AND ANOTHER THING
Forget the ideology; all of nature is part of a providential plan
PAUL JOHNSON
It seems empty without them but other creatures, no doubt, welcome the respite. I heard tearful complaints last week from a lady who had just lost all her prize hens to foxes, only two eaten, the rest snapped to death for sport and devilry, the fox being a rough, 18th-century gentleman for whom the kill comes before moderation or pity. Here in the Quantocks, foxes take newborn lambs whenever they can get them; one reason why local farmers are devoted to the hunt. Threescore sheep, many with lambs, were put into the big field on the left yes- terday afternoon, and bleated piteously at the change well into the evening. But they have settled down now and are quiet. Their attention span is short but conceals deep memories of homeland and heath. Those who live on the tops of hills, amid the heather and bracken, are staunchly tena- cious of their moorland freeholds.
In the even bigger field on the right, near my orchard and paddock, there are the bullocks. These beautiful animals, in an infinity of shades of fawn and pale yellow, with spots of white and pinky grey, are hugely inquisitive, but also shy and tim- orous. When I appear, they come clumping up to see what I want or have to give; but if I try to touch them, they jump back in ter- ror. An incautious sound, a sudden move- ment, will send them stampeding away down the field. So I remain perfectly still, hardly moving my head to take in the dif- ferent faces and characters, and they nudge each other aside to come closer and lick my hands with their rough, affectionate tongues. Their eyes are mild, innocent, beatific, their eyelashes immensely long and pretty, their body markings and curly hairs come as close to absolute beauty as nature can contrive. They force me to think of God's mysterious ways. He makes these exquisite, trusting creatures, with no sense of sin or peril, gives them long, lazy days at grass in the sunny meadow, then dooms them to a sudden, horrific and early death in the slaughterhouse. These master- works of hue and shape, diffident but friendly, are tomorrow's red meat, and I cannot get this brutal fact out of my head as I share their pleasure at our warm encounters.
I wish that loyal Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who treasured such mottled colours and gave us 'Pied Beauty', had also written a sonnet explaining the divine pur- pose in the process of rearing living art for destruction. No doubt he would explain that, without our carnivorous appetites, the bul- locks would not have been in the field in the first place. I would not have seen them. Their beauty would never have existed. The entire world is a series of accidental plea- sures, incidental atrocities, compensating glories, ugly necessities and clashes of light and darkness. It rests on an infinity of fine balances, weighing exact quantities of good and evil to keep the machinery of destiny moving. God moves in antitheses, has his own moral and aesthetic dialectic, exercises what philosophers call the principle of dou- ble effect, contrives by design a world which is Janus-faced, indeed multi-faceted. The bullock is a tragic actor in this oscillating cos- mic drama; or rather he is not tragic, for he has no imaginative knowledge of his fate. As he gazes at me, his mild, sympathetic eyes reflect none of the guilt and anxiety in mine. Trusting ignorance is likewise providential.
All nature is in a spasmodic state of war, punctuated by long spells of mindless peace. I have been observing a colony of small birds, house-martins, I think, who livein the eaves of my house, over the wisteria. They flit about, happily, a dozen or more, doing their obscure nothings. Suddenly, first one, then all, cease to move, and crouch, only their anxious beaks showing under the tiles. I look up, knowing what this means, and sure enough, a hundred feet above, there are the two buzzards on their mid-morning patrol, inspecting their territory for anything small and succulent that moves. They are nearly always in twos or, if single, call to each other with mournful cries, and I have often seen one or other take a tiny bird in its deadly claws. It is all over in a second, then home they go. They are just, as a farmer once said to me, 'doing their job like the rest of us'. A few seconds later, the skies clear, our little birds are at it again, flying hither and thither, happy, heedless. Wildlife moves from absolute terror to total compla- cency in an instant, content with its intuitive warning system.
The birds like our garden as well as our eaves, and so, therefore, does a sleek Siamese cat. She does not come here every day to admire the flowers, that's for sure. But they are admirable, nonetheless — old- fashioned blooms, not too regimentally set out, more cottagey, haphazard, Gothic, pic- turesque — closer to Payne Knight than Capability Brown. There are hollyhocks in pale violet, and phlox in unfashionable pink, not shocking but mild, lavender and vetch, some nasturtiun-js and marigolds, hydrangeas, penstemons, sweet peas. Among the big yellow daisies we planted bulbs which had lost their label and which came .up as purple thistles, an uncovenant- ed contrast of colour, horticultural serendipity. It has been raining a lot, but the sun is now out, fleecy clouds scudding from the south-west across the sky, and all is fresh and delectable in the big border. Soon, many of these fine flowers will be cut and gathered, arranged and vased for inter- nal display. Is this destruction of nature frivolous, akin to the felling of the bul- locks? Surely not, for they were planted to be displayed, and this creative act cannot have been a vain thing. Rearing and culling, embedding and gathering, sowing and reap- ing: the great cycle of nature swings through the seasons anyway, and all we humans do is to put an occasional shoulder to the wheel. We help God to create beauty so that we may destroy it for our needs.
This urge to create is, happily, stronger than our destructive impulse: that is why the world thrives and progresses. I myself have a fragile, but persistent, urge to create, in words and paint. So I cannot just lie still and contemplate the flowers, or watch the birds in their fears and reassurances, or hold my daily conversazione with the bullocks. I have to be up and painting, filling myself with gra- tuitous anxiety about the exact rendering of the flowers, so difficult in watercolour. Or I have to be putting the scene into words, as I am now, trembling with fear lest I overdo it or simply bore the reader. But that is part of the providential plan too.
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