Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion

Epilogue: X the Unknown

195 Epilogue: X the Unknown As kids in the fifties and early sixties, my big brother,Tom, and I loved monster movies. Nothing like the slashers of today, which I can’t stand, these were the early Frankensteins and Draculas and Wolfmen and Mummies, starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney, Jr. The violence was only suggested, the personalities of the tragic figures were developed (or so it seemed to our easy sensibilities), and the tension could be exquisite. Certain space movies qualified, like The Forbidden Planet with its all but invisible, cat-like monster projected from Walter Pidgeon’s id, and a few psycho-thrillers such as Macabre and Split Second grabbed us too. Of course, in those days of “duck and cover,” the ever-present Bomb, and the Red Scare, all manner of radioactive threats crept onto the matinee screen:giant tarantulas,mutated sea creatures,and—most memorable by far to this day—X the Unknown. Experiments on a Scottish bog draw forth a radiation-seeking something (true to the title, we never find out quite what) that melts people’s faces, grows, and spreads, as Dean Jagger leads the battle against it. This movie was a little more graphic, or gross, than most we watched, and very, very scary. But quite aside from the slender plot and chilling black-and-white effects,I think it is the title itself that sticks in my memory. There is something about the idea of the sheer unknown that thrills me, draws me out of doors or into a book,makes me excited to get up and face the day so as to press into territory never before plumbed ... which might be a clump of moss just as well as a new trail or state or mountain range. It’s as if things can’t be too bad, as long as there are brand new discoveries out there to be made. Do I flatter myself to suppose that Darwin himself was drawn or driven by the same impulse when he took on the pollination of orchids, the formation of coral atolls, the sex of barnacles, the power of movement in plants, the making of soil duff by earthworms, and much more, then wrote great books about each of his preoccupations in turn? TheTangled Bank:Writings from Orion 196 For what better way to come to grips with X, than to write about it? And what, after all, defines the “X” of the matter; what is the actual nature of the “unknown?” It is one thing to approach true terra incognita, somewhere or something that no one has ever before plumbed—or at least published. Few of us will have such opportunities, although they are not all gone: when I found the first monarchs west of the Rockies migrating into Mexico, or the first arctic skippers recorded in Columbia County, these were new quanta added to the sum of our knowledge. But just as righteously to be called unknown is any question we have not answered for ourselves alone.My topics have borne little of the“grandeur”of which Darwin spoke when he referred to“this view of life.”I have engaged simple enough ideas, questions, precepts, mysteries, and biases. But with each excursion, I have essayed, in Montaigne’s sense of the term, some element of the earth with which I dearly wished to acquaint myself, and discover what I thought about it. Now that I am no longer writing these short pieces for Orion,I miss the exercise, the enterprise, the outright surprise of the thing. So I take up my journal,or write a letter,a poem,or even,the gods help me,a contribution to someone’s blog. There is no denying that “The Tangled Bank” was a privileged pulpit from which to utter these moss-murmurs and fern-words, more than half a hundred times, and make them fast on paper. It gave me a rare invitation to ask my questions, explore my opinions, and chase my whims to a degree any essayist would, or should, envy. This lucky gig also offered the rare gift of working intimately with a maddeningly good, sweet-natured, rough-and-tumble editor who almost never let me get away with writing crap. (When her tender years rendered my cultural references occasionally opaque, I usually deferred in favor of youth. But Broderick Crawford was non-negotiable, so I referred Jennifer to Google.) My long engagement with the best magazine going (no...