Poets through the ages have struggled to define the relationship between humankind and nature. Photo by Richard Lautens.

by Cameron Smith

I watched a bumblebee die the other day, caught in the web of a spider a quarter its size.

For an hour I watched. Every time the bee tired and ceased its struggle, the spider approached, and when it did, the bee resumed its effort to fly out of the web, and the spider retreated.

Finally, the bee was too tired to try and escape one more time. Motionless, it watched the spider come near, and with one quick bite, the spider delivered its venom.

From the beginning, the end was inevitable — a stately dance of death, and what was surprising to me when I thought about it later was how lost I was in the dance. I forgot detachment. Forgot to try and identify the spider. Forgot to recall all the science that would place the dance firmly within a Darwinian struggle for survival.

Instead, it seemed to me that I vibrated to the buzz of the bee’s wings, and I sensed the quivering insistence of the spider.

In a way that I still don’t quite understand, we — the bee, the spider, and I — shared more than the moment. The hierarchy of life as I had known it was suspended. I was no longer at the apex looking down. In fact, there was no apex; there was no hierarchy.

This sent me to a book a friend recently loaned me — Robert Bly’s News of the Universe: poems of a twofold consciousness, published by Sierra Club Books in 1980. It’s a collection of poems through the centuries that have dealt with nature.

Mostly, the poems chronicle the struggle to return humans to nature after Descartes’ cogito ergo sum — I think therefore I am — in the mid-1600s, encouraged people to see themselves as separate, a superior product of intellect and lords of the universe. As the British poet Alexander Pope so famously wrote a century later: “The proper study of Mankind is Man.”

But Descartes’ legacy stranded some in a fearsome place where a dreaded chaos lurked just beyond the lamplight. Alienation had bred anxiety. “And here we are as on a darkling plain... Where ignorant armies clash by night,” wrote Matthew Arnold, a century after Pope. Yet as Bly points out, this view of the world isn’t true. “Protozoa don’t clash by night. They have intricate harmonies worked out, which have already lasted for millions of years.”

It was the German and French poets, and one English poet, William Blake, who rebelled against the Cartesian divide. “May God us keep / From Single vision & Newton’s sleep,” Blake wrote in 1802. (Isaac Newton outlined his theory of gravity in 1687.)                                                       

Frederich Hölderlin, a German poet, writing in 1798, reacted angrily against what Descartes had bred: “I’m sick of you hypocrites... / Rationality is what you have, you don’t believe / In Helios, nor the sea being, nor the thunder being; / And the earth is a corpse, so why thank her?”

And then there was the mighty Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who touches my heart the most. His poem The Invisible King, written in 1782, tells of a father riding late at night carrying his young son in this arms to keep him warm. The boy keeps seeing figures at the edge of clearings, but his father tells him it’s all his imagination. What he is seeing, the father says is mist, or an old willow tree, and the sound he hears isn’t a voice but simply the wind in dry oak leaves.The boy pleads with his father, because the figures are coming for him, and by the time the father gets home, the boy is dead. Rationality had triumphed over wonder.To this day, poets are still trying to free wonder from its Cartesian shackles. One of my favourite modern poets is a Russian, Andrei Voznesensky. He writes: “Darkmotherscream is... / a cry from prison or a yell for help... / Darkmotherscream is the ecstasy of the sexual gut... / is the original mother of languages... / Don't forget — Rome fell / not having grasped the phrase: darkmotherscream.”
Throughout Bly’s selection of poems there are references to the dark side of nature, which I take to mean the mysteries that lie beyond the intellect. And the suffering that poets speak of, is the suffering that comes from banging into the wall that seals off those mysteries. It’s a wall built of narcissism and intellectual arrogance.

I suppose, what happened among the bumblebee, the spider, and me, is I simply forgot to think.