“Salt Point,” by Elisa Stone, elisastonephotography.com
In the century old poem, Continent’s End, California’s poet, Robinson Jeffers, speaks to the Ocean, that vast expanse of the Pacific, a being he also calls, “Mother”:
“You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline. / It was long long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter . . .”
We, the proud child, and our Mother, now bitter.
Does he mean disappointed, angry, or does he mean something else? People who’ve heard me read the poem don’t like this personification of the ocean as a bitter mother. But I sense what Jeffers is after.
I read something similar this morning in the thread of daily news that I can’t seem to avoid (though doesn’t do me much good. I scanned through the daily litany of weirdly alluring human mistakes and cruelty, violence and insanity that play incessantly on the screens of our digital devices, all of it testifying to the fragility of our human existence on this planet, despite our overbearing hubris as human beings—children, as Robinson puts it, of our mother, the ocean.
We are a race that as we grew up have come to believe we’ve always dominated the earth and always will, that all things are our inheritance to be hoarded and exploited for our purposes and pleasures, despite the fact that we are such newcomers to this planet, a species that’s been around for a mere hair’s breadth of planetary time.
I read this morning that the coral reefs are dying everywhere—the great, teeming beds of life that help sustain our our oceans, the planet’s great lungs, are dying. Scientists are warning us that the extreme and unprecedented heating of our planet, largely the result of human-made greenhouse gases, mean the global coral reef systems are bleaching, becoming inhospitable to life, signaling irreversible damage to our fragile ecosystem.
Long ago a wiseman said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Now, so many years later, it’s clear he foresaw what the earth would suffer because of us and all that the meeker species would one day inherit. Homo sapiens are anything but meek. There are exceptions, of course—individuals and groups who know how to walk humbly, sensitively, cooperatively. We are a malevolent presence, not a benevolent one. By and large, the immodest, aggressive, impatient, insatiable and domineering nature of our race overrides any meekness that could have shaped a more benevolent human presence on the Earth.
Only fools refuse to acknowledge that we’re on a collision course with disaster.
That we can distract ourselves from this fact is just one more sign of our insensitivity. That we can dissociate from the debacle is evidence that, while we may be intelligent, we are not yet wise. It is said that Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Today, we may just be entertaining ourselves to death.
It’s not hard to imagine, as Jeffers does in this poem, the ocean as a mother, embittered by what her grown child has become, what we are doing to others.
In so many ways we can be a wondrous species. We’re the only creature that can make a pizza or a martini. We can turn plants into medicines that comfort and heal. We can mend a broken leg or a wing. We can rescue beached whales and deliver breeched babies. And yet, despite the good we can do, our species is headed toward extinction. Our current political chaos proves that we’re not likely to find the collective and collaborative muscle to avert the disaster; we’re living in the twilight of humanity’s short-lived experiment as sentient beings in the universe.
The planet will produce intelligent life again at some point, maybe another million or two years from this ending. I’m tremendously optimistic about that. “The meek shall inherit the earth.” There are life forms, meeker ones, that will carry life forward on this planet after our presumptuous race is done.
All this may sound terribly gloomy, cynical, and unwelcomely fatalistic.
But to me it’s not. I’m entirely optimistic about the power of life—its tenacity, its durability. As America’s preeminent poet, Walt Whitman, once wrote: “And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.”
In Jeffers’ poem, Continent’s End, written shortly after World War I, I hear nothing of fatalism even though he, like me, senses that humanity’s time on Earth is waning.
Jeffers felt that history was cyclical and that “civilization was pointed for an inevitable slide into decadence and barbarism.” He’d just witnessed the atrocities of World War I. Yet to come was the decadence and barbarism of fascism under Hitler, a new world war, the holocaust, and all that would follow from that fateful era. And now a century later, fascism is again popular, strong man politics threaten democracies, and environmental crisis threatens life as we know it.
Jeffers’ poem “Continent’s End” is both literal (he’s standing, looking out across the Pacific with the continent behind him), and it’s figurative: he senses that he stands at the “End” of the epoch.
But there’s something more, something Bigger, more enduring that rescues us from fatalism.
And for me, the coming collapse, the sixth mass extinction, is only the beginning of something new. There’s something “older and harder,” he says, something “more impartial,” an “older fountain” from his the new will emerge.
Now here’s Jeffers:
At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed
with wet poppies, waiting spring,
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the
ground-swell shook the beds of granite.I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established
sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before
me the mass and doubled stretch of water.I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava and coral
sowings that flower the south,
Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours that has
followed the evening star.The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you
have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and
lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline.It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and
you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the
insolent quietness of stone.The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your
child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that
watched before there was an ocean.That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation of thin
vapor and watched you change them,
That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat
rock, shift places with the continents.Mother, though my song’s measure is like your surf-beat’s ancient
rhythm I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our
tones flow from the older fountain.