Palomar's Starlings and Benjamin's Otter
ONE OF ITALO Calvino’s (1923-1985) delightful creations is Mr. Palomar.
There isn’t a stretch of horizon, a gecko’s gullet, a queue in the cheese shop, an expanse of ruins, or a naked bosom that doesn’t set him thinking. And there turns out to be no better “observation post” for watching birds than Palomar’s terrace in Rome.
“The sky is crammed with birds,” but his eye is drawn to the hundreds of thousands of starlings who assemble each autumn before migrating to African coasts. The effect of trying to describe their fluid formations overhead —a “moving body composed of hundreds and hundreds of bodies”— is “that of a vertigo that grips him at the pit of the stomach.”
Illusions, optical and otherwise, draw him into an “aerial pageant.” It’s the apparent regularity that astounds.
And yet, “after having convinced himself that the flock as a whole is flying towards him, [Mr. Palomar] directs his gaze to a bird that is, on the contrary, moving away, and from this one to another, also moving away but in a different direction . . .
he soon notices that all the birds that seemed to him to be approaching are in reality flying off in all directions, as if he were in the center of an explosion.”
Taking his eye off one, seemingly central “gust of starlings” to watch “a dispersion of birds at the edges” bewilders as it entices. “He barely has time to notice . . . before the pattern is dissolved.” *
IT’S NOT SO different for Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), who—in the short-form pieces that became Berlin Childhood around 1900— casts his wandering and noticing back in time.
He recalls, for instance, how his childhood self chose to enter the Berlin Zoological Garden at the entry gate by the Lichtenstein Bridge. It was “by far the least used entranceway” and “most neglected part of the garden,” he insists.
And it was “closest to the otter’s enclosure.”
There would be peace and quiet. And plenty of time to admire the otter’s basin, a “small rock formation, constructed with grottoes,” surrounded by trees and plants. To the boy, the place was “more . . . temple than . . . refuge,” the abode of a “sacred animal.”
As for the “glistening inmate of the cistern,” it was often never seen. And when the otter did appear —a black body breaking the water’s surface— it did so “in the blink of an eye . . . [only to] disappear once more into the wet night,” racing back “to urgent affairs below.” **
*Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar, translated by William Weaver ([1983]1985), 61, 63-64; 61-66.
**Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, translated by Howard Eiland ([ca. 1932-1938] 2006), 79, 80, 81; 78-81.
paintings by Kenneth Mills (who has visited neither Palomar’s Roman terrace nor the Berlin Zoo. Except in his mind and with his students, most winters).
I'm hoping these mind-sketches will become a weekly thing – they're great to think with!