I Have Landed

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Creation of the Stars and Planets, from the Sistine ceiling, by Michelangelo, sixteenth century.

  Part 2 describes the work of days five and six, the creation of animals: creatures of the water and air on day five, and of the earth, including humans, on day six. Soloists and chorus alternate as in Part 1. Haydn’s music exudes beauty, power, exaltation, etc., but he can also be whimsical, earthy, and ordinary—a combination that captures the essence of the humanistic (or should I say naturalistic) spirit by acknowledging that glory and fascination lie as much in the little foibles as in the grand overarchings. Haydn shows this bumptious and quotidian side of totality in describing the creation of animals. First, the soprano soloist, in a charming and idyllic aria, describes the birds—the noble eagle, the cooing dove, the merry lark, and the nightingale, who had not yet learned (but, alas, soon will) to sing an unhappy note: “No grief affected yet her breast, Nor to a mournful tale were tuned her soft enchanting lays.” The bass soloist, alternating between the bucolic and the simply funny, then describes the tawny lion, the flexible tiger, the nimble stag, and, finally, “in long dimension, creeps with sinuous trace the worm” (usually ending, if the bass soloist can, and ours could, on a low D—actually set an octave higher by Haydn, but taken down by soloists as a traditional bass license corresponding to those annoying high C’s that tenors forever interpolate).

  The shorter Part 3 then uses Milton’s style (if not exactly his words) for two long and rapturous duets between Adam and Eve, interlaced with choral praises and culminating in a paean of thanks with a final musical device that always thrills me as a singer (and, I hope, pleases the audience as well). The final expostulation of joy for the glorious diversity of the earth and its life—“praise the Lord, utter thanks, Amen”—runs twice, first as an alternation of passages for a quartet of soloists and the full chorus, and then, even louder, for the full chorus alone. This acceleration or promotion—more an emotional device than a compositional beauty per se (but mastery of such devices also marks a composer’s skill)—always leaves me feeling that we should mount even higher, thus allowing the performance to reverberate beyond its formal ending (which can only be deemed quite grand enough already!).

  Haydn’s text stands revealed as a great document of optimism and humanism as much for its omissions as for its inclusions. Interestingly, although nearly the entire text of Genesis 1 enters the narrative, one long passage has been conspicuously (and, I assume, consciously) omitted—the set of “objectionable” (to me at least) statements about divinely ordained human domination over nature: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth. . . . And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26 and 28).

  Instead, following the creation of land animals, Haydn’s text, in a nonbiblical interpolation, suggests an entirely different reason for the creation of men and women. In Genesis 1, God fashions us to have dominion over everything else. But in Haydn’s text, God creates humans simply because the living world remains unfulfilled, even a bit sad, after such effort in making everything up to the tawny lion and the sinuous worm. In nearly six full days of hard work, God has stuffed the earth with a glorious series of diverse and wonderful objects. But he then realizes that one omission precludes the fulfillment of this greatest architectural task ever set to music (far exceeding the accomplishments of Fasolt and Fafnir in building Valhalla). Not a single item in his creation has enough mental power to appreciate the beauty and glory of these optimal surroundings. God has to make men and women—so that some creature can know and praise the grandeur of existence. And so Raphael, just following his low D for the sinuous worm, exclaims: “But all the work was not complete; there wanted yet that wondrous being; that, grateful, could God’s power admire, with heart and voice his goodness praise.”

  I don’t want to make either this recitation, or Haydn’s text, sound too saccharine or devoid of complexity. The humanistic tradition does not deny the dark side, but chooses to use these themes as warnings for potential correction, rather than statements about innate depravity. Thus, Haydn does not entirely neglect the common biblical subject (so prominent in Genesis 2) of dangers inherent in knowing too much. But he certainly reduces the point to a barest possible minimum. Just before the final chorus, the tenor soloist sings a quick passage in the least impassioned narrational style of “dry recitative” (with only keyboard and continuo as accompaniment): “O happy pair and happy still might be if not misled by false conceit, ye strive at more than is granted and desire to know more than you should know.” Modern listeners might also be discomfited by Eve’s promises of obedience to Adam in their second duet (from Milton, not from Genesis 1)—even though her inspiration follows Adam’s promise to “pour new delights” and “show wonders everywhere” with every step they take together upon this newly created world. We can’t, after all, impose the sensibilities of 2000 upon 1798. And who would want to defend 2000 before any truly just court of universal righteousness?

  But while we identify Haydn’s text as a creation myth in the most expansive and optimistic spirit of love and wonder for all works of earth and life, we must also confront a historical puzzle. Haydn began his work in 1794, and the first performance took place in 1798 (with Haydn conducting and none other than Antonio Salieri, the unfairly maligned villain of Amadeus, at the harpsichord). Such an expansively optimistic text seems entirely out of keeping with the conservative gloom that spread throughout Europe after the excesses of the French Revolution, culminating in the guillotining of the guillotiner Robespierre in 1794. Moreover, the spread of romanticism in music and art, for all its virtues, scarcely sanctioned such old-fashioned joy in the objective material world.

  The apparent solution to this problem rests upon an interesting twist. Haydn wrote The Creation as a result of inspiration received during trips to London, particularly in 1791, when he heard (and felt overwhelmed by) the power of Handel’s oratorios. This source has always been recognized, and the pleasure of singing Haydn’s Creation lies at least partly in the wonderful Handelian anachronisms included amid the lush classical and near-romantic orchestration. But Handel’s posthumous influence may have run far deeper. The source of Haydn’s text has always presented a mystery. Who wrote it, and how did Haydn obtain the goods and the rights? (We know that Haydn’s friend, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, translated the text into German from an English original—but whence the original?) Latest scholarship indicates that the text may have been written for Handel more than forty years earlier (Handel died in 1759), but never set by the greatest master of the oratorio, and therefore still available for Haydn two generations later.

  Such an earlier source would solve the problems of content. For if Haydn’s libretto really dates from the 1740s or 1750s, then the incongruities disappear. The text becomes a document composed during the heart of the Enlightenment, an intellectual and artistic movement that embodied all the optimism, all the pleasure in nature’s beauty, all the faith that a combination of human reason and moral potential might ensure both goodness and justice. The text of The Creation reflects this hopeful world, when Linnaeus worked in Uppsala, classifying all plants and animals for the glory of God and the knowledge of men, while Ben Franklin promoted the virtues of fire departments, public libraries, and universities in Philadelphia. The Enlightenment may have veered toward naïveté in its optimism about human and worldly possibilities, but the goals still seem attainable—and we will never get there if we lose the hope and spirit. Ya gotta believe.

  The difficulty of this task (so well epitomized in some great words of another famous Enlightenment thinker as the actual provision for all people of our unalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”) requires that all facets of human achieve
ment be mobilized in the great work. We will surely need the benefits of science—if only to feed, and keep healthy, all the people that science has permitted us to rear to adulthood. We will also need—and just as much—the moral guidance and ennobling capacities of religion, the humanities, and the arts, for otherwise the dark side of our capacities will win,, and humanity may perish in war and recrimination on a blighted planet.

  Art and science provide different and equally legitimate perspectives on the same set of saving subjects, and we need both approaches. Thus, for me as a scientist who has devoted a full career to the study of evolution (but who also fancies himself a serious and competent choral singer, and not just an occasional duffer at a Saturday-night piano bar), I see no contradiction, but only harmony, in integrating the final line from a great work of science, a statement that Darwin chose to make in personal terms of poetic awe, with Haydn’s decision to write an inspirational choral work based on an Enlightenment version of a creation myth that seems to use (in its different way) the same subject of Darwin’s scientific studies. The factual truth of evolution cannot conflict with the search for meaning embodied in a good creation myth. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin wrote. And, as Haydn said, “the heavens are telling the glory of God.”

  The task before us remains so daunting that we need to find tools beyond the integration of science, morality, and all the other separate patches on what I like to designate as our coat of many colors called wisdom. We also need symbols to intensify and epitomize this grand effort that, ultimately, must lead us all to hang together or hang separately (a great pun by the Enlightened Mr. Franklin). Given my propensities and proclivities, I do not know how, in this symbolic sense, I could have spent the inception of the millennium in a more meaningful way. And so, Mrs. Ponti, my truly beloved fifth grade teacher, I dedicate this version of “what I did on . . .” to your memory and to the inspiration that you so freely provided with your love and skill.

  I spent the millennial day that, in long tradition and the persisting fears of some folks, would mark the end of the world, by sharing and blending my efforts with a group of colleagues who had worked long and hard to prepare a performance of the greatest musical work ever written about the joyful, glorious, and optimistic beginnings of an order that can end (on our time scale) only if we fail to join the spirit of Darwin and Haydn, thereby potentiating all the saving graces of our nature. We express this union in many ways. The last words of Genesis 1 do not represent my personal choice, but who can doubt the nobility of the sentiments, and what person of goodwill can fail to be horrified by the prospect (and therefore be inspired to devote some personal effort toward prevention) that one species might eviscerate something so wonderful that we did not create, and that was not fashioned for us? “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”

  20

  The Narthex of San Marco and the Pangenetic Paradigm

  I DO REALIZE THAT THE BIGGEST OF ALL BOSSES LABORED with maximal sweat and diligence during those first six days. So “perhaps it would be wise not to carp or criticize,” as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Chief of Police once remarked in a different context (in The Pirates of Penzance). Still, I must confess that I’ve always been puzzled by the relative paltriness of accomplishment on the second day, for the import of this episode seems almost derisory compared with the scope of all others—light created on the first day (in the grandest of all opening acts, and especially necessary for noticing any subsequent event); earthly land, waters, and even plants in a foretaste of life on the third day; sun and moon, with stars as a mere afterthought, to populate the heavens on the fourth day; animal denizens of the sea and air on the fifth day; inhabitants of the land, culminating in our exalted selves, on the sixth day.

  But on this second day of relative nodding, God limited his efforts to installing a plane of division (called the “firmament” in the King James Bible, the “sky” in many modern translations, but closer to a thin metal plate in the original Hebrew), simply to distinguish the water above the plate from the water below. Big deal. Compared with all the makings and shakings of the other days, this second effort created nothing new, but only constructed an artificial division within an existing homogeneity. Did God need a breather right after his initial effort in the creation business? Did he have to pause after the first step in order to recoup his courage, or to gain a second wind for pushing through to the end?

  The light dawned on my pugnacious ignorance (thus validating the product of the first day) several years ago when I studied the thirteenth-century mosaics of this creation story (Genesis 1, of course) in the south dome of the narthex (the covered western porch just in front of the main entrance) of the great cathedral of San Marco in Venice—thus also explaining the first part of my cryptic title (I shall soon shed light on the second and even more cryptic part, but all in good time).

  In this wonderfully animistic set of scenes, radiating downward in three circles from the apex of the dome, each episode of creation features the youthful, beardless God of Greek and Byzantine traditions doing his appointed tasks for the day, while an appropriate number of angels either help out or look on (Otto Demus’s authoritative four-volume work on the San Marco mosaics argues convincingly that the scenes of the creation dome derive from an illuminated fifth-century Greek manuscript of the Book of Genesis).

  In the scene for the second day—and begging an authorial pass for my irreverent anachronism in explication—God goes bowling to divide the waters by rolling a globe horizontally through the middle of the homogeneous mass, thus carving a barrier to define “above” and “below.” The two angels of the day stand awkwardly at the right of the scene, more in the way (for the waters remain undivided to their right) than as auxiliaries in this case. (Demus explains that the mosaic has been heavily restored, and that the separation may originally have extended all the way to the right edge.)

  But I only understood my error when I backed up a scene to contemplate the work of the first day. God, again at the left edge, creates light by making a vertical division this time—with a dark globe representing night at the right edge, and the light globe of day closer to God on the left. The single angel of the first day, in a lovely touch, bears one luminescent wing in the realm of light above his right arm (the angel faces us, so his right arm lies in the left domain of light), and a dark wing in the nighttime of his left side. Six rays, representing the work of creation’s six days, emanate from each globe.

  Mosaic from the narthex of San Marco in Venice showing the second day of creation—as God rolls a ball horizontally to divide the waters above the firmament from waters below the firmament.

  And now I grasped the maximal depth of my error. I had demoted the second day because I had failed to appreciate the controlling theme of the entire story! I had always regarded the narrative of Genesis 1 as a creation myth based upon the theme of sequential addition—as I think most people do, given our current cultural preferences for viewing history, at least for technological achievements, as a tale of accreting progress, and as my childhood instructors, both secular and religious, had certainly taught: light on day one, something about water on day two, land and plants on day three, sun and moon on day four, birds and fishes on day five, humans and other mammals on day six.

  But the mosaics in the San Marco narthex clearly expressed a quite different organizing theme in their charmingly naïve iconography. At least for the first three days, these mosaics tell a story about the successive separation and precipitation of concrete items from an initial inchoate mass that must have contained, right from the beginning, all the seeds or prototypes for later realizations—in other words, a tale of progressive differentiation from unformed potential, rather than successive addition, piece by novel piece, in a sequence of increasing excellence.

  The first day of creation. God (at left edge) divides darkness (to the right) from light (to the left). The angel in the middle has one wing in the realm of li
ght, the other in the realm of darkness. In the scene to the left, a dove flies above the initial chaos and void before God’s first act of division.

  The striking device of drawing these divisions as alternating vertical and horizontal planes illustrates the case in a wonderfully direct way—thus emplacing, in a million mosaic tesserae, the organizing theme that, I feel confident, the author of the text intended, and that artistic translators understood and expressed for at least a millennium or two before changes in Western culture blurred this context and subtly led us to read the story in a very different manner.

  The tale of creation in San Marco’s narthex begins in the undifferentiated chaos of full potential as, in the first scene, a dove (representing the spirit of God) flies above homogeneous waves of inchoate stuff. Then the divisions begin: a vertical plane on the first day to separate light from darkness; a horizontal plane (the bowling ball through the waters) to separate rain from rivers on the second day; and, in confirming the theme of separation rather than addition, both a horizontal and a vertical strip of land on the third day, as God differentiates the earth below the firmament into its primary components of land and sea.

  Further divisions on the third day of creation. A vertical strip differentiates the earth below the firmament into land and water.

  With this different theme of separation and coagulation in mind, I could finally understand two aspects of the story that had long puzzled me when I erroneously regarded Genesis 1 as a myth about creation by progressive addition imbued with increasing excellence. First, and to resolve my opening conundrum, the doings on day two no longer seem anomalous, for the separation of waters becomes, under the model of differentiation, an eminently worthy and weighty episode in a coherent tale. Most prescientific conceptions of basic elements regarded water (along with earth, fire and air, at least in the classical Greek formulation) as one of the few fundamental principles of cosmic construction. The ancestors of our cultures did not understand that ocean surfaces evaporated to form clouds that return water as rain. Thus, for them, the location of life-giving water in two maximally separated realms—at their feet in rivers and seas, and from the upper reaches of the sky as rain—must have generated a major puzzle demanding resolution at the fundamental level of creation itself. The work of the second day achieves full centrality and importance once we recognize the story of Genesis 1 as a tale about differentiation, and once we acknowledge water as both a primary element and a source of all sustenance. The separation of life-giving waters into two great reservoirs, located at opposite poles in the geography of existence, certainly merits a full day of God’s creative effort.