3 April 2007, Chicago IL

A year and a day ago, everything loaded into the truck, through a rain-drenched Coastal Range, its body draped in soft pale green folds, and into the crenellated bulk of the Sierra Nevada, where I was snow-bound for several days, hesitating, perhaps, on the brink. Of what? The Great Basin, to be sure, on its two-mile-high brink, though I skirted it, running down through the Owens Valley and across the Mojave Desert into the Colorado Plateau. Of all the places I have been I liked none of them so well as that high, dry country. How can I explain how completely I fit there, how sweet the shapes and colors of the land seemed to my eyes, or how apt my strange and hungry heart felt to the simple act of walking through the scrubby pines, dry silt-flaked soil, rocks shaped in impossibly ancient floods? Does landscape have its particular geniuses? I thought so, once, of Pt. Reyes, that unaccountable hook of foreign soil so different from the neighboring continent, that mysterious sigil of the invisible motions of the earth. Well, in the Colorado there are an infinitude of geniuses, whole civilizations, complete with long-established customs, engrained rivalries, theological dichota, finer and lesser arts. Yes, arts: is there any other way to explain the implacable monuments in their trench-shaped valleys? The arches, the whorled sandstone, the smudged paints, the intricate river-scars?

We are so far removed from the experience of nature, intellectually, historically and spatially, that the notion of a genius is utterly, utterly foreign. So much, perhaps, that an unfamiliar reader may suspect me of an incipient polytheism, theosophy, or gnosticism. Quite the opposite. Genius is a product of the mind. It is quite literally making things up: things instead of sense-data, pattern instead of randomness, an internal representation of the world instead of unconnected stimuli. But is anyone less amazed? That a couple hundred pounds of matter, water and dust in a hundred years, could stand in some nameless valley and feel something as indefinite, sweet, and ephemeral as home. Are you tempted to say there must be something more: some divine spark, some ectoplasmous goo, a vital principle, untainted by the muteness of matter? Are you tempted to say, there is something we don’t yet understand, some principle of organization, some formal calculus, some new data? Don’t. Just be amazed.

Does this explain at all how it is I can be so utterly convinced of the importance of biology? Life is the strangest thing there ever was, and the more you chase it into its mysterious rabbit-holes the more it appears in glory.

(cdm, in ContinuingEastwards | 3April2007 )