‘She did read quite a lot of H. G. Wells,’ says Peter. ‘I think from memory that all or most of my copies of his work were hers.’
Canadian writer Grant Allen is an even more obvious inspiration for her work on pollination.
‘To-day, in the words of Grant Allen, half the flora of the earth has taken the imprint of the dislikes and necessities of the ubiquitous insects,’ she wrote, quoting his words from The Colour Sense. I track down the source of the quote (via Alfred R. Wallace’s The World of Life, for he too was a fan of Allen’s) and I am enchanted by his unabashedly ecocentric view in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.
‘While man has only tilled a few level plains, a few great river-valleys, a few peninsular mountain slopes, leaving the vast mass of earth untouched by his hand, the insect has spread himself over every land in a thousand shapes, and has made the whole flowering creation subservient to his daily wants. His buttercup, his dandelion, and his meadow-sweet grow thick in every English field. His thyme clothes the hill-side; his heather purples the bleak grey moorland. High up among the Alpine heights his gentian spreads itself in lakes of blue; amid the snows of the Himalayas his rhododendrons gleam with crimson light. The insect has thus turned the whole surface of the earth into a bound-less flower-garden, which supplies him from year to year with pollen or honey, and itself in turn gains perpetuation by the baits it offers for his allurement.’
The story turns full circle, science inspiring fiction and fiction inspiring science. Not in opposition, not back to back, but in an enriching and fruitful collaboration.
An unknown woman reading by Lake Bolac, Victoria
Some nature writers look at the lake and see only the reflections of the birds and the sky, or themselves, in the gleaming surface.
‘Occasionally I lean forward and gaze into the water,’ writes Mary Oliver. ‘The water of a pond is a mirror of roughness and honesty – it gives back not only my own gaze, but the nimbus of the world trailing into the picture on all sides. The swallows, singing a little as they fly back and forth across the pond, are flying therefore over my shoulders, and through my hair. A turtle passes slowly across the muddy bottom, touching my cheekbone.’
Seeing just what is there – the world as it is and no more, not as it ought to be or as we think it might be – is a very particular artistic skill. The reflections are beautiful, but I want to see beyond the surface and the reflections. I want to know where the water came from. Why this turtle is subtly different from the turtles in another pond. I want to look through the layers of time and place, through history and prehistory. I want to see this place through the turtle’s eyes, through time’s eye, not just my own. It is the eye, not the I, that interests me most.
Thoreau observes with painstaking detail, but the understanding he reaches is of himself, of human nature, not of nature itself. It is the wildness within, rather than without, that Thoreau seeks to understand. Walden Pond remains a ‘perfect forest mirror’.
‘Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; – a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush – this the light dustcloth – which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.’
Nature frames all of Thoreau’s experiences, but he requires no deeper understanding of what lies beneath the surface.
‘The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know,’ Thoreau observes.
Mary Oliver, too, seeks not to know.
‘I would therefore write the kind of elemental poetry that doesn’t just avoid indoors but doesn’t even see the doors that lead inward – to laboratories, to textbooks, to knowledge. I would not talk about the wind, and the oak tree, and the leaf on the oak tree, but on their behalf.’
I can’t agree. I am struck mute by ignorance. I do not have words to describe that which I do not know. If I cannot name it, by species, by structure, by system, how can I speak for it? In ignorance I would see only the surface, the superficial. The detail is hidden until I have the process, the mechanism, the meaning to unlock it. It is only through knowing that the details come into focus, and things that were quite hidden and unnoticed reveal new and exquisite beauty.
Sympathy without insight feels like a lack of empathy to me. It feels locked within the human experience, constantly looking inward, checking on our own perspective, reflecting our own views and values onto the outside world. It is an imprisonment I long to shed. We can never escape ourselves, of course, or genuinely understand what it is to be other than human, but if any organ is going to help us achieve even a semblance of such a magical transformation it will be an achievement of the brain rather than the heart. The brain takes us to worlds we could never experience, while the heart ties us to our lived reality. And it is writing that allows us to share that vital, temporary, imperfect experience of otherness.
Edith’s words gently chide me as we walk along a Sorrento beach, reminding me of the ecologist William Beebe’s words, ‘I am truly sorry for anyone, be he technical conchologist or casual naturalist, who, for some brief time, has never forgotten all science, all
