Darwin and FitzRoy Depart

The "On This Day . . ." feature on Wikipedia's main page notes today, December 27, as the day the HMS Beagle left Devonport (now Plymouth), England for its most famous voyage.  In Charles Darwin's The Voyage of The Beagle, first published twenty years before On the Origin of Species, the ship's naturalist and gentleman companion to its captain begins in matter-of-fact fashion:

After having been twice driven back by heavy southwestern gales, Her Majesty's ship Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N., sailed from Devonport on the 27th of December, 1831. The object of the expedition was to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, commenced under Captain King in 1826 to 1830--to survey the shores of Chile, Peru, and some islands in the Pacific--and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round the World.  

According to Janet Browne's excellent Charles Darwin: Voyaging (first of a two-volume biography) the Hydrographer of the Admiralty, Francis Beaufort, was deeply committed to expanding scientific knowledge and the capacity to use it in the Royal Navy. Darwin's invitation to join the voyage was a result of inquiries within the network of scholars at Cambridge University. Captain Robert FitzRoy wanted not only a gentleman companion, but also someone who shared his scientific curiosity. Darwin eventually got the job, though he wasn't the first to be asked. 

In the early days of the voyage, screams of sailors FitzRoy had flogged combined with Darwin's debilitating seasickness to make the young adventurer regret what he'd gotten himself into, at least momentarily.  Fortunately, he regained his enthusiasm and amassed an overwhelming amount of evidence, from comparative anatomy and the fossil record, that biological forms change over time. Given enough time--amounts of time that were mostly unimaginable before Darwin's geologist friend Charles Lyell argued for what we might now call deep time--the forms could change a lot. 

The theory of natural selection followed, offering an explanation for exactly how one species can change into another, and for 150 years now has been validated by streams of evidence converging from almost every corner of science. For a lot of us, the body of knowledge begun by Darwin is exciting. It takes us out of  a temporally and spatially limiting context, one that most of our religiously conservative contemporaries still find nurturing. 

But our immemorial, cosmic context is hospitable to human life, and also has its nurturing features, at least for now. This larger context can also be indifferent to human life at times, though for myself I prefer atmospheric thermodynamics to the notion of a wrathful god as an explanation for deadly tropical storms.  

I even find the inner life richer for all the room I have to bump around in. I feel more connected to everything else--my friend Marlowe, the dog lying on the floor in my office right now, has most of the same genes I have. His general body plan (phylum) is like mine--he has legs with femurs and forelegs that each have a radius, ulna, and humerus, and so on. I have four teeth named for his kind. Even the plastic keys I'm typing on used to be fossils before they were petroleum and then petrochemicals. Before they were fossils, they were alive. 

Those who prefer to think of themselves as assembled by a personal deity find meaning and purpose in those beliefs, and I understand the need to find meaning and purpose. I work on it a lot, most of the time less consciously than I'd like. But it's my privilege and my responsibility to make meaning from all the building blocks in the world that I myself could never make. That's challenging and humbling at the same time. 

Wedding Days

On Saturday, December 20, 2008, my 29-year old daughter Melanie married Josh Clark. It was, as weddings go, a large one, at least by my lights--somewhere near 250 people. I have always thought of large weddings as extravagant, but in the days leading up to the wedding and during the ceremony itself, as the Church of the River became a container for a warm community of friends and family stretching across the depth and breadth of my family's life, I decided that things were as they should be. 

At the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding, I sat with the Rev. Burton Carley, minister of First Unitarian Church/Church of the River in Memphis, where the ceremony would be held. We talked about how the culture has changed around marriage--starting with the later average age of marriage, then to some of the things that are currently fashionable. One of those fashionable trends is the "destination wedding" that stages the ceremony in an exotic location, like a Caribbean beach. I'm sure some of these weddings are lovely experiences, but they're also in some way mere consumer products. A traditional wedding is a powerful community ritual, bringing and binding people together. And at the Church of the River, a panorama of the wide Mississippi River formed the backdrop for the ceremony. As a location, one could do worse.

Historically, weddings have belonged to communities, groups of people that form the living context of the new couple's lives.  Our culture, in recent decades, has been more focused on notions of individual freedom than on the quality and integrity of communities. I applaud and embrace individual liberty, but at the same time I feel my own freedom most keenly in a community.

I am an individual, but in order to understand how my life and being are distinctive, I need my community as a touchstone. I can only know who I am in relation to others. An insular life--one as an island, so to speak, is no more possible now than it was when John Donne wrote that no man could be an island.  

As a community moves through the years, a history is recorded in the minds and hearts of people who in some way belong to each other. Melanie and her husband Josh wrote meditations for their wedding that were read by their friends in the course of the ceremony. One passage in Melanie's reading recalled lines from Thornton Wilder's Our Town. The lines were in the scene of the character Emily's backward-in-time visit from the grave to the day of her twelfth birthday, an ordinary day of "clocks ticking" and other elements of our lives that we take for granted. 

In her high school years, Melanie played Emily in a production of Our Town. I went to see it two nights in a row. I cried both times during that powerful return-to-life scene. So when I heard some of the lines she spoke on stage all those years ago, I went back to a special moment when I learned a little more than I'd known before about special moments. My eyes filled. 

At the wedding reception I talked with two of Melanie's high school teachers, one of whom had directed the same Our Town production--people still in the community, carrying the history in their own ways. Both of them also recalled Melanie's performance and were moved by the memory in much the same way I was moved. So the lines from Wilder's play nested in Melanie's original contribution to her wedding ceremony, read by her longtime best friend, traveled up and down the years through people in her life who had kept common memories with her and with me. The play's ideas, in the minds and hearts of all of us, resonated in the vessel of time, and across the space enclosing all of us who'd shared the same experiences. 

Now the community of my history extends once again, this time into the now-overlapping territory of Josh's family and friends. The collective human assembly of my life grows larger, more richly varied, and I have more life to savor. 

Josh eloquently wrote for the ceremony of his own thoughts and feelings.  A longtime friend of his read those wide-ranging thoughts. He even inserted a passage from Origin of Species, from Darwin's concluding words launching the still-reverberating bombshell of Origin out into the world: "There is grandeur in this view of life . . ." Grandeur indeed. From those "endless forms most beautiful" that Darwin described, to the minister who officiated at the wedding, to all the other members of the community who witnessed this passage in the lives of Melanie and Josh, I know with Tennyson's Ulysses that "I am a part of all that I have met." 

And "all that I have met" is too complex to unravel. But I do get a feeling about it sometimes, when so many influences on my identity are gathered at once.  People, places, history, life itself come together in a startling, irreducible admixture. I think of a stanza from Robert Penn Warren's "Whatever You Now Are":

Is it you that flows from distance to distance,

With the tune of time and blood intertwined forever?

Or does the dark stream of log-ripple and stone-chance

Define the pattern of your whole life's endeavor?

What elements, shadowy, in that dream interlace

In a region past categories of Time and Space?

Any doubts any of us may harbor about whether we have a place in the world can be erased or at least moderated by joining in a ritual enacted and developed over thousands of years, made new in the context of a community of people living it right now. 

To Josh and Melanie: Thanks for bringing something new and promising into the world, for adding to the "tune of time and blood" in your own inimitable ways.  

Things Are Tied Together

History is, among other things, the repository in which all known human behaviors are stored. All these behaviors--from the uncommonly noble to the unspeakably vicious, may be examined, studied as something that fascinates us, avoided as something that repels or just bores us, or entered into as something to be experienced vicariously. 

Our personal histories, and the family histories we've all lived in are part of this larger pattern, and can embody surprising ranges of those human behaviors, both in the realities we inhabit and in the fantasies we entertain as we think about novel ways of being in the world, or as we cast what-if scenarios that reflect our dreads and longings. Some fantasies may simply help us think through what we need to prepare for. 

We're all together in Heraclitus's river of process and time. In his last novel, A Place to Come To, Robert Penn Warren writes:

Something is going on and will not stop. You are outside the going on, and you are,  at the same time, inside the going on. In fact, the going on is what you are. Until you can understand that these things are different but are the same, you know nothing about the nature of life. I proclaim this.

In another novel, Flood, one of Warren's characters says: "Things are tied together. . . . There's some spooky interpenetration of things, a mystic osmosis of being, you might say." This "osmosis of being" is a major theme of Warren's. It means we can't live outside history, that we can't separate ourselves from the human condition just as it is. 

Some of the memories in my own history are sources of much pleasure, even from a distance. Moments of suspended time in conversation with friends are among these pleasures, as are times of deep joy watching my daughters. In one scene from their childhood, they are picking daffodils in a spot on the farm where my wife grew up. The girls, on a day early in March, gather the bright yellow flowers against a backdrop of still-brown field and woods. Their faces and the flowers in the scene are heartrendingly bright and vivid. On a spot near the place where the flowers grew, a house once stood, one built well over a hundred years before the day we spent there. The flowers must have been planted by someone who lived there generations ago.  

Other memories bite. Some of them just never get peaceful, never lose the tinge of anger or sadness. I've had times of feeling trapped and degraded in my workplace. From observation, and lots of conversations, I know I'm far from being alone in this. The poet James Richardson includes these lines in his "Vectors 2.0: More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays": "Institutions are the opposite of God: their periphery is everywhere, their center nowhere." In an institutional context, people often become less centered, and far less than authentic. 

A number of years ago I recall a meeting with an agency that funded a program I worked for briefly. The program's director gave me a visual signal during the meeting that said I'd offered something in the conversation that was taking up time that should have been his. Problem was, the director was absent from the day-to-day operations of the program and really didn't have detailed knowledge of some of our work. But he still had the need to be seen, when speaking to our funders, as the sole interpreter of everyone else's activities.

The less pleasant memories, those often painful pieces of personal history, are just as much a part of our identities as the history we like. We can edit our stories, but we can't edit ourselves. 

The Closing of Doors

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, "Don't demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well." Epictetus was lame, and had probably spent his early years in slavery. He understood that our control over external events is limited, and advocated the practice of control over our internal reactions to what befalls us.

My parents live in a nursing home. They moved in almost three years ago, both of them admitted for rehab. My mother had a severe left-side stroke seven and a half years back, and just before entering the nursing home had a fall that cracked ribs and punctured a lung. Somehow, after this injury, she lost the ability to swallow. Her rehab consisted of treatment, administered by a speech therapist, involving external electrical stimulation of muscles involved in swallowing. It worked.

My father's rehab was about learning to walk again after a fall that severed the large tendon holding the quadriceps to the knee. He had surgery followed by another surgery after a re-injury of the same type. 

After the rehabs the two of them were strongly encouraged by the staff of the home, my brother, and myself to stay there. My father strongly resisted this proposed arrangement. He was sure he could continue to care for my mother as he'd done for the almost four years since her stroke. 

But he'd lost most of his sight to macular degeneration. He'd lost the ability to get around without a walker, and wasn't going to get all of his knee function restored. It took him a long time to realize and admit this, just as, after the stroke, it took him a long time to realize and admit that my mother would not walk or talk again. 

Like most of us, my father doesn't like it when a door closes and there's no going back to the more familiar and more spacious territory on the other side of the door. Some would say these junctures are deaths of a sort. To me, they're more like exiles--something was there, a place of comfort at least, and maybe even a place that was cherished. From your exile, you can recall the comfortable place so vividly you can see it, feel the weather there, smell the scents, and hear the sounds. But you can never go back.

I can't go back either. It's one of many things that make all these years of watching the slow, incremental decline of my parents painful. My father complains of some privilege he's lost--doing exercise in his room with one-pound weights being a recent one. He feels like he's being treated like a child, and there's some sense in the way he looks at it. The institutional environment with its need for hyper-vigilance in matters of safety isn't a world that makes sense to him. 

He brings some of his complaints to me--complaints that grow out of his inability to control little things in his own life. His power to make things happen has been slipping away for years, but he hasn't gotten used to the fact. It a hard fact for the human animal to assimilate. 

Unlike Epictetus, my father's orientation has always been toward fixing what's broken in the world around him. For most of his life this approach served him well, but somewhere along the line it became a habit he couldn't break or even moderate. In fact it would probably never occur to him that breaking it would serve any useful purpose. So now he rages against the dying of one light after another, and for the most part whatever he pushes against pushes back harder. 

The inner life is what's most genuinely ours. Of course it bears the stamp of influences too numerous to count, but our strongest influence is on what we are within, developed in the course of our interaction with the world outside. Whatever modicum of free will we have operates most convincingly within us. The only compensation for loss of freedom on the outside may be gains in the freedom we can develop for ourselves on the inside.

My father's disappointments seem connected to a sense that the world just isn't what it should be, and the people in it not what they should be. I've had similar disappointments myself. The line between acceptance and resignation is elusive, but it's there somewhere. Or so I hope.