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Show 217. to publish his first contribution under the more prosaic title of "Yosemite Valley in Flood." Here he was better able to embody the flow of his theme, that "destruction is in fact creation," as he structured his essay around the image of Nature's throbbing heart. The Merced River was an artery, fed from the heart of Nature, and the heart beat in all storms: "Many a joyful stream is born in the Sierras, but not one can sing like the Merced . . . of sublime Yosemite she is the voice." The sound of the storm was the sound of the waters, flowing in the same joyful place, to the listener who was mindful of the deeper harmonies of Nature. In storm one could hear the throbbing of Nature's loving heartbeat. Rooted not in Muir's fancy, but in his scientific theory, the vision of Yosemite's watershed as a circulatory system showed that what appeared to be chaotic was in fact an organic phenomenon. The many torrents which streamed over the walls of the Valley became a "countless host of silvery-netted arteries gleaming everywhere!" A scene which would normally be taken as sublime in the full eighteenth century sense - a war of the elements - became powerfully but lawfully beautiful as he wrote about it. No doubt he had prepared himself by coming to see the same truth in the power of Yosemite Falls. Two years before, he had struggled to describe the rushing waters of Yosemite Falls, without falling into a dualistic or gothic perspective. His journal records that |
