September Sunset

Summer has a fury that even the coldest winter storm cannot match, a tireless fury of long hot days and rainless months, of the sun and its wake of fire.

Autumn is like a second summer here in southern California, a milder summer, a lesser fury. While the temperature drops, the chaparral burns and warm Santa Ana winds spread the flames across the coastal mesas and foothills. High in the mountains, ferns in the meadows turn yellow, gold, red, and then brown, as the earth releases the heat of summer.

The furies of summer and fall and the wake of fire: bound up, as they are in modernity with chance and necessity in a phantom order, yet imply great moment beyond. While the setting sun reddened the sky over the Pacific this late September evening, a rainbow stretched out in the clouds northeast of Cowles mountain unperturbed by the fury of departing summer. And then came darkness.

There was day and there was night, summer and fall, and there were spectres of fury and ease in the sky.

Resistance to Time

My wife and I climbed Cowles Mountain to watch the sun go down over the Pacific a few days ago.

We were not alone there. Others had come to the top of the mountain to watch the sun go down. Everyone acted nonchalant, but nervousness evident in the motions of their bodies and eyes revealed that each had come for a reason, if one can call it a reason. Each came to touch the stone at the top of the mountain. Each came to watch the sun leave. Many come every day. Others come early in the morning to watch the sun return. Each gazes over the land and to the ocean beyond and into the sky above. Each touches the stone.

The layer of fog along the coast was so thick that the sun faded from view before it descended to the horizon. It happens that way sometimes. The evening wind was cold, even though the time is August. The sky was gray and starless. We descended the mountain by flashlight. The night haze blurred the rocks and contours of the trail. The side of the mountain was quiet except for the sound of our careful feet. The others had left by other paths. Each wandered back into the city that surrounds the base of the mountain.

What happens on Cowles Mountain is resistance to time. What happens in the city is evolution. What happens on Cowles is a returning and a starting over.

Imperviousness in Motion

Emotional appeals and argument mean nothing to natural selection.
Darwin lamented and praised the indifference of Nature.  And yet, Darwin also wrote that Nature selects for the good of each being that she tends.  It is a strange attentiveness, or a strange indifference.

This paradox of Nature is the same as the divine paradox.  We petition God.  Scriptures, traditions and many who confess faith today tell us God is moved by our feelings and arguments.  And yet, in the end (as at death) we know, or we discover, that God is not moved by our pleas for life, nor by our best bargains.  The way of life and death is fixed; it is part of the impervious order that is the cosmos.  It is fixed, unless it is changed in eternity, in another life.

Whether born of Nature, or God, or both, we are, ourselves, impervious.  Perhaps it is a mercy given by a strange attentiveness.  It is a kind of immunity, even though it is only partial.

In No Place for You, My Love, Eudora Welty described the dance between a man and a woman as “imperviousness in motion.”  She wrote, “Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost….They were what their separate hearts desired that day, for themselves and each other.”

On Metaphors and Nature

Darwin wrote that Nature selects for the good of each being that she tends. Nature, selection, good, tending: all are metaphors. Nature is evolution personified. She selects and tends. Her work is good.

A hundred years earlier, the great naturalist Comte de Buffon had written that Nature is “attentive … to the preservation of each species.” The metaphors are the same.

Darwin also associated the metaphor “survival of the fittest” with the workings of evolution. It is a metaphor for indifference, one Darwin learned from Herbert Spencer. Nature is not present, or at least, away at a great distance, in this metaphor – the beings struggle to survive on their own, they are not tended by Nature.

It is the metaphor of indifference, survival of the fittest, that one most often hears associated with Darwin, and yet, in Chapter 4 of Origin of the Species, Darwin also associated natural selection with another metaphor – one he called the “preservation principle.” In this other metaphor, Nature tends for the good of each being. This metaphor is the one that Buffon used.

I think it is Darwin’s preservation metaphor that Aldo Leopold appropriated in his land ethic. Darwin contrasted Nature, who selects for the good of each being that she tends, with humanity, who selects for the good of humanity. Leopold tried to change human selection to follow the way of Nature rather than the way of survival of the fittest. It is a religious effort – to try to live by the ways of gods, of Nature.

The cosmos, the order of life and the universe, is a great paradox.  It appears both terrifyingly indifferent to life and yet benevolently attentive to life. It is susceptible to investigation by naturalists, and yet it is ultimately knowable only in metaphors.

Phenomenology

On most days in southern California, light from the sun washes away the color of the land. On this day, an afternoon wind from the ocean carried clouds from the coast into the mountains, thick clouds that darkened the light of the sun. Only a little light remained and it was no brighter than the light that remains for a few minutes in the evening when the sun passes beyond the horizon. In this unnatural darkness with its little light, the color of the land became intense and the light itself seemed to emanate from the trees and rocks and ferns.

On most days in southern California, rays of heat from the sun warm my skin even while a cool breeze chills my bones. On this day, in the unexpected dark light of the afternoon, the coldness that I usually feel only in my bones spread to my muscles and skin, even while my jacket kept the wind outside.

On most days light and darkness, and warmth and coldness, seem to have a normal order about them that went away on this day when the clouds covered the sun and filled the mountains. In the alternative order of this day, light and darkness are not controlled by the relative position of light and dark spheres, but light is something that emanates from rocks and trees and ferns. Warmth is unknown and coldness radiates from bones.

In the normal order, the sun heats the air over the ocean to make the wind, but in the alternative order, the wind is inexplicable because warmth is unknown.

So much depends on what we know and what we don’t – the motion of the spheres, the light within and without, the coldness of bones, the color of things, and the meaning of wind.

Serendipity

Last week on the ridge above a deep canyon, before descending into the canyon with my wife and friends, I miscalculated our location and the distance around the base of a mountain peak that is part of the ridge.

The canyon is steep and rocky and forested.  Some of the rocks are large boulders.  The thorns of the ceanothus that grows there hurt to touch.  In some places the thick duff is topped with slippery pine needles.  Fallen trees add to the ruggedness of the land.  Although my GPS guided us to the destination, our journey was much longer and harder than we expected when we left the ridge.  The thorns scratched us and we all fell more than once when the pine needles slid beneath our feet.  Climbing through and over boulders tired our legs and arms.  It all stressed our patience and confidence.

Deep in the canyon are ruins of a historical log cabin, so deep that hiking there from any point in or above the canyon is strenuous, difficult, slow and tiring.  On the day last week when I was lost, by being lost I unexpectedly found a new route to the cabin – something I had previously sought but been unable to find.

Two days later I returned with my wife and friends to explore the new route.  It was more difficult than the others we had used, but more dramatic, more remote, more isolated, and unused except by deer and other wild creatures.  I often hike in lands designated “wilderness” by Congress, but walking this steep forested canyon slope was really the first time I had been in a place that was plausibly unvisited by humanity before me.  It was a place like Thoreau described in Chesuncook:  “There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot.”  There were no signs that other hikers had been here seeking solitude before us.  This was wilderness.

Places like this – so beautiful, so remote, so inhospitable, so wild – seem to affirm Darwin’s suspicion: the land was not made for us.  Wild land confounds agrarian theology.  Chance and necessity seem to have found expression in error and travail.  In wilderness life came unexpectedly and it still does.

Night at The Outermost House

“Learn to reverence the night,” Henry Beston counseled in The Outermost House. Gazing at the night sky we are touched by an “awareness of the mystery of being,” he wrote.

William Blake had warned, “We are led to believe a lie when we see not through the eye that was born in a night to perish in a night.”

To both men something religious was at stake. To Beston, it was “a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.” In Blake’s poem, when the eye was born in the night “the soul slept in beams of light.” And now it doesn’t.

We have banished the night. That was Beston’s lament. And waves in a storm, washed The Outermost House into the sea.

What I think both men saw in the night is that, in spite of the great enlightenment, a certain darkness still covers the face of the deep.

Walking to Stills Landing with Thoreau, Darwin and Nietzsche

The walk to Stills Landing and back was twelve miles in the wilderness, in a place a friend of mine calls “tall and uncut.” His expression is an allusion to Thoreau’s use of those words to describe the forests were he liked to walk – a places not transformed by humanity.

Stills Landing is named for someone who attempted to settle there in the 1940’s. The homestead failed.

The beauty and benevolence of wilderness is deceptive. The harmony is illusion. The river runs cold through Whitewater Canyon, bears hunt the deer, and my survival, as well as that of bears and deer, depends on me leaving this tall and uncut place before night.

I want to be deceived – I love the illusion. And yet, my disbelief in the terror of existence, my disbelief that nature is sublime, is hard to suspend.

Thoreau, Darwin and Nietzsche, each in his own way, confirmed the terror. I think Thoreau hoped for transcendence and feared the nihilistic boredom of civilization more than he feared places tall and uncut. Darwin faced the terror stoically – accepting it as it is and admiring the grandeur of the terror and the deception. Nietzsche faced it heroically – acknowledging the power such terror has over us, but resisting, not with suspension of disbelief, but with a raised fist. It is as if Thoreau said, “Let it not be so;” Darwin said, “so be it;” and Nietzsche said, “Nevertheless, thou must reckon with me.” Nietzsche was like Job.

As for me, I guess I am much like Thoreau – I walk in the wilderness and return to the city with hope renewed. I admire Nietzsche, and yet I love the wilderness too much to raise my fist. Let it be – tall and uncut, and terrifying.

Whitewater Canyon

We crossed the river about a dozen times, hopping from rock to rock above the rapids, but at one place, at the base of Paw Hill, the only way to cross was to wade. That will be the only crossing that I will remember, the only one that will matter.

Cool water matters on a warm day. Bare feet on cold rocks in rushing water matter.

I remember wading across a river in the desert mountains a few years ago – the cold water, the soft sand.

Rock hopping above the rapids is good, but not enough. It is wading that matters. One must step into the river to live, step into the river to remember.

Mount San Jacinto

The land is so simple in the snow – no chinquapin, manzanita, fallen tree trunks or boulders to hike around or through.  The snow makes the rough textured land smooth.

In the photo, my wife is approaching the summit of Mount San Jacinto.

Something important is only visible on mountain tops covered in snow – the high limit of being alive – and something frightening – the thinness of it, the fine layer of life.