little animals & imprecise ontological taint
1. “miracles exist, now, can you draw them?”
I just finished reading The Little Animals by Sarah Tolmie, a really wondrous meditation on what it means to see and the limitations of visibility, told in the form of a fictionalized magical realism glimpse into Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek’s1 world.
Catherine Rockwood’s review gets at part of what made the book so satisfying - “the pure, pleasurable efficiency… both tremblingly receptive to the mysterious and determined to pin it down for further use. Miracles exist, now, can you draw them?”
a. plot? what plot?
There’s no big epic conflict and resolution, but it’s bittersweetly triumphant in its quiet cascade of man vs self in the broader context of our everyday loss vs nature.
“Confirmation of the existence of the “little animals” has increased the sum of human knowledge, without decreasing the vulnerability of the human animal by even a microscopic amount.” - Catherine Rockwood (Strange Horizons)
b. if we were in english class together I’d offer this thematic list on seeing and its limitations
The goose girl hears animalcules that other characters need lenses to see and most people never perceive at all
But of course they do, in a sense. Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to see bacteria, but they were here and people could perceive their effects on the world all along
The goose girl telling Vermeer that his paintings only see the outsides of things vs seeing their insides also (a beautiful young man, vs also what he’s thinking about and looking at), which reminded me of one of my favorite lines from Arcadia:
“If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.” - Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
more echoes on the limitations of our perception: the colorblind artist, and a subplot on our inability to see what’s going on in the homes and private lives of people we see every day
is the dollhouse a toy or a tool
cousin Martin - sees a beautiful woman and instantly calculates the cost of her attire; is seen as a drunk slowly unveiled to be a beautiful and kind man; seeing him causes the priest to finally see himself as gay
the fabric patterns based on animalcules - naming changes how they’re seen and valued (eg “water garden” vs “pond scum”)
c. fictionalized history both scares and attracts me
I’ve been too scared to read When We Cease To Understand The World by Benjamin Labatut lest I accidentally remember fictionalized details about real scientists as facts instead. Little Animals felt so much safe in that respect, though I’m struggling to really put my finger on why.
2. imprecise ontological taint
Apparently when you add secular water to holy water, “so long as the water added to the holy water does not amount to half the amount of the holy water then all water in the container is considered blessed water.”
But let’s say you have 10g holy water, to which you add 4g secular water. Can you immediately then add another 6g secular water and have it all be holy, or is there some lag before the previously added secular water is sanctified? If so, how long? Given a continuous pour, do you evaluate at the end of the pour, or at various moments along the way? What if it’s drizzling in for hours on a misty moisty morning?
It’s like they don’t even care about being precise. Compare with the rabbis who study kezayit (a “halakhic measure for the minimum amount that may not be eaten of a prohibited substance or that must be eaten to fulfill a commandment”). (This comes up a lot.) From them we learn:
A kezayit is a based on the size of an olive.
But what kind of olive? Has it been pitted?
Is an olive more like half the size of an egg, or a third? (Peninei Halakhah, Pesach 16:23)
We typically measure kezayit in volume, not weight - “see Or Letzion (Vol. 3, Introduction) who argues that the custom to use weight is only for foods which have similar density to water, but for other foods (like Matza) one would use volume.” - Halachipedia (sure, I often use my food scale with a shrug towards the idea that a pint’s a pound if you assume everything we eat is approximately water)
“One needs to make sure that he does not count air in the food as part of the shiur of kezayis. If one has a food that is hollow, a kezayis of that food is considered when the food would be pressed. (Rama 486:1)” - Halachipedia again
Six Tim Tams constitute a kezayit - "Determining the Quantity of "Ke'zayit" in Some Common Snack Foods"
and so on.
tbf sometimes precision is moot. Even a spoonful of sewage transforming a barrel of wine into a barrel of sewage being the canonical example (‘canonical’ of course having an ecclesiastical flavor (and history) itself). This is supposedly Schopenhauer’s Law of Entropy, which got me very stuck on trying to remember which movie depicts a cute little girl very seriously saying “Schopenhauer?” until I finally figured out that I’d been thinking of Antonia's Line.
3. Addenda
a. CONCH-L
The CONCH-L mailing list (“a forum for informal discussions of molluscan biology, taxonomy, natural history, evolution, conservation, and collection related subjects”) appears to be alive and well. Members are at least occasionally referred to as “conchlers”. They are much cooler than me and I sincerely wish I wanted to be one of them when I grow up. A quick jaunt through the archives uncovers such marvelous phrases as:
“I've been trying to get my periwinkles straightened out” (Subject: Several items)
“I never meant to be the proponent of common names” (Subject: Re: Florida Cone)
and in a lively discussion on state snails that took place just last month:
“As of 27 Sept, California has a state slug (Ariolimax) and a state seashell (black abalone). What would be the best state slug for your state?” - David Campbell
“Hawaii doesn't have a state slug, but we have nine state snails designated as such in a state law enacted two years ago through the efforts of Dr. Norine Yeung at Bishop Museum and a horde of school kids who gave testimony before the Lege.” - Carl Christensen
New York unfortunately does not have an official state slug either, but we do have an official state fossil, Eurypterus remipes (aka sea scorpions). (And milk is our official state beverage. What.)
b. a crabbed specimen
“Some years later, I was looking for shells in a rocky area and I found my first Cymatium parthenopeum (von Salis, 1793) -- a dead and crabbed specimen. It was very exciting and we wanted to keep the shell, but I didn't want to kill the poor little animal. Well, I decided to prepare an aquarium to keep the hermit crab alive. For months I took care of the small crab and one day I found a dead crab body on the aquarium floor. Great! I could finally put the shell in my "collection." When I took the shell from the aquarium I sensed a fresh marine odor and I decided to cook the shell to clean it. The crab wasn't dead -- it just changed the old skin and I cooked it alive! It was a nasty shock! I didn't know about hermit crabs and their habits. Anyway, I put the shell in the collection.” - Jose Coltro, "Do You Really Know About Shells?"
c. Searchable Sea Literature
Richard King (of barnacle fame) also created Searchable Sea Literature, “a free online resource devoted to works by North American authors who write about the ocean” (“or the Great Lakes,” adds a later section on their broader mission).
tldr on Van Leeuwenhoek - when this draper decided he needed to be able to see his thread better, he got into lensmaking, invented better lenses, and became the first person to ever see bacteria and other microorganisms. He called them dierken, later translated as “animalcules” or “little animals”.
I just wanted to thank you for referencing, as no one ever seems to, one of my favorite movies, Antonia’s Line. 💖