By Wayne Allensworth
William Blake illustration for the Book of Job
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
The Tyger William Blake
To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.
Letters of William Blake
Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm…Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Job 38:4
I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil. I the LORD do all these things.
Isiah 45:7
They hover over the treetops. They float over the roofs. Half a dozen of them, wings spread wide. One of them takes off straight toward the roof of the sky, then nosedives in astonishing turns and spirals. Harriers at the hunt and, seemingly, at play, swirling around the skies above my neighborhood. They are quite striking. I’ve spotted them a number of times recently, though I can’t recall ever seeing these predators and aerial acrobats before. Their bodies are hawkish, steel gray with a lighter underbelly and head. Their eyes are set nearer the front of their head than in most birds, and like many other raptors, they have a flatter and broader head. The first day I saw them, one was perched in a cedar tree and watched me go by. At first I thought it was an owl. No, the eyes weren’t big enough. The harriers have become a fixture near the stream running behind my house, flying low, surveying the yards and the greenery, diving and then taking off in a headlong charge into the sky. Beautiful. Deadly. Nature, red in tooth and claw. Yet awe-inspiring in beauty and grace. All at the same time.
Since late spring, I have been watching the ducklings hatch and grow, waddling behind their mothers. At first, long lines of those baby ducks, 10 or more in a row, followed a watchful hen. Sometimes colorful drakes hovered at the periphery of their marches through the grass and into the pond or stream. As spring wore into summer, the ducklings diminished. From 10 to six in one case, four in another, as they were taken by predators or died naturally, sometimes swept away by the floods that came with spring storms.
The stream is home to myriad snakes, including cottonmouths. On a bright May morning, I was strolling by the stream and a strange movement, an unlikely dance, caught my eye. Something was moving through the water with what looked like two oscillating tails. I walked closer and watched the apparition swirl by me. It was two snakes latched onto the body of a small fish, one on each end of the prey, the gills and scales visible, the snakes’ motion locomoted by a tug o’ war. The snake latched onto the head finally jerked its catch free and dragged it to the bank. The other snake swam away, cutting its losses.
Turtles are all around in the steam, at the pond, and sometimes veer far off course, lumbering down the sidewalk, even into the streets nearby. When I see them, I pick them up and return them to the stream, lest they be crushed under the wheels of a car. I thought I spotted one near the street recently, but it was just a large turtle shell, an empty vessel drained of its contents. All but the gnarled feet and claws were gone. Perhaps a coyote had eaten it. The forlorn shell lay on its back, feet curled up in a death pose. I’ve glanced at it for days. On the pond’s shoreline, green turtles, along with a few nasty snappers, stand guard. They line up on the rocks to bask in the sun.
A few summers ago, I saw two girls, maybe 10 or 12, walking toward a turtle on the sidewalk, obviously playing at Good Samaritan. They intended to return the turtle to its pond. It was a snapper. I warned them off then gave a little demonstration. I picked up a stick and tapped the snapper on its shell. It leapt at me, hissing and snapping its powerful jaws. The girls jumped almost as far as the snapper. They learned a little something that day.
Life’s flow carries on, a creative dance and a deadly one. Distinct but not wholly separate from the flow, entities come into being, then flow away with it. The energy that provides the potential for the realization of life encounters some twist or turn, an eddy in the stream. Resistance that provides the friction and traction necessary for movement and evolution. And another form materializes. An elan vital inhabits our world. Motion is creative, evolution self-organizing in a temporal realm of duration that is extended in space, the realm of Being’s realization. Space and time are aspects of Being, not discrete individuated things. Movement, motion, flow, patterns ever shifting but with a measure of continuity. A river that is greater than the drops of water that make it. Heraclitus asserted that one never steps into the same river twice. But it is nevertheless an identifiable river. Multiplicity in unity. Think of the Trinity in Christian theology.
We live in a complex, paradoxical world: swans and snakes, flowers and brambles, suffering and joy, life and death, all necessary complementarities that keep the flow in motion, a current of space and not in it like a container, that is time as duration in Henri Bergson’s interpretation of Being (“Creative Evolution”). In his stress on creativity, potential and possibility, and not strict determinism, Bergson anticipated modern physics decades before Niels Bohr declared that “particles” were abstractions whose properties can be observed only in interaction with other systems. We perceive fluctuations in fields as distinct entities that are themselves constantly in motion. Motion as change and fluctuation, a wave, yet possessed of a certain ability to manifest form and continuity. Potential and possibility indicate the freedom of Being’s realization.
As Iain McGilchrist wrote, God is the source of Being itself, not a controlling tinkerer who manipulates his puppet-like creations. That means sentient beings choose. It also means beautiful sunfish and menacing crocodiles and playful dolphins and predatory sharks coexist in the same waters, in the same world. Good and evil are the moral equivalents of the friction between opposites in the creative flow. That clash, that friction makes motion, time, and choice possible. Complementarities appear to be prevalent throughout our universe. McGilchrist likens them to the poles of a magnet that cannot exist independently. Separating them only results in new dipoles. Continuing to split the magnet will eventually result in an iron atom with a north and south pole.
The energy that drives evolution and animates creatures great and small finds its niches wherever they may be. Strange hunters can and do appear. Hunters who are not predators such as tigers or wolves or harriers, but lurking parasites who invade and seize control of their hosts. Microscopic killers or insects and worms infesting and controlling even the nervous systems and behaviors of their hosts, draining them of life, directing them for the parasites’ own purposes. The lancet liver fluke invades the bodies of ants, then steers them toward fields of grass — and grazing cows. Cows consume the grass and the ants. The fluke invades the cow’s stomach. A bizarre parasite called the Toxoplasma gondii seizes control of the nervous system of rodents and reduces their fear of cats. The rodents are eaten, and the parasite, a malevolent form of consciousness, finds its final host.
Even so, as the great mystics understood, the ultimate foundation of all Being is in a sense beyond good and evil. Yet the complementarities in our moral system are asymmetrical in the sense that Good, the positive value that is creation and life and beauty, constricts, contains Evil, both moral and in the malevolence of many life forms. Evil in moral choice, predation and suffering help shape the world and its life cycles and are necessary for meaning. But Evil cannot contain anything on its own. It’s a point C.S. Lewis made a number of times concerning the nature of Good and Evil, which includes the natural world. When Yellowstone lost its wolf population, for instance, the number of elk multiplied quickly and outstripped the land’s carrying capacity. They and other animals and plant life suffered as a result. So, the wolf was reintroduced by conservationists to sustain the park’s ecosystem.
The problem of Evil is a moral conundrum if one imagines God as a puppeteer who is in absolute control of the universe, a cosmic magician who conjures up any reality he chooses. And that mistaken view, I think, has caused untold mental anguish among us, disillusionment, and loss of faith. How could a benevolent God produce a world so full of pain and suffering and evil? The pain and suffering and evil, as well as malicious pride, that inspires the existential rage of militant atheists and revolutionaries. It is the problem of Job, whose faith was challenged but nevertheless survived. There is reason to rejoice that we are part of such a strange, beautiful, terrible, wondrous, meaningful creation. Is this the best of all possible worlds? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Is this the only way a world capable of life with purpose and meaning could be? I think the answer is “Yes.”
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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