It was Elizabeth Bishop who pointed me to Darwin. Elizabeth,
who lived near Rio de Janiero for almost 15 years, read Darwin all her life.
Bishop had a perilous childhood, but it resulted in poems in which the power
lay in what was not said. Precise observation, often of animals or natural
phenomena, and a modesty of expression are her hallmarks. Her spare, elegant
poetry hits heavy where it lands. No ideas but in things.
Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle [1845] is the
adventure story of a young man in his twenties, who trained himself to be an
excellent field biologist along the coasts of South America and then retired to
his home near London to spend the rest of his life writing about what he had
found. In The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen says it isn’t the idea
that we all have a common evolutionary background that horrifies people. It is
that natural selection accomplishes it. No divine spark, no hand of providence
watching over its precious creation. And certainly no special demi-god status
for man. Evolution is relentless, out of chaos and uncertainty, toward
survival. No ideas but in things.
Christopher Alexander, a British architect who spent most of
his life working in Berkeley, California, states that our current problems are
a result of our certainty that matter is value-free. We treat matter as a
mechanism and act as if nothing we do matters. But if we were to accept the
living character of space and matter, everything matters. “It paves the way to
an ultimately personal view of the world. Matter is personal. We then treat all
creation – of buildings, gardens, roads – as the protection of the personal
which resides in matter, and which, through our actions, may see the light of
day.” [The Nature of Order, Book Four, The Luminous Ground, 2004] No
ideas but in things.
Robert Pirsig upends the concept of value further. Value is
not a property of matter, he says. Matter is really a subspecies of value. “The
metaphysics of quality says that if moral judgments are essentially assertions
of value and if value is the fundamental ground-stuff of the world, then moral
judgments are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world.” [Lila: An Inquiry
into Morals, 1991] Pirsig shows us how, grounded in the world, life
migrates toward freedom. No ideas but in things.
We look ever toward the point at which matter and spirit
meet, where, often briefly to our heavy, everyday perception, matter is
illumined by the light within. It can happen anywhere, any time. There is as
much chaos and uncertainty in spiritual evolution as there is in physical
evolution. Physical evolution looks toward success in being alive, but the
evolution of the spirit looks toward value. Spirituality is flat-out value. No
ideas but in things.
And finally from Pasternak – my mentor since earliest days:
“So that there shall be no dead branches in the soul, so that its growth shall
not be retarded, so that man shall be incapable of mingling his narrow mind
with the creation of his immortal essence, there exists a number of things to
turn his vulgar curiosity away from life, which does not wish to work in his
presence and in every way avoids him. … Hence all respectable religions, all
generalizations, all prejudices and the most amusing and brilliant of them all
– psychology.” [From The Childhood of Luvers, 1918, translated by Robert
Payne]
No ideas but in things.
