Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
He sits up. He’s caught an error in the last line, where it says, “We’ll fell the joys of love and sing its power.” That should be “feel.” He makes the correction. You can actually see it there in his fat dark pencil on one of the two copies to survive the scuttling of the
Minerva
. But he slips. He misses an earlier, more serious error, in the poem’s title, which reads, “For Maria, who asked me if I should like to Love in a Cottage.” Doubtless she’d asked him if he would ever like to
live
in a cottage.
Suddenly the whole poem sounded different, or, rather, like what it really was. “Let us repair where purling streamlets roll,” it goes on, “With mingling hearts, a tender bliss we’ll share.” Rafinesque’s bowels must have sickened when he heard the next morning that a set of proofs had been leaked, and looked up to find the “sophisters, aristarchs, and moles” coming toward him. You can see plainly that his boldest note at the top of the poetry section is “I must see another proof.” Not his fault this time. Still, he left himself open. From then on Rafinesque had only vicious things to say about Horace Holley and Transylvania, too.
In 1825 he went on a months-long journey to botanize and attend a meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, where he was spotted and remembered as “rather corpulent.” When he came back to Lexington, he found that Horace Holley—who, like most sensible persons there, assumed he was dead—had, in order “to evince his hatred against sciences and discoveries … broken open my rooms, given one to the students, and thrown all my effects, books and collections in a heap in the other.”
Rafinesque slunk away, “leaving the College with curses on it and Holley.” He notes with unappealing approval in his memoir that the curse must have worked, as “the College has been burnt in 1828 with all its contents.”
In 1924 some bones believed to be Rafinesque’s were moved from an unmarked grave in downtown Philadelphia back to Transylvania, where they were entombed in a cube-shaped concrete vault in Old Morrison Hall.
In January 1969 my mother began the second semester of her freshman year at Transy. That month Old Morrison burned to the ground, leaving untouched only the concrete cube, with its bronze plaque inside reading,
HONOR TO WHOM HONOR IS OVERDUE.
In 1987 the foremost modern scholar of Rafinesque’s works, Charles Boewe, proved to the satisfaction of most reasonable persons that the bones in Rafinesque’s tomb are those of a sixty-two-year-old pauper named Mary Passamore, who died of consumption in 1847. The Philadelphia exhumers hadn’t dug deep enough.
* * *
The Philadelphia years were a long decline punctuated by spasms of frantic, fruitless activity. He tried to start a Utopia in Illinois. He tried to get funding for a
Beagle
-style voyage to go around the world collecting specimens. Of course, he also, during these years, deciphered “dot-bar numeration,” the counting system used in the Mayan glyphs, though his paper on that subject was ignored so utterly that a French abbé spent a chunk of his life recracking it forty years later, never having so much as heard of Rafinesque (who had also predicted, correctly, that the Mayan script would eventually be solved by connecting it with some language still spoken in a part of Mexico. One of his pathetic deathbed letters was to John Lloyd Stephens, the presidentially appointed Maya man, begging Stephens to throw him a bone and credit him for having realized this, about the living-language angle, years before Stephens himself. The latter took no action).
His letters get sadder and sadder. He’s asking for money; at one point he’s asking for bail money. He writes to Torrey, in a last, tantalizing statement on evolution: “My last work on Botany if I live [will contain] genealogical tables of the gradual deviations having formed one actual Sp[ecies]. If I can not perform this, give me credit for it, and do it yourself upon the plan that I trace.”
He wrote to his daughter, Emilia, begging her to come to him. She wrote back these sweet, effusive letters that basically said, “Who are you?”
He wrote to the Cherokee Nation asking how his name should be pronounced in their language.
They replied to him. “La-hwi-ne-ski” was the answer.
Did he ever forget Mary Holley? Is she the woman he speaks of in a late poem?
But when he found the lovely maid entwining
The poet’s wreath, a cruel fate decreed
She should be torn from him.
In solitude He wanders yet thro’ life; but tries to soothe
His lonely way, by culling mental blooms …
One must assume so. She’s the only woman with whom we see the American Rafinesque having affectionate interaction of even the very, as he would put it, “wannest” variety. We know he kept in touch with her during the Philadelphia years, because she’s included in a list of his botanical correspondents, her name given as “Mary Holley born Snowden.” Who knows what they’d shared—some kind of mystical communion, surely. In his will, he left his immortal soul to “the Supreme Ruler of Millions of Worlds moving through space.” Mary Holley, after drawing her last breath on her New Orleans deathbed, gasped, “I see worlds upon worlds rolling into space. Oh, it is wonderful!” (Those were better than Rafinesque’s last words, “Time renders justice to all at last,” which were either grouchy or untrue.)
He did not fear death, which came agonizingly from stomach cancer. Last in his list of misplaced virtues is this: his natural science makes a marvelous metaphysics. He was among the first to appreciate the implications of humanity’s rediscovery of itself as an animal, as an actual physical projection over eons of the material universe. “Nature does not make leaps,” had said Leibniz, one of Rafinesque’s guides. If we are part of nature, then we are synonymous with it at the metaphysical level, every bit as much as the first all-but-inorganic animalcules that ever formed a chain of themselves in the blow hole of a primordial sea vent. There is no magic rod that comes down three hundred thousand years ago and divides our essence from the material world that produced us. This means that we cannot speak in essential terms of nature—neither of its brutality nor of its beauty—and hope to say anything true, if what we say isn’t true of ourselves.
The importance of that proposition becomes clear only when it’s reversed: What’s true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. Nature became conscious in us, perhaps in order to observe itself. It may be holding us out and turning us around like a crab does its eyeball. Whatever the reason, that thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious. One cannot look in the mirror and rationally deny this. It experiences love and desire, or thinks it does. The idea is enough to render the Judeo-Christian cosmos sort of quaint. As far as Rafinesque was concerned, it was just hard science. As for what this thing, this world, is—who knows. That part is mysterious. “She lives her life not as men or birds,” said Rafinesque, “but as a world.”
Mystery is not despair. The sheer awe inspired by Rafinesque’s vision makes a sufficiently stable basis for ethics, philosophy, love, and the conclusion that a fleeting consciousness is superior to none, precisely because it suggests magnificent things we cannot know, and in the face of which we simply lack an excuse not to assume meaning.
Rafinesque perfected his variant of this honorable philosophy while botanizing in the literal backyards of my childhood, examining ruderal plants I’ve known all my life, and so I have appropriated it from him, with minor tweaks. It works perfectly as a religion. Others talk about God, and I feel we can sit together, that God is one of this thing’s masks, or that this thing is God.
To quote Robert Penn Warren (who set part of his best novel at Transy in the nineteenth century), “Can you think of some ground on which that may be gainsaid?”
UNNAMED CAVES
Henry Louis Mencken famously called the American South a “Sahara of the Bozarts,” the joke being that’s what a Southerner hears when somebody says
beaux arts
. He was exaggerating, but even at the time, many Southerners conceded the point: the region has always produced its geniuses, but nobody ever referred to it as an incubator of civilization.
Which makes it stranger and more wonderful that over the last few decades, archaeologists in Tennessee—working for the most part in secrecy and silence—have been unearthing an elaborate tradition of prehistoric cave art, which dates back thousands of years. The pictures are found in dark-zone sites—places where the Native American people who made the artwork did so at personal risk, crawling meters or, in some cases, miles underground with cane torches—as opposed to sites in the “twilight zone,” speleologists’ jargon for the stretch, just beyond the entry chamber, that is exposed to diffuse sunlight. A pair of local hobby cavers, friends who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, found the first of these sites in 1979. They’d been exploring an old root cellar and wriggled up into a higher passage. The walls were covered in a thin layer of clay sediment left there during long-ago floods and maintained by the cave’s unchanging temperature and humidity. The stuff was still soft. It looked at first as though someone had finger-painted all over, maybe a child—the men debated even saying anything. But the older of them was a student of local history. He knew some of those images from looking at drawings of pots and shell ornaments that emerged from the fields around there: bird-men, a dancing warrior figure, a snake with horns. Here were naturalistic animals, too: an owl and a turtle. Some of the pictures seemed to have been first made and then ritually mutilated in some way, stabbed or beaten with a stick.
That was the discovery of Mud Glyph Cave, which was reported all over the world and spawned a book and a
National Geographic
article. No one knew quite what to make of it at the time. The cave’s “closest parallel,” reported
The Christian Science Monitor
, “may be caves in the south of France which contain Ice Age art.” A team of scholars converged on the site. The glyphs, they determined—by carbon-dating charcoal from half-burned slivers of cane—were roughly eight hundred years old and belonged to the Mississippian people, ancestors to many of today’s Southeastern and Midwestern tribes. The imagery was classic Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), meaning it belonged to the vast but still dimly understood religious outbreak that swept the eastern part of North America around
A.D.
1200. We know something about the art from that period, having seen all the objects taken from graves by looters and archaeologists over the years: effigy bowls and pipes and spooky-eyed, kneeling stone idols; carved gorgets worn by the elite. But these underground paintings were something new, an unknown mode of Mississippian cultural activity. The cave’s perpetually damp walls had preserved, in the words of an iconographer who visited the site, an “artistic tradition which has left us few other traces.”
That was written twenty-five years ago, and today there are more than seventy known dark-zone cave sites east of the Mississippi, with new ones turning up every year. A handful of the sites contain only some markings or cross-hatching (
lusus Indorum
was the antiquarians’ term: the Indians’ whimsy), but others are quite elaborate, much more so than Mud Glyph. Several are older, too. One of them, the oldest so far, was created around 4000
B.C.
The sites go from Missouri over to Virginia, and from Wisconsin to Florida, but the bulk are in middle Tennessee, and of those a greater number exist on or near the Cumberland Plateau, which runs at a southwest slant down the eastern part of the state, like a great wall dividing the Appalachians from the interior.
That’s what it was, for white settlers who wanted to cross it in wagons. If you read about Daniel Boone and the Cumberland Gap, and how excited everyone got in the eighteenth century to have found a natural pass (known, incidentally, to every self-respecting Indian guide) through the “Cumberland Mountains,” those writers mean the plateau. Technically, it’s not a mountain or a mountain chain, though it can look mountainous. A mountain is when you smash two tectonic plates together and the leading edges rise up into the sky like sumo wrestlers lifting up from the mat. A plateau, on the other hand, sits above the landscape because it has remained in place while everything else washed away. On the high plain of the Cumberland Plateau lies an exposed horizontal layer of erosion-resistant bedrock, a “conglomerate” (or pebbly) sandstone, which keeps the layers directly underneath from dissolving and flowing into the rivers, or at least holds back the process. It can do only so much. Fly above the plateau in a small plane, and you can see that it’s a huge disintegrating block, calving house-size boulders as it’s inwardly shattered by seasonal “frost-wedging” or carved away by streams that crash down through the porous strata. Water bursts from steep bluff faces: the sides of a plateau don’t slope like a mountain’s do, they shear away or tumble down at the edges. Those cliffs create a physical barrier for species, meaning you get different animals and vegetation on top and at the bottom. The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt called that a requirement for a true plateau, this eco-segregation (Humboldt liked to chide his colleagues for playing fast and loose with the term
plateau
).