Rachel Carson wrote: “Our origins are in the earth.” So there is in us a deep response to the natural universe, which is part of our being. “Our world, and the worlds around it and within it,” wrote Sy Montgomery a generation later, “are burning with the flames of intelligence that we cannot understand…
There are people whose eyes are more focused on that radiance, their ears are more attentive to the murmur of mountains and seas and trees, their inclinations to the world are tenderly related to our natural origin. Some of them become artists, some scientists, and others who cross boundaries who refuse to be separated, who know that to separate our ways of seeing is to keep us from experiencing all the best.
Growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a child so shy that he dreams of being able to communicate with bioluminescence, Ash Eliza Williams realized that, due to the lack of luciferin necessary for the language of light, the human animal has turned to its alchemical method of silent communication: art.
Inspired by “a fascination with other languages and forms of communication,” Williams draws on ancient zoology and geophysics, on 19th-century animal illustrations and graphic novels, to bring together the wonder that Rachel Carson insists is our heritage and our best defense to ourselves. What appears in the drawings and peaks are the “infinitely beautiful and most wonderful ways” that delighted Darwin – from bioluminescent moths to the bat (that organic triumph over the possible), from chlorophyll (that constant mystery of chemistry and chance) to clouds (those ever-present spells against serial subjects like indifference) – Emergency Creatures again Climate History.
One began as a book about Rachel Carson and instead became a series of long-lasting sketches about the lives of various creatures — a starling, a violet-eared waxbill, an orange fruit dove, a hickory tree — using the graphic novel format to explore their experience of time, “thinking,” Williams writes, “about the proliferation or impermanence of the creature.”
As enchanted as I am by this whole work, nothing pleases me more than the algae-painted songs of Williams, that extraordinary teacher of how to be a better person.
Stepping out of all that may be the most fruitful path one can have in the world – a curious but broad curiosity that, through the lens of small details, reveals the beauty of the big picture. “Everything is simpler than its parts,” noted physicist Willard Gibbs in what remains the leading koan of science, but it is only by approaching the parts, separate but connected by threads of endless communication, that we can touch the majesty and mystery of the whole.
