Earthworms, Charles Darwin & Secular enchantment

……. In a famous passage in his Autobiography, written when he was sixty-seven, Darwin declared that he’s lost his taste for poetry. Well, actually, he didn’t just declare it, he confessed it. Perhaps he even apologized for it, it’s an important passage because it has often been appropriated by anti-Darwinists as a moral billboard to illustrate the supposed flattening-out and deadening of the secular life….. ~ Page 208

The passage falls at an important junction in the Autobiography. It immediately follows Darwin’s description of the last book he had written -- on earthworms -- a book he had just sent off to the publishers. In describing the worm book, he had caught up with himself in his present moment. He marked the moment by moving from the past tense to the present, and you can almost hear the intake of breath as Darwin writes:

“I have now mentioned all the books which I have published, and these have been the milestones in my life, so that little remains to be said.”

But much did remain to be said. Darwin knew he was more than the sum of his books, more than those milestones. A further seventeen paragraphs in fact remained to be said as he began to puzzle out for himself what made him unique. ~ Page 209

One of the most poignant and famous sentences in Darwin’s lament reads: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collection of facts…..” Why grinding? What was Darwin thinking when he chose that word rather than another? It’s a private joke I think -- a moment of levity in this otherwise often anguished and death-haunted passage. ….. Page 211

Phillips (Adam en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Phillips_%28psychologist%29 ) writes of this passage: “Darwin, in other words, leaves us with a baffling simple question the resonance of which he characteristically understates: what would our lives be like if we took earthworms seriously, took the ground under our feet rather the skies above our heads, as the place to look, as well as, eventually, the place to be?” And this is precisely the point I am reaching for here: the final paragraph of Darwin’s earthworm book is not just counterrelegic, as Philips rightly claims, it is also powerfully ‘countertranscendental.’ It is a common place to say that Darwin celebrates the lowly and the overlooked, that it is part of obvious beauty of a Darwinian way of seeing, but what is less evident is what Phillips points out here -- that Darwin would have us look at the earth and the work of the worms, rather than the skies, as the place of miracles. By looking at the skies for meaning and truth, we miss the miracle at our feet. If Darwin has been searching for a way of emptying out the theistic form of sublime, he had found it here with the grinding of the worm ~ Page 214

In 1964, Anne Stevenson wrote to the American poet Elizabeth Bishop about surrealism. She was writing a book about Bishop, and she wanted to make a connection between Bishop’s poetry and surrealists’ interest in “hallucinatory and dream material” in terms of shared belief that “there is no split personality [a split between the consciousness and unconscious mind], but rather a sensitivity that extends equally into the subconscious and he conscious world.” Remarkably in her letter of reply Bishop wanted to talk about Darwin, not the surrealists. Bishop wrote to Stevenson:

“Yes, I agree with you…. There is no “split” Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of e it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can’t believe we are wholly irrational -- and I do admire Darwin. Reading Darwin, one e the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic -- and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phase, and one feels the strangeness of his understanding, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown.” ~ Page216