A Composer's Comment

The Gaia hypothesis seems to me both very simple and extraordinarily complex. Lewis Thomas, whose essay "The World’s Biggest Membrane" is used at the opening of my Gaian Variations, wrote elsewhere of being unable to conceive of the earth as an organism. I sometimes feel the same way. Yet even when it seems ungraspable it still appears utterly important. It is now more than three decades since Gregory Bateson hosted a conference about the possible role of human consciousness in a future environmental crisis (suggesting by its very topic the role of the unconscious as well). As Lynn Margulis has written since then, the word "consciousness" actually means "awareness of the environment," and, simply put, the Lovelock/Margulis conception of Gaia seems to me the epitome of our "consciousness" today in that sense.

Many might wonder what the Gaia hypothesis could have to do with a work of art. For the answer, you might need look no farther into the obscure than the Mona Lisa. The Leicester Codex shows that Leonardo went to extraordinary lengths to investigate the workings of water. Stephen Jay Gould, inspired by seeing it at the American Museum of Natural History in 1996, wrote in the title essay of his book Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms about how he used to think of Leonardo as a sort of ‘space man’ who had travelled in time, so much did some of his scientific observations seem ‘modern.’ But Gould then writes almost with a sense of relief that Leonardo really was, after all, just a man of his time in that these amazing paleontological observations of his, some not to resurface for another three centuries, were in the service of the outmoded idea of man as "the microcosm" to the earth’s "macrocosm." What drove all of Leonardo’s brilliant observations, Gould demonstrates, was to show that waters flowed through the earth just like blood flowed through the body. Leonardo’s research was meant to prove his fundamental assertion in the Leicester Codex that, "The body of the earth, like the bodies of animals, is interwoven with a network of veins, which are all joined together, and formed for the nutrification and vivification of the earth and its creatures."

Gould recognizes, as have others, that the Mona Lisa is itself a depiction of this statement. He writes, "La Gioconda stands on a balcony overlooking a complex geological background of flowing waters that complete a full hydrological cycle just as blood moves through the human body." Gould also suggests that the painting provides proof of just how central the idea was to Leonardo’s thinking. But Gould, while respectful of the work of art, cuts off his interest in Leonardo’s scientific work just where it really becomes fascinating. In focusing on the excessive literalness of Leonardo’s attempts to find parallels between the body and the earth, Gould misses the point. When James Hutton in 1785 gave a lecture in which he stated that the earth was a living organism, and its proper study should be physiology, one of the primary things that he cited to support this idea was how the flow of water around the planet was like the circulatory system of a living being. In the 1960s, without any awareness of James Hutton, James Lovelock, in one of the earliest published papers on Gaia, mentions William Harvey and the discovery of the circulation of blood. Leonardo’s concept hardly resembled Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, to be sure, (nor did Hutton’s, or Vernadsky’s, in the early 20^th century, for that matter) but they (all of these, really) are linked as a current of thought with roots in ancient history, and in Leonardo’s case we can see its deep connection with the history of art as well.

Gould’s essay came to the conclusion, "Finally we grasp the central importance of Leonardo’s paleontological observations in the Leicester Codex. He featured fossils in order to validate the cherished centerpiece of his pre-modern wordview — the venerable argument, urged throughout classical and medieval times, for interpreting the earth as a living, self-sustaining organism." My contention is that Leonardo, treating this ‘venerable idea’ neither as a metaphor nor a throwback to archiac religions or paganism, intuited that it was a proper subject — indeed, a highly important subject — for scientific inquiry, and that it was something that could ultimately be rationally understood. It was also for him a proper subject for art as well.

Perhaps you could call the Mona Lisa ‘proto-Gaian’ art. The painting is so canonical, further, that, if true, it means that some secret sense of Gaia is written throughout a good deal of our art history. I have in my oratorio simply made that secret explicit. This ‘explicitness,’ further, in setting the actual words of Lovelock and his scientific texts to music is perhaps fundamental to what I was driving at, since a more ‘metaphoric’ sense of Gaia (something that already underlies a long, if subterranean, line of Western thought and finds overt expression in most other cultures worldwide) is not in and of itself exciting. It is, to my mind, the modern science that is so exciting. Like looking at Leonardo’s sketches of flying machines and then at modern airplanes, thinking about Leonardo’s quest and then about the Gaia hypothesis makes it seem both inevitable and yet completely unpredictable - having ultimately demanded such far-flung developments as thermodynamics, cybernetics, spectrometry, even space travel itself, before the current Gaia theory could be conceived of and elaborated.

When Lewis Thomas wrote of the Gaia hypothesis being perhaps ‘one of the great discontinuities of human thought,’ the irony is that the basic idea is in a certain sense so old. Thomas was certainly not unaware of this, I feel sure, but I think he must have felt that the point at which our scientific description of the earth linked up with, and arrived back at, this ancient vision must be a kind of geological event of human thought — like a long built-up internal pressure of thought exploding to the surface. In any case, I feel that way, and it led me to spend much of the last half-dozen years writing Gaian Variations.

-Nathan Currier