The lungs of butterflies are contained within a narrow and rigid framework. In order to fly, these creatures need an additional respiratory surface, which the extended wings provide, and thus serve to absorb oxygen and light. Both are more easily obtained the darker the wings are. I agree. But once more, why the patterns? Plain wings, of the shade suitable to supply the insect with energy, would serve as well or better and I dare say with greater economy of effort. Of course it is affirmed that the striking or soft colours are useful in both cases: the soft colours to make the insect invisible and confuse it with its background, the striking colours to act as obliterating colouring, that is to dazzle the retina of a predator just that fraction of a second which is enough to ensure the escape of the insect. But the patterns are not explained by this. A vivid colour, all over, without a pattern, that the escaping insect shows and then immediately hides, as in some grasshoppers, would serve equally well. For these reasons I dare to advance the opinion that the patterns and the colours of the butterfly wings are insects’ ‘‘paintings”’.
However I do not maintain that a Lepidopter has anything in common with an artist. Still less do I say that a butterfly paints its wings or that one of its far-off ancestors conceived or willed this form at some point in the evolutionary process and that they have been the same ever since and will be transmitted unchanged for many centuries to come. Even using the word “ painting” for the fixed positioning of the small scales that make up the wing is a flagrant abuse of language. I must not overlook any of the points in which a painting differs from a butterfly-wing. But I notice—this is my task— that these differences are just those that separate insect and man, so in a certain sense they are expected and reinforce the view that the argument is well founded. Here are two kinds of surfaces both having coloured parts, brilliant or soft, forming a whole. The two things moreover are both equally useless. They cannot really be compared: nevertheless they are homologues.
The wings owe nothing to the intervention of consciousness, of will, of free choice; they arise through the working of uncontrollable animal mechanism. There are patterns but no plan. They are always the same and have been for thousands of years in all the members of the same species: they seem to be those things that would have been created had some ideally perspicacious spirit, in the undeviating insect world, made in advance the objects which were going to become man’s paintings.
On the other hand, the other surfaces—the paintings —are original things by very definition. The artist’s personality is shown in every one of them. He does not carry them about with him as he does his finger nails, his hair or eyes (but he has colour in his eyes and hair). He alone is responsible for every shade and every stroke in the picture. If a free and capable being, able to work outside himself, started spreading colours on a surface so as to get something like a butterfly’s wing and if you allowed him to use any colour he liked, so as to get the best possible result, he would invent painting, more precisely abstract painting, the geometrical patterns of baskets, pottery and embroidery.
To sum up, the theory leads one to believe that there is with living creatures in general a tendency to produce coloured designs and this “tendency” shows itself particularly in the two evolutionary extremes—a butterfly’s wings and an artist’s paintings. I would not dream of denying—indeed I am stressing—the vast differences which separate the painting and the wing, but I think that these differences are already implied in the all too evident fact that the wing is part of the butterfly whereas the artist invents and carries out his picture himself. It follows from this statement that it becomes interesting to try and determine the singular reasons for man’s achieving a very different destiny from that of other living beings.
This is usually explained by man’s erect posture and the fact that his thumb is opposite his fingers. Neither one of these reasons is completely convincing. ‘The erect posture has not helped the penguin or the kangaroo very much. The lobster and crab do not make much use of their claws to hold before their eyes objects arousing their curiosity. As for monkeys, who stand up when they want to and have the use of four hands, it is clear that they have not profited much from this plurality and abundance. It would seem that the advantages put forward are less decisive than is claimed.
Perhaps the approach to these problems could be helped by making a more exact record of what is gained and what is lost. Man, by assuming the erect posture, sacrificed his running speed and thus became an easier prey for swift predators. On the other hand he liberated his front limbs. Thereafter the conception of the hand became possible. But the selection of the hand with its opposing thumb and gripping fingers was once more to sacrifice some possible alternative such as the hoof or claw. Each time it was as if man “chose” a solution which was at first harmful to him, but which was soon to reward him with additional powers. Man seems to have advanced by a series of successive eliminations. In a way he impoverishes himself and denudes himself to the extreme, finally to gain a greater diversity of useful gifts. At the same time he has “avoided” any too specialised organ, such as the wing or fin, wonderfully adapted as they are, but only to one use. The fur-covered mammal has ‘“‘invented”’ its fleece to protect itself from the cold; the crab its carapace and the mollusc its shell for protection against predators. Man has invented clothes and armour, which he can take off and put on according to his need, always for the purpose of protection or self-defence. His policy is therefore to avoid any organic solutions which would involve a modification of the body, for they have the fault of being permanent and incompatible with each other. Man makes solutions which are external and, as a result, capable of an infinite number of combinations. This is a general principle. The crayfish “chooses” its armour-plating, the bird its wings; but there are no flying crustaceans nor any armour-plated birds, whereas, for man, the construction of an armoured aeroplane—a flying fortress— presents only one difficulty to be overcome, a new relationship to be established between the total weight of the machine and the power of the engine which drives it. The electric eel “invents” its electric discharge and equips itself with a sort of internal accumulator. Man makes use of virtually all the possible applications of electricity.
Another example and not the least. Man does not have that faculty possessed by bees and ants of being able to orientate himself practically infallibly. He has invented for his own use a compass independent of his body, which does not simply help him find his own home but gives him direction over the entire planet.
There is no need to labour the point. It is well known that man differs from animals in that he makes tools, weapons and machines. He has no claws or talons nor natural suckers, but if he needs them he manufactures as many of them, and makes them as powerful and as intricate, as he wants: he sets himself up with a mass of varying articles which he possesses all at the same time and which he can use in turn.
We are, however, dealing with insects. The intention of this brief digression is to show how commonplace my observation is in as much as it does not extend the case beyond the objectives already stated, ones which, I am afraid, are more obvious and superfluous than paradoxical and controversial. However, the opposite happens as soon as I try to suggest the least connection between a butterfly’s wings and an artist’s paintings, although the relationship is the same. On reflection it is no more and no less acceptable in either case. The only difference that I can perceive between the two series of analogies is that the first concerns organs, machines or useful functions: the second superfluities the usefulness of which is obvious.
I have used butterfly’s wings as a special example. I could have chosen others from all the spheres of nature and might have given preference to crystals, flowers, the skins of certain mammals or the scales of numerous fish. These recurring patterns—for the most part it is not a question of anything more than just regularities—simply reveal the principle of distribution which governs living matter. Examples are the allotment of seeds in a pod or the shape of a starfish. Other schemes progress in a modulated rhythm, as the spiral of a shellfish. ‘These geometric patterns, which are easily discerned by man, please him and he is led to speak of beauty. In fact he is only noting equilibrium or symmetry, that is to say, neat arrangements. If the butterfly’s wings seem to present a special case, it is, I think, for two reasons: in the first place the outline and the pattern would appear under the circumstances to be a superfluous ornament which has been arbitrarily added to the organism of the insect and would not appear to be an essential part of its make-up; further, the patterns are often very complex, whereas the symmetry of butterflies—strictly lateral —is reduced to the most simple shape possible—as is the case with the human body. Geometry and simple regularity seem in this case to give way to a richer composition, free of the laws which govern the balanced economy of living matter.
Can we then speak of art? In the human sense of the word, certainly not. But a new principle has appeared over and above geometry. I will explain what I mean. Geometry is a constant principle of the universe, and the universe has examples of it at far from elementary levels. Life, in a way which one might call altogether abstract, at times, develops what could be called polyhedral structures, similar to the perfect bodies which Plato, in the Timaeus, regards as the only things worthy of divine construction.
The Radiolaria are remarkable collections of spherical bodies formed of regular polygons united to each other. Slender spikes radiate from the centres or the angles of the polygons, like rays of light frozen into immobility. In his work E. Hackel¹ alone amassed several hundred types. I shall only quote two examples of these, chosen from among the most simple because they seemed to be complementary to each other. The Circorrhegma dodecahedra (Hackel plate 117, 2) with twelve faces and twenty spines and the Circogonia isocahedra (Hickel plate 117, 1) which has inversely twenty faces and twelve spines. From the depths of the warm seas they appear like a set of delicate tiny models predating the ideal solids deduced by Plato, who knew nothing of these natural prototypes.
At times the central sphere, as is the case with Tuscaretta globosa, remains empty and uninhabited, the eight animalcules which secreted it in common remain suspended from the perforated surface spread out like the eight corners of a phantom cube.
There exists, therefore, a geometry which derives more spontaneously from life and which is considerably more developed than that which is apparent in a spider’s web, a ring of petals, the distribution of leaves on a stem, the spiral on a seashell or the shell of a sea-urchin. I do not intend to enthuse over the alleged wonders of nature.
On the contrary it seems to me completely natural, or rather, more probable and foreseeable than the contrary, that the intelligence of mankind and the purely biological phenomena of calcification among the lower orders of life have, in spite of the abyss which separates them, a deep-seated relationship. However I must stress one point: however many varieties of Radiolaria there are, it is the organic geometry which, in spite of the flexibility of sap and lymph, is important and which shows itself to be limited and unchangeable, without possibilities of development. And it is rigorous reasoning that enables man even to go as far as to operate in a medium without properties and to create there logical entities which the imagination itself cannot represent and which can only be understood on a mathematical basis. Taking the Radiolarians, with their symmetrical forms unchanged since their origin, as prototypes, I am thinking of an endless series of models made of string and wire. Man needs these puzzling fragile constructions in order to make for himself a very rough and almost symbolic representation of the flow of the abstract surfaces which his mind is able to conceive.
The design of corollas and the rhythms of growth are perhaps in accordance with the Law of Golden Proportion, of which the Pythagoreans made such great play. Why should it not be so? The Golden Number is a formula for the perfect use of resources. The symmetrical placing of the Radiolaria spines can be seen to end by giving a creature in which the available resources are used to the best advantage. A simple law of inertia should be able to explain this so economical use of resources. If sand is poured, it forms a regular shape, a cone, which, barring external intervention, keeps the form which its weight gives it. Alain expressed no surprise at the great age of the pyramids: monuments - which, when they were built, were already the natural shape they would be in decay.
Let us return to the butterfly’s wings with their spots, streaks and piping, crescents, seed-like dotting, cameos, scalloping and ocelli vying one with the other, in the display of designs which, on the single wing, in this case owe nothing to symmetry. There is no less fantasy, richness and variety in the colours. What is more, they are not just flat colours. They are greatly enriched by various physical qualities which make them deep or glistening, metallic or moiré. Thus there is the black or brownish velvet of the great ornithoptera, the electric blue of the Morpho, the fiery reflections and variegation of the Uranus and Arcturus, the enamel, mother-of-pearl and mica of numerous species, the light which flickers on the wing whenever the grains which make up the scales have a different index of refraction. Their shapes are elongated, jagged, crenellated, slashed or whole. The wings of Actias are prolonged by its enormous stiff tails which appear to be starched. With the Hypolycena’ they are thin, downy and rolled up in coils. In this mass of shapes, patterns and colours, there is an excess all the more surprising in that it appears to be in complete contradiction to the consistent discipline which has just been operating to make the best distribution of a valuable jelly quivering with life.
This consistency would doubtless give rise to harmony, but only because harmony is a property common to mathematics and aesthetics. A rose window in the form of a corolla is drawn by a compass. In speaking here of beauty man equivocates and is satisfied to designate by an all-embracing and ambiguous name a pleasure which, springs directly from a harmonious division of space. He might with as much right (and lack of propriety) speak of justice.
On the other hand, with butterflies’ wings there is a genuine beauty in the broadest sense of the word. They are a biological creation combining most pleasing shapes and colours which cannot be wholly explained in practical terms. Therefore it is reasonable to speak of art, and more particularly the art which concerns itself with the relationships of shapes and colours, that is, painting. Of course it is important to remember the differences which I have stressed above: on the one hand the external pictures resulting from the inventions of a free imagination; on the other hand, the internal and unalterable pictures, created without conscious invention by the change taking place inside the chrysalis, when the organs and tissues of the caterpillar dissolve and rearrange themselves into the wing of the particular species. The individual has no choice in this matter. Here each species is the artist. The picture, repeated indefinitely, gives all the individual members of each species the livery which they bear in perpetuity from season to season.
Samivel described the insect as an “introverted technician”. He says that they have become “their own machinery, forming the details of their own structure with a view to a particular use”.¹
Thus, by the simple fact that the function creates the organ, what was primitively merely a paw has become “a fin, a weapon, a musical instrument, a burrowing shovel, a spring mechanism, etc.". It would be easier to lengthen this list than to exhaust its possibilities. By contrast in this field which is by definition characterised by superfluity it cannot be a question of the function creating the organ. With butterflies I imagine everyone would be willing to agree that flight developed the wing, but it could just as easily have developed a transparent wing like the dragonfly’s or the bumble-bee’s, the strong wing of the stag-beetle, the cockchafer, the water-beetle or the rose-chafer’ which, with a minimum lifting-surface, carries a far heavier body. Besides in this last case the concealment of the closed, supple wing under its sheath contrasts with the “vanity” of the butterfly who plays with his wings, slowly opening and closing them on a flower, by a stretch of water or on the pebbles of the road.
Therefore, if so many insects appear to be introverted technicians, might not the Lepidoptera be the artists, the introverted painters. In the same way that the others transform parts of their own organisms into specialised tools—hooks, knives, pincers, scissors, borers, syringes or siphons—they, by means of the incredible chemistry of necrosis, produce on themselves a rich and distinctive display less like a picture than a flag or armorial bearings, but armorial bearings so rich and detailed that they suggest not so much heraldry in the human world as painting.
In my opinion this unusual proposition comes up against two major difficulties: the first is that stated by Samivel in connection with the tools and utensils so perfectly adapted by these introverted engineers, when it comes to supposing them created by the insect technician’s decision, even a confused one, a choice, however rudimentary, or a foresight, however obscure. “It is hard to believe that creatures who are in the majority of cases incapable of modifying their own behaviour would be endowed with the extraordinary power of shaping their own structure.” From this he derived a hypothesis which is, to say the least, daring. If one systematically neglects in this instance the theory of natural selection, is it possible to imagine that insects or certain types of insects, ants for example, were, at some given time, intelligent beings, in the sense which we give this term, that is, endowed with a mystique, philosophy, art, science and technology? And that after a mysterious avatar—who knows?—perhaps as the result of a voluntary physiological conditioning brought about by methods similar to ours but further perfected, they have become, by virtue of an unalterable consequence, what they now are, that is to say, machines for living, nothing more, nothing less??
This problem of initiative in the construction of their own selves, the problem of the original decision, even in the weakest sense of that term, would, if it were just a question of any number of purely mechanical consequences brought on by the repetition of one phenomenon at the cellular level, still remain mystifying in the extreme; in fact, unfathomable, to a point where it is perhaps ridiculous to imagine it, because it has no meaning when applied to man. Man’s progress is in the opposite direction, for he, who can fabricate everything externally, is, by way of compensation, virtually unable to modify his own organic structure.
The second great objection arises from the assimilation of useful qualities and attributes of no use. A doctrine of natural selection readily admits or even postulates the pliability which produces the fin of the Hydrophilus, the mantis’s jagged harpoon and the mole-cricket’s excavator, but it refuses by the very nature of its theories to conceive of a similar mechanism for the pattern and colour of the butterfly’s wings. The opposition between the necessary and the superfluous seems here to be decisive. It is argued that anything serving no definite purpose cannot be a determinant. Any non-utility of characteristics cannot be admitted. In other words anything which is superfluous is a priori inexplicable.
I maintain that there is here what I call a “deep anthropomorphism". At all costs people want to avoid talking of art or beauty, blazonry or pictures when considering butterflies’ wings, for these are words which only make sense in relation to human emotions or to human history and little does it matter that anyone who uses these words in this connection takes care to emphasise the differences and contrasts. To avoid the forbidden words it is commonly held preferable to exalt the concept of utility, that is, of survival, as all-important. However, if we stop projecting our human reactions on to the non-human part of nature we find that an immense squandering of resources is the rule there. It is a world where there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to indicate that an ostentatious outpouring of resources, with no intelligible end, may not be a wider and more universal law than the strict vital interest, the imperative of the survival of the species.
Thus man remains convinced that nature does nothing in vain. Just about everything in it suggests the opposite, but he does not cease to believe, if not in the best of all possible worlds, at least in one with the least loss of energy. For me it seems dangerous to accept such a theory.
I wonder at least to what criterion it would be legitimate to resort, to give here a clearly defined meaning for the expression “in vain’’. In the last analysis, I fear, the discrimination is purely human. Herein lies, I suspect, the final anthropomorphic error. Indeed, I have no doubt that it is I who will be accused of delirious anthropomorphism: what could be more ridiculous than to dare compare butterflies’ wings to the works of painters?
However, it could be that my system of references might show itself to be the least distorted of all: for it also provides a presentation of a painter’s pictures as the human equivalent of the butterflies’ wings.
What could such a relationship indicate if not that there appears to be an autonomous aesthetic force in the world of biology in general? This force, doubtless inexplicable, shows the impossibility of going any further in this progression of causes and effects, in certain cases a final goal just as imperious and tyrannical as the sacred survival of the species. It happens that, in different conditions, the most divergent paths lead to the same end: the interplay of shapes and colours. Both men and insects, knowing nothing of their hidden docility, obey the same organic law of the universe. This law, like the law of economics, wherever it reigns, reigns absolutely, without any half-measures, at least when there are no forces to counteract it. A butterfly, which has no consciousness or insight, would not be able to make for itself a wing that was ugly, for it has no power to erect obstacles to this development of forces which produce harmony and beauty naturally. This is too little: I should have said to this natural expansion by which harmony and beauty define themselves, because man (an integral part of this same nature) necessarily perceives harmony and beauty, in conformity with that great canvas which determines the shape of crystals, shells, leaves and corollas and which cunningly suggests to him the relationships wherein he imagines, not without some presumption, that he is exercising his personal genius.
Man is free, clumsy, and wicked on occasions. Without knowing anything about it, and as the result of an incomprehensible metamorphosis, the Lepidopter makes gaily-coloured wings out of the dull paste with which the pupa is filled. Between himself and his work man sets the risk of a decision taken deliberately which may be of doubtful value. He also has to carry out what he has conceived. He calculates and then makes it real.
Each time he risks making a mistake. His reward is to be the true creator of his pictures; but on the other hand an unsuitable choice or bad workmanship by this one fallible being can result in bad painting. It is a far cry from the age-old norms, whose works, being repeated indefinitely, could not help but have a cold and unchangeable perfection about them.
The Mask of Medusa
Roger Caillois
WHETHER THE WINGS of butterflies do, or do not seem to be paintings, it must be admitted that history shows no painter with a special preference for these shimmering surfaces, where his work has already been done. On the contrary painters seem to avoid them, and never reproduce a butterfly-wing except as a minor element in a still life. For instance, they never take part of a wing of some butterfly, enlarge it to the full size of their canvas, all the time most carefully keeping the wing’s pattern, proportions and colours. I put this down without comment. I suspect, however, that this arises from the fact that the artist already sees the wing as a picture and that to paint it would not be to paint a picture but to duplicate an existing work.
[From the next chapter NATURA PICTRIX]
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