Finding the Thread of the Story

Long before there was the first written word, people looked up at the night sky and sensed that their life on Earth was part of a larger world, a larger story.  Once the rhythmic, circular movements of the sun and stars were charted, the mathematical harmony of that larger story came over time to be called "the music of the spheres" --  circular movements seeming to repeat themselves to eternity. However, in the 20th century, a different but also awesome story emerged from modern astronomers.  It is the story of how our universe began with a Big Bang, leading to the formation of galaxies, to our Sun, then to our planet Earth, and finally to life upon it.

Because that often-repeated narrative has come out of the discoveries of modern science, it seems so scientific, so objective.  Unlike ancient cultures' imaginative creation stories with their own messages to tell, the modern scientifically-based narrative gives the appearance of being just facts, not prejudiced by human desires.  Often overlooked, however, is one critical way in which that modern scientific narrative is unconsciously shaped by a human bias.

Think about it:  Why is that story of our universe, which begins with the Big Bang, always told with life on planet Earth as the outcome of its narrative?  Why is it told as a chain of events leading to the development of planet Earth?  A narrative could be constructed just as scientifically that would lead to planet X in galaxy Y, or to planet Z circling around one of many other suns in a different solar system.  The actual history of the universe is that of countless causes-and-effects scattering throughout the cosmos in innumerable directions.  Multiple chronologies, not just the one that leads to our home planet.

Thus analyzed, that often-repeated narrative about the universe that modern science has made possible reveals itself to be not totally objective.  But that is just as well.  After all, what meaning could it bring to us if we did not follow the thread of the story that leads to life on Earth and even to us?  The scientists who tell our modern story of the universe have thus revealed themselves to be not just scientists but also narrative-makers -- storytellers!  They have thus engaged in an ancient art.

Narratives are not simply an imaginative form of art. They can also be sources of knowledge. We humans can comprehend the world when we isolate threads that form a narrative.  The modern theologian John Haught speaks to this point when he writes:

"For human subjects the world is not experienced, at least in a rich or interesting way, apart from stories....  There is a narrative quality to all of our experience, and it is from stories, whether mythic or historical, that we acquire any sense or reality at all."

Looked at in still another way, one message of modern science's story of the universe is that out of the universe have emerged, of all things, storytellers!

~~~

Has your life been a story?  How?

(The Haught quotation is from Is Nature Enough?

  Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, by John F. Haught.  © 2006. p. 46.)

Loving Rain

The last half of the 20th century and first part of the 21st saw many spiritual writers who were widely read:  Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Thich Nhat Hanh, Kathleen Norris, and others. Although Thomas Merton is not my favorite (just a personal taste), there is part of one essay of his I like so much that I can return to it every few years.  It is that part in which he describes his experience of rain while he is alone in his cabin in the woods.

Merton's description of the rain is as good as about any nature writer's, but he puts a slight twist on his experience by interpreting the sound of the rain as being like speech:  "It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound.  It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms."  The heart of the significance of rain, as Merton understands it, is that rain is a gift, in contrast to a human society that has become increasingly commercialized.  Merton makes that point in the opening words of his essay:  "Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money.  By 'they' I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value...."

A "gratuity."  A gift.  To use a theological word, grace.

Many years ago, I noticed how in the U.S., weathermen on TV almost invariably described predicted sunny weather as "good" and predicted rainy weather as "bad."  What a narrow, city-centered viewpoint, I realized -- one that thought of rain mostly in terms of the inconvenience of driving on wet city streets.  Or temporarily avoiding them until the rain subsides.  (Only when droughts have been occurring in some areas do we have weathermen looking forward hopefully for rain.)  But any farmer knows that what is really needed are alternations of sun and rain.  And all our human lives depend on the farmer's success.

Thomas Merton depicted the rain he experienced as "a festival."  His use of that word made me remember a photograph I saw in Life magazine when I was a boy.  It was of children and youth in a city in India, dancing about outdoors, completely drenched by the first monsoon. They had been parched for so long that they knew rain was a gift, and knew how to celebrate it as a festival, even to the point of bathing themselves in it.

More than that, as I've come to celebrate rain, I can also celebrate it as being ecumenical. That fact was expressed well by one second-century Jewish Midrash (commentary) on a Biblical psalm.  To appreciate this statement about rain, we need to realize that in the Jewish faith-tradition, the central written teaching -- the Torah -- is celebrated as a great gift because it enabled people to create a community together.  Nevertheless, there is, as this Midrash, explains, an even greater divine gift:

"The sending of rain is an event greater than the giving of the Torah.

 The Torah was a joy for Israel only,

 but rain gives joy to the entire world, including animals and birds."

~~~

Do you have a memory of an occasion in which you experienced rain as a gratuity?

(The Merton quotes are from "Rain and the Rhinoceros"

 in Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton, © 1966.  pp. 9-10.)

(The Midrash is Midrash Psalms 117 and is taken from The Green Bible, © 2008.  p. I-99.)

Seeing What Animals See... Kind of

The contemporary author Andrew Parker writes:  "Today we live in a visual world."  It certainly sounds as if he's describing our contemporary urban societies.  Signs (mostly advertisements) sprout from every surface, all the way down to the tops of gasoline pumps.  Television (especially its commercials) uses more images per minute, trying to hold our attention .  Even our portable phones now use a visual screen.

stick insect
on end of a tree trunk

Andrew Parker was not, however, writing about modern technological societies.  Nor was the "today" he referred to even the past half-century.  Instead, his topic was what resulted from a development in biological evolution that began 500 million years ago -- the sense of sight. Parker's very next sentence describing some of this "visual world" also reveals that he is referring to the world of animals:  "There would be no such animals as stick insects, chameleons, or birds of paradise... if we did not [live in a visual world]." We have a clue as to what Parker means in that two of the animals he lists are familiar examples of camouflage:  A stick insect is hidden from predators because its body so closely resembles a stick.  A chameleon's skin changes colors to match that of its surroundings.

I enjoy watching shows such as PBS's Nature, whose cameras give me a peak into the world of such animals. On TV nature documentaries, however, the narrator usually talks about the evolution of the features of the stick insect, chameleon, or other camouflaged creature.  Andrew Parker points to the other side of the coin, which is equally important.  Namely, the evolution of vision in the predator who sees (or does not see) that camouflaged prey.

Those two sides of one coin thus demonstrate one type of what evolutionary biologists call co-evolution, which means that features of two species evolve in conjunction with each other. The two sides, camouflaged prey and seeing predator, evolved together -- each driving the evolution of the other. Camouflage is an example of one of the paradoxical forms of co-evolution. Part of the paradox is that predators have improved the evolution of their camouflaged prey, making what they want to catch harder to catch.  The paradox also extends to the other side of the coin: The increased camouflage of the prey improves the evolution of the predator species' eyes, making the prey easier to catch.  A sneeky, unconscious cooperation between what seem to be enemies.

This also means that as we look at Nature, a great deal of the diversity of appearances we see has resulted from the evolution of the eyes and power of vision in animals.  We see a world shaped by sight.  It also means that as I delight in looking at the almost amusing stick insect, I am also getting a glimpse into the vision and mind of whatever preys upon that insect.  Thus, in a way, I see some of what animals see... but only up to a point.  Through contemporary scientific research, we also know that some animals eyes can see things our human eyes cannot, such as the ultraviolet end of the spectrum.  To some degree, the worlds of other animals must remain their own, not meant for our eyes.

~~~

Do you remember every seeing an insect, lizard, or other animal whose color especially interested you?  Do you know why that species had evolved that way?

(The quotation by Parker is from Seven Deadly Colours, by Andrew Parker, © 2005.  p.265.)
(The photo of the stick insect is used under a under a
 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license [no name given].)

Of Slugs and Slime and Snails

The 20th-century naturalist Gerald Durrell wrote that one of his earliest recollections as a child was of when he and his caretaker were walking along a dirt road in India.  The earthen road was wet from rain.  As he explains, he saw "two huge khaki-colored slugs brought out by the rain.... I remember squatting down and watching them, enraptured, seeing them slide over the earth without any legs to propel them.... To me, they were not only fascinating but, in their own way, as pretty as [an Indian woman] in her beautiful sari."

Durrell's adult caretaker was alarmed, pulling Durrell away from the "filthy" things. Understandably, even though it aids their locomotion, the sliminess of slugs and snails can be a turnoff to us.  But if we are self-reflective, I think we might conclude that such a repugnance comes from a natural concern about mucous discharged from our own bodies.  We should not blame the little animals for that.

Although both slugs and snail are in the same class of gastropods (having a single foot-pad beneath them for locomotion), snails have an edge on engaging practically-minded adults.  Snails, besides being candidates as food (which we delicately call "escargot"), have aesthetically pleasing spiral shells, sometimes used for jewelry.

sea slugs ("nudibranches")

Meanwhile, as we humans eat our escargot and make jewelry, in the deep ocean, cousins of the land-species live their own ocean lives.  The parallel to our land slugs are called either sea slugs or nudibranches, some of which are highly colorful.  Those marine slugs and snails speak of the ancestry of gastropods going back half a billion years.

Although in our everyday life we usually encounter a lone garden snail or garden slug here or there, some species can live in great concentrations in their usually hidden world.  I remember a biology teacher on a field trip probing into the continually damp ground on a river embankment. He wanted to show us what he thought might be the greatest concentration of snail's possible -- tiny ones, less than 1/4-inch in diameter, crowded "shoulder to shoulder," if it could be said that snails have shoulders.

Am I the only child who, when first seeing a slug, thought that it must be a snail that had somehow lost its shell? Am I the only child who felt a concern for the slug, which looked terribly vulnerable without a protective "house" on its back into which it could retreat for safety?  I cannot believe I am the only child who had such thoughts.

Placing that childhood recollection of mine beside Durrell's childhood recollection, I see similarities in the caring about something and in the finding something to be wondrous.  My caring, and Durrell's wonder.  Both having an element of child-fullness.  Maybe wonder, like caring, comes more from the heart than from the head.

~~~

Do you have any childhood or adult recollections of slugs or snails?  What are they?

(The Durrell quote is from The Amateur Naturalist by Gerald Durrell, © 1982.  p. 9.)

(Photo of blue nudibranches is by Alexander R. Jenner; that of the brown slug by Guttorm Flatabø [user:dittaeva].

Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licenses.)

A Dog Named Polly

Neither Charles Darwin nor his dog Polly made it to the cemetery of the St. Mary's churchyard, which was where Darwin had wanted to be buried.  St. Mary's was a centuries-old flint-stone church in the village where he had lived most of his life.  But Charles Darwin did not get his way because people outside his family intervened, convincing his family that his scientific legacy called for his being buried in Westminster Abbey, where scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton, and poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer had been laid to rest centuries before.

With Darwin's burial at Westminster, it was not just a scientist who was laid to rest, but also a veteran dog-lover.  When Charles's future wife Emma was being courted by Charles, one thing that attracted her was the kindness he demonstrated toward dogs and other animals.  During the course of his lifetime, Charles had a dozen different dogs.

Charles's daughter
 Henrietta
with Polly

The last of those dogs, and Charles's favorite, was Polly, a terrier.  She had originally been given to one of Darwin's daughters, Henrietta, but when Henrietta married and moved away, her dog remained behind with the family. Polly would usually accompany Charles on his daily walks on a sandy path around the grounds of the home.  And when he spent hours in his study doing scientific research or recuperating from illness, Polly would often be found nearby, resting on her dog-bed.  Charles's son Francis recalled that his father "was delightfully tender to Polly, and never showed any impatience at the attention she required."

drawing of Polly from
"The Expression of the Emotions"

As with other animals Charles encountered, Polly also became an object for Darwin's scientific observation. (Even Charles and Emma's children could not escape his scientific interest in human and animal behavior.) Darwin's aim was to find similarities between not only the anatomy of humans and animals but also between their bodily behavior and facial expressions -- similarities that would be additional evidence of common ancestry. That decades-long project of Darwin reached its apex in one of the later books of his career, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  That book contained a drawing of Polly, poised, pointing, with one front paw in the air.  The engraving was titled, "Small dog watching a cat on a table."

Polly, the pet who had become most deeply engraved in the affections of Charles Darwin's heart, died less than a month after he passed away.  Polly was buried under the apple tree near the Darwin home.  Being a dog, she would not really have been a candidate for burial in the graveyard of St. Mary's church, the place where Darwin also did not manage to be buried. And yet, then as now, pets were free of the complexities regarding cemetery plots, burial permissions, death certificates, and wills that can make human life complicated.  Nevertheless, Polly, being a pet, had helped Darwin make the case for his theory of evolution.  By including examples of the behavior of dogs, he had taken advantage of the similarities many readers had already observed between themselves and their pets -- animals with which they also had an emotional kinship.

~~~

Do you have a fond recollection of a particular dog?  What was the dog like?

(The quote by Charles Darwin's son Francis is from his "Reminiscences" in

 Selected Letters and Evolution of Origin of Species, ed. Francis Darwin, © 1892, 1958.  p. 74.)

(The drawing of Polly is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)