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Wednesday
Although I delayed my Earth Day post for a day to write an essay on the late Pope Francis, he would not have approved. More than any previous pope, Francis focused on the environment, attempting to rally the world around the threat of climate change. The passage in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, where we pray for “this fragile earth, our island home,” is very much in the spirit of Pope Francis, as well as of the saint after whom he chose to name himself.
NPR notes that Francis repeatedly raised the problem of how fossil fuels were heating the earth, and his writing on the subject became increasingly urgent. According to Christiana Zenner, associate professor of theology, science and ethics at Fordham University, Francis’s encyclical on the subject was “the first of its kind to look at the relationship between humans and God, as well as humans and the natural world, and to link these types of relationship as matters of faith.”
To mark this day, I turn to Catholic convert Denise Levertov, whose tender poem “Beginners” acknowledges a paradox: at the same time that we understand, more deeply than ever before, the wonders of nature (at least from a scientific angle), we are destroying that very nature. What good are our amazing documentaries on the natural world when we find ourselves in thrall to despoilers who are overtly hostile to forests, national parks, and clean air and water?
In her poem, which I shared 14 years ago following the horrific Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the poet begins with a dedication to Karen Silkwood, the activist who blew the whistle on lax nuclear plant practices (she herself had been radiated) and who died in a suspicious car accident after meeting with a reporter. (I don’t know who Eliot Gralla was, perhaps a Levertov friend.) The poet then quotes a passage from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s hypnotic but very disturbing “The Garden of Proserpine.”
As I noted in my previous post, I think Levertov begins her poem with Swinburne because he represents a dangerous tendency that she wants to counteract. Sometimes we get so discouraged that we just want to give up.
Proserpine is the Roman name for Persephone, the daughter of fertility goddess Demeter/Ceres who was abducted by Hades/Pluto and dragged off to the underworld. Regarded by some mystics as a conduit to the spirit world, in Swinburne’s poem Proserpine represents a kind of death wish. At one point in the poem she says,
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
The only flower in her garden, the poem reports, is the poppy, used for opium.
Levertov’s purpose in writing “Beginnings” aligns with the purpose of Earth Day, which is to rouse herself, and us, from lethargy. As is customary with the poet, she does not do this in a way that is facile or shallowly optimistic. “I know you feel defeated,” I hear Levertov saying, “but focus on this exciting new love rather than feeling that you are ‘hastening into the sea of non-being.’ You are a beginner, not someone at the end of the river. The possibilities that are opening up should galvanize you. Hope and desire aren’t dead; they are in bud. It’s time to tap into our anger at the brokenness and desecration and take action.”
The anger must be constructive, not destructive. Unlike, say, Trumpian anger, it should be fueled not by resentment and fear but by a vision of connectedness with “beast and flower.” It will be life affirming if it is guided by justice and mercy, which we have “only begun to imagine.”
Such a vision will allow us to “join our solitudes in the communion of struggle.” Whatever form that struggle takes–each of us must exercise our own particular gifts–it will have power if it is guided by a sense of things “unfolding.”
Here’s the poem.
Beginners
Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla
“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea–“
But we have only begun
To love the earth.
We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
— so much is in bud.
How can desire fail?
— we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision
how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.
Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?
Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet–
there is too much broken
that must be mended,
too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
so much is in bud.
One reason why we should spend time around children is because, for them, the world is fresh and new. Similarly, the reason why we should “join our solitudes in the communion of struggle” is because in communal action there is hope. Instead of withdrawing into solitary caves of dragon despair—instead of dwelling on old grudges and the “hurt we have done to each other/ that cannot yet be forgiven”—we can give ourselves over to celebrating and mending.
Earth Day always occurs somewhere close to Easter, which has fertility goddess origins. When Christian missionaries came to medieval Britain, celebrations of Jesus’s resurrection merged with celebrations of the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre and the spring solstice. Stepping beyond the old dispensation and embracing the new, as Christians claim they do with Easter, is also a good way to see the environment in which we move.
Why give up when so much is in bud?
