saw it, and it may tour elsewhere. But no
matter if you miss it, because the lavish
book that augments the exhibition, Endless
Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and
the Visual Arts (edited by Diana Donald
and Jane Munro and published by Yale
University Press), is quite a fine summary,
and even adds numerous critical essays
by art critics and historians to the show’s
visual argument. It is fascinating just to
gaze at the plethora of natural history illustrations therein, from engravings to color plates,
and observe how they differed before and after
Darwin, the former being
more random catalogues
of strange creatures and
forms, and the latter being
characterized by relationships, by an understanding of how all things are
connected. All seeds are
the end of all flowers, all
flowers are connected to
all seeds.
The overlapping forces
of natural and sexual selection were necessary for the development
of the science of ecology (the scientific
basis for the moral vision of this very magazine), a term invented by Ernst Haeckel,
who was represented in the exhibit as the
most artistically savvy of Darwin’s scientific followers. Haeckel’s world-famous
images of radiolarians and other formerly obscure sea creatures celebrated
the beauty and mathematical structure of
life forms and also inspired much turn-of-the-century architecture based on flowing
natural forms.
It was Haeckel who truly saw the cul-
tural possibilities of Darwin, though not in
a narrow, business-speak, survival-of-the-
fittest scenario where the strong pushed
aside the weak, which was nothing Darwin
ever had in mind. No, Haeckel saw that
evolution was a vast call to a pantheistic
vision of natural beauty and spiritual mean-
ing, where humanity could fit into nature
in some grand march toward increased
perfection. Haeckel’s “oekologie” was not
a plan for a new science, but a new way of
conceiving of humanity’s position in the
tangled thicket of nature. He, like Darwin,
was a mix of artist, scientist, and philoso-
pher, and through his beautiful drawings
of the symmetries of diatoms and bacteria
he bolstered the notion of nature’s beauty
as a prime result of eons
of selection.
About a Mountain
BY JOHN D’AGATA
W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
$23.95, 240 pages.
Darwin’s vision
of evolution is a
fundamentally
aesthetic one, not
an icy vision of sur-
vival of the fittest.
It’s survival of the
most beautiful.
David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds
Sing and Thousand Mile Song, is writing
a book on why nature is beautiful. His first
recording for ECM Records, a duet with
pianist Marilyn Crispell, comes out in the
spring of 2010.
JoHN D’AgATA has written a book about
one of the nation’s most nagging environmental concerns, but he does not come at
his topic as an eco-scribe — and his style is
both refreshing and e=ective, the kind we
would expect from one of America’s best
contemporary essayists. About a Mountain
is an excellent literary work, but it is also
a relentless and thorough examination
of our government’s dodgy plan to store
high-level nuclear waste inside Yucca
Mountain, a desert-island mountain range
just outside the city of Las Vegas, Nevada.
There’s a cultural narrative here too,
and it’s tempting to mistake the biting,
nearly gleeful irony of D’Agata’s prose for
an outright mockery of modern American
life. But there is also this: the epigraph “To
whomever I did not help”; the sobering statistics he ticks o= with the odd poetry and
genius of Dustin Ho=man in Rain Man;
and his delicate obsession with a youth
who committed suicide by leaping from
the top of Las Vegas’s tallest hotel and casino—a teenage boy with whom D’Agata
believes he spoke just before his death.
The book’s structure is divided, literally,
into the tenets of a good investigation. Of
the “Who, What, When, Where, Why, and
How” sections, it is the Why that matters
most to D’Agata. It comes not once as a section heading, but rather in several refrains.
And with each remorseful repetition the
reader spirals steadily downward into the
subterranean catacombs of our culture.
In America, D’Agata hints, such dark
psycho-social spaces are buried beneath a
mountainous yet unfounded sense of san-guinity, and it is this deeper issue that fascinates as the author engages with Yucca
Mountain public relations representatives
and Las Vegas residents alike to expose
