If Rachel Carson has written a secular scientific Genesis with reverence, it seems to me the comparison between the original source and her writing will reveal more about Carson’s preoccupation. There are many similarities, which open up a vast range of thematic meanings, between Genesis in the Bible and Rachel Carson’s ‘The Grey Beginnings’, while their differences spark interesting discussions, delving into the mythical nature of the sea, the universality of myths, and more importantly, the role of God.
The opening reference to Genesis (And the Earth was without form, and void; / and Darkness was upon the face of the Deep.) reveals that this chapter is Carson’s response to the biblical creation myth, among other possible references. The lightness in Genesis (‘God said “Let there be light”’) and the greyness of Carson’s world are set in contrast. ‘The Grey Beginnings’ is her reconstruction of the following events. Before there is non-stop heavy rain, ‘no rays of sunlight’ penetrate a ‘dense, perpetually renewed cloud’. Mammals, reptiles, and even birds came from the sea. The blue origin gives us life and breath.
When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal-each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. (Carson, 13)
Nobody actually has figured out the truth of the beginnings.
Many people have debated how and when the earth got its ocean, and it is not surprising that their explanations do not always agree. For the plain and inescapable truth is that no one was there to see, and in the absence of eyewitness accounts there is bound to be a certain amount of disagreement. (Carson, 3)
Carson, as well as other scientists, has no assertion to make. There is no witness to the cosmic birth. No one, unlike God in Genesis, can be sure what has taken place. This humbling tone is lacking in Genesis, where God is assertive. They embrace the ambiguity of our origin. The sibilance in the second sentence in the quotation evokes secrecy; the smoothness of swaying back-and-forth is brought to mind. As if the auditory effect presents the sea lurking beneath us and whispering to us their secrets. Compared to Genesis, instead of God’s commandments of the light and the dry land, ‘The Grey Beginnings’ gives the reader a more scientific account. At the end of the text, Carson gives the man the power to return to the sea where he travels on his yacht or delves into the unfathomable depths with a diving cylinder; yet, so does the sea have the power to reclaim his life.
Interestingly, God doesn’t seem to have created the waters. In ‘The Grey Beginnings’, there is heavy rain, falling continuously ‘day and night’. Not until the rain has been drained from the continental masses does the sea appear; the waiting is worth it – now all the water slowly fills up the ocean basins. The lack of clarification for the sea in Genesis adds to its unknownness. The life-breeding sea, mysterious yet powerful, is almost like God in Genesis.
The text is intertextual not just with Genesis, but also with other myths. At the beginning, the earth is ‘Stygian’, a Greek reference to the river Styx in the underworld, redolent of the void and darkness in Genesis. The title also seems to hint at the Grey Sisters in Greek mythology, daughters of sea-deities, Ceto and Phorcys, who personify the hidden marine danger. These Greek references are not aesthetically appealing. Perhaps myths should be like this – man and nature co-exist, scared of one another, juxtaposing fear and awe. Carson subtly puts in the mythical elements, mystifying her overall scientific descriptive account.
Perhaps the mythical references shed light on rather than enshroud the water's magical creative power. The text, unlike Genesis, leaves the reader both in awe and fear. The unpredictable tides bring life into existence. The birth of the moon evokes perhaps the most awe-inducing descriptive prose, pleasantly long, eloquent of the oceanic rhythmical pulses:
There were tides in the new earth, long before there was an ocean. In response to the pull of the sun the molten liquids of the earth's whole surface rose in tides that rolled unhindered around the globe and only gradually slackened and diminished as the earthly shell cooled, congealed, and hardened. Those who believe that the moon is a child of Earth say that during an early stage of the earth's development something happened that caused this rolling, viscid tide to gather speed and momentum and to rise to unimaginable heights. Apparently the force that created these greatest tides the earth has ever known was the force of resonance, for at this time the period of the solar tides had come to approach, then equal, the period of the free oscillation of the liquid earth. And so every sun tide was given increased momentum by the push of the earth's oscillation, and each of the twice-daily tides was larger than the one before it. Physicists have calculated that, after 500 years of such monstrous, steadily increasing tides, those on the side toward the sun became too high for stability, and a great wave was torn away and hurled into space. (Carson, 5)
Apart from the scientific recount of the beginnings of all things, The role of God seems to be questioned, given the intertextuality and decentralisation of ‘The Grey Beginnings’. The plurality of the title (‘Beginnings’) echoes Carson's focus on how different elements are given shape and life, each of which deserves separate focus. There is only one beginning in Genesis where God has the final say; but not so in Carson’s writing. The formation of the earth is a chain of occurrences and reactions, in which mythical elements appear. Things take place dependent on each other, but not on a centre – God.
‘The Grey Beginnings’ offers a scientific account of nature’s origins worthy of close shots, in which the observant reader finds traces of myth. Still, the nature that he observes stays central.
Reference list
Rachel Carson. The Sea around Us (2018). Oxford University Press.