Even for people like me who like being alone, at times even crave aloneness, the recent lonely days smear solitude with fear at times.

What if we all end up alone? Truly alone, not just the state that we currently experience, in our respective living conditions, geographic locations, separated from family and friends? The kind of alone where you lost the one closest to your heart, or take your last breath being surrounded by strangers, if surrounded at all?

I find comfort, when these threatening thoughts crop up, in thinking of a German scientist, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who conquered an immense loss when his wife-to-be suddenly died, by throwing himself into work and art. In fact, he confronted the pain of aloneness with creating a whole worldview of systemic connectedness – ecology – and devoted himself to promote Darwin’s theory of evolution. The fate of the individual, the very fact of individuation, could be subsumed into ideas of connectedness and dominant needs within and for the preservation of the species. He and Darwin became close friends, and cooperated on numerous scientific explorations.

Haeckel’s scientific methods as a zoologist and professor of comparative anatomy as well as his philosophy where not uncontroversial – to this day creationist websites call him Darwin’s lap dog and the German menace – his Tree of Life was and is incendiary to religious folks clinging to biblical literalness of creation. The Nazis, long after his death, selectively picked some of his writings on the political and religious implications of Darwinism to justify their racial programs, perhaps one of the reasons that he has fallen into obscurity more so than Darwin.

Within the scientific community some of Haeckel’s biological assumptions are no longer accepted. Inferring from his work with radiolarians, tiny plankton that is found in the ocean, he believed that an individual’s biological development mirrors the evolutionary one of the entire species – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Not so.

He is heralded, though, as a brilliant naturalist and discoverer of multiple new species.

Whatever you think of his science, or his beliefs, there is no controversy around the fact that he was an amazing artist.

In fact, it was his art that introduced him to Darwin in the first place when he sent him portfolios with his drawings of jelly fish and other maritime creatures. The drawings in Kunstformen der Natur – Art Forms in Nature – are breathtaking, you can judge for yourself, of course.

I can vividly imagine how the painstaking creation of these detailed drawings and watercolors of jelly fish and other creatures distracted him from his loss; the embrace of a theory that celebrates interconnectedness in nature must have helped to transmute his grief into a sense of belonging. We should all be so lucky to find appropriate distractions and beliefs ourselves.

Or we could engage in truly downward comparison to make us feel better if we are really desperate: over dinner, the time of day where we try to cheer each other up by reporting useless factoids, I learned that marine biologists discovered, deep, deep at the floor of the ocean, a species of octopus that has to sit on her eggs (all 155 of them) for a gestation period of 4.5 years. Not eating during all this time, not moving once other than fending off ravenous crabs, the emaciated Mama dies when the little ones emerge. Now there is loneliness. To the bitter end.

Below is a 4 minute art film that uses Haeckel’s concepts and drawings to explain some of the things I mentioned. Nothing but wonder.

Music today fits the topic, I think. Anything and everything is captured in this concerto, from lonely distance, listlessness, determination to intense joy (Hindemith wrote it while still in the killing fields of WW I – art transmuting fear here as well.)

Photographs are of jelly fish at diverse aquariums, in Newport, OR, Vancouver BC and Charleston, SC.