Through Nature's Eyes

Green grass shows through half-hearted snow.

The sky is uniformly grey.

The evergreens are tall and dark.

The other trees are stark and bare.

A few new flakes began to fall,

Slightly angled in descent,

A while ago, as I looked out

Struck by silence and by the same,

The same old face of Nature,

Always there, moving or still,

Ever-changing yet stubbornly

Still the same, standing, lying down—

Like that grass under its frowning snow.

Now new snow is falling thicker.

A small gust sweeps a curl of it

Right off the roof. The house

Back there is still asleep,

Its windows dark, the blue tarp

Covering a boat still dully blue.

It’s January 1st out there,

A new beginning—but Nature’s

Eyes see just another day.

Two Natures

In an op-ed in the New York Times this morning Alan Lightman speaks of Nature. The article is “Our Lonely Home in Nature,” and its thematic is that “nature doesn’t care one whit about us.” Lightman’s context is natural disasters of recent memory: mudslides, tornadoes, and the like. Lightman is a physicist who teaches humanities at MIT. He is also the author of The Accidental Universe. He belongs to a kind of coven of modern thinkers who are hard atheists because they can’t reconcile the observations of science with an interventionist God. By intervention here we can think about miracles, say. Our “Home in Nature” is a lonely place because, as Lightman says, “Nature, in fact, is mindless.” His atheism is coupled with an aesthetic view of the cosmos, something that recalls Carl Sagan, another member of that coven, and his exultations over galaxies.

Is Nature really mindless? Here we encounter that curious Now-You-See-It-Now-You-Don’t that always arises when materialistic scientists engage in philosophizing. The philosophizing itself is obviously the activity of a mind. Yet according to the materialistic doctrine, mind arises as a consequence of the “accidental collocation of atoms” (per Bertrand Russell). That’s when “Now-You-See-It” applies. But mind considered as a radical power outside the reach of matter, even when it manifests inside the cosmos, that sort of mind is denied; then we have the “Now-You-Don’t.”

The truth is that there are two Natures. There is as radical a divide between “living” and “non-living” as there is between “mindful” and “mindless.” Living Nature quite observably is a tour de force in an environment that itself “doesn’t care one whit”—and can’t: it’s mindless. When we speak of Mother Nature, we speak of life, not of rocks or galaxies. And when such life has achieved a certain status, it does care—and it cares a lot.

So long as we adhere to the belief that matter is all there is, we cannot explain life and, therefore, cannot explain mind. In that situation Lightman’s Lament is true. But it may be premature. Science has thus far only described the living, always sticking to life’s tooling, which is material, ignoring its essence, unable to explain it. Such explanations are beyond the methods of science, but our minds continue to demand some answers. These will come after we’ve passed on—and to all of us, no matter our beliefs. Then we’ll also know why life, in this inhospitable environment, must have its own material tooling.

Science has succeeded because, abandoning natural philosophy, it has limited its subject to the easy part—which is, itself, monstrously extensive. The hard part is still there, daily experienced, but science cannot handle it.

Now regarding humanism, it comes in a rather extensive color-scheme. I’ve outlined that on this blog here.

Innocent Nature

Nature red in tooth and claw? Oh, come come. That’s pure projection. The gardening season is now upon us—draws us outward irresistibly—and hence we encounter a small patch of nature immediately beyond the sunroom door. The same thought always occurs as I then set to work clearing off winter’s layers: Nature’s innocent and so’s the cosmos. The world itself has never fallen. It has always been and still remains absolutely obedient. Then, unless I have to do something drastic, like move a hosta bush a few feet over—which invariably escalates to digging dirt and axe-cutting through buried roots—my mind goes on elaborating…

Hermes had it right when saying, As above, so below. This innocent but demanding realm we know may be a faint mirroring of heavenly vistas. Swedenborg spoke about correspondences between this world and those above. Yes, I need a new cutting shear, my tooth and claw all clogged with wood debris. It makes a kind of temporary order in the untutored jumble of nature in which the only red I see is the color of my quince-bush flowers.

Cheerless Corrective

Pondering the horrors in Syria as, around here, rain drops drip from our tomato plants and all is peace. We both passed through the greatest ever war humanity has fought, and although the mayhem came quite, quite near us, we managed to escape without a scratch. Yet something like Syria is always going on somewhere. Watching the dripping plants—while near me yet two more caterpillars are striving to butterfly-hood—I was reminded of a 1980s book I’d picked up in St. Paul: Peaceable Nature by Stephan Lackner. The book is at best only so-so, but it argues that nature on the whole is far, far more peaceful than would appear if we accept Tennyson’s harsh “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (from “In Memoriam,” LVI). This thought—and that mental reference to Lackner’s book—recurs at intervals. Another expression of that thought, one we often use around here, is to say how lucky we’ve been all our lives. I think it is to humanity’s credit, by and large, that we abhor violence, war, ethnic cleansing, and other evils that our status, as part-time humans, imposes. At any one time, if hard statistics were available, we would discover that overwhelming majorities of humanity are peacefully going about their days. But the mere statistical distribution of a peaceful status quo does not suffice to make us feel good when rumors of wars waft our way.  

Nature Nature

Urban life is man-created nature--although one's tempted to call it artificial. But, in truth, it's no more artifical than the nature that now surrounds me here, in the Florida keys: palms, pines, pelicans; sand, sea, horseshoe crabs; herons, egrets, and the unfortunate portuguese man-of-war who'd sailded too close to our dock and had been caught by the ebb tide. The natural seems natural only thanks to our ignorance. The agencies that shaped and shape it are on average hidden from our view. Human intentions? Those we know. We may not always approve of them, but we are never fooled; we understand. By contrast we discern spontaneity in nature--technology in all that's human-made. But it's all technology--indeed technology of the highest sophistication and driven, as our own always also is, by narrowly focused utilitarian designs. Odd, then, isn't it? Odd that out here on the edges of the urban, with Nature-Nature so much more visble and present, a strange peace and exaltation spreads over the contemplating mind. Is it that when life's sustaining mechanisms and its driving intentions are much more hidden the inner aspect of it, that which makes life really life, becomes more visible?

The portuguese man-of-war? It is a hydrozoan, thus a small predatory creature related to and distant cousin to jelly fish and corals. It produces and holds above the surface of the sea the gas-filled balloon-like structure it uses as a sail to move from place to place.  It trails tentacles up to an astonishing 60 feet in length which, coming in contact with little fish, sting, paralyze, and kill them. The tendons also act to draw the "kill" up to the predator's ingestive regions where the victims then turn into fodder. The translucent, irridescent, blue-to-pink colors of this creature's sail above the water produce feelings of magic in the ignorant human viewer--but it's best to keep your distance lest you limp thence with severe chemical burns. Nature-Nature. The deep sighs are not the whole truth of our experience of it. They arise from the beholder's innocence. Sometimes its nice, indeed needful, to indulge in ignorance.

The image comes from Wikipedia's article (link).

This Horse is Not an Equus

In these maddened times when elephants fight donkeys, a little excursion into the wonders of nature might be appropriate. A gift we purchased led to a discussion about the seahorse—which is actually a fish. Humanity’s long, long association with the horse—domestication is said to have begun before 3500 BC—no doubt led to the instant identification of the seahorse, when first encountered, with its huge land-based look-alike—up to a point, that is. The official name of this creature is Hippocampus. That word, from the Greek, comes from hippos, horse, and kampos, sea monster, a word that etymologists, using their favorite word, perhaps, say might be linked to kampe, caterpillar, a creature that loomed larger than life for us this summer. Hippocampus is the genus; there are some 50 species beneath that. The higher-up Family name is Syngnathidae, collectively the pipefish—which gives some indication of how these creatures move: pipefish are elongated worm- or snake-like swimmers.

To the left is a photograph of a Hippocampus hystrix, called the spiny seahorse (source). I assume, therefore that hystrix means spiny. As you see, the artist who fashioned the gift we purchased was imitating nature fairly closely. If you would like to see seahorses galloping around in the water, this absolutely delightful YouTube film will show them to you in action (link).

Being a Renaissance woman (her field was physiological psychology in school), no sooner had I produced the name of the seahorse genus Brigitte reminded me that each of us carries a little seahorse embedded deeply in our brain. That’s the hippocampus, of course. It is located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain (therefore in its middle). The temporal lobe is behind and lower than the massive frontal lobe.

The function of this structure is the consolidation of short-term and long term memory. Damage to the hippocampus occurs early in Alzheimer’s disease. The hippocampus is also active in spatial navigation. Navigation? Why of course. That is a sea-faring skill. Why this part is called the hippocampus becomes evident when we place the two hippocampi side by side—as Wikipedia helpfully does in a picture on the subject (link).

All horses aren’t equine, not all elephants are wise, and not every donkey is stupid. But one certainly hopes that each donkey shall remain at least as stubborn as donkeys are supposed to be.

Late and Soon

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
     William Wordsworth, 1806

(To handle a nitpick first, I hate accented syllables as in wreathèd, hence I removed that accent grave above. When I entered college it was to study English Literature, but I abandoned that for History after a horrid course in Shakespeare early on when I discovered what that kind of learning actually portended—namely the reading of critics on critics on critics on literature light years distantly removed. Therefore I think I missed out formally learning that in early English poetry such syllables were actually sounded out. People read wreath-ed not wreathd. I made the discovery sailing solo through Spenser’s The Fairie Queene where you find lines like this one (plucked at random):

     Then called she a Groome, that forth him led

… a line in pentameter that demands that we read call-ed and not called. Therefore, up there, we hear old Triton blow his wreath-ed horn. Nitpicks sometimes take over, but I grow passionate about such things.)

What I wanted to say in comment is that Wordsworth’s leading phrase has taken such roots in our language that the unwary might think it biblical. And then those who, having forgotten what it might be all about, if they’d ever read it—one really wonders if such things are even read in school any more—thus curious about the poem itself, might then be slightly shocked (or thrilled) that it appears to promote pagan values, Pagan with a leading cap at that. That would be wrong as well, but indeed the world is too much with us, hence almost anything written is read in a polarized way. Now I propose that almost nobody actually understands that this poem is about Diet, about Nutrition.

Whoa! Hold it! Is that some lame joke slouching towards Broadway to be born? No, sir. I’m deadly serious. To use a genuinely biblical phrase, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” And applying that teaching, Wordsworth is speaking of nutrition. The world that’s too much with us is the world of human fabrication—distraction from the meaningful, the high, that which gives us genuine life. We don’t even attend to Nature—which is God’s word in its most elemental form. Despites its roaring sound and howling wind and breaking surf it represents a kind of silence in midst of which we can perceive the still small voice that nourishes the distinctly human. The problem’s with us, late and soon, and has nothing to do with the times.

A Walk

Long solitary walks produce a kind of silence. Even when my head happens to be busy as I set out, busy in a directed sort of way, that process is sure to fade, eventually to end. It isn’t countryside around here, but functionally close. Depending on the route, I meander through one or two of five small but old communities. To the east the waters of Lake St. Clair. To the west the great vast dirty broken-down sometimes empty, abandoned Detroit metroplex extends—to a man on foot infinitely deep. I’d probably have to walk for days before, eventually, genuine country would open around me somewhere west of Anne Arbor, Michigan.

Around me here houses, sometimes grandiose mansions, always trees, lawns, parks, bushes, yards, streets. Surprisingly few people. They’re all inside. TV. Whatever. Out here lots of squirrels, birds, rabbits—and in season butterflies. Cars pass, but I no more consciously notice them than I see the electric over-grid when I look up into the branches of the trees.

Sometimes I pass places surrounded by walls too high to see over easily, but stepping to them I can rest my arms on neck-high parapets and look into empty private places—and there I’ll see a bird pecking at something, itself all alone. Equally silent bushes and grass, sometimes flowers; lonely lawn chairs wait for warm weather; pots left over from the fall stand mute against some wall. And always that peculiar silence of nature, not really an absence of sound but, instead, the absence of that something else we call civilization. The pecking bird is very much at home, oddly centered in itself, unaware of names. Startled it flies away—and its flight is spontaneous, swift, clean, and empty of all qualities we associate with people—anxiety, embarrassment, hurry, discomfort. Nothing of the sort. Just peck-peck-peck—a swift straight flight.

Sometimes, to be sure, in a big store, observing women shopping by themselves, I see the same total absorption—the same unity of total identification with a task, faces without makeup, just shopping, concentrated, hands helping the eye sorting through some pile of something. And then a swift turn to another rack, another stand on which more blouses hang.

But on my walks I see this always, no exceptions. Even when birds arrive in flocks, even when they make a great noise, even when they push and shove competing around a feeder—while others wait on gutter edges for their turn—even then, in social manifestations, still a kind of silence rules, the absence of something—an absence that, oddly, means peace.

Walks that last long enough, walks that outlast the mentation in which they begin and endure until the eye sees what is all around, walks that last beyond an hour and take place without the sense that I am exercising or trying to arrive at any point at all, just movement, sometimes a stop, arms on a wall, or a stop, hands on the bars of a wrought iron fence, such walks wash away the accumulations of grit and dust and grime deposited while pursuing strictly human occupations so that I arrive home and, at the door, I slide it open with a kind of sigh.

Peacable Nature

Back in the early 1980s we still lived in Minneapolis, and we frequently visited St. Paul where daughter Monique had a rather unique apartment—the bottom floor of a sprawling old mansion, in what had once been one of the most fashionable neighborhoods, almost walking distance from the Capitol. Near there, about two blocks away, was a splendidly large and eccentric bookshop where, on many an afternoon, I’d wander to find strange and wonderful books. Quite a few from my collection come from there. I chanced across one of these in an almost hidden half-aisle at the back. It was titled Peaceable Nature, by Stephan Lackner; it came out in 1984. The title alone brought instant affirmation. The theme of the book had many times come into my own thoughts as I’d avidly studied biology down to its very foundations and discovered there something quite other than “Nature, red in tooth and claw” as per Lord Tennyson. Lackner’s observation, in a phrase, was that nature is cooperative and symbiotic, by and large; it’s peaceable and, furthermore, all of one piece—and so is, hold on now, humanity.

I’d also had had that same thought often when looking at the world as a whole rather than through the distorting lens of the Media, the first time many years before, in Washington, DC. I was working late downtown, alone in an empty office suite. It was after dark already—it was Spring—when I descended into the grubby underground to drive our little blue VW up and out in a spiraling course and then, down 18th Street, then headed west to cross into Arlington by the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, aiming further for the suburbs. I discovered the next morning that at that very time, about two blocks from the office that I had occupied, the largest protest march in all of U.S. history up to that time had taken place. The cause was the Vietnam War; the year was 1970. I’d seen nothing, nothing whatsoever, to signal that something really big was going down. The big picture was quiet.

To this picture I must link what Brigitte and I call “the virtues of modernity,” namely that so many, many things—indeed most things—work so wonderfully well and last so long. We never fail to note this when we’re on a trip and hurtling through some urban area on a well-made freeway at seventy miles an hour in dense traffic, with huge truck roaring as we pass them and other vans and cars pass us, even at that speed. “The noble ball-bearing,” I always think—thousands and thousands and thousands of them—and never a one failing. And that’s just the transport system. But this general virtue—which depends on discipline, care, consistency—and each system, social and physical, properly interlocking—touches virtually every aspect of modern life. To be sure, a cynical take might be that what we call virtue isn’t. It’s simply adaptive behavior; those who violate it will feel the lash of sanctions. All right, all right. That’s true enough. But here, this morning, I take the wider view. I look down upon all this from a great height. I think of the workmen who poured the concrete of what is now our new neighbors’ drive; I watched them working, carefully, thoughtfully, returning several times to one spot that wouldn’t behave. And what I saw was care, commitment, virtue. And these were ordinary people, a real random sample of American humanity. I prefer to think of it was virtue. It’s there, and overwhelmingly present.

It’s good to remind ourselves, occasionally, of this, the bigger picture, in nature and in man—because by our very biological design we’re much more inclined to see those things that fail, that threaten, than the overwhelming mass of things that function with exceeding excellence.

Summer's Peak

A brief celebration of a gift and its giver. I received a little Kodak camera for my birthday. The world’s brim full of them so that, at large public gatherings, you can’t see the event, performance, or display because a sea of arms lifted holding cameras or telephones—one no longer knows which is which—blocks your view. But in the deep hole of the past where Brigitte and I live no such devices have been available until now. Monique had to test the little thing before trusting to wrap it, and one of the first images I found on it after learning the scary process of USB porting was the lovely celebration of summer’s peak that Monique produced by looking through the lens at a little piece of her own garden fence. Tomatoes grow behind those slats and a pear tree, tended by John over several seasons, is now finally spreading its branches over that fencing as well. Altogether lovely. My heartfelt thanks!

Perspective

Quite a while back I chanced across an automated slide-show titled “Secret Worlds: The Universe Within.” The title is a little lame, but the experience is not. The merit of this project is to enlarge our perspective, an activity fit for that day of the week reserved for contemplation. There are many dimension to reality, but the physical is certainly the one our eyes can’t help but contemplate. This show illustrates in images the Hermetic “As above, so below.” I urge all who see this post to take the tour and click through to see for themselves. The link is here.

For those who didn’t scroll down to the bottom of the page, I note that credit for this innovative view of our fractal universe belongs to Michael W. Davidson and the Florida State University, the joint copyright holders.

The idea for digging up this site—it took me a while to reconstruct the processes of mind that first produced it and to find the two- or three-word strategy I used in my search then—came to me while I was clearing a vast jungle of neglected growths in our back yard. Whenever I do that, and I am in touch with nature, handling branches and weeds and the dried out detritus of the last season still clinging to the soil and forming mats through which the new emerges; and then, always, I’m reminded of the stupendous complexity of everything, living or not—and who’s to say where living yields to dead? Relentless branchings and branchings of branchings of branchings—and looking at the tips of the tiniest things, catching my breath, I realized that I’ve not even begun to see. There’s much, much more, as the ads keep telling us—and so also the world.