Editor’s Note:
Are you good at reading entrails? I am. At least, I’ve had lots of practice. People say we’re cruel, cats are, but we’re just animals—we all do it. So I get it with words, I do, because they look pretty much like long, tiny entrails. To read a whole book though, heavens, you would have to be a bit desperate. Bored. Hungry. Bewildered. But then again, can anything be said to be untinged, pawing as we do at an enigmatic cosmos, by desperation? So you and I are not that different. Gingerly we struggle and dream. This explains my reluctant part in this book, which under unfortunate circumstances I must finish off and drop at your feet. I won’t explain what the book’s about. I leave that to my so-called owner, the more habitually loquacious—and naturally solicitous—member of our household.
To the Reader
I promise definitions of wonder: sixteen of them. This may strike the reader as too many, perhaps fifteen too many, to be of any use. After all, the word define came into English from the Romance languages, where it meant to bring something completely to an end—exhaustively, you might say, to a close. To define is to say, that’s that. But to this, one can only reply, fat chance. No sooner do we hear a definition than a shadowy swarm arises unbidden, of paraphrases and associations, crisscrossing our definition from every direction, tying down our comprehension like Gulliver to the shores of a teeming Lilliput. To define is to evoke in us and inevitably to demand yet further formulation, in other styles and layers of definition—indeed to fatten, in order really to understand. Hence my sixteen definitions are no whim, they are in earnest. Indeed, I believe they are urgent. For wonder, in this era coming to be called the Anthropocene, has been fatally misunderstood.
There is a sort of yearning that I feel sure my reader and I have shared, at least at some point in our wanderings, and that we continue to share if we live in similar worlds. This yearning awakens and arises out of wonder. I do not refer to the desire for wonder’s experience. We needn’t yearn for that. Whether it comes as rarely as lightning or as surely as daybreak, wonder is not unfamiliar to us. Notwithstanding that the world panders to us, presses upon us so many counterfeits in wonder’s name, and that we are well used to all those products so named which generate a thrilling surge, merely, in sentiment, utility or fun; we know that true wonder is different. We have seen it in the iridescent swirl of a snail shell, or in the awful, enduring seduction of bullets, or in a stranger’s passing syllable or penetrating glance. And I know that you understand all this, that we are on the same page as it were, because we are alike readers: we have learned to sift, through that ink sieve of words on the page, all that fake wonder, which assumes everything it will do in advance, from the genuine, which assumes little and risks much more, which opens a portal for the unknown, a conjuring.
We also know how it feels when we close our book, our books, putting words away. Conjurations linger, then depart. However used to it we are, however solvent it feels, is it not strange that wonder must ebb, the experience receding utterly, leaving the rock of ordinary life unbudged? Why does wonder not overflow the rim of our functioning selves, carrying us on its effervescent wave toward some new state of affairs? Why is it not a real force—in our personal lives, in our worldly lives—just as love or hate are such irresistable, indeed grandly historical forces? We want not only to experience the feeling of wonder, but also for it to carry weight, to be meaningful, to make a mark, to do something.
In this spirit, in searching for what it is in wonder that may intervene in my fate, and in yours, the following pages try to do something. They wonder about wonder, what it is, what it does to us, and how it should be lived in desperate times. They comprise a sort of curiosity cabinet, but not the grand Renaissance kind. Rather the dim basement kind: one that has long failed to anticipate any visitors, is stocked with old schoolbooks, dusty postcards, and personal trinkets, where hasty labels have fallen off or paled to illegibility. This cabinet, this book, is thus going to be a kind of accidental diary, but also a kind of deliberate daydream, with the intention of becoming a kind of ad hoc toolkit. It is a way of turning myself, a hopeful reader no different from you, inside out, shaking the contents onto the fungible ground of our once lucky planet. Sixteen items have fallen out. These are not made to wonder at, but rather, I hope, to conjure from and to wonder with—like books themselves.
1. Aristotle, circa 430 BCE
I’d never read anything more boring. I was an eager student when I first made the attempt, turning to the philosopher’s venerated Poetics as to a landmark shrine on a pilgrim’s way. What I found, held in my hands in the mellow radiance of a library aisle, was unrelievedly dispiriting—sentence after sentence of an almost insistent dullness, and in stark, unapologetic disarray. I returned it to its niche, quickly, as one let’s go a lifeless thing.
Years later I knew we would have to meet again. Because Aristotle, like me, had tasked himself to think about how art can shake you up—about wonder. And also because I, like him, had learned to construct a great variety of sentences in merciless academic prose. Thus there was something off-kilter in us both, which now looked eye to eye. When I again picked up the Poetics, I searched for what he said about wonder. It was not much. But he seemed to have equally little to say about anything else, and as before, all these bits and pieces of littleness lay in disconnected sequence, like a tray of specimens defying identification. Perhaps this is because he thought of them off the top of his head, as he walked back and forth, talking—Aristotle was nicknamed the peripatetic philosopher—which I now recognize, from personal experience, as a type of obessive compulsive behaviour, if not ADHD, which also explains the relentless categorizations and definitions and qualifications, etc. etc. of a relentless style. But it was years later from my first meeting with him now, and I no longer needed a grand storyteller to say what’s what. What I now saw in these spasmodic sentences were traces—rightly for a philosopher, defining traces—of something very peculiar that had happened to him.
Once dusted off, the cobwebs of expectation rent aside, the traces became a picture. The picture, as I say, was and is peculiar—turn it this way and that, and it will never entirely make sense, having a persistently uncanny look, half familiar, half alien—so it sticks with me. The picture is of Aristotle, one among thousands gathered at the immense festival theatre. Here, his ancient heart is aching, his mind swimming sideways as if caught in an unexpected current, but it's not because of the heat. It’s an awful sight, he is thinking, that man down there, a mere man like himself. But he cannot not look at him. True, that man is not suffering, not yet, but he will. He does not know that he is a murderer, a plague-bringer. He has polluted the Earth, changed it. He has condemned his children. He does not know all this yet. Bursts of feeling—of anguish, sympathy, indignation—flare up across the crowd. For a moment the philosopher is aware of the thousands assembled to face that man, people like him and not like him, all perched on stone and cloth in the amphitheatre’s circles within circles. What is happening to them, to me?
He stares again at the mask of pain or puzzlement that conceals the actor’s face. The chorus sings their questions, so many questions. They ask who gave you birth, orphan Oedipus, in that wilderness loved by a wild god, Dionysius. In that wilderness humans are merely visitors, passers-through. They do not know, and you do not know, who or what made you what you are. Are you a stray seed, they ask, grown from some rough peasant, out of sight of city streets and kings, or did you grow from some inhuman fate, a spirit that happened to surge through a green leaf or a blast of sun? You are something surprised into life, amazing, but also hidden, a riddle posed by a sphinx.
Amazing, yes, but like me watching you, just a human animal, that’s all. With all too human limits. Oedipus the master riddle-solver is unable to see what he does to the world around him, or what he has already done. Is that not myself, after all? Right now, he does not know that the plague tearing through his world—its people, its animals, its plants—starts with him. And how could he know? How could he see that his little life is so tangled up with olive trees, goats, gods, children, and kings? The truth is almost unimaginable; it cannot be laid out like a theorem; it has no simple, geometric shape just needing to be dusted off, as Socrates seemed to think. Oedipus says he thought he was free, a stranger drifting through a world of chance. But he is fatally rooted in the earth, in others; he is only a stranger to himself. To see this truth, the visible and invisible panorama of this truth, is both beautiful and terrible. The philosopher imagines him circled by nymphs and suicides, by healing and harm. He tries to think of a word that will capture his sense of all of these different things swirling around in him—for this rapt, mind-stretching feeling; for this vision of life as something that fades and unravels around the edges; for this humility and fear for what one is and what one does in a suddenly unavoidable cosmos, a cosmos now speaking from an actor’s mask. That word is wonder.
If this is what literature can do, the philosopher thinks eagerly, it must be worth a few notes, maybe a whole treatise. For there are always plagues in the world: the pollution of misunderstanding, of misrecognition, all those fatal errors of careless thought from which further plagues spring. Maybe wonder can save us from them! Jot, jot, jot. A curious notion, but there may be some to read, to listen.
Addendum:
Plagues that ravage the world, must they always be a human’s fault? That is really depressing. Is there, way out there, on some planet inhabited by nothing more than plants and protozoa, some reckless species, maybe an almost worm-thing or maybe one of those viruses that look like modernist bath toys, yet intellectually inclined, hence easily confused, ready to devour everything in sight then die, leaving the place a desert? I hope so. But maybe it’s only humans who have come up with the impossible, paradoxical idea of a world to be destroyed in the first place. A world is everywhere, yet it’s not over there; it has everything in it, not counting everything else. A world might be created and might be ruined. What an oddball idea. I can hardly believe there anything else alive in the cosmos that wants, like Oedipus, to save its world from itself.
Aristotle thought wonder could save us. Well, not on its own, naturally. But he thought that wonder tied curiosity down to care, by revealing ignorance and provoking a desire to question, to know, motivated by compassion. It’s an appealing thought, that something so pleasing as the experience of wonder should also be good for us. Don’t we all look for moments of wonder in our lives? Of being in awe? Of feeling drawn out of our everyday way of thinking and feeling? Often beautiful things will do this, when something about them tantalizes our mind or feelings, something that points beyond us and defies easy explanations. Like the splendour of a rainbow. Humans have always been in awe of rainbows. In Greek mythology, Iris, the rainbow, is a daughter of Thaumas, the god of wonder. But sometimes ugly or scary things will have the same effect on us. The other famous daughters of Thaumas are the harpies, terrifying messengers of fate or punishment. As for me, when I think of wonder and horror, I always think of the Blob. That’s a B-movie creature that comes from outer space and grotesquely expands, amorphously blob-like, with each human it engulfs. It only existed on late-night television when I was growing up. Things of horror seem wondrous because they are half in our world and half out of it. They intrude on the everyday, like a clawed hand reaching through the crack of a door. They impose themselves on us and change our world into something strange, as if what we had taken for normal reality was revealed to be only a thin, decorative veil we had thrown over a weirder, far less explicable—or palatable—universe.
Is there such wonder in ordinary life? Is it easy to find, or do you have to go looking for it? I feel that I have to go looking for it, and that there are countless obstacles on the path, burdens, distractions, misdirections. And once found, as I said already, it’s role in my life remains evasive. I’d rather have a reliable enemy than a busy friend. I don’t feel that wonder, good or bad, is really getting its claws into me. Can it help me or help anything, as much as Aristotle thought it should?
Editor’s Note:
What is it with claws? I bet claws have done a lot less harm in the world than fingers. And the Blob? As boring as television itself. Which is, as far as I can see, basically a pulsating Blob that absorbs S.C.O., my So-Called Owner, for hours on end. If you want wonder, why don’t you turn off the Blob, close your eyes until they are just tiny, little slits, so you can only see the edges of things, so you can’t quite be sure what they are anymore. And then let your thoughts drift. That’s obviously what my fellow cats, those sphinxes, were doing hunkered down in the Sahara—contemplating the vast, sandy backyard of time stretched out before them, making up riddles for troublesome Egyptians and Greeks. Try it out, S.C.O., try keeping your eyes half closed to the world, and your ears alert. It’s a cat thing, but you can learn it.
You may wonder, then, why I bother myself to interrupt his cogitations. Although if backed into a corner, I might confess some concern for S.C.O., these addenda are not altruistic (a quality foreign to my nature). Rather, I have been roused—because monologues always have such a pitiful futility to them—to an impatience for truth. I watch, I can see S.C.O. veering drunkenly between theories and sentiments, neither of which cats can tolerate. To see all sides of one’s prey, to see how it moves in the foliage, one needs really to embrace the grammarlessness of things, and a certain sang-froid.
2. My Favorite Martian, circa 1968
In the earliest dream I can remember, maybe it was around four or five years old, I am lost. I wander through an empty space with no horizon, like the background of a printed page. I have to zig-zag between tall, free-standing two-dimensional rectangles set at angles to each other like in an exhibition. They are huge pictures of smiling cowboy faces. I am looking for my sister. Part of me is in awe of this strange world—its geometrical beauty and its enigmatic visages—and part of me is afraid to be alone. When I don’t find my sister, I wake up.
The dream was memorable because although surreal, it was a real place. Those looming, free-floating faces and abstract, dimensionless planes came from a colour advertisement on the back cover of a 1960s My Favorite Martian comic book. The wonder I felt in my dream revealed to me, as in an emotional mirror, how I instinctively felt when looking at this printed cover. Its mid-century, modernist graphic design and its iconic masculine figures fascinated me, and it became surreal and forever memorable when I imagined entering that design as a habitable world. The mystery of that world… one might interpret it in all sorts of ways, and they would fail to touch, I think, what inspired its wonder. Dreams do not only express what we desire, or fear, or repress, or displace; the buried stuff sought out by psychoanalysts. Dreams also poke and prod at the edges of what we know or feel. They let our curiosity play with what might lie beyond the world as we know it, or us as we know ourselves—and to feel that lack of knowing as an anxious but sensational, undimensioned pleasure.
The comic book I was looking at and the television series that inspired it are after all based on the same feeling: we are fascinated by the idea of a Martian visitor because we are fascinated by the idea of a life that might be unknown, that may go unrecognized by us. As a small child, even the stereotypical cowboy was an alien to me. In my dream, however, the strangeness of the cowboy was a mere footnote to the strangeness of the space itself and my sister’s and my own uncertain belonging to it. I had learned to embrace such spaces from a very young age, as my mother was an abstractionist artist. But the teasing question of what it would mean or feel like actually to live within a Mondrian painting, or some utopian planet like it, with others there or to be sought there, was prompted by this accidental, mundane image. That aesthetic world is a humanist one, we might say, because it imagines a utopian world that is organized by universal sensory forms—shapes and colours—and invites an undifferentiated human viewer; alternatively, it ventures beyond us, drawing colours and geometries indifferent to human life, then returns to embed them in style, in how we live and what we care about, changing the very nature of humanity, if only a little. I’ve never thought much of cowboys, but I’ve always wanted to go back to that dream world. Back then I decided my sister wasn’t there. But maybe she’s actually still there, or someone is, looking for me.
Addendum:
No doubt each of us carries with us their own wonder cabinet, a quaint repository of bell jars and cubbies, somewhere in our inner self. It rests comfortably in a corner, well out of the way of foot traffic. Though we cherish the moments we add an item to it, our spring cleaning does not reach into its alcove, and its shelves lapse gently into disarray. Its exhibits lack order, the older ones are poorly lit or moth-eaten; many of the drawers are stuck shut or badly labelled. We so easily forget what we put there and why.
It is a sad thing to pick up a familiar bird in our mind, because it once lit a fire there, and then to admit that its plumage has faded, that its stuffing shows at the seams. How do we care for our sense of wonder?
I want to understand wonder better, to care for it and cultivate it. What makes something wondrous? I do not think it can be the special quality of a thing. I do not think that some things are essentially wondrous while other things are not. Maybe we all put rainbows in our wonder cabinets, but not any old rainbow; and we put many other things besides, that other people don’t bother with. And those could be anything, really. An advertisement on the back of a kid’s comic book, for example. But for some reason, sometimes, a certain thing imposes itself on us, on our attention, on our emotions and curiosity, awakening awe from its habitual dormancy. That thing arrests us because it is sensory, and a little bit sensational. We cannot, even if just for a moment, not look at it. We feel bumped outside ourselves. By the radiant face of the moon. Or by the stark guts of a roadkill. Or by the jarring song of tragedy.
Wonder is a kind of event, not a kind of thing. True, for each of us, some things invite it more than others, but what those things are will depend on who we are, where we’ve been, and what we’ve done with our inner cabinets, and what others have done. To understand myself this way, I imagine myself as a traveller. As always a visitor here, always a guest here. I imagine myself fifty-nine years ago, washed ashore on this earth like someone with amnesia, having to figure out where I am. Every day I look at the trees, and the sky, and the dirt, and the lives that will remain when I leave, not so many years from now. I am a traveller come among them, come to see the colour blue for example, then depart. The colour blue is a special mystery to me. I often think about it. Knowing that it’s an energy wave with 490 nanometre ripples instead of longer ones or shorter ones makes the mystery that much more, not less. Even stranger to me is that I’m glad it’s here, that I met blue. Also orange. There’s no end of peculiar meetings like this, once you start imagining yourself as a traveller. Not all meetings are so pleasing as with orange, of course. Many wound or hurt. Some of those, too, end up afterwards in the jumble of my cabinet.
Although I do not know how to take care of my wonder, what to do with my disordered cabinet, something about Aristotle’s response to wonder sounds right: that we should not neglect it, and rather we should talk about it, lest like Oedipus we bring some plague of carelessness upon ourselves or others—that is, if that has not already happened to us, this time around, in the ubiquitous permeation of microplastics, in the ghostly juggernaut of carbon emissions, in the planetary tide of species extinctions, in the unfolding varieties of exploitation and the terrifying flourishing of rancour and mistrust. Aristotle, looking down at an ancient stage, decided that wonder is too important just to stumble across: we should cultivate it. Thus I have begun this inventory, to make something of wonder’s uneventful events, to confront its capacious cabinet, its unresolved dream.
Editor’s Note:
Here, S.C.O. is sadly ambitious. When will he ever learn? What—is he going to write about everything shiny he latches onto in a moment of boredom? Because any thing can be wonderful? (Sorry, but I can’t write the word wondrous with a straight face.) He thinks he’s a traveller passing through some strange land. But that strange land is just other travellers, exactly like him. Take blue: sure, it’s always there. And I also like it. But orange? I know it only from books. Neither really exist. Or they only exist for a while. Just like the trees and sky that my S.C.O. thinks will outlive him, will only exist for a while. Everything is a swarm of moving, changing stuff. If you sit in one place for a long time and watch carefully, you see that. Everything out there is the visitor, the traveller. Don’t write a travel diary. Write a hotel guest book. Or, if you are an evolutionarily authorized predator like me, write a menu.