The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There Is No Dead Matter

No one knows how to distinguish living from non-living matter. At the boundary between them the A-level “7 Characteristics of Life” break down. Viruses, some organic chemical compounds, prions, perhaps some bacteria, among other things don’t fit neatly into the biological vs. merely material categorisation. We are accustomed to thinking in Darwinian terms: Mind, we presume, emerges in an evolutionary process from matter.

But the 19th century American philosopher C. S. Peirce audaciously suggested that we have it the wrong way round. For Peirce, matter is a degraded, and therefore a potentially upgradable, form of mind or spirit. Spirit and matter transform mutually into each other; they are alternative forms of that which is.* The 17th century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, would have felt comfortable with Peirce in his intimations of a world imbued with the divine.

Bruno Schulz likely never heard of Peirce, but he would have known about Spinoza in his Galician Jewish community; and he certainly subscribed to Peirce’s philosophy. “There is no dead matter…lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life,” one of Schultz's characters announces. It is not just life which is deserving of respect in The Street of Crocodiles but literally everything that exists, all matter sentient or inert. Both these forms are temporary; each is necessary for the other, and for the emergence of new forms which are at any moment inconceivable. Such unexpected forms are nonetheless inherent in the infinite possibilities in matter.

This attitude has profound consequences. Nothing, for example, is undeserving of one’s attention. Importance does not lie in magnitude or mass but in delicate, not necessarily conventionally beautiful, form. The creeping dementia of one’s parent, for example, is such a form, as it literally transforms its victim from an urban shopkeeper into, temporarily at least, an Old Testament prophet: “He was like a magic mill, into the hoppers of which the bran of empty hours was poured, to re-emerge flowering in all the colours and scents of Oriental spices.”

This is remarkably similar to the ethos espoused by Peirce: “What is man? What a strange union of matter and mind! A machine for converting material into spiritual force." So too, for Schulz, a retarded village orphan, a puppy, a familiar building, a ghoulish tramp, or a deadly boring winter’s day can be appreciated for the potential they hold. He therefore contends that “…we should weep…at our own fate, when we see that misery of violated matter, against which a terrible wrong has been committed.”

Of course this unconventionality can and does lead to The Great Heresy of man as Creator. It is proclaimed by Schulz’s father in his state of advanced insight/dementia: “If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say ‘Less matter, more form!’" And it is through an imagination worthy of Mervyn Peake that Schulz lays in the forms missed by the divine Creator. Whereas God, as the gnostic Demiurge “…was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material.”

The demented father, therefore, re-creates creation out of the Demiurge’s dross. He makes new forms of life beyond that which even God had contemplated,

“…these primitive forms were unremarkable compared with the richness of shapes and the splendour of the pseudofauna and pseudoflora, which sometimes appeared in certain strictly defined environments, such as old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredients of human dreams; rubbish heaps abounding in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom. On such soil, this pseudovegetation sprouted abundantly yet ephemerally, brought forth short-lived generations which flourished suddenly and splendidly, only to wilt and perish.”

The pathos is increased infinitely when one knows his fate as a Jew in Galicia - shot as less than vermin by an eminently disrespectful SS officer.

In my experience Schulz’s prose and imagination are unique. Among other things, he doesn’t narrate a story, yet still manages to convey a way of being so intimately and concisely that one feels a profoundly important tale has been told. But unlike a Proust who dwells almost interminably on each and every detail so that one can feel deadened by description, Schulz moves his attention continuously to yet another interesting thing so that his exquisitely laconic descriptions have wonderful force.

Schulz's language is somehow comforting while simultaneously unusual and exotic. The effect is not unlike that of Borges in the osmotic passage from the real of the quotidian to the hyper-real of imagination. In the manner of another contemporary, the English Charles Williams, his forms appear sometimes as if a wind from the mouth of God that threatens to consume the world; sometimes as the indistinct but overpowering sound of a mob or crowd of shoppers; sometimes as apocalyptic signs in the air and water; once as the visage of crumbly old Aunt Wanda conjured up on the back of a dining room chair.

I have a conceit that if C. S. Peirce or Spinoza could have written poetic prose it would look like this.

* I suspect that both Schulz and Peirce received at least some of their inspiration for this idea from the 16th century Italian, Giordano Bruno. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Polish Science-fi writer Stanislaw Lem also has a rather interesting variation on this idea of the relation of mind to matter emphasising the latter as superior: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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