Essays

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Nature has a way of showing up unannounced. And I don’t just mean those episodic depredations of storm and flood, or even that field mouse you found in the pantry of the beach house this spring—the one that had chewed its way through the top of the olive oil bottle to die in panicked ecstasy, treading the golden elixir into an extra virgin froth. No, I mean sometimes Nature actually shows up, as in: Poof! There she is.

Take the story of Alain de Lille, who was wandering along one fine day in the twelfth century muttering to himself about Ovid, when, suddenly, down from the sky sweeps a crazy crystal chariot drawn by celestial doves and bearing a towering, magnificent maiden queen. Around her head whirl the very stars and planets, and upon her billowing robes an overcome Alain seems to see the medieval equivalent of an IMAX nature documentary: over there, on the scrim of her diaphanous cloak, a montage of the bird kingdom, where falcons wheel and clip herons in midflight, and ostriches roam over desert sands; over here, on her seamless mantle, some Jacques Cousteau-style footage of whales disporting themselves in the deep, escorted by dolphins and a host of finny friends; and finally, on the linen tunic gathered up against her shapely body, a drive-in movie of life upon the terrestrial earth, where lions and tigers stalk their jungle prey, nervous rabbits bound along a hedge, and graceful deer graze upon the dales.

As this cosmological funhouse goddess—Natura—drops to his side, Alain swoons in queasy terror; but just before he blacks out and face-plants at her feet, he finds himself momentarily fantasizing about the hidden picture show probably playing on her panties. Typical. That’s a defrocked monk for you.

Not that it was a totally unreasonable fantasy—after all, who could miss that gaping tear right down the middle of her dress?

Thus begins one of the great phantasmagorical allegories of the Western canon, De Planctu Naturae, or The Plaint of Nature, a text that put the commandments of God on the lips of nature, whence they’d be heard murmuring for the better part of the next eight hundred years. Alain de Lille didn’t invent the idea that “nature,” rightly understood, teaches us how to live and what to do, but he gave dramatic shape and voice to this proposition, which would organize much of the intellectual life of Europe well into the nineteenth century. When nature showed up, it was generally time for a lesson—about politics, about sex, and, above all, about sexual politics.

It’s 1690—are you curious about how to arrange your government? Beehives and beaver dams offer plausible models, both stamped with the authority of the Creator—so Early Modern thinkers studied them closely as they reasoned about novel political forms (and they were very worried when they found out the “King Bee” was a Queen). By the 1770s, newly discovered Tahiti seemed like the ideal place to meet a “natural man,” who would presumably be able to instruct Enlightenment philosophes in something like “natural politics.” But then “natural woman” was so distracting! Over the next two decades, fantastical descriptions of the social and sexual practices of the island helped drive nails into the coffin of the Ancien Régime, while the Grub Street pornographers cashed in. Back in the era of Bleak House, more than one waistcoated bourgeois gentleman, smoking his pipe before a crackling coal fire, found himself musing about the moral justifications of an increasingly dog-eat-dog economy. Well, there was good news: it turns out dogs do eat dogs down on the African savannahs. Darwin’s theory of the developmental and progressive effects of deadly competition in the wild very quickly did double duty as a means of extending cosmological sanction to the weed-out abuses of late Victorian capital. Darwin had some things to say about mate selection too.

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