Like Woodstock, But With Bats

         Gateway Park lies just north of Luke Air Force Base, a forty-five minute drive from my house in good traffic. The October day is cooling a bit but it’s still bug season on the soccer turf, the moths replacing butterflies at sunset, whirligiging up and down from the field lights. Over at the skate park, the longboarders leap and spin in the same motion, and on the playground an eight-year-old wields a swing like a trapeze. The coach is three feet off the ground at half-time, “There he is,” he shouts to the team, “coming in off the side like gangbusters – what do you do?”

         Everything’s flying here tonight at Gateway, fighter jets roaring

in double-pair sets from Luke, stealthily black against the black sky but at full volume; on the ground we feel that rock-concert thrill of the vibration through our bodies.  We search the sky but see only a faint-blue moving blink. Mostly we see the bats, the glossy silvered membranes of their wings reflecting the lamplight. They flap in loopy maneuvers, honing in on the cyclone of moth wings. A soccer fan beside me brushes the top of her hair rapidly with both hands. “I feel like I walked into a spider web,” she says.

         Why do we still have icky feelings about these honorable little warriors? Without the bats, this ground would have a layer of insects as high as the goalposts. The babies are as photogenic as any mammal, and at least, with the exception of vampire bats, they only drink the bodily fluids of their own species.

                                                                                                            Bat World Sanctuary

         The same is not true for humans, who feed on the milk of our herd animals, prompting paleoanthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harbending (The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution) to call us “mampires.” An early gene mutation gave many European and African human populations the ability to produce lactase in adulthood; before, people stopped making that enzyme after infancy. I can now see even more logic in the barn scene in The Little Vampire.

 

PAREIDOLIA

      We all do it; we were programmed that way, not so much by our original humanoid genes but by that main driver of all life, natural selection. Carl Sagan wrote, in A Demon-Haunted World: “Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper.” Little Taryn is an absolute champ, a master hypnotist whose eyes lock on, convincing her dad that she loves him more than anyone.

     It's doubtful her face-attachment is stronger than the average infant, but if it is, she got it from me. I see faces everywhere: in plaster cracks and tufts of gray cat fur and the shadowed leafy depths of a Brittlebush. I don't think there's a person in the moon, but there is a personality – mournful when full, or when gibbous, merely surprised. On clear nights thousands of years ago, nomads and Greek philosophers saw faces and whole beings in the thick stars and produced the beginnings of mythology.
     I could support the theory that rocks are alive, their apparent immobility due to an altered frame of reference in time. To them, perhaps, we move so quickly as to appear invisible or at most a blur, like the Srike in Hyperion. How else can one explain this?

     Not everyone knows they're here. Consider this young couple, enjoying the late afternoon sun on the top of a cliff face carved by the swirling of a hundred thousand high tides.

    Or is there something else – something not evil and perhaps very young? Something simply hungry whose cry remains physical long after the sound waves have dissipated. Something able to wait for hundreds of hours until one of the blurry feet above it slips. Someone who recognizes the rock face of a larger opposing cliff across the bay opening its own mouth in mimicking surprise.

  Dr. Sagan is rolling in his grave with agony over what he has done to me.

Perception

        Right now a fairy tale kingdom of clouds is parading over the inverted bowl¹of early evening. A broad irregular band curves midway across the sky like a giant’s dragon-belt, two ends meeting with mouth swallowing tail. Fading sunlight shines through a hole in the reptilian skull allowing the dragon to see. A line of lighter purple-gray outlines the sharpness of its jaw, and the tail and pink spiked horns peak and retract like warm marshmallow. Above the tail, white popcorn clouds scatter backward toward the horizon, picking up the last bright rays. A broad granular darkness hangs in front: a wisped evil haunting the outskirts of my neighborhood.

         The shades of light wreak havoc with my depth perception cues. The tiny clouds are rightly in the distant layer, but their brightness shoots them forward. The gargantuan dragon assumes the foreground, but his darkness forces him to recede. I once read about an isolated people who, having had no access to photographs, at first could not interpret a picture as representing any object at all. Early experience is everything. When I was young I had only a black and white television. I watched The Wizard of Oz when it was broadcast once a year, but until I was an adult I never knew of the iconic change to color when Dorothy first steps into Munchkin Land. What I gained, however, was the ability to forget that a screen was showing what we now call grayscale; in my mind, the color was there. Even now, when my children stumble across an old black-and-white movie, they’ll start to groan a few minutes before I begin to notice there’s no color. My kids are perception-impaired: they never learned to interpret the varying lights and darks and so feel cheated.

          Have you ever been told that the eye is like a camera? I’ve just learned that my pocket-sized Nikon is a little like an untrained eye, unable to pick up the nuances of depth and clarity in black and white. Film, properly exposed, can do this. Think of Ansel Adams:

But not my camera. While walking along the central California coast with my daughter, I accidentally changed my camera setting to grayscale. The camera recorded details of the real world poorly because it couldn’t differentiate between similarly intense wavelengths of light. For it, a certain level of blue and green might look the same. That’s probably why the picture of this deer:

is distinct from its background while a picture of the same animal taken before I discovered my camera-setting error somewhat disappears.

Perhaps it’s just poor photography. Either way, as a human with an adequate range of color perception, I am a master hunter.

         Mastery drives us humans: the Nobel prize for literature was announced today. I’m always excited for the result – it seems an awfully strong book recommendation – but this year more than ever since the Pulitzer jurors awarded their 2012 prize to no one. The Nobel honoree was Chinese author Mo Yan, who has written such intriguing titles as The Garlic Ballads and Big Breasts and Wide Hips. I’d like to read his Frogs, but it hasn’t been translated yet. I always wonder, with a translation, if I’ll miss something important that the author has to say. When I was in high school I loved The Rubáyát of Omar Khayyám. We all quote from it: “The moving finger writes . . . ” or rather we quote from Edward Fitzgerald’s creative translation. Compare one Fitzgerald stanza:

                  For I remember stopping by the way

                  To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay:

                  And with its all-obliterated Tongue

                  It murmur’d – “Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”

to an accurate translation by Juan Cole, of the University of Michigan:

        

                  The other day I passed a potter at his wheel, displaying every

                  moment a new skill; and it occurred to me, though one less

                  clear-eyed wouldn’t see it: It is our ancestors’ clay in a potter’s

                  hands!

       It’s not just the inexactness of translation, or the necessary adaptions for readers of a different culture. Writers chose each word not only for literal meaning but also for the connotation of its sound and the implication of its meaning in popular reference. Curled at the cellar door is a tired child or a pair of kittens, while passed out on the basement steps is your slob of an uncle after Aunt Mildred finally locked him out at 3 a.m.

        I’ll read an English version of Mo Yan’s work, and keep my fingers crossed that I can perceive the author’s color inside the translator’s black and white. In the meantime, here’s a little guy who lives near the Monterey Bay Aquarium, whose features translate in either color scheme and whose name, the Snowy Plover, is a poem onto itself:

¹The Rubáyát of Omar Khayyám, stanza 52