2. Nature creates
It’s th’ Good Thing. It isn’t like us poor folks as think it matters if us is called out of our names. Th’ Big Good Thing doesn’t stop to worrit, bless thee. It goes on makin’ worlds by th’ million – worlds like us. Never thee stop believin’ in th’ Big Good Thing an’ knowin’ th’ world’s full of it – and call it what tha’ likes. Tha’ wert singin’ to it when I come into th’ garden. (Susan Sowerby in Frances Hodgson Burnett ‘The Secret Garden’)
Nature makes and makes unceasingly. Inanimate objects are arranged into endless new patterns, and new life is created – new creatures, new eggs, new seeds sprouting, every living thing growing and adding new cells to itself, separating into new beings. Zillions of new forms made every second for billions of years, and every one of them unique. It is beyond imagining. ‘What an infinity of infinities infinitely replicated, what a world, what a universe, apperceptible in whatever corpuscle one cares to choose,’ cries Leibniz, his cultured pedantry exploding into delirium.
On it goes unrelentingly, without pausing to seek inspiration, without ‘block’, always elaborating like a musician improvising ever new haecceities from existing material. It does not attempt complete novelty but remains always original, continuously reworking the same themes like an icon painter or Cézanne at Mont Sainte-Victoire, everything arising out of what has gone before.
Take an oak – our stately Oxfordshire oak perhaps. An oak produces pollen and flowers to be fertilized by pollen, but produces them at different times ruling out the possibility of its pollinating itself. (I am phrasing this carefully if awkwardly to avoid imputing purpose to the tree.) The pollen is dispersed by the wind and an acorn of course will be produced only if a pollen grain happens to alight on an oak-flower open at the time. What are the infinitesimal chances of that? of any para-gliding pollen grain alighting by chance on an oak flower when half the Cotswolds is its landing-ground? And yet how many millions of acorns are produced! Hay-fever sufferers will know better than I just how busy the summer plants are, constructing infinite individual new grains of pollen.
Buddhist teachers used the supposed indistinguishability of grains of pollen – like droplets of water in the ocean – as an analogy for the insignificance of individual human lives but, in reality, pollen-grains are so different from each other that they have become invaluable markers in archaeological sediment analysis. There’s no escaping the complete uniqueness of everything that is.
For Annie Dillard, the sheer fecundity of nature is overwhelming: ‘If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacy and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigour. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.’ Ultimately, she finds it ‘more than extravagance; it is holocaust, parody, glut’, not so much grandly generous as almost obscenely wasteful.
If the great quantities of eggs, sperm and pollen are needed to maintain the population in a dangerous and uncertain world, it is of course nature that has created the danger and uncertainty. Nature makes with wild abandon and lets die. [Footnote: occasionally, as with some seabirds who lay a single egg and strive to cosset it to maturity, nature shows restraint, but in general, it is rarely parsimonious or prudent. Indeed, the idea that prudence is a virtue seems like a modern one, growing slowly on humanity. It began perhaps with the first agriculturalists – crafty Jacob disinheriting simple Esau – boomed with the invention of money, merchants and capitalists usurping the warrior caste, the homesteaders defeating the cattle-ranchers, the synod replacing the shaman. Farewell, rewards and fairies! Modern politics dominated by economics shows the same tendency (though some recent elections suggest a democratic reaction against prudence, this time in favour of bone-headed tribalism).] It does not save for a rainy day. It just keeps making; and its making is an end in itself. To question the wastefulness is to misunderstand this.
For example, a stallion’s ejaculation produces 4,000,000,000 sperm – four billion new haecceities, and that is what it is for. Creation is its own end. The fact that a sperm will, in the right place at the right time, fertilise an egg is, like the self-satisfaction of the stallion, a coincidence, though it is only by a long series of such coincidences, privileged by natural selection, that the horse in question came to exist. This at least must be the case, so long as one rules out intention or design in nature, and our clear-eyed gaze at the sun and mist and trees of STA reality gives no certain evidence of that.
I am claiming, perhaps rather contentiously, that creativity rather than reproduction is nature’s chief business. Once upon a time that first single cell from which we are all descended, (and whose astonishing achievement far outweighs anything that Alexander, Shakespeare, Florence Nightingale or Don Bradman ever did) divided and made another cell. (Who knows? perhaps there had been another single living cell created before our ancestor, but it never produced anything and died all alone. Perhaps there were millions of the lonesome philistines. And how fortunate that no little wriggle in the earth’s crust, and no sudden gust of wind, dislodged a stone to squidge our Adam before it could create a thing.) You could call this process ‘creating’ or ‘reproducing’. I prefer ‘creating’ because it is less instinct with intention than ‘reproducing’. If you think of the process as ‘reproducing’, you find that, millions of years later when some creatures reproduce sexually, you have suddenly introduced the notion of ‘failure’ when sexual couplings do not produce offspring (or, for that matter, when pollen grains fall to the ground), and failure implies purpose which I think none of us means to impute to such primitive creatures. I see ‘reproducing’ as a by-product of the innate drive to create. Our first ancestor simply, without purpose, made something. Creativity is not an optional extra; it is our inescapable essence. [Footnote: I am all too aware that this argument can be sniggeringly ridiculed as a theoretical apologia for Onanism or, to say the same thing a little more crudely, a ‘wankers’ charter’, or that it could be devalued as special pleading by someone who has no children, but I think that it still stands firm.]
The notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ is a misconception because, in fact, none survives. All die. To say that species or families survive is meaningless because species and families do not exist. They are fancied abstractions – mere words without a corresponding reality. Only individuals exist. The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr is clear about this: ‘What is true for the human species – that no two individuals are alike – is equally true for all other species of animals and plants. Indeed, even the same individual changes continuously throughout its lifetime and when placed into different environments. All organisms and organic phenomena are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind of organic entities, form populations of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation. Averages are merely statistical abstractions, only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality.’
‘Nature creates without an end in view; fitness is but an afterthought,’ writes Michael Pollan. (Even ‘afterthought’ might be over-stating it; ‘epiphenomenon’ might be better.) The ceaseless creativity is an end in itself, like the paintings by young children. The process not the product is the most important thing. The product can be nothing other than perfect – being nature’s. [Footnote: and a child’s first pictures could be considered almost perfect, before they are burdened with intention and convention. I remember seeing a three-year-old happily painting a picture of an erupting volcano. His grandparents gently ‘corrected’ him: ‘But all that lava should be red, not blue!’ Another young life crushed by literalistic thinking. In our adult creativity we struggle to achieve nature’s inevitable perfection because the self-awareness that shows us choices and asks our aims and objectives, inviting us to pursue ever-receding horizons of expression, is not just the result of officious grand-parents but is a part of our haecceity, innately us, and must, somehow, be accommodated. Our joy in creativity involves aspiring and achieving in spite of the risks of failure – risks to which nature is immune.]
A creature that breeds is not more successful than one that does not; it dies like all the rest of us and its descendants are not it. As A.N. Wilson put it in a different context (he was talking about writing biography), ‘It is only by telling the tale that we create the illusion that there is a tale to tell.’ The tale-teller decides, quite arbitrarily, that the transmission of genetic material constitutes success and then identifies those who have transmitted genetic material and congratulates them on their success. History is written by the winners and we, by virtue of being here for this brief moment, consider ourselves winners. But in nature there is no history. Nature exists in a continuous present. It makes and makes from moment to moment. Purpose need not mean linearity – the purpose is now and now and now.
The Small Path
The small path
wanders away
up to the mountain
wriggling past stones and bushes
and other intrusions
singing to itself
and the listening air
not
as we have so mistakenly thought
of going somewhere
but of being there
already
Jehane West
Nature shows no sign of linearity. On the contrary, its motions everywhere are circular. The moon rotates around the earth, the earth around the sun and both spin on their own axes. Night and day, summer and winter, oxygen is turned
into CO2 and back again; birth, youth, age, death and the atoms redeployed in another birth.
The whole thing keeps on turning but it doesn’t get anywhere because there isn’t anywhere to get to. A belief in ‘progress’ as accrued capital, knowledge and moral worth, building the human project like a giant anthill (or a giant game of Buckaroo) is as ‘unnatural’ as it is self-congratulatory. [Footnote: a belief in ‘progress’ breeds complacency. We fatalistically accept whatever seems to come next in a linear progression. War is the logical conclusion of egotism; landfill is the logical conclusion of materialism. Nature, it hardly needs saying, is more complex than that.]
Comments