The Enormous Absurdity of Nature
Paul Allen Carter
I: "The enormous absurdity of nature"
During the week in the hot summer of 1994 when we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the first human visit to Earth's moon, broken chunks of Comet Shoemaker-Levy, carefully labeled from A to W by watchers on Earth, crashed into the back side of Jupiter. When the big planet rotated sufficiently to show Earth observers the extent of the damage, Jupiter quite to their surprise displayed visible blemishes, some of them more than Earth-sized, on its colorful cloud-banded face. They shared space with the long-extant Great Red Spot, which Jupiter watchers had had under continuous observation for two centuries and more.
Jupiter's diameter is ten times Earth's. A comet hurtling into that roiling gas ball, unless perchance it were to stir up organic processes out of that primal soup, must be less than a pinprick. But a similar solid body smiting the Earth would be quite another case. Conceivably it could send the current lord of creation, homo sapiens, to join his august predecessor the dinosaur.
Dinosaurs, from the innocuous children's purple friend Barney to the frightful raptors portrayed in Jurassic Park and its sequels, have in the modern imagination to a great extent displaced the dragon. What fascinates us about them is precisely that they came, lived, flourished and died without any human referent whatsoever. To one 19th century Victorian clerical gentleman, that utter absence of human context posed a troublesome question for traditional faith: "Who can think that a being of unbounded power, wisdom, and goodness should create a world merely for the habitation of a race of monsters, without a single rational being in it to serve and glorify him?" Thus, says Loren Eiseley, the wounded human ego as it fails to discover its dominance among the beasts of the past learns that the world supposedly made for its enjoyment has existed for untold eons entirely indifferent to its coming."
From early in the Triassic era when dinosaurs were the new kids on the block, yielding precedence to other, then far more formidable swamp dwellers, to late in the Cretaceous when Tyrannosaurus Rex reigned as true king of all the animate world --a span one hundred million years longer than the entire time that has passed since they became extinct--the race of monsters persisted, filling ecological niches in the sea, the swamps, the air, while oceans advanced and drew back, volcanoes spewed ash, swamps turned into desert, and the whole vast primal supercontinent Pangaea began to break up into parts that drifted across the world. And what was the point?
Toward the end of the film Jurassic Park one of the human characters proposed an answer. The dinosaur, he said, had been on Nature's drawing-board for 160 million years, and then set aside. It is impious of us to reopen the book thus closed and repeat the experiment; a point underscored by the movie's catastrophic conclusion. This is a shaky apologia. It ignores the theologically staggering question William Blake two hundred years ago put to the Tyger, burning bright: "Did He who made the Lamb make thee?"
Man at the verge of achieving self-consciousness, the Genesis narrative reports, "gave names . . . to every beast of the field." But the meaning of some of those names has eluded that primordial man's descendants. Behemoth, who trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth, and Leviathan, whose "breath kindleth coals--whatever these archetypal beasts may be, they can't really be tamed into mere hippopotamus and crocodile as timid scholars have attempted to classify them. "They are evidently embodiments of the enormous absurdity of nature," G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1905. "Whatever this cosmic monster may be, a good animal or a bad animal, he is at least a wild animal and not a tame animal" from which Chesterton drew the uncivilized inference that "it is a wild world and not a tame world."
God in the Whirlwind tells Job that the "dominion over every living thing" promised to Adam has after all its limits. Not only do these wild cosmic monsters Behemoth and Leviathan escape human management; so do other, less exotic beasts: the eagle, who "abideth . . . upon the crag of the rock," or the wild donkey, "whose house I have made the wilderness," and who "scorneth the multitude of the city."
