anyway, at this point, though a chasm has opened between my feelings and the thoughts that should seem to follow from my STA epiphany, I need to examine the extremely untimely claim that
Nature is Perfect
Avoid as you would the plague those whose hands are bound in woe. Live always as if life were just beginning. (Goethe)
Believe me; life is right, in every case. (Rilke)
Everything created by nature is itself. It has its individual identity, and lacks nothing necessary to being itself. It is not a more or less successful attempt to be something else – it is what it is. Which makes it perfect by definition, because any perspective other than the universe’s own must be personal, partial and frankly impertinent. We, who live at best a century on a small, very finite planet, are in no position to assert laws of eternal and universal perfection. It would be like the woodlouse who crawled across my Shakespeare last week criticizing Hamlet. Our human scale is not a cosmic standard. Our perspective is the tale we tell to explain things to ourselves, but it is not the basic reality – it’s just our voice, talking – in a little, local dialect, not widely known.
So far as we can tell, nature does not make things as means to an end. Everything is an end in itself – end after end after end, now and now and now – a constant stream of perfection, because it is capable of nothing other than perfection, constantly achieving its will. The perfection is not that of a circle or an equilateral triangle. Who on earth first suggested that perfection was such control-freakery? Nature is not a gigantic factory producing goods, some of which are rejected by Quality Control. There is and need be no Quality Control because everything made is perfect. Creatures are made for their haecceity, not their utility. A circle is intrinsically no more perfect than a blob. A blob is only less perfect than a circle if it is trying and failing to be a circle, like the printed full-stop under the microscope in Hooke’s Micrographia. But trying and failing to be something you are not is a human, cultural pastime. Nature produces blob after blob after blob, many of them outlandish and horrific to our etiolated sensibilities, but every one of them perfect.
‘I cannot tell by what Logicke we call
a Toad, a Beare, or an Elephant, ugly,’ says the ever serene and tolerant Sir Thomas Browne, ‘they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best expresse the actions of their inward forms.’
Beauty is real, while ugliness (in nature, at least) is not. To perceive beauty is to align ourselves with what is, to perceive ugliness is to rebuke the universe for failing to meet our presumptuous pre-conceptions. Beauty is not achieved by an attempt to produce beauty. No-one ever emerged from a beauty parlour looking beautiful. It is the by-product of rightness – fidelity to the inner coherence every creature possesses. The butterfly’s wing is necessary; its beauty is not ornament. Nature is as free of ornament as a Quaker meeting-house. No flower or dragonfly is decorated; all of it is function. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ as Keats said (though he didn’t mean quite what I mean in saying so).
‘Natura nihil agit frustra’. (‘Nature does nothing in vain’) is true enough, but could be simplified as ‘Natura agit’. An infertile woman, a baby born with a cleft palate or a life-threatening disease, is not a flawed version of some ideal human form – there is no such thing. Mortality is universal. Life is a life-threatening disease. Death is not a personal or a systemic failure, and the measure of life is not longevity. God is not at work in his cloud-lab, grudgingly content for the time being with the tortoises but still frustrated that he can’t get the mayflies to last. ‘The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.’ Nature makes things that are. Their job is simply to be. [Footnote: I realise that I am beginning to sloganize like a T-shirt or a bumper sticker, which is not how literature is meant to be, but there is no merit in veiling unarguable facts in verbiage. Only when there is such complexity that plainness obscures the truth – like a light which dazzles rather than illuminates – must we proceed with hints and nuances to approach more nearly an inexpressible reality. The universality of death can be told in crushingly simple terms (and, because we hide from the fact, should be); the grief it leaves behind can only ever be suggested obliquely.]
There is a commonly held view that survival (of the fittest) or passing on one’s heredity (via selfish/collaborative genes) is the purpose of life. Plainly it isn’t – mortality takes us all, genes included. If a life isn’t ended by genetic ‘error’, other means will be found. There was nothing genetically ‘wrong’ with the creatures who found themselves on the landmass that slowly and inexorably drifted south, and finally froze all their fine-gened descendants to death, aeons before we came to call the place Antarctica. Nor were the dinosaurs botched jobs.
Once upon a time there was a mouse who lived in my garden. He was a very special mouse indeed (as, of course, all creatures are unique and special), but his especial speciality was that his individual genetic code made him resistant to every disease and every sign of degeneration. What a remarkable mouse! He was famed through all the length of the lawn – ‘Methuselah’, he was called by his surprisingly scripturally aware family. Who knows what medical breakthroughs humans might have made had we brought him into our labs? But Ipsy found him first. Crunch crunch crunch. Genes aren’t in charge of everything tap tap tap.
Creation, not survival, is the law of nature.
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