusioning. He most often worked as a security guard, though inevitably he would quit or get fired. John seldom slept. Romance was impossible. So were the mundanities – utility bills, toothaches problems, keeping a car on the road. But he loved talking books and philosophy, and my self-appointed role was court jester, keeping John laughing.

Herbert tells us Swammerdam became a doctor but “did not ever dress a single wound.” Instead, “The new passion that never left him until death was the study of the world of insects. Entomology did not yet exist as a separate domain of science; Jan Swammerdam established it foundations.”

But Swammerdam, like John, repeatedly sabotaged himself. He did brilliant work with dung beetles, wasps and mosquitoes but it never brought him “revenue or fame.” A deeply religious man, he came to see his passion for insects as “a barren and useless occupation,” and a betrayal of God’s glory. Swammerdam died at age 43 but for years before that he “looked like a decrepit old man,” Herbert tells us, and continues:

“The soul that usually flies to infinity at the moment of death left Swammerdam’s tortured body prematurely. It could not bear the rustle of the wing cases, not the senseless buzzing that disturbs the pure music of the Universe.”

The last I heard, John was living with his mother in Rochester, N.Y. I trust his body and soul remain intact.