A summer's day, on the lawn at Winsley. We had a large garden with apple trees and a vegetable patch; a swing hanging from the old oak tree; a stream running along the bottom of the gently sloping grass. I was up near the house, below the rockery, where a patch of weeds had invaded the grass. Tiny blue flowers with white stars at their centre embedded in a cushion of emerald leaves. Staring at the flowers. The same Siamese-cat's-eye blue as the July sky. Each one an exercise in perfection. Put there by no hand, flourishing by their own grace and the sun and the rain, the minerals of the Devon soil. Too flat to the earth to be threatened by the mower's blades. A flourishing of flowers.
The woods near Trehill, down at the end of a farm track. You had to pass through or over a broken down metal gate, rust-eaten, and avoid the muddy water in the tyre-tracks, the brambles and the nettles, to reach this protected copse. Battle through shrubby undergrowth and leaf-litter where there were tracks of deer and fox, rabbit and badger, untangling jeans from thorns, pushing aside low-hanging branches. The dog behind me or in front or somewhere round about. She chased scents, I chased the promise of green-hued light in a little opening, a tiny clearing near the middle of the wood. Yes, there, the sun-light softened and enriched, where some old, ancient tree have fallen, creating space. the rotting wood changed the composition of the soil as the light altered what vegetation thrived. A bank, that must have been the corpse-like tree-trunk, upholstered in fine grass and a flush of primroses. There was magic there. Puck's memory, Titania's ghost, the faeries and elves, the pixies and dryads. Nature invaded mind.
A field in Northamptonshire, where I sat on a rug near the river, watching as a storm passed in the west, heading north up the valley. Lightning in daylight and, seconds later, the thunder-clap. A shaft not of light but of driving rain, a margin of black moving across iron-grey.
The night sky at my brother's place. Not just the constellations, but, remarkably, the whole night illuminated. Even the most distant stars visible as a miasma of light. There is no darkness, really, if you can see far enough. In every orientation, at some point in this infinity, is a beacon of brightness. If you look far enough.
In New Zealand my friend and I stayed in a small B&B on the Coromandel Peninsula. We'd arrived at night, under the same kind of brilliant sky. In the morning, the view of the beach and the sea. The sand stretching white in a wide strip, kissed by cold sea-flavoured grey waves. And these rocks standing out as Titans in the ocean, masses of jagged sepia, crowned in green. Old men of the sea, resistant to time and tide, but not, in the fullness of existence, entirely able to withstand the battering of the elements. Once they were part of the land; one day they will be no more.
Here, in my conservatory, a pelargonium plant that originally my mother had grown. Twenty-five years since her death, but the salmon pink flowers still bloom from May to October. The citrus tree I gave up for dead after a scale-insect attack and left for a year in the garden. It survived frost and dehydration, though the insects did not, and will bloom again this summer.
One cat today caught a fly in his paws; the other investigated a spider's web with all the concentration of a scientist at study. What does it do? What can I do with it? The dog, in the garden, tracking down a pizza crust that some neighbour, thoughtless, had thrown into my bushes, his nose leading him inexorably to his prize, before my fingers prised it from his teeth.
The intent focus of we animals, feline or equine or canine or bovine, ursine or ovine or whatever we may be. Threat or promise? Bad or good? Does death or does life come calling? Is it all a matter of existence. Or could it, perhaps, be wonder?
I know I feel wonder, among my other emotional responses. So why should not a dog or a cat? They used to say, you cannot anthropomorphise. But here - one should not anthropomorphise our reactions when one does science. All our reasons are guided by processes no little homunculus within ordains. We too are unconsciously motivated, guided by our past into our future. Yet we do feel. And they do feel. And parsimony suggests, when one acknowledges the similarity of nervous systems and brains, that something analogous to what we experience is shared throughout sentient beings. So, fear and pleasure, want and disgust, joy and sadness even, why not? For all the reasons that it is wrong to inflict suffering on sentient beings, it must be valid to grant them the faculties of emotional valence. But wonder, surely that's for humans alone? Maybe, in its narrowest conception or its most powerful expression, but, as a combination, in varying quantities, of surprise and delight and fear and incomprehension and expansion and personal transcendence, there may be seeds of it in other living beings.
What is it after all? Recognition of the greatness of something external to the self? Of the possibility of the unattainable?
That would demand that other animals have a sense of the self that does not encompass all externalities. I mean, to a cat, what it cannot eat and cannot play with, what will not stroke it or shelter it, appears insignificant. Only if things outside the scope of harm or benefit to the self can sustain attention could we see a cat's behaviour as registering something akin to wonder. One of my cats looks in a mirror. He does not tap on the glass; he ignores himself; he looks instead at the reflection of the room. Sometimes he sees something in the reflection that leads him to turn from the mirror and attend to that place in the real world represented in the reflection. But sometimes, he just stares. What is he doing? Is he seeing something
unattainable that holds his attention?
Our senses are attuned to what it matters for us to attune to. Salmon and eel can ascertain different levels of dissolved salt in river water. They require this information for their migration from river to sea. Otters and humans have no such abilities. We are attuned to the sound frequencies that match those of human speech. As for light frequencies, our capacities are pathetic compared to some birds and insects. My dog's scent-world is a realm I am excluded from. A horse can read the mood of a herd-mate in the twitch of an ear, the tension of muscles around an eye. The specific length of the hours of daylight in spring trigger some birds to mate.
There is no limit to all I do not know and all I cannot experience.
This is enough for wonder - and for curiosity, too. Curiosity about the unattainable and the glory that can never be part of my self. It's not pragmatic or utilitarian. And yet this wonder and curiosity is what drives us. Nature is what, ultimately, inspires us. Nature made us and we, whatever we do on this warming planet, will never, ever, be able to overcome her. Thank the night sky and the primrose glades, the azure flowers and the storm clouds. We are part of nature, but such a small part. She continues, whether we do or not.
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