Linnaeus and the poetics of evolution
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5. The rise of prose, decline of poetry Linnaeus read Latin poetry daily, Ovid and Virgil were favourites, but he condemned rhetorical ornate writing. However, his plain style was just as much a form of rhetoric, but one that matched his simple, practical system of taxonomy.53 Plain diction has been praised from Horace to the English empiricists.54 Locke argued for propriety in language, and for a common usage.55 Geoffrey Hartman cites neo-classicism, Puritanism as well as the scientific Enlightenment as influencing this trend.56 Galileo published a report of his trials of the telescope in a pamphlet ‘The Starry Messenger’ (1610), of which John Carey comments: ‘It was written in a tersely factual style no scholar had used before, and it fell like a bombshell on the learned world.’57 (He was provoked by a personal attack by the Jesuit astronomer, Orazio Grassi (writing under the pseudonym Lothario Sarsi) who upheld the traditional authority of the poets against ‘scientific’ truth claims). Bacon, Boyle, Locke, and others, were all worried about the role of language.58 Thomas Sprat, student of John Wilkins and author of a history of the Royal Society (1667) was a poet, yet his theme is the purification of language from poetic artifice, as language was a tool for learning.59 Both the introductory Ode and frontispiece of Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) honoured Francis Bacon as prophet (his belief that science was best undertaken in institutions as a social activity with laboratories and technical specialists was very influential in changing attitudes to knowledge - and thus poetry). Scientists attacked poetry and praised writing that was ‘brief’ and ‘concise’ to quote Francis Bacon, hoping for increased rationality.60 Sprat argued for, ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive statements expressions; clear sense; a native easiness; bringing all things as near to mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artisans, Countrymen, and Merchants before that of Wits or Scholars.’61 He wanted, ‘to curb the quasi-magical effect of strong figure, and perhaps a religious ‘enthusiasm’ associated with that effect.’62 But as I have mentioned, language is naturally metaphoric, creative and poetic. The Royal Society made reality its aim: "For the main intendment of this Society is to erect a well-grounded Natural History which takes of the heats of wanton Phantasie, hinders its extravagant excursions, and ties it down to sober Realities," wrote Joseph Glanvill in his 1668 defence of the Royal Society.63 But his best seller was a book Sadducismus triumphatus, defending belief in witchcraft, though he was active in the Royal Society, from a Cartesian perspective citing limits to knowledge, sceptical about causation (anticipating David Hume).64 Glanvill was interested in plain prose, defending Anglicanism from a Platonist position and undertaking scientific studies of witchcraft and psychic phenomena. Glanvill's eliminating wordiness and substituting simple words for complex ones indicate that his stylistic aim was parallel to that of the Royal Society. The transition in his style may be seen as representative of the general movement toward the plain style in scientific and technical writing advocated by the Royal Society and still felt today. Michel de Certeau suggested that scientists condemned literary language for lacking ‘univocity’.65 Glanvill moves towards a clear and distinct style, but at what loss? 66 Stephen Metcalf compares two passages in The Vanity of Dogmatising. Glanvill first wrote: “If after a decoction of hearbs in a Winter night, we expose the liquor to the frigid air; we may observe on the morning under a crust of ice, the perfect appearance both in figure and colour, of the Plants that were taken from it.” This then becomes a general law. “… after a decoction of Herbs in a frosty night the shape of the Plants will appear under the ice in the morning.”67 Charles Dufay the French physicist, departed from Robert Boyle’s ‘virtual witnessing’ to write scientific papers in detail, but offering only essential facts of the experiment and its outcome.68 This is the modern style. Then there is the rise of print, an issue I can only touch upon. Elizabeth Eisenstein has argued that the printing revolution, which resulted in the publishing of fixed, accurate texts and images, was the key to the scientific revolution.69 Lennard Davis notes, ‘Yet by 1664, when Joseph Glanville translated his book Scepsis Scientifica into the English version The Vanity of Dogmatising, print seems to have attained another status in the culture – it had become a guarantor or preserver of cultural immortality.’70 In contrast, Adrian Johns claims, ‘Far from fixing certainty and truth, print dissolved them. It exacerbated the ephemerality of knowledge.’71 Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth were initially strong supporters of the new sciences. In a preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth assumes science and poetry can connect and he was intimate with leading figures in the expanding field of geology.72 He viewed language as declining from passion towards mechanical language.73 Richard Dawkins’ attempt to bridge science and poetry (a riposte to Blake, Keats and Newton) is narrowly focussed on the ‘awe of wonder’ that both fields require (a sublime scientific awe (divina voluptas atque horror) that Lucretius experienced with Epicurean cosmology). Dawkins follows Thomas Sprat’s lead not wanting poems from scientists, but simple clarity – ‘The poetry is in the science.’74 He fails to come to terms with poetry. 6. Linnaeus in England Linnaeus left two great bequests: 1. The binomial system of naming species that he himself admitted was arithmetic and arbitrary, but as he put it, “made the ordering of floral collections less daunting both to the learned and amateurs.” By luck it is open-ended (in his lifetime systema naturae grew from 14 to 1300 pages) and still in use today; but like ideal languages of the 16th & 17th centuries has not the depth nor richness of ordinary language (I described earlier); and 2. His simple system interested people in nature and gave them the tools to pay attention to nature. This is despite his deep religious feelings prompting him to write in Systema Naturae (1735) - Nullae species novae (no new species in a perfect world). I situate Linnaeus’ project among other Enlightenment thinkers from Giambattista Vico (died 1744) to Condorcet (died 1794), who used what was variously called "philosophical" or "natural" history to order, usually hierarchically, their understanding of natural and cultural world. Religion was beginning to lose its ontological and epistemological authority. This order comes at a price (being alert to the ecology). Mermaids, gryphons & unicorns "In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting." Lord Rutherford Trophies of imagination: a British Guiana Cottonreel or an Hawaiian Missionary, or Roubles with and without lightning when the wind eases and night feeds the mind with dreams of flight, control, prediction and repetition and ideals of reversibility in experimental science. The rest of our studies have not that freedom, hence our vast ambition for economy, engineering triumphs/ disasters, exotic food (roast flamingo sating Roman orgies) and exotic décor (pink flamingos haunting Americana), and novelty (the platypus the British Museum thought faked). We are sealing so much of the shrinking world punctured by bolts, steel, chemicals, clear felling and oil. The sacred is not sacred. Value clings to celebrity, eviscerated language tunes to sales and slogans, swallows don’t arrive right and the birds are singing much shorter faster songs. Taxonomist Richard Fortey argues for the centrality of his trade. Far from mere "stamp collecting," taxonomy provides the very foundation for almost all other studies involving organisms: biogeography, biostratigraphy, evolutionary studies, paleoecology, and so on. The process of ordering Bill Bryson terms ‘a battleground’, and he relates the serious lack of taxonomists.75
15 Dogs-toothed violets blow. 16. Nightingale heard in Maiden-dance. Ring-dove builds in my fields. Black-cap sings. 17. The buds of the vines are not swelled yet atall. 19. Timothy the tortoise begins to stir.
3. Earthed the annual beds. Set up a copper-vane on the brew house. 5. Cut the first cucumber, a large one. Golden weather. . . shot three green-finches, which pull-off the blossoms of the polyanths.78 White's local history and practice of Linnaean taxonomy influenced Coleridge, Thomas Gray, Carlyle, Darwin, Ruskin and others. Horace Walpole complained after Thomas Gray's death (Elegy in a Country Churchyard) in 1771, that his friend would spend hours annotating his copy of Linnaeus' Systema Natura rather than writing poetry. 1771 the date Herder wrote Essay on the Origin of Language and a date I chose for proto-romantic notions of nature by Goethe and Rousseau (see my installation). White importantly started a botanising fad that swept through the leisure classes and encouraged attention to nature, even by women. 7. Erasmus Darwin, a didactic poet Erasmus Darwin poet and doctor and inventor became interested in the work of Linnaeus and undertook a translation of his major taxonomic works (1783 & 1787). He promoted Linnaean taxonomy, praising its simple hierarchical organisation and tried to apply it to his own speciality - medicine. Darwin used the didactic poem as an informational poetic providing scientific information, a tradition going back to Lucretius who wrote a new type of epic didactic poem, ‘De Rerum Natura’ (‘On the Nature of Things’) which informs and argues on various topics, from farming to cosmology and an early evolutionary notion, and development of the arts and technologies, refusing to cite the Gods as causes. The poem championed the philosophy of Epicurus, through investigating the nature of the world and our presence in it, and uses the plough as metaphor for fecund creativity.79 The didactic remerged in the 18th C with poets like Welshman John Dyer who published The Fleece (1757) a long informational poem (in Miltonic blank verse) on the wool trade and industrialisation. He celebrated a rapidly changing England with increasing division of labour, which required a new industrialised georgic.80 In the Eclogues Virgil describes, ‘and now far-off smoke pearls from homestead rooftops’ – whereas, Dyer describes smoke issuing from fast expanding Yorkshire mill towns as, ‘incense of thanksgiving.’ The poem’s didactic and informational style is clear from the précis provided. The poem opens, ‘The care of Sheep, the labours of the loom, / And arts of trade, I sing.’ The didactic poem i.e. one intended to educate or provide information (as opposed to the sense of the morally didactic) was revived and transformed by lesser-known Romantics (despite Joseph Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756) which instigated one important strand of Romantic sensibility – an antipathy to didactic poetry.81) This revival was not for neo-classical and moralistic reasons, but scientific ones (and emerged later with poets like W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Jorie Graham and J.H. Prynne). Erasmus Darwin hoped, ‘to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science, and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy.’82 His long didactic poems are in traditional forms, and hard to read today, though The Loves of the Plants, part 2 of The Botanic Garden was published in the same year as Lyrical Ballads 1798 and was vastly more popular, despite the new popularity of the lyric form. Lyrical Ballads by Coleridge and Wordsworth is viewed as triggering the Romantic Revolution in English poetry. Coleridge and Shelley, among others admired his pedagogical poems (culminating with The Temple of Nature, 1803). Yet Erasmus Darwin, a poet, first suggested that evolution is a historical and contingent process, independently of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (died1829) (of whose work he was apparently ignorant). Erasmus had a clear idea of evolution - change over time - species "strive" to change in response to environmental pressures, but he had no clear idea of how adaptive change came about. In Zoonomia, He suggested: “All animals . . . originate from a single living filament.” But the cell theory of Schleiden and Schwann was nearly 40 years away and it was his grandson and Alfred Russel Wallace who solved one key question with their theory of natural selection83 Charles Darwin’s copies of his grandfather’s books survive today, heavily annotated.84 Charles initially "admired greatly the Zoonomia" but withdrew his praise after a re-reading it, "the proportion if speculation being so large as to the facts given." Charles wasn't the first to make this complaint). Coleridge, while admitting that Erasmus possessed "perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men," coined the term darwinizing to describe wild speculation. Erasmus was an amazing polymath and predictor – of his grandson’s theory of evolution and of technology. He was a friend of Samuel Johnson’s and inspired artists (William Blake and Fuseli illustrated the 1799 edition of The Botanic Garden - an extraordinary poem of four thousand lines of rhyming couplets, with copious footnotes and a section called ‘Additional Notes’, of encyclopaedic interest: from meteors to clouds and steam-engines. Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth borrowed from the poem.85
“Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER'D STEAM! afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying-chariot through the fields of air.”
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By 1791, Darwin was not so popular. Alarmed by the French Revolution, England embraced a conservatism at odds with the radical, individualistic, atheistic materialism of Erasmus. He died in 1802 and was buried in a purple velvet dressing gown. 8. Attention to objects These species you see around you were once individuals with individual behaviour patterns and DNA, and many are endangered - or have adapted to a planet of weeds and ferals we are creating. “In the US, there are five times as many raccoons per square mile in suburban settings than in ‘the wild’.”88 And there are 10,000 pet tigers but only 7,000 in the wild! If you recall, Robert Boyle encouraged our “thoughts to expatiate much further, and to make of the Objects they contemplate . . .”89 Rosamond Purcell notes, “A label without the specimen has intrinsic historical value but, as a curator of mammals once said to me, "a monkey without its tag is worthless”."90 I mention objects in the flyer, and would just add that I think we must respect the autonomy of objects, to quote Richard Sennett (from a very different context) – “Autonomy . . . requires a relationship in which one party accepts that he or she cannot understand something about the other. The acceptance that one cannot understand things about another gives both standing and equality in the relationship. Autonomy supposes, at once, connection and strangeness, closeness and impersonality.’91 I have been asked - so I must just state my innocence – I did not pull the legs off the creature in my video. I am guilty of being a witness, as we all are. Living objects are the more powerful, and in the accompanying poem (on the wall), I investigate this issue. James Putnam of the British Museum writes, “It is a vital role of a museum to paint the larger picture, to reveal the life behind the artefact, to present the interpretation imaginatively and to provoke the visitor's thought rather than simply instruct. One of the most enjoyable features of a museum is the opportunity to browse and explore its unknown territory which offers ample opportunity for accidental, spontaneous discovery and enlightenment. . .”92 A museum's programs and objects ideally act as catalysts for conversations, memory, imagination, research, aesthetic appreciation, curiosity, and empathy (like James Clifford’s notion of museums as "contact zones".93) Poems are artefacts with the same potential. Poems provide opportunities to use our amazing cognitive technique of language which connect us with our environments, facilitating webs of meaning and skilled practice we continually weave in our dreams and every moment of our waking lives. I use poetry to work with the world. In his Defence of Poetry §279: ‘It [poetry] is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred.’ (A theory first seen in the poems 'Epipsychidion' and 'Hymn of Apollo'). Wordsworth also proclaimed poetry as the meta-discipline: ‘the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society.’ I make no such claims, preferring poetry that works with other disciplines, including science. As citizens and neighbours and friends, our responsibility is to use our creative energies and imagination for ongoing dialectical engagement with the world. I’ll end with a poem. My Latin is badly faded but my invention for humans Baro mollis-macresco means something like soft-skinned barbarian. And I should explain the last line. There are three racoon poems in the sequence, and one refers to camping by a lake in Vermont when hearing a rustling at midnight I flashed my torch and saw a racoon escaping with an unopened packet of chocolate biscuits. I gave chase but he got away. Counterfactual For the infinitely little is equivalent to the infinitely great. Maurice Maeterlinck, “The Life of an Ant” If Linnaeus had been an ant, classification would be different. Humans would share a single genus with chimps (we can’t decide whether to love apes for their language or utter wildness) and homo sapiens might be named Baro mollis-macresco. But Linnaeus was Swedish, so the glass case of butterflies with wings spread like butter I’ll call light in the shadows, or dancers in the dark, lovely as serried rows of moons. And I should suggest a collective name hovering somewhere between an exultation of larks, span of mules, deceit of lapwings, unkindness of ravens, murmuration of starlings, watch of nightingales, swarm of flies, shoal of fish, cast of ferrets, charm of finches, skein of geese, bevy of swans, down of sheep, wisp of snipes, sneak of weasels, siege of herons and gaze of racoons, though I prefer sneak for racoons. I’d like to thank the staff especially Jude and Rebecca and Erna for working with me patiently. |