Rachel Carson The Sea and Homology with Robert Park on The City

Rachel Carson’s The Sea sets up a vast canvas where she looks at evolutionary theory in terms of geological time capsules. This is useful for us as categorization of sea creatures, birds of the air and mammals (bats can fly, so the categories are malleable in nature) provide us with a time dimension. Space and time interlock to give us geological epochs where disruption is key, but so also is abstraction and variation. Much of how we deal with the past, in Sociology, negates this huge quantam of time, and geological disruption as beyond our interest. We remain with the key categories of tribal, peasant and industrial time which are occupationally specific, but also symbiotic. By looking at cataclysm as event, Carson shows us that the very nature of geological time is beyond our immediate comprehension and left to speculation. As the ocean is dredged it provides us a glimpse of its depths, and the cycle of being rests on being ‘eaten’ or ‘escaping’ or in turn eating lesser beings, whether plankton or mammal. In this sense Carson creates a homology between the biography of fish, stories of birth, survival and death, and that of humans. Here, the school of fish provides a matrix of sociability and received practices but on their own, they must escape the angler or the octopus. There is a certain nonchalant acceptance of time as neutral to the existence of humans. Events such as geological and geomorphological structures can be read, but there is also arbitrariness to the existence of the universe. This reading of the symbolism of geomorphology is true for Octavio Paz who suggests to us that the earth appears to us in terms of images. He writes, “Geographies, too, are symbolic: physical spaces turn into geometric archetypes that are emissive forms of symbols. Plains, valleys, mountains: the accidents of terrain become meaningful as soon as they enter history. Landscape is historical, and thus becomes a document in cipher, a hieroglyphic text. The oppositions between sea and land, plain and mountain, island and continent, symbolize historical oppositions: societies, cultures, civilizations. Each land is a society: and a vision of the world and the otherworld. Each history is a geography and each geography is a geometry of symbols.” (Paz 1985:293) While Carson is concerned with the boundaries of the sea held in check by the moon tides, Paz looks at how territorial boundaries defines the existence of humans. We know that boundaries collapse with war and colonialism, so what happens to the people who flee. Who are the conquered people and where do they go? American anthropology, thanks to Robert Redfield was invested in understanding the Yukatan as a syncretistic world of adaptation, where Spanish and indigenous cultures wove their tapestry as masters and slaves. For Paz. the resilience of Mexico, to the colonial domination of Spanish and/ or American civilization. was the return to ritual, the ability to absorb victimhood through a process of translation. Interpretation and translation which are inextricably tied together. We do not understand our actions, but the past is recurrent as it surfaces in our thoughts, memories and cultural legacies (ibid 292). It is this familiarity with the past that helps us to understand the present, incomprehensible at present though it may seem.. He writes, “The masks of Hitler and Stalin are now succeeded by an incorporEal reality we cannot even name and execrate. To name it, we have to know it – and only thus can we defeat it” (ibid 281). Paz describes the usefulness of the moebius strip, where otherness is internalized. “Duality is not something which is added, artificial or exterior: it is our constituent reality. Without otherness, there is no oneness. And what is more, otherness is oneness made manifest, the way in which it reveals itself. Otherness is a projection of oneness; the shadow which we battle in our nightmares. And conversely, oneness is a moment of otherness, that moment in which we know ourselves as a body without a shadow – or as a shadow without a body. Neither within or without, neither before nor after: the past reappears” (ibid 289 To this end, he describes history writing as a combination of elements, a montage. It is similar to biological processes, and forms of representation such as family lineages, the writing of poetry, cinematic emblems and juxtaposition (ibid). Pliny the Elder (historian, naturalist and militart commander) had left evidence of the harrowing days after the eruption of Mount Vesuvious. As Rome’s naval commander he was stationed at Micenum 50 kms from Pompei. When his sister Marcella pointed out the cloud of smoke spiraling in the shape of the top of a pine tree (a mushroom cloud) into the sky, he wished to sail closer to the site for scientific purposes of validation and description. He had before being summoned by his sister, enjoyed the sun in the garden, had a cold bath and a light lunch and had gone back to his books. Marcella’s son, Pliny the Younger who was about 17 years old, was absorbed in a book, so he did not accompany his mother’s brother who was around 56 years old and a very powerful representative of the Roman Empire. The volcanic eruption took place in 79 A.D. Twenty five years later, Tacitus asked Pliny the Younger to send him an account of his uncle’s voyaging out to rescue his friends in the last days of Pompei. (These letters are reproduced in the website Pompeii,org,uk which has an archaeologist and tourist guide as administrator.) The enormous detail that Pliny the Younger brings to these two letters is evidence of the relation between the oral and literate. The relation between volcanic eruption and the tsunami that followed are graphically described. Stones, ash, smoke, pumice rubble and terror all bestow themselves on the survivors and the dead. In the case of Pliny the Elder, he had rescued his friend Rectina and her family who had asked for his help, but at Stabiae, where he went to rescue his friend Pomponianus, they were besieged by misfortune. Pliny himself had behaved very normally to comfort his friend, all his actions were without panic or anxiety, and his nephew reports that being a corpulent man with difficulty in breathing, his soldiers could hear his “heavy and sonorous breathing” when he slept at night. However, they had to wake him up, and they left with pillows tied to their heads, their only protection against the falling rocks which were being hurled from the top of the mountain. When they reached the sea, they saw that the sea was very violent and that they could not getaway by boat. Then, Pliny died because he was suffocated by the toxic fumes that surrounded them, and in death he looked like he was asleep, and he had no injuries on him. In a second letter written 25 years after the cataclysmic event, Pliny the younger describes the sea, “The sea seemed to rollback upon itself, and to be driven from the banks by the convulsive motion of the earth, it is certain atleast the shore was considerably enlarged, and several sea animals were left upon it.” This act of witnessing and the ability to reflect upon the moment of gravest danger in such a way that Pliny the younger communicates the presence of mind of his uncle, and reflects his own ability to record what he had heard in the intensity of voice, that travels through the centuries. This is what witnessing is about: the self awareness that makes the litterateur experience the moment in an inter related way, so that autobiographically speaking he/she cannot separate himself or herself from the environment that he writes about. As the keeper of Pliny the Elder’s monumental work Historia Naturalis which survived till the 16th century and beyond, though the rest of his other work did not, we see that the ordinary task of documentation and dissemination are a legacy which Pliny the Younger saw as his primary obligation to a much loved uncle. Ofcourse, in this history writing and record keeping, the distinctions between myth, legend and history were hard to distinguish. Pliny the Elder had been to India in 77 C.E and this formalizes our understanding of the monsoon winds which brought ships to India from Rome in search of spices, ivory, nard (perfumed ointment) linen, and corals and pearls. Pliny the Elder prefaces his Naturalis Historiae with a plea to his patron the Emperor Tacitus to endorse his work. Yet, he knows that he must put his case before his patron in a way by which the latter will be intrigued. “…Emperor! Why do you read these things? They are written only for the common people, for farmers or mechanics, or for those who have nothing else to do; why do you trouble yourself with them? Indeed, when I undertook this work, I did not expect that you would sit in judgement upon me. (9)”(www. Perseus Tufts Digital Library/edi Historia Naturalis.’ Further he exhorts his readers, “Most of us seek for nothing but amusement in our studies, while others are fond of subjects that are of excessive subtlety, and completely involved in obscurity. My object is to treat of all those things which the Greeks include in Encyclopedia (17) which however, are either not generally known or are rendered dubious from our ingenious conceits. And there are other matters which many writers have given so much in detail that we quite loathe them. It is indeed, no easy task to give novelty to what is old, and authority to what is new, brightness to what is tarnished, and light to what is obscure, to render what is slighted acceptable, and what is doubtful worthy of our confidences, to give to all a natural manner, to each its peculiar nature. It is sufficiently honourable and glorious to have been willing even to make the attempt, although it should prove unsuccessful.. And indeed, I am of the opinion that the strides of those are more specially worthy of our regard, who, after having overcome difficulties, prefer the useful office of assisting others to the mere gratification of giving pleasure, and this is what I have already done in some of my former works.” The pleasure of knowledge and its dissemination kept this commander of the Roman navy busy at night, and during the day, he carried out his official duties to the empire, delegating and taking decisions. 36 books with 20,000 entries and one book which forms the introduction, preface and contents have been passed on to us by the familiar routes of the “love for learning”. Detachment was one of the principles. He had been master of many occupations, and staying awake to write the Encyclopedia was subsumed in the aphorism “”for life properly consists in being awake…” This theme of curiosity about the earth, voyages made by sea, and the classification of knowledge in terms of collation, according to subject, had as its its two poles, the subjective and the objective. Methodologically these are placed in well known biographies as central to the task of collation itself. In Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E.Park and The Chicago School, Fred H Matthews says that, for Robert Park, facts and it collection were the tasks of the historian, statistics was the work of the statistican, and the search for meaning is what made the sociologists carve out a dialectic of empathy and detachment. “To Park himself, the self understanding of the individual or milieu was the first step in a two stage process of research: the student must combine empathy with ecology, and trace the evolution and significance of attitudes and values within a broader context of instititutional position and social authority”(Matthews 1978:115). As Pliny defined the purpose of conquest of peoples for the Roman Empire was for reasons of loot and trade in which knowledge production was necessary, so also Park himself saw this detachment as a methodological link between the trader and the sociologist. He felt that anonymity was integral to this transaction, essential to avoid emotional attachment, easier to be objective if one kept a distance, and the reason why being an outsider helped. He genuinely felt that objectivity was the secret of academic success, and detachment its secret (ibid 116) Any ‘compulsive’ ideology would remove the ability to view social relations or actions in a detached and empathetic view, just as ‘sympathy’ could be an obstacle to understanding reality. He did not believe that sociology was a call for crusaders, and their role as scholars was to be “the calm detached scientist who investigates race relations with the same objectivity and detachment with which the zoologist dissects the potato bug” (ibid). The passion for observation and description made litterateurs like Pliny (uncle and nephew) and Rachel Carson stand out in their preoccupation to document. In doing so they were interdisciplinary, using their skill as polyphonic interrogators to create fantastical worlds, where the preoccupation for detail was primary. Robert Park believed that in the city, the terrifying aspects of nature had recreated itself, ‘the urban jungle’ being what it is, while outside the city, nature had become domesticated. The city represented the terrifying aspects of both threat and decay, while outside the city, it became gentle, nurturing and inspiring (ibid 122). He believed that city people could organize and represent themselves, that the great crowds had an ability for mass movements and action. The human personality deftly represented itself in this mass aggregation. Here there was “ethnic diversity” and “clustering” (ibid 126). Using the detailed ethnographic work of their students, Park and Burgess wanted to explore the dynamic between the individual personality and the State, mediated by ethnicity and race (ibid 127). They used maps to show co relations between a variety of indices, attempting to bring a correspondence between time, space and human mores and values (ibid 128). Erle W Young drew huge maps to show that railways and roads criss crossed the city, connecting ware houses and industrial establishments, while residences were located around parks, fountains and boulevards, showing their elevated class and status locations (ibid 128). The ecological aspect depended on certain determined aspects, while the cultural aspects were dependent on choice and variation. The ecological aspect would highlight population segregation, and therefore occupational variation. Here lay many of the corresponding dilemmas of the relation between race, ethnicity and occupation which brought the Chicago School into tension with the later statisticians who dominated Sociology. Yet the insights of the Ecological School were varied, and centred around the place of the individual and the cultural stereotype, both being fragmented by the methods of generalization in philosophy and archetypicalisation in social psychology ( ibid 129). Film culture between 1938 and 1958 represented the many ways in which the Chicago School’s preoccupation with the Hobo, the Boss, Gambling and Saloon Culture, Workers, Police and Politicians became a type of given/ or ascribed roles to be analysed. Women were either socialites or domestic servants, or singers in cafes, or dependent on capitalists as wives or whores. The central question that Park’s students asked was, is mobility possible for these marginalized or ascending groups? As someone who had been an acolyte and collaborator of the great educationist Booker Washington, Park was able to effect potential symbiosis between the marginalized black community with its history of slavery, and the aspirations of poor whites. For him, The City, in a Simmelian methodological format became the way that the human heart could be deciphered ( ibid 30). Rachel Carson attempts to study the geomorphological structure of crustacean evolution and its remnants in the sea-bed as symbols of the long history of the microcosmic development of sea creatures and plants. The history of corals and co equivalently their death by climate change and pollution is another way of telling time. Coral reefs are resplendent in their colours when alive, they seethe with an amazing vitality. When they die their intricate structure are finger like skeletons which then have ossified and demean us with their troglodyte presence. As humans the wonder of the visuality of natural splendor becomes part of the ancient world, we are frightened by its death and the skeletal remains. Human beings then decide that they must leave the planet. Carson’s words describing the intricate relationship between infinitely tiny sea creatures and their continuously transforming environment (the sea washes them into inlets and then drives them back with the tides, and their notion of time, sustenance, neighbourhood and procreation are all instinctively defined in terms of what they must do. Describing the serpulid tube wor, she says. “The fact that the tube worms have managed to live in the intertidal zone for millions of years is evidence of a sensitive adjustment of their way of life, on the one hand to conditions with in the surrounding world of the rockweeds, on the other to vast tidal rhythms linked with the movements of earth, moon and sun (Carson:1991:458). This idea of adjustment is central to evolutionary expansion and devolution. It is this perhaps that makes us understand her work in terms of implicit homologies between fish and humans, though we might as well consider the homo;pgy between fruitflies and us. By presuming that the code of similarity is not the same as identification, or static notions of totemic identity, we can move to learning from the animal or plant world. This abstract notion of the one ness of the life force always reduced to symmetry and the concept of the One, is useful only for advancing our experience of the design of the universe. Experientially we only see multiplicity and endless grandeur and mutation, and that too is significant. We cannot count on “Fate” or Moira as the Greeks called it, when in the Anthropocene we name our culpability and delineate our future responsibility. The meteors still glance past planet earth and our destiny is writ in this ‘firmament of time’ as Loren Eiseley called it. There were so many disasters in the 19th century, including the eruption of Krakatoa, that the Comteian immutable laws of Physics became an anomaly. Yet, since ideological fetters are hard to drop, the organic metaphor for Sociologists still remained within the frame of slow evolutionary principles. How long, for instance, did it take to ‘drop the tail’ to building cities? Homologies are satisfying because we see in the instinctive response of termites, bees and ants very similar responses to calamity: they must run and hide, or they must die. So the myth of Antaeus who loses his power when he is removed from the power of Mother Earth is a very telling myth. How will we behave if we are separated from Earth, when gravity is all that we have known? The coexistence of time in the relational sense is about memory and instinct. The past conveys itself to us in our extraordinary dream life, our archetypes, and our involuntary behavior in crises. It is then we recognize our kinship with the ecological dilemma that knits the sea and shore. Like the fish who are suddenly uplifted by the tides, floating in extended marshes and then without their volition the tides throw them into the sea. They are dazzled by their fate not knowing of the presence of the sea birds that waited for them at the edge of the shore, so many thousands of these migrants never made it “past the portals of the sea” (Carson 1991:255). She describes their habitations with reference not just to time and seasons, but in relationship to levels of access to light. Predators lurk at every turn, and whether she gives them names, species identity markers. or refers to them as schools, she is engaging us to see how life in the sea, however tiny or massive is characteristically unique. With her, through dramatic prose compositions we begin to see the translucent nature of eels, their coming of age and their demise, both consequentially as life cycle moments but also of interlocked moments of concomitant variations as with old eels and newly spawned ones. “As the time approached for them to lose the leaflike form of the larva and become rounded and sinuous like their parents, the impulse to seek fresher shallowing waters grew. Now they found the latent power of unused muscles, and against the urging of the wind and current they moved shoreward. Under the blind but powerful drive of instinct, every activity of their small and glassy bodies was directed unconsciously towards the attainment of a goal unknown in their own experience – something stamped so deeply upon the memory of their race that each of them turned without hesitation towards the coast from which their parents had come” (Carson 1991 361-362). The old eels ofcourse die and become part of the sea, but more complex is her representation of the relation between river and sea in this continuous dialectic. “And as the eels lay offshore in the March sea, waiting for the time when they should enter the waters of the land, the sea, too, lay restless awaiting the time when once more it should encroach upon the coastal plain, and creep up the sides of the foothills, and lap at the bases of the mountain ranges. As the waiting of the eels off the mouth of the bay was only an interlude in a long life filled wih constant change, so the relation of sea and coast and mountain ranges was that of a moment in geologic time. For once more the mountains would be worn away by the endless erosion of water and carried in silt to the sea, and once more all the coast would be water again, and the places of the cities and towns would belong to the sea” (ibid 364). How does one study the changing landscape that comes about with floods and the calamities of war? Robert Park had a hard time decoding the pleasures of philosophy to his post war students, who didn’t want to deal with words, but preferred maps and indexes, ushering the next phase of hyper objective sociological analyses (Matthews 1977:128). Why do people live in areas which are known to be dangerous? The stockyards and factories had been replaced with the face of the gangster, the friendly shark who opened his mouth and let the fish enter his belly. Chicago was dangerous, and films and ethnographers tried to bring it into the view of the hapless resident. Born on the wrongside of the tracks meant that one could not enter the elite institutions or be part of the upper echelons of the hierarchy. Yet, Chicago had energy. Floyd Dell writing of Robert Herrick’s fiction wrote that Chicago was a ‘condition’ not a city ( 127). By looking at migrants and their life styles the Chicago school in the 1930s was preoccupied with the culture of African origin migrants, pr the Polish. the hobo and the dance hall, the ghettos and the bohemias (ibid). The visual aspect of writing and describing was typical of Park and his students, there had to be a tactile quality which was superimposed upon the writing of sociology and depended on memory and history. Park and Burgess quote from Wendelband who gave a lecture in the University of Strassburg in 1894, that the historian tires to ‘revive and call up into the present, in all its particularities an event in the past. His aim is to do for an actual event precisely what the artist seeks to do for the object of his/her imagination. It is just here that we discern the kinship between the historian and the writer of literature” ( Park and Burgess 1969:8). It seemed crucial to emphasize the abstract nature of science, and the concrete method of representation in history, literature and narrative production in social science. This is why Rachel Carson’s determination to reach out to a lay or common reader become texts of long lasting beauty. It would be centrally as texts published in newspapers and journals encouraging readers to look at the riveting beauty of the ocean. Park describes this concern with the unique, and the preoccupation with mobility, as central to the methodologies of the 1930s of which both were so much a part. “Consider how quickly our appreciation is deadened as some object is multiplied or is regarded as one case in a thousand. “She is not the first” is one of the cruel passages in Faust. It is the individuality and the uniqueness of an object that all our sense of value has its roots. It is upon this fact that Spinoza’s doctrine of the conquest of the passions by knowledge rests, since for him knowledge is the submergence of the individual in the universal, the “once for all” into the eternal”(ibid 10). The concern is for Park, the relation between criminal/civil/moral law which is an old Durkheimian preoccupation of The Division of Labour. This brings us to the rights of groups and individuals in the time of the Anthropocene. Tracey Skillington argues that rising seas, green house gases and climate change are questions of everyday concerns, and policy makers must take into account the intergenerational responsibilities of planning for the future. By focusing on questions of the youth and their right to livelihood, it is possible to think about what we leave on planet earth for generations not yet born (Skillington in Wallenhorst and Wulf 2022 :819) Hajo Eichoff, a cultural historian from Berlin argues that in the 12000 years of settlement in food gathering and growing, the word culture emerged from culturare or care of the earth. It is this earth which is now languishing as war and technology deplete resources faster than they can be rejuvenated. He takes the example of the mobile phone which combines camera, word processor and recorder and leaves behind not just images, but a trail of destruction of waste dumps which cannot be recycled, and are poison fields for later generations to handle. As there is no balance between biomass and the waste that humans leave the future is increasingly bleak (Eichoff in Wallenhorst and Wulf 2022:1133). However, human preoccupation remains with the idea of security, which word has its origins in ‘no worry’. Alejandro Cerreata in Sea Level Change shows us that 7000 years ago a certain stability allowed for humans to occupy coastal belts. Now that global warming has entered a phase which may go on for hundreds of years, leading to oceans rising and heating, the earth would not be much affected by any manoeuvre to bring down temperatures. This statistical and chronological analyses of geological phases such as ice ages due to cooling, and entropy due to heating, are understood over huge swathes of time. There are two options, one is to move from coastal areas, the other is to build architecturally adaptive structures which keep out the sea. Given the population density of coastal towns and villages, reviving the marshlands or associated rivers and canals, is one temporary solution, but finally as humans we have to accept what Eiseley showed us so magnificently that the ‘firmament of time’ is not a geological concept merely, it is how humans deal with their fate, and the aesthetics of it. References Carson, Rachel: The Sea (A Trilogy;Under The Seawind; The Sea Around Us; The Edge of the Sea.) Paladin, London, 1991 Cearetta, Alejandro: 2022 Sea Level Change in in Nathanell Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature (1124-1127) Eichof, Hajo: 2022 Security in Nathanael Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature (1128-1134) Eiseley, Loren: 1960 The Firmament of Time, Nebraska, Bison Books. Matthews, Fred H. 1977: Quest for an American Sociology:Robert E.Park and The Chicago School McGill Queen’s University Press, Montreal and London Park, Robert E and Earnest W, Burgess 1969: The Science of Sociology Chicago: Chicago University Press. Paz, Octavio: 1985, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, New York: Grove Weidenfeld Skillington, Tracey: 2022 Intergenerational Justice in Nathanael Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature pgs 819-822 Wallenhorst, Nathanel and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature Susan Visvanathan, Formerly Professor, CSSS/ JNU