Darwin, Lincoln and Me:
A Series of Reflections

by John Styron

Part 1

The recent bi-centennial of their birth—Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, both born on February 12th, 1809—occasioned news stories and magazine features that set me to mulling. Of course, I’m prone to mulling. The cover story for February’s Smithsonian Magazine, “Twin Peaks,” by Adam Gopnik, particularly intrigued me. It’s a brief piece that sketches the outlines of how Lincoln and Darwin have so significantly shaped the modern world. I knew when I read it I’d be back when time availed for a deeper mull because Gopnik’s big picture helped put my little picture into better perspective—how Darwin and Lincoln have significantly shaped my own personal version of the modern world.

Two statements from Gopnik’s article highlight aspects of the world they entered and changed. To set up Lincoln’s impact, Gopnik writes, “’Democracy’ in the sense we mean it now was a fringe ideal of a handful of radicals. Even in America, the future of the democracy was unclear, in part because of the persistence of slavery.”

Gopnik sets the stage for Darwin like this: “The new science of geology was pressing back the history of the earth; old bones would start turning up; the new studies of the text of the Bible were pressing against a literal acceptance of biblical truth, too.”

That’s a glimpse of the big picture. To see my little picture will require meanders, as my mullings often do.

Darwin via Roberto Clemente

The last time I was seized with an overpowering urge to mull Darwin was during a business trip to Puerto Rico a few years ago. The purpose of the trip was actually to see two collectors of Roberto Clemente memorabilia, to interview Clemente’s widow, Vera, to familiarize myself with an exhibition at San Juan’s Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico that chronicled the baseball star/humanitarian martyr’s Latin American apotheosis. The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services (SITES) planned to use parts of the exhibition in a web based presentation I’d been hired to write, “Beyond Baseball: The Life of Roberto Clemente.”

The project and trip was partially a deep dive into “America’s Pastime,” and that viewed through the lens of Caribbean baseball which was like time-travel to a pre-gigantism, presumably pre-steroid past in American baseball. But then, all travel is time-travel because all places are places in time. My trip to Puerto Rico was especially rich in this sense because I was also tunneling into another dimension of time, time remembered. All of this together—and the sea—primed me for a Darwinian epiphany that would come late in the journey.

I chronicled my trip into the memory of Roberto and I share notes from my journal as reflections, not scientific field notes like Darwin made on the voyage of the HMS Beagle, but in the spirit of Lincoln and Darwin about whom Gopnik observes, “They particularized in everything, and their general vision rises from the details and the nuance, their big ideas from small sightings.”

March 7, 2004:
San Juan Beach Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico

The surf is crashing on the rocks of the narrow beach just outside the large open windows of the hotel restaurant and bar. It’s five in the afternoon on my fourth day in San Juan.

The waitress, who is cute and young, has been humming something that sounds vaguely like Latin pop to my gringo ears. She appears table-side with a Heineken. I’d ordered a Presidente. She is endearing as she admits her mistake and offers to bring the right beer but I say this is fine.

At about the same time, someone starts warming up the piano across the long room and I think how the music, something with more of a European and less Latin flavor strikes a relaxing chord somewhere deep in my gut. A few sips later, a choral group has gathered around the piano and starts vocal warm-ups, up and down the scales. Then they begin an a cappella arrangement of Ave Maria. It’s pleasant. I realize this must be the same group I had heard through my tenth floor window a couple of nights ago, very late, to the applause of guests on the deck. My guess, a college group from the States.

So it continues with my visit to Puerto Rico: much that is familiar, much that is misunderstood, a mix of Latin, world tourist, and outright American cultures.

Now outside on the beach. The sun is slanting golden and sea is breathtakingly beautiful, white spray and foam surging across brown green stones along the shore, swells of emerald in the distance fading into the unbroken horizon where the pale blue of the evening sky, absolutely cloudless, seems to fall far behind the curve of the earth, an endless backdrop to the merely ancient.

These “small sightings” were affecting me in ways I did not yet know. I believe it was William Sloan Coffin who said, “We can apprehend more than we can comprehend.” He was speaking of the mystery humans experience and name “God.” As of this point in the trip, I did not imagine that I was traveling such lofty heights, only that I might be apprehending the substance of particular moments as I traveled in time.

Part 2

March 7, 2004 (continued)

Photo by Mark Steele, Creative Commons License Agreement

Today has been a day for resting, not the hard pace I’ve been keeping for weeks now (sixteen hour days reading, writing, shooting video for another project, an existence outside the realm of my family’s reality, outside of a specific time/place, a shadow world I so often enter when the only points that matter on a clock or calendar are looming deadlines). 

I slept till ten this morning.  Fell asleep again at seven this evening.  Now it’s eleven.  The only work I’ve done today is drive from the hotel to Vera Clemente’s house to refine my written directions to make certain I can get there tomorrow morning.  Geez! I meant to call Ms. Clemente this evening and confirm our meeting.  I haven’t spoken with her for a week.  I’ll call first thing in the morning.

My scrappy directions to the Clemente home came from a ride I took on Saturday with Angel (pronounced “Ahn-hel”) (I’ll use his first name only).  My familiarity with Spanish is so poor that I spent the first week on the job communicating with the Smithsonian project director about someone he called “Ahn-hel” while I was reading documents that referred to ‘Angel;’ It took awhile for me to make the connection.

Little mysteries like these always emerge at the beginning of a new project—clients make assumptions about what I know and don’t know; I try to keep my mouth shut long enough to pick up the clues I need to fill in the blanks for myself without revealing the full scale of my ignorance where I think it can harm me.  I try to ask good questions to expose my ignorance where I think it can help me.

It is a process I love and hate.  The anxiety twists my guts when the connections refuse to come.  When the connections do come, when in the chaos I sense some division of darkness and light, some emergence of dry land from the deep, whether I am just finally putting the right face with the right name—historical or contemporary—or beginning to sense the trajectory of a story, the hair stands up on the back of my neck.  My chest feels full.  My speaking voice chokes off. Some other voice opens.

When I arrived in San Juan four days ago, I wasn’t there yet with Clemente.  I was exhausted and in the depths of trying to piece together a story—not the specifics of Clemente’s life and death, I’d read enough to know these.  But the story is never merely a sequence of events—this happened and then that happened.  There has to be some reason for telling it—some larger themes.  I hedge at the idea of calling this a “plotline;” it’s difficult, maybe impossible, to conceive of a plotline without imposing a plotline.  Is this the edge of fiction?

Gopnik writes of Darwin and Lincoln as writers, “They matter most because they wrote so well.”  He marvels at the clarity and accessibility of their prose.  Of Darwin specifically, Gopnik observes that The Origin of the Species, published by a house that also published novels and memoirs, might be the last (or only) seminal scientific work that an amateur can actually pick up and read.  Yet, obviously, the content is complex. Darwin “… uses insanely detailed technical arguments about the stamen of an orchid to pay off, many pages later, in a vast cosmic point about the nature of survival and change on a planetary time scale.”  Lincoln’s version of this, says Gopnik, is the detailed legal argument, and that both Lincoln and Darwin “have in common their hope, their faith, in plain English, that people’s minds and hearts can be altered by the slow crawl of fact as much as by the long reach of revelation.”

But, it seems to me, there is an element of revelation in Darwin.  He saw the connections.  Others had inched toward his insight.  Why did he see it whole?

I had decided to take the day for rest and reflection because, as yet, I could see nothing whole. 

 “The greatest act of faith a man can perform is the act we perform every night,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote.  “We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and our body into chaos and old night.  We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world: for all practical purposes we become dead men, in the sure and certain hope of glorious resurrection.”

After jotting a few notes in my journal, the window open to the sound and breeze of the sea, I went back to sleep hoping to wake with new vision.

Part 3

Photo by Steve Philp, Creative Commons License Agreement

For two days I’d been gulping down experiences and information. The previous day was with Angel, a Roberto Clemente memorabilia collector, primarily paper and mostly baseball trading cards. He has thousands of items, knows exactly why he has acquired each item, what each means to Clemente’s story. He also strikes me as a wonderful man, warm and generous. In his professional life, he’s an engineer who works on historical restoration projects. Currently he’s involved in restoring a sugar cane mill.

From my journal

Angel takes me on a drive in his GMC Envoy (“gray when it’s clean,” he laughed on the phone explaining which car to watch for in front of my hotel). First, we wriggle our way through Old San Juan with stops at a couple of bookstores. I’m looking for something to help me capture the flavor of the sugar cane industry of Clemente’s father’s era, the 1930s and ‘40s. The drive gives me a glimpse of the old fort—San Cristobal Castle, and the narrow brick streets that Angel says were originally built with bricks imported from Spain. Not only did the Spanish import bricks, but also limestone slabs for foundation stones. (I think I’ve read somewhere that these stones and bricks were used for ship ballast, then repurposed for construction, but I could be mistaken.)

The narrow streets are lined with brilliantly painted buildings of 16^th and 17^th century vintage filled with merchandise of 21^st century vintage with a decidedly tourist market in mind. There are antique shops as well, but the usual brand names, Ralph Lauren, Guess, & etc, are everywhere, except where there are places to eat and drink.

No less than six cruise ships float in San Juan Bay. Thousands of disembarked passengers stroll around Old San Juan with their mouths and wallets open—buying, eating, toting, and gawking at the oldest settlement within the territory of the United States.

I wondered what many different levels of experience these tourist-time-travelers might be having of Old San Juan. Some would, no doubt, have read the natural or social history of the Caribbean Islands, some would be familiar with maritime history and how the islands played into the European “discovery” of the new world, the history of settlement, slavery, war. Others, maybe from northern climes, might simply see a welcoming port of call and enjoy the warmth of the spring sun. All these realities exist side by side, occupying and shaping the same space. Most of us, I think, grasp little of what is before us.

Angel and I moved on to see some Clemente sites, two in particular: Ciudad Deportiva (Sports City) and a public monument in his honor both in his home barrio of Carolina. I hasten to add that I’m focusing on these two, but there are many. And I was astounded to learn that throughout the world there are schools, hospitals, highways, and coliseums that bear his name; dozens of books in several languages have recorded his story; his image has inspired sculptors, illustrators, and painters; he is the subject of pop art creations ranging from ceramic bobble heads to paintings and poems; his image appears on countless commemorative items including a coin in circulation in the African nation of Liberia. And, of course, Clemente’s likeness has graced commercial products ranging from baseball cards to breakfast cereal to beanie babies.

But the two particular sites I mentioned reveal why—beyond baseball—Clemente stirs such devotion.

Part 4

Photo by celerrimusClemente established Sports City with the hope of teaching kids, especially underprivileged kids, the virtues he believed were key to his own success in life, not just sport—hard work and personal integrity.  He also wanted a venue where Puerto Rico’s premiere athletes and teams could prepare for international competitions.  Sports city is just one example.  There is no end to the stories and examples of how Clemente gave himself to Puerto Rico.

Which leads to the public monument—a cenotaph at the Roberto Clemente Municipal Sports Complex. Cenotaphs are traditionally funerary monuments dedicated to heroes whose bodies are not recovered from the field of battle, so the very genre honors Clemente as one who gave all to his country.  The panels of this cenotaph picture the biography of Roberto.  An inscription reads: “Exemplary Citizen, Athlete, Philanthropist, Teacher—Hero of the Americas and the World.”

In the center panel the figure of Clemente stands holding a lamb in his arms, a distinctly Christ-like image. The scene bears powerful resemblance to some Renaissance painting—Roberto as savior in a Pirate uniform surrounded by the apostles of Puerto Rican baseball.

The exhibition catalog does not disabuse me of this impression.  It explains that the lamb is a central symbol from Puerto Rico’s coat of arms, and that Clemente spent his professional career lifting up his country.  The closest the exhibition catalog comes to making a specifically religious reference is this: “For the most devoted of his fans, the admiration has become almost a religion and its praise of Clemente the hero can only be compared to words traditionally reserved for saints.”

I suspected that the coat of arms has a history connected with Spain, Spain with Catholicism, Catholicism with the lamb. I knew I could be projecting my own religious orientation onto a purely secular—though mythologized—depiction of a national hero.  Even if I was right about the lineage of the lamb, I wouldn’t be writing about it.

Writing exhibition texts and media scripts for museums, I practice neutralizing my specifically Christian interpretations.  But this is difficult for me.  I was trained from birth to interpret all things from a specifically Christian point of view.  This heritage is a gift I am still unwrapping; to some degree, it is the type of gift that is what one makes of it.

I have little interest in a bobble-head Jesus.  I found myself thinking deeply about the difference between Clemente and Christ. 

Part 5

Photo by Timo HeuerIt would be another year or two before a client—the owner of a production company focused on museum media— actually asked me to neutralize my resume by deleting the reference to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The producer was putting together a team for pitching a big museum job.  We had collaborated successfully for many, many years, and this person is one of my closest friends.  We both knew that SBTS, when I was student there, was a vigorously academic invitation to nearly free inquiry.  Not any more.  Taken over by the fundamentalist faction of the Southern Baptist Convention, it has long been headed by a vocal Christian fundamentalist apparently supportive of the far right agenda of so-called Christian conservatives—one Dr. Al Moeller, who is often in the news. My name attached to that school could only raise questions in a potential client’s mind which, unfortunately, I very likely would never get the chance to answer. 

No one in this business has ever asked me to check my Christianity at the door.  But the museum world overlaps with an academic world that rests its credibility on factual scholarship presumed to be unbiased by religious faith or commitments to creeds.

Of course, I have seen enough to know that this is an impossible standard: people are subjective; sanity rests on a faith in some narrative, religious or otherwise; one’s narrative—received or consciously chosen—will always color interpretation.  But for the moment, Christianity enjoys limited legitimacy as a worldview in my work world; its narrative is assumed to have been debunked.

I have come to believe that Christianity in America is in cultural exile.  I would venture to say that most Americans who cast their eyes on the image of Roberto holding the lamb see no Christ image.  They see a tribute to one of the greatest Major Leaguers of all time, a Golden Glove and MVP award winner, the 11^th player in history to rack up 3,000 hits.  They see a tribute to a national hero.  But no religion, Christian or otherwise.

Are we missing a dimension of interpretation that has value? Could that be provided without proselytizing or insulting? Or without taming the history and theology to make it safe for tourists?

The introductory text for the original Clemente exhibition includes this quotation from famed Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s Man And His Symbols.

The universal hero myth…always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions (as if with magic spells) and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero.

If we try to see such a situation with the eyes of a believer, we can perhaps understand how the ordinary man can be liberated from his personal impotence and misery and endowed (at least temporarily) with an almost superhuman quality. Often enough such a conviction will sustain him for a long time and give a certain style to his life. It may even set the tone of a whole society.

Safe for tourists?  As long as they aren’t fundamentalists.

Jungian psychology is to Christ what Darwinism is to Creation—both are extra-biblical narratives that offer explanations for phenomena credited in scripture solely to God. 

I first encountered Jung—I’d guess—in an intro to psychology course as a freshman in college.  By that time, I’d spent four years in the Air Force and had begun a long, slow, and sometimes painful transition away from the fundamentalism of my rearing.  Working through a bachelor degree in Psych, I continued to find Jung disturbing, but also intriguing. He offered a way to describe the deep contours of human psychology, even spirituality, freed from the message-laden language of a specific religion. So he was clarifying and useful.

In time, I would decide that the universal hero myth resonated with my faith narrative, and did not have to be seen as contradictory.  Jung’s narrative ultimately is not about the substance of religion but about the human social mechanisms through which religion works.

As does baseball.

Part 6

Angel said, “I have a collection. José has a shrine.”

Photo by pacomexico

I’d spent the previous day with José, the owner of the other Clemente collection that had been used in the exhibition. He talked baseball pretty much non-stop as we drove around to see some sights and get his feel for the ground of Clemente’s rise.

Late in the afternoon we stopped for coffee at a little shop in Cidra, owned by a friend of José’s, twenty years his senior, ready to talk baseball. It was as if they continued a conversation that had been in progress for some time, probably years. I’m guessing, because they spoke mostly Spanish except for English interruptions intended as openings for me to join in if I could.

I couldn’t. I understood little of what they said, but could comprehend the spirit of the exchange—familiar, friendly, collegial though not without the playful tug of competing opinions and loyalties. It was the talk of baseball fans, like devotees of a religion; it was a moment of fellowship for them in a reality at once past, present, and future, thick with meaning.

The walls of the tiny coffee shop were plastered with Puerto Rican baseball memorabilia and framed newspaper clippings. Clemente’s image was prominent, but not overpowering in the array of local team pictures and players, if not sainted as Clemente is then at least heroes of the faith. As we were leaving, José pointed out three players besides Clement who moved on to the Majors in the U.S.

It is an amazing thing to consider that this little island has produced so many Major Leaguers per capita. But in Puerto Rico, baseball is not just a national pastime; it’s a national passion.

So I was way out of my league as a fan because, unlike many people I know, I’m not passionate about America’s pastime. I like it. I don’t love it, though I must admit I’m sometimes envious of people who do. They have these moments of fellowship; I’m only a spectator to their witness. At times, they might as well be speaking in Spanish, or in tongues, for all I understand, given the jargon and the intimate knowledge of leagues, teams, players, games—past, present, and the next big one coming up.

But there is something about sports, in general, that I do love. (And this is critical because I have to find something I love about a story in order to sustain certain agonies of contract writing.)

Growing up, I played baseball, basketball, and football, played hard, practiced diligently, idolized coaches, dreamed the common dream of professional stardom. And, though I was never very good, I enjoyed a few fleeting moments of ecstasy of a kind I’ve since found almost nowhere else. Searching for ways to describe it, I’ve often thought of Goethe’s Faust who ultimately moves past his deal with the devil, past his theological/intellectual and physical battles to reach a moment of true happiness.

What do I know of Goethe? I haven’t read him in years, decades. The Faust analogy may be over-blown or ill fitting. Yet, I can’t stop these free-associations. They often bring me trouble, but often enough open a path—a vision of the story I need to tell, and in a fresh way. I survive to get another project.

What I’m searching for is a way to describe the sports experience of entering so completely into a single moment in time that physical and intellectual consciousness seem to merge completely—awareness rises to a state of unawareness of either. Performance rises above your usual game. People describe it as playing over your head, out of your mind.

I’m remembering a few diving catches, inspired baskets, an interception—and all were moments when endless hours of training and preparation, will, physical ability, and intelligence somehow surrendered to the instant, became one; all else fell away; I felt myself watching, as if in slow motion, my own body move; at once hyper-conscious and completely unselfconscious, I watched myself make the play that I could not, in any other state of being, have made.

I’ve heard athletes describe this level of experience as being “in the zone,” and the great ones can get in it and stay in it regularly.

For me these moments were only flashes, like suddenly zooming to the top of Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs. At the top of his pyramid are the needs for self-actualization; meet these and you’re happy: morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts. All are present in truly great play.

But Maslow wasn’t addressing the occasional peak experience (at least not with this theory). What he had in mind, I think, were people who, once they have attained it, live life more than less on this self-actualized level. So maybe the theory doesn’t fit what I’m trying to define. I’m searching for a way to explain what happens in those peak moments in sport. I don’t know what it is exactly.

I do believe it is a spiritual experience. Not specifically religious; for me, not as rich, nuanced, dimensional, or mystifying. But the sports experience is powerful and, I imagine, widely accessible. If I, with my limited athletic ability, could get there, surely millions do.

If not the experience itself, the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else “in the zone” must be at least part of what accounts for the sports mania that has long gripped millions of people around the world. A player “in the zone” draws viewers into the zone, not literally yet more than symbolically. Or maybe not more. Maybe we are touching here on the power of symbols, which might be the genesis of religion.

Maybe this is why, in the Old Testament Hebrew faith, one high priest could enter the inner sanctum of the temple, the holy of holies, the dwelling place of the divine presence, and could be seen as offering prayers for all the people. Not that individuals among the faithful could not, or had not, experienced something of the mystery in person, but that they also wanted or needed religion, a social expression that publicly affirmed individual experience. That is, in part, the purpose of religious ritual. For devotees, ritual is not empty reenactment of the core story. It somehow becomes real-time experience.

It occurs to me that a sporting match is in many ways a ritualized reenactment of a core story—a hero myth—each game a battle, each season a campaign, each career a study in survival across year after year of unending conflict—there are always dragons to slay. The survival of the fittest, the Darwinian aspect, which implies death for the less fit, is necessary to the drama. As it is in Christian theology. Or redemption has no meaning.

I wasn’t consciously thinking on these things as I visited with José, but I was getting a clear impression of a survivor-soul. Baseball, to him, was more than a game. Clemente to him was more than a hero of the game. He was a redeemer.

Part 7

Photo by Joe M500From my Journal

The circumstances of José’s move to Puerto Rico were tragic. One of eight kids.  Dad in the Army, a Vietnam veteran, died suddenly in his mid-30s.  Nobody knows why.  Records were later destroyed in a fire.

‘It will always be a mystery, I guess,’ he tells me, his dark eyes crinkled a little at the edges and his barely graying black hair more noticeably thinning as he bows his head ever so slightly.

His mom got a life insurance settlement after they moved to the island.  They’d spread the kids out with aunts and uncles and grandparents.  Mom needed some help getting back on her feet.  When she got the insurance money she put every bit of it into a house.

This story came as we drove along and I asked why all the houses are built of concrete with slab roofs. 

’Hurricanes,’ he says.  ‘It’s the only thing that’ll stand.  We used to have more frame and traditional construction, but that’s pretty much all gone.  You see some people putting gabled tin roofs on their concrete houses but that will change with the next hurricane.’

I asked if his dad might have died from Agent Orange exposure. 

’We don’t know,’ he answered, ‘and Mom could not speak English well enough to go through all the stuff to find out.  So just came back here.’

I spent most of Saturday with him at his home in a very comfortable gated development between Caguas and Cidra.  (Turns out that the development was designed by an architect who is now a curator at the Art Museum of Puerto Rico where the Roberto exhibition was first mounted.  I know this because Angel and I bumped into him at lunch not far from the Roberto Clemente Coliseum.  I sensed that I was glancing into a community of connections, maybe glimpsing the tips of the iceberg, touching on the outer edges of a gigantic unseen presence.)

Behind José’s house, he had a small building, not what you would call an out building because it was well finished and maintained.  The outside décor matched the house.  It was kind of a clubhouse. Inside, one main room and bathroom.  The main room was about 16’ x 16’.  Except for two or three pieces of serious exercise equipment, the room was filled with his Clemente collection.  It was nearly all in bubble wrap.  That’s the way the museum returned it, and José, like Angel, wasn’t in a hurry to reorganize before finding out what the Smithsonian would want to use.

So José’s “shrine” was not intact when I visited it. 

“I have pictures,” he explained, “I know where every piece goes.”

The photos show how his stuff was displayed in the clubhouse before the exhibition, indeed, shrine-like.

From my Journal

His collection—hundreds, maybe thousands of items—includes baseball cards, stacks of Clemente figurines, models of Pittsburgh stadiums, from Forbes Field to Three Rivers to PNC Park (or whatever it is called now), posters, framed prints, shadow boxes, jersey’s, commemoratives of all sorts, a Roberto Clemente signature model bat that he found being used at a batting age where he told the owner, ‘You can let me pay you for this or I’m just going to walk out of here with it, but one way or another I’m going to have this bat.’

José is in his mid-40s and is clearly focused on playing ball (softball now, no longer baseball) for as long as his body will let him.  He is muscled and tanned.  Not a big guy, maybe 5’ 7”, and makes more than one comment that leads me to imagine he thinks his size is part of what kept him from a shot at the majors.

He has two kids, a boy and a girl.  The son is only 3, the daughter, I believe, is 13.  Of his wife, José observed, ‘She can’t understand why I spend so much time on baseball.’

‘She knew it, surely before you married,’ I quipped.

‘That’s exactly what I tell her,’ he smiled, ‘But that doesn’t do much good.’

José is intense.  He is openly competitive.  His dark eyes burn with a deep passion that comes quickly to the surface when he speaks of Clemente—especially when I asked about Clemente’s televised message from the Pirate’s locker room just after winning the 1971 World Series in which Clemente was named Series MVP.  Clemente spoke in Spanish to his mother and fans at home before he spoke in English to his fans on American TV.  José stunned me with this: ‘The first thing he said was, “First, I ask for my mother’s blessing.  And then I would like to say hello to all my fans in Puerto Rico.” For Puerto Ricans this was a chest-bursting moment of pride.’

For José, I thought, it was a moment of redemption.

Part 8

Photo by glindsay65Angel remembered Clemente’s interview a little differently from José. “First he says to the newsman, I think it was Bob Prince, ‘With your permission I would first like to speak to my fans in Puerto Rico,’ and then he spoke. Angel stressed Clemente’s courtesy, verbally underlining the phrase, “with your permission.” 

“The moment was, ah, more than my heart can hold,” Angel nearly whispered, pulling his hands to his chest. 

According to the exhibition catalog, Clemente said, “First, I would like to say something in Spanish to my mother and father in Puerto Rico. Primero quisiera decir algo en español a mi madre y mi padre en Puerto Rico. En el dia más grande de mi vida, para loas nenes la bendición mia y que mis padres me echen la bendición…”

After this, he addressed the English speaking television audience.

In his greatest moment of glory to date, the first thing Clemente did was to remember his family. That he did so in his mother tongue was a way of remembering his country.

It was by no means a first for Clemente; he had established a history of staying true to his Puerto Rican roots and his personal values. Again, from the exhibition catalog: “Roberto Clemente, honoring his parental surname, not only felt solidarity with the weak and discriminated against but also became a militant defender of his rights and the rights of others. In one of his first games as a professional he protested angrily when the fans yelled ‘Nigger!’ at on of his teammates and the man received the racist insult without reacting. With the same passion he defended players’ rights to demand better working conditions and benefits. And so Clemente became, without anyone’s asking, a union leader in the incipient Major League Players Association.

Some members of the U.S. press were rude to Clemente or scornful of him because he was black and some made fun of him because of his accent.

As a fighter, Roberto neither gave nor asked quarter. That is perhaps why his frankness and intolerance for injustice earned him antipathy from influential sectors of U.S. baseball, especially in the media. Among his many confrontations with sportswriters in the States, this one from 1969 is memorable: ‘The farther away you writers stay, the better I like it. You know why? Because you’re trying to create a bad image of me … you do it because I’m black and Puerto Rican, but I’m proud to be Puerto Rican.’

In 1970, after Roberto Clemente Night in Pittsburgh, Clemente told reporters:

In a moment like this, you can see a lot of years in a few minutes. You can see everything firm and you can see everything clear. I don’t know if I cried but I am not ashamed to cry. I would say a man never cries from pain or disappointment. But if you know the history of our island, you ought to remember we’re a sentimental people. I don’t have words to say how I feel when I step on that field and know so many are behind me, and know that to many I represent my island and Latin America.

Clemente wasn’t the first Puerto Rican to make the Big Leagues. Hiram Bithorn, a right-hander, made his pitching debut with the Chicago Cubs in 1942. Bithorn was white. Clemente was the first black Puerto Rican to make the Majors.

I’m sorely tempted now to burrow into the racial history of baseball and through that into the ugly history of racism—particularly in America—and then to meditate upon the grip that notions of white supremacy have held on American society. But not yet. I will doubtlessly dig more deeply into racism once this “Darwin, Lincoln, and Me” mull finally gets around to Lincoln.

For now, let’s just think about the words of Casey Stengel, one of the greatest baseball strategists of all time, who evaluated Clemente as “…the best right fielder I’ve seen in my fifty years in baseball.”

Not the best “black” right fielder. Simply the best.

Clemente had joined the ranks of non-white players who followed Jackie Robinson—Willy Mays, Zoilo Versalles, and Juan Marichal, to name a few of Roberto’s contemporaries—in crushing the myth of white supremacy in baseball.

Putting aside valid critiques of the concept of “meritocracy’ in America, what happened in baseball became a high profile exemplar for the society at large—merit, not race, should win the day. This is, in some sense, a Darwinian concept that finally came to bear through the workings of free-market capitalism, as Darwinian as any system I can think of. Puerto Rico, long a venue of play for off-season Major Leaguers and Negro Leaguers, developed local pools of highly skilled players of world-class competitiveness. And they could be employed for less money. In market parlance, this is known as “a value.”

Once social conditions in the States ripened adequately, economics trumped racism in professional baseball. Lower cost, high quality players began to take the field. Clearly, economics is only part of the story. But it is a real part.

Undoubtedly, the first white spectators to be vicariously drawn into “the zone” through the heroics of non-white players found themselves going reluctantly. I wonder if the experience is analogous in any way to that of the 18^th century white slaveholders in the American South who, especially during the Second Great Awakening, found that black people could comprehend the Gospel message and be changed by it—just like the whites. 

I am always moved by stories of blindness based on pre-cognition, or received wisdom, which turns out to be wrong. And by the stories of courageous individuals who stand against the ignorance, often at great personal cost, presenting facts that cannot logically be denied. In the material I’ve read, little is said of Clemente’s religious orientation, only that he was raised in a deeply religious home and that he never forsook the values. He is presented as a civil saint not a religious one. He had an unusual capacity to bear a much larger identity than his own personal one—not just for Puerto Rico but for all of Latin America, and to do so with dignity and admirable grace. But why would he?

In an “After word” to Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, posted on his website of the same name as his recent book, Wright—a Princeton professor who grew up Southern Baptist but no longer claims Christianity or a belief in God—suggests that “there might be a kind of god that is real. This prospect was raised by the manifest existence of a moral order—that is, by the stubborn, if erratic, expansion of humankind’s moral imagination over the millennia, and the fact that the on-going maintenance of social order depends on the further expansion of the moral imagination, on movement toward moral truth. The existence of a moral order, I’ve said, makes it reasonable to suspect that humankind in some sense has a “higher purpose.” And maybe the source of this higher purpose, the source of the moral order, is something that qualifies for the label ‘god” in at least some sense of that word.”

This is a stunning equivocation for an author whose book rests on the premise that God is a human creation. But it is a “big league” equivocation by a big league thinker who also states, “In modern intellectual circles, speculating seriously about God’s existence isn’t a path to widespread esteem … in the space of only a few years [post 9/11/01], the more-or-less official stance of intellectuals towards believers moved from polite silence to open dismissal if not ridicule.”

And yet, Wright speculates, I imagine, because the mystery deserves it.

The day after my visit with José, in the stands at a Puerto Rican game, in a professional league like the one Clemente entered as a teen, the fans seemed not to be mulling the mystery so much as simply enjoying baseball.

Part 9

It was a beautiful evening for a game. Angel and I met José at the park in Caguas after we’d spent most of the day together talking Clemente and life and looking at his collection.Photo by Eric Beato

From My Journal

Angel did his best to teach me a little Spanish as we drove to Caguas.

’Lo’ is for male nouns. ‘La’ is for female nouns. ‘Los’ and ‘las’ are for plurals,” he explained as he drove. He has trouble pronouncing “plural,” but his English is very good. It’s fun to listen to him—he is a reader and he speaks English as a reader. “I was very impress-ed with this fact.” I sig-ned that document.” And he is patient as I hack up Spanish names—streets, towns, people, everything. 

’To make angels male or female (though ‘angel’ itself is a feminine noun),’ he continued, “Add an ending. Las Angelitos. Los Angelitos. Boy angels. Girl angels. Note, that there are only five vowel sounds in Spanish, short e, short i, short a, long o and long u. English is much more difficult.”

I’m not sure I got any of this right. (There is so much one needs to know in order to learn anything at all.)

I am quite sure that I’m glad Angel was driving. I’ve been lost on these crazy streets six ways to Sunday at least a dozen times. Only today did the Oeste and Este begin to meet in places I expected. Landmarks began to be familiar enough that I could sometimes choose roads that ended somewhere that I actually wanted to be.”

Remembering now that ride to the ballpark with Angel somehow opens a memory of my first trip (as a little leaguer) to a big league game. It was in Kansas City—the Athletics vs. the Twins, I believe. Our coach drove eight or nine of us the four hours to KC in his big Olds with air-conditioning and magic radio tuner. He could simply point at the radio with his finger and the tuning bar would move across the dial. It wasn’t until late in the trip that I realized there was a button under the floor mat that he actuated with his foot. But that was Jack, the most popular, and the winningest coach in our small town little league. And that was me, easy to fool for a time because I was always drawn to the questions: “How did he do that? How does that happen? Why?”

Jack could do lots of tricks besides throw a curve ball. He could put one of his filterless Camels between his hands, put his hands under the water fountain, and rub the cigarette into mush that suddenly revealed a dollar bill. He said that’s how he kept himself in cigarette money. But he could also pull quarters out of little boys’ ears.

Maybe it was my fascination with Jack—something he could feel—that caused him to invite me on the trip to Kansas City even though I wasn’t on his little league team. I was the only kid in the car who played for “Granby Gas Company” not “Shewmake Funeral Home.” Maybe that same kind of fascination is why I seem to have been invited by life—along a winding, mostly benighted pathway—into this profession, into this car, on my way to another professional ball game, trying to grasp how it fits into a story that reaches beyond baseball.

And when one of the boys—yelling racial epithets out the window because we were ignorant and raised racist and had rarely seen African Americans let alone a whole black section of a city—said, “Oh my gosh, Jack. That boy gave me the finger.” Jack laughed, “Well, give it back. We don’t want it.” The little leaguers cackled and flipped the bird.

I was giddy and almost nauseous, innately ashamed of the way the guys were acting, drawn inexplicably to stare into the dark eyes of pedestrians along the street, particularly little boys who looked so much like me and nothing like me all at once, and partly excited to see my first big league game. The atmosphere seemed to become more circus-like the closer we got to the stadium.

To my delight, the atmosphere in Caguas, as Angel and I approached the stadium, drew me into another dimension of memory. The scale of the event and the apparent protocol around it touched a homey chord—reminding me of the “big guys” in my hometown carrying their cleats in one hand, a bat with a glove hanging on it over the other shoulder, sauntering into the old ballpark on the north end of Main Street just past Gum Springs Branch on a flat stretch just under Steadman Hill where drivers could take a small bridge over the branch or “Y” off to a ford and drive through the stream (or even stop in the middle of the stream and wash their cars, as many did). The Caguas stadium wasn’t quite that casual, but it had a feeling of accessibility that reminded me of baseball in my own long ago.

I suddenly started remembering stories I grew up on, of when the “town teams” of the region played each other, and when the Boyer boys came to town—Kenny and Cletus—pre-professional. There was a texture to that, touchable, as real as the crisp chalk lines on raked dirt, a diamond put down on the rough of my old town with more care than anything ever got there except maybe Jim Bridge’s ’57 Chevy.

From My Journal

Angel and José tell me, this is the kind of league Clemente came up in before getting spotted by a scout and signed to a farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1954, the Montreal Royals. (Clemente was just 17 years old when he broke out of the Puerto Rican amateur leagues and signed with the Santurce Crabbers for $40 per week.)

These leagues are for grown men, but anybody good enough can play. So the ages of the players range from teens to forty-something. They are coached by retired professional ballplayers, managed by local men. The small stadium was built by the municipality which also takes the gate and does the maintenance. Sponsors (signs all along the outfield fence) support the team. The arrangement is duplicated in towns all over the island and they draw respectable crowds, enthusiastic fans who know these players and what they can, can’t, and shouldn’t do.

The fans span generations. Lots of kids, teens, many families, and gatherings of older men who all seem to know each other; they speak and shake hands; some hug. Even a politician or two. The fans warmly greet the costumed mascots who come onto the field occasionally to whoop it up. Local radio is there interviewing players on the field. There are several people in the press box. José’s friend, the café owner, showed up for the ballgame and sat with us.

Not unlike my trip through Old San Juan, I found myself feeling that I was in several “times” at the same time, that a number of realities—perhaps countless—existed within the same space and were all part of a larger reality, and that different people in the stadium were seeing different parts of that reality based on what they brought to the scene with them. The more I learned about Clemente, Puerto Rico, the connections between American and Caribbean baseball, and the more I could feel the long ago but resurging excitement of my own baseball experiences, the more I could see into different dimensions of that moment.

I’m thinking now of William Faulkner’s famous assertion, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”

The baseball that evening was mostly mediocre as professional sports go. Quite a few errors. The visiting team started a rookie pitcher who got tagged three or four times in a row in the second inning and that was the end of him. There was a nice moment when a runner got nailed at second by the catcher’s rocket blast to stop the steal. In one play, the right fielder zinged a throw to the catcher to hold a runner at third.

Would I have noticed if that right fielder was a Clemente? I doubt it. I don’t have the data, the experience, the memory—the ability to “see” a Clemente.

Vision is more than a purely physiological phenomenon unless memory and emotion are also purely physiological. And they might be.

I remember my first encounters with B.F. Skinner and his behaviorist approach to psychology—there is stimulus, there is response; espoused beliefs or attitudes (so shaped by memory and emotion) often do not translate into behavior consistent with those so-called commitments. Behaviorism suggested compelling explanations for the inconsistency between belief and behavior I saw in others and in myself. It also disturbed me.

Taken to its logical extension, behaviorism seemed to leave inadequate quarter for the moral dimension of existence, for human phenomena like selfless acts of charity. Sacrifice, some say, is the deep impulse of a species to perpetuate itself. It might be. But where does that impulse come from? Why did Clemente risk so much for others?

Part 10

Photo of The Old Cathedral of Managua by permanently scatterbrainedOn December 23, 1971, a massive earthquake devastated Managua, the Nicaraguan capital city, killing 7,000, injuring thousands more, and leaving over a quarter of a million people homeless.

Clemente had just spent most of November in Nicaragua managing a Puerto Rican all-star team in the Amateur Baseball World Series tournament.

In my interview with Vera, Clemente’s widow, she said, “He liked Nicaragua because it looked like the old days in Puerto Rico when we didn’t have so much progress.  He said the people on the farms still used animals, and it reminded him of when he was a little boy.  And when he traveled through the country he like to visit with the people and learn more about the way they lived.  The common people, he just liked to talk with them.”

In Puerto Rico, Roberto accepted the honorary chairmanship of a relief committee and used local media to generate help.  But he went far beyond the role of honorary chair.  He worked night and day.  He solicited donations door to door.  He helped raise $150,000 and 26 tons of food, clothing and medicine.

Roberto lost friends in the disaster.  He knew that many more of his colleagues, friends and fans were in grave danger, but especially a fourteen-year-old orphan, double amputee for whom Clemente had arranged to get artificial legs.  Reports from Managua indicated that shipments of relief aid were being intercepted by the corrupt political regime of General Anastasio Somoza.

Clemente believed he could get the aid to the right people.  On New Year’s Eve, he helped load an aging DC-7 and boarded the flight.  There were questions about the air-worthiness of the plane, and even about the pilots. 

Vera, Roberto’s wife, remembered him saying, “When your time comes, it comes; if you are going to die, you will die.  And babies are dying.  They need these supplies.”

Almost immediately after take off, just off the Atlantic coast, one of the DC-7’s engines exploded.  There were three more explosions as the plane plunged into the sea.  The search for survivors lasted nearly two weeks.  Clemente’s body was never recovered.

A natural disaster had begotten human tragedy, and, as natural disasters often do, revealed more clearly the common disaster of political oppression.  Somoza’s response to the earthquake was to hoard, control, and profit from the aid that flooded into Managua.  That’s a survivalist strategy that makes sense on the face of it.  As a survival strategy, Clemente’s response makes less sense. 

Clemente’s response has a moral dimension, a sense of right and wrong that appears, at first, to operate independently from the expediencies of survival. Evolutionary psychologists might root Clemente’s response in what they call “reciprocal altruism,” a behavioral trait that, as I mentioned in my last “mull,” helps an entire species perpetuate itself.  For humans, one could boil this notion down to a truism: We get by best with a little help from our friends.

But even then, one’s best shot at survival might be to have Somoza as a friend. 

Walking along the seashore, looking out over the waves where Roberto’s plane had gone down, I found myself asking questions.  Is there really a “right and wrong” that exists somewhere beyond the tangible world?  Is there justice?  Is this the same as asking, “Is there a God?” 

The vast space around me, the crash of the waves, the sand under my feet, seemed all to absorb my questions and give back a response—endless waves, my footprints dissolving in the surf.

Vera said to me, “Now it is 31 years since the accident, and I receive mail from fans of different ages.  They use his name for babies and some send me the birth certificates to sign.  And really, it doesn’t stop.  Every year.  United States. Latin America.  Europe.”

Roberto’s footprint had not yet dissolved.

Part 11

The visit with Vera Clemente was a success.  My nerves settled.  Some nagging certainty that I would blow the interview, somehow offend her, or embarrass myself by exposing my relative ignorance of Major League Baseball, finally lifted.

Ms. Clemente met with me alone in the front room of her home. The home itself was not extravagant, not showy, not a structure designed to telegraph greatness.  It was solidly upper middle-class, but nothing “mansion-like;” there was nothing aspirational-feeling about it.  In that sense, it certainly fit the Clemente character.

I’m not sure there was another soul in the house.  Vera and I had spoken on the phone, but had never met.  Looking back, this arrangement strikes me as a little odd.  She had Smithsonian assurances that I was legit, I suppose. But still, for a late middle-aged woman to welcome a strange man into her home?  I was lucky.  She was very gracious and gave me nearly three hours.

But she wasn’t what I expected.  I’d seen the pictures of her as a striking young woman.  I’d read descriptions in Clemente books—how Roberto saw her, thought she was the most beautiful girl Carolina had ever produced, and told his mother the same day that he’d met the girl he was going to marry.

The day we met, Vera didn’t look healthy.  She’d gotten heavy.  She told me she’d had an illness and nearly died. The evening after our interview, and after I’d walked the beach looking out over Clemente’s crash site in the sea, I sat waiting for a flight back to the States thinking about the life that Ms. Clemente had lived.

From my Journal

Photo at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport by Radio RoverMarch 9, 2004, Luis Muñoz Marin International Airport

Beyond appearance, Vera Clemente is beautiful.  Her beauty is in the work she has done, the people she has helped, the dream she nurtures with her sons of doing more.  She has the heart of a social worker, the strength of a rock, the confidence of a person who has seen stardom and recognized both its lie and its power.  She comes across in the most humble, self-effacing, genuine way.

She’s essentially lived three lives.  First she lived as a Carolina girl growing up in a very, very strict home.  At twenty-one, finished with college and working in a bank, she met Roberto.  She refused to see him except on the clear and certain terms her father proscribed.  I’ve read no account of Roberto resisting Vera’s traditional commitments.  In fact, everything I know about him would suggest that Vera’s family discipline might only heighten his interest.

After they were married, Vera lived eight years and three births with Roberto –“a lifetime in itself,” she smiled.  Her third life has been the thirty-one years since his death in which she has raised her sons and stayed with the mission—to her it isn’t so much a business as a cause—of nurturing Roberto’s legacy.  I would add that it is her legacy as well.

After our visit, she left me on my own to wonder around the house with my camera.  I took pictures of Golden Glove Awards, a trophy signifying Roberto’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, World Series Rings, batting trophies, and a Congressional Medal of Honor.”

 As I wondered around the Clemente home a powerful impression settled over me. There surely were other rooms in the home that bespoke more of Clemente family life after Roberto.  But not the rooms I roamed.  For all I know, these rooms may have been decorated for the purpose of serving Roberto-related guests like me. Monuments to Clemente’s achievements filled the spaces—awards, paintings, posters, photographs, and framed ephemera.  But what I sensed in those moments, in those rooms so full of Clemente’s presence, was nothing so much as Clemente’s absence.

That feeling, I knew, was an indication that the spirit of the story I needed to tell was taking hold.  I “missed” Roberto in some way that had moved past abstraction. I had delved deeply enough to understand something about the pain of losing Roberto.

I don’t mean to overstate my understanding.  Vera said, “I see him sometimes when I am alone.  People remember him as a ballplayer, but he was so much more.  He was a father, a husband, a wonderful man.”  Her deep, loving, familial response clearly reaches beyond my experience of Roberto.  But it touched me in a way that even José’s and Angel’s Clemente sentiments didn’t, maybe because their Clemente connection and devotion is rooted in the soil of Puerto Rico and baseball, realms to which I am so much the outsider looking in; Vera’s connection is rooted in another order of love.

I want to believe that human love is something more than “reciprocal altruism.”  I want to believe that the shape of the stories we find most compelling, the ones that inspire us to our best acts, reflect the shape of a truth that exists apart from the tangible world.

I wonder if human beings are the only animals in the natural order that survey the evidence of an unseen presence, feel an absence, and seek to fill the void with a story—written, told, or lived out—that gives the presence/absence meaning beyond ourselves.

For love, Darwin delayed publishing his theory of natural selection and nearly missed his chance at history.

Part 12

Darwin’s gardening boots? Photo by Chris Barber“Darwin was born to money,” Gopnik writes, “and though he kept some gentry tastes … he chose to live not in imitation of the old aristocracy but in the manner of the new bourgeoisie—involving his children (ten, three of whom died in childhood) in every element of his life, having them help with his experiments, writing an autobiography for them and very nearly sacrificing his chance at history for the love of his religious wife.”

This sentence in Gopnik’s essay (Smithsonian Magazine, February 2009) stopped me. It’s one of his points that set me mulling Darwin again. 

Charles Darwin loved.  He was beloved. 

The thought sent me back to the last time I’d tried to think a little more deeply about Darwin—it began at the Ft. Lauderdale airport after a moment of epiphany in a hotel room on the way home from Puerto Rico.

In truth, the experience in that hotel room is a little mysterious to me. It was—I now realize—something like the thought of Charles Darwin as a man who loved. It was a little disorienting, yet centering.

From my journal

March 3, 2004, Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport

Woke up this morning to the roar of I-95 outside the Days Inn where I spent the night.  I immediately missed the ocean.  The sea and the sun and the breeze had become a presence to me.  It’s difficult to explain, but maybe it is the vastness of it, and the way it shapes every activity every day.  The reminder is always there; you are in the presence of mystery, a wild blue yonder that can carry the mind back and forward in time to such an extent that time itself seems to take on a different meaning.

The concrete sprawl of the Ft. Lauderdale/I-95 corridor had slammed its way into my consciousness as I woke that morning. Suddenly, it seemed, I felt out of the moment.  I hadn’t fully realized I’d been in the moment.  But lying in bed that morning, looking back at the days in Puerto Rico felt like looking back at a moment of being “in the zone” as a young athlete.  I had been fully engaged.  And what resonated most deeply with me while I was in the zone was the love of a woman for a man, Vera for Roberto. 

What’s mysterious to me about this experience is that it seemed, in that instant of disorientation, I could see everything more clearly.  The image that came to my mind, like a dream image to this day strong in my memory, is that of tracks disappearing in the sand, time emerging as an essence almost tangible.

This contemplation turned into a long scrawl in my journal that lasted all day, through the flights and connections back to Granby.  The sense of it was this: If I live by the clock, I am one step removed from time as that thick reality, that near-tangible essence.  Clocks are not time. They are crude but useful measuring devices, metering the linear passage of intervals that we call “time” (cronos in New Testament Greek).  But clocks cannot measure “the fullness of time” (kairos) as an EKG cannot tell the meaning of a beating heart. 

The scrawl about time led quickly to Darwinism—his theory implies time on a scale most people had not yet reckoned with in his day, and some resist still.  And Darwinism opened a window into my anxieties over the generally ugly argument between science and religion.

Something dawned on me; I had long since come to terms—as most, but not all, western Christians have—with the difference between the brevity of linear time since “the beginning” that the Book of Genesis suggests, and the immense time scale that Darwinism requires. Yet I was still nettled by the argument between Creationists and Darwinists and didn’t know why. 

What dawned on me was that the battle that raged in Darwin’s time, and still rages, between science and religion is not about the observable world and what the data suggest.  It is not about truth, or Truth.  It is simply about power.  It is a fight over who controls the narrative. 

The extremists on both sides impose plot lines that edge into fiction.  But between the extremes, science and religion hold common ground—the question mark at the center of existence.  The only honest narratives in the presence of that question mark are those that describe the search with small sightings along the way. 

To the extent that the full body of small sightings appears to add up to an all-encompassing design, a theory or a theology may emerge.  But a theory or a theology is an imposed plot line, highly useful yet necessarily contingent, provisional, something like what a clock is to time.

Western Christianity—dating back to at least to the time of Copernicus—has helped usher itself into cultural exile by imposing a plot line where it should not, refusing to embrace the question mark, substituting certitude for searching. Copernicus (1473-1543), a monk and scholar who introduced the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, not vise versa, was excommunicated from the church. 

The great irony in this instance is that the church through this scholar was at first the beacon of light and learning, and then the cloak of darkness.  The darkness fell when the church over-reached in its quest to control the narrative.

In our time, that same darkening impulse is generally accompanied by claims of belief in the inerrancy of scripture and the necessity of a literal interpretation.  But the Bible—read literally or metaphorically—doesn’t provide any more technical information on the mechanics of evolution than it does on the specific arrangement of the solar system.  That isn’t the scope or intent of its narrative.

There are many ways to read the Bible.  For me, the mystery at the center of existence is abundantly clear in scripture—Eve’s curiosity in the Garden of Eden; Abraham’s journey into the question mark (a land God would show him); David panting for God’s presence as a deer pants for water; Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, “if;” and the huge question mark he left his followers, “when?”  

The question that lives at the center of each of these examples is a fullness of time question, not a linear time question.  To miss the difference is to stumble into idolatry; idolatry leads inexorably to a quest for temporal power, a spiritual disaster also abundantly clear in Biblical stories.

So my journey brought me to a new peace with the science-religion fight; I would never again conceive of it as a struggle between competing truth claims, but as a clash of opposing powers, each over-reaching.  I feel less defensive.  I can still become agitated when someone implies that I am a fool or an intellectual coward for cleaving to faith.  I see that point of view as limited.  Over-reaching. 

That I came to this point via Roberto Clemente is fascinating to me.  That a story of love ultimately opened my eyes to Clemente’s story is instructive.  That this journey led only to a contemplation of Darwinism, not Darwin the man, is an indication that my journey is not complete.

A man who loved his children, and his wife, Emma, and who did not take lightly the implications for them should he reveal what his careful observation told him must be true, is a different man than the Darwin I grew up fearing.

Part 13

Darwin’s very name touches childhood memories of threat.  With no malicious intent, many Biblical-literalist A common idea, but Darwin, once a student of Anglican priesthood, struggled with the implications of his observations relative to his own understandings and was reluctant to publish what he believed to be true because, at least in part, he knew how his theory might disturb the lives of people he loved. Photo by Old Sargepreachers and teachers of my youth painted Darwin in dark hues, a foreboding, atheistic, menace intent on killing the faith, eviscerating Holy Scripture.

It had not occurred to me that these early Darwin impressions were still lingering with any potency.  Not until the sparks of imagination began to fly as I read Gopnik’s essay. 

He pictured Darwin clearly as a man contending with the commitments of a life in a specific time, not a brooding presence across all time, rather a decent man who studied medicine but decided he didn’t want to be a doctor, then went to Cambridge to prepare for the Anglican priesthood but broke from that to follow his true passion, a field we generally call “science” then known as natural philosophy.  In 1831, he took an unpaid position as a naturalist for a five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle to survey the South American coastlines. 

It was, of course, on this trip that Darwin began to make the small sightings that seemed to add up to a larger picture that was stunningly at odds with the received wisdom of his time. Upon his return, he spent years in research, and in correspondence. Not only did Darwin wrestle with the implications of his observations relative to his own understandings, he was reluctant to publish what he believed to be true because, at least in part, he knew how his theory might disturb the lives of people he loved. 

Gopnik offered this telling quote from a letter Darwin wrote to a fellow naturalist in 1844.  “I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”

In other words, species change, evolve over time, from one generation to the next, traits that help a species succeed are passed on, other traits do not survive.  That gradual adaptation is the engine of change.  A common textbook concept today, the idea was earthshaking in Darwin’s day.  He presented a very different view of “creation” or the “creative process” from the view widely held by the western academy and the public at large.  Most people subscribed to the notion that the natural world was “static,” that species began fully formed.  Within Christendom, the two Biblical accounts of creation in Genesis bolstered that view and gave it the imprimatur of revealed truth.

The fight was on.  It is still on.  Just last night at supper, my twelve-year-old daughter told me that one of her dearest girlfriends instructed her, “You can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution.”  Grace said, “But I’m a Christian and I believe in evolution.”

Grace has not, I think, received the foreboding Darwin. 

I hope not.  I hope that her religious faith will actually help provide her with courage to explore mystery and difference. 

Foolish me—for never having thought to think of Darwin as a man, not a demon—I am not foolish enough to take Gopnik’s word as the last word.  I will do more exploring on my own.  But his words do resonate with many other small sightings I’ve made over the years.  And his story makes me think maybe, or probably, those foreboding early impressions of Darwin have been guiding my thoughts—avoidance?—subconsciously.   But now the darksome presence is out in the full light of reason. 

Like many people who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies, I’ve done a fair amount of groping through my past, trying to defuse early, impairing impressions and trying to build on solid, constructive foundational experiences.  Bringing elements of the subconscious into the light of consciousness can be a path to spiritual growth. And yet, I have never forgotten the cautionary note provided by a former pastor, Dr. H. Stephen Shoemaker, who said that if you constantly pull the plant up to check on its roots the plant will die.  Sometimes you should “keep it in,” he said.

As for my formative Darwin impressions, they emerged on their own.  In the fullness of time, I suppose.  Like a splinter deep in the palm that will not come out, but left alone, the flesh festers and the irritant comes to the surface.  (What relief then to pluck it!)  I am left to wonder why it happened when it did, and what there is to learn from the experience.

Part 14

A structure outside a museum in Nairobi. Photo by computerwhiz417At no time on the trip do I remember thinking about Charles Darwin.  Nor do I recall pondering anything that seemed overtly related to his theory of the origin of species, evolution, or even the modern controversy that continues to swirl around these concepts in Christian circles.  I’ve checked my journals, and found nothing in the vicinity of that time to indicate I was thinking about Darwin before leaving on the trip.

On the other hand, Darwin is everywhere present.  More precisely, “Darwinism” is everywhere present.  Not the man who loved, but the central ideas that take his name.  The concepts of natural selection, evolution of species, “the survival of the fittest,” are so much a part of the cultural air that I breath that it may be fair to say that I think about Darwinism even when I’m not thinking about Darwinism. 

When I looked back over my journal entries from the trip—perhaps like a first century Jewish convert to Christianity re-reading Hebrew scripture with a resurrected Christ in mind—everything seemed to be imbued with a certain “survival of the fittest” motif—certainly the competitive aspects inherent in Caribbean baseball, but also a “great chain of being” or “food chain” theme that runs through the politics and economics of Puerto Rico.

From my Journal

“’Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States,’ Angel answered when I asked about the island’s official status. 

“My eyebrows went up. ‘A colony?’”

“He smiled.  I knew instantly he was kidding me, but with a purpose.  (Puerto Rico is a territory acquired, along with the Virgin Islands, by the U.S. after World War I.)

“‘Colony,’ he said.  ‘Well, the people are U.S. citizens but they can’t vote for the U.S. political offices.  No vote for president.  They have an elected representative in Washington who can vote—but his or her vote can never break a tie.’

“’Same as no vote at all,’ Jose grumbled on the same subject.

“’So there is a movement for statehood or independence?’ I asked both guys.

“Both, separately, gave me the same answer.  There are about 5% of Puerto Rico’s 4 million people who want independence.  Another 5% are very anti-statehood.  It’s pretty easy to guess that these are the people currently in power, the very wealthy and connected who want to maintain the status quo.  The vast majority would like Puerto Rico to be the 51^st state.

“Jose, who has a good U.S. government job, said, ‘We already comply with Federal work rules, emissions standards, food standards, educational requirements, etcetera.  We are a commonwealth with independence and freedom to vote for representatives and run Puerto Rico the way we want, but it’s really ‘the way we want’ in order to meet the Federal guidelines.’

“’So why aren’t you for independence?’ I asked Angel.

“’Better to be the tail of a lion than the head of a rat,” he smiled.  ‘Things are so much better here since we came under the protection of the U.S.  There’s a lot of investment, grant money, good wages, stability.  That’s the difference between us and the rest of the Caribbean—even most of Latin America.  They envy us.  And thank God for Castro.  If not for him, Cuba would be us and we would be Cuba.’ 

“Angel went on to describe another driving force of the island’s economy.  Central and South American companies, as well as U.S. companies, use Puerto Rico as a kind of halfway house for adjusting to another language and culture.  This makes total sense to me.  The island is that blended culture writ large.

“There are genuine Puerto Rican cafeterias and open farmers’ markets next door to American branded chain restaurants and grocery stores.  Walgreen’s stores are everywhere.  But they haven’t yet killed off the local farmacias.  You’ll see a joint with a Latin name, and it will be authentically Puerto Rican, but it will purvey lots of American products.  Nearly everyone I met spoke at least some English, some spoke English like a first language.

“Road signs reflect the same mixture.  ‘Velocidad Maxima 35.’  That’s what the speed limit signs say.  Spanish language, American measurement—miles per hour.  You would expect to see kilometers per hour.  And so it goes throughout San Juan, and I suspect, through out the island.  In fact, you can drive down a highway and see one sign that marks the distance to the next town in miles, and another sign a few miles further that marks the distance in kilometers.

“Angel reminded me of the joke the curator made at the restaurant. Angel: ‘You could put the Smithsonian name up under the museum name.’ Curator: ‘No.  ‘Smithsonian first.  Then Museo de Arte.’”

In these observations, a simile presents itself.  Imagine for a moment that businesses, road signs, and institutions are biological species. Even I, with very scant technical training in economics, could see that there were transitional forces at work, that the economy and society in Puerto Rico was evolving.  It did not occur to me that many of the “species” that I observed had begun fully formed in their then current state as the part-Latin-part-American entities that I observed.  Nor did it occur to me that the mixture overall was static.  My snapshot glimpse clearly told a story of change.

Now imagine Darwin the naturalist, with much technical knowledge in his grasp, observing species far from his homeland.  I imagine him seeing things fresh.  I imagine him open to the many small secrets his observations held for him. 

It is possible that if he hadn’t followed his heart, his passion, in joining the HMS Beagle expedition, if he had made the prudent choice and stuck with medicine or the ministry, he might never have seen the natural world as clearly as he did on that voyage so far from home. It is possible that following his heart put him in a place of “seeing.”

That Darwin could “see” the dynamics of change at work in the natural world—given all that he did not know—and knit together a general theory for explaining how the dynamics work demonstrates amazing conceptual powers. 

Perhaps, this was the fullness of time for Darwin.

My own theory about the fullness of time is that it is a moment when certain givens, previously obscure, become clear to us. We see things in a way that we haven’t before.  Then we are forced to make choices about what we have witnessed.  The choices are not always easy.  That’s where Darwin was—in my reading of Gopnik—as he considered whether or not to publish his findings.

Darwin was first but not alone in perceiving the grand scheme of evolution of the species.  In fact, during the years that Darwin delayed publishing his theory, a fellow naturalist and professional specimen collector, Alfred Russel Wallace, came to similar conclusions; it became clear that he would soon publish.  That’s what persuaded Darwin to go ahead with the publication of his theory, beating his friend to the punch.

So “Darwin,” not “Wallace,” became the name of the demon. .”  And the furor began.

Part 15

Photo by magnoid

In a companion article to Gopnik’s (“What Darwin Didn’t Know,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 2009) Thomas Hayden writes that the first public airing of Darwinian evolution caused little commotion, but the following year, when Darwin published his ideas in book form, the reaction began.  On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favorured Races in the Struggle for Life sold out of its first press run.  Within a year over 4,000 copies were circulating.

Hayden: “Allies applauded [Darwin’s theory] as a brilliant unifying breakthrough; scientific rivals called attention to the gaps in his evidence, including what would come to be known as ‘missing links’ in the fossil record; and prominent clergymen, politicians and others condemned the work and its far-reaching implications.”

Of course, the far-reaching implication that drew the most ire—especially from the Judeo-Christian community—was that Darwin’s theory seemed to contradict the Biblical account of the origins of life.  But I’ve come to believe that the central offense has little to do with the evolution of bacteria or cockroaches.  The central offense is the notion that human life evolved. 

Hayden provides a classic example: “In 1864 Benjamin Disreali, later Britain’s prime minister, famously decried the idea—barely mentioned in Origin—that human beings too had evolved from earlier species. ‘Is man an ape or an angel?’ he asked rhetorically at a conference. ‘I, my lord, I am on the side of the angels.  I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence those newfangled theories.’”

Disreali’s choice of words—“indignation and abhorrence”—is telling; they reflect offended human pride. The word choice is to be respected in light of Disreali’s standing as a British literary figure as well as a politician. 

Equally telling, his rhetorical contrast of “ape and angel,” declaring, “I am on the side of the angels.”  He is declaring allegiance to the Biblical idea expressed in the 8^th Psalm, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him … for thou hast made him a little lower than the angels …” (KJV).

The Psalmist’s response to the great mystery, surveying the evidence before him, is humility.  By contrast, Disreali’s response to the evidence before him is indignation; human pride seeks a diminution of the mystery.  In the intervening years, the tenor of the anti-Darwin rhetoric, it seems to me, has not changed.

As Copernicus removed the earth from the center of the cosmos, Darwinism seemed to remove the human species from the center of creation—another affront to human self-centeredness. The irony is that natural selection seems, so far, to have favored the self-centeredness of the human species.

The evidence that Darwin was right has multiplied many fold.  Yet the argument continues.  The bitter words that fly may simply be the sound of evolution in process, the competition of ideas, one of which might prove to be more beneficial to the survival of the human species than the other.  I’d bet on Darwinism, given the magnificence of modern biological sciences (thus medicine), rooted deeply in Darwinism, its practitioners marveling that Darwin’s grand 19^th century vision still holds up in the 21^st century.

Darwin has not dispelled the great mystery.  He has opened a portal of insight.

Having recently begun work on a new museum project—one that focuses on natural history—I’ve encountered Darwin anew, and to my delight a Darwinian insight into the story-making mind, thus the very spirit, of our species.

Part 16

Photo title: Viola’s Heart by Madmoiselle Lavender“Now to the very heart of wonder,” writes Harvard Professor E.O. Wilson in Biophilia: The Human Bond With Other Species. “Because species diversity was created prior to humanity, and because we evolved within it, we have never fathomed its limits.  As a consequence, the living world is the natural domain of the more restless and paradoxical part of the human spirit.  Our sense of wonder grows exponentially: the greater the knowledge the deeper the mystery and the more we seek knowledge to create new mystery.” 

As I began work on a new natural history museum project—a multi-media experience exploring issues of environmental sustainability—Wilson’s book was on my reading list.  And practically every other book on the list references this one.  Once I’d read it I understood why, and the book landed on my own short list of reads that, when I’d finished, I knew I would never look at the world quite the same again.

Wilson’s thesis is that humans have a natural affinity for life and living things—biophilia—that this affinity evolved as a survival trait, and that “our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents.” 

The hope he addresses is not an ontological hope, but a survival hope. Wilson’s purpose is to express a conservation ethic that offers hope for slowing the massive destruction of species.  Instead of simply blaming the human species and offering a menu of un-likely fixes, as so many conservation/ecology writings do, Wilson, one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, probes much deeper. 

Via history, literature, and visual arts, as well as the biological sciences, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner explores the origins of the questing human spirit, and the powerful myths and symbols of human culture. Thus, Wilson edges close to ontology—the nature of being—in a way that illumines my Darwin mull.

Wilson: “The brain evolved into its present form over a period of about two million years, from the time of Homo habalis to the late stone age of Homo sapiens, during which people existed in hunter-gatherer bands in intimate contact with the natural environment.  Snakes mattered.  The smell of water, the hum of a bee, the directional bend of a plant stalk mattered … the glimpse of one small animal hidden in the grass could make the difference between eating and going hungry in the evening.  And the sweet sense of horror, the shivery fascination with monsters and creeping forms that so delight us today even in the sterile hearts of the cities, could see you through to the next morning.  Organisms are the natural stuff of metaphor and ritual.”

Using his own experiences with snakes, growing up with a fascination for reptiles in Alabama, Wilson opens a portal into the deep biological roots of human spirituality.  “Culture transforms the snake into the serpent, a far more potent creation than the literal reptile. Culture in turn is a product of the mind, which can be interpreted as an image-making machine that recreates the outside world through symbols arranged into maps and stories.  But the mind does not have an instant capacity to grasp reality in its full chaotic richness; nor does the body last long enough for the brain to process information piece by piece like an all-purpose computer.  Rather, consciousness races ahead to master certain kinds of information with enough efficiency to survive.  It submits to a few biases easily while automatically avoiding others.  A great deal of evidence has accumulated in genetics and physiology to show that the controlling devices are biological in nature, built into the sensory apparatus and brain by particularities in cellular architecture.

“The combined biases are what we call human nature.  The central tendencies, exemplified so strikingly in fear and veneration of the serpent, are the wellsprings of culture.  Hence simple perceptions yield an unending abundance of images with special meaning while remaining true to the forces of natural selection that created them.”

Some people of faith are threatened by this kind of analysis; it appears to be a scientific materialist argument for the human creation of religion and its gods.  By contrast, I find it a fascinating glimpse into the process of creation (and by faith, the Creator at work), not only of human biology, but of the human spirit; to me this analysis lends credence to my theory that human sanity—individual or societal—requires a narrative around which to cohere. 

To summarize, deep in our evolutionary past, the brain—shaped by biological evolution—began to weave sensory perceptions into the fabric of human consciousness, the mind.  The mind turned the threats and struggles, joys and sorrows, of experience into the mythic images and stories that helped humans understand their place in the world, helped pass survival wisdom from one generation to the next, provided cohesion for families, tribes and societies.

Wilson: “Certain great myths—the origin of the world, cataclysm and rebirth, the struggle between the powers of light and darkness, Earth Mother, and a few others—recur dependably in cultures around the world.”

Of course, the problem for Christianity (and any other religion that claims to hold the exclusive and ultimate revelation of God) is that such scientific analysis suggests that the stories of all religions are equal.  Far more important to me is the idea here that religion—or some kind of narrative structure—is essential.

The human need for God, as a line of reasoning toward the existence of God, is not one I’ll take up here.  I’ll keep the thoughts more personal—I like having a biological explanation for my own hunger for God; it affirms what feels like a question mark in the center of my being; it makes sense that experiences in nature can have such a restorative effect; the body—contrary to much thought in Western Christianity—can be a pathway toward spiritual peace.

At the outset, Darwin threatened the reigning narrative structures on both sides of the fence, science and religion.  In an earlier “mull” I discussed the religious reaction to Darwin.  Wilson provides an interesting account of a particular reaction within the scientific community. 

Louis Agassiz was, in 1859, the most celebrated American scientist of his generation.  A much sought after lecturer, leading authority on fishes and the general classification of animals, a Harvard professor, founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, a friend of Emerson, Longfellow and other great figures in American letters.  And he was Darwin’s fiercest critic.

Agassiz, in his own masterwork, the “Essay on Classification,” had written, according to Wilson, that species “are creations in the mind of God, brought to life when the creator thinks of them and extinguished when he ceases to think of them.”  Wilson continues, “It seemed a perfect conception, uniting science and religion in a form consistent with the transcendentalist beliefs then ruling America’s intellectual scene.”

History and science, so far, seem to have favored Darwin’s argument over Agassiz’s.  I suspect, but of course do not know, that Agassiz, the scientist, lost the argument to Darwin for the same reason the religionists have lost the argument:  their efforts to unite science and religion begin at the wrong entry points.

Wilson: “The role of science, like that of art [and religion to a large extent, I would add] is to blend exact imagery with more distant meaning, the parts we already understand with those given as new into larger patterns that are coherent enough to be acceptable as truth …”

The question mark at the beginning of the quest is the only point of entry that makes sense for uniting science and religion.  From there, the roles begin to differentiate, feeding each other, but never again truly uniting.  Science and religion are complementary—though they will always exist in tension because of their distinct foci.

Again, Wilson: “Scientists do not discover in order to know, they know in order to discover.  That inversion of purpose is more than just a trait, it is the essence of the matter. Humanists are the shamans of the intellectual tribe, wise men who interpret knowledge and transmit the folklore, rituals, and sacred texts.  Scientists are the scouts and hunters.”

As we enter a golden age for the biological sciences, the scouts and hunters are going to be bringing home new discoveries practically every day.  I believe these are exciting times for people of faith.

If … religion is part of culture, culture is a creation of the mind, the mind is a creation of the brain, and the brain is truly material in its origin … then there is much to be learned about religious experience through the direct study of the brain.

Wilson quotes Darwin: “…to study the Metaphysics, as they have always been studied, appears to me to be like puzzling at astronomy without mechanics.—Experience shows that the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself.”

Of course, vital faith is not as abstract as studying “the problem of the mind.”  True religion is lived.  It is lived in a material world about which far less is known than unknown.  Thanks to Darwin, we now know more about the scope of the mystery.

Rather than discouraging faith, I find this encouraging.  As for the particularity of my faith, Christianity, I cannot know scientifically that it is the ultimate revelation of Truth; that’s why it is faith.  I do know that love is the organizing principle, the heart of the story, for me, and the more that I conform to its demands through practice of my faith, the deeper and richer my experience of the mystery, and the less I am hobbled by old fundamentalist fears.

I like Wilson’s line: “Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.”

With this, I’m going to leave my Darwinian mulls and begin to explore Lincoln.  But, because more than one reader has observed that the intermittent nature of these missives makes it difficult to hang on to the thread of thought, I’m going to take a break from postings until I have the Lincoln mull well in hand.  I’ll make regular posts—at least one per week—starting in a month or so, hopefully to finish by the 201^st anniversary of Darwin’s and Lincoln’s birth.

To be continued.