Nature vs. Man
Felstiner, John
Nature vs. Man For Robinson Jeffers, it wasn't even close by John Felstiner Not Man Apart. For a 1965 Sierra Club photo book, the environmental activist David Brower took this title from Robinson...
...In "Lashing," "Flashing," "peering," you can feel the bent of mind she shared with her husband, plus what he mightn't have said: "incredibly," "menacing," "arrogant...
...Past midnight the fire's flame "Lighted my sleeping son's face . . . and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall / Across the stream...
...A certain pain arises from photos of Tor House and Hawk Tower solitary on a wild bluff in 1919, 1923, 1927, before "suburban houses" crowded round...
...As he aged and his voice grew faint against the noise of progress, Jeffers dug in, "Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth / Under men's hands and their minds . . . my own coast's obscene future...
...It is likely the enormous Beauty of the world requires for completion our ghostly increment...
...Because in it he sees a "fate going on / Outside our fates...
...From his own standpoint, Jeffers held to a tenet of "Inhumanism," based on "the astonishing beauty of things" and "the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe...
...No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin Over rock shaped like flame...
...Such sentiment does not belie his severe creed, an integrity of humankind's organic wholeness with our earth...
...Then an astonishing recovery program literally snatched them from the brink of extinction and they're now back in the hundreds...
...I cannot Tell you how strange...
...And where Yeats hoped an aristocracy rooted in folk tradition could save civilization, Jeffers relies on a lonely rock and our needs and nature no more changed "in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles...
...No imaginable Human presence here, he moralizes...
...Introducing his lucid, level reading of the poem to a 1941 audience at the Library of Congress, he said, "You must understand that this is not southern California...
...Not "man / Apart," he wrote, and this too: "No imaginable / Human presence here . . . " Jeffers's "The Place for No Story" holds back like George Oppen's "Psalm," impinging on a landscape only by the force of imagery...
...Then, thanks to power lines, pleasure shooting, and lead poisoning from hunters' kills, Jeffers saw them decline from 600 to about 50 to none in the wild...
...This bluff thought, from "Hurt Hawks," might turn one off Jeffers...
...And why strange, when a rock is so familiar...
...The old ocean at the land's foot, the vast Gray extension beyond the long white violence...
...Jeffers stares at "pure naked rock . . . as if I were / Seeing rock for the first time," those dots of his allowing for a movement of mind from the visual into the visionary...
...Because there was nothing human involved . . . no smirk and no malice...
...His poem "Rock and Hawk" calls these two presences, bird and stone, "Fierce consciousness joined with final / Disinterestedness...
...Instead there was "forest on forest above our heads...
...Jeffers might have ended on "gray air haunted with hawks," but his colon there won't let him: This place is the noblest thing I have seen...
...But listen to the end, after he's fed the broken-winged redtail for six weeks: I gave him the lead gift in the twilight...
...California condors had thrived for tens of thousands of years, until whaling and sealing deprived them of marine carcasses...
...Later, he told Alfred Stieglitz he hoped "to call attention to the simplicities of environment . . . to 'the enormous beauty of the world,' as Jeffers writes...
...No human could help but "dilute" raw rock, old ocean, the surf's white violence...
...Traveling by stagecoach they "looked down through pines and sea-fogs on Carmel Bay"—"our inevitable place...
...Soared . . . fierce . . . fear": The poetry identifies utterly with animate life, while "rising . . . unsheathed from reality" discovers a raw and spirit-bound beauty...
...Prophetic arrogance has been the charge against Jeffers, and misanthropy, something sharper than Frost's "I had a lover's quarrel with the world...
...At 17, in The Youth's Companion, Jeffers published "The Condor," whose rhyme and meter he'd soon abandon but not its austere stance: "My wings can dare / All loneliest hanging heights of air...
...The coast hills at Sovranes Creek...
...Praising "Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things," Jeffers then says: "Love that, not man / Apart from that"—a loaded line break...
...Yeats, for whom "The falcon cannot hear the falconer...
...Jeffers first caught East Coast attention thanks to a 1925 California anthology whose title poem, "Continent's End," has ocean storms shaking "beds of granite" and the poet "gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray...
...Lashing waves roll in, incredibly green and blue beyond the foam, menacing and gray in storm...
...His photographs of California's Big Sur coast were featured in Not Man Apart, and Adams mostly turned his lens on the nonhuman world...
...Sometimes disdain vies in his writing with a stubborn love for primordial nature...
...I reck not of the earth below...
...This is adapted from So Much Depends: Poetry and Environmental Urgency met in 1926...
...Again and again his verse comes back to "living rock," "lonely rock," "water-darkened . . . lovely rock," "pure naked rock...
...By 1985 one breeding pair remained...
...Digging for a fireplace foundation he found bedrock blackened by ancient Indian campfires...
...Ansel Adams found Jeffers "a strange presence with his rugged features and relentless glance" when they John Felstiner, professor of English at Stanford, is the author, most recently, of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew...
...Pray for me...
...That summer Jeffers hiked with his son up "the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek" near Big Sur, and recounted this event in "Oh, Lovely Rock...
...Calling "the breed of man" a "botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped," Jeffers waives any affection for "man / Apart" (and for himself too) in favor of a deeper, necessary love...
...Where catastrophe for Yeats was cultural, Jeffers imagines the sun combusting like a nova: The earth would share it...
...Vultures too peering down, and a rare pair of eagles...
...A herd of cows and the bull Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope...
...In "Orca," written just after World War II, he taps Walt Whitman's surflike verse for his own coast: "Sea-lions loafed in the swinging tide in the inlet," and offshore rocks Bristled with quiet birds, gulls, cormorants, pelicans, hundreds and thousands Standing thick as grass on a cut of turf...
...Here was a voice like Thoreau's confronting "vast, terrific . . . inhuman Nature" at Mount Katahdin in Maine...
...d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk...
...but what Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality...
...The water boiled for a moment," while below "a screaming / And wheeling sky . . . brown blood and foam / Striped the water of the inlet...
...And from Jeffers recalling how he and Una once watched a puma stride along a nearby ridge...
...Why "living" rock, as if there were another kind...
...Things fall apart...
...No false sentiment, no sentiment at all, spoon-feeds these lines...
...Yet the bitterness Jeffers felt at human spoliation—the "year's filth," "the wheels and the feet," "the power-shovels"— always sprang from awe of the earth he settled upon and basic faith in our love for it...
...But any scene requires a seer: "shaped like flame," he says, "hardly apparent...
...Completion, perhaps, and consciousness, yes, his poems pulse with it...
...We sense a flayed openness...
...Let such things stay pristine, primal, "as if I were / Seeing rock for the first time," he says in a later poem...
...What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers...
...And the gray air haunted with hawks: Notings only, with no main verb, and semicolons hold this terrain intact, unstoried (as Frost, a continent away from Jeffers, said about "the land vaguely realizing westward...
...For a 1965 Sierra Club photo book, the environmental activist David Brower took this title from Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962...
...Ending this memory of a "lovely rock," Jeffers says he "Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock...
...A mind-cleansing rightness strikes home if we hear those three spare words, "Not Man Apart," the way they actually occur...
...Less hangs on "Beauty" here than on "enormous," the cosmos in which humanity is a late and transient addendum...
...Terror, death, "yet it looked clean and bright, it was beautiful...
...Nowadays California coastal dwellers, watching their bluffs and beaches erode, build cement "sea walls, because we don't put waves before the homes of people...
...There are no orange groves and no oil wells...
...No American had bound together such starkness and passion in writing of nature, speaking from "this granite edge of the continent...
...His family, strict Calvinists, had moved from Pennsylvania to California in 1902...
...Then "two black triangles, tacking and veering," killer-whale fins, drove in, panicking the seals...
...It takes rare keenness to sense those atomic energies, and humility to move from "lovely" to "lonely," speaking for himself in speaking for pure naked rock...
...these tall Green trees would become a moment's torches and vanish, the oceans Would explode into invisible steam...
...Nothing strange...
...wild flowers of every sort, "Flashing bird-wings . . . And high above, arrogant hawks hover, marsh hawks and sparrow hawks, redtails and peregrine falcons...
...This may seem sensible, but it hides a puzzling idea of waves...
...In the mid-1930s the carving of a coast road, Highway One, brought acute dismay, yet "the great bronze gorge-cut sides of the mountains" remain "Not the least hurt," "Beautiful beyond belief...
...Along with hawks, Jeffers bonded with gray rock, the "granite sea-boulders" he hauled up "wind and wave-worn" to help construct Tor House on a stone outcrop 50 yards above the Pacific...
...And whose pasture, whose herd...
...A few years later, with his twin boys, he built the four-story Hawk Tower (setting into it a piece from Yeats's old stone tower in Ireland...
...Una describes Big Sur, south of Carmel, with the skill and verve of a Dorothy Wordsworth transplanted to the Pacific rim: "Canyons, gushing springs and streams, are thickly wooded with redwoods and pines, laurels, tan-oak, maples and sycamores, and, high up, the rosy-barked madrones...
...Beyond these, blue, gray, green, wind-straked, the ocean Looked vacant...
...Why...
...However perverse this sounds, he felt it a mark of nobleness, maturity...
...But not egocentric self-consciousness...
...He and his son will die, "this age will die," but "this rock will be here," the energies That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above...
...They occur again as he sees the real and bodily And living rock...
...After college in southern California, Jeffers in 1914 moved north with his new wife Una...
...the centre cannot hold...
...Turning 50 and stirred by Europe's imminent barbarism, in other poems he draws on the fierce oracles of W.B...
...Jeffers deplores the "contagion" of selfish human consciousness on our planet, But who is our judge...
Vol. 12 • May 2007 • No. 35
