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  By the sixteen hundreds, however, peas had become dear, like delftware. Many Holland seedsmen, now involved in obscurity, were once involved in the quality of the pea. They rendered the rattle-pea succulent and creamy. Peas were not just averters of hunger anymore: pea-eating was a madness. Fresh tender green peas were escaped from dances for, stolen at midnight from kitchen larders, smuggled by pocket into church, considered one of the very merits of life, often so hardtack.

  At first the life of the pea does not seem to be that of a mad-maker. The young pea plant lives by diligent routine, forming two tiny equal leaves every four and a half days. If leaf-leaf on a Tuesday morning, then leaf-leaf on Saturday evening, and leaf-leaf on Thursday morning. Someone who helps peas—a friar or a bee—may look in on them, but young peas are as autonomous as mushrooms and responsible as clocks.

  But then, what had seemed a mushroomlike spirit of autonomy turns out to be just the delusive stability of shortness. Peas are clocky children who become spoony adults. Once they grow long-limbed, they start to teeter, because they possess more self than they can support. Then they grow madly wending tendrils, to sweep the air for lattices—just as teetery marionettes will grow marionette cords to sweep the air for marionetteers. Yearning begets yearning: the pea plant yearns for a lattice, so it grows tendrils—then every tendril too yearns for a lattice. Yearning draws tendrils out of the spindly green pea-shoot only to find itself compounded, elephantine.

  Tendril wending is swervy and conjectural; like a dancer who cannot quite hear the music, pea tendrils are antic with inapprehension. Since there is no way for them to apprehend a lattice, the only direction to grow is yonder. Haywire personalities like peas, wobbly personalities with loose ends, iffy ends, result not from having no aim, no object in life, but from having an extrasensory object. What they want is beyond their powers of apprehension—until they hold it in their acute green wisps—so their manner is vagabond. The personality that longs only for perceptible things is down-to-earth, like a dung eater. But the teetery-pea kind send out aerial filaments to hound the yonder, tending every which way, guessing themselves into arabesques, for they are fixed on the imperceptible.

  The truth is that lattices are not the only things that are extrasensory. When you cast your small, questioning arms into the opaque universe, you may find a trellis to tether yourself to; or you may find a tree sticky with birdlime; or a snuffling piglet; or a trapeze artist swinging by who takes you for an aerialist and collects you—then alas, unless you have excellent timing and a leotard, you will be a lost cause.

  Or you might find nothing, in which case your yearning will unhorse you. Yearning can horse you or unhorse you. You can only look for so long before your looking apparatus topples you over. Maybe there is no lattice within your reach; for not every plant is issued a lattice, just as not every planet is issued a people and not every person a pudding and not every pudding a plum. Or there may be a lattice right there next to you, installed with you in mind, around which your feelers verge and twist but never touch until finally, freighted with longing, you fold, same as the plant with nothing nearby. The lattice an inch away might be a moon, a myth, an abstraction. You might have grown your tendrils as filigree.

  If the road from pea to pea is shortened, the plants can be lattices for each other, like marionettes winding their cords around one another—hold me up, Blue Baroque Lady; hold on to me, Lindenwood Gnome. But then the pea patch becomes a pea ward, because “mildew cometh by closeness of air.” Crowds do not divide the blight but multiply it. On May Day everybody dances around the maypole together and everybody feasts together and the plague travels from him to her to him to him. More people means more plague, more wood means more fire, more peas means more mildew. Pea powdery mildew will infect the pea and the pea and the pea, not just the pea.

  Pea powdery mildew spores travel by being puffed around by the wind—so they might get blown into a community swimming pool, or a henhouse, or onto a freshly painted mural. In fact, anything but a pea plant is a cemetery for them; though sometimes they land nowhere and remain in the air, unberthed with the specters. Once in a while a flurry of spores gets blown straight into the thin, seeking arms of a Pisum sativum plant. Then the spores settle down and with their hollow haustoria grieve the plant; they drink its terminable green blood, making it powdery-pale and curly-weak; but they drink carefully, sipping slowly through their straws, for how can you drink from an empty glass? If in all this wide herby world, if in all this gardeny world of moonflowers and lespedezas and daphnes and daisies and frangipanis and ghost weed and bluets and galaxes and blazing stars and blood-on-the-snow and mind-your-own-business and porcelain berries and rain lilies and chinqua-pins and withywinds and salsifies and fritillaria, you light on the one thing you can live on—pea plant—why would you drain it dry and give yourself back over to the air? The air is a question and those who travel upon it travel in questions: When will I find what? Where is who?

  LONG AGO, LONG BEFORE the air and its travelers, there was an immense void between Muspelheim and Niflheim, the lands of fire and ice. It was called the Ginnungagap—the gaping gap, dark and empty. But when the Fire Giants from Muspelheim trooped across the Ginnungagap to war with the Frost Giants from Niflheim, there was provoked some lively melting, and the yeasty droplets flung into the void became persons and plants and beasts. These proliferated and filled up the emptiness; and for the ones who can easily reach the materials they need, the Earth is nothing like a gap; they are content, like clocks endlessly fingering integers.

  But there are others who still experience the Ginnungagap, like buttercups. Into the gaping gap buttercups send their yellow-dusted anthers, petitioning for a bee; and the gap is where the crane flower sets up its blue landing-petals and orange flicker-flame petals—in order to doubly tempt the sunbirds—with blue stability and orange witchery. And into the gap the Pisum sativum dispatches its loopy tendrils. But like a lost wolf howling for her pack, whose long strains of find me might attract the wrong wolves, the plants might summon the wrong thing with their susceptible anthers and petals and tendrils. So instead of sunbirds the landing-petals could receive Diseases that cause corkiness, mushiness, yellowness, sogginess, stinkiness and spots.

  Why even take the chance? Why try at all? Only soaked in full-cream milk and putrid egg yolks and train oil and copper arsenic can anyone be invulnerable. So why not stay safe in the dirt, a seed holding tight, instead of a seed bursting forth and offering the plummy stationary self to slime mold and powdery scab and blossom end rot and weevils and sow bugs and gangrene and silver scurf and scrappy little sparrows waiting above ground?

  Plants cannot stay safe. Desire for light spools grass out of the ground; desire for a visitor spools red ruffles out of twigs. Desire makes plants very brave, so they can find what they desire; and very tender, so they can feel what they find. Thus genips with hearts of honey-pulp; thus poppies with hearts of fringe, and picker-elweeds with hearts of soft pale purple frill, and tulips with tilting hearts, and foxgloves with downy freckled hearts, and the maddening-sweet hearts of the careening pea. Those who are feeling their way into the Ginnungagap must be able to feel, which means able to freckle, and fringe, and soften, and tilt. And if they can tilt they can fall; which is a different design from that of the ticking hearts of crystal-quartz.

  Radical Bears in the Forest Delicious

  There once was a king of Babylon who was too proud, so he was given the mind of an animal and put out to pasture. For seven years he roamed the fields on all fours and munched on grass, after which period he was allowed to return to his palace and rich robes of purple, his barley beer and skewered locusts and royal hairdresser who gave him back his dignified ringlets. (Along with an animal’s mind he had been given the animals’ hairstylist.) It is not specified which animal’s mind Nebuchadnezzar received, but from his glad return to civilization and fine cuisine we can infer that it was not the mind of a panda bear. If he had had a panda’s mind for sev
en years, in the end he would have rejected the restitution of his kingdom; he would have somersaulted away, to continue leading a free, elusive, unfollowed life.

  Having followers is an honor pandas dream not of. There is no tragopan so trustworthy, no bushpig so dependable, that they would want it tagging along. Pandas even head away from pandas, like the stars in the universe, spreading farther and farther apart (you can never be too far away to say goodbye)—except their territory is neither infinite nor expanding, and in order to deliver more panda bears into existence, they can’t just scatter into particles at the end. Pandas come together every two years or so; marriage isn’t always marriage of the mind.

  Maybe if they had been given a choice they would have picked a less conspicuous coat, one to better correspond with their reclusive spirits. Admirers can be secret admirers and afflictions can be secret afflictions but pandas cannot be secret pandas, since they contrast dramatically with green ferns, gray rocks, pink rhododendrons, and their own bellies and ears and legs. They are showy bears, sensationally visible, which might actually be an advantage for a solitary species: the easier to avoid you, my dear. Camouflaged animals must always be bumping into each other.

  What does the animal do all day who is not engaged in society, its duties and pleasures and ferments? There may be some wedging in trees, some gazing into the mist, some fiddle-faddle. Sometimes the panda breaks an icicle off a branch and tosses it into the air over and over till it melts. Sometimes, trotting pigeon-toed across a hillside, he trips, then rolls, because he is round; having enjoyed that, he climbs back up and rolls back down. He might pick wild irises or crocuses and recline among the fern-fronds to eat them, or lounge underneath a weeping willow, munching on the little leaflets that dangle into his mouth.

  Mostly what pandas do with their time is eat bamboo. Bamboo, that sturdy wooden grass, makes up to 99 percent of their diet and they eat it for up to fourteen hours a day. They have to consume it constantly since they are only assimilating about 20 percent. Their penitential diet is a mystery; pandas are like celery saints—everyone else is convivially dining on stuffed eggs, truffled fingerlings, little pies and oranges, enjoying the tableside crooners, while out behind a bush sits a celery saint with his basket of celery, crunch crunch crunch. Eat enough pies and you can put aside the desire for food and pursue something else, such as a cowhand. Rare is the romance of the celery extremist.

  With their carnivorous anatomy and herbivorous behavior, it is as if pandas are pledged to an ancient covenant—as if they used to be bon vivants like other bears, blood and berry juice staining their muzzles, slugabeds all winter, until one day they fell into a trance and received a deep message: “You are standing, pandas, on the very borders of the eternal world, but you have become charmed with infatuating food; the subtle poison of sensuality courses through your veins. You must disregard custom and the strong clamoring of appetite and passion. It will take, at times, every particle of willpower which you possess; but give yourselves wholly to a bamboo diet, and guided by firm, unspotted principle your lives will become pure and noble.” Thus was formed that radical sect of bears, the Bambooists. Modern-day Bambooists show a remarkable resistance to temptation: a stream runs by, serving up fresh fish, and what does the panda do? Wades across, to get to a stiff thicket of bamboo on the opposite side.

  But willpower might not entirely account for such abstemiousness anymore. Bamboo is not power food, and the bear who eats it is not a power bear, and swiping fish from the river takes energy, as does sleeping all winter. If you’re going to sleep for seven months you need to eat your hickory nuts, your ungulates, your honey. Bambooists have to stay awake all winter to eat bamboo—incidentally witnessing the sapphirine sparkles of snow falling from a branch, the cliffs draped with icy fringes, the white snow powdering the green bamboo leaves. (Could any dream compare with winter?)

  What does a panda know, who studies just a few cloudy-mountain miles of the world? From her experience she must know about fallibility. Icicles melt, flowers fail, intangibly small babies grow tangible and autonomous, and one day when you come back from foraging to collect yours from the tree fork where you left him, he is gone. Mushrooms, moonlight, everything is ephemeral, with one exception: bamboo. Bamboo never fails, bamboo is eternal, evergreen, green in the orange season, green in the white season, green in the green season, poking up sweet little shoots into the spring rain. Blessed is the bear that trusteth in bamboo.

  For lucky pandas it is true, bamboo never fails. Bamboo can be eternal for a hundred years, which is four times as eternal as panda bears; but there is in the character of bamboo a devastating defect. Most grasses stagger their dying, piece by piece, like an orchestra—though a trombonist goes down the collective life carries on. The trouble with bamboo is that it crashes all at once: after a century of continuous availability the entire thicket flowers together, dies together, and like a dead orchestra it can take twenty years to get back on its feet.

  At this point an animal might wise up and become a Whateverist. With so many edibles in the world why consume, almost exclusively, a miserably nutritious, erratically fallible one? It’s not as if bamboo is pleasant to eat, like horsebeans; bamboo splinters poke and scratch the swallower all the way down. That old covenant was arbitrary and perverse; bamboo is a silly staple; specialism is folly. Consider pragmatists—when the linguini runs out, a pragmatist will eat the centerpiece, and when that is done he will eat the tablecloth. As pragmatists have no principles their numbers are myriad.

  But pandas betrayed by bamboo go looking for bamboo. For there is such a thing as specialized hunger, being hungry for one thing—similar to specialized loneliness. Sometimes they don’t have to travel far; pandas eat several kinds of bamboo, and even though arrow bamboo collapses, there might be umbrella bamboo growing nearby. Sometimes they have to go farther afield, and sometimes they travel in pitiful directions—would you know which way to go to find a hotbed of celery?—until their coats don’t fit very well anymore. Vagrancy used to be easier on the animals, because there used to be more forest. Even if an expedition wasn’t efficient, it was foresty all the way, just as the journey from earth to heaven is milky all the way. Now, between patches of forest, there are villages and gravel mines, steep cornfields, dance tents, frightened people waving blankets, mushroom-ers, other things to avoid.

  People have tried to help pandas become pragmatists, to see sense, to switch to alternatives during a bamboo strangulation. And in captivity they comply—they eat the yams and bananas and fish set before them. But compliance is not conversion. When they are set free, pandas return to their ruinous fidelity to bamboo, shuffling past opportunity—for on the far side of that hill might be the Forest Delicious, where they can lie back, in the million-column sanctuary, a bamboo cane in each forefoot, crunching on the one and then the other, munching on flappy bundles of leaves. There are fewer than twenty-five hundred free pandas left and they’re all in the same boat, made of bamboo. When it goes down they go down with it, into dark water, and they won’t switch to another boat, not for all the tea in China. Pandas have their own wisdom, unaccountable and unamendable, whose roots shoot down deeper than we can penetrate, and if they mind anyone at all it is someone more elusive than man.

  Trooping with Trouble

  To whom, then, does the Earth belong?” said the dragon as he was being slain. “Sometimes it seems to belong to dragons; at other times to dragon-gaggers. Sometimes it seems to belong to the harmattan wind, then to the doldrums. Sometimes to the slaves, when the sea parts to let them through, and sometimes to the sea when the sea does not part. Now to the siskin finch and sablefish; now to smitheries and smelteries. Perhaps the Earth is neutral, like a bridge between two cities, traveled on but possessed by no traveler.” Such are the behindhand ponderings of a doomed dragon.

  Turtles do not have to be doomed before they become canny. While it is not known how much eggs understand, the tiny sea turtles nosing out of their leathery eggshel
ls recognize instantly that this is not a turtle’s world. A hatchling who believed otherwise would scramble out of his sandy burrow and, upon emerging, stop: “The world is my sphere and the sun is my traveling lamp and I, soft-shelled, shall span my sphere and nothing can ruin me.” Then he would step sportily down to the sea.

  But in fact the hatchlings unbury themselves gravely, stealing up out of the sand over several days, to give their soft shells time to harden. Once they are close to the surface, they pause, and wait for the sun to go down; then they run frantically down to the water, and beat through the shallows to get to the deep. The sandy newborn turtles shimmying down the Yalimapo beach as night falls are no ninnies. The dog, the raccoon, the wave, the catfish, may ruin them and there is no mother.

  Neither does the world belong to snakes, as they forthwith apprehend: stuffed into clay pots by snake-catching guilds, vipers are ignominiously milked of their venom, which is then turned to antivenom. Potted snakes employed in canceling their own powers cannot consider themselves sovereign. Even the king cobra, fifteen feet long, finds itself ridiculous when giddy women kiss it lips-to-lips to amass fertility luck for themselves.

  Although lizards have some edible subordinates, like mealworms and sweet potatoes and snails, lizards are edible subordinates, too, for birds and bobcats. The worst menaces that lizards can perform are just medium. Only two—Heloderma horridum, the Mexican beaded lizard, and Heloderma suspectum, the Gila monster, made of black and peach beads—carry poison in their bites. But while snakes store their venom in the upper jaw, whence it flows into ankles and guild jars, the horridum and suspectum have their venom glands in the lower jaw, so that when they bite, the poison must seep up weakly through the bottom fangs. Only the seediest victims get bitten long enough to be defeated by the Heloderma suspectum; the plummy ones get away. The peach-bead monster can barely access its most devastating ingredient, and its status on Earth is Vulnerable.