“Their vision is so sensitive that a mantis shrimp can see in both infrared and ultraviolet spectra, and uses 16 color receptor cones (compared to just three for humans).

Inman observes: ‘Where we see a rainbow, the mantis shrimp sees a thermonuclear bomb of light and beauty.’â€

When I saw the “Peacock Shrimp†post, from The Monterey Bay Aquarium, I was instantly reminded of Peter Ainslie, one of St. Helena High School’s most colorful and dynamic teachers. It wasn’t the Peacock Shrimp, but the Monterey Bay Aquarium that jogged my memory.

Students attending St. Helena High School, during the mid-60s to the mid-90s, might have known that one of his favorite poets was Robinson Jeffers. Pete had walked by Jeffers’ “Tor House†in Carmel Ca. and was amazed at the construction. He introduced me to Jeffers by sharing the poem, “The Excesses of God.†Jeffers drew deep inspiration by living next to the sea and much of his poetry celebrates nature.

Unlike the Peacock Shrimp, Pete’s appearance was modest, however his teaching style resembled The Shrimp, outrageously flamboyant. His stories evoked laughter and sorrow, anger and bliss. He could transition easily (and unpredictably) from prayerful to provocative, to profane. Pete was an “Ivy-leaguer,†having graduated from Princeton Univ. Several times each year I would have to pause and let my students listen to him belt out the Princeton Fight Song. His ex-students who visit the campus might still hear echoes of him belting out:

“Roar tiger roar, in the name of old Nassau!â€

 Teachers can often be described as “a little like this or a blend of that,†however, Ainslie was iconoclastic. He became legendary and it was an honor to teach next to him until the painful end.  Teaching is an energy-sapping profession and it was boggling to imagine how he was able to continue teaching while coping with dreaded effects of what is now known as a bipolar disorder.

While searching for Jeffers’ poem, I found this biographical sketch on an on-line poetry review site.

 “Robinson Jeffers is famous for building by-hand his own stone home, “Tor House and Hawk Tower,†in Carmel, California. Because of that, it is natural for readers to approach a Jeffers’ poem as if it were also built stone-by-stone.

The image of poet as stone-builder is a good one: the perfect combination of the primitive and the craftsman and the anachronistic. Poetry is, after all, all of that.

Poetry is the oldest art. Even those who painted on cave walls were moved to try and shape their own world ultimately by the magic and religious words that gave their world and their lives meaning.

Words like stones have weight. We may treat words sometimes like they are merely the movements of breath, and play with them that way… like stones we skip across the water to kill a few moments of the day. But words have a weight unto themselves. A weight we can hold in our hands and feel and measure. Words like God, beauty, desire, secret.

Jeffers, maybe more than any poet, understood the true weight of words, a primitive and anachronistic weight. A weight we cannot always articulate but which is always able to articulate us.â€

The Excesses of God:
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

Not surprisingly, the word “superfluousness†connected with the Peacock Shrimp. How this shrimp looks,  sees and acts is “over-the-top†outlandish.  In his book, The Great Evolution Mystery, Gordon Taylor claims that Darwin’s Theory can not explain “organs of extreme perfection.†He includes eyes in this category and suggests that the billions of cellular/molecular variables in eye anatomy make it impossible to credit natural selection as their cause. The Peacock Shrimp’s eye anatomy and physiology easily qualify as a Loren Eiseley-kind-of-miracle, not to mention its pincer capability which seems like something from a Star Wars movie.

Creatures like these assured Eiseley that “The Mystery†remains and I suspect that Jeffers, “Ainslie†and Robert Frost surely would agree:

“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.â€

                                                                                    Robert Frost.