By 1870 the Smiths and other nurserymen had four thousand acres under cultivation, creating in the terraced land above the lake some of the largest commercial orchards in the country. The Smiths planted yearly twenty thousand rose bushes in over two hundred varieties on a single acre. In summer the smell of the rose fields filled the air of the town.
The Timber Culture Act made it mandatory for settlers moving west to plant trees in order to claim land: to plant an apple orchard meant to own a farm. In the decades after the Civil War, the Smiths sent daily shipments of grafted apple trees west across the country on the new railroads to meet the demand, shipping as many as six million pounds in a year.
William Smith traveled around the world in search of new apple seeds and stock, and surrounded his house on Castle Street with a twenty-five-acre botanical park of unusual trees and plants that he collected on his travels. The trees were not merely a business, but an enactment of Smith’s interest in the natural world that had its roots in a mix of spiritualism and Swedenborgianism.
At the time, the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg saturated American thought in its transition from the abstraction of America as a promised land to the idea that the landscape itself was numinous, a transformation from Jonathan Edwards’s man as a spider suspended over the fires of hell to an Emersonian luminosity: now the fire was within.
Swedenborg’s early work involved mineralogy and other areas of hard science. He studied widely, and at Cambridge attended Edmund Halley’s lectures in astronomy. Following the model of Halley (who had made his stunning discoveries by observing the heavens minutely), Swedenborg investigated the question of the exact placement of longitude, the physical nature of time. The work of closely examining the night sky occupied Swedenborg for forty years. His long immersion in objective scientific observation seems to have opened into a vision. He saw the New Jerusalem of Revelation come down from heaven and become manifest on earth as a geometric plan, a square made of luminous particles—like stars or precious stones—with doors on every side, a pattern imbued with divine light, only mankind could not see it. The doors were always open, and within there was no night, for everything shone with the soft jewel-like light of the presence of God. In the heart of the New Jerusalem stood the tree of life, bearing fruit every month of the year, and all who entered could freely partake of the fruit of the tree.
“Nectar and ambrosia,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in the 1840s, “are only those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates fail to perceive, just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without knowing it.” Heaven was earth, suffused with the illumination of divinity.
In the 1820s the Swedenborgian missionary John Chapman—American folklore’s Johnny Appleseed—wandered west through the Ohio River Valley. Chapman lived like an Indian, carrying little. He wore a shaggy beard and slept unsheltered in the wild. Everywhere he went he planted apple seeds so that within the unlimited expanse of the New Jerusalem all would eat of the tree of life, which in his European conception of the Garden of Eden was the apple tree.
The apple is not native to the ancient Near East with its tradition of the cultivated garden or “paradise.” The native Mediterranean “apple,” or archetypal fruit, is the fig, whose connection with birth and the feminine is self-evident and translates into the contemporary Italian obscenity fico with its obvious derivatives. The Greek word for fig was sukon, from which derive words that mean sweetness itself: sugar, suck, as well as sycophant, a displayer of figs, a pimp. In the biblical tableau of the Garden of Eden the woman bears the Semitic name Eve, hawa, the word for life. Haya, the snake, completes the visual pun. The snake in the tree of life is life itself, ever renewed, the current of life that flows through the female body, the flower and the fruit.
“The apple of America is a totally different apple,” Henry James said. His father was a Swedenborgian spiritualist who had had a religious conversion in western New York, where the James family had amassed a fortune by feeding the workers who dug the Erie Canal.
In keeping with his interest in spiritualism and the natural world, William Smith built an observatory in his botanical park. He persuaded William Brooks, an Englishman famous for the discovery of comets, to direct its construction and become its resident astronomer. The observatory was a round, spiraling building, with a round library paneled in dark wood below, and beside it a small transit telescope for calculating time by the movements of stars in a narrow north-south patch of sky. The huge celestial telescope on the floor above weighed eight thousand pounds and sat on wheels that swung it around beneath a silver dome. Brooks moved the telescope clockwise by pulling a rope with considerable effort; with another rope he slid back a panel of the dome to open it to the sky. For a decade or more, Brooks lived for the most part in the observatory itself, where his constant vigilance enabled him to discover fourteen new comets and win the Leland Medal from the Academy of Science in Paris.
…
William Smith was a rugged-looking man with a shock of white hair and a thick white beard on his hatchetlike, almost Indian chief’s face. He never married, but his closest friends in Geneva were women—the notorious radicals Elizabeth Smith Miller and her daughter Anne. Elizabeth Miller was the granddaughter of John Jacob Astor’s partner in the fur trade, Peter Smith. She had grown up in her grandfather’s house, east of Skaneatales, when her father, Gerrit Smith, was one of the wealthiest men in America.
The Smith manor house in the days of her childhood was filled with people from New York and Boston seeking her father’s patronage, with the displaced remnants of the Iroquois tribes who knew it was an easy place to find food and money, with runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad, and religious eccentrics seeking refuge in western New York. Smith’s niece, Elizabeth Cady, who fell in love there with one of Smith’s protégés, the abolitionist Henry Stanton, wrote that her visits to the manor were the happiest days of her life.
Elizabeth Miller and her daughter eccentrically wore a Middle Eastern costume of trousers and a long shirt around Geneva. Amelia Bloomer, the editor of the reform paper in Seneca Falls, wrote that if women across the country would adopt this costume they would be freed from the gradual suffocation of the corset, a critical step in the freeing of women themselves.
In 1904 Elizabeth and Anne Miller persuaded William Smith that although he was unable to formalize spiritualism into a completely new kind of education, the most innovative thing he could do would be to found a college for women as the twin of Hobart, the conservative Episcopal men’s college in the town. But William Smith College would represent intellectual freedom—it would have no connection with traditional religion.
Spiritualism, was, after all, a women’s movement—something that took place anonymously, in the home, under the direction of women—by its very nature antiauthoritarian. It involved the haphazard, personal investigation into the essence of religion itself—the meaning of death—and though it was essentially a scam, it was also essentially true.
…
It can accurately be said that everything is made of light, and that death and decay are nothing more than the freeing of trapped energy. The continuous motion of particle waves that constitute both free energy and energy trapped in matter manifests as light.
The human eye perceives only a fraction of the vibratory spectrum that creates the closely linked entities of light and form, and sees a world of moving patterns as a solid thing. This perceptually defined conviction in the solidity of a world of moving patterns has long given rise to the sense that there is a hard barrier between form and formlessness, between life and death, a barrier that is everywhere feared as something dark. Yet there has always been a parallel intuition that death involves crossing into a realm of light, and that beings of light inhabit some kind of other world.
Images and ceremonies prompted by this intuition abound in every culture and religion. Some are of extraordinary beauty. The dissolution of consciousness witnessed by a tantric practitioner at death i
s perceived in stages as waves of color—the appearance like fireflies in this progression oddly suggesting the particle wave spin of the freed electron. Fireflies, like stars, have long signified the world beyond.
Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally “night,” like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian Fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian “Field of Rushes,” the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divitie/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).
Madame Blavatsky unknowingly followed the pattern of Manicheanism, cobbling together a relevant contemporary religion from fragments of ancient and modern belief. Predominant among them was the unshakable belief in the spirit world, in the luminous souls of the dead.
Blavatsky’s success was extraordinary. Theosophy rapidly spread around the world with disciples as diverse and powerful as Gladstone and William Butler Yeats, and opened the way, it has been said, for a new strain of Buddhism in America in the twentieth century.
Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1881. It was an amalgam of eastern esotericism and spiritualism; she had, until that date, been active as a spiritualist medium. The disarming thing about her is that she saw theosophy as a vast and delightful joke which she played at the world’s expense, and if, incidentally, she was enabled to get rich . . . well, why not? “If personal sensibilities can be trusted, she is a genuine being with a real desire for the good of mankind,” wrote Henry Sidgwick of her not long before she was unmasked . . . by the Society for Psychical Research, of which he was a founder.
(Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists)
Blavatsky wrote of herself:
What is one to do when, in order to rule men, you must deceive them, when, in order to catch them and make them pursue whatever it may be, it is necessary to promise and show them toys? Suppose my books and “The Theosophist” were a thousand times more interesting and serious, do you think that I would have anywhere to live and any degree of success unless behind all this there stood “phenomena”? I should have achieved absolutely nothing, and would long ago have been pegged out from hunger.“ (Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists)
Phenomena tended to be simple tricks like bedsheets and bells swung around on strings in the dark. Blavatsky claimed to have used them to suggest the reality of an intangible world.
Pinning the spirit world down was a difficult task, as William Smith found in attempting to create a program in which it could be taught. Sherlock Holmes liked to say that he had figured out his own eccentric education, a mix of chemistry and tracking, by himself. He had invented his profession and was its only practitioner. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle traveled widely in America and Europe to lecture on the new religion, and he seems to have modeled the character of Holmes in part on the spiritualist investigator: the person who was called in to figure out the trapdoors, false-backed closets, and hidden compartments in a dark room. Conan Doyle’s best friend was a rabbi’s son, Harry Houdini, the spiritualist investigator par excellence, who ultimately used the devices he uncovered as stage tricks.
When William Smith died in 1912 his nurseries were still supplying the ornamental trees and shrubs for Central and Riverside Parks in New York. But the nurseries soon fell into neglect and filled with weeds. Over the decades the town gnawed away at the orchard land. What was left of the nursery business went into partial bankruptcy and was sold to a catalog company.
Smith left his house and observatory to Hobart, but the college considered the house, way up by the ruins of Kanadesaga where the nurseries were, too far from their location on the lake and sold it almost at once. The botanical park was broken up and sold off in housing lots. The observatory was too expensive to disassemble and cart away. For more than half a century it stood open to the rain and wind. The library, papers, and celestial photographs within were taken to the town dump.
The other day an old friend of mine who bought the observatory as a weather-beaten ruin thirty years ago showed me where he made a break in the water-rotted wall of the room that still contains the great celestial telescope. Behind the broken wood he found the rounded walls thick with honeycomb, honey, and bees.
…
What remained of the vast nursery land became the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, where, during my childhood, Terry discovered the molecular structure of sweetness. He once wrote:
In May of 1963 1 met Robert Sands Shallenberger for the first time in a bar on University Avenue in Berkeley. He talked about the subtle and complex structure of sugars with such passion that I was thrilled when, after several drinks and many marked-up napkins, he asked me to be a student in his lab. Starting from Shallenberger’s notion that the initial event in the perception of sweetness was the hydrogen bonding of a stimulant to receptors on the tongue, we developed a model we called “the A H-B Theory” of sweet taste, published in Nature in 1967.
The perception of sweetness was a process of absorption, like color vision, that depended as much on the molecular configuration of the membrane of the receptor as on the composition of what was to be perceived. The taste of something sweet involved a “vibratory hydrogen,” a hydrogen atom that would jump to the electronegative center of the receptor, creating a weak hydrogen bond. Terry envisioned the process in the form of an electric plug, where the positive charge within the sugar loses a hydrogen atom to the negative charge within the molecular structure of the receiving membrane, and pulls a loose electron from the receptor into its own molecular sphere. The sweetest-tasting thing, like the fructose in an apple, was the chemical compound with the greatest solubility, the ability to flow and bond with the receptor tissue lining the tip of the tongue.
I never knew that this was what Terry actually did for a living. Although I remember when he left the sense of taste for the sense of smell around the time I moved to New York to go to school. Taste told you only one thing, he said, but smell told you everything. He would say things like, “You know that characteristic smell of a New York apartment? I figured it out in the lab today: cockroaches. You see one, there are a million in the wall.” Or when I came home from New York for the first time and told him how I loved the smell of rain. “The smell of beets,” he said, meaning wet ground. “I’m working on the patent as we speak.”
Terry was figuring out in those days how to isolate the precise molecular components that constitute a particular smell. Then he invented a machine to help him track them down.
This was the kind of thing that people did at the Experiment Station. I thought of the Station as a perfectly ordinary institution. The director was a friend of my parents and a member of our church, as were Anne’s parents, Ed and Nell Glass. They were the Station to us: Nell’s bright blue eyes, her Southern voice, the full-blown fragrant pink roses on her table from summers long ago. She liked to say that she remembered how I would stand at the end of our cottage row waiting to see their blue Oldsmobile coming down the road on the way to our house for supper.
Dr. Glass was a tall man, with a spare New England manner and a voice that vibrated slightly down in his throat, having an odd tremolo quality. I remember going as a child with my mother to see him in the entomology department at the Experiment Station, where he worked for almost half a century, a visit that gave me a lifelong love of collecting, of glass-faced boxes and cases, for in the lobby there I saw with delight for the first time in my life, mounted on hidden pins that pierced a kind of tucked white cotton, shimmering butterflies that seemed to be made of bright colored metal, staghorn beetl
es, and other strange oversized insects. We may have been bringing him some childhood discovery from the cottage—a walking stick, segmented like a twig, with antennae that curled back like wisps of bark torn from a tree.
“But insects are so much like plants, aren’t they?” I used to say to Dr. Glass.
And he would laugh, “I can’t see how,” his pale blue eyes bright behind his thick black-rimmed glasses. “How?”
“The way they reproduce.”
“They both reproduce.”
“I mean the way they reproduce,” I say, thinking of how insect wings uncurl and dry and leaves uncurl and dry, but I can’t explain it.
Critical discoveries had been made at the Station for over a century. There were also notorious incidents of academic malice. A history of the Station published in the late 1990s tells of how, forty years before, a young researcher named Robert Holley began to see something unusual in his work on the molecular composition of New York State grapes. A supervisor forced him to drop the project. The researcher quit and pursued his work elsewhere. In 1968 Holley won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of RNA.
When I was growing up, Dr. Glass was often away in India or Africa or South America solving insect problems. These were essentially problems of food production. In response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Dr. Glass and his colleagues spent thirty years trying to figure out how to control insect pests responsible for the wholesale destruction of crops around the world, without the use of poison. They eventually figured out how to scramble pheromones, the chemical signals of insects, so that the insects could not reproduce. The immense patience involved must have seemed like going backward.
Wolves & Honey Page 6
