Postscript to last entry: Biology Class

 

     Before leaving this topic, for the time being at least, another 'implication' of my initial wonder over the life at the pond. In 9th grade biology, we got a very large, very dead frog in formaldehyde to dissect. I still retain a photographic memory of that dead frog. I hated biology after that and it is still by far the science I am least drawn to. I often think of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in connection with biology. Again, an attitude perhaps, partially subconscious at that point as I no longer went to the pond and felt wonder over the life there, still originating from my childhood experience, conflicting with my earliest attitude toward life. It goes deeper, I think, than simply disliking dissection. Less like squeamishness and more like an intuition about alienation.

     I encountered the frogs at the pond in their own world. They leapt, hid, swam, hunted insects, basked in the sun. They were living participants in a larger order of life that had become fascinating to me. The frog in formaldehyde had been removed from that world. It had become an object for us. Its significance reduced its usefulness for instruction. That may have been what felt wrong. Not just that it was dead, had been killed. I encountered many dead animals without feeling this way. The frog had become strangely disconnected from its own life, alien. (Heidegger might speak here of the difference between encountering something as a being and encountering it as a resource or object of representation.) The frog had ceased to appear as a fellow creature, however strange, and had become merely a specimen. This frog has been killed. Its death is being treated as insignificant because it serves a purpose. I think the latter disturbed me more than the former. My reaction was perhaps not simply at killing but at a certain attitude toward what is killed. The frog becomes a means and its life disappears from view. So I wonder whether what troubled my 9^th grade self was not so much that the frog had been made dead but that it had been made strange. 

      I can’t help but see a connection here to my pond story. I know the boy with the syringe and the biology class are not the same. Cold brutality vs. some educational purpose. Yet both share, at some level, a tendency to regard the frog primarily as an object upon which something is done. That is perhaps why the memories go with each other. My memories point to an intuitive answer to what a living thing is and what claims living things make on us. I first encountered frogs as living beings I wondered over and not as objects of analysis or biological mechanisms. A living frog is familiar in a deep sense. You can watch it move, hide, breathe, leap. You can encounter it as a creature. The preserved frog is uncanny. It was physically present but the life that made it what it was was absent. With my childhood memories under the surface of my conscious response, I seemed to feel that the real frog was the one by the pond.

   What disturbed me about the biology class was not that it taught me something false about frogs. It was that the form of understanding it offered seemed disconnected from the form of attention through which frogs had first become meaningful to me. The living creature that had inspired wonder by the pond had become a specimen floating in formaldehyde. The dissection – about which I remember almost nothing – might have taught me something about anatomy, but it taught me nothing about the frog’s life. I learned that outside of school, outside of the lab.  Even at that age, though only dimly, I felt the tension between two attitudes toward the world: one grounded in wonder and attentive presence, the other in analysis and control. The question that has remained with me ever since is whether the former reveals something about reality no less important than the latter.

       I wonder whether the frog by the pond and the frog in formaldehyde are not really two separate memories. They seem almost like two symbolic moments in my biography: the first awakening a sense that life possesses an intrinsic meaning, the second confronting a picture of knowledge that appeared unable and unwilling to acknowledge that meaning. 

    That thought runs close to many of the themes I have thought about ever since: the difference between explanation and understanding, between analysis and wonder, between brute fact and meaning, between knowledge about something and knowledge based on familiarity of what it is. The frog in formaldehyde may have been one of my earliest encounters with that tension.