There is no progress in nature. Evolution throws up more complex forms, but this is neither a goal nor progress: it is simply the common, though not inevitable, consequence of continually mixing more and more different elements. Complexification is not better. There are still zillions of very ‘simple’ creatures in the world and (if we are still thinking in terms of species and survival) it is they who are likely to last longest.
Indeed there are some species today that hardly differ from their ancestors billions of years ago. These intrigue scientists, but perhaps there is no mystery. An amoeba in this puddle at my feet and I may both be descended from the same amoeba-like eukaryote three billion years ago. We are both unique individuals and different from our distant parent. The fact that I am more egregiously different is irrelevant. It is only taxonomy – name-calling – that clouds the issue. [Footnote: taxonomy is a controversial subject. It has its uses and its dangers. There are those like Robert MacFarlane and Richard Fortey who quite reasonably argue that by naming things we acknowledge them and give them their due, because in practice at least it is only what we know that we will love and protect. They might point to the Australian Aboriginals preserving the world by singing its names, and, for that matter, preserving themselves by identifying plants and animals and sharing essential knowledge about them, just like any other creature in its environment. Naming establishes relationships. But defined relationships easily become distinctions, differentiating and finally ‘othering’ (often on quite arbitrary bases). It doesn’t take long for the emphasis on differentiation to become a warrant for treating ‘others’ differently, ignoring both their difference from one another and their similarity with ourselves, denying, in other words, their individuality. The namer arrogates to himself, as in Genesis, a spurious dominion. Battery farming, apartheid, sexism, religious persecution and genocide would be impossible without taxonomies. And of course, none would be possible with humility and the habit of wonder. The rhyme is wrong: name-calling has hurt many more than sticks and stones ever have. God, for what his opinion is worth, avoids taxonomy: ‘I am that I am’ is as much as he’s prepared to say.] What we are left with is variety – an ever-expanding Palace of Varieties. Let’s stand still for a moment and consider some miracula:
The Patagonian Vine can camouflage itself by mimicking the colour, shape and size of the plants through which it is climbing, even if it has never encountered them before. Within a few feet, the same plant can have completely different leaves depending on its host. As Richard Mabey notes, ‘In being able to cope with unfamiliar situations, it is demonstrating the first principles of intelligence’ (though, of course, without any of the brain equipment we associate with intelligence).
Dogs align themselves on a North-South axis when they shit.
A dung-beetle climbs on to the ball of dung it has collected, gazes up at the Milky Way and, waggling its legs and antennae in a kind of dance, plots the night sky in its memory so it can navigate home by the stars.
Although puffins return every year to the same breeding-grounds and the same partners (often for decades – a puffin can live fifty years), once the autumn comes they take off on their own. Of those who breed next-door to each other in Pembrokeshire, one may hang around the Irish Sea for the winter, another head up to Greenland or out into the North Atlantic, while their sun-loving neighbour may opt to spend Christmas in Italy. None of this is ‘species’ behaviour, nor genetically determined – they just make their individual explorations, before heading back to Wales as Spring arrives.
Carol Haf
Mae’r ddaear yn glasu
A’r coed sydd yn tyfu
A gwyrddion yw’r gerddi
Mae’r llwyni mor llon
A heirdd yw’r eginiau
A’r dail ar y dolau
A blodau’r perllannau
Pur llawnion
Os bu yn ddiweddar
Wedd ddu ar y ddaear
Cydganodd yr adar
Yn gerddgar i gyd
Gweld coedydd yn deilio
A wnai iddynt byncio
Cydseinio drwy’n hoywfro
Draw’n hyfryd
Mae’r ddaear fawr ffrwythlon
A’i thrysor yn ddigon
I borthi’i thrigolion
Yn dirion bob dydd
Pe byddem ni ddynion
Mewn cyflwr heddychlon
Yn caru’n un galon
Ein gilydd
Ioan ap Hywel
(The Earth is greening and the trees are growing
And the gardens are green – the groves are so merry
And beautiful are the buds and the leaves on the meadows
And the orchards are full of blossoms
Even if lately there’s been a dark look to the earth
The birds sang harmoniously together
To see the trees coming into leaf makes them carol
Harmoniously throughout our beautiful valley.
The great fruitful Earth with all her treasures is sufficient
To feed her inhabitants with ease every day
If only we men in a state of peace
Would love each other with one heart.)
When the great Swedish botanist Linnaeus came to England and saw gorse for the first time, he fell to his knees and gave thanks for so beautiful a plant.
And having created all these marvels, nature lets them die.
Death is the way of it. By my rough calculations, a quarter of a million humans die every day. That’s three every second. People die faster than you could say their names. In the west, death is mostly hidden away and because we experience it through the media more than in the flesh, we see it as something outlandish rather than commonplace. But on it goes, for the most part in a dull, unnewsworthy way (though five thousand died while you were watching the news). Even the atrocities of September 11th 2001 contributed less than 1% of that day’s harvest. Three people every second. Keep time. Tap it out on the table-top. First take the beat of the seconds from a clock and then play triplets. That’s the rhythm of human departure. Tap tap tap. The death toll, if you like, though a church bell would be the wrong instrument here. If I heard the bells of St Michael and All Angels keep that time, I’d think it was a wedding. It’s a quick tempo – vivacissimo ironically. And think tap of tap the tap mass tap tap deaths of tap other creatures tap – ants tap, say tap – tolled at tap a tap frequentapcy far tap above humantap hearing. tap Every taproom is tap a tap hospice in tap which thoutapsands tap of tap creatures tap die every tap minute tap. We are tap surrountapded by tap the tapdyingtap, and tapfull of them taptoo, tapas the microbes tap– my tap cousins tapof course tap- which taphelp keeptap me tapalive tap perish every tapmoment withtapout obsequiestap tap.
Since death is the only inevitable thing in life, to fear death is to be disastrously out of kilter with the universe. We cannot lay much claim to wisdom or intelligence if we try to deny the only certainty. ‘If it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.’ But we’re too often squeamish. We think it ‘against the course of nature’ if children die before their parents, though five or six generations ago it was a common occurrence here, as it remains elsewhere in the world (and everywhere in the rest of nature). Previous generations planned for their after-lives, rather than their retirement. [Footnote: it occurred to me recently that while we think that people in medieval times lived short lives, they believed they lived forever, albeit only briefly on earth. The Anglo-Saxon word ‘Dustsceawung’ – ‘contemplation of dust’ – meaning the realisation that the dust around you was once other, greater things, and that ‘Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’ is a reminder that previous ages thought more deeply about life and death. Dust, properly considered, will be a greater factor in our lives than AI, politics or most of our other preoccupations.] Animals try to avoid being killed but no creature ‘fears death’. Only humans have the intelligence to be so stupid.
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? fie, ’tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death.
Karen Armstrong, in her study of the ‘Axial sages’ – the thinkers of the mid-first millennium BCE, including Confucius, Buddha, Plato, Isaiah, Lao Tzu et al – observed that ‘They spent as much creative energy seeking a cure for the spiritual malaise of humanity as scientists today spend trying to find a cure for cancer.’ I don’t suggest that we should stop medical research, simply note that, having survived cancer we will assuredly die of something else. We can run but, seeing that we can’t hide, we might decide not to expend all of our time and energy in running tap tap tap. There’s no need to ‘come proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb’ as Yeats, in one mood, commends; that’s just the flip-side of panic. Death is the most natural thing in the world and, acknowledging it, we should absorb it into our lives. The more deeply we accustom ourselves to the objective reality of the world (what I’m calling ‘STA’) and the unreality of much of the social and media-tethered activities with which we fill our days, the more achievable that challenge becomes. An awareness of death gives a savour and an extra value to each day, so that now, for example, looking at these fields in low morning sunlight, I can see how precious it all is.
Here under Black Earth, Ashes of Holy Monks lie Hid.
Marvel not. Sterile sand of Sacred Bones everywhere becomes Fruit,
And loads the fruit-Tree Branches …
Go on your road, All things will be well.
For, after all, as Lolly Willowes says, ‘In the midst of death, we are in life.’ In spite of the mass exterminations that surround me every moment as I walk across these fields between Hay and Clyro, nature in its abundant bounty feels joyous rather than apocalyptic. It is probably psychomorphic to attribute such feelings to an unknowable process, but perhaps it would be equally mechanomorphic to deny them. Long ago we thought nature was like us – we knew that our own activities had intent, could see intent in the actions of cats, birds and lions, and so assumed nature too was impelled by intent. Later, when we constructed machines we thought it (and, indeed, ourselves) mechanistic; now we have computers we draw new parallels. Plainly we see nature (and everything else) from the perspective of our latest preoccupations. But David Jones argues that it is ‘important to be anthropomorphic, to deal through and in the things we understand as men’. We anthropoi are at least made by the same process as the rest of nature. We are more closely related to blackbirds and woodlice than to machines and computers, however much we try to make them simulacra of ourselves. To be at some level consciously anthropomorphic is to be honest about the limits of our perspective.
And all our attempts at understanding will only ever be partial; and expressed in language that can only be analogous. A tree is a tree. It is. And any painting or photograph, poetical or technical description or ream of scientific data about it is not a tree. (It might be an interesting project to collate all the data possible on a single tree and exhibit it together with scores of artistic interpretations and reminiscences of that same tree. Would all these perspectives triangulate to give a focussed image, or would they be a Babel? And is the truth about any of us a focussed thing or a Babel? And, in any case, is even a Babel, a cacophony, simply a secret harmony beyond our hearing? Perhaps, just as the random motions of sub-atomic particles ‘cancel each other out’ when seen on a human scale, and harmonise in the predictable patterns that we have identified in the laws of classical physics, so the individual actions of all of us – mosses, bank-clerks, oak trees, walruses, woodlice, pole-dancers and puffins, mushrooms and sheep – harmonise at some level undiscernable to us. Perhaps, just as the changed ‘spin’ of an electron can instantaneously affect the ‘spin’ of another, though it be light-years away, so every action of mine (I am just going downstairs to make another cup of tea) is compensated by the actions of toadstools in Borneo or gases in Betelgeuse; and my tea-making activities (time for cornflakes too, I think) though assuredly consciously willed by me, help balance some seismic disturbance beneath the Southern Ocean. Perhaps.) But, inadequate as all our perceptions of the tree may be, we carry on. We attempt clarity, cheerfully aware of its elusiveness. The tree is. And that is enough to justify our attention.
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