DISCOVERIES

STILL LIFE WITH OYSTERS AND LEMON By Mark Doty; Beacon Press: 72 pp., $20 “It’s a simple painting, really, ‘Still Life With Oysters and Lemon,’ by one Jan Davidsz de Heem, painted in Antwerp some three hundred and fifty years ago. . ,” but it sets Mark Doty’s mind a-wandering, sets it on fire, illuminates his already luminous consciousness and clears the cobwebs from the structural corners of his mind’s attic. Books like this, that address the sources of creation and the sources of our humanness, come along once a decade. Often they start with a painting or a piece of music or a poem. “Oysters” is still in the way that the nucleus of the atom is still, the way the heart is still. “The heart,” Doty writes, “is a repository of vanished things,” and the poet remembers many of them, from the best plum brandy he ever tasted to the blue-and-white platter that gave pleasure even as he watched over his partner’s death. What is the value of the particular, the singular, the detail fetched from memory? “First,” Doty writes, “a principle of attention... A faith that if we look and look, we will be surprised and we will be rewarded. Then, a faith in the capacity of the object to carry meaning, to serve as a vessel. For what? Ourselves, of course.” “The vibrant quality of attention itself,” Doty argues, is the soul, “the outward-flying attention, the gaze that binds us to the world.” He explores the way the eye moves over the world, compares it to being in love: A lover links the self to the world, draws the soul from the body, sends it flying out over the world the way this painting does, the way certain things do, when we shine our faith and attention on them. “Interiority makes itself visible,” Doty writes, referring to the soul. That is why the artist bothers. That is why the painting matters.

BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE SEA Sailing With Jason and the Argonauts, Ulysses, the Vikings, and Other Explorers of the Ancient World By Mauricio Obregon; Random House: 142 pp., $21.95

Speaking of the soul flung out across the world, here is a brief comparison of some essential journeys: Jason’s journey east along the coast of the Black Sea in search of the Golden Fleece, Ulysses’ voyage around the Mediterranean, the Polynesians’ explorations of the Pacific, the Norsemen’s explorations of Newfoundland in the 11th century and the Muslim explorations of the Spice Islands, which took Islam across the Eurasian continent from the 7th century to the 16th. Mauricio Obregon describes the ships these sailors used, the routes he believes they traveled, their motivations for leaving home and “the women they dreamed of.” “Each people sailed in character with the way each lived,” he writes. The Greeks hugged the shore, the Polynesians were “blue-water sailors, always ready to probe the deep.” In his description of the various forms of navigation, Obregon describes the gods and constellations the sailors used. The Greek gods, for example, were “always present to illuminate everyday things like bread and wine and death, with that transcendence necessary to sanity that we so lack today.” The book is passing strange and reads often like Jorge Luis Borges, with unfamiliar words like “praus” (the ships used by the Polynesians) and “knorrs” (the ships used by the Norsemen--”beamy knorrs,” no less). It is not a book that is digestible all at once. The illustrations alone can send your imagination to sea.

THE APE AND THE SUSHIMASTER Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist By Frans de Waal; Basic Books: 256 pp., $26

“How did we get to be different?” Frans de Waal, author of the groundbreaking bestseller, “Peacemaking Among Primates,” asks of our relationship to other animals. “Each time we must ask such a question, another brick is pulled out of the dividing wall. To me, this wall is beginning to look like a slice of Swiss cheese.” With this and other examples from his lifelong experience studying apes, chimpanzees and other animals, De Waal debunks scientists’ terror of anthropomorphizing, a stumbling block in our understanding of animal behavior. This is a book about the possibility, the probability, that animals have culture. De Waal defines culture as “knowledge and habits acquired from others,” the “nongenetic spreading of habits and information.” Why ponder the question of animal culture? One reason is to abolish what De Waal calls the “outdated Western dualism between human culture and human nature,” the idea that culture and nature are two opposite poles of human existence. “I see little life left,” De Waal concludes, “in the position that we humans fall outside of nature, and that it is culture that sets us apart.” De Waal is one of our clearest science writers, not afraid of personal detail, not afraid to stand on the shoulders of the greats, like Charles Darwin, to exchange “survival of the fittest,” for example, for “survival of the kindest.”