“We overlook that nature itself is one huge miracle transcending the fact of night time and nothingness,” the anthropologist and thinker of science Loren Eiseley wrote in his poetic meditation on life in 1960. “We overlook that every considered one of us in his private life repeats that miracle.”
The historical past of our species is the historical past of forgetting. Our deepest existential longing is the eager for remembering this cosmic belonging, and the work of creativity is the work of reminding us. We might give the tendrils of our inventive longing totally different names — poetry or physics, music or arithmetic, astronomy or artwork — however all of them give us one factor: an antidote to forgetting, in order that we might dwell, even for a short while, wonder-smitten by reality.
In the identical period, the science-inspired poet Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962) took up this reckoning within the closing years of his life in an immense and ravishing poem that grew to become the title of his assortment The Beginning and the End (public library | free ebook), revealed the 12 months after his loss of life.
Jeffers was not solely an beautiful literary artist, however a visionary who bent his sight and perception far previous the horizon of his time — he wrote about local weather change lengthy earlier than it was even a tremor of a fear within the widespread thoughts, although he died months earlier than Rachel Carson revealed her epoch-making Silent Spring, which woke up the human thoughts from its ecological somnolence and seeded the environmental motion. However though he’s celebrated as one of many nice environmental poets, he was as enchanted by the wonders of nature on Earth as past it, for he understood higher than any artist since Whitman that these are components of a single and superior actuality, and we’re a part of it too — not as spectators, not as explorers, however as residing stardust.
Born into an period when the atom was nonetheless an unique notion for the common particular person and molecules a mystifying abstraction, Jeffers drew richly on the elemental realities of nature — in no small half as a result of his brother, Hamilton Jeffers, was one of many period’s most esteemed astronomers, having gotten his begin on the Lick Observatory — the world’s first actual mountaintop observatory, the place the primary new moon of Jupiter because the Galilean 4 had been found months earlier than Hamilton was born.
Jeffers wrote about black holes and the Huge Bang, about amino acids and novae, in regards to the indivisibility of all of it — nowhere extra fantastically than in “The Starting and the Finish.”
Sixty springs after he returned his borrowed stardust to the universe, his everlasting poem got here alive in a redwood-nested amphitheater down the mountain from the Lick Observatory, because the opening poem of the fifth annual Universe in Verse, learn by my darling astronomer pal Natalie Batalha, who led the epoch-making discovery of greater than 4,000 potential cradles for all times by NASA’s Kepler mission and now continues her work on the seek for life past our photo voltaic system with the astrobiology program at UC Santa Cruz.
As usual, Natalie prefaced her studying with a poignant reflection that’s itself nothing lower than a prose poem in regards to the nature of life and its accountability to nature — that’s, to itself:
We are Earth. We are the planet. We are the biosphere. We aren’t distinct from nature.
But, on the identical time, we’re, as life — as residing issues: ourselves, the redwoods, the birds overhead — we’re the head of complexity within the universe, from the Huge Bang till now. It took 13.7 billion years for the atoms to come back collectively to type this portal of self-awareness that’s you.
[…]
Given this ephemeral existence that we now have, of self-awareness, what are you going to do along with your second? What are we, as a species, going to do with our second?
Excerpts from “THE BEGINNING AND THE END”
by Robinson JeffersThe unformed volcanic earth, a feminine factor,
Furiously following with the opposite planets
Their lord the solar: her physique is molten metallic pressed inflexible
By its personal mass; her lovely pores and skin, basalt and granite and the lighter components,
Swam to the highest. She was like a mare in her warmth eyeing the stallion,
Screaming for all times within the womb; her ambiance
Was the breath of her ardour: not the blithe air
Males breathe and dwell, however marsh-gas, ammonia, sulphured hydrogen,
Such poison as our remembering our bodies return to
Once they die and decay and the top of life
Meets its starting. The solar heard her and stirred
Her thick air with fierce lightnings and flagellations
Of germinal energy, constructing unimaginable molecules, amino-acids
And flashy unstable proteins: thence life was born,
Its nitrogen from ammonia, carbon from methane,
Water from the cloud and salts from the younger seas,
It dribbled down into the primal ocean like a babe’s urine
Soaking the material: closely constructed protein molecules
Chemically rising, bursting aside because the tensions
Within the inordinate molecule turn out to be insufferable —
That’s to say, rising and reproducing themselves, a virus
On the nice and cozy ocean.Time and the world modified,
The proteins had been not created, the ammoniac ambiance
And the nice storms no extra. This virus now
Should labor to take care of itself. It clung collectively
Into bundles of life, which we name cells,
With microscopic partitions enclosing themselves
In opposition to the world. However why would life keep itself,
Being nothing however a grimy scum on the ocean
Dropped from foul air? May it maybe understand
Glories to come back? May it foresee that mobile life
Would make the mountain forest and the eagle dawning,
Monstrously lovely, wings, eyes and claws, dawning
Over the rock-ridge? And the passionate human intelligence
Straining its limits, striving to know itself and the universe to the final galaxy.[…]
What is that this factor referred to as life? — However I imagine
That the earth and stars too, and the entire glittering universe, and rocks on the mountain have life,
Solely we don’t name it so — I communicate of the life
That oxydizes fat and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to dwell on, and from that chemical power
Makes pleasure and ache, marvel, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these factor develop
From a chemical response?I believe they had been right here already. I believe the rocks
And the earth and the opposite planets, and the celebrities and galaxies
Have their varied consciousness, all issues are acutely aware;
However the nerves of an animal, the nerves and mind
Carry it to focus[…]
The human soul.
The thoughts of man…
Slowly, maybe, man might develop into it —
Do you assume so? This villainous king of beasts, this deformed ape? — He has thoughts
And creativeness, he would possibly go far
And finish in honor. The hawks are extra heroic however man has a steeper thoughts,
Enormous pits of darkness, excessive peaks of sunshine,
Chances are you’ll calculate a comet’s orbit or the dive of a hawk, not a person’s thoughts.
Complement with other highlights from The Universe in Verse — together with readings and reflections by Rebecca Solnit, Yo-Yo Ma, Patti Smith, and extra — then savor Jeffers’s breathtaking letter to the principal of an all-girls Catholic college about moral beauty and the interconnectedness of the universe.
