Peripheral Visions

species evolving and the old shifting into new constellations. Even as we try to describe the properties of the system, new ones emerge—and so do new theories of the nature of unpredictability. Often enough the pattern is changed by human actions, but the results are not fully controlled by us. Natural systems, encountering change, often meet it in unexpected ways, seizing unvisualized opportunities. Every antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria, every rapidly varying virus, from flu to HIV, is affected by its environment, both in the short term and as lineages—and the immune systems of organisms, in their varying complexity, learn at the same time. The AIDS epidemic is not a demonstration that the natural world is inimical or judgmental but a demonstration of its essential wildness as the changing habits and interactions of human beings destroy some species and create new niches for others. When we think we understand what we are seeing, knowledge itself proves to have unexpected properties. Strangers meeting in a walled garden, whatever mental models we have of the place where we meet, these must include an acknowledgment of the unknown, a quality of tentativeness that allows us to feel our way into relationship. Yet without models, without metaphors and analogies—poetry and mathematics and experimental constructions like Biosphere 2—it is almost impossible to think about the planetary ecosystem as a whole, and thus impossible to care.
    The parable of the blind men and the elephant is endlessly repeated to illustrate the problem of different and partial points of view. Everyone knows it: one blind man is standing by the elephant’s leg. He feels it up and down and says, This is a creature rather like a pillar. Another one is off at the front, and he finds the trunk and says, No, it is rather like a snake. One finds the tail and reports that an elephant is rather like a rope. Each one has some sort of detailed knowledge based on contact with a part of the elephant, but they have no way of putting it together.
    From time to time I have played with the fantasy that if I were in that situation, with a group of blind men or women, each of whom had knowledge of one part of an elephant, I’d go out and find a small mammal, a puppy perhaps, and put it in turn on each one’s lap. I’d be able to say, That pillar you felt corresponds to this part, but now you can feel, because this creature is smaller, the relationship of legs and tail and nose and eyes and so on. All terrestrial mammals are constructed on the same ground plan, so there are very great similarities between a dog and an elephant, sufficient to use familiarity with the dog as a framework for putting together the specific knowledge that each person has of a part of the elephant to make a whole. There is a pattern that connects the dog and the elephant, largely the same pattern that connects the mother and the toad, the child and the sacrificed sheep.
    However many times we hear about that elephant with blind men groping from one end to the other, the elephant never moves. It is always, in the stories, an immobile elephant. A puppy, on the other hand, is likely to wiggle. At the same time that the ground plan of a mammal would be conveyed, giving a context for inserting specific specialized knowledge, a much more immediate sense of the aliveness of the creature would come across.
    A puppy would be a living metaphor. It is important to avoid the rhetoric of merely and not disparage the very complex truth that it would convey, for metaphors are what thought is all about. We use metaphors, consciously or unconsciously, all the time, so it is a matter of mental hygiene to take responsibility for these metaphors, to look at them carefully, to see how meanings slide from one to the other. Any metaphor is double-sided, offering both new insight and new confusion, but metaphors are not avoidable. By recognizing similarities, metaphors bring different kinds of knowledge together, but they also preserve the pockets of mystery that are part of the whole. The puppy is not fully known; it brings its ambiguities to the understanding of the elephant. Even the special strains of laboratory animals used to model human frailty are still largely mysterious.
    In the contemporary effort to attend to the relationship of our species to the biosphere, we are combining multiple metaphors, old and new. The dips and crashes of amphibian populations may look like a rather minor