Solvitur Ambulando

DB Jonas

DOWN HOUSE, KENT, 1878

Je ne vois qu‘infini par toutes les fenêtres
Charles Baudelaire, Le Gouffre

I’d one day meant to count the paces
each way out and back, but never did.

The number of my steps increases
with every passing season, but by the world itself,
and by the provident thought it instigates,
I’m pitched relentlessly onward, headlong
into the unimagined with each unsteady stride,
intrepid as some mutton-chopped, bullock-muscled
athlete or hairy circus performer in a skintight suit
poised high above the gaping throng, or with
the scrupulous caution of the shuffling codger
that I am in fact, this hoary creature that age and work
and illness made, all my voyaging long since passed,
when contemplations loiter far behind me,
turning in madcap circles or lunging out ahead,
impatient of my over-wary syllogizing,
like loosed hounds outpacing my dim,
path-shackled sight, impatient, imploring,
at every distant turn.

I like to imagine that this dear old Thinking Path
knows my footfall well after all the years of quiet pacing
in every weather, after the morning’s sick headache
has at last subsided, the bed-sweats and vomiting
and angry bowel for a short while held at bay. Wrapped
in muffler, coat and gloves today, I imagine
that it knows the scraping sound, the grim
determined grind of gravel beneath my boot.

Familiar of my wondering pauses, my frequent fits and starts,
this stand of poplars will attest to my desultory progress,
year in, year out, as it tightly frames the narrow path
of this modest voyaging of mine, corseted and cossetted,
sweetly swaddled in the soothing rounds of happy domesticity,
my unquiet cogitations come to rest these not quite forty years
in Kentish country. From the bosom of a loving family,
from the shelter of this house, past borders and woodlands,
kitchen garden, orchard and greenhouses, I wander
out and back, and thus far always out again.

I read this morning how one quite distinguished
parson in a neighboring county, bright beacon
of his congregation, has grandly titled me
“The Guy Fawkes of Faith, Arsonist of Belief,”
sworn enemy of Family, Home and Nation,
whose object is none other than to set aflame
the mansions of Heaven and leave a bloody, smoking
charnel-house in the place of our good God’s creation.

But rest assured, dearest Vicar, it is not.
The world, my friend, is more eloquent by far,
I’ve found, than my own poor plodding prose
could ever be, and speaks quite clearly
what it is. Its creatures too abide where each one
says exactly how it’s made, and how it came to be,
if we might only learn to listen.

My objective, if objective I have, is just to be
a better listener than we have been, to amass the massive
evidence of the living, past and present, and to offer you
the story all things tell. And if it’s glory you’re after,
what grander stuff than the eloquence incarnate
of mollusk and musk-ox, penstemon and pangolin,
hawk and hazelnut, aster, asparagus and ape?
And if it’s impiety you deplore, what greater impiety
than to shout down this very voice you call Creation,
to silence all the world with mighty fulminations
and those smug, impious certainties we call faith?
No, dear Padre, let us all seek humility. My feeble wit
may not find your God here, for the life of me,
but keen discerning such as yours just might.

III

Notice the sound he makes, our prelate in his rage,
the desperation in his voice, its rising pitch and panic.
For I’ll waver he has understood me better even
than my dear old Huxley has, and hears life’s oceans
pounding at his bastioned shore, where each man stands,
his own Albion, to preserve inviolate his lonely bordered soul
in hopes of future glory, but now must hear me tell him
of the here and now he flees in horror, tell him that
we are many, tell him we are never one alone,
that every creature houses others in its curious skin,
this skin that time has woven from the porous membranes
of our many-bodied world.

If I’m not mistaken, tomorrow’s light should see
a vast pelagic swarm intrude upon this newly stubbled ground,
my neighbor’s field, a maritime incursion from the sky
that wanders up the estuaries seeking forage, leaving tilth,
for every boundary on this earth, like the sugared chambers
of the flesh, is but a flagrant invitation, the perverse locus
of promiscuous exchange and penetration.

Great clouds of starling swarm, shape-shifting
over the harvested field beyond the hedgerow
with the approach of autumn twilight. The poplar tops
sway overhead in a breeze gone chilly now.
Their drying leaves make a sound like rain.

Shortly, my boy Francis will be out to fetch me in,
but I’ll delay as long as I am able in this waning light,
for the worthy parson’s vituperations have set me to thinking.
I do now wonder at it all, and thrill. How thrilling to discern
from the great body of evidence we call Nature
that creation has no end, that the inexhaustibly malleable
stuff of us, whose fabric we will one day uncover,
is fashioned into this curious world’s astounding spectacle
of canny creatures by this glorious old, self-authoring
world itself, this world devoid of closure, this world
of fecundity and change and endless exposure to change,
this vivid, churning manufactory of teeming replication
and variation, of multiplicity and diversity,
of provident complexity and pitiless cruelty, yes,
and of boundless, dumbfounding, luminous beauty.
And I did anticipate that this would happen,
the seething Jeremiad, the vile invective, the odor
of Sulphur everywhere. I delayed the publication
of these modest observations and conclusions,
these unexpected fruits of travel and repose,
endured those twenty years of stubborn reticence,
not only for the sake of my own beloved Emma,
but fearing such ferocity from the very likes of our
irate divine, from the imputation of insult, offense,
defilement of his fraternity’s fond devotion to the stories
our fathers told, from those who’d fathom in my candid
contemplations not just an assault on heaven,
but more pernicious still, the final removal of humankind
from center stage in this untidy drama of our universe,
the Copernican revelation that the story of this world
is grander by a long shot than all the solemn installations
of a human pathos at the roiling hub of time’s creation.

VII

I see lamplight in the windows of the house now,
and my devoted Francis will soon be walking toward me
to take my arm and lead me home, and in my mind’s eye,
I see the quiet vicarage in that neighboring county,
like our own dear Down a sanctuary, fashioned
with the Englishman’s special genius for leafy ease
and patriarchy, and imagine the worthy prelate in his armchair,
confecting the lofty sentences of next Sunday’s sermon.

And I seem to see myself as well here, when indisposition
or inclement air forbids the prospect of an excursion
out onto this path, when after hours spent squinting
at my specimen-trays, or teasing out the mysteries of filiation
in my own inscrutable offspring, I turn to snatch a glimpse
of sky and weather, and like that irascible poet-genius of our age,
seem only able to behold infinity out all the windows.

The Science

The work of coming to terms with the world, the enterprise we call science, requires of its practitioners a fundamental humility in the face of the evidence and a commitment to endless, restless motion. Unlike the propositions that faith and belief require, the propositions offered by science are always in transit, always on the way to better, truer articulations of our understanding. The title of this poem, Solvitur Ambulando, comes from a Latin proverb meaning “it is (or will be) solved by walking.” Our questions propel us always forward into the unknown, and always back into the world itself. Perhaps the most famous walker in the history of the intellect, and the person who best exemplifies the kind of humility that true science requires, was Charles Darwin, who stepped modestly into the unknown to find the logic of living things hidden in plain sight. Visitors to Down House in Kent can still see the gravel path on which he ventured out each day, health providing, to contemplate the infinite diversity and complexity of truth.

The Poet

DB Jonas is an orchardist and writer living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico, was educated at the Universities of California (Irvine) and Padova, Italy, and earned postgraduate degrees at Princeton and Yale. After a long career in business and the sciences, he has returned to an early avocation in poems.

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