"I'm just less evolved than you are..."

Paul Simon sings in the ear of my mind:

At the fire pit, embers glow faintly. A waterbuck snorts out in the Kanderi swamp. Far off, an elephant screams. What on Earth am I doing here? I think of Marianne. A little like ancient Athens... slaves to do the dirty work so Plato ard Aristotle ard that lot could sit ard think. Eight days ago, Bob and I were driven to Tsavo from Nairobi by Verity's driver, a short, stocky Kikuyu named Sammy. We stopped at the roadside and pitched into the cooler for sandwiches and a beer. A villager appeared, quite literally appeared out of nothing, like some wretched genie sumnoned from wherever genies spend their time. His belly was sunken, his glassy eyes haunted by hunger, his clothes ragged and filthy. He didn't beg, didn't speak a word, just stood there, his very presence a reproach. I couldn't eat. I gave him my sandwich, an act of charity akin to giving aspirin to someone racked by deep bone pain. So what if some lions have manes and others don't? Who cares why they do what they do? Isn't this expedition pointless? Considering the conditions in this country, and in most of black Africa, doesn't inquiring into all these fine points of animal behavior represent a form of decadence?

Under these African skies at two in the morning, it is best to be candid with myself, since such candor cannot hurt anyone. I yearn for the poet's, the songwriter's response to the natural world. I´m a little weary of the empirical approach, all these infrared cameras and skull measurements and data sheets. Data. Data. Data. Art and science, that hoary chestnut of a conflict. Candidly speaking, Phil to Phil, some part of me resists Craig and Peyton and Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans and their theories and hypotheses, tests and experiments. I long for the company of a naturalist like John Muir, for whom the petal of each mountain flower was "a window through which we may see the Creator."
I believe that to be true, tut I also believe that the theory of evolution is right, which is something of a tricky juggling act, because if you follow Darwinism to its logical conclusion, then you have to believe life on Earth isn't here because God intended it to be, or that it's evolved as it has because that's how he planned it. lt could just as easily have gone some other way or never come into being in the first place. lt's one vast accident, in so many words. Extending that thought from the animate to the inanimate, I have to conclude that all this around and above me, these Stars of the Southern Hemisphere, is likewise accidental, unguided by a divine intelligence, without purpose. Yet we call it creation ard creation implies a creator. We don't look at, say, a 747 and assume that 200,000 individual moving parts just chanced to come together to form a machine that takes off, lands. and flies at 500 miles an hour. In Craig Packers own book, Into Africa, he states: "Zebras are bulk feeders, preferring mature grasses. Wildebeest seek any green grass. By mowing down the longer grasses, the two larger species create fresh swards of the short green grass preferred by the Thomson's gazelle.... What are the advantages of migration?... The short grasses of the volcanic plains are much richer in protein, calcium, and phosphorous than the tall grasses of the northern woodlands. Mineral levels in the northern grasses are so low that nonmigratory grazers would suffer reduced fertility from phosphorous deficiency. Browsers can obtain ample minerals from tree leaves, but grazers must migrate south as soon as the rains permit." In the margins, I have scrawled, "The design of it!" A design implies a designer. That's what John Muir saw in the blossoms of the high Sierra.
Astrophysicists, cosmologists, biologists, bioengineers, doctors, and cutting-edge medical researchers are the Aztec priests of our secularized civilization, speaking to us from atop the temples of science, leading us on to a future in which we shall all be liberated from our comforting illusions and submit to the reign of a ruthless rationalism. Maybe we'll be better off, considering that one of those illusions, religious belief, has been and continues to be the source of so much bloodshed and misery. Nevertheless, I fear we'll suffer from a spiritual impoverishment in that brave new world.
It's in the field of bioengineering that the high priests join hands with the ministers of globalization. Private companies with shares traded on the computerized floors of the world's stock exchanges will extract stem cells from human embryos, will manipulate our genes and recombine our DNA, and all for the best of reasons: to cure diseases, save lives, repair defects in our natural makeup, give us children who will be superior in every way. Surely, Mr. and Mrs. jones, you'll want your child to have a genetic head start, things are so competitive these days, it will be well worth the investment.... Such miracles will not come cheap and will be bestowed on those who can afford them; the miracle makers will have to show a profit to the cyber-traders and shareholders. I don't imagine the woman I met in southern Sudan, the one who had to walk six days under African skies to get her sick child to a clinic, will benefit. Darwinian economics won't permit it.
Just two months ago, I addressed the student body of the high school I graduated from in 1959: Fenwick, a Catholic prep school in Oak Park, Illinois. I told the young women in their dark skirts and uniform jackets, the young men in their blazers and ties that the great challenge that will confront their generation will be the one hurled by the bio-technocrats of our wired world. Someday, I said, in your lifetime, perhaps even in mine, a band of lab-coated geniuses, impatient with moral questions, are going to clone a human being. Humankind will then possess a power commensurate to the harnessing of the atom, and what will we do with it? This is going to happen, I told the students. No matter how many laws and regulations are passed prohibiting reproductive cloning, no matter how many objections are raised by priests ard ministers and ethicists, it's going to happen, and the bio-techs will get on television and in the soothing tones of practiced media-speak tell us that it's a good thing that will bring the greatest good to the greatest number. lt's going to happen because the high priests of science are riding high these days, as are the cyber-capitalists, and they obey one commandment, not ten: If it can be done, it should be done, especially if there's money in it. And once it's done, you will be faced with ethical, political, and even metaphysical questions no one has faced before. If any man or woman can run off a Xerox of himself or herself, can we say that the facsimile possesses an immortal soul? Can we say that he or she is a sacred, unique individual, endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights? But can we say that if we are the creators? Can we say that when a clone, by definition, is not a unique individual? Human beings are fickle; values change with circumstances. What if, someday, it's decided that we who gave the clone life now withdraw its rights to equal treatment under the law?
Sometimes the post-industrial world's rush into the future strikes me as mindless. It's like Everest. We're going there because it's there. In my more paranoid moments, and I'm certainly in one now, standing here under African skies, the cold stars' light in my eyes (the pale yellow moon has set, Paul), I think science is in a hurry to get there because it sees, glimmering on the temporal horizon, the final triumph over its old adversary, faith. There's another hoary chestnut of a conflict. They've been at war ever since the church persecuted Galileo for stating that the Earth was not the center of creation. Cosmologists have reported, with a certain bleak glee, that the universe will expand forever, becoming an immense, cold, dark void in which protons will be separated by distances equal to those separating galaxies today: in other words, the universe is pointless, spinning toward oblivion.
Contemporary research into the brain has found that our emotions, fron love to rage, are the product of specific electrochemical reactions in the cranial soup, our capacity to think and reason not a reflection of the divine in our natures hut functions of brain centers that can be observed with fast MRIs and PET scans. The hard-wired circuitry in the frontal lobe is the only path to knowledge. There is no room in this view of life for such fuzzy concepts as a Poet's inspiration much less a prophet's divine revelation. We're almost there, the future, and we'll be there when man at last creates man out of his own skin, the soulless, identical copy, coming off the sterile assembly lines of Embryo, Inc., with genes that can be jiggered into whatever configuration may be desired. The paragon of animals will be shown to be mere matter, and science will do what logicians say is impossible, proving a negative: God is not the author of human life or any life. God provably does not exist. Sometimes, in these paranoid moments, I imagine myself beside Ted Kaczynski, there in the solitude of his madness and his Montana cabin, helping him make bombs to hurl against a future I want no part of.
What am I doing here, thinking these thoughts under African skies? I am a novelist by calling; my fundamental reaction to the natural world comes from the belly, which somehow communicates to the spirit. Nothing rational about it. I can feel myself slipping away from information and data and the empirical method toward a romantic primitivism. I long to be a savage, "suckled in a creed outworn," who stands in ignorant awe of creation and sees in the bursting volcano not geologic and thermal forces unleashed but the wrath of some malevolent deity; who dances to the shaman's drum and listens to mythic tales grunted round the tribal fire and has no way to reproduce except by fucking.
I return to my tent and write down these jangled musings, not to make sense of them, but to get them out of my system. The pharmaceutical demons still prod me, but not as sharply as an hour ago. I lie down, and having tried the Psalms and Lakota centering, I browse through Seneca's letters to Lucilius and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. The headlamp goes off, and I doze, to be roused only an hour later to the sound of water poured into the bucket outside, the glow of the kerosene lamp the man has lit for me. In that brief hour of untroubled sleep, I have made friends once again with Craig and Peyton, Gnoske, Kerbis Peterhans, and Darwin, though not with the bioentrepreneurs. It's impossible for me to see human beings as anything other than creatures who exist to find out, to seek, to add to the great edifice of knowledge, brick by brick, even if, as we used to say in Vietnam, it don't mean nuthin', dont mean a thing. Still, I'm so tired I cannot get off my cot; then I recall the words Marcus Aurelius spoke to me just a little while ago: "When Thou risest reluctantly in the morning, let this thought be present: I am rising to do the work of a human being."

And that also answers the question, What am I doing here, under African skies?

First time I have touched this book for days.

I must be mad to have gotten myself mixed up with Werther. He is brilliant, very probably the finest naturalist I have ever met. At times his virtuosity is exhausting. It is always breathtaking. The other morning in a patch of forest up in Aceh we came across a feeding flock of birds and he began identifying them, rattling off their names, using their scientific names only - Pycnonotus squamatus, Malacopteron magnum, Malacopteron magnirostre, Stachyris maculata, and so on, faster than I could even spot them, a performance fit for the stage.

I understand him more and more. I have even come to like him. What I do not understand, what I cannot understand, is how he can go on living with all that bitterness. Whenever he speaks of a certain wild place he has been, whether it is in Africa or in South America or Asia, he cannot help appending some comment as to how it is being degraded or destroyed or how many years (usually few) remain until it and its inhabitants will vanish altogether. Sometimes the very mention of a place is sufficient to work him up into a towering rage. Then it is a1l blackness. The list of people who disgust him, whom he hates, whom he would like to kill (or who he predicts will be killed), is seemingly endless.

At the same time, or rather at different times, he can be calm and strangely gentle. This inevitably occurs when he has found something in nature to look at. I have seldom come across anyone so able to turn his entire concentration on a single object.

The other morning at Brastagi we were up on the edge of the volcano. It was early morning, and as is usual at that hour, we were out birdwatching. We had been working the trail for about half an hour without much success when he either heard or saw something moving in the very top of a tree we were approaching. Flipping up his binoculars, he was able to focus on the bird immediately and point it out to me. "Get on that bird quick!"

I was already on it. It was a thrush-size bird, entirely cobalt blue, with a noticeably long tail and a dark bill. "A whistling thrush?" I asked.

"Something better than that." He smiled.

"You don't mean the cochoa?"

"Yes, that is exactly what I mean."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, a moment ago it was perched on a branch in good light and I could see the forehead very clearly."

I looked back at the bird, hopping front branch to branch, feeding on berries. I could not see the forehead because the bird was now in a shadowy part of the tree's crown, an area dappled with shadows. Nevertheless, I knew that he was right. It was Cochoa azurea, known in the English-language guides as Malaysian cochoa - one of the rarest and least known birds of Southeast Asia.

I looked back at Werther and he was beaming. It was as though just then all his cares and hatreds and excesses had fallen away. It was as though he had not simply sighted a rare bird but rather had seen something infinitely more precious, perhaps an angel.