'A Poetic Achievement'

My middle son and I spent two hours in the Morian Hall of Paleontology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, looking at fossils of plants and animals. Dinosaurs occupy the same space but are less interesting and beautiful than the smaller fossilized flora and fauna. See, for instance, the crinoids, plant-like animals, cousins to today’s starfish. Crinoids belong to the class Crinoidea, rooted in the Greek for “lily-like.” In 1920, Janet Lewis published “Fossil, 1919”: 

“I found a little ancient fern

Closed in a reddish shale concretion,

As neatly and as charmingly set in

As my grandmother’s face

In a round apricot velvet case.”

 

In the museum, the fossils are as clean and precise as a draftsman’s renderings. Something about these ancient impressions, especially ones so life-like, is plangent, like sepia prints of long-dead strangers. The fossils are artful and often look manmade, like jewelry or small sculptures. Half a century after the poem above, Lewis wrote “Fossil, 1975”:

 

“Changed and not changed. Three million years.

This sunlight-summoned little fern

Closed in a cenotaph of silt

Lies in my hand, secret and safe.

In quiet dark transformed to stone,

Cell after cell to crystal grown,

The pattern stays, the substance gone.

Changed and not changed. Three million years

The Spirit, ranging as it will,

In sun, in darkness, lives in change.

Changed and not changed. The spirit hears

In drifting fern the morning air.”

 

Twice she writes “Changed and not changed.” More elegantly, Lewis reformulates the process of permineralization: “The pattern stays, the substance gone.” This is why fossils appear so artfully crafted -- the persistence of pattern. Here is David Bentley Hart on Vladimir Nabokov, artist and scientist:  

 

“[T]he greater the complexity, subtlety, and grace of the patterns he perceived, the more certain he was of the presence of creative intelligence in the fabric of things, a dimension of intentional meaning at once communicating itself and yet concealing itself from direct scrutiny. One might almost say that, for him, there really was no ultimate formal distinction to be made between nature and art: Practically everything is, if approached with a sufficiently responsive sensibility, a poetic achievement.”