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In Eudora Welty’s story, A Still Moment, the student scientist and artist Audubon shot and killed a white heron so that he could gaze upon it long enough to sketch it, to paint it, to study it. Watching it happen, the evangelist Lorenzo felt depressed by Audubon’s killing of the bird because Lorenzo had felt love for the bird, even though he had only seen the bird for a moment before Audubon killed it. Lorenzo had seen, in the bird feeding in the marsh, a female bird, the love of God.
Audubon had closed his eyes when he pulled the trigger and killed the white heron. When he opened his eyes he saw “horror deep” in Lorenzo’s eyes. It was the first time Audubon had ever seen horror. Welty wrote, “He had never seen horror in its purity and clarity until now…” In this sense, Audubon was innocent.
Riding slowly away on his horse, Lorenzo thought: “He could understand God’s giving Separateness first and then giving Love to follow and heal in its wonder; but God had reversed this, and given Love first and then Separateness, as though it did not matter to Him which came first. Perhaps it was that God never counted the moments of Time… Time did not occur to God.” Lorenzo tried to assure himself that God was there, but innocent, that God had never thought of time before – he tried to justify cruelty in the world to save God from oblivion.
Murrell, the marauder, the devil in the story, who had planned to kill Lorenzo until Audubon unexpectedly arrived, also watched Audubon kill the innocent bird and he felt a certain pride in what happened – it proved to him the innocence of travelers, the innocence of the people upon whom he preyed, the innocence upon which his livelihood as a marauder depended. Welty wrote, “his faith was in innocence and his knowledge was of ruin.”
Loren Eiseley, in his autobiography, All the Strange Hours, wrote this: “All the sciences are linked by one element, time.” He wrote that he had spoken those words in a speech, that he had spoken them “desperately into the microphone.” Desperately? Had time not occurred to the scientists in his audience? I suppose they were innocent, and knew nothing of ruin or horror.
Chance and necessity – these are the ways of life, the boundaries in the struggle for existence, and Darwin’s most brief expression of what lies at the heart of natural selection, of life.
“Are they sufficient to explain the immense and wonderful universe?” That is a question Darwin asked himself. In spite of all he argued in The Origin of the Species, he had, for part of his life at least, doubts that they are sufficient.
I wish they were not sufficient. I wish we could exchange chance for love, necessity for beauty.
There was a time when beauty lived with truth in love. That time was before Emily Dickinson’s poem where one who died for beauty and another who died for truth were laid together in a tomb. Beauty said, “We talked … until the moss had reached our lips and covered up our names.”
Now it is for chance and necessity that we live and die – and yet, it is unfair, for they themselves are immortal. In the myth by which we now live they are immortal gods who gave birth to mortal children: truth and beauty and love.
Leatherneck Ridge is the olive brown ridge prominent in the bottom half of this photograph. To hike it one begins at the base of Mount San Jacinto and ends up in a hidden valley named Shangri-La. The camera angle and distance in this photograph understate the slope and ruggedness of the ridge’s terrain. Experienced hikers in top physical condition make the trip in sixteen hours if the weather cooperates. The ridge is named for marines rescued there.
Just above Leatherneck Ridge in the photograph, curving upward and to the left, Whitewater Canyon recedes into the distant mountains. The photograph does not reveal the canyon’s colorful boulders and rushing white creek or the Bighorn Sheep, the phantoms who dwell in the canyon, drink water from the creek and graze on the leaves of chaparral.
The photograph is taken from a rocky saddle below a steep peak named Cornell.
The photographer remembered a rainy winter day spent in Whitewater Canyon, with a double rainbow and Bighorn Sheep. A couple of his hiking companions remembered a grueling day last Spring when they climbed Leatherneck Ridge.
After leaving the saddle the hikers followed a deer trail along the flank of Cornell and down a draw into Shangri-La, led by a member of the hiking party who was retracing by memory steps he had taken many years ago when he found first found Shangri-La. Along the way a woman in the party remembered reading Lost Horizons recently. She mentioned it to everyone and for a moment the party tried to decide whether the book’s ending was happy or sad.
My father was a marine.
To hikers, mountains become an anthology of life’s memories.
In Eudora Welty’s story, “The Key,” Albert picked up a key on the floor of the train station and placed it in a pocket by his heart. Albert associated the key with happiness. Albert “knew,” Welty wrote, that happiness “is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.”
It is hard to sustain that belief, what Albert “knew” about happiness and life, in an age when we “know” that nothing is meant for us, when we know that everything has a cause, but not a purpose, and that where order appears it has not been designed.
A red-haired man accidentally dropped the key that Albert picked up believing it was meant for him. At the end of the story, the red-haired man placed another key in the hand of Albert’s wife Ellie, and then “did not wait to see any more, but went out abruptly into the night.”
I think the red-haired man is a God-figure in the story, not the God of our ancestors, but a contemporary theologian’s God. Welty wrote, “you felt a shock in glancing up at him,” and “you felt some apprehension that he would never express whatever might be the desire of his life … in standing apart in compassion, in making any intuitive present or sacrifice, or in any way of action at all – not because there was too much in the world demanding his strength, but because he was too deeply aware.”
The red-haired man is something like God, or, rather, what is left over of God, when what we know is that natural selection is the giver and taker of life, when what we know is that nothing is meant for us.
About the red-haired man, Welty wrote, “You could see that he despised and saw the uselessness of the thing he had done.”
“…the extreme fertility of her garden formed at once a preoccupation and a challenge … she seemed not to seek for order, but to allow an overflowering … she planted every kind of flower that she could … planted thickly and hastily, without stopping to think … if she thought of beauty at all, she certainly did not strive for it in her garden.”
The way Eudora Welty described Mrs. Larkin here in A Curtain of Green resembles the way Darwin described natural selection in The Origin of the Species. In another excerpt the way Eudora Welty described Mrs. Larkin resembles the way some contemporary theologians justify the ways of God, in a way that merges God and natural selection:
“…so helpless was she, too helpless to defy the workings of accident, of life and death, of unaccountability … Life and death, which now meant nothing to her but which she was compelled continually to wield with both her hands, ceaselessly asking, Was it not possible to compensate? to punish? to protest?”
Mrs. Larkin’s garden reminds me of Eden in Genesis and, at the same time, of the old and wild garden of life that Darwin described. An image in the story that blends the two gardens together is the pear tree at the center of the garden in A Curtain of Green. Eudora Welty mentioned it three times, and the one that I cannot forget is:
”The shadow of the pear tree in the center of the garden lay callous on the ground.”
It frightens me to associate that image with the tree of life, the one in Genesis and the one in The Origin of the Species.
Fecundity and mortality are bound together in the intricate molecules of life, bound together in the struggle for life. They are inexhaustible – to exhaust one is to exhaust the other. In A Curtain of Green, the story of Mrs. Larkin, Eudora Welty wrote: “against that which was inexhaustible, there was no defense.”
At the end of A Curtain of Green, the young man in the story “ran out of the garden.”
Geology reveals that the San Andreas Fault created the San Jacinto Mountains: a curve in the fault, where the fault bends towards the Pacific, created them. As one tectonic plate rammed into another along the fault, an edge turned up and crumbled to make the mountains. Erosion sculpted the edge into the shapes we now see.
Geology reveals that mountains are detritus.
Biology reveals that life in the San Jacinto Mountains, and everywhere, is the product of great fecundity and an almost equal portion of death.
Biology reveals that life is waste.
The truth that science tells is macabre.
A new friend, my wife and I spent the last day and night of May in the San Jacinto Mountains at a place in the wilderness named Caramba to survey the detritus and waste. I took the photo above as darkness covered the mountains at the end of May. The lights are in Palm Springs. The San Andreas Fault runs along the base of the dark mountains in the background. I took the photo below earlier in the afternoon at Tahquitz Creek and the one below it from the door of my tent on the first morning of June. It shows the sun rising over the San Andreas Fault.
The truth science tells is cold and mean.
The heat rising up from the desert below Caramba kept us warm at night and a breeze from the ocean so many miles away kept us cool in the day. Sunset and sunrise, mountains and waterfalls, boulders and vistas, trees and flowers, deer and birds: Caramba.
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