A Natural History of the Senses (41 page)

We are not just lovers of one another’s features, of course, but also of nature’s. Our passion for beautiful flowers we owe entirely to insects, bats, and birds, since these pollinators and flowers evolved together; flowers use color to attract birds and insects that will pollinate them. We may breed flowers to the pitch of sense-pounding color and smell we prefer, and we’ve greatly changed the look of nature by doing so, but there is a special gloriousness we find only in nature at its most wild and untampered with. In our “sweet spontaneous earth,” as e. e. cummings calls it, we find startling and intimate beauties that fill us with ecstasy. Perhaps, like him, we

and our pulse suddenly charges like cavalry, or our eyes close in pleasure and, in a waking faint, we sigh before we know what’s happening. The scene is so beautiful it deflates us. Moonlight can reassure us that there will be light enough to find our way over dark plains, or to escape a night-prowling beast. Sunset’s fiery glow reminds us of the warmth in which we thrive. The gushing colors of flowers signal springtime and summer, when food is plentiful and all life is radiantly fertile. Brightly colored birds turn us on, sympathetically, with their sexual flash and dazzle, because we’re atavists at
heart and any sex pantomime reminds us of our own. Still, the essence of natural beauty is novelty and surprise. In cummings’s poem, it is an unexpected “convulsed orange inch of moon” that awakens one’s notice. When this happens, our sense of community widens—we belong not just to one another but to other species, other forms of matter. “That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone,” John Berger writes in
The Sense of Sight
, “that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.” Naturalists often say that they never tire of seeing the same mile of rain forest, or of strolling along the same paths through the savanna. But, if you press them, they inevitably add that there is always something new to behold, that it is always different. As Berger puts it: “beauty is always an exception, always
in despite of
. This is why it moves us.” And yet we also respond passionately to the highly organized way of beholding life we call art. To some extent Art is like trapping nature inside a paperweight. Suddenly a locale, or an abstract emotion, is viewable at one’s leisure, falls out of flux, can be rotated and considered from different vantage points, becomes as fixed and to that extent as holy as the landscape. As Berger puts it:

Art is more complex than that, of course. Intense emotion is stressful, and we look to artists to feel for us, to suffer and rejoice, to describe the heights of their passionate response to life so that we can enjoy them from a safe distance, and get to know better what the full range of human experience really is. We may not choose to live out the extremes of consciousness we find in Jean Genet or Edvard Munch, but it’s wonderful to peer into them. We look to artists to stop time for us, to break the cycle of birth and death and temporarily put an end to life’s processes. It is too much of a whelm
for any one person to face up to without going into sensory overload. Artists, on the other hand, court that intensity. We ask artists to fill our lives with a cavalcade of fresh sights and insights, the way life was for us when we were children and everything was new.
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In time, much of life’s spectacle becomes a polite blur, because if we stop to consider every speckle-throated lily we will never get our letters filed or pomegranates bought.

Unbeautiful things often delight our eyes, too. Gargoyles, glitz, intense slabs of color, organized tricks of light. Sparklers and fireworks are almost painful to watch, but we call them beautiful. A flawless seven-carat marquise diamond is pure scintillation, which we also call beautiful. Throughout history, people have crafted nature’s rudest rocks into exquisite jewelry, obsessed with the way in which light penetrates a crystal. We may find diamonds and other gems visually magnificent, but seeing them the way we do is a recent innovation. It was only in the eighteenth century that the newly improved art of gem-cutting produced the glittery stones full of fire and dazzle we admire. Before that, even the crown jewels appeared dull and listless. But in the eighteenth century faceted cuts became fashionable, along with plunging necklines. In fact, women often wore jewels pinned to the necklines of their gowns so that each might draw attention to the other. Why should a gem strike us as beautiful? A diamond acts like a bunched prism. Light entering a diamond ricochets around inside it, reflects from the back of it, and spreads out its colors more ebulliently than through an ordinary glass prism. A skilled diamond cutter enables light to streak along inside the stone’s many facets and shoot out of the jewel at angles. Turn the diamond in your hand, and you see one pure color followed by another. Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things. We find life’s energy, motion, and changing colors trapped in the small, dead space of a diamond, which one moment glitters like neon
and the next spews out sabers of light. Our sense of wonder ignites, things are in the wrong place, a magical bonfire has been lit, the nonliving comes to life in an unexpected flash and begins a small, brief dance among the flames. Watching faces or fireworks or a spaceship launch, the dance is slower, but the colors and lights grow achingly intense as they surround and upstage us in a fantasia of pure visual ecstasy.

A huge glittering tower sparkles across the Florida marshlands. Floodlights reach into the heavens all around it, rolling out carpets of light. Helicopters and jets blink around the launch pad like insects drawn to flame. Oz never filled the sky with such diamond-studded improbability. Inside the cascading lights, a giant trellis holds a slender rocket to its heart, on each side a tall thermos bottle filled with solid fuel the color and feel of a hard eraser, and on its back a sharp-nosed space shuttle, clinging like the young of some exotic mammal. A full moon bulges low in the sky, its face turned toward the launch pad, its mouth open.

On the sober consoles of launch control, numbers count backward toward zero. When numbers vanish, and reverse time ends, something will disappear. Not the shuttle—that will stay with us through eyesight and radar, and be on the minds of dozens of tracking dishes worldwide, rolling their heads as if to relieve the anguish. For hours we have been standing on these Floridian bogs, longing for the blazing rapture of the moment ahead, longing to be jettisoned free from routine, and lifted, like the obelisk we launch, that much nearer the infinite. On the fog-wreathed banks of the Banana River, and by the roadside lookouts, we are waiting: 55,000 people are expected at the Space Center alone.

When floodlights die on the launch pad, camera shutters and mental shutters all open in the same instant. The air feels loose and damp. A hundred thousand eyes rush to one spot, where a glint below the booster rocket flares into a pinwheel of fire, a sparkler held
by hand on the Fourth of July. White clouds shoot out in all directions, in a dust storm of flame, a gritty, swirling Sahara, burning from gray-white to an incandescent platinum so raw it makes your eyes squint, to a radiant gold so narcotic you forget how to blink. The air is full of bee stings, prickly and electric. Your pores start to itch. Hair stands up stiff on the back of your neck. It used to be that the launch pad would melt at lift-off, but now 300,000 gallons of water crash from aloft, burst from below. Steam clouds scent the air with a mineral ash. Crazed by reflection, the waterways turn the color of pounded brass. Thick cumulus clouds shimmy and build at ground level, where you don’t expect to see thunderheads.

Seconds into the launch, an apricot
whoosh
pours out in spasms, like the rippling quarters of a palomino, and now outbleaches the sun, as clouds rise and pile like a Creation scene. Birds leap into the air along with moths and dragonflies and gnats and other winged creatures, all driven to panic by the clamor: booming, crackling, howling downwind. What is flight, that it can take place in the fragile wings of a moth, whose power station is a heart small as a computer chip? What is flight, that it can groan upward through 4.5 million pounds of dead weight on a colossal gantry? Close your eyes, and you hear the deafening
rat-a-tat-tat
of firecrackers, feel them arcing against your chest. Open your eyes, and you see a huge steel muscle dripping fire, as seven million pounds of thrust pauses a moment on a silver haunch, and then the bedlam clouds let rip. Iron struts blow over the launch pad like newspapers, and shock waves roll out, pounding their giant fists, pounding the marshes where birds shriek and fly, pounding against your chest, where a heart already rapid begins running clean away from you. The air feels tight as a drum, the molecules bouncing. Suddenly the space shuttle leaps high over the marshlands, away from the now frantic laughter of the loons, away from the reedy delirium of the insects and the open-mouthed awe of the spectators, many of whom are crying, as it rises on a waterfall of flame 700 feet long, shooting colossal sparks as it climbs in a golden halo that burns deep into memory.

Only ten minutes from lift-off, it will leave the security blanket of our atmosphere, and enter an orbit 184 miles up. This is not
miraculous. After all, we humans began in an early tantrum of the universe, when our chemical makeup first took form. We evolved through accidents, happenstance, near misses, and good luck. We developed language, forged cities, mustered nations. Now we change the course of rivers and move mountains; we hold back trillions of tons of water with cement dams. We break into human chests and heads; operate on beating hearts and thinking brains. What is defying gravity compared to that? In orbit, there will be no night and day, no up and down. No one will have their “feet on the ground.” No joke will be “earthy.” No point will be “timely.” No thrill will be “out of this world.” In orbit, the sun will rise every hour and a half, and there will be 112 days to each week. But then time has always been one of our boldest and most ingenious inventions, and, when you think about it, one of the least plausible of our fictions.

Lunging to the east out over the water, the shuttle rolls slowly onto its back, climbing at three g’s, an upshooting torch, twisting an umbilical of white cloud beneath it. When the two solid rockets fall free, they hover to one side like bright red quotation marks, beginning an utterance it will take four days to finish. For over six minutes of seismic wonder it is still visible, this star we hurl up at the star-studded sky. What is a neighborhood? one wonders. Is it the clump of wild daisies beside the Banana River, in which moths hover and dive without the aid of rockets? For large minds, the Earth is a small place. Not small enough to exhaust in one lifetime, but a compact home, cozy, buoyant, a place to cherish, the spectral center of our life. But how could we stay at home forever?

In our mind’s eye, that abstract seat of imagining, we picture the face of a lover, savor a kiss. When we think about him in passing, we have various thoughts; but when we actually picture him, as if he were a hologram, we feel a flush of emotion. There is much more to seeing than mere seeing. The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions. One photo can remind us of an entire political
regime, a war, a heroic moment, a tragedy. One gesture can symbolize the wide angles of parental love, the uncertainty and disorder of romantic love, the fun-house mirrors of adolescence, the quick transfusion of hope, the feeling of low-level wind shear in the heart we call loss. Look at a grassy hillside, and you can remember immediately what freshly cut grass smells like, how it feels when it’s damp, the stains it leaves on your jeans, the sound you can make blowing over a grass blade held just so between your thumbs, and other assorted memories associated with grass: picnicking with the family; playing dodge ball in an orchard in the Midwest; herding cattle from the dusty New Mexico desert up to high fields of lush green to graze; hiking through the Adirondacks; making love in a grassy field at the top of a hill, on a hot, breezy summer day, when the sun, shining through the clouds, lights one part of the hillside at a time, as if it were a room in which the lamp had been turned on. When we see an object, the whole peninsula of our senses wakes up to appraise the new sight. All the brain’s shopkeepers consider it from their point of view, all the civil servants, all the accountants, all the students, all the farmers, all the mechanics. Together they all see the same sight—a grassy hillside—and each does a slightly different take on it, all of which adds up to what we see. Our other senses can trigger memories and emotions, too, but the eyes are especially good at symbolic, aphoristic, many-faceted perceiving. Knowing this, governments are forever erecting monuments. Generally they don’t look like much, but people stand in front of them and rush with emotion anyway. The eye regards most of life as monumental. And some shapes affect us much more than others.

For example, I’ve been following the space program closely for the past twenty years, and learning with robust delight about the solar system, thanks mainly to the Voyager spacecraft, which have been sending back home movies of Earth’s closest relatives. What a lovely shock it’s been to discover that half the planets have rings: not just Saturn, but Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and maybe even Pluto. And all the rings are different. Jupiter’s dark, narrow rings contrast with Saturn’s bright broad ribbons. Uranus’s obsidian rings have baguette moons in tow. The solar system has quietly been running rings
around all of us. How magical and how poignant. Few symbols have ever meant as much to us, regardless of our religion, politics, age, or gender, as rings. We give rings to symbolize infinite love and the close harmony of two souls. Rings remind us of the simple cells that were the oldest version of life, and the symphony of cells we now are. We reach for the rings on merry-go-rounds. Rings halo what is sacred. We draw rings around things to emphasize them. Sports often take place in the magic ring of the playing field. A sensory kaleidoscope unfolds in the circus ring. Rings symbolize the infinite: We are only ever beginning to end. Rings signal a pledge made, a vow taken. Rings suggest eternity, agelessness, and perfection. We chart time on the face of a clock, as points along a ring. On playgrounds, children shoot marbles into a chalked circle; they are prime movers, acting out planetary mechanics. We bring the world into focus with the globes of our eyes, worlds within worlds. We treasure the well-rounded soul we think we see in a loved one. We believe that, just as a strong circle can be made out of two weaker arcs, we can complete ourselves by linking our life to someone else’s. We who crave the no-loose-ends, deathless symmetry of a ring praise the wonders of the universe as best we can, traveling along the ring of birth and death. The Apollo astronauts returned to earth changed by seeing the home planet floating in space. What they saw was a kind of visual aphorism, and it’s one we all need to learn by heart.