What occurred to me years ago as a student, during compulsory courses
in poetry and literature, is that once a poet dies, trying to infer meaning
from the strings of words in his or her poems is very much like labouring
to put flesh and skin on a dinosaur skeleton. (I didn’t share this insight
with my teachers because my personal interpretations of the written word
caused them enough anxiety.)

In 1993, dinosaurs and poetry simultaneously, become the rage in the
US. One got the idea that when American citizens were not in cinemas watching
Jurassic Park, they were reading the poems of their country’s newly named
poet laureate, Rita Dove, a native Midwesterner and now professor of English
at the University of Virginia. And there are, in fact, other similarities
to be drawn between dinosaurs and poems.

It’s true that some recent dinosaur exhibits – notably, the movable
ones – carry disclaimers. They remind the viewer that the colours and textures
of the reconstructed animals’ skins and so on are matters of conjecture;
nothing more than someone’s best guess.

Moreover, the practice among scientists of admitting where fact ends
and extrapolation begins might not be a bad one for literary critics to
follow. Readers could expect a warning of this sort: ‘When we attempt to
analyse the writings of the 19th century American poet, Emily Dickinson,
we are offering our best guesses of her powerful, terse, enigmatic poems.’
Some of the wilder interpreters of prose and poetry (including Dickinson’s)
might particularly want to offer such warnings. And that would help for
some of the American feminists, such as Camille Paglia, who seems to see
sex in every word.

In any case, eager to pursue the line of convergence between reconstructed
terrible lizards and reconsidered metered words, I looked first for poems
that incorporate dinosaurs. There are not many. Of course, who can forget
‘Middle Age’, a poem penned by the 20th-century New Englander Robert Lowell,
in which the person to whom he speaks has:

. . . left dinosaur death-steps on the crust, where I must walk?

Poets have, however, been relatively inattentive to dinosaurs, as the
pithy wordsmiths apparently know which metaphors to avoid; so a related
animal group must serve. And as dinosaur relatives of the not-too-distant
sort, birds do nicely. Birds are, in fact, extraordinarily popular subjects
among poets.

In the ‘most popular’ category, birds surpass ‘bugs’ by a 3:1 margin,
claims Katha Pollitt, poet and literary critic (‘The top 500 poems’, The
New Yorker, 22 February 1993). Better still, birds frequent the poems of
the Anglo-Irish poet W. B. Yeats. And Yeats, I admit unashamedly, is my
favourite poet.

As many people know, a swan got Yeats into a great deal of trouble in
the 1920s – specifically, his poem ‘Leda and the Swan’ (1923), which graphically
describes sex between the heroine of Greek myth and Zeus in bird form. (The
British poet Philip Larkin has recently been accused of similar moral failings
since the posthumous publication of his diaries.) But that ‘trouble’ is
just the point. Recall the succinct reminder of M. L. Rosenthal and A. J.
M. Smith in their book Exploring Poetry (1955): ‘We must submit ourselves
to the poem the author wrote, not to a vague approximation that our own
intuitions, prejudices and limitations have substituted for it.’

‘Leda and the Swan’ started as a political commentary on the lamentable
ends of certain pursuits. Here is a crude paraphrase of Yeats on his own
motivation for writing the poem – that undeterred, humans do such great
damage to the Earth that it takes something horrible and unexpected to make
them rethink their course. (For example, out here in the middle of the
US, the great flood of 1993 has got the attention of levee builders, flood-plain
dwellers and everyone else.)

Yeats admitted that as he worked on the poem and began to recast the
Zeus/swan metaphor, reality intervened. That’s not surprising. The meaning
behind any metaphor worth reading is clearer than that of reality. And so
it is with reconstructed dinosaurs. Simile just doesn’t work. For years,
palaeontologists were content to point to collections of dinosaur bones
and say, ‘It’s as big as a blue whale,’ or ‘It ran like a turkey.’

Then, someone got the idea to add bodies to bones. ‘This is Tyrannosaurus
rex,’ says Jurassic Park. And perhaps it is. We shouldn’t be too worried
if it’s not. After all, the mechanical metaphors accomplish a task that
metaphors do best: making people think. And they serve the ultimate poetic
device – the conceit, a yoking together of seemingly unrelated images.
As all know the story by now, the ultra-safe haven of the theme park becomes
decidedly unsafe hell. With homage (and apologies) to T. S. Eliot, . . .
the dinosaurs are spread amongst the green grass Like missiles readied on
a carrier. We might not know precisely what a poet had in mind or what a
dinosaur looked like. Yet if we take the time to reflect upon their fleeting
images, we often get a chill.

Recently, Mary Schweitzer, a biologist at Montana State University,
commented in Science that when she thought she saw blood cells in thin sections
of 65-million-year-old dinosaur bones, she ‘got goose bumps’. One can only
wonder which poem, if any, gives Schweitzer ‘goose bumps’.

Hers is the same feeling each of us gets whenever we become part of
a triad that spans space and time. I get the feeling when I recall Yeats’s
‘Politics’, a poem that connects me profoundly to the poet. And I get it
just as assuredly when I watch the water striders in my pond – insects that
link me to tropical bodies of water. There will always be parts missing:
pieces not fossilised; poets long dead. By struggling to fill in the gaps,
we explore the world in a new way. Imaginations fly and hearts stir.

The potential for cloning dinosaurs from the blood of the mosquitoes
trapped eons ago in amber – or blood cells in fossilised bone – doesn’t
excite me. And if Yeats reappears, let’s not encourage him to rewrite
‘Politics’ in a manner more attuned to the 1990s – say, as an essay on the
failings of bureaucracy.

Sometimes it’s the gap between what’s there and what’s not that makes
things interesting. Palaeontologists and poets have known that for a very
long time. The good news is that many others are discovering the same thing.
Or, as Yeats wrote in ‘Another Song of a Fool’:

This great purple butterfly, In the prison of my hands, Has a learning
in his eye Not a poor fool understands . . .

I accept that ‘This great purple dinosaur . . .’ would not have worked
as the first line.

Diane Calabrese is an entomologist and writer based in Columbia, Missouri.

During my one-semester foray into ethology, I took seriously the stern
advice of the instructor and the literature never to apply human motives
to other species. Therein, after all, must lie the boundary between the
two disciplines. The admonishments came through to me, even as I fought
a case of lecture-induced narcolepsy and despite my scepticism: at the time,
ethology seemed long on description and short on experimental design.

In fact, I learnt many things in that invertebrate behaviour course.
A film I made of pondskaters propelling themselves against the sides of
a glass container stands as a record of aberrant behaviour in the laboratory
in winter. The list I memorised of 17 ways to ascertain death in an invertebrate
made me realise that nothing – not even the passing of an animal without
a backbone – is simple.

More than a decade separates me from my experiences in ethology. In
the intervening years, I have marvelled at advances (none my own) in cinematography,
winced over a few pondskaters who jumped about without their heads, and
pronounced some invertebrates – notably cockroaches – dead. Most of the
time, however, I have simply wondered whether there’s an ethologist anywhere
who can resist mixing sociological labels and observations of non-human
responses to the environment.

Scrupulous avoidance of anthropomorphic labels seems no longer a part
of the canon of working ethologists. At public lectures, they lace their
presentations with references to ‘amorous behaviour’ and worse. Into their
publications creep ‘sneaky males’. And they now endow even individual sperm
with human qualities, ranging from ‘macho’ to, well, ‘weak’.

Recently, I read a book about lizards in which the author wrote that,
while the social structure of certain lizards is not understood, the males
often operate a kind of harem system. Never mind that he got the concept
of a harem wrong (in a harem women are secluded; and they don’t go to males,
males go to them); it was the idea of polygyny he was trying to convey.

Contemporary ethologists apply sociological labels to non-human responses
so often that the dictum to avoid anthropomorphism must be considered one
from a bygone age.

And if sperm are vulnerable to the sociological labels, then anything
– living or not – that captures the attention of the ethologist must be.
Suppose chairs caught the attention of an ethologist. Ten years ago, the
retort that ethologists confine their studies to the way living things respond
to the environment would have squelched such a supposition. But that’s no
longer true.

Imagine that I invite an ethologist, E, to my home. I wonder whether
E will be so atuned to the stereotypical human condition that even arrangements
of chairs will require sociological labels.

In my kitchen, where I see nothing more than four chairs around a table
and a fifth against a wall, perhaps E will see a ‘sneaky’ chair, awaiting
an opportunity to consort with those at the table. E might label the folding
chair in my living room ‘retiring’ and the large, stuffed one ‘assertive’.
E could see an ‘amorous’ interaction in the two chairs, one stacked atop
the other, in my den.

The cynic in me believes there must be two ways to look at everything:
as a dispassionate observer of the world and as an ethologist keen to assign
human motives. That’s not fair, however.

The organisms we study, regardless of our discipline, draw us to them.
The aesthetics of pondskaters gliding across the water’s surface hooked
me. Even Barbara McClintock, the Nobel prize-winning geneticist, described
feeling herself down on a microscope slide with maize cells. The ethologist
must be pulled to a group – or a living entity like a sperm – because in
it there seems to be something similar to a human response.

Western science dictates that as long as what captures attention is
not what leads to conclusions, then there is little danger in relating to
our organisms in this way. Whether molecular biologists see something of
themselves in, for example, reverse transcriptase (versatile and dogma-slaying?)
only they can decide. It’s the sort of decision we all must make. How else
would I be able to label the response of my pondskaters, and not my own
filming activity, aberrant? Why film pondskaters in a glass container –
where they never live in nature – in the first place? Whether any scientist
admits to the confounding effects of narcissism, or can afford to admit
to them, is another matter. If we knew where the observer ended and the
object began, we probably would not be as interested in the things we study
as we are. But nothing is so much a part of Western science as is the concept
of dualism.

Oddly enough, the question of ethologists studying chairs is a belated
one. Some of them do. They look beyond the chairs to the humans who move
them about. Practitioners of Feng Shui, the Chinese art of furniture arrangement
and building design, work to modify an environment to their advantage in
life’s endeavours: they plan the spatial arrangement of all structures,
including chairs.

Perhaps the fuzzy demarcation between observer and object violates a
principle of Western science and puts ethologists in the realm of other
Zen thinkers. Or perhaps it puts them ahead of all of us constrained by
Western science. Whatever the answer, as I look around at my chairs, it
occurs to me that E might look at them and assign labels. But not to the
chairs . . . to me.

Diane Calabrese is an entomologist and writer based in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Trading information across and down aisles, my row-mates and I pieced
together that no flights would be permitted in the airspace over New York
while Gorbachov and Reagan were visiting various landmarks. While it would
have been logical for us to disembark, we were not permitted to do so: we
had to be on the plane with the door closed so that when a time came in
which we could take off, our pilot could avail himself of it. Minutes grew
into hours. I had nothing left to read. I was hot and agitated. In boredom,
I turned and looked down the centre aisle of the plane. As far as I could
see, there were men wearing red neckties. Fearing delirium, I stretched
and squinted and looked again: red ties were de rigueur.

What did it mean? Was the red tie the newest badge of courage? Were
those businessmen the soldiers of the US economy? Were they the front-line
troops of the 20th-century civil battle field, the competitive market place?
When it occurred to me that the novelist Stephen Crane was born in Newark,
I decided my brain was overheated, the red neckties a coincidence and I
turned my attention to eavesdropping: ‘We have sold the prototype; now we
must develop it.’

When I arrived in Newark five hours after boarding the plane in Boston,
I chose to ignore what I saw at the luggage claim area: a woman wearing
a masculine grey suit, a red necktie and, atop the tie, a strand of white
pearls. One of the men I met at dinner that night was wearing a pink necktie;
I learnt he had two daughters and taught at an all-girls school. I began
to draw deductions, but checked myself. I gushed to him how refreshing it
was to see a man wearing a pink necktie, and then, channelled my mind to
business.

Months passed. When I encountered a group of red neckties, I averted
my eyes; I had to do something in order to halt my thoughts of the significance
of red in the animal world: a warning, an attractant. Then, a few days ago,
my browsing at the local library put me face to book with Signals in the
Animal World (translated from Signale der Tierwelt, 1967) by Dietrich Burkhardt,
Wolfgang Schleidt and Helmut Altner. Out of curiosity, I opened it to read
it as a retrospective of the state of ethological knowledge 20 years ago.
Red neckties were back in my mind already when I reached the section ‘How
is a Signal Flag Rolled Up?’.

The authors wrote: ‘There are ..good reasons why such signals should
be displayed only occasionally ..in the struggle for existence ..it is better
to be inconspicuous and well camouflaged and to display the signal only
at the right time.’ It’s so erroneous, but so tantalising, to extrapolate
to humans. Does a buttoned grey suit jacket not conceal most of a red tie,
at least two-thirds of it given that the neck-end is the most narrow? When
a jacket is unbuttoned the full tie is exposed.

I should not have continued reading. The authors wrote about an example
I knew, the three-spined stickleback: ‘Normally the males are of a nondescript,
greyish brown colour …’ The red belly is a double signal. It warns any
rival entering its territory to expect to be attacked. On the other hand,
the same signal inspires the appropriate response in a female which is ready
to mate.’

Are the men in grey business suits giving mixed signals when they unbutton
their jackets? Are they issuing a warning that they are tough or are they
hoping to find a date? Is the meaning of the signal determined by the receiver
or the sender? What does it mean when a man wearing a red necktie removes
his jacket?

Generating more questions than answers, I sent the questions ‘Do you
own any red neckties?’ and ‘Do you think a red necktie symbolises anything?’
to men in an on-line computer conference in which I participate. Answers
flooded back into my message box. Some were introspective: ‘I own four of
them. I just like the red with otherwise boring greys and navy blues ..
but I like red in other places too ..wall paper ..sport shirts ..flowers
..they are almost the only ties I wear. I do think many guys who now wear
red ties think they symbolise ‘power’ and use them to establish or signal
their ‘dominance’. Actually, on days that I am going to see my president,
I deliberately choose my reddest ..because he always wears one and I ‘out
red’ him ..ohhh ..’

Some responses were factual: ‘I own about 10 to 15 red ties. I have
owned at least some red ties since 1965. Red is supposed to symbolise authority
and conservatism. At least that’s what I’ve been led to believe.’

One response was unique: ‘Yes I own one, have had it for some years,
wear it occasionally on Christmas. To me it symbolises nothing, but my wife
gets a kick out of it if I wear it at Christmas time. She’s into seasonal/holiday
costumes.’ And one response was succinct: ‘Yes. Neckties in general are
a phallic symbol. Red emphasises this.’

As intriguing as the answers were, even spurious correlations were absent.
It looked as though clues to red neckties as behavioural signals were not
going to be found. Then, I thought again about my plane experience, and
identified a correlation I’d missed: as the consequences of the deregulation
of the airlines in the US became more and more apparent – smaller planes,
longer waits, crowded flights, cancelled flights, misdirected flights –
it took more and more courage to undertake air travel. Some soldiers of
the business world log hundreds of thousands of air miles a year. They have
adopted a red badge to signify their courage. The hypothesis gains strong
support from the fact that red neckties supplanted a large-scale but short-lived
and post-deregulation flirtation with yellow neckties, which gave the wrong
signal in any context.

What about the woman with the white pearls atop the red necktie? There
is no accounting for taste.

Diane Calabrese, an entomologist, is based in Dedham, Massachusetts.