The Parrot and Descartes by Pauline Melville

Pauline Melville

The Parrot and Descartes

I had better tell you about the parrot.

In the Orinoco region, it is said, everything began with a wish and a smell. A hand stuck up out of the earth. An arm. The earth opened. A woman who was watching turned into a male parrot and began to scream a warning. Then all sorts of things happened. A man dropped a gourd of urine, scorching his wife’s flesh with it. Her skin was roasted. Her bones fell apart. Night burst over the world and something white like a capuchin monkey went running into the forest. That’s what they say. I wasn’t there myself.

Centuries later, still in a state of shock, the same parrot that had screamed the warning was discovered in a guava tree by a certain Sir Thomas Roe. Sir Thomas was an English courtier, known as Fat Thom, who travelled up the Orinoco in 1611. He pulled back some foliage and discovered the bird, amongst the leaves, head on one side, returning his gaze with curiosity. The parrot was green. At first Fat Thom thought that sunlight was falling on the bird’s head, then he saw that it had a golden beak. In other words the creature was a traditional plain and not particularly fancy South American parrot.

It was a shockingly easy capture. Fat Thom dispatched the parrot immediately to England as a wedding present for Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I, who was about to marry Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine in London.

This was the wedding at whose celebrations Shakespeare’s The Tempest was first performed. Having survived a rough journey and upset by the climate, to his horror, the parrot was forced to sit on a lady-in-waiting’s shoulder and watch one of the worst productions of The Tempest the world has ever seen. The parrot’s genetic construction, however much he willed it to the contrary, ensured that every word sank ineradicably into his memory. Sensibly, he refrained from ever repeating any of it – including the sotto voce ‘Oh no’ from the bard himself, as Ariel slipped on a piece of orange peel and skidded across the apron stage into the wedding party. How the scions of literature would have torn that bird wing from wing had they known that Shakespeare’s own voice was faithfully transcribed on his inch-long brain. He kept his counsel and tried to look dumb.

The parrot naturally developed a phobia about The Tempest. Why he should also have developed an irrational loathing of the philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes, is something I shall address later.

It was the parrot’s destiny to find himself in Prague in 1619 at the momentous time when science started to split from magic. How did he get there?

After watching that odious version of The Tempest, the parrot underwent a severe attack of the shits and members of the Royal Household preferred not to have him sitting on their shoulder. In disgrace, he made the journey in his cage when the Electress Palatine left England for Heidelberg. It was the 28th of April, 1613. The ship was bound for Flushing. A northerly breeze ruffled the bird’s feathers. The cold made him miserable.

He looked out bleakly over the cold, choppy waters as the royal party was brought to shore in a barge decked with crimson velvet. Twenty rowers kept in time to a band of musicians rowing in the stern. The parrot sulked. He was, however, cheered up by the rapturous welcome of the Dutch citizens whose applause and roars of approval he faithfully recorded and repeated out loud to himself on those occasions when his morale needed a boost, as it often did on this unasked for, cold-arsed tour of Europe. From Flushing, the party went to Rotterdam, then on to Delft and eventually Heidelberg.

Heidelberg suited the parrot. The castle was at the top of a steep ascent from the River Neckar. He besported himself in the formal gardens of the castle among magical curiosities such as the statue of Memnon, which emitted sounds when the sun’s rays struck it, and he recorded the pneumatically controlled speaking statues. He was carried around on the shoulder of Inigo Jones during the latter’s visit to the gardens and grottoes which were talked of as the eighth wonder of the world. Occasionally, he dipped his green tail feathers in the singing fountains. He listened half-heartedly to the debates of the Rosicrucians, Brotherhood of the Invisibles; yawned behind his wing at the arguments on Utopias and religious factionalism and disappeared into an ornamental box hedge whenever a troupe of actors arrived – even when it was known in advance that they were to perform an alchemical romance such as The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz and had no intention of doing The Tempest.

It was at Heidelberg that the parrot first came in contact with Christianity. He was naturally sceptical. Hearing the story of the Annunciation, he was astounded by the ignorance of his human captors in not realising that the news had clearly been brought to Mary by a Great Parrot. When he compared what he heard about angels with what he knew about parrots, it was resoundingly obvious to him that parrots were the superior species. What does an angel have that a parrot doesn’t? Multi-coloured wings? Forget it. Ability to speak in tongues? No bid. Have you ever seen an angel hold a great big mango in its claw and nibble at it? No. They sit there with their wings folded and an expression on their face like they just shit in their pants or something. The parrot preferred his own kind any day. Parrots fight and squabble and sulk and drop bits of food on the floor like normal people. Parrots live in the real world. They get drunk on the fumes from rotten fruit and fermented corn. Bravo and brilliante for us, cried the bird.

And so, at the University of Heidelberg, where strange and exciting influences, both mechanical and magical, developed rapidly during the reign of Elizabeth and Frederick, the parrot passed a time of such intellectual stimulus that he rarely gave a thought to the quarrelling rapids, surging rivers and thorny bushes of his own South American continent.

Despite a happy and settled life in Heidelberg, the October of 1619 found Monsignor Parrot (he had adopted a continental handle) in a covered cage, travelling clandestinely to Prague. When the cover was whipped off, he discovered that he had been the only one of the Royal Household travelling clandestinely and that everyone else was bowing and waving out of the carriage windows to the crowd, as the procession of magnificently embossed coaches swung giddily over the Vtlava Bridge, along the cobbled path and through the stone-jawed entrance to Prague Castle.

The Protestant Elector and Electress Palatine, whose wedding gift he was, had become the Winter King and Queen of Bohemia – a name coined by the Jesuits who said, quite accurately, that the couple would vanish with the winter snows, which, after the Catholic Hapsburgs attacked in the Battle of the White Mountain, they did.

However, before the Hapsburg attack, the wondrous city of Prague was host to every sort of cabbalist, alchemist and astronomer and housed the most up-to-date artistic and scientific collections. The parrot inspected the paintings of Arcimboldo the Marvellous (who had also been the Master of Masquerade) which showed men made of vegetables, tin pots and books. Tycho Brahe had discovered the fixed position of seven hundred stars and Johann Kepler raced to discover the periodic laws of planets. The Castle of Prague, through which the parrot fluttered nonchalantly, accustoming himself to his new habitat, contained Rudolfo’s Room of Wonders and the wooden floor of the Great Hall thrummed with men walking up and down, arguing and debating. The room was lined with books, maps, globes and charts. Men discussed sea routes, navigational passages and astronomy. Ideas were propounded which made men’s mouths dry with excitement and fear, giving them palpitations and erections, often at the same time.

However, the servants in the great gloomy castle inexplicably took against the exotic pets that had arrived with Elizabeth of Bohemia, whose foreign dress they regarded with suspicion. A monkey frightened a waiting-man by leaping on his shoulder. Food was deliberately tipped off the plate before it could be served. A serving girl threw cake at the parrot.

It all ended in a terrible scream.

When exactly, at what precise moment, did the parrot scream? Historians have battled for doctorates over both the cause and the timing of the scream, which was only the second time that the parrot had found it necessary to utter such a cry of warning. There has been as much scholastic dispute generated by that shriek as there has over the snort of the Nilus camel.

Some scholars say this:

Whilst unpacking the royal baggage, a serving-girl looked round for a place to put the crystal ship that was the christening gift from Prince Maurice of Orange to the firstborn son of Elizabeth and Frederick of Bohemia, the infant Prince Henry. The parrot cast one eye on the glittering boat and let out a prophetic scream that reverberated through the castle foretelling the dreadful end that was to befall the young prince.

What was this dreadful event? Well, years later, in exile in The Hague, the young Prince Henry and Frederick his father rode one winter’s day to the Zuider Zee to see two ships from the Caribbean brought there by Dutch pirates. They wanted to see the booty. All the way there, the horses slipped and slid sideways along the icy roads.

It was dark when they arrived in the evening. Freezing mists caused chaos as oarsmen in soaking woollen mittens tried to outmanoeuvre each other to find the best position for boarding the galleons which towered overhead. There were shouts and oaths and the unstable light of lanterns through fog. Two small boats crashed in the dark. It was not until morning, in a grey lake bobbing with frozen horses’ heads, that they found the corpse of young Prince Henry. The galleon was covered in ice, his body was entangled in the rigging. His collar and ruff lay stiffly under layers of hoar frost and his cheek, frozen to the mast, seemed in its icy transparency to have turned to crystal.

A life is always slung between two images, not two dates. Find the right image and you can foretell the manner of death. They say that the parrot foresaw the death as soon as he clapped eyes on the crystal ship, the sight of which caused him to shriek. Not a bit of it.

Parrots are not well known for their prophetic abilities. They live for hundreds of years and are the owners of exceedingly good memories, but they cannot think forward for more than two ticks.

The next theory of the scream.

As is always the case in times of upheaval, a troupe of actors was wandering around Prague, looking for digs. The company was led by one Robert Browne. They had turned up to spend the winter in Prague after a long European tour which included moderately successful performances at the Frankfurt Fair and Heidelberg. The actors mooched around town looking for the best eating-houses and arguing over whether it was better to stick to their production of The Tempest or to introduce into the repertoire The History of Susanna, and, of course, fighting over who was to play what in which.

Could it have been a certain conversation, overheard by the bird, that caused its cry of distress?

Just before supper in the Lesser Hall, the parrot was seated on the stone sill of one of the slit windows. Beneath him, Robert Browne, manager of the troupe, was listening to an actor who thought he should be playing the part of Trinculo in The Tempest:

‘Robert. I’ve had the most wonderful idea for Trinculo. If you will let me play the part, I thought it would be a good idea for Trinculo to make his first entrance with a parrot on his head.’

‘I think not, Arthur. I don’t want anything to distract from the text at that point.’

‘It would be very realistic. We could borrow the parrot that belongs to the Queen’s household.’

‘The theatre is supposed to be a garden of illusion. Anything real would be a distraction.’

‘It would get a laugh.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

Did the parrot emit his famous scream at this point? Not at all.

Rather, he emitted a disgusted groan that he had picked up from a crowd disappointed at the last-minute cancellation of a public execution. He managed to fly, notwithstanding, to the safety of the rafters, lest his greatest fear be realised and he be put in their production of The Tempest.

Just at this point, history intervened and saved him from one torment only to present him with another.

Unbeknownst to the Winter King and Queen or any of their household, on the cold night of November 10th, 1619, warmed by a German stove in a small house on the banks of the Danube, a young man slept and dreamed that mathematics was the sole key to the understanding of nature. His name was René Descartes. He spent all – or almost all – that winter meditating on this notion. Then came the news that the Duke of Bavaria and his Catholic army were about to march on the Winter King and Queen of Bohemia. Curiosity caused René Descartes, educated by Jesuits, to re-join his old regiment in order to see a little action.

And so it came about that Descartes, innocent symbol of reason, skulking in the back rows of the soldiery, watched and participated as little as possible as the Battle of the White Mountain was fought outside Prague. The battle put to flight the newly ensconced King and Queen, smashed the spirit of Bohemia and destroyed the unity of magic and science which had developed as one under the liberal auspices of Rudolfo and his successors. Magic and technology were, from then on, to go their separate ways.

Elizabeth and Frederick piled what they could into two carriages: children, a few staff, monkeys, the crystal christening gift and other sundry valuables. In the whirlwind rush to leave, they left behind, by accident, the Order of the Garter and the parrot.

Meanwhile, among the sweaty sergeants, bone-aching mercenaries and big-chinned Hapsburgs, marched one mathematically inclined soldier with a forgettable face, thoughtfully chewing on a piece of dried beef. The raggle-taggle, victorious army hobbled up the steep road leading to the castle walls. At the same time, a servant of the fleeing royals, who had been sent back to retrieve the Order of the Garter, but unable to find it, had grabbed the parrot in lieu, came running down through the ranks of the ascending army, holding the parrot aloft like a green-and-gold banner.

And so, for a brief moment, they came face to face. The master of rationalism and the parrot.

The parrot screamed and it was indeed the same disturbing and terrifying sound that had rent the air in the Orinoco basin when the earth split and a hand poked out and a white figure ran into the forest. The sound reverberated for days along the banks of the Vtlava, making the citizens of Prague shake their heads and wiggle their fingers around in their ears.

And it was thus that the man whose hidden presence in the conquering army might well have been their secret weapon, the man who contributed to the rout of a certain sort of imagination, the man who later claimed that common sense was the prime mover of men, the man who thought he was there because he was, or who was there because he thought he was, wandered into Prague in search of nothing more profound than a pork sausage on rye with mustard.

Thus was reason born, by chance, out of the dark disorder of war. The parrot had intuitively recognised the danger of a man who believed that animals were automatons and that parrots ceased to exist when they were asleep. But reason tells us reason has its limits, thought the parrot. And he was so delighted with his own wit, that he let out an involuntary laugh which had the servants searching all night for an intruder.

The parrot, ruffled by his moves around Europe, finally settled into unhappy exile with the rest of Elizabeth and Frederick’s household in an apartment in The Hague which belonged to Prince Henry of Nassau. Later, the exiled family moved into a draughty and gloomy palace on the river near Leiden.

The Dutch phase of the parrot’s life proceeded uneventfully until the day in 1640 when, out of the blue, there was a loud knocking on the palace doors. Who should be standing on the doorstep, but René Descartes. Fortunately, the parrot’s cage was covered and he slept with his beak tucked under his wing, unaware that his greatest nightmare (not including The Tempest) had sidled into the palace to discuss mathematics with the young princesses. When he awoke to see the unwelcome visitor he gave a dismal squawk. Nobody heeded his warning, although from around then mind and matter started to divide, body and soul to separate and science and magic to march in opposite directions.

The princesses of the household were shabby, handsome and gifted. The eldest, Princess Elizabeth, studied Cartesian philosophy until her nose went red. Descartes himself said that he had never met anyone who had such a grasp of his writings. However, soon she fell in love and had an affair with one of her ladies-in-waiting and Descartes sought solace (and financial reward) at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden. Despite himself, the parrot had picked up the rudiments of analytic geometry. He secretly took emetics to rid himself of the affliction. On foggy nights, before his cage was covered, he asked himself where rationalism had come from.

During this time the bird was lost in thought. What he thought about was the written word. Books had become the truth. The written word had become proof. Laws were built on books which contained precedent. People were killed in their name. Confession, word of mouth, rumour, gossip, chattiness and oratory had all lost their place in the hierarchy of power. Passports verified. Documents condemned. Signatures empowered. Books were the storage place of memory. Books were written to contradict other books.

The parrot, a natural representative of the oral tradition, began to sob. He used the sob he had heard in Lisbon of a young girl whose lover had been drowned at sea. He was fed up with the cobbled streets and castles, grey, snowy skies and the written word. He began to long for the chattering waters of the Essequibo River, the hot humid smells of the bush and the celestial choirs of humming howler monkeys. As solace, he often reproduced for himself the deep silence of the forests before words swarmed over the earth like cushi ants, the piccolo fluting call of a certain bird and the rushing of a thousand rivers over the rocks. He was unspeakably homesick.

And so when two of the sons of Frederick and Elizabeth, named Rupert and Maurice, discussed venturing to the Caribbean to seek elephants and rose-emeralds, the parrot, who was now allowed the freedom of the palace, decided to stow away.

In 1649, The Antelope was rigged up in the port of Rotterdam. Two years later the ship set sail with the parrot hiding in the cook’s cabin where he dined to the sound of rushing waters and creaking timbers. Near the Virgin Islands, a squalling hurricane upturned the ship. Rupert landed but Maurice disappeared. As soon as the parrot felt the familiar, warm uplift of air over the Orinoco he relaxed on the wind and allowed the sun-heated breezes to carry him east. He found his way to a region, now known as Berbice, and for a long time, kept his head down in a mango tree, trying to make sense of his experiences.

The parrot had brought back with him:

a) Shakespeare’s voice.

b) The tumultuous roar of a Dutch crowd on April 28th, 1613.

c) The sound of René Descartes scraping his plate with his spoon.

d) The scratch of Rembrandt’s etching needle.

e) The heartrending sob of the Portuguese girl whose lover had drowned.

None of it was any use except the sob.

It was 1652. The parrot was almost dozing off when he heard two men conversing beneath where he sat in a tree. The speaker was one Père de la Borde, a Jesuit priest. He was talking to a Dutch merchant.

‘The Indians are dreamy and melancholy. They sit silent for whole days at a time. They don’t care about the past or the future. They get angry when I try to explain to them about Paradise because they do not want to have to die before they go there. I can’t seem to persuade them to leave their present goods for future ones. They know nothing about either ambition or anxiety. What can I do? They are lazy, inconstant and wayward.’

He was addressing his remarks to Abraham van Peere, a tall Dutchman with an emaciated face, wrinkled hands and a spattering of freckles, who cursed the muddy banks on which they stood. Mould exploded in spectra of colour on his leather uppers. Rottenness ambushed his nose. He had arrived from Holland to build a life as a merchant. The priest continued.

‘I shall probably be accompanying Père Meland, another Jesuit brother, to Santa Fe de Bogota,’ continued Père de la Borde. ‘He is a fine man. He had correspondence with René Descartes, the philosopher mathematician who died in Sweden recently. Père Meland is going to introduce the ideas of Descartes in a series of lectures at the Jesuit College there. Descartes’ work Meditations which he converted to scholastic form will be the main topic of his lectures.

Ah well, how were those two men to distinguish one more parrot scream amongst the thousands that reverberate through the Orinoco basin and the Amazonas.

Time passed. It was clear to the bird that ideas from Europe were gaining ground in his own territory. This realisation was reinforced when a chartered vessel from New York arrived in Georgetown. It was now the year 1800. The parrot watched suspiciously as a cargo of canvas palaces and painted forests, cardboard trees, crowns, daggers, sceptres and chains was unloaded. The strolling players had arrived from North America, having toured the islands first.

Intimations of predestination should have warned the parrot to steer clear. His appetite for fruit, however, overcame his trepidation. They fed him. The actors, a group of bearded German Jews who also played the female roles, began to rehearse as they chewed on mango seeds and cast them aside. On the first night of their concert party, a furious fight broke out between the ‘female’ singers and the orchestra. The bearded actresses hitched up their gowns over their hips, revealing filthy pantaloons, and began a regular boxing match. It was decided to dispense with the orchestra. They would do excerpts from The Tempest.

The parrot was snatched once more from a real tree and chained to a cardboard one. Every now and then he released his sob. As Prospero came forward to deliver his final epilogue, the bemused audiences heard two voices speaking at once:

… now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so, that it assaults

Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon’d be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

At the end of the tour in 1801, the parrot, wings clipped and wearing an ornamental chain on one leg, set off wearily for a new life in North America.