Pulphead: Essays (24 page)

Yet he saw much of what Darwin saw, could feel with his antennae the knowledge that would be Darwin’s glory. This isn’t making claims. Darwin himself acknowledges Rafinesque as a forerunner in
The Origin of Species
. He quoted a sentence from
New Flora and Botany of North-America
, albeit grudgingly. In a letter to a colleague, Darwin writes: “Poor naturalist as [Rafinesque] was, he has a good sentence about species and var[ietie]s. which I must quote in my Historical Sketch and I sadly want the date at once.” The good sentence was this: “All species might have been varieties once, and many varieties are gradually becoming species by assuming constant and peculiar characters.”

But in reality Darwin had little idea how far Rafinesque had gone. In a letter of 1832 to Torrey, Rafinesque wrote:

The truth is that Species and perhaps Genera also, are forming in organized beings by gradual deviations of shapes, forms and organs, taking place in the lapse of time. There is a tendency to deviations and mutations through plants and animals of gradual steps at remote irregular periods. This is a part of the great universal law of perpetual mutability in every thing. Thus it is needless to dispute and differ about new Sp[ecies] and varieties. Every variety is a deviation which becomes a Sp. as soon as it is permanent by reproduction.

One reason the scope of Rafinesque’s ideas in this area wasn’t known to Darwin or anyone else for so long is that Rafinesque buried their boldest expression in his unreadable poetry. The lines dealing with evolution are in fact some of his least awful, as you feel him, for a second, stop versifying and start thinking: “Just like a tree, with many branches; most Of genera produce the various kinds Or species; varieties at first, like buds Unfolding, and becoming species, when By age, they may acquire the proper forms.”

The proper forms
—you see his needle start to twitch there. Also, “constant characters,” in the sentence Darwin references. He got close. Often when he approaches this question you can watch him—with a sudden flourish of meaningless, euphonious adjectives—trace a broken silhouette around the answer, as when he talks about “the natural evolution of spontaneous vegetable life exerted in wisdom thro’ ages” or about “fixed forms, and those that may vary to produce breeds or proles, until these assume the specific rank by important features, united to permanency, multiplicity of individuals or insulation in distinct climes.” Distinct climes! He was almost there—but the interior of the silhouette remains forever a vista of fog.

That’s what’s terrifying but also heroic in Rafinesque, to know he could see that far, function at that outer-orbital a level intellectually, yet still wind up viciously hobbled by the safe-seeming assumptions of his day. We do well to draw a lesson of humility from this. It’s the human condition to be confused. No other animal ever had an erroneous thought about nature. Who knows what our version of the six-thousand-year-old earth is. It’s hiding somewhere in plain sight. In five hundred years there’ll be two or three things we believed and went on about at great length with perfect assurance that will seem
hilarious
to them. Rafinesque, who sensed the presence of those voids with exquisite, defenseless nerves, nonetheless tumbled into them.

There are some lonely destinies, but Rafinesque’s is up there, the destiny of geniuses lost in time, heralds of false dawns. His beautiful human brain was wrong for the nineteenth century. He was an eighteenth-century man. In fact, this is an essential feature of his charm, that he carries a gospel of newness, and is remembered as a thinker too far ahead of his time, but had about him, too, something fusty, something frock-coat-and-jabot. In one of our scant glimpses of his childhood we find him alone in the library, reading the
Spectacle de la Nature
, one of those anonymous or pseudonymous or otherwise clandestine Enlightenment pamphlets put out in Paris in the 1750s or ’60s. It’s a helpful detail. This is the milieu of Diderot’s
Encyclopédie
, of total knowledge and all-enveloping
systèmes
. It’s here that Rafinesque’s mind is formed, and formed with the tenacity only intense early self-education can impart. He never attended a university, not for a day. He says obscurely, “I was to go to Switzerland, into a College … but this project was not fulfilled.” Instead he was shuttled between aristocratic grandmothers who told him he was the smartest boy on earth and to go read. He taught himself Latin and Greek at fourteen not because a tutor demanded it but because he found himself needing them in order to follow the footnotes any further. His command of those languages, though he seldom had his books handy, was absolutely pure (there’s a note in an old ornithological journal: a field researcher tried to tinker with one of Rafinesque’s genus names,
Helmitherus
[warbler], on the basis that it was bad Greek, but one of the dons wrote in to overrule, pointing out that Rafinesque’s nominative stem, though not well-known, had been preferred by Aristotle).

The years when Rafinesque should have been getting properly taught and trained, right around 1800, are when academic specialization as we know it was codifying itself. The million philosophical projects launched by the Enlightenment had generated the West’s first overwhelming wave of data sets, especially in natural history. In order to know something thoroughly now you had to know much less. Rafinesque slept through the alarm on this shift in the matrix. He showed up still wanting to know it all, to be a synthesizer. He didn’t see it was a time instead for clean, precise, empiricist gathering. His books, he quaintly announces, are henceforth to be thought of as volumes in a life’s work, the
Annales de la Nature
. Deep down he is still in Grandmother’s library. And then he goes to America, where the profusion of unclassified organisms that has helped to trigger these methodological and conceptual upheavals to begin with lies waiting. He might as well have on a banyan and turban when he says things like “The variety of sounds which [thunder] produces, can hardly be reduced to any descriptive enumeration: I mean however to attempt it at another time.” The New World shattered him, and we have these magnificent shards. Rafinesque knew more, but knew it broken. His rivals knew less, but knew it more solidly.

He invents the word
malacology
(the study of mollusks). He invents the still-current word
Taino,
for the Caribbean islanders met by Columbus. He earns the title “father of American myriapodology” (study of many-legged bugs). He becomes the first person to understand dust, that much of it comes from the atmosphere.

In 1831 he writes to a philosophical club in New York proposing the establishment of a “Congress of Peaceful Nations.” He then writes an open letter to the Cherokee, warning that they will soon be forcibly moved to the West, a decade before it happens.

In 1821, in Lexington, Kentucky, he had published and tried to pass off as an epigram of Ben Franklin’s (it’s not—I’ve looked everywhere) this exhortation: “Agricultural nations! Have no slaves among you; the earth is a free gift of God, and must be tilled by free hands.”

And as subway-prophet crazy as can be his gibberish about the Atalantes, he was the only early researcher to work seriously on the Kentucky mounds who
never harmed them
. He did not excavate. He knew there were grave goods inside, but he felt that the most important thing was to describe the exterior as accurately as possible and then protect everything. He looked toward the day when “our pyramids and monuments will be visited like those of Egypt.” This philosophy, had it been taken seriously, would have been more important than any archaeological idea to emerge from America in the nineteenth century. I mean that in all transparency. We can’t go at most of the mounds with our ground-penetrating radar and carbon dating, because they were destroyed by people trying to prove the Indians are Hebrews. Rafinesque only wanted to look.

At Transylvania University, in Lexington, Kentucky, where he walked into a five-year roving professorship in the natural sciences after leaving Audubon’s place, they wouldn’t let him teach
materia medica
, because he wouldn’t cut cadavers.

*   *   *

At Transy he wound up living with my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents Luke and Ann Usher (I’d been fascinated with him for years when I learned this). The Ushers were stewards at Transy, meaning they built a boardinghouse on campus where the school’s out-of-town students lived. Rafinesque kept a room there during the first year of his appointment. One of his students left an admirably vivid account:

He wore wide Dutch pantaloons of a peculiar pattern, and never wore suspenders. As he proceeded with a lecture, and warmed up to a subject, he became excited, threw off his coat, his vest worked up to make room for the surging bulk of flesh and the white shirt which sought an escape, and heedless alike of his personal appearance and the amusement he furnished—was oblivious to everything but his subject.

He became greatly fat in Lexington. One can probably blame my great-&c.-grandmother Ann for that. She herself was huge, and so was Luke (“of the Falstaffian model” is the phrase recorded). She’s known to have physically forced plum pudding on people. Right after that year in Rafinesque’s life, you start seeing the word
corpulent
in descriptions of him.

Perhaps on account of the family connection, I’ve long felt an intimate familiarity with the “room in College proper,” where Rafinesque spent 1821–22. You can’t read him and not feel it. In his writing it’s the one place where you find him getting cozy, the moment when he looks around and notices that he inhabits a human dwelling. Since he’s a naturalist and always making lists and notes, we know a lot about that space, which a graduate remembered as “a curiosity, filled with butterflies and bugs and all sorts of queer things.” Letters from Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York and from Jefferson, with whom Rafinesque has renewed contact, lie oopsily conspicuous on the edge of the table. The least dreadful among the essays stacked and waiting to be corrected would be that of young Master Jefferson Davis, who when imprisoned by Lincoln in 1866 will ask his physician at Fortress Monroe to procure a few volumes of “conchology, geology, or botany,” he desiring to commune with the interests of more innocent days. On the outside sill at Rafinesque’s southwest window, nestled close over by the right jamb so the sun won’t hit it, a metal thermometer made by Frederic Houriel of Paris silently transmits knowledge year-round. There is sound: “On the 11th were heard the first frogs … On the 25th the Black birds were already noisy.” Vegetation we watch: “The grass begins to grow and was quite green … the catkins of lombardy poplars begin to appear.” Then a “remarkably white frost happened on the morning of the 29th.” An unrolled ink-drawn map of an Indian site strains to curl up on itself, but its edges are pinioned with fossil-rock paperweights on two opposing corners, a magnifying glass on the third, and on the fourth a perfectly smooth and homogenous lump of ash-gray limestone, which rests on its flat, fracture side.

Rafinesque hunches with a thick pencil over proofs for the first and only issue of the
Western Minerva
, the magazine he’s started, which will get suppressed before it leaves the printer by what he describes to Jefferson as
“une cabale nouvelle del ignorance contre les lumières.”
The existing copy is mainly a time capsule of Rafinesque’s astonishing social obnoxiousness whenever he felt slighted, which is how he woke up in Lexington, a town that showed him more respect than any other on earth and gave him the only real job of his life, but where, as everywhere, he felt they ought to have followed him around with styli and tablets at the ready. Nonetheless he founded societies there and a botanical garden and gave open lectures on science. (People flocked to hear him do the one on “the history of the ants,” in which he described them “as having lawyers, doctors, generals, and privates, and … great battles.” Yet he scoffed at the citizens as “Squires and Sanchos.” He went to their parties and snorted at the cloddish dancing, whining that everyone stood in little groups, so that “no one can shine to any advantage … since it is ten chances to one that the best bon-mot will only be heard by a couple of neighbors” (the eighteenth-century manners).

The
Minerva
, he believes, will spark an Enlightenment of the early West. He sits going over the proofs in the small hours of the morning. The vaguely menacing footsteps of the students past his door have ceased, and the only person likely to bother him is my grand-cookie, asking if he wants some coffee and corn cakes.

Rafinesque burned too many candles. The school actually complained at one point about how much they were paying Luke for them (the school that surely could have found Rafinesque a freestanding cabin somewhere).

He’s tired, rubbing the “fine, black eyes.” He comes to the end of the issue. There’s a poem he’s written, entitled “To Maria. Who asked me if I should like to Live in a Cottage.” It’s the only one of the poems he’s signed “Constantine,” rather than with some foppish nom de plume. The name Maria would have been understood by Lexington readers to signify Mary Holley, wife of Horace, the president of Transy. She presided over a parlor salon at which Rafinesque was ever present, though he couldn’t stand the husband, his boss—and his rival, for, in Mary, Rafinesque had found his philosophical angel. She was a shockingly accomplished and sophisticated woman to be over the mountains at that date. In later life she wrote a history of Texas that’s said to have been the single most important text in persuading people to migrate there before the Civil War. She made sure Rafinesque’s hair got brushed and the mud from his caving expeditions washed from his clothes. He ate supper with the Holleys on many nights, no doubt refusing eye contact with Horace. It seems to have been one of those things. When Mary said, “Oh, I do adore you, Msr. Rafinesque,” she meant that she loved his mind, whereas he heard something like, “Help me to escape this toad and free me to bear your genius heirs.” At any rate they’d grown comfortable with this bandying of the word
love
, which is why he’s permitted himself the cheek of dedicating these verses to her.