For small creatures such as we

On (cosmic?) coincidences, Carl Sagan, and my father.

"There’s no such thing as coincidence": a frequent, and manifestly false, mantra of fictional (if not real) detectives and probably many others. Unless you believe that literally everything is predetermined, then there is some element of randomness in the Universe, and this can apply in our everyday lives just as much as it does to the fate of atoms or Schrödinger’s Cat.

Well, here’s a coincidence which may or may not mean anything, beyond the fact that it meant something to me. There I was, sitting in a café, reading Substack Posts on my phone, when in the space of less than fifteen minutes I twice had occasion to recall quotes from the late astronomer and science communicator, Carl Sagan (1934–1996).

For the first I was responding to a Post by Elif Shafak entitled Why Can't You Write About Flowers, Trees and Stars? Her novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, was officially accused of “insulting Turkishness”, which caused an elderly relative to ask, "Why can’t you choose something lighter—next time write about flowers, trees, and stars?" A question which, in almost every respect, Shafak answers eloquently in her Post.

But there was one aspect which immediately struck me and perhaps wasn’t explicitly addressed: the implication that flowers, trees, and stars are somehow inconsequential or trivial. No doubt this struck me, even hit a nerve, because for much of my freelance career I had been writing about flowers and trees, if not stars.

I say this loosely, of course, because I’m not a botanist, nor have I ever been a nature writer as such; but for more than thirty years my freelance career involved, to a greater or lesser extent, writing about and photographing the outdoors, landscapes, and the natural world. I most certainly have taken hundreds of images of flowers and trees.

At the outset of that career (which became my full-time occupation thirty years ago last May) I was coming from the position of an enthusiast for exploring the great outdoors, armed with a conviction that being active rather than passive deepens our engagement with nature and the environment. Even then I felt a general but woolly impulse to encourage people to act responsibly in the countryside; the very first books wholly written by me were the two volumes of 'Car-free Cumbria' (2002) through John Gillham Publishing, and the reason John commissioned me to write them was because he already knew of my interest in widening the use of public transport in accessing the outdoors rather than acquiescing in the seemingly inexorable growth in car use.

I’d better wrangle this Post back to my intended subject, but just want to say that over the ensuing decades I’ve only grown more convinced of the importance of engaging as many people as possible with the natural world, while also, and arguably paradoxically, wanting to minimise our potentially damaging impact (feel free to pick up this argument in Comments).

My basic point was that there’s nothing 'light' about trees and flowers: we depend utterly on our biosphere. We all (should) know that one of the best ways to combat or mitigate climate change is to plant more trees. And there’s nothing trivial about stars. Yes, as Carl Sagan knew very well, they don’t influence our daily lives in the way astrology claims¹; their significance is different and perhaps much deeper. All the heavier elements which make up much of our substance are only forged in supernovae; everything, in fact, except hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of lithium.

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos.

And then, just minutes after responding to Elif Shafak’s Post, I read a short but powerful one by Paul Crenshaw, entitled Control, Or, The Color of Bruises. If I can just quote the opening two sentences, 'I stand shoulder to shoulder with my LGTBQ+ friends. Bigotry is bigotry, no matter what Bible verse it’s packaged in, and I can quote verses all day long about loving one another.’

Now it may well be that, having just cited Carl Sagan in one context, I was thereby primed to see a connection in another. Coincidence (probably) had nothing to do with it. Be that as it may, I found myself thinking of another line of Carl Sagan’s which resonates even more powerfully with me.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
Carl Sagan, Contact

This line (from Sagan’s 1985 novel, Contact, which became a 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster. (In fact the book originated years earlier as a screenplay, by Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan.)

Although I shed any Christian faith before I was out of my teens, I was raised in a Christian household, and I have enough residual identification with the faith to be incensed whenever someone cites Scripture as a justification for bigotry. And though he’s no longer around to ask, I’m sure my Dad would have felt the same. In my early childhood, my Dad was a Church of England curate and then a vicar, but when I was 11 he left the full-time ministry to retain as a teacher.

Chris Sparks (1929—2012)

What lay behind this decision is a long story and I was too young to understand it at the time anyway; but it wasn’t because he’d lost his faith. He continued to act as a priest part-time, served for a while as a volunteer prison chaplain, and later became a regular celebrant at services in the church nearest home, which was one of several which had been folded into one 'United Benefice'.

Dad also had yet another career, as a psychotherapist, and much of his practice was with people who were struggling with the conflict between their inner natures and the religious doctrines they’d been born into or become involved with. Obviously confidentiality meant he could never discuss individual cases, so we only ever talked about it in the most general terms, but there’s no doubt in my mind that at least some of his clients’ internal conflicts would relate to clashes between doctrine and their sense of sexuality or gender identity; which is, pretty obviously, why I connected him with those lines from Paul’s Post.

But what’s the link with Carl Sagan? That’s not hard either. Dad and I shared a love for Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (first the TV series, then the book, which I still cherish; both date from 1980). At Dad’s funeral I quoted Sagan, first the famous 'Pale Blue Dot' and finally the 'small creatures' line. Which I am sure Dad would have found far closer to his own with his faith than any misappropriation of Bible quotes in the service of hatred. As I said, 'I think Carl Sagan knew something about love; and I know my Dad did.'

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

I miss them both.

St Petr’s Quernmore, where Dad often officiated. The churchyard is also the last resting place of both my parents.

1. “How could the rising of Mars at the moment of my birth affect me, then or now? I was born in a closed room. Light from Mars couldn’t get in. The only influence of Mars which could affect me was its gravity. But the gravitational pull of the obstetrician was much larger than the gravitational influence of Mars. Mars is a lot more massive, but the obstetrician was much closer.”
https://culturacolectiva.com/en/technology/carl-sagan-astrology-science/