Reg Saner: "What Does 'Nature' Name?"
ONE NIGHT NOT LONG AGO, SLEEPLESS AND WANTING TO SLEEP, I
had hoped to mute the wakeful firing of neurons by thoughts of something
pleasant. But what?
"Oh, anything," I had told myself, "so how about places?
Just where, for example, have you been happiest?"
Before an inventory could even begin, simple images had
come forth unbidden, pure volunteers. Solar fire. Blue sky. Rimrock. Canyon
strata below me, a saturated and sundown gold. All round, desert horizon: Utah
juniper and pinon pine, blue-green, stretching from ever to ever. Suddenly
above that horizon where most rains are less than five minutes wide--above the
unimproved, unimprovable miles of nothing at all but the world--blurted a lone
peregrine falcon .
During lunch last week with Gary Holthaus, a poet, my
normally soft-spoken friend rumbled into eruptive mode at a reference to Bill
McKibben's The End of Nature. "Of all the absurd . . . it's an idea
that is absolute nonsense! There can't ever be an end to nature, not if the
last grizzly dies, or the last condor, or the very last clover mite. Not if
every single tree in every single forest is turned into plywood or matchwood;
not even when the sun goes red giant--as we're told it will in, what, three,
five billion years?--and the planet is wiped out completely! It still won't
mean a thing, nature will still be exactly what it was!" His fair complexion
had ruddied, deepening its angry flush as he added, "Anything like 'the end of
nature' is simply drivel!"
"But Gary," I had said, "what McKibben means by nature,
and the nature you're talking about, those are two different things." He
huffed a little, as if to start up again. Then I prophesied warningly: "If I
quote you, it'll end with 'he snapped'." Gary had chuckled.
Both McKibben and he are right, of course. McKibben's
nature of unblighted forests, rivers, fields, and skies will end, inevitably.
Its end has long since begun. By A. D. 2100 the projected global population of
11.3 billion people will have finished mining it out, sawing it up, burning it
down, then hope to thrive on the ashes. Between that time and this, between
human expansion and desertification, poets and novelists will offer their lip
services. Printed laments will rue the fact that against lunging animals, for
example, our avatars have wired us with reflexes suited to instant action,
whereas against slow explosions of our own kind we may talk till every cow has
come home with lead in its milk (to say nothing of mothers), and talk and
talk, and remain helpless to react usefully soon. Our avatars haven't wired
our heads to avert perils not actually hurtling at our throats.
If semantic variety often causes "nature" to name quite
another category than some readers or listeners have in mind, that's natural.
"Nature" names whatever we want it to. It names the horizon, and beyond.
Anything is "nature" if you say it is, and we often do. Logically, that's so
even if it doesn't feel so. One meaning of those two, all-inclusive syllables
is--to cite Robert Frost--"the whole goddam shebang." True. But the main trio
of meanings which "nature" has signaled for ages is equally valid: a universal
creative power, an essence or defining quality, a collection of material
things and limited forces.
The latter usage might seem to take in all that is or can
be, including the power that Gary took "nature" to mean--but no. Its forces
are local, specific as capillary action or magnetism. By contrast, using
"nature" to evoke some ultimate creative vitality makes it both a verb and a
secular way to say "god." McKibben's opposite usage in The End of Nature
refers to the blighting of things and forces in the green and animate
world once uncrippled by humans. This is the nature of"nature lovers" and
"nature poets," the world always "out there," the one most people feel you
have to travel to get to. Finally, "nature" as naming an essence or defining
quality might be exemplified in noting that it's the nature of "nature" to be
what Raymond Williams has judged "perhaps the most complex word in the
language."
A usage more and more bandied about in these waning hours
of the century, however, differs in kind from the preceding main three.
That new one, the "nature" naming our glances toward
what's ahead isn't so much a concept as an emotion. Nostalgic, repentant, what
it names is half valediction. "Nature" spoken that way invokes ever so
wistfully a future that will have already waved goodbye to the offspring of
our children's children before it could reach them. To be sure, given certain
yearnings built into our bodies, the wash of touchy-feelyness or half-hidden
metaphysics we bathe in when intoning the word is mildly narcotic; a form of
lotus eating more pleasant than facing our own consequences as Homo
reductor.
On the other hand, escapism has its uses. It produced mind
from blind matter--if matter be "blind." From our slithering existence as
ocean-floor worms it transformed us into rodentlike mammals. From our narrower
focus as mere seed-nibbling rats it broadened us into primates, gave us
arboreal views. Escapism then brought us down out of the trees into the grassy
savannahs of Africa. Escapism built ziggurats, invented goddesses and gods,
graven images, literature--where it continues to thrive. Lately, it helped me
get to sleep.
Those unbidden, desert images had come to visit me
hundreds of miles in distance and time since I'd experienced the things they
were memories of. They had recurred as I lay abed at home, near midnight They
had been true images of desire, a past that wanted to go on being a
future.
They had implied a season, a locale, a particular half
hour: mid-June, around 7:30 p.m., Utah's red rock country near the Arizona
border. There, under a solar disk almost touching a couple of indigo buttes
far west of me, great sandstone walls deepened their ochers and russets.
Bullet Canyon? Yes, and miles beyond! And the wide desert sky saturated with
an intensely clear stillness that seemed to listen. Even at the time I must
have felt that I'd never been, could never be happier; must have known that
that very rimrock, its light, its hundred-mile horizons, was the land of
heart's desire. Aloud and to my own surprise, I had heard myself murmur, "This
is the most beautiful place in the world."
Outdoors I'm only fitfully aware of being "in nature," and
then only when the mind is free of immediate physical demands. Several years
ago I spent a few days at around 13,000 feet, just below Longs Peak, the
Colorado mountain everybody wants to top out on. My tent was pitched in a huge
boulder field where--after six miles uphill from the trailhead--the going gets
tough. All around us lay behemoths of granite talus, while above and beyond
the hike turns into a climb. During three full days of a Labor Day weekend I
loafed up toward the summit and down again, interviewing an amusingly numerous
straggle of hikers. In chatting with over a hundred people I never heard a
single usage of "nature." Not one. Instead, hikers had dwelt on "how far,"
"how high," "how slow," "how tired," and-when the highest, trickiest going
required both hands--"how you could really..."
For them, nature as such was nowhere. High rock and thin
air existed; and lungs, and thigh muscles, and miles. Endurance and will power
existed. Also quitting, because about half who try for the summit give out,
either exhausted or scared. To be "in nature" the mind needs to see
spherically: the near, the remote, the all-round interrelationships. Great
physical resistances--fatigue, heat, hunger, thirst, cold--narrow focus to the
immediate: this, here, now.
Surely that partly explains why no primitive people
possessing anything like our concept of nature has ever been discovered.
Instead, primitive cultures embody variants of animism: separate spirits
projected into every phase of nature--sun, moon, cloud, fire, water, tree,
stone, snake, bird, and so forth.
Abetted by a tent site just below 13,000, and thus not
doing the climb's sixteen rough, roundtrip miles in one go, I could afford to
wander. For me, nature was visible even in a mouselike rodent such as a
vole.
The only voles I've seen enjoy high places. Certainly this
vole lived way up in the sky--a half mile aside from that hiker parade on
Longs Peak. Crouched in his burrow he had shivered as I bent, peering closer.
I had seen that if shyness were very, very quiet, its fur would be a subtle
gray-black; its eyes would glisten like droplets of oil; and its nose
whiskers--fine as cricket lash--would vibrate apprehension There at the tiny
entrance of his burrow his bright eyes were focusing on a rather large animal,
species Homo sapiens, maybe for their first and only time.
Around us the somber crush of primeval stone which Longs
Peak and its boulder field are made of had been alleviated only by cloudlight
bouncing off a snowfield called "the Dove," and by ultralow-growing blooms of
alpine cushion plants surviving--at that altitude--in crevices. What had
imprinted me was the rawly arrogant "No way! No way!" of the peak looming
quite literally just above us--contrasted by the tremulous, "Yes, if you
please: this way," of that tiny, quivering mammal. Among all who move,
breathe, blink, we looked at each other across millions of years: the vole was
my past, I was its future. Pausing there below Longs Peak, my body's mind had
had glycogen enough to be aware of standing in the flow of shapes called
evolution, which is to say, in the middle of nature.
At the rarest of intervals, with a physical surge actual
as adrenaline, body-hair may rise, neural currents suffuse the mind like a
blush, as creation opens and happens. Or doesn't. But it's nothing anyone can
will. Instead, it's an elliptical flicker, one wide as a thought returned from
almost but not quite our old selves. If my happiest moments have been those
alone with the world, maybe--for me anyhow--what "nature" tries naming is
why.
Responses to a general-information quiz I once gave agreed
that nature doesn't include people. At least that seemed implied when
university juniors and seniors answered this question: "What does 'nature'
name?"
As if helpless to define any word so vaporlike, some
students Ieft that space on the quiz sheet blank as fog. Others--most,
actually--made a stab at it: "What is supposed to be"; "Anything God has
created"; "Outdoors"; "The ecological niche of all createdness"; "Everything
in the world"; "Anything"; "The sum total of what preceded 'man' & his
monkey-business"; "Everything that is living. The way in which the living
interact with one another." Those are fair samples of the serious answers. And
of course there were flippancies, forms of a shrug: "Opposite of computer
chip," or "Nonexistent in Cleveland." Even these, however, fell into a
surprise pattern--of exclusion. Flippant or serious, the majority of
respondents implied that man and nature were two different things, even
adversarial: "All things unrelated to man"; "Natural beings, plants and
animals in original habitat"; "Something wild"; "Everything that 'we' haven't
developed"; "All that is not of human development"; "Not civilization";
"Nature is like plants, trees & animals"; "Everything that exists w/out
the aid of humans & technology"; "Anything not synthetic," and so forth.
The most common answer, frequently repeated word for word, said "Anything not
man made."
In this latter phrase, "man" signals a vague degradation,
whereas "nature" implies--if equally vaguely--something pristine, unbleared,
uncorrupted. Or maybe that student phrase mixed selflove with misanthropy, as
if to say, "We're above nature, but, given our adulterated states of mind and
culture, we're also beneath it."
Our essence as bipedal paradoxes neatly centers our
doubtful place in nature: a part of, yet apart from. If evolution's aimless
aims include intelligence freeing itself from the tyranny of brute matter,
alienation from is simply the price of mind. Just as "wilderness" is the
invention of cities, therefore, that cleft between the "me/not me" has like a
vulva given birth to the concept-cluster which "nature" is now our word for.
To view it, being outside what we're within is the indispensable condition.
Lacking our ability to see double, we couldn't have made "nature" so tricky a
field of meaning, or even a word. Nor does paradox end there. It might be said
that nature has used the concepts called "nature" to re-enter our lives. Odder
yet, to escape the alienation that nature herself has instilled in us, we must
freely step toward the "not me" so as to become what we are a little further.
In doing so we're drawn into a great revelation: the inhuman--it is that which
has humanized us.
So much for natural history. Collectively our species is a
massed animal grown to be a physical weight, itself a force, and a chirping
network whose stridulations make up the sounds of a second planet. But what
salvations can even its most literate chirrups effect on behalf of the natural
world that hasn't yet happened? Writerly self-congratulations on "the power of
the pen" prove how easily we mistake words for deeds. Still, don't we sense
that in saving all we can of things mostly green and breathing, with animals
in it, we're somehow saving ourselves, and saving for ourselves the only
perpetuity we can have? We do sense it, but may at the same time forget how
naturally--among the mind's darker sensualities--we relish the pleasures of
destruction. Through them we have shown nature a face nobody shows a
friend.
By happenstance, I had reached Utah's coyote- or
coral-colored buttes and blood cliffs mere hours after enplaning from a
horticulturalist's prophecy of what all the earth might be, if we weren't who
we are. The place was a peninsula jutting into Lake Como, an estate cultivated
into an Italian version of Utopia: artificial forest, terraced gardens, and
their grandly Renaissance villa on Italy's Lake Como. A few days after my
final saunterings among its clippered civilities, I was back in the American
West, where a wildly different Eden exists in "badlands" still left as wind
and weather would have them; still pretty much as they had been when Earth
found no one to turn to but itself. My plane's takeoff and landing had
touched, as it were, opposite poles of one dream: nature wild and nature
tamed, wilderness and garden.
Amid Italy's tame nature, evening crosslight had often
mixed bird twitter with May leafage and sunfire. By six o'clock that sun had
blazed in great sheets of reflected flare off Lake Como. When strolling high
on the promontory's summit, I had, as if floating, often looked down through
boughs of great-boled beeches or chestnut trees. Far below, the rooster-tail
wake of a fast launch or the slow bobble of a fishing dory offered peeks of
themselves eclipsed by, then reappearing from behind, ilex leaves or umbrella
pines or palmettos. What with red and yellow roses brocading the rough stone
of terrace walls, with the topiary shrubs, the lavish cascades of
bougainvillea--pink, hot magenta, ultrapurple--it had taken me a while to
notice that I was dawdling within the great Utopian idea of "someday." Though
originally laid out by the rich for themselves, the villa's gardens (now owned
by the Rockefeller Foundation) implicitly teach the art and hope of
terrestrial paradise. What much of this planet conceivably could
become.
Mere hours away from dressing for dinners of gourmet fare,
I had then found myself unrolling a blue nylon sleeping bag on the bare rubble
of Cedar Mesa sandstone. From Italy's tame nature to Utah canyon country and
spacious chromas of stone--all in an eyeblink! Those extremes, I was aware,
might symbolize our world's ideal balance between the created and the made:
most of Earth's surface given over to variants of artificial paradise such as
I'd strolled amid on Lake Como; other portions left--or re-consecrated, as it
were--to exist as the transactions called "wilderness" would have them.
In that starry night--on the rim of Owl Creek Canyon, as
it chanced--I had fallen asleep amused at the contrast between my bedroom in a
palatial villa and that naked rock. All around me was a wild Other no word can
summon. Light wind breathed or broke on the junipered shores of a unanimous
forest. Yet the mind feeling itself amid a wilderness Eden knew it had been
induced to do so by acculturation
Anciently, nature wasn't things; it was a power, a
process. That's how all but the very naive still see the Grand Canyon. To hike
down into it, to draw near the water that carved it, to hear the current's
great voice before turning the last bend along a tributary canyon, and doing
so lay eyes on the Colorado River's tremendous, stone-shouldering surge, is to
feel nature's implacable drive pouring light through the marrow of your bones.
In the Hopi sense, my Emergence--into quite a different world than I had
left--was from that very canyon.
Our ecological mess may have been encapsulated for us over
two thousand years ago by those perennially advanced thinkers, the Greeks,
among whom the terms physis and nomos offered categories of
thought more relevant today than ever. Roughly speaking, nomos referred
to human conceptions of reality--often misconceptions leading to
tragedy--whereas physis denoted not how we think this world works but
how it actually does. Boasting our "conquest" of nature, as the Industrial
Revolution gathered steam and megalomania, we enacted nomos. The
natural world, we supposed, was a mechanism whose gears and levers, once
mastered, would give us power to do whatever we pleased. Ironies implicit in
that Enlightenment definition of "nature" continue to mock our
presumption.
In listing merely one effect of our refusal to correct
that mistake, and thereby to move from nomos to physis, we might
consider our bland harrumphing over the mass extinction of species.
Recently I heard an update on that ongoing catastrophe.
The lecturer was Norman Myers, an international authority in global
environment, consultant to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, to the
World Bank, the World Resources Institute, and many such others. As Myers
reported the estimated current rate of extinction at 'somewhere between 50 and
200 species," my hastily scribbling pen anticipated his next word before his
lips had formed it. The pen scribbled "yearly," but Professor Myers'
actual word had then named the physis of an irreparable loss which we
either ignore, or consider well within reason and convenience, or consider as
much ordained by the stars as by human actions. His word was "daily."
Our own species' alacrity in mounting a concerted response
to mass extinctions and other impending eco-disasters such as the population
bomb only seems slower than continental drift. Compared with geological time,
Homo sapiens has risen, civilized itself, and exerted its present
technological leverage in far far less than a tick of the geological clock.
Will that celerity apply to defusing the population bomb? No. Not possible.
There isn't even room for discussion. Massive evidence against is already
in.
Why should animals whose care of their own health so often
mimes the suicidal now give two hoots for the health of the world's
body?
It is one thing to read worst-case scenarios of AIDS
claiming in Africa alone as many as 70 millions of lives; or to hear that
Thailand, for example, will soon face an AIDS crisis it doesn't yet quite
realize it has. Oh, the Thai people do believe in germs. Not to mention
Africa, how much loving care and forbearance will be spent on Thailand's green
world when a large part of its next generation has been orphaned? But, we may
say, Africa and Thailand aren't fair examples. Or are they?
Don't huge numbers of U.S. teenagers and adults daily risk
AIDS, drug addictions, alcoholism, and lung cancer--traps they have been daily
warned to avoid? Take melanomas. Developed countries have by now had it dinned
into them that "a healthy tan" amounts to tissue damage from ultraviolet rays.
Nonetheless, many of my own university students cannot get enough of that
attractive damage, nor can the many hundreds of educated Europeans whom I see
annually touring under a Southwestern sun, hatless, in short shorts and
abbreviated T-shirts. They ask nothing better than to return to Ulm or Rouen
or Copenhagen a nicely-burnt brown.
Or take the San Andreas Fault. How many million
Californians willingly live along its danger zone? Merely by doing so they
misdefine "nature" to fit the presumptions of nomos, whereas the
shudder of crustal tectonics is physis.
If all this is true of informed publics, to the mass of
humankind, the pulping of hardwood forests, the drawing down of the Oglala
Aquifer, the irreversible salinization of farm land in the Euphrates Valley,
the devastations of Madagascar's fauna, are neither terrible nor immediate nor
personal nor even remotely important, save as occasions for the egoisms of lip
service. During recent U.S. primary elections to nominate presidential
candidates, public responses focused on many things, but on nature's health
least of all. Although U.S. consumerism impacts global ecology out of all
proportion to our numbers, Americans heard--evidently wanted to hear--nothing
but hazy allusions to "the environment," much less the world's. Mainly they
wanted to hear "jobs" and "growth" and beating Japan--which is, alas,
natural.
So the evidence is already in. Far from being foresighted
enough to save the green world which "nature" often names, many tens of
millions of literate Earthlings lack the resolve to stop polluting or
destroying their own bodies.
On an afternoon in mid-June a rocky track of red sand had
led me across Shiek's Flat to the edge of Bullet Canyon. With others, among
them biologists and wildlife experts working for the State of Utah, I had
legged it from trailhead to canyon rim. Sun glare so dazzled us that the red
sand looked blond, and juniper shadows looked black. Despite a broad-brimmed
straw hat shading dark glasses, my eye corners had fixed themselves in a
squint.
On reaching unshaded rimrock their squint had tightened.
All afternoon as we scanned with spotter scopes and binoculars for the
peregrine "whitewash" which gives away the cliff-niche of an eyrie, high
desert sun had drilled down. And there was wind. As Coloradan, I'd known wild
weather, but hadn't known wind quite so hot, dry, and single-minded as that.
It meant to level anything taller than sand, and will. We lurched and we
teetered. My hat yanked at its chin strap. Surely in the next gust, I had
thought, it'll rip loose. Wind you could lean on, and we had; till sudden
lulls pitched us forward like drunks. But the hat held.
An odd place to be "happiest." On that afternoon, only for
moments or so had I actually seen what we'd come for: a flying predator, one
of the ablest, the peregrine falcon. Which kills songbirds for a living. Which
it feeds on, and feeds dripping red to its nestlings. Under optimum
conditions, these in turn have never had a better than one-in-two chance of
surviving to do the same.
"Hey! A peregrine!"
"Where?"
"Right up there, heading down canyon!"
If I'd been facing wrong, I'd have missed it.
These days, at least, our redefinitions of "nature" enjoy
the rueful compensations of hindsight. Looking back over all those eras when
we sleepwalking ones supposed Earth had nothing to do with her own story, we
can see, now, that had historians not left the green world absolutely
invisible to consideration, or at very best had they not treated it as a
painted backdrop for armed kings, that green world might have been admitted
into history sooner, and so become visible. Now "conquered," it's a nature
whose very defeat imperils its conquerors. In developed nations at least,
owing to changes that have our names on them, our very separation from nature
has become our connection to it.
Forty miles north of Bullet, on the rim of Dark Canyon, I
had seen peregrine mates sport and soar for many minutes at a time. But
neither there nor anywhere is a falcon a falcon.
Over years, Darwin hadn't been the only of my species who
taught me to see each thing as a convergence of vitalities our word "nature"
often tries to stand for. The raptor I had caught sight of at Bullet was both
a fast-cruising peregrine and a nexus of those energies. Had my inner eye run
one by one through all vectors convergent in any falcon, it might have begun
with the unimaginable absence of everything, including nothingness. Out of
which had flared primal energy called "plasma." Like shrapnel, white curds of
spiraling fusion had then spewed every which way. A great spatter of fuel
dumps. One teeny dab had come into more and more spherical focus, finally
deciding on itself as our nearest, seminal star, circled by smaller gobs not
quite incandescent. Each had orbited through wild ellipses as it cooled to hot
gas or hot rock. Vulcanism abounding. Superheated water seething from stone,
steam boiling up from archeozooic seas. Ammonia skies, primal cells,
cyanophytes. Then voila! anaerobic bacteria. Then oxygen, then aerobic
bacteria. Then every sea-floor creepy-crawler, leading to creatures that had
slithered ashore, leading to primates, leading to us, standing on
rimrock.
Instead of such one-by-one seeing, obviously the inner eye
could converge into that falcon only as much as it already knew. Hence the
instantaneity by which, when we look with as much as we are, even a coyote
changes into its story. Yet at the same time is the coyote. So my peregrine
had become a crossroads flying toward me out of the empire of powers that
created the eye, out of deeper than the mind can go--while remaining a lone,
actual, Utah raptor. Yet had also been flying toward another time, another way
of being. Evolving toward a shape no one alive will know.
What we see is what we are, because eyesight flows inward
and outward at once. A falcon, a vole, a sand dune. Familiar, unfailing
amazements; with us briefly inside them. For example, the number of planetary
turns a single sage leaf implies. Because the West grows millions of sage
clumps it had taken me years hiking amid them to actually see one.
In New Mexico's Lummis Canyon I had found shade, then
eased the pack off my shoulders to set about lunch. Up on the rim I had been
wading through thick heat that emanated in waves off friable rock; but the
canyon floor was lush with ponderosa shadows, under which grew New Mexican
locust. Fuchsia blossoms hung from its bushes in gravid clusters looking
succulent as grapes. The canyon "stream" had dried to a flume of sand; but
presumably pine roots and locust roots found plenty of dampness underneath.
Out of my shirt pocket I had taken a sprig of sage, and, while breeze tousled
those grape-thick blooms, had examined one leaf. Through my 20-power hand lens
I had admired the surprising weft of its leaf hairs-silvery, gossamer fine. In
guessing how many millions of turns of the planet had grown into their
weaving, I stood in a time not at the beginning and not at the end, grown lost
to myself. Between eons and ions, the life of that sage leaf and the life of
my hand arose, disappearing .
That sense of something visibly offered, yet withheld, can
open on anything. Such crossings of time, light, and place, may lift the alert
veer of a falcon from eyesight into vision. During their flick of
inter-awareness, our pitiful ephemerality and the size of creation change
places. That's how Bullet Canyon becomes other than it is.
11.3 billion of us by A.D. 2100. The current forecast.
True, some projections show a tad more--a "tad" being 200 to 300 million.
Population pressures in the Arab world alone, especially Egypt, make phrases
like "the long run" already out of reach. New construction for Cairo's over 12
million souls has now swallowed up more arable land than was reclaimed by the
Aswan Dam. China had brought its birthrate well under control till a few years
ago. Now, however, some 80 million Chinese have slipped through the grid of
official restraint and may procreate without government approval. Nobody can
be sure what that will amount to. For China's birthrate to rise even one
percent adds 10 million people!
Third world populations know their own well-being is tied
to that of the planet. Knowing doesn't mean they can afford to do much about
it, despite knowing they can't afford not to. Soon they'll do even less. Soon
what little ecological restraint an Estonia or Sierra Leone, for example, now
practice will be swept aside. As foodbearing fields grow salty or dry up,
global altruisms will shrivel. All long- or mid-range concern for"the next
generation" will collapse to "the next decade," which will finally dwindle by
similar degrees to, literally, concern for the next meal. "The story," as
reporters say, will no longer be beluga whales, the humpbacked chub, nor the
sandhill crane. The story will be 11.3 billions of us "eating the
bones."
In art and literature "nature" will name, increasingly,
our nostalgia for the blown world, one that won't come again. One can imagine
fat anthologies of poetry varying a single theme: "Planet, we hardly knew
you."
Wholly different from ecological connotations are the
metaphysical overtones "nature" has taken on in the past hundred years. Its
two syllables have acquired time and space so wide we can't think across them;
space/time so different in scale from former conceptions as to make any being
measured against that scale a being different in kind.
That's not the half of it. Further enlargement of a more
intricate sort comes into the word via biodiversity. How many species now
exist? Nobody knows. Perhaps the 1.4 million species already described
represent but a small part of the whole. Five million? Thirty? If E. O.
Wilson, the Harvard biologist, is right, we can only guess at their total.
Presently, according to him, "There is no theory that can predict what this
number might turn out to be." Meanwhile, mass extinctions lessen that number
each day.
Traveling the road to Bullet Canyon had been my
less-than-minuscule contribution toward saving--hoping to save--a single
species of raptor. Glimpses of this or that falcon during our survey had
amounted to one ephemeral facet of the biosphere--me-observing another. The
bird's mortal bone, brain, and sinew were still evolving, as were mine. Like
the peregrine's flight, my awarenesses had streamed into and out of an
instant. Like falcon's breath they had blown away on the wind. The two of us
had been fellow motes, algae, flecks vanishingly small in one unknowable
vastitude called "the natural world."
Within that sphere of interactivities all creatures seem
transient as foxfire; physical matter itself, shifty as the aurora borealis.
Feeling so, we don't bother to ask, "How did this happen?" because we'd be
answered only by silence. Sensing our future silence within it, knowing nature
has nothing to do with its own creations--beyond making more of them--we stand
among the sun's brilliant futilities and ask instead, "What can a falcon
matter?"
It doesn't, of course. Weighed against geological strata,
nothing does. So why not just sit down on a hunk of epochs posing as granite,
and die? Logic says that wouldn't matter either. But life isn't logic, or even
belief. It's an emotion. As for human brevity, why should we allow duration to
seem the sole measure of value? If it were, the various sandstone strata
called southern Utah could feel "meaningless" compared to Grand Canyon schist
and gneiss over a hundred times older. They are, I am. Whether to the cosmos a
peregrine falcon matters, I don't know. It matters to me, and that's what
counts, because when I'm alone with the world I'm the one doing the talking.
Rather, the talking back.
Besides, I prefer not to die of myself. Nor of any
basilisk called "the laws of nature." To be depressed by their terrible
impersonality, to foresee an unpeopled planet upon which blind "laws" work
like fate on rails, is to forget that "the laws of nature" is a concept
constructed by humans. In deferring to such "laws" our very selfsubtraction
produces a fate artificially sealed. No matter how often waves of futility
sweep through us--and in desert heat those waves can feel tidal--we don't sit
down on rimrock and die. We don't, because quitting isn't our nature.
Jouncing over dirt road to Bullet Canyon, fighting gritty
wind, desert sun, midge-clouds, bone weariness; sleeping on rock or rocky
sand; downclimbing and reclimbing canyon trails under considerable pack
weight; feeling saliva thicken to glue while still a long way from water;
waiting below, on, or atop sun-crumbled stone for a falcon to show--that had
been my own ephemeral "yes." What meaning? It "meant" I wanted to say it.
Knowing that that too is "meaningless" gives existence a strange allure I more
than enjoy. Better yet, it renders the business of being alive inexhaustibly
odd, enigmatic--about which I think and think, and don't know what to think.
Happily illogical amid the unfathomable fact of plain daylight where the
desert colors were themselves intensities, I had thought of a Havasupai chant:
"Make me always the same as I am now."
Besides, over the days of canyoneering, cliff-scanning for
peregrine eyries, I had learned a fair amount about that species of falcon.
"Peregrine" had therefore grown from mere tag to become my word for a
remarkably vital astonishment. It had also grown to be the entire green world
imperiled. And more. As a single, brilliant particle, the peregrine sighted at
Bullet Canyon had become a fleeting expression of something else that "nature"
names; something deep, immediate, and vast. Something we don't know is there.
Nor know that it isn't.
Scrutinizing our half inch of infinity, we conjecture the
rest. Does "nature" name, too, whatever existed before anything did? If there
was a beginning, does it name what sort of spin may have then been put on the
cosmos? How many Big Bangs before this one? Why shouldn't their number be
endless? Say, the serial systole and diastole of a heart? How corny. Yes, but
something like that is the life of a universe I often imagine I'm in. One that
doesn't "care," "love," "know," and which is a heartbeat only because it
amuses me to take the whole thing into my chest, declaring my metaphoric
kinship with energies so wildly violent they scare me to think of them
"really." Hyper-fire blown outward then inward. An eternal pulsation. In this
usage "nature" isn't conceptual. Like "infinite" and "eternal" expressing
similar musings, it's purely emotive.
As a child I once heard a down-at-the-heels Irish tenor
announce, "I'd like to close now with 'Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life'." How well
he sang, I wouldn't have heard, having been absorbed in ways the notes opened
and closed his face; but I had remained much puzzled by that title, enough to
wheedle my way toward some explanation. On the ride home I kept asking my
mother, my Aunt Minta, and my grandmother in turn, "What mystery?"
A few Octobers ago I went up atop the county-size lump of
sandstone that Utahans have dubbed Boulder Mountain. It lies northwest of
Bullet Canyon, past Escalante. As part of the Aquarius Plateau it offers
matchless views out over stone badlands whose erosional terraces are sometimes
called "the Great Staircase." The was sunny, yet with a sharpness in the air.
The mountain's aspen forests had long since turned pollen-yellow. Around me a
truly handsome aspen grove riffled in breeze that would soon carry off its
last color. Already most of its leaves stippled the ground with autumnal gold.
In gusts, some had flipped into the air and blown further off, spinning like
coin. I had driven a long way for that particular panoramic view, one the
nineteenth century geologist Clarence Dutton had been struck by. In fact, he
had used his considerable literary flair to describe its significance so
impressively that his description made me want to see it for myself.
My motive was incredulity. When still even more a
geological ignoramus than now, I had found "nature" beginning to deepen its
significance during a visit to scenic erosions called Monument Valley. There
at the border of northern Arizona, the enormous buttes-photo cliches
admittedly--which look so otherworldly huge are, I had learned, just scraps,
leftovers, mere oddments that haven't yet joined the miles-thick strata they
were once part of. Miles thick? I had of course known about such granulations,
but it was book knowledge. To stand on that ground and see that what was
missing implied a sky of stone--well, it had left me bodily
flabbergasted.
Despite my having lived among mountains, that had been the
beginning of a personal perspective utterly changed. Once upon a time, as I
had gradually learned, much we now call the Southwest was sea floor whose sand
turned to stone, from which Utah's and Arizona's greatest buttes are the
puniest of leavings. They themselves are slowly going back to be sea bottom;
to be uplifted again as stone destined again to be sand. And so forth, and so
on, and on. Geological ruin? There is none; just as, between the sea and the
cloud, each river's a wheel.
Backpacking within the Grand Canyon had completed my shift
in perspective. The shift was an emotion. My flesh and bloodfelt its
overwhelmed relation to what "nature" names. Not "the Other," nor the "not
me," nor really even "the world." Instead, a carnal knowledge of time; time
penetrating the personal blood and grease that allows me to say "I am." Fear,
beauty, awe--those are feelings that suffuse our bodies when "nature" as
neatly defined abruptly turns into a terrifying immensity. In the immediate
path of a fast-tumbling boulder, for example, our habitual "superiority" over
blind matter vanishes. During that instant, fear expresses a new relationship
between us and the world. Without warning we have become a tiny, smudgeable
squeal.
Yet the shift needn't be triggered by risk. A bat's face,
weird yet human, gives off emotional sonar more complex. So can awe. Awe can
dawn on you through a hand lens, as along a spruce needle you actually see
rows of tiny pores through which a whole forest is at that moment
breathing.
Days ago in Utah's rugged Fish Creek Canyon, along a
stretch so narrow the moon can never look all the way down, I used the same
lens to inspect a penstemon blossom. Between craggy sheernesses 500 feet
overhead, I squinted at oddly fibrous tips on the blossom's stamens. Then a
lovely insect no more than a few millimeters long caught my eye. Briskly it
scurried about its encoded business--now this way, now that--inside the
blossom. As, among pinon and juniper, a mourning dove cooed high on the canyon
rim, I felt the blue-purple transition of the blossom's petals, of that tiny
insect's lithe and segmented body, of its busily twitching antennae, of its
pale yellow colorations, of the dove's once reptilian now avian existence, of
the canyon's cross-bedded winds petrified there since Permian times, of the
creek-trickle and flood-wash that had carved my fascinated way through them.
All, taken together, had swept me into a widening spiral formed by the power
and delicacy of "nature" naming anything that can happen.
The last communal transcendence. Each of us has a
vocabulary of personal transcendences. We invoke them here with one or another
mantra that for us centers some ultimately desirable there. Merely pronouncing
such a word feels wealthy; it closes at least part of the distance between us
and some apparitional wish. "Cougar" or"wolf" said that way becomes more than
it is. For somebody else, "flying down to Rio" might do the same. Or simply
"Tahiti," even "Las Vegas."
Therefore as more and more of the green world gets sliced
into plywood, mined, sub-divided, "nature" will increasingly name some
wonderfully vague era of being. Thus "nature" as sound-bridge. A spoken
migration to "that good time, that good place." In our semi-consciousness its
word will evoke a communal dream we willfullymistake for a reality that
actually was, or very well might have been. A verdant and burgeoning
elsewhere, an elsetime. A desire best realized in remaining desire.
With more than 11 billion mouths gnawing its surfaces by
A. D. 2100, Earth will never again be closer to Eden or Utopia than it is
right now. Therefore, to our descendants we will have left a testament saying
something like this: "The last we saw of the sky in health and happiness, its
health and happiness weren't heading toward you. What you may glimpse of even
its starriest nights will filter into your eyes through our chemical air and
particulate matter. Already, long before you were born, we had begun using
'nature' to voice our nostalgia for its futures you're not going to
have."
In strict logic, of course, "nature" as a transcendent
term-of-terms gets us into verbal circularity. Words define each other within
the language. None can be exempted, released from this relational limitation
so as to be elevated above it. But because when we use "nature" that way we're
being emotive not analytical, logic doesn't apply. Pronounced as
name-of-all-names "nature" thus enacts a sort of out-of-body travel
experienced inside its syllables. We simply ignore linguistic reality in favor
of a gestural sound reaching toward our personal attunement with a desirable
utterness. Thus when we make "nature" name some rhythmicity sensed both in and
beyond all conceivable permutation of words, things, or forces, it names
instead our gestural intention. Or at best our dim intuition. This is the
usage I hear implied more and more frequently. As of a song we believe almost
audible. With words so ancient that--even if we heard them--nobody could say
what they mean.
