The Unexpected Universe Read online

  “I can be bold to say,” pronounced Cook, turning north toward the summer isles, “that no man will venture farther than I have done.” In eighteenth-century terms he was right, just as now the way beyond the moon lies dark and inexpressibly desolate and costly for men to follow. The mariners in their sea jackets and canvas headgear were not equipped for the long land traverse that, in the twentieth century, took Scott and Amundsen to the pole; even then the fierce ice gods took away one man’s homecoming. With grim amusement Cook heard his officers suggest that if Terra Incognita existed it lay north, in sunnier climes. Ignoring them, perhaps with Dalrymple in mind, he tried one more run southward before he swung away. The highborn scientists were frequently to complain uneasily that he never told them where he was going. What was he expected to do, sailing under secret orders in the wastes below the Circle? He might, if he had chosen, have responded like Odysseus, “I am a man. I am not a god.”

  A little over a half century after Cook’s death in Hawaii, an inexperienced voyager into the bottomless sea of time came to anchor in the Galápagos. It was the young Charles Darwin, fresh from his wanderings on the pampas and his Andean ascents. At Tierra del Fuego he had glimpsed from the Beagle the stormy, racing waters through which Cook’s ships, the Endeavor and the Resolution, had ridden on their long world journeys. Now the Beagle had rung down its anchor at what the Spanish had called, with singular discernment, the “Encantadas,” the Enchanted Isles.

  Odysseus had come similarly upon Circe’s island, only to find his crew transformed into animals—specifically, into pigs. When, at his behest, the changelings were created men once more, they took on a more lively and youthful appearance. By the sixteenth century the Florentine writer Giovanni Battista Gelli had produced his Circe, in which a variety of animals refused Odysseus’ offer to restore them to their original form. Their arguments for remaining as they were constitute an ingenious commentary on the human condition. From rabbit to lion the animals are united in being done with humanity. Not all the argumentative wiles of Odysseus can talk them back into the shape of Homo sapiens. The single exception proves to be a dubious Greek philosopher immured in the body of an elephant. He alone consents to a renewed transformation.

  The Encantadas are the means by which the whole Circean labyrinth of organic change was precipitated upon the mind of man. What had appeared to Odysseus as the trick of a goddess was, in actuality, the shape shifting of the incomprehensible universe itself. Among the upthrust volcanic chimneys, which Darwin compared to “the cultivated parts of the Infernal Regions,” the young naturalist meditated upon a flora and fauna seemingly distinct, as in the case of the famed Galápagos tortoises, from the living inhabitants of the continents.

  Circe kept herself hidden, but it was evident to the wondering Darwin that there was a power hidden in time and isolation that alone could transmute, not just men, but all things living, into wavering shadows. He had entered by the mysterious doorway of the Galápagos into a sea as vast in its own way as the limitless Pacific. Yet even here upon the ocean of time the ghostly sail of Cook’s vessel passes by. Cook’s surgeon-naturalist, William Anderson, records in his journal of the third and fatal voyage—that voyage which Cook himself had preternaturally referred to as the “last”—that animals and human beings must be attributed to the different stocks “from which they sprung before their arrival in the south sea, or we must believe that at the creation every particular island was furnished with its inhabitants in the same manner as with its peculiar plants.” Anderson’s words do not precisely express evolutionary ideas, but they hint prophetically at the puzzling thoughts—to a degree, heretical—that had arisen and would not be downed about the role of islands in the biology of the living world.

  The momentary phantom of the Resolution fades on the infinite waters of the past. William Anderson is dead on the Bering passage, but others will look and ask, and ask again, until the answer arises upon Darwin’s return to London—that London which, like Odysseus searching the horizon for Ithaca, he yearns for in a note to his former teacher John Henslow: “Oh, to be home again without one single novel object near me.” But the novel objects are there, fixed in the memory, ever to be relived. Each covert of the Enchanted Archipelago will forever resound with the reptilian hisses of antediluvian antiquity.

  The memory of the modern scholar will, I suspect, be wrenched by the thought of all that Captain Cook patiently endured as well as learned from Sir Joseph Banks, the well-intentioned, blustering, aristocratic naturalist, and his sometimes complaining colleagues of the first and second voyages. Only once did the restrained Captain allow himself the liberty of a quarter-deck comment, involving the violation of the commander’s printing rights by the naturalist Forster and his son. The careless assignment to Cook by the scribe Hawkesworth of some undiplomatic remarks derived from Banks’s private journal did nothing to allay the Captain’s wrath. “Damn and blast all scientists,” he exploded to Lieutenant King on the eve of the third voyage.

  Cook had reason for his spleen. Yet it is worth recording that this son of a Yorkshire laborer left a record of his voyages far more accurate than the first version produced by Hawkes worth, who had been assigned by the Admiralty to prettify Cook’s work and make it palatable. In modern terms, Cook was, on the whole, a magnificent and tolerant anthropologist who, at every inhabited island, had to improvise his Odyssean role. It was not scientists who died on the beach of Kealakekua in Hawaii. Instead, it was the underrated circumnavigator of Antarctica, the genuine Ahab of the ghost continent. Cook had, times without number, brought his ships off dangerous shoals and, in addition, penetrated the high latitudes of both poles.

  We inhabitants of a scientific era may well prize our accomplishments, but it behooves us to acknowledge that without the skills of the relentless Odyssean voyager, Joseph Banks and all his colleagues might well have fed the coral upon some tropic reef. Banks is believed to have anonymously paid Cook a just, belated tribute in the Morning Chronicle when the news of his death was announced in London. “Cook’s competence changed the face of the world” was to be a mature, twentieth-century judgment.

  James Cook himself would have cast a proud, cold eye upon land-bound opinion. He had emerged unheralded and alone from the grimy foreshore of history. The horizon, the pack ice, and the albatross would have been all he asked as memorials of his passage—these and the carefully drawn maps for those who followed. It may be that the space captains, when and if they leave the solar system, will alone come to understand that remote, serene indifference.

  There is, however, one thing more to be considered: the Odyssean journey in which the mind turns homeward, seeking surcease from outer triumphs. Perhaps this crossing of the two contradictory impulses in the mind of man is nowhere better expressed than by the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli in “Ultimo Viaggio” (“The Last Voyage”), published in 1904. Pascoli realized that Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, his homeward goal, was in a sense an anticlimax—that the magical spell wrought by Circe would follow the hero into the prosaic world.

  Pascoli picks up the Odyssean tale when Odysseus, grown old and restless, drawn on by migratory birds, sets forth to retrace his magical journey, the journey of all men down the pathway of their youth, the road beyond retracing. Circe’s isle lies at last before the wanderer in the plain colors of reality. Circe and whatever she represents have vanished. Much as Darwin might have viewed the Galápagos in old age, Odysseus passes the scenes of the marvelous voyage with all the obstacles reduced to trifles. The nostalgia of space, which is what the Greeks meant by nostalgia, that is, the hunger for home, is transmuted by Pascoli into the hunger for lost time, for the forever vanished days. The Sirens no longer sing, but Pascoli’s Odysseus, having made his inward journey, understands them. Knowledge without sympathetic perception is barren. Odysseus in his death is carried by the waves to Calypso, who hides him in her hair. “Nobody” has come home to Nothingness.

  III

  Those archaeolo
gists and students of folklore who frequent the Scandinavian swamps in which bog acids have preserved such bodies as those of Tollund man—men who were alive upon earth in a time almost coeval with Homer—speak of a strange crossroads religion. An earth goddess was driven in a massive coach through gloomy northern forests. She was peripatetic and did not stay, but the ox-drawn vehicle in which she lumbered over abandoned and ancient roads paused, with curtains drawn, at ignorant villages.

  Out of the rising fog wisps shambled her priests and obedient worshipers. No one was allowed to thrust his head behind the draped curtains of the ornamented cart or to query the immobile coachman or to touch with worshipful fingers the steaming oxen in the night. After the proper ritual, a selected human sacrifice would be cast down into the waiting bog. The coach would lumber again into the night, across wild heaths and forbidden pathways.

  But suppose—the thought strikes me suddenly as I startle awake at midnight, hearing cries and rumblings in my hotel corridors—suppose the wheels of the great car are still revolving before its attendant worshipers. Suppose further—and I sit up at this and shiver uncontrollably as I hear the mead-soaked voices and the running steps—suppose the same awkward coach still lurches through the darker hours of our assembled scientific priesthood.

  Suppose that in the ancient car there sits in one age the masked face of Newton, his world machine ticking like a remorseless clock in the dead and confined air; or suppose that Darwin lurks concealed behind the curtains, and all is wild uncertainty and change in the misty features of his company; or that Doctor Freud looks coldly and contemplatively down upon a sea of fleecing goblin faces. Or is it the Abbé Lemaître’s followers who hear the alternate expansion and contraction of nature’s pounding heart, like a rhythmic drum amidst the receding coals of the night stars? Or imagine that, silhouetted gigantically in the fierce rays of atomic light streaming from the carriage, four sinister horsemen trample impatiently, while within a muffled voice cries out to the assembled masses: “God is dead. All is permitted.”

  Suppose, I think, lying awake and weary in my blankets, the figure in the coach is a changeling and its true face is no face, as Odysseus was “no one” until he shouted a vengeful name before the Cyclops. Or deduce that behind the concealing drapery, hooded in a faceless cowl, there is caught only the swirling vapor of an untamed void whose vassals we are—we who fancy ourselves as the priesthood of powers safely contained and to be exhibited as evidences of our own usurping godhood.

  I hear now, as I have heard before, the far-off, long, premonitory trundling of the dreadful cart at midnight. I think of the face of No Face—protean, dissembling, alternating death’s-head and beautiful Circean goddess, forever forbidden to descend and touch common flesh. I think of her acolytes, ourselves, toiling in a hundred laboratories with our secret visions of what is, or may not be, while the wild reality always eludes our grasp.

  Long ago a Greek named Plato, who was also a voyager not unfamiliar with Odyssean wanderings, remarked after much thought, “We must take the best and most irrefragable of human doctrines and embark on that, as if it were a raft on which to risk the voyage of life.” Plato makes, however, one humble addition to his meditation, one that marks the Greek distaste of overvaulting pride. “Unless,” he adds wistfully, “it were possible to find a stronger vessel, some Divine Word on which we might take our journey more surely and with confidence.”

  Earlier I have dwelt upon the magical incidents that beset Odysseus on his voyage. These are the stories remembered through unnumbered generations, of the island of the Cyclops, of Circe, of Calypso, of the cattle of the sun, of the Lotus-Eaters and the Sirens, of the dreadful bag of the four winds inadvertently loosed in mid-passage. The Odyssey is, as the critic Howard Clarke once observed, the world of the folk tale. It is the arena of uncertain violence that confronts man on the voyage of life—sex, irresponsibility, inordinate hungers that evoke equally monstrous figures from the human subconscious. Such a world is like the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk world of childhood, whose memories linger more clearly than many of the events of later life.

  Once it is raised, not only is it difficult to subdue such a world again, but anything that follows it is apt to prove an anticlimax. Odysseus’ goal is home, but after the adventures on the mysterious sea where Proteus can be found basking on a rock among his creatures, the suitors and their puerile human rapacity are singularly unattractive. Odysseus himself loses stature when he is reduced to lynching helpless if inobedient women servants. Something vanishes from the tale at this point, no matter how necessary it was for Homer to complete the Odyssean voyage. The poet has been sufficiently perceptive, however, to lay upon Odysseus, through the device of prophecy, the injunction of a further journey.

  The poet, or, rather, his hero, has returned in middle age to a household that will obviously not long give him scope to breathe. Odysseus must, in other words, be given a legitimate reason to escape from Ithaca. This has been so strongly felt by generations of readers that from Dante through Tennyson to Kazantzakis poets have been impelled to launch the immortal navigator once more into the realms of dream. Perhaps among these poets Pascoli alone was wise enough to visualize an end in which the trivial and magicless themselves are transmuted by human wisdom into a timeless dimension having its own enchanted reality.

  In this connection, there is one event involving Odysseus’ homecoming, one episode that, in the mundane world of Ithaca, shines like a far light reflected from Calypso’s isle. Oddly enough, that other voyager on more recent seas, Charles Darwin, experienced and recorded a similar episode after his five-year absence from Shrewsbury. Odysseus’ great dog Argos, abused and cast out on a dung heap, wagged his tail and was the first to recognize his old master after nineteen years of absence. In a like way Darwin’s favorite dog recognized him after his five-year absence on the Beagle.

  It is not necessary to cavil over the great age of Odysseus’ dog. The surprising thing about the story’s descent through the millennia is that it comes from a fierce and violent era, yet it bespeaks some recognized bond between man and beast. The tie runs beyond the cities into some remote glade in a far forest where man willingly accepted the help of his animal kin. Though men in the mass forget the origins of their need, they still bring wolfhounds into city apartments, where dog and man both sit brooding in wistful discomfort.

  The magic that gleams an instant between Argos and Odysseus is both the recognition of diversity and the need for affection across the illusions of form. It is nature’s cry to homeless, far-wandering, insatiable man: “Do not forget your brethren, nor the green wood from which you sprang. To do so is to invite disaster.”

  Many great writers have written private meanings into their versions of the Odyssean voyage. In the twentieth century particularly, Odysseus has been seen as a symbol of the knowledge-hungry scientist, the Faustian penetrator of space and time. But, as scientists, we have sometimes forgotten the inward journey so poetically expressed by Pascoli in “The Last Voyage,” that inward journey whose true meaning was long ago expressed by Circe’s cryptic warning. “Magic cannot touch you,” she had said to Odysseus, but today we know that the heart untouched by the magic of wonder may come to an impoverished age. Cook, the navigator, died in the Lotus Isles, perhaps fortunate that he never returned to his Penelope. Darwin, who voyaged as deeply into time, came home to Down, where he is said to have slept ill. In fact, it has been reported on good authority that he walked so late he met the foxes trotting home at dawn.

  Thus, in the heart of man, and, above all, within this turbulent century, the Odyssean voyage stands as a symbol of both man’s homelessness and his power, a power more unregenerate than that which drove Odysseus to string the great bow before the suitors. Long ago, when the time to Homer might still be numbered in centuries, Plotinus wrote of the soul’s journey, “It shall come, not to another, but to itself.” It is possible to add that for the soul to come to its true self it needs the help and recognition of the
dog Argos. It craves that empathy clinging between man and beast, that nagging shadow of remembrance which, try as we may to deny it, asserts our unity with life and does more. Paradoxically, it establishes, in the end, our own humanity. One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.

  It has been asserted that we are destined to know the dark beyond the stars before we comprehend the nature of our own journey. This may be true. But we know also that our inward destination lies somewhere a long way past the reef of the Sirens, who sang of knowledge but not of wisdom. Beyond that point, if perchance we reach it, exists the realm of Plato’s undiscovered word. It is a divine word, or so Plato gropingly called it, for he hoped against hope that it might suffice to guide our human pilgrimage when, in the ritual language of the Odyssey, “the sun has set and all the journeying ways are darkened.”

  In our time, however, the mind still persists in traveling along those darkened sea paths where all manner of strange creatures swarm. For myself, I have penetrated as far as I could dare among rain-dimmed crags and seascapes. But there is more, assuredly there is still more, as Circe tried to tell Odysseus when she warned that death would come to him from the sea. She meant, I think now, the upwelling of that inner tide which finally engulfs each traveler.

  I have listened belatedly to the warning of the great enchantress. I have cast, while there was yet time, my own oracles on the sun-washed deck. My attempt to read the results contains elements of autobiography. I set it down just as the surge begins to lift, towering and relentless, against the reefs of age.