This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought - the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.

~ Michel Foucault, The Order of things

The Order of things

Ivo was sitting perfectly still in the meadow, observing the play of life around him. A pair of butterflies flitted from flower to flower, one alighting on his sleeve – either by mistake or curiosity; a small grey rabbit chewed on grasses, it's nervous nature manifest in the frequent pauses of activity; a burrowing beetle bumbled along the terrain, falling and recovering his step as he progressed towards his destination, wherever that might be. It seemed a very poetic setting to me. I wished I could paint it. Instead I chewed on my pen and thought of words that might begin to capture its beauty.

"No, it isn't like that at all," Ivo interjected, reading what I had written over my shoulder. "At any second a lizard might project its tongue to catch the butterfly, the rabbit might be eaten by a fox, and some wretched child might stomp on the beetle."

"Must you?" I complained, dropping my pen to underscore my frustration. "Must it always be death and destruction in your world?"

"It isn't death and destruction," he objected. "Those are your blinkered layman's terms that fail to account for the laws that govern nature. You mustn't adopt the tone of so-called 'civilized' man in your endeavor to portray the world around you."

"I'm not," I said, querulous as always when he accused me of falling victim to the narrow outlook enjoyed only by Westerners who lived a sheltered and wholly unnatural existence. "But your way of seeing things kills the beauty of it all. You must admit that a world in which life has a purpose is much more marketable than your scenario of brute survivalism."

"But each life does have a purpose – if only as a food source for another life. Perhaps it is your rigid definition of beauty that prohibits your finding it here in the complexity of life."

"There is no beauty in war and what you describe is a system in which all occupants are set against one another – each struggling to ensure its own survival at the expense of another. That's barbaric."

"That's reality," he countered. "How do you suppose we as a species gained so much power, or we as westerners acquired such wealth? Divine munificence? I can assure you that the exploitation of man by his fellow is what enabled us to get ahead in the game. Whether by position in the pecking order or cunning intelligence, surely you must acknowledge that those who climb to the top of the food chain do so at the expense of others."

"You cannot approve of that!" I cried.

"It is never a question of approval, it is the way of the world. Why is it so difficult for man to face what he is? We are no better than a pack of wolves or hyenas. Why must we hide behind these attempts to legislate suffering – death even! – out of the picture? If man is a superior being, created as they claim by the most supreme of beings, does it not stand to reason that he must rectify these natural tendencies to permit all members of the species to live as equals, each with the same rights and opportunities regardless of their given talents and dispositions?"

"Now you're taking the other side of the argument," I laughed.

"No, I am simply pointing out that if the order of things is so appalling to the human species, then more hypocrite they for doing nothing to change it."

"I reiterate, you have switched sides," I smiled at him. "You're starting to sound like a socialist. Or a believer."

He stiffened at the suggestion. "I do not concern myself with the politics of man as it is a futile expense of energy. And as for any 'God', thank you but I shall put my faith in science which is real and tangible."

"And also formed in the minds of men," I purred under my breath.

"What did you say?" He frowned, guessing correctly that it was nothing he would want to hear.

"Nothing," I smiled serenely at him. "Nothing." And I returned to my portrait of the scientist in his natural element.