Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Fecundity (10)

Chapter Ten: Fecundity

When it comes to reproduction, do we feel differently about plants and animals? I think we do. One could be a subject of polite discussion and the other is not. Why do you suppose that is?

There is tremendous growth pressure. It appears to be in the design of the Designer. Growth happens. Life is stubborn and insistent. Sycamore roots break sidewalks. Mushrooms can shatter a cement basement floor. And human beings will wreck themselves because of growth pressure. As we seek love and a companion and sex and children, it seems to be, in seasons, all consuming.

Consider life in the waters, in the ponds and lakes and oceans. Do you ever consider how much life and death and left-overs are teeming in the waters? We push these kinds of ideas away. It ruins swimming in the ocean. It makes us think, “That’s gross!” Of course I can hardly swim in a pond, or a lake, for the very same reasons. It is full of life! How does God consider the life of the barnacle? Are the individual barnacles important to God? What about the individual lives of whales? Or rats? Or cats? Or dolphins? Or horses? Or us? Does God care about the fish that we eat, or the cows?

Either Mother Nature is a monster, or human beings are a freak of nature, somehow different from the way of the cosmos. It could be that our emotions are a curse, that we should accommodate ourselves to the amoral natural reaction to life and death. This is also unacceptable to us. What does nature have to say to us about Creation and the Creator? I do not think we can close our eyes, or refuse to think about what we see. I suppose many do refuse to see and refuse to consider the implications of what they see. I cannot refuse either.

Quotes:

I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives. (162)

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. ... No, in the plant world, especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is as a population explosion among field mice. (164)

Bamboo can grow three feet in twenty-four hours. (165)

“Acres and acres of rats” has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, “acres and acres of tulips.” (167)

Rock barnacles: The barnacles encrusting a single half-mile of shore can leak into the water a million million larvae. ... My point about rock barnacles is those million million larvae in ‘milky clouds’ and those shed flecks of skin. Sea water seems suddenly to be but a broth of barnacle bits. Can I fancy that a million million human infants are more real? (168)

The pressure of growth among animals is a terrible kind of hunger. These billions must eat in order to fuel their surge to sexual maturity so that they may pump out more billions of eggs. (170)

Lacewings are those fragile green insects with large, rounded transparent wings. The larvae eat enormous numbers of aphids, the adults mate in a fluttering rush of instinct, lay eggs, and die by the millions in the first cold snap of fall. Sometimes when a female lays her fertile eggs on a green leaf atop a slender stalked thread, she is hungry. She pauses in her laying, turns around, and eats her eggs one by one, then lays more, and eats them, too. Anything can happen, and anything does; what’s it all about?

Valerie Eliot, T. S. Eliot’s widow, wrote in a letter to the London Times: My husband, T. S. Eliot, loved to recount how late one evening he stopped a taxi. As he got in the driver said, “You’re T. S. Eliot.” When asked how he knew, he replied, “Ah, I have an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, “Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?” and do you know, he couldn’t tell me.” Well, Lord God, asks the delicate, dying lacewing whose mandibles are wet with juice secreted by her own ovipositor, what’s it all about? (“And do you know...”) (170-1)

I have to look at the landscape of the blue-green world again. Just think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained altar stone. (177)

Are my values then so diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves? This is the key point. (178)

We value the individual supremely, and nature values him not a whit. (178)

Either this world, my mother is a monster, or I myself am a freak. We are moral creatures in an amoral world. (179)