When was axolotl written

New York: Pantheon Books, Stavans, Ilan. Southwest Review Browse Items Browse Exhibits. Axolotl: The Real Julio Cortazar. It had been enough to detain me that first morning in front of the sheet of glass where some bubbles rose through the water. The axolotls huddled on the wretched narrow only I can know how narrow and wretched floor of moss and stone in the tank. There were nine specimens, and the majority pressed their heads against the glass, looking with their eyes of gold at whoever came near them.

Disconcerted, almost ashamed, I felt it a lewdness to be peering at these silent and immobile figures heaped at the bottom of the tank. Mentally I isolated one, situated on the right and somewhat apart from the others, to study it better.

I saw a rosy little body, translucent I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky glass , looking like a small lizard about six inches long, ending in a fish's tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body. Along the back ran a transparent fin which joined with the tail, but what obsessed me was the feet, of the slenderest nicety, ending in tiny fingers with minutely human nails.

And then I discovered its eyes, its face. Inexpressive features, with no other trait save the eyes, two orifices, like brooches, wholly of transparent gold, lacking any life but looking, letting themselves be penetrated by my look, which seemed to travel past the golden level and lose itself in a diaphanous interior mystery.

A very slender black halo ringed the eye and etched it onto the pink flesh, onto the rosy stone of the head, vaguely triangular, but with curved and triangular sides which gave it a total likeness to a statuette corroded by time. The mouth was masked by the triangular plane of the face, its considerable size would be guessed only in profile; in front a delicate crevice barely slit the lifeless stone. On both sides of the head where the ears should have been, there grew three tiny sprigs, red as coral, a vegetal outgrowth, the gills, I suppose.

And they were the only thing quick about it; every ten or fifteen seconds the sprigs pricked up stiffly and again subsided.

Once in a while a foot would barely move, I saw the diminutive toes poise mildly on the moss. It's that we don't enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped—we barely move in any direction and we're hitting one of the others with our tail or our head—difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels like it's less if we stay quietly. It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility.

I knew better later; the gill contraction, the tentative reckoning of the delicate feet on the stones, the abrupt swimming some of them swim with a simple undulation of the body proved to me that they were capable of escaping that mineral lethargy in which they spent whole hours.

Above all else, their eyes obsessed me. In the standing tanks on either side of them, different fishes showed me the simple stupidity of their handsome eyes so similar to our own. The eyes of the axolotls spoke to me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing. Glueing my face to the glass the guard would cough fussily once in a while , I tried to see better those diminutive golden points, that entrance to the infinitely slow and remote world of these rosy creatures.

It was useless to tap with one finger on the glass directly in front of their faces; they never gave the least reaction. The golden eyes continued burning with their soft, terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth which made me dizzy. And nevertheless they were close. I knew it before this, before being an axolotl.

I learned it the day I came near them for the first time. The anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the reverse of what most people believe, the distance that is traveled from them to us. The absolute lack of similarity between axolotls and human beings proved to me that my recognition was valid, that I was not propping myself up with easy analogies.

Only the little hands. But an eft, the common newt, has such hands also, and we are not at all alike. I think it was the axolotls' heads, that triangular pink shape with the tiny eyes of gold. That looked and knew. Usually about 9 inches long when full grown, the Axolotl keeps its tadpole-like dorsal fin which runs along its body, and its endearing feathery gills which protrude from the back of the head.

In extremely rare cases, an Axolotl will progress to maturity and emerge from the water, but these individuals are short lived. Due to the importance of the Axolotl in scientific research, they are no longer collected from the wild and large numbers are bred in captivity.

Research focuses on their amazing healing and regenerative abilities. Few animals have the capacity to re-grow a lost limb but Axolotls can, as I have seen for myself. One of my Axolotls lost a leg and then regrew it completely. Some people dream of owning a sports car or being on television. Me, I wanted to see an Axolotl in the wild.

We found and photographed three beauties. It really was a dream come true. The theme was clean rivers and water, and characters included a toad, a beetle and an axolotl. All handmade they were a huge hit with children.