174 PA RT T W O
As he aged and his voice grew faint against the noise of progress, Jeffers dug
in, “Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth / Under
men’s hands and their minds... my own coast ’s obscene future.” Nowadays
California coastal dwellers, watching their bluffs and beaches erode, build ce-
ment “sea walls, because we don’t put waves before the homes of people.” This
may seem necessary, but it masks a puzzling idea of waves.
A certain pain arises from photos of Tor House and Hawk Tower solitary
on a wild bluff in 1919, ’23, ’27, before “suburban houses” crowded round.
And from Jeffers recalling how he and Una once watched a puma stride along
a nearby ridge. In 1936 the carving of a coast road, Highway 1, brought acute
dismay, yet “the great bronze gorge-cut sides of the mountains” remain “Not
the least hurt,” “Beautiful beyond belief.”
That summer Jeffers hiked with his son up “the pathless gorge of Ventana
Creek” near Big Sur and recounted this event in “Oh, Lovely Rock.” Intro-
ducing his lucid, level reading of the poem at the Library of Congress, he says,
“You must understand that this is not southern California. There are no orange
groves and no oil wells.” Instead there ’s “forest on forest above our heads.” Past
midnight the fire ’s flame “Lighted my sleeping son’s face... and the vertical
face of the great gorge-wall / Across the stream.” There was “no fern or lichen,
pure naked rock... as if I were / Seeing rock for the first time.” Those silent
dots of his trace a movement of mind from the visual into the visionary. They
occur again as he sees
the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange... I cannot
Tell you how strange.It ’s “living” rock, he reminds us. And strange, though rock would seem familiar.
In it he sees a “fate going on / Outside our fates.” He and his son will die, “this
age will die,” but “this rock will be here,”
the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above.Ending this memory of a “lovely rock,” he “Felt its intense reality with love
and wonder, this lonely rock.” Emotion doesn’t belie his severe creed, the in-
tegrity of humankind ’s organic wholeness with our earth. It takes openness to
sense those atomic energies, and humility to move from “lovely” to “lonely,”
speaking for himself in speaking for pure naked rock.
Seventy years later to the day, a group with Jeffers’s grandson clambered
two days up the still pathless gorge and found the rock, now spread with ferns
and moss. Or was there green growth even back then in 1936, and the nighttime
force of his vision made Jeffers see “pure naked rock”? (Plate 12)