Nature and Literature: Living in the Flicker

There is a profound, visceral connection between man and Nature, and although he has endeavored to tame and separate himself from Nature’s magnificence, he will inevitably feel the haunting of “persistent hints of impermanence” and need to tell a good and true story that speaks into his longings for identity with the Nature he has rejected (Hawkes, 24). Identity then becomes a central issue of our place in the story of the universe, as we evoke McLean’s lesson, “that the nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself” (145).

The whirling blaze of a wildfire must begin with a smoldering stump or the phosphor-filled tip of a matchstick, and one would be foolish to maintain that the ashes and blackened trees that remain after the fire has run its course have no connection with the simple striking of the first match. And so it goes with humanity. The match that was struck millions of years ago still burns slowly on into the present and we must blaze on, recalling our deep relations with our prehistoric ancestors and life and death. Joseph Conrad, Jacquetta Hawkes and Norman Mclean take up the theme in the flicker of the present through stories of land, darkness, fire and death.

In Heart of Darkness, A Land, and Young Men and Fire, the stories touch the intimate places of mysterious Nature and by so doing touch the secret inside places of the human soul and experience, revealing the tragedy of the human story. Marlow, the narrator of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, tells a story of the darkness of the deep interior of the Congo and of the profound and black intricacies of the human heart. He begins to weave his yarn by relating that it was “not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light” (Conrad, 11).

The story of Marlow’s journey to the dark recesses of uncharted rivers and jungles illuminates an understanding within his soul of the nature of wild Nature and the nature of man. It seems that the further he delves into the depths of the jungle in search of Kurtz, the more he sees his own self and makes connections with the past. He relates that, The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there-there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men wereâÂ?¦No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it-this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity-like yours-the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar (Conrad, 38).

Marlow slowly begins, through the telling of his story, to recall the match that was struck to begin the flickering flame of his life. He begins to see his “remote kinship” with something “monstrous and free”, making the poignant realization that he is not apart from or greater than the uninhibited and wild Nature but rather that he has deep ancestral ties to its prehistoric howling and leaping and spinning. The import of such an observation lies in the notion that the further “civilized” man reaches into the “uncivilized” world, the more glaringly he can see the darkness of his own heart. It is in this realization that Marlow is able to make the connection that “the mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future” (Conrad, 38).

In discovering a long lost kinship with Nature and the past and darkness, a place in the inner sanctuary of Marlow’s spirit resounds with his surroundings and it reshapes his identity, molding it to the sensibilities of all times and ages. Kurtz, however, the embodiment perhaps of the “heart of darkness”, in this way becomes the antithesis of this kinship with all times and epochs and peoples and Nature. He is one to whom the control of Nature and the bridling of the wildness of life is law, and the exploitation that comes from such control reveals the greed and inner darkness that are in the human soul. Kurtz found not his identity by belonging to the land, but rather made the land belong to him, which made him belong to its material wealth in horrid addiction and pride.

The subtlety of the secondary story, the undercurrent of change being effected in the life of the storyteller Marlow, is Conrad’s second genius in Heart of Darkness. Marlow returns home to London after his adventures in the Congo, finding himself “back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other” (Conrad, 70). Marlow almost retains a Rousseau-like sense, having spent time in the realm of Nature and having seen the contrast between the darkness of man and the darkness of Nature, and he becomes disgusted with the unenlightened Londoners and the trappings of city living. Conrad suggests that the darkness within the heart of humanity is more dangerous and consuming than the darkness of mysterious Nature, and this truth transforms the storyteller, who truly embodies McLean’s notion of finding stories that shape identity.

While Joseph Conrad tells a story of darkness and identity in which a deeper connection between man, Nature and the past is achieved, Jacquetta Hawkes relates the story of the geological occurrences of her land, England, focusing on the transformation of the land in direct relation with the transformation of people. For Hawkes, man and the land on which he dwells are inextricably linked together in a cosmic relationship in which “geologists and archaeologists, those instruments of consciousnessâÂ?¦are engaged in reawakening the memory of the world” (Hawkes, 26). She is a storyteller of the science of the world, one of those few interested in remembering the earth’s true story and how we are just members of the earth’s tradition of life and death and past and present and future. For Hawkes, the story is earth-centered rather than me-centered, and she goes so far as to say, “‘Me’ is a fiction, though a convenient fiction and one of significance to the consciousness of which I am the temporary home” (Hawkes, 40).

Like Alexander Pope, Hawkes rejects the mentality that grips the world with white knuckles, controlling and manipulating it, for a perspective that reiterates her small place in the long line of rocks, dirt, animals and life. She is controlled and not controlling, explained and not explaining, by the story of the universe: “even now I imagine that I can feel all the particles of the universe nourishing my consiousness just as my consciousness nourishes all the particles of the universe” (37). The mutuality of her experience with the natural world gives Hawkes a challenging vision of Nature, especially that man carries “inside this delicate membrane of skin, this outline of an individualâÂ?¦the whole history of life” (Hawkes, 38). She carries the story of geological change within her, being changed and controlled and affected by the variations of science and Nature. In telling the story, Jacquetta Hawkes also discovers that she is not the only storyteller: “The forces of attraction and repulsion, of mutuality, in all their forms, have acted like some universal, instinctive artistic genius”; that is, that Nature in its own subtleties acts as one who tells a beautiful story, with layers of plot and intricacies of character (Hawkes, 37).

Much like Conrad, Hawkes comes to “see the present moment as a rose or a cup help up on the stem of all that is past”, echoing the notion that the present condition of humanity is not a separate entity from the ancestors who bore it so long ago (Hawkes, 239). Furthermore, Hawkes follows Conrad’s commentary on the woes of the Kurtzes of the world, and the way that mankind forgets the value in being connected to the land and rejects the possibility of receiving a true identity through it. “It ceased to be creative, a patient and increasingly skilful love-making that had persuaded the land to flourish, and became destructive, a grabbing for material for man to destroy or to refashion for his own design” (Hawkes, 201-202). Such deep and unfettered communion with the past, the geological and human histories, makes Hawkes a true product of her land, a daughter of the Nature that wrought her, and finds herself in the good story she tells. The match that started the fire of life is conjured up and revered and looked upon in reverence by Hawkes, and the flickering flame of the present is the story that she tells, how the fire came to be what it is from past moment to present flicker to future blaze to final embers. The import of such a perspective drives the engine within humanity to define the self and to look no further than the ground on which we walk, the rocks on which we build, and the past of which we remember; to call itself the strand of flame that emanates from the fire that began billions of years ago.

So there is Conrad with a story of the inner human darkness, Hawkes with the story of the land and how we are a part of its tradition and history, and now McLean with a story about fire and death and tragedy. In Young Men and Fire, an investigation of how thirteen young men died in the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 draws out a story of identity and of the uncontrollable nature of Nature. For the narrator of the novel, the search for the tragic elements of the story of Mann Gulch becomes the tragedy itself, and he largely identifies himself with the fiery deaths of those thirteen young men. In explaining the scientific, psychological, and historical evidence of the fire, the narrator draws out the tragedy within the catastrophe, discovering in the process “that the terror of the universe has not yet fossilized and the universe has not run out of blowups” (McLean, 46). That is, in relating the catastrophe of Mann Gulch, the narrator recognizes that what happened at that point in history is not altogether unrelated to what might be in the present or the future. In taking up the details of one specific story, McLean reveals the greater tragedy of the human experience; the Mann Gulch fire may indeed be a microcosm of the way that humanity relates to Nature and handles the issues of death and tragedy. Similarly, McLean encourages mankind not to be “willing to escape into sentimentality of fantasy” but rather begin to understand tragedy as a part of our identity as humans (McLean, 46).

The brilliance of this story is not merely its first class investigation of various facts, but rather the manner in which the story is drawn out and how it reveals itself to the storyteller, who gradually and increasingly finds himself. After a long period of investigation, he expresses a part of this transformation: “If now the dead of this fire should awaken and I should be stopped beside a cross, I would no longer be nervous if asked the first and last question of life, How did it happen?” (McLean, 87). As the tragedy takes shape throughout the investigation, the narrator comes to a greater understanding of death and the natural processes of life, and although it is impossible to feel nothing regarding tragedy, he is “no longer nervous.”

Like Hawkes and Conrad, McLean delves profoundly into an engagement with Nature and its processes, especially regarding man’s relationship to it. He expresses the falsehood of the idea that “we have conquered nature”, always, like Hawkes, reminding and being reminded of those “persistent hints of impermanence” (McLean, 46, Hawkes, 24). He even describes the reaction of an aeronautical engineer to the unpredictability of wildfires and the uncontrollable nature of Nature, who admits that, “it’s a lot easier to predict the speed of a missile than that of a wildfire. Generally, he said, it’s easier to predict the behavior of objects made by man than natural objects” (McLean, 258). All three of these storyteller poets feel the weight of these simple words, feeling the haunting of a world they can’t control, and that ultimately gives them their identity and controls them. A wildfire is unpredictable, wild, even prehistoric; the uncontrolled, unmanipulated, nakedness of Nature that refuses to bend to the hands of humanity but maintains its inexorable ancestral place as originator.

The match that was struck billions of years ago rages on in a wildfire that takes the lives of thirteen of the best, the matchstick that teaches a lesson of the past and gives the attentive storyteller insight into the future. McLean, like his storytelling counterparts, makes such connections to the natural world and finds himself, making intimate connections to the greater reality, letting it finally push back against him. The narrator ponders: “If you have lived a life that has thrown you in contact many times with nature, you have already discovered that sometimes you can deal with nature only by allowing it to push back what until now you and others thought were its edges” (McLean, 277). The question of all three authors resounds from this notion and idea; will you let Nature push its edges further and further into your life until you see that you are not separate from it, until you find yourself in it? It is the dark heart of nature, that wild and untamed beast, that shows humanity the darkness within its own heart. It is the changing, dynamic historic and prehistoric world of trilobites that nourishes the human soul with the particles of the universe. It is a raging fire whirl on a hillside in Montana that cuts to the human heart with the knife of mortality and reveals Nature’s true kinship with humanity. It is the kinship and solidarity that Nature provides to man that sustains and perpetuates the universe allows for good and true stories to pertain to reality. Nature allows the current flicker to last long enough to tell an important story about the past, about an ancestor, about a particle, about death and life. Whether or not mankind will receive graciously the gift of story and identity that Nature has allotted him is entirely within his realm of choice if he should choose to make himself available to “persistent hints of impermanence.”

Conrad, Hawkes, and McLean point humanity to the deep dark heart of Nature, to reveal his own pride and insecurity, his desire to attain and control and manipulate, to enter into the deep abyss of geological history and be reawakened in his memories to his ancient ancestors, to take up a tragedy that describes his own life. The match that was struck billions of years ago still blazes, and we cannot wield it, but instead we “live in the flicker”, telling stories of darkness, fire and death to invoke beginnings and connect the fire that burns with the match that struck.