Considering the real paragon of animals

From within the congregation of vapors

The phonetics of certain terms do a lot of work sketching out the textures of the concepts they represent. I thank the stars for a delicious word like firmament, which for me is one such term. Firmament feels like a heavy blanket fortress you’ve burrowed into, forming a dark dome overhead with constellated and randomized pinpricks casting thin threads of glimmering white down into your eyes. Shakespeare famously likened the firmament to “a majestical roof fretted with golden fire… a congregation of vapors.” Hamlet, so articulate and dramatic even in his state of nonstop agitation. Saying firmament aloud three times might cause a spontaneous uncharted solar eclipse, or bring the stars down on your head.

The tapestry of the heavens - the firmament - along with the skin of the earth and the variegated forms that life takes on it - these must be the base elements of all visual art; the reference material for codified aesthetic beauty. Aloft in the eerie zone delimiting the firmament and the surface of the planet, the essential rightness of this world among all possible worlds¹ is plain to those that bother to look. Funnily enough on this particular trip, I am passing over the vast icesheets of Greenland, that headline-grabbing frozen mass I used to go a year or more without hearing a peep about. The brilliance of the recent limelight doesn’t seem to have melted Greenland yet. For long stretches, no lines of any kind appear on its surface. Only a palette of a thousand different shades of white, stretched out over endless subtle contours. No lines and no boundaries between sky and land, land and water. No lines, only light and shadow.

Too normal now to move us as it should, this vantage point miles above the earth ought to be understood as a forbidden perspective, as dangerous as the moral perspective illuminated by the fruit of the tree of good and evil. An eye-view meant only for the gods. From up here it all feels too awesome and too heavy for me in all my feebleness to consider properly. I'm not sure anyone else onboard has even noticed that there are windows on this craft.

Taking in the stark nobility and apparent emptiness of Greenland below, for no clear reason I am reminded of my cat waking me up, maybe 2 AM on a brightly moonlit night. He beckons for me to join him crouched on the rug by the screen door facing out onto our backyard. We huddle together there shoulder to shoulder, like co-conspirators. Like vagrants by the tracks in an old freightyard listening for the iron murmur and clack that softly signals the advance of a distant train. But this night is dead silent. Hearing nothing, we watch. We watch the strange and beautiful procession of two skunks rummaging through the weeds and dirt in the yard, unearthing grubs and bugs. My cat on his haunches and me on my knees and elbows, moonlight playing at his whiskers and along my eyelashes, there is something deeply moving about the night’s invitation to witness this bonded pair going jointly about their feeding routine. So simple and sacred.

When they forage like this, in focused vulnerability, they do so with their butts up and their magnificent and iconically striped tails held proud, like horsehair plumes atop old-fashioned cavalry helmets. They are advertising clearly the species that they are members of, lest they be misidentified by passing predator or adversary. Neither my cat nor I need the visual to recognize them. A distinct vegetal funk accompanies them everywhere, pungent enough to wake me up on the nights they grub in our yard.

With those tails up and noses down, they look for all the world alien, even like alien craft roving through moonbeams, scanning for signals of insect colonies. Running lights along the port and starboard flanks wouldn’t seem out of place on the bodies of these emissaries of a different world. They demonstrate to me a different way of leading natural lives. Like Greenland, they hold a promise normally ignored and largely misunderstood. Disdain is generally heaped on these stinky creatures, but their shared chore of grubbing through the yard together strikes me as a humbling act of love and a most holy spectacle. I can think of no natural wonder more marvelous than the vision of those skunks that night.²

1. Die beste aller möglichen Welten! I’ll be keeping a mental tally of Leibniz references made here and probably rewarding myself with a brownie every tenth one.

2. This reverie in the combined mode of naturalism / romanticism is a style I might be aping a little bit from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I just finished after a detour to Le Guin’s EarthSea. Being such a novice I fall easily under the influence and can’t help but resort to mimicry of whatever I happen to be reading at the moment. Like Dillard’s language, I am prone to grandiloquence when I go on about natural wonders. In the afterword of my edition of Tinker Creek, the publisher admits that critics found fault with Dillard’s work, calling it self-absorbed and overwritten, even quoting one particularly put-off reader who found that “her observations are typically described in overstatement reaching toward hysteria.” Easy does it! The sense of humor and self-awareness that Dillard and her editor display in including these critiques in the book I find charming. Decades later she admits of the 27 year old self who wrote the book that “a grand sentence was not quite done until it was overdone.” Takes the edge off when you lean into criticism a bit and are willing to take the piss out of yourself. And the world seems the richer for Dillard risking all the grandiosity. The natural subjects she ponders (changing seasons, Eskimo hunting behavior, locust migration patterns, particle/wave duality…) are too grand for sentences to be done up tersely and inadequately. Much better to go all in, bucking the self-consciousness and discretion that would otherwise diminish the considerable power of her observations. Fuck the critic in other words. Tinker Creek won a Pulitzer and found its way into lit syllabi around the world while the humorless critic carried on with his grumpy life. Speaking of grandiosity I put this all down here because, mimicry notwithstanding, I recognize a shred of my typical approach and style in Dillard’s voice. Her enraptured response to the world in all its outrageousness feels very familiar. I’m aware of the wide gap in talent and skill, but that kernel of sameness is a validation and a permission slip from her to me to let it rip while also not taking myself too seriously. I’ll keep an eye on the mailbox for that Pulitzer announcement...