The Slap and the Salamander

… “Why “The Slap and the Salamander”? My title comes from a passage in the autobiography of the sixteenth century goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. Let me quote it in full:

“When I was about five years old, my father happened to be in a basement chamber of our house, where they had been washing and where a good fire of oak logs was still burning; he had a viol in his hand and was playing and singing alone beside the fire. Happening to look into the fire, he spied in the middle of those most burning flames a little creature like a lizard, which was sporting in the core of the intensest coal. Becoming instantly aware of what the thing was, he had my sister and me called, and pointing it out to us children, gave me a great box on the ears, which caused me to howl and weep with all my might. Then he pacified me good humouredly, and spoke as follows: ‘My dear little boy, I am not striking you for any wrong you have done, but only to make you remember that the lizard which you see in the fire is a salamander, a creature which has never been seen before by anyone of whom we have credible information.’ So saying, he kissed me and gave me some pieces of money.”

Cellini and his father lived at a time when the salamander was believed to have magical powers, the most striking of which was its supposed ability to live in fires, and — should it so choose — to extinguish them. Pre-modern illustrations of what we today know is just a lizard-like amphibian often show the creature nestled happily in the midst of flames.

The reason I’ve used this dramatic incident from Cellini’s autobiography as the source of my title doesn’t stem from any sympathy for the superstitious belief that salamanders can flourish in fires. Clearly, they cannot. Thinking that they can probably came from those occasions when salamanders, which often hibernate in log piles, received a rude — most likely lethal — awakening when the logs were brought in for burning. I chose my title because of the way Cellini’s father, glimpsing something that he thought extraordinary, sought a powerful mnemonic to fix it in the mind. He acted as he did in order to ensure that his children took notice, that they saw and remembered what he was drawing their attention to.

Let me stress that I’m not in favour of his method. Hitting a small boy (it’s left unclear if his sister was also struck) is not something I condone. But the basic dynamic that Cellini describes so vividly in this passage is similar to the one underlying the essays in this book. They are on a wide range of subjects, but each has its origin in my glimpsing something I consider extraordinary — and that seems worth drawing to others’ attention. In the same kind of everyday surroundings as Cellini’s basement chamber, in the heart of our workaday world, there are quicksilver seams of what’s astonishing. Writing about them is my equivalent of Cellini senior’s slap. My intention is to provide a mnemonic — principally for myself, but I hope of interest to others too — a means of helping me to see what’s really there, and to remind me that the mundane is threaded through with mystery and miracle.

Instead of being charmed by some imagined mythical creature, the things that catch my eye are real, not fanciful inventions. They take all manner of forms: a condemned man’s last words; the challenge of writing about birds; how reading transforms a life; the imaginative possibilities implicit in a daily commute; what’s needed to kindle a sense of home and belonging; the otherness of things close at hand; what pencil marks left in a book can reveal; whether the memory of a face can be held pitch-perfect in the mind for years. Despite the variety, each of the essays stems from a moment of astonished noticing akin to what Cellini’s father must have felt when he gazed into the flames and saw something that struck him as out of the ordinary. But whereas he misread the death throes of a burning lizard as the fireproof cavorting of a legendary animal, I hope my readings point only to the nature of what’s actually there, without foisting any fabulations on it.

Although this little cameo from Cellini’s autobiography neatly sums up what lies at the root of my writing, using the slap and the salamander in this way is not without risks. To liken essays to slaps may make readers shy away from them. To draw a parallel between the topics I write about and a mythical creature may make it seem as if I’ve fallen prey to ludicrous credulity. These risks of misinterpretation notwithstanding, the slap and the salamander are such a close analogical fit for the nature of what follows that I couldn’t resist using them for my title. I’m only sorry that Cellini’s father hadn’t thought he’d seen a phoenix, for a bird would have fitted my purposes better than an amphibian. I’ve always been interested in birds, as their regular recurrence in these pages will attest. Cuckoos, corncrakes, starlings, curlews, long-tailed tits, and sparrowhawks serve as touchstones of meaning. This is far from being a work of ornithology, but birds form a leitmotif that I keep coming back to.

… The act of composing the essays is an attempt to keep my looking, thinking, and writing sharp — self-administered verbal slaps intended to stave off the dullness of quotidian perception. There are parallels, I think, between this and the use of the keisaku in Zen meditation. Just as this “awakening stick” is wielded in order to remedy sleepiness, or failing concentration, a blow from it helping to keep the mind directed in the desired direction, so what I write is intended to keep attention focused on aspects of life beyond the commonplace. In a passage that always reminds me of Zen meditation’s keisaku, Virginia Woolf famously asked what art the essayist can use to “sting us awake and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life.” “Stinging awake” was precisely the intention of Cellini’s father. Analogously — but without the violence — it is my intention in this book.