'What He Knows Who Looks Into Life and Sees'

Most of my preoccupations lie elsewhere but I retain a casual interest in what used to be called field biology. That is, the non-molecular, outside-the-laboratory practice of observing plants and animals, even in the middle of Houston. The motives are pleasure, wonder and aesthetic satisfaction, untainted by politics or academic dullness. I’m strictly an amateur. It’s an interest I’ve had since I was a boy, when the fields, woods and creek behind our suburban home in Greater Cleveland served as a convenient paradise. 

Early on I discovered the writings of Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915), friend to Pasteur and John Stuart Mill, of all people. Out of a lifelong love of insects, Fabre blurred the dubious line separating amateur from professional. With Montaigne and Proust, he is my favorite French writer, author of the ten-volume Souvenirs Entomologiques (more than 2,500 pages, almost 850,000 words). Darwin called him an “incomparable observer,” though Fabre never accepted the theory of evolution. Marianne Moore nominated Fabre’s work for inclusion in Raymond Queneau’s Pour Une Bibliothèque Idéale (1956). I’m browsing again in The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre, the selection edited by Edwin Way Teale in 1949 I read as a kid.

 

Fabre was an autodidact in the age when enthusiasts with little or no formal training could do pioneering work in science and elsewhere. He never attended a university. In his essays he happily anthropomorphizes. His descriptions of field work sound like miniature dramas. They’re reminiscent of the epic battle among the ants in Walden, minus Thoreau’s portentousness. Fabre’s entomological equipment was laughably primitive and served him well. In “Wasps of the Bois des Issarts” he writes of his early insect studies (as translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos):

 

“A fig for Mariotte’s flak and Toricelli’s tube! This is the thrice-blest period when I cease to be a schoolmaster and become a schoolboy, the schoolboy in love with animals. Like a madder-cutter off for his day’s work, I set out carrying over my shoulder a solid digging-implement, the local luchet, and on my back my game-bag with boxes, bottles, trowel, glass tubes, tweezers, lenses and other impedimenta. A large umbrella saves me from sunstroke.”

 

Mark Amorose’s poem “Fabre” in the Spring 2013 issue of Modern Age sent me back to the French entomologist. Amorose takes his epigraph from Fabre’s The Life of the Fly (1879; trans. 1913):

 

“You rip up the animal and I study it alive; . . . you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life.”

 

“On his harmas in the valley of the Rhône—

his laboratory light, florescent sky;

his microscope, his unassisted eye—

a patient plotter watches all alone.

In what swift ambuscade does he lie prone?

upon what secret doings does he spy?

into what minute mysteries does he pry,

this sentinel of worker, queen, and drone?

 

“All others lose the forest for the trees—

how could they not who lay whole forests low

only to squint at stumps and count their rings,

as if one learns life’s truths from lifeless things?

Blind analysts of death will never know

what he knows who looks into life and sees.”

 

Without citing John Keats by name, the sonnet recalls to this reader the poet’s experience as a medical student dissecting cadavers in Guy’s Hospital in London. Fabre shows up in Richard Wilbur’s “Cicadas,” the first poem in his first collection, The Beautiful Changes (1947):

 

“You know those windless summer evenings, swollen to stasis

by too-substantial melodies, rich as a

running-down record, ground round

to full quiet. Even the leaves

have thick tongues.

 

“And if the first crickets quicken then,

other inhabitants, at window or door

or rising from table, feel in the lungs

a slim false-freshness, by this

trick of the ear.

 

“Chanters of miracles took for a simple sign

the Latin cicada, because of his long waiting

and sweet change in daylight, and his singing

all his life, pinched on the ash leaf,

heedless of ants.

 

“Others made morals; all were puzzled and joyed

by this gratuitous song. Such a plain thing

morals could not surround, nor listening:

not 'chirr’ nor 'cri-cri.’ There is no straight

way of approaching it.

 

“This thin uncomprehended song it is

springs healing questions into binding air.

Fabre, by firing all the municipal cannon

under a piping tree, found out

cicadas cannot hear.”

 

Wilbur is recalling the test performed by Fabre: Setting off cannon to see if cicadas can hear. Like true poets, they went on singing despite the boom. In his recent delightful book The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment, in a chapter titled “The Mindful Present: Seeing and Being,” Nigel Andrew speaks for me and Fabre and all observers of the natural world: “To get involved in watching butterflies, is to enter a new world, one that is rich, vibrant, abundant with life and color and energy—and in which we figure only as marginal, fleeting presences, potential threats but of no other interest. This parallel world goes on, with or without us.”