Noticing you can do nothing about.
It’s the balancing that shakes my mind.
NORMAN MACCAIG, ‘ THE EQUILIBRIST’ , FROM COLLECTED
POEMS (LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, 1990)
I am now nearly seventy, and no longer fully trust my brain, but I should like to try to give some of my feelings about the cruise, as I tend to think of the experience of living on this planet—‘cruise’ because it seems artificial, not quite real in terms of the countless moral, philosophical, and religious past assertions I’ve read about it; and not quite real because it is deeply imbued for each one of us by something I’ll mention later: keraunos, or hazard. I’m well aware that my own voyage has not been unpleasant, and that I am, especially in view of the far worse experience life has both now and in the past given to so many others, fortunate. There have been some descriptions of the ‘cruise’ in all my novels, but perhaps more relevantly, certainly as regards nature, in an essay I first published in 1979, ‘The Tree’. I’d like this present tangled nest of memories and thoughts to be read in association with that. Perhaps ‘The Nature of My Nature’ would be a more honest title.
A year or two ago I was asked, with others, to re-evaluate C. P. Snow’s well-known essay of 1959, The Two Cultures. The history of that upset in stock intellectual thinking may be read in Stefan Collini’s account of the affair in his introduction to the work as published by the Cambridge University Press.1 Like many at the time I was torn, reproached, and confused by it. I knew I was not, and would never be, the ‘true’ scientist Snow appeared to recommend; and I felt some sympathy for his best-known opponent, the formidable Dr Leavis. I saw the necessity for science on countless technological and economic grounds and realized only too well the cost of ignoring it, the blindness of which Snow accused us on the artistic side. I was clearly, in his terms, a drone.
Although I have called myself a natural historian all my life, I am more precisely (though in something inherently imprecise) a nature lover. I wouldn’t now pretend to be a scientist at all; if I were truly one, I suspect I’d even deny I was primarily a writer. I certainly know that I see literature far more as an expression of feeling conveyed through poetry, drama, and fiction than as any sort of serious scientific statement about reality. I seem closest to a clever octopus, a mere—to us humans—feeler. This does not mean that I reject or am rejected by serious science; though I am banned from or dismissed by much of it purely because of my own stupidity and lack of ability to concentrate. An academic friend, I hope not meaning to be too critical, very recently told me that I was ‘tangential and Coleridgean’, expensive adjectives to indicate ‘tangled’ and ‘disorganized’.
I acknowledge the often vital importance of scientific knowledge as a part of my own deep attachment to nature. Yet I somehow felt that the quasi-revolution Snow provoked in our culture was being fought on a wrong field (or a defective map) and in a biased cause. It failed to realize the importance of the individual and the aesthetic, and seemed largely unaware of the key element of the now and its existential reality. Snow’s essay seemed to respond to something that was oceanically subtle and complex with a shout as foolish and implicitly Fascistic as Canute’s unsuccessful command to the tide.
I soon scribbled some notes when I began to collect my thoughts about The Two Cultures recently. One was this: Science tries always to dismiss and discount feeling. The other: Marrying feeling and knowing, that is the problem. Of course it is pre-eminently the problem because feeling is for individuals, between a you and a me. Each of us is always, at heart, however apparently similar, inalienably not anyone else. Knowing is for society as a whole; it always intends and wishes to be ‘final’, certain, eternal—all that we know we and our personal lives may never be. I wasn’t happy with the attitude (in public, in Snow, and in myself) of these two transmitters respectively of feeling and of knowledge. At the same time I recognized the separate importance of each in the whole. Snow was quite right to recognize or publicize the fact that feeling (so often expressed through the arts) had long tried to suppress or omit the facts (the science) from any intelligent view of our human life. But just as women have long been grossly and selfishly misunderstood, slighted and exploited by men, so has the feeling by the knowing. I abhor the crassness of my own sex, abhor how ineptly, not to say cruelly, it has behaved on the voyage since the Bronze Age. Intelligent history has almost constantly linked the feminine gender with the more personal mode of apprehension, and most men do now have a sense at least of the apology owed for their gender’s having historically encouraged a slavish adherence to convention—the past—and made it (only too often brutally and brutishly) the social norm. But the guilt of our whole species over our previous slighting and despising of science is rather different. The leap to now demanding a near hegemony for it, to invite it so wholly to invade and occupy our societies, lives, and minds, seems headstrongly rash. Not to know becomes a kind of crime; only to feel, a sort of sin.
My ‘problem’ may seem irrelevant, because insoluble; but its two constituents are so interwoven, so symbiotically one, that to separate them risks, as sometimes with Siamese twins, destroying both. Society and school, the way the world trains and conditions its young termites through politics and education, are hell-bent on keeping these vital modes or functions separate. One is not supposed to feel and to know at the same time, though of course one may (if less commonly) feel what one knows and (much more frequently) know what one feels. The problem lies in trying to get the two systems of information exchange, each ruled by a fundamentally different ethos, to marry and bear fruit. It seems only too obvious, in this world of 1995, that in general, knowing is cock of the roost. Feeling is the runt of the litter.
This must sound as if I were spoiling to damn all science as distasteful and foreign, like Dr Opimian in Peacock’s Gryll Grange of 1860, or like the writer himself, a sceptic as to most of what progress has brought to my own culture and civilization; but I’m not, to use Snow’s language, a Luddite. I am grateful for almost all of the saner scientific discoveries since (and especially those put forth by) Darwin, and not least for the so-called information revolution. I may be technologically illiterate, near helpless, even by average standards, as I can neither drive a car nor use a word processor, but this isn’t something I am in the least proud of. I know it’s because I’m digitally clumsy and disciplinarily lazy.
I never much liked C. P. Snow as a novelist. His stories seem a little too hard to excavate and cleanse from the coagulated strata of all his academic and class snobberies, as pointed out by Collini. The rancorous spat with Leavis now seems to me near primitive and ill judged on both sides. As with so many writers in English on this side of the Atlantic, Snow’s middleclassness, his craving to become a pundit, cling to him like rust on some ancient suit of armour left out in the rain. If I had to rate novelists and essayists by their knowledge of science, and their intellectual pungency, let alone by the quality of their own fictional writing, I should certainly place the ferret-like Arthur Koestler well above him. But murdering the already dead is akin to tomb-robbing, very rarely a defensible pursuit, as well as being only too clear a proof that most of ‘educated’ humanity grossly undervalues the now. The now is a delicate plant. Almost everything in society forbids or denies the climate and conditions in which it may flourish.
I now come to something far worse in the mea culpa line. That concerns my distinctly shabby claims to any real science myself. I know just enough to trick the even more ignorant than myself; novelists are like conjurors, always expert at misleading. To a true believer in the scientific process and its basic ethos I must seem preposterous: that horror of horrors, a mere glib amateur, little more than an irritating poseur. The way I invent names, both Latin and English, for some of the plants whose true ‘labels’ I have forgotten in my own ill-kept garden . . . such shameless misleading of innocent visitors is unforgivable.
Yet I do passionately love nature. I never really understood why I loved my now-dead wife, yet I did; and long ago realized that the not-knowing (the emotion’s prevailing over common sense and reason) can become a mysterious part of the love.
Some reference books have me down as an atheist; and certainly, as regards any established deity or religious figure, I am so, and all the more resolutely when some god or goddess is presented with purely human qualities such as being kind or merciful, and possessing listening and intervenient powers. Such fairy-tale figures are for children; my universe is, or appears, infinitely bleaker. I do respect and sometimes admire many religious images and icons, sects, theologies, and what lies beyond them, but I am by trade an inventor of fiction, almost a professional liar. I appreciate the countless virtual realities that the religious create; and what drives them to claim, sometimes with a savage fervour, that their plausible fictions are unique truths. The religious instinct is in essence a great novelist.
So. If I’m not at all religious in any conventional sense, what am I? To try to pass my view off as a philosophy would, at this date and among so much infinitely more sophisticated thinking on such matters, be ridiculous. I’d prefer a more human term. My feeling about human existence on this uncontrolledly sprouting planet is that its perceptible reality, and its destiny, waver and zigzag amid a triangle of opposing yet counterbalancing factors. Physically and mentally we individuals bounce, carom, and ricochet like pin-table balls. I call (rather in the way I rebaptize plants) these beliefs or views among which we collide by classical Greek names: sideros, keraunos, eleutheria. Iron necessity, lightning hazard, freedom.
The first pin off which the ball (our soul) bounces is iron necessity, which projects all those inevitable facts, only too real, that curtail or limit our freedom. A ubiquitous example of these is death. A slightly less obvious—to us self-obsessed humans—one is the cell we are all obliged to inhabit. Its walls are formed by eachness and ego, our difficult individuality. We imagine disciplines, efforts of ascesis, that may exceptionally seem to grant us a sort of freedom from these two tyrants; but generally we know we must, like grubs in their cells, inhabit the cramping structures our biology and psychology—and that odd computer we call the brain—have evolved for us. We can then devote our imprisonment to becoming (at least in the West) distinguishable and—we hope—distinguished. That latter seems the only plausible way we shall partly avoid the certain final oblivion of the primary iron necessity.
The second and most random course-changing pin is the one I typify as keraunos, ‘the thunderbolt’. This is pure hazard. It shows as much in fatal air crashes as in exciting lottery wins, in many dire tragedies and in as many shocks of happiness. Its results may be hoped for, expected, predicted, dreaded; but they are never certain, real, until after they have occurred. Yet very few would have it otherwise. Bliss, hell; the good cries to the bad, while the keraunos makes a nonsense of that dark iron necessity, the arrow of time.
The last pin or shoulder off which we spring on our loxodromic way is eleutheria. Freedom springs from our instinct to revolt against iron necessity and from our perpetual doubt as to whether we can possess any verifiable page_freedom of will, or whether everything is not, finally, determined for us. Because our individuality and so much else (like our eventual death) is imposed on us, we crave escape. Almost all we think of as progress is this eleutheria. It destroys all stasis. We may call it rebellion, revolution, a thousand things, many of them seen (especially if one is comfortable with how and where one lives) as evil. But evolution itself is a form of terrorism, a civil war against stasis. We don’t realize it because its bombs take a demieternity, compared with the brevity of our human lives, to explode. Freedom has long had a deep and powerful fascination for humankind. Its effects may be good or bad; those of iron necessity are almost all counted outwardly as the latter. For us humans, sideros lies in shadow; eleutheria in light.
I found one indispensable first rung onto the ladder of natural history: an interested uncle. He was in charge of practical biology at the local preparatory school to which I went, and I associate him with almost all my early red-letter days. My father had been totally disgusted by wild nature ever since his agonies in the trenches of the First World War; to him it was intrinsically hostile and useless, except in his own small garden. It was to my uncle that I owed the thrill of hunting for lappet caterpillars among the sloe thickets of the Essex sea walls near where we lived. To him I owed the vaguely roulettish pleasures of ‘sugaring’—the practice of creeping round Leigh-on-Sea and Westcliff, torch in hand, patrolling at his side various wooden fences and tree trunks anointed with the sweet gunge he concocted for attracting moths. One day, he entrusted me with a great rarity, the huge larva (it was near pupation) of a death’s-head hawkmoth, which some neighbouring farmer had found in his potato field. Oh the joys of that, the gloating countless times a day over its jam jar, the stroking that induced the poor thing to peep—a miracle, an insect that ‘spoke’! All nature seemed human, its diverse forms puzzlingly near . . . cousins.
I had a highly eccentric real cousin on the other side of the family, who also encouraged me to see nature. Among other things, Laurence ran long-distance for the England team, abhorred all onions, and collected scarce clarets, but even more oddly still he travelled all over the world and worshipped, almost as he might have a guru, Donisthorpe the myrmecologist. In later years a recurrent nightmare of my life became that Laurence might die and leave me his huge collection of spirit-bottled ants. It was groundless, for some Australian museum has them now. What I did get from him was a dose of Darwin’s disease: perpetual curiosity.
These two men lit a spark in me, though I believe it was alive even earlier, almost ab ovo. I’d been fascinated since my earliest years by nature’s mysterious otherness, its belonging, though ‘related’, to a world where things happened in different ways than in our human one, seemingly often governed by the fortuitous. This charming innocence was to be worsened, indeed corrupted, by Oxford, where I studied French. I later went to live in France, and plunged even deeper into sin, having a passionate, life-changing affair with a shatteringly beautiful and rich young woman. I found her only in the remoter countrysides. I had glimpsed her in England, though never quite declared my fascination, already sensing that her true home was further south, in the Mediterranean. I called this lovely creature la sauvage, ‘the wild’. Of course I’d been taught something of France’s arts, her society and culture, her peoples and cities (and been hooked, like many of my generation, by Camus’s existentialism), but they have all paled before the naked, generous breasts, the languorous limbs, the exquisite jewellery, the sensuous underclothes, the sheer abundance, of this charming persona. I have ever since sought by preference la sauvage in every country in which I have lived or travelled and judged most events and persons in its light. It is that aspect of wild nature beyond all that we normally attach to culture and civilization, the naked reality of the rus far beyond all urbs.
In France I also became deeply enamoured of a distinctly un-English notion of liberté. This was a freedom chosen far less on ‘correct’, democracy-loving grounds than because it so happily promoted and encouraged the pleasing of myself. That rather selfish freedom—I had first suffered from it on being evacuated to rural Devon at the start of World War Two—did seem to be implicit in nature itself, but my passion for it (or her) was unashamedly hedonistic. It liberated me, a little as France itself had just been liberated from the Germans, from the crippling polio of English Puritanism, or what its later zealots had made of the original. The natural life of France still remains for me a marvellous memory of a release, a little like a visit to a high-class restaurant for a gastronome: delight and variation, endless surprise. If France was a sort of mistress, Greece (where I next lived) was half Circe, half mother. I am trigenic, of three motherlands, a matriot for all, and far from sure where I truly belong.
With my third progenitress, England, I had long grasshoppered from insects to other creatures, but I went into that in the transparently worst (though I suspect sometimes more heuristic than truly damaging) way. Whenever I could, as well as watching, I hunted and fished. All Nimrods get to know their nature, both outwardly and inwardly, along with their prey. My one excuse was the 1939–1945 war, the rabbits, pigeons, and trout that I could sometimes bring home; but I also killed other creatures, and some of them have haunted and still haunt me in this present appalling dearth of so much other English nature. One bird I shot (though only once) was later to become my totem. Its august, benign and quasimythical—like the Persian simurg—presence in a landscape has in my eyes and ears long condoned, or by its absence condemned, much else. If I see or hear ravens, something in me always rises with and to them. I’m lucky, where I live now, to know of a pair that still breed only a few miles away. That is more the reason I still live here than the sobriety my seniority sometimes pretends. I remember loathing Los Alamos, knowing its history, when I first saw it many years ago. But as I stared grimly past its boundary warnings there was a kwark, a call from the very soul of freedom, high in the blue sky over it. I might perhaps have taken that as darkly, sickly, and ‘symbolically’ as Poe did, as implying that all was death and desolation in this world. But in that black speck two or three miles away I saw life, and ‘evermore’.
In botany I soon realized I particularly cherished wild orchids (la sauvage at her most seductive). Some of them became rather like the ravens, whose presence or absence in an area profoundly changes it. My special paradises were the Causses, or limestone plateaux of southern central France and Greece, especially Crete. I have now hunted wild orchids over most of Europe, and by proxy (in Luer’s books) over the United States also. The hothouse millionaire’s orchidomania I despise, as I do bird-twitching and most of the other collecting and hoarding activities; all seem to me sick, however useful they may claim to be scientifically. A few years ago I had a small stroke and ended up at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London. I made up a mantra in my very first days there: it was tenthredinifera, tenthredinifera, tenthredinifera. . . . Only two years before I had stumbled, near the top of a Cretan mountain, on a loosely scattered cluster of the sawfly orchid (Ophrys tenthredinifera). This is a very beautiful relation of our own English bee orchid, but my cri de coeur (based on a conviction—not yet disproved—that I should never again tread that or any other Cretan mountain) was really a lament for a delectably plant-rich island.
I haven’t quite finished with my own inconstancy over natural knowledge. Before my aversion to London (indeed to all large cities) finally drove me away from it, I was one day in the early 1960s summoned to the Old Bailey on jury duty. The case the twelve of us had to decide concerned incest. It was diabolically, obscenely nasty, as accreted with falsehood and human bestiality as a pigsty with dung. Its victims and even the accused were so stupid and illiterate that the real people who should have been in the dock were we jurors, guilty of having allowed our own culture to sink to such abysmal depths. I remember standing outside the court with my jury duty fee in my hand when we were dismissed. I came to an instant decision: I would go straight to the nearest large bookshop and perform an acte gratuit, buy something as remote from my own insufferably disgusting species as I could find. I ended up with Lockett and Millidge’s British Spiders, the standard textbook of the time. For many (too many) years I then spent an absurd amount of time peering down an entomological microscope and looking for infinitesimal trichobothria or trying to decipher, like some insane papyrologist, the exact shape and outline of both male and female sex organs (by which alone the vast majority of smaller spiders can be surely identified). It was during my pursuit of spiders that I was infected by an eventually overwhelming doubt. But this is not quite the end of what must seem a sadly fickle story.
In 1978 I became curator of our little museum here at Lyme Regis in Dorset. Lyme is above all famous for its mainly Jurassic—and also Cretaceous—fossils. This collector of ‘ologies’, despite the several foundered voyages that littered his past, now decided he was lured by yet another wreckers’ beacon: palaeontology. But as I have hinted, I had by that time been bitten by a tarantula of doubt over what most of the general public still supposes to be a foundation stone of true science. I’d often been harried by academics over my own writing, and probed over what they evidently saw as a noisome paradox, a lamentable deficiency, in my work. I might keep claiming that natural history (as I knew it) was behind all my fictions; yet where was there any real evidence of that? I might say I admired Gilbert White, Thoreau, Richard Jefferies, and many others, but I seemed totally disinclined to try to emulate them. This was at least half true. I have always regarded nature as peculiarly sacrosanct. It was Jefferies who first pronounced it ‘ultrahuman’, or beyond humanity. D. H. Lawrence, nowhere near as misguided as Snow made out during his vendetta with Leavis, reached nearest—especially in his poetry—to penetrating that strange otherness about it. The experience is nearly impossible to describe in prose, but I will try.
The acutely sensitive Virginia Woolf stated my own general difficulty quite plainly: ‘Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy . . . they tear each other to pieces.’ I have always felt, from long before I became a practising writer, very nearly the same thing. As soon as we start, an angry ‘Trespassers are forbidden’ or Noli me tangere springs up. I know I adore nature; yet must feel myself as regards expressing that love, when faced with it, a eunuch. I may seem to go where I want, but in reality I may not, because I cannot.
With palaeontology (and our fossil-rich local cliffs, quarries, and beaches in Dorset) I soon realized I was faced with not only an enormously complicated field but a still-shifting one, by no means definitively fixed. Science, hypnotized by Linnaeus, was still announcing new species, sometimes whole new genera, because of the enormous lacunae left by the as-yet-undiscovered. Only if near-infinite multiplicity is desirable—its classifications endlessly fluid, elastic, and mobile—can this become anything but a labyrinthine nightmare.
This brings me to the giant tarantula lurking in its subterranean lair and waiting to pounce on my would-be dalliance with science. Its fangs first struck towards the end of my obsession with spiders: put simply, why was I so mesmerized by the binomial system? In Uppsala, some years before, I had offended some worthy Swedish literary professors by selecting the wrong visit of the two that they had offered. They could happily show me some of the precious early manuscripts in the university library, or, since it was one of his almae matres, I could (if I must) walk around Linnaeus’ original garden. I had no doubt. To hell with the great library and its treasures; I wanted, and duly got, Linnaeus’ curious little walled and parterred patch.
I have described elsewhere (in ‘The Tree’) the ‘heresy’ that began there. It does not surprise me at all that the poor doctor was half crazed by the end of his own life, drenched and drowned in the enormous flood of names, names, names he had unleashed. When I took over the museum in Lyme I soon saw that I stood on the same terrifying cliff brink, about to fall into a sea of fog. I tried to relabel some of our collection of ammonites and other fossils; it was like walking through the distorting maze of a fun fair, walls bizarrely lengthening or shortening, incomprehensible elisions and hiatuses, ends to all previous assumptions. After a few years of stumbling and pratfalling in the dark wings, I turned my back on this theatrical maze.
In so many sciences this endless cataract of new names and knowledges has created an awesome new Frankenstein, otherwise known as the specialist. Specialization may focus, as a lens the rays of the sun, on the knowledge of one generally very small field and subject. But it also has an unfortunate habit of focusing not just on the subject but on the specialist as well; and can sear him or her into desiccation like an autumn leaf. In plain language, nothing can more distressingly dehydrate, isolate, and detach.
I was long a victim of the myth of the polymath. Knowledge is encyclopedically vast. Nowadays it can be mastered only through cybernetically controlled computers; by a single man or woman, a single consciousness, never. Yet we former mythomanes are reluctant to give up the idea that all may be held in one small brain. Personally, I have abandoned all hope of mastering the specific details in the various fields of which I used to boast—I’m afraid sometimes to flaunt—knowledge. More and more I take a far humbler comfort in at least knowing a little at the generic level; and I grope after something beyond all species.
What my refusal of too dry an obsession with spiders and fossils, indeed with much else of nature, has provided is a kind of parallel view. One perspective remains not unscientific. If I had to praise one book from recent palaeontological literature, it would be Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life of 1989,2 about the Canadian—and Cambrian—Burgess Shales. It doesn’t worry me that some of his fossicking through the deeper significance of evolution remains in dispute; it is still a marvellous example of what my myrmecological cousin always sought beyond his eccentricities: the stimulation and (at least temporary) satisfaction of curiosity. The other, humbler view springs from what used to be called the amateur approach— much more the liking and being interested than the being totally immersed. I love the mucking about for ‘gold’ in the panoplies of both past and present time to be found in the Dorset world about me, or indeed wherever I am.
I do now accept the necessity of a binomial system for all academic specialists and many professional people, even for some skilled amateurs. But I mistrust such obsessive particularization for myself and the vast majority of mankind and womankind. I long ago half realized that while names in one way make us see, in another, like clouded glass, they blind. We all know our world is grossly overpopulated in human terms; it’s just as intolerably overcrowded by names, by tickets and labels. That is why so many can’t, or don’t, see nature: among the brainwashed, if a thing is nameless, it is invisible. Social, economic, and architectural factors all conspire to induce such myopia. We are equally dim-sighted as to time, being unable to see so much of the past and believing we must live in the present (though so seldom seeing what I’ll speak of in a moment, the now). We use our general insensitivity to time as a censor does his scissors: to remake the world around us not as it is, but as it suits us and our societies to believe.
In any case there is, due to our appalling inability sanely to administer the environments about us, less and less nature to see. I keep a kind of funeral register of the plants, birds, insects, and animals that I knew were present in my garden here in Dorset, and not uncommonly up to far less than my own lifetime ago. They are now, it seems irrecoverably, gone; or at best on the brink, ‘endangered’ species locked in a desperate fight for survival against the planet’s most viciously selfish and greedily dominant one, man.
Nature in England, if still more in danger of dying than actually dead, is nonetheless in a parlous state; we slowly slide into the zero of extinction. To many foreigners, conditions on this cramped island may appear far worse than those in their own (in this context) far richer and happier countries . . . and perhaps, in view of our blundering imperialistic past, this is deserved. Our virtuous Protestantism, though for long shocked by and suspicious of la sauvage, hasn’t of course allowed this sad decline in (or indifference to) nature without attempts at prevention.
I don’t wish to dismiss such protests, as I certainly don’t want to suggest that the state of the whole planet, the prolix rattishness of humankind, its plague, don’t make me often despair. We seem either blind (lacking in elementary knowledge and common sense) or evil (deliberately harmful and self-destructive). Fine language will not save or reorient us; as well give space vehicles to peasants and expect them to fly at once to an unknown tomorrow. One obvious underlying cause of the countless wrongs, pollutions, and deprivations we inflict on our world is the atrocious overpopulation our species permits itself, a hypertrophy infinitely worsened by what we may think of as our special grace, our individuality, the fact that each one of us is unique. Despite that raven at Los Alamos, unless some great change in humankind occurs (unblinds, converts, transmogrifies), our gross stupidity and apathy will one day doom the Earth.
Yet here my savage old mistress pulls me back from total gloom. My study in Lyme Regis looks out on a green May garden over the English Channel and evokes both present and past. The past . . . both my own and the world’s. My reason tells me that so much, not least the terrifying random keraunos, sudden all-changing fate beyond prediction, must seem to consign not just our, but all, species to oblivion. I have no belief at all in any divine power that might save us from this threatened nostricide or the total hazard of the keraunos. Yet something in wild nature, though often dumb, masked, or hooded, has on occasion, as just now, touched my individual soul. It is a perhaps foolish optimism, a memory of how one escapes through what Sir Thomas Browne called the ‘postern of resipiscence’— the recognizing of past error. I am; very well, I shall one day die, knowing I’ve failed to do anywhere near enough to halt the folly, to try to reduce it before it becomes too late; but I will not believe that all sentient, intelligent being must end.
This brings me to beingness, existingness. It is the best example of that complaint about the lethal enmity between words and nature that Virginia Woolf noted. D. H. Lawrence seems to me to have come closest in this century to touching it, and I have written about this in my commentary on The Man Who Died. I doubt if I understood the implications of realizing this existingness when I first fell for Lawrence, but as I have said in that commentary, ‘I did share it, though but as a candle to his sun. It is why I became a natural historian; it is why I became a writer myself, always stumbling, despite being a novelist, after the poem. . . .’
Illness has kept me even more alone than usual these last two years, and brought me closer to being, though that hasn’t always been very pleasant for my body. What has struck me about the acutely rich sensation of beingness is how fleeting is its apprehension. It’s almost as transient, as fugitive, as some particle in atomic physics: the more you would capture it, the less likely that you will. It refuses all attempts at willed or conscious evocation, it is deaf to pure intelligence alone, it envelops you in a double or twinned feeling. One is of intense nowness, the other of realizing that you (oneself) alone, in your individuality, are infinitely fortunate to experience it, perhaps in nothing so much as its seeming to fall from something whole and unindividual on your separateness. It is being, being, being . . .a perpetual miracle, so vivid and vital that ordinarily we cannot bear it; always rare enough to be a shock, no similes or metaphors can convey it; like a sudden nakedness, a knowing of oneself laid bare before a different reality. There looks to be nothing; then, as with the thunderbolt, all.
Only yesterday I bought a new, posthumous, unfinished novel, The Double Tongue.3 The publishers discovered it among William Golding’s papers. Unfinished, yet it seems to me a subtle weighing (or ‘feeling’!) of both this world and the ancient one by a very wise old philhellene (no Nobel in recent years was more deserved). Something on its very first page caught my eye. Golding describes the Pythia, the famous female oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece and the central character and ‘message’ of his fiction: ‘Blazing light and warmth, undifferentiated and experiencing themselves . . . there was no time, even implied. So how could it be before or after, seeing that it was unlike anything else, separate, distinct, a one-off. No words, no time, no even I, ego. . .naked being without time or sight. . . .’ My revered brother novelist would have known what I’m speaking of here. Among other things this intense awareness of being makes the pointless destruction of other life (whether of other species or of other human beings) seem as unthinkable, as wicked, as some Eastern religions and famous European ‘feelers’ such as Saint Francis have long maintained it to be.
It is this experience of existingness, of having both possessed and known it free of all the usual cloying detritus of religion, superstition, and mysticism, that makes me profoundly grateful that fate allowed me to become at least something of both an artist and an aesthete. It is the realizing that I have been set, not by any special effort or diligence or because I deserve it, but by what seems almost total chance, on a right path—right not just to foster my own pleasure, but far more importantly, right for the betterment of my entire species. If I had to prescribe a future type for humankind, the writer (reflective of ego) and natural historian (seeking beyond it) would rank high above the technologist and computeromane. I am not at all happy that a pseudo-scientific quirk in me once demanded, like a dictator, that I must know in one approved scientific way alone.
I fear I’m not making the main tenor of this essay very clear. I am distorted by science, unable to think or write outside its bias. Just as Jefferies coined the word ultrahuman, so we need an ultrascientific (beyond its own terms, vocabulary, and logic). To try to portray feeling only in and by ‘proper’ scientific terms and methods is like using the long-stuffed or the dry skin to evoke the moving, or representing the living by the still, colour by black and white: it is an approximation, not the reality.
This ‘feeling’ part of our being, this other self, is the shadowed one, and in some ways the more primitive, though in countless others the more complex. Many might consider it yet another thing, like religion, to be relegated to the lumber-room of history. Such a comparison seems to me terrifyingly wrong. We desperately need its counterweight to all the autocratic excesses, encroachments, and ukases of knowing.
All writers make up their own private slang as to what goes on when they write. An important term—at any rate for me, in my own practice—is the fork (as in a path), by which I mean a fairly continuous awareness of alternatives, both ‘learned’ (remembered) and ‘fortuitous’ (wild), in what is done. This possibility-mongering may vary intellectually and emotionally in the shape of narrative, in dialogue, through moral and descriptive passages, down to individual words. One thing eternally ‘on sale’ is the blue pencil: omission. This fertile awareness is far subtler than a mere crossword quickness at hitting on synonyms, and derives in part from the green embryo without clues constituted by the pristine, unformed, barely conceived text. The polycistronic (‘producing more than one gene’) and polyfunctional capacities of the imagination invent both the clues and the final answers to any work of art. This can lead the artist nearer to something he or she may profess not to credit: God, or a simulacrum (in my own case, once, a muse).
This two-edged power of hypothesization can very easily transfer itself from the text to ordinary life. Every time I fly, I know I shall crash and be killed; every time (even at my age!) I meet an attractive woman, I imagine love will follow . . . even though I’m only too certain it neither will nor can. A puritan might equate the freedom to invent with being given the luxuries—in both senses—of a Mogul emperor, a perpetual licence. But my intention here is to suggest that being allowed to exist within such an infinity of possible variations, the endless bifurcations of the alternative, forms the reality, like some difficult differential equation, that most serious artists have either to worry or rejoice over.
Alas, the world seems determined to abolish and destroy living feeling by stifling its existence with dead knowledge. I have doubted recent attempts both to scientize something so compounded of irrational feeling as literature and to presume it might be explained by the language and methods of a patently hostile Aschauung. We writers have recently been told that believing there is such a thing as an autonomous individual self is ridiculous and that the very corrupt nature of the words we use—not just our art but the language we couch it in—is suspect also. We are eternally behind bars, our tongues are tied, our words by being words kill all chance of verity.
This is why, while not denying the vast utility of science in the countless practical and technological spheres where it now dominates our lives, I still think that Snow and his kind were gravely wrong when they maintained that in the infinitely complex and still-unsounded reality of what we are, ‘feeling’ (the old aesthesis, the world of the emotions and the arts) is so much less important than ‘knowing’.
What did Jeans once say? The world is not just stranger than we think; it may be stranger than we can think. We must allow not only for countless ‘scientific’ fresh truths but for equally countless new evaluations of their comparative importance. The world has changed prodigiously since I was born, in 1926; knowing it fully, in all its scientific diversity, is already impossible. Yet the feeling about it of each ‘I’, that obstinately unassimilable and irreducible one, is and always will be relatively possible to ascertain. The unique individual must, by very virtue of his or her uniqueness, realize that things can be judged and decided only partially—that is, on what it alone chooses or is chosen to sense and perceive. Science strives after totality; it wants always to know more. Habitually, in strict scientific terms, wrongly, feeling is stoical. It knows enough.
Any true scientific knowing is always, like feeling, only partial. How much we know—or ignore—depends largely on hazard. Our human freedom lies in allowing or admitting that this hazard is like rain in our lives.
We seldom realize how vital to us this both exquisite and baneful uncertainty is. Cruel, painful, even death-dealing though it may be, we could not live in this world without its sheer incomprehensibility.
What frightens, bewilders, and enchants me about the keraunos, the thunderbolt of pure chance, is the constancy of its occurrence. It is a beyond-science, an antithesis of all that normal science, with its mechanical fixities, has led and leads us to foresee. This unexpectability remains a main source of every individual’s energy, physical and psychic.
Both art and science, behind the clumsy fixed classifications and etiologies out of which that latter tries to construct a supposedly ultimate truth, are in eternal chaos. We need to institute an oscillation between the two sides, like a heartbeat; to understand not just the nature of things, but the nature of understanding them. This will never be clear to science, by mere knowing alone. The unnecessary border war, as foolish and futile as most others in human history, is aggravated by the artistic side’s pandering (sometimes very debasedly) to its audience’s pleasure. The old Puritans sternly maintained that the seduction of our animal side distracted from what they considered to be the unique and only proper truth. Something in the arts must therefore (especially in a Protestant-leaning culture) make them seem inherently the more selfish and wicked; and the sciences the more sober, serious, and decent. The arts establish their realities far less quickly, despite the instant communications of the global village; yet these slower fruits of feeling frequently affect and alter the general course of the ‘cruise’. The seeming-blind, hesitant, octopod gropings of the arts towards a more general sense of fulfilment (‘purpose’) for humanity are not all to be dismissed. Poets and writers (like painters and musicians, saints and philosophers) are in precisely the same situation as Columbus, knowing neither quite where they are going nor what they will find—or how their discovery will later develop.
Both the knowledge and the feeling ‘maps’ of our contemporary world are in effect little more adequate than those primitive geographical notions (the crude maps we now tend to smile at) of the Middle Ages. This is because we suppose that feeling (as shown in things like taste, conviction, and opinion) must be essentially a personal matter, very private and individual; therefore, in a world of general laws crying for ubiquity and fearing all exception, unimportant. Actual science may have cast huge doubts, a pervasive scepticism, on all the old gods. Yet religion remains a warm blanket to cover man and woman against the hideous frosts of death and space. Science has, in proclaiming such authority and power, secretly usurped divinity.
I may be, as George Steiner warned, a mere word-helot: imprisoned in the past, or far more in it than in any future. But in this I prefer to be guided by what I have learned scientifically, creatively, and existentially from nature. I accept that I am ludicrously unfinished, that I constantly lose my balance (or that sense of eukosmia, ‘decency and right order’, which fosters it). This is what the excellently shrewd and sharp-eyed Scots poet Norman MacCaig speaks of in the quotation that opens this essay. I know now that I shall never have children, that I betray the apparent fundamental biological purpose for existing. I shall die hopelessly short of entelechy and bitterly regret that fate bore me when it did (I thank hazard it was not historically earlier, and wish it had been later); yet would rather have been created at any time than not at all. While I live I would hope to conserve my own powers of feeling and knowing, defective though they often are. This is not selfishness but awareness of the reality of both the sideros and the keraunos, necessity and chaos, and of how short our individual cruise is . . . or seems, towards its end.
It pains me that such a galimatias as this must express me, that I can say no more about all that has said so much to me. Perhaps you will count me as a peculiar outcast, an exile from normality. I hope you will credit that I truly venerate, behind my inadequacies, the wild; and pity the ignorance of all those who deem themselves so superbly evolved that they judge they can do without it. Such seem to seek extinction; like this, they shall find it.
A large garden owns me—not the reverse—here in Lyme. I behave there as I do with texts, pursuing alternatives. Most plants, both wild and cultivated, have dates of epiphany. They may vary little from year to year, yet when they explode, they appear at their most fulfilled, most perfect, most fit to be contemplated à la japonaise, in the Zen Buddhist way. Their epiphanies are when their existences most crave to be seen.
It is a beautiful June evening. I shall walk down the hill to the bottom of my steep plot, past the cream-white furbelows, bee-loud and brave against an azure sea, of the acacias. In a secret corner there, a few stems of Ophrys scolopax, the woodcock orchid, grow. Woodcocks come from the Mediterranean and are not meant to flower as far north as this island, but in the warmth of our south-facing coast they do. They have become my every summer’s secret joy, an apotheosis of the recurrent green universe. I cherish them empathetically so much they would make me cry, if I were the crying kind. I look at them now, knowing they are and that I am, in love and silence.
1. The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
2. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990.
3. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1995.