In 1924 some bones believed to be Rafinesque’s were moved from an unmarked grave in downtown Philadelphia back to Transylvania, where they were entombed in a cube-shaped concrete vault in Old Morrison Hall.
In January 1969 my mother began the second semester of her freshman year at Transy. That month Old Morrison burned to the ground, leaving untouched only the concrete cube, with its bronze plaque inside reading, HONOR TO WHOM HONOR IS OVERDUE.
In 1987 the foremost modern scholar of Rafinesque’s works, Charles Boewe, proved to the satisfaction of most reasonable persons that the bones in Rafinesque’s tomb are those of a sixty-two-year-old pauper named Mary Passamore, who died of consumption in 1847. The Philadelphia exhumers hadn’t dug deep enough.
* * *
The Philadelphia years were a long decline punctuated by spasms of frantic, fruitless activity. He tried to start a Utopia in Illinois. He tried to get funding for a Beagle-style voyage to go around the world collecting specimens. Of course, he also, during these years, deciphered “dot-bar numeration,” the counting system used in the Mayan glyphs, though his paper on that subject was ignored so utterly that a French abbé spent a chunk of his life recracking it forty years later, never having so much as heard of Rafinesque (who had also predicted, correctly, that the Mayan script would eventually be solved by connecting it with some language still spoken in a part of Mexico. One of his pathetic deathbed letters was to John Lloyd Stephens, the presidentially appointed Maya man, begging Stephens to throw him a bone and credit him for having realized this, about the living-language angle, years before Stephens himself. The latter took no action).
His letters get sadder and sadder. He’s asking for money; at one point he’s asking for bail money. He writes to Torrey, in a last, tantalizing statement on evolution: “My last work on Botany if I live [will contain] genealogical tables of the gradual deviations having formed one actual Sp[ecies]. If I can not perform this, give me credit for it, and do it yourself upon the plan that I trace.”
He wrote to his daughter, Emilia, begging her to come to him. She wrote back these sweet, effusive letters that basically said, “Who are you?”
He wrote to the Cherokee Nation asking how his name should be pronounced in their language.
They replied to him. “La-hwi-ne-ski” was the answer.
Did he ever forget Mary Holley? Is she the woman he speaks of in a late poem?
But when he found the lovely maid entwining
The poet’s wreath, a cruel fate decreed
She should be torn from him.
In solitude He wanders yet thro’ life; but tries to soothe
His lonely way, by culling mental blooms …
One must assume so. She’s the only woman with whom we see the American Rafinesque having affectionate interaction of even the very, as he would put it, “wannest” variety. We know he kept in touch with her during the Philadelphia years, because she’s included in a list of his botanical correspondents, her name given as “Mary Holley born Snowden.” Who knows what they’d shared—some kind of mystical communion, surely. In his will, he left his immortal soul to “the Supreme Ruler of Millions of Worlds moving through space.” Mary Holley, after drawing her last breath on her New Orleans deathbed, gasped, “I see worlds upon worlds rolling into space. Oh, it is wonderful!” (Those were better than Rafinesque’s last words, “Time renders justice to all at last,” which were either grouchy or untrue.)
He did not fear death, which came agonizingly from stomach cancer. Last in his list of misplaced virtues is this: his natural science makes a marvelous metaphysics. He was among the first to appreciate the implications of humanity’s rediscovery of itself as an animal, as an actual physical projection over eons of the material universe. “Nature does not make leaps,” had said Leibniz, one of Rafinesque’s guides. If we are part of nature, then we are synonymous with it at the metaphysical level, every bit as much as the first all-but-inorganic animalcules that ever formed a chain of themselves in the blow hole of a primordial sea vent. There is no magic rod that comes down three hundred thousand years ago and divides our essence from the material world that produced us. This means that we cannot speak in essential terms of nature—neither of its brutality nor of its beauty—and hope to say anything true, if what we say isn’t true of ourselves.
The importance of that proposition becomes clear only when it’s reversed: What’s true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. Nature became conscious in us, perhaps in order to observe itself. It may be holding us out and turning us around like a crab does its eyeball. Whatever the reason, that thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious. One cannot look in the mirror and rationally deny this. It experiences love and desire, or thinks it does. The idea is enough to render the Judeo-Christian cosmos sort of quaint. As far as Rafinesque was concerned, it was just hard science. As for what this thing, this world, is—who knows. That part is mysterious. “She lives her life not as men or birds,” said Rafinesque, “but as a world.”
Mystery is not despair. The sheer awe inspired by Rafinesque’s vision makes a sufficiently stable basis for ethics, philosophy, love, and the conclusion that a fleeting consciousness is superior to none, precisely because it suggests magnificent things we cannot know, and in the face of which we simply lack an excuse not to assume meaning.
Rafinesque perfected his variant of this honorable philosophy while botanizing in the literal backyards of my childhood, examining ruderal plants I’ve known all my life, and so I have appropriated it from him, with minor tweaks. It works perfectly as a religion. Others talk about God, and I feel we can sit together, that God is one of this thing’s masks, or that this thing is God.
To quote Robert Penn Warren (who set part of his best novel at Transy in the nineteenth century), “Can you think of some ground on which that may be gainsaid?”
UNNAMED CAVES
Henry Louis Mencken famously called the American South a “Sahara of the Bozarts,” the joke being that’s what a Southerner hears when somebody says beaux arts. He was exaggerating, but even at the time, many Southerners conceded the point: the region has always produced its geniuses, but nobody ever referred to it as an incubator of civilization.
Which makes it stranger and more wonderful that over the last few decades, archaeologists in Tennessee—working for the most part in secrecy and silence—have been unearthing an elaborate tradition of prehistoric cave art, which dates back thousands of years. The pictures are found in dark-zone sites—places where the Native American people who made the artwork did so at personal risk, crawling meters or, in some cases, miles underground with cane torches—as opposed to sites in the “twilight zone,” speleologists’ jargon for the stretch, just beyond the entry chamber, that is exposed to diffuse sunlight. A pair of local hobby cavers, friends who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, found the first of these sites in 1979. They’d been exploring an old root cellar and wriggled up into a higher passage. The walls were covered in a thin layer of clay sediment left there during long-ago floods and maintained by the cave’s unchanging temperature and humidity. The stuff was still soft. It looked at first as though someone had finger-painted all over, maybe a child—the men debated even saying anything. But the older of them was a student of local history. He knew some of those images from looking at drawings of pots and shell ornaments that emerged from the fields around there: bird-men, a dancing warrior figure, a snake with horns. Here were naturalistic animals, too: an owl and a turtle. Some of the pictures seemed to have been first made and then ritually mutilated in some way, stabbed or beaten with a stick.
That was the discovery of Mud Glyph Cave, which was reported all over the world and spawned a book and a National Geographic article. No one knew quite what to make of it at the time. The cave’s “closest parallel,” reported The Christian Science Monitor, “may be caves in the south of France which contain Ice Age art.” A t
eam of scholars converged on the site. The glyphs, they determined—by carbon-dating charcoal from half-burned slivers of cane—were roughly eight hundred years old and belonged to the Mississippian people, ancestors to many of today’s Southeastern and Midwestern tribes. The imagery was classic Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), meaning it belonged to the vast but still dimly understood religious outbreak that swept the eastern part of North America around A.D. 1200. We know something about the art from that period, having seen all the objects taken from graves by looters and archaeologists over the years: effigy bowls and pipes and spooky-eyed, kneeling stone idols; carved gorgets worn by the elite. But these underground paintings were something new, an unknown mode of Mississippian cultural activity. The cave’s perpetually damp walls had preserved, in the words of an iconographer who visited the site, an “artistic tradition which has left us few other traces.”
That was written twenty-five years ago, and today there are more than seventy known dark-zone cave sites east of the Mississippi, with new ones turning up every year. A handful of the sites contain only some markings or cross-hatching (lusus Indorum was the antiquarians’ term: the Indians’ whimsy), but others are quite elaborate, much more so than Mud Glyph. Several are older, too. One of them, the oldest so far, was created around 4000 B.C. The sites go from Missouri over to Virginia, and from Wisconsin to Florida, but the bulk are in middle Tennessee, and of those a greater number exist on or near the Cumberland Plateau, which runs at a southwest slant down the eastern part of the state, like a great wall dividing the Appalachians from the interior.
That’s what it was, for white settlers who wanted to cross it in wagons. If you read about Daniel Boone and the Cumberland Gap, and how excited everyone got in the eighteenth century to have found a natural pass (known, incidentally, to every self-respecting Indian guide) through the “Cumberland Mountains,” those writers mean the plateau. Technically, it’s not a mountain or a mountain chain, though it can look mountainous. A mountain is when you smash two tectonic plates together and the leading edges rise up into the sky like sumo wrestlers lifting up from the mat. A plateau, on the other hand, sits above the landscape because it has remained in place while everything else washed away. On the high plain of the Cumberland Plateau lies an exposed horizontal layer of erosion-resistant bedrock, a “conglomerate” (or pebbly) sandstone, which keeps the layers directly underneath from dissolving and flowing into the rivers, or at least holds back the process. It can do only so much. Fly above the plateau in a small plane, and you can see that it’s a huge disintegrating block, calving house-size boulders as it’s inwardly shattered by seasonal “frost-wedging” or carved away by streams that crash down through the porous strata. Water bursts from steep bluff faces: the sides of a plateau don’t slope like a mountain’s do, they shear away or tumble down at the edges. Those cliffs create a physical barrier for species, meaning you get different animals and vegetation on top and at the bottom. The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt called that a requirement for a true plateau, this eco-segregation (Humboldt liked to chide his colleagues for playing fast and loose with the term plateau).
The Cumberland is a special kind of plateau; it’s a karst plateau, and karst means caves. Really it means cave country, or what you get when there’s plenty of exposed limestone and rain. The term karst is derived from the name of another plateau, the Kraška Planota in Slovenia. There geologists made the first studies of what they termed Karstphänomen, the unique and in some cases bizarre hydrologic features associated with karstic terrain: sinkholes, blind or pocket valleys, coves, and subterranean lakes. Among the most famous Karstphänomen is the so-called disappearing stream. You have a big rushing stream that runs along for a million years, then suddenly a hole is dissolved in its limestone bed, and the entire flow goes underground, into a cave system, never to return. It can happen in an instant: people have watched it happen. A classic disappeared stream, all but a ghost river, can be seen on the Cumberland Plateau; its eternally dry bed winds on through the forest like a white-cobbled highway.
The plateau is positively worm-eaten with caves. Pit caves, dome caves, big wide tourist caves, and caves that are just little cracks running back into the stone for a hundred feet—not long ago, explorers announced the discovery of Rumbling Falls Cave, a fifteen-mile (so far) system that includes a two-hundred-foot vertical drop and leads to a chamber they call the Rumble Room, in which you could build a small housing project. All that is inside the plateau and in the limestone that skirts its edges.
* * *
We were flying along the top of it in a white truck. The archaeologist Jan Simek, whom I’d just met in a parking lot, was driving (Jan as in Jan van Eyck, not Jan as in Brady). He’s a professor at the University of Tennessee who, for the past fifteen years, has led the work on the Unnamed Caves, as they’re called to protect their locations. We were headed to Eleventh Unnamed. It was a clear day in late winter, so late it had started to look and feel like earliest spring. Simek (pronounced SHIM-ick) is a thick-chested guy in his fifties—bushy dark hair mixed with iron gray, sportsman’s shades. I’d expected a European from the name, but he grew up in California. His Czech-born father was a Hollywood character actor, Vasek Simek: he played Soviet premiers, Russian chess players, ambiguously “foreign” scientists. Jan looks like him. His manner is one of friendly sarcasm. He makes fun of my sleek black notebook and offers to get me a waterproof one like his, the kind geologists use.
Simek was unaware of the caves when he came to UT in 1984. Only a few sites had been uncovered at the time. His best-known work, the research that built his career, was all in France—not in the celebrated art caves, but at Neanderthal habitation sites. Simek had spent close to a decade working at Grotte XVI, a Paleolithic cave in the Dordogne—a wide-mouthed open cave that had accumulated tremendously deep cultural deposits, and where the stratigraphy was all twisted, owing to the complicated hydrologic history of the cave. You couldn’t dig it like a normal place. A twenty-thousand-year-old artifact could show up below one that was thirty thousand years old. And when you hit those very deep strata, they’re so compressed, so thin, you end up looking for smearings of dark soil: Neanderthal fire pits. “I really do soil chemistry,” Simek said. His work at Grotte XVI has played a major role in the movement, over the last decade, to rehabilitate the Neanderthal, showing that they were more like us than we’d suspected, smarter and socially more complex (indeed, they are us: we know now from DNA research conducted in Germany that most of us have Neanderthals in our family trees).
Simek had heard talk of Mud Glyph, however—the book on the cave, edited by his colleague Charles Faulkner, was coming out just as he arrived. When the task fell to him, as a new hire, of recruiting grad students for the TVA to use in its natural-resource surveys, he made a point of reminding them, before they went out, to check the walls of any caves they found. After years of doing this to no effect, some students burst into his office one evening, talking excitedly about a cave they’d seen, overlooking the Tennessee River, with a spider drawn on one of the walls inside. They competed to sketch it for him, how its body had hung upside down on the wall, with the eyes in front. Simek went to the shelf and pulled down a book. He spread it open to a picture of a Mississippian shell gorget with an all but identical spider in the center. “Did it look like this?” he asked.
That was First Unnamed Cave, “still my heart cave,” Simek says. When I visited it with him he showed me the spider. Also a strange, humanish figure, with its arms thrown back above its head and long flowing hair. First Unnamed happens to be the youngest of the Unnamed Caves. Its images date from around 1540. The Spanish had been in Florida for a few decades already, slaving. Epidemics were moving across the Southeast in great shattering waves. De Soto and his men came very near that cave in their travels, just at that time. The world of the people who made those glyphs, the Late Mississippian, was already coming apart.
We turned onto a side road, then onto another, more o
vergrown one, then started hairpinning down into a valley. Only at the bottom, climbing out and gazing around, did I get a sense of what we’d descended into—it looked as if a giant had taken an ax and planted the blade a mile deep in the ground, then ripped it away. The forested walls went up, up, up on all sides. We started walking across the little narrow patchwork fields, the farm of the people who owned and protected this place. Jan had called them to say we were coming. Overhead was a wedge of blue sky, with storm clouds starting to mass at one end. Thunder filled the coves.
We approached a grotto. A curving, amphitheater-like hillside went down to a basin. It was Edenic. “No diver has ever been able to get to the bottom of that thing,” Jan said, indicating the blue-black pool of water. Frogs plashed into it at the sound or sight of us. We stepped sideways, following a half-foot-wide path through ferns and violet phlox, little white tube-shaped flowers whose name I didn’t know.
Following a ledge around the pool, we reached the entrance. Jan struggled with the lock on the gate. It looked like a major piece of metal. I wondered if they weren’t overdoing it—that was before I’d heard all the stories of what some Tennesseans will do to get into caves they’ve been told not to enter, using dynamite, blowtorches, hitching their trucks to cave gates and attempting to pull them out of hillsides whole. Jan sent me back to the truck for motor oil, to lubricate the lock. I went gladly, jogging no faster than I had to back through that sanctuary, my pristine white caving helmet bouncing on my hip.
There survives a record of the first whites ever to see this place. In 1905 a local inhabitant came upon the journal of his great-grandfather, one of the original party who’d settled the valley in the 1790s, and he wrote it up for the paper. They’d journeyed from Maryland, men and women and children, with hopes of forming a tiny Utopia here, a community that would have its own laws. Their leader was a man named Greenberry—Greenberry Wilson. They brought a handful of slaves, who had musical instruments, and every now and then, supposedly, Greenberry would call a tune. “Old Cato gives the wink and the melody of old Zip Coon swells up on the forest air. The wild beasts listen at a distance, the dusky Indian maid approaches and looks upon her white sisters’ enjoyment with envious eyes.” The descriptions are fanciful like that. It’s not clear to what extent you can trust them as transcriptions. The great-grandson seems to have been a drinker. He tells the same stories in wildly different ways, in the same newspaper, weeks apart. He’s clearly mixing details from the old journal with his own dreamings. I think at one point he admits he’s doing that, then at another tries to conceal it. The reason we know there was an eighteenth-century journal at all, that this descendant didn’t invent the whole thing, is that he has the settlers say the cave was full of mummies. There’s no other way he could have known that in 1905.
Pulphead: Essays Page 19