Animals Emerging Out of Darkness

Tens of thousands of years ago, human beings would have sat around fires after dark, listening to storytellers.  Occasionally their eyes would have followed sparks rising upward in the fire's heat -- bright sparks joining the stars against the darkness of the night sky.  I imagine that while looking up into the night sky and listening to the storyteller, their minds would have begun to see shapes -- constellations -- emerging out of the myriad stars:  Images of animals and of people.  There, a bear!  And there, a scorpion!

An immense time later, in the 9th century C.E., a man named Jahiz (or "al-Jahiz") described a different way that animals emerged out of darkness.  Jahiz wrote about how he and Bedouin travelers camping in the desert at night had repeatedly observed a series of animals coming out of the surrounding darkness.  First came the flying insects, drawn into the campfire's circle of light.  Then, looking for food as well as warmth, came lizards, mice, snakes, and even foxes. Sometimes as many as seventy different kinds of animals would emerge on a single night.

 
from The Book of Animals

Jahiz collected such accounts and spun them together with stories, other observations of animals, and philosophical reflections in his Book of Animals.  It was more than an inventory of those animals that emerged out of the darkness.  What also emerged into the awareness of the Bedouins and Jahiz was how the animals seemed to form a hierarchy from tiny to large, and how the animals' lives were tied together with multiple interrelationships. Jahiz (being also a writer of philosophy and theology) added to that awareness his answer to some Bedouins' question of why the Creator had made noxious creatures.  Jahiz explained to his companions in the desert (and to his readers) that:  "Each species constitutes a food for another species....  Divine Wisdom has decreed that some species are the source of food for others, and some species are the cause of death for others."

Orpheus and the Beasts

Constellations emerging into focus. Real animals coming out of the darkness.  So also have animals emerged into the lives, culture, consciousness, and imagination of human beings.  That emergence occurred in a transformative way in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago, when animals were domesticated for food and labor. There was also another form of emergence as animals became part of humans' mythologies, legends, fables, and proverbs.

In the 20th century, as our societies became more urban, animals often faded into the background, often forgotten except for when we took outings to the zoo or to national parks. Today, however, I think animals might be re-emerging into our human consciousness in a new way.  As we watch TV shows such as Nature and National Geographic, we learn about more of life's immense diversity -- the number of species being almost as innumerable as stars in the night sky.  Also, we are trying to bring into sharper focus how we might be caretakers for threatened species so that they will not become extinct, like stars extinguished into darkness.

~~~

Are there occasions on which you think of animals?  What are those occasions?

(The Jahiz quote is from his Living Beings,

as quoted in Darwin's Ghosts by Rebecca Stoat, © 2012, p. 53.)
(The page from the Arabic book is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.) 

Not in Jest

I am not a seer.  Nevertheless, I can predict one news story that will assuredly be on my radio every April 2nd:  There will be a news story explaining how some other news story the preceding day was only an April Fool's hoax.  The inevitability of that post-April-Fool's story makes me want to not believe anything I hear on any April 1st.  It seems it might be safer to just wait twenty-four hours until everything gets sorted out.

But life won't wait for everything to be cleared up.  There are too many things I have to accept as if they were true, or I would be paralyzed.  Even stepping out my front door in the morning, I have to assume the ground will support me the way it did the day before.

These thoughts came to me after I was struck by the similarity between two quotations, even though their authors never met.  The first quotation is from Islam's primary scripture, the Qur'an (Koran).  In this passage, God (using the royal plural) tells us:

"Know that We did not create the heavens and the earth,

 and all that is between them, in frivolous play."

Reading that passage, I recalled immediately a quotation by the 19th century American writer Henry David Thoreau. It goes like this:

"God did not make this world in jest;

 no, nor in indifference.

 These migrating sparrows

 all bear messages that concern my life."

These lines from Thoreau tell me that I should treat the world of Nature around me --  a world not made by humans -- with an earnestness.  Even treating it as having messages for me.  The line quoted from the Qur'an, in its context, tells me the same.  It is a view also expressed by the traditional Christian idea that Nature can in some fashion be read as the "Book of Nature," with its messages about God.

Even if I do turn my attention away from the many distractions of our highly technological society to look at Nature for awhile, the challenge can be that there are so many "messages," and they do not always seem to be saying exactly the same thing.  One "message" Spring brings feels comfortably warming after the harsh winter.  Another "message" that Spring often delivers irritates my allergies and can lead to a sinus infection.  And those are only two of the messages at one particular time of year in my "Inbox" from Nature.

It can be a bit like trying to sort out which e-mails are junk-mail needing only a glance, which e-mails are easily misleading spam, and which are personal e-mails I should truly slow down for, letting the inner message sink into my mind and heart.  Only some messages seem to be "signs" in the sense of pointing significantly to deeper truths.

Nevertheless, perhaps by just going through the "Inbox" of Nature every day -- being sure it gets my attention -- I will be invigorated.  For, as the 20th-century author Isaac Bashevis Singer said:

"What nature delivers to us is never stale."

~~~

Is there a particular time during the day when you have a chance to turn your attention to Nature? What is that occasion?  How does observing it affect you?

(The verse from the Qur'an is 21:16.)

(The Singer quote is from New York Times Magazine, 26 Nov. 1978,

 as quoted in A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes, © 1992.  87:108.)