A BRIEF DIGRESSION ON UNIFIED LIVES
Introducing Pandaemonium, his remarkable documentary account of the Industrial Revolution, the author and film-maker Humphrey Jennings wrote, ‘At a certain period in human development the means of vision and the means of production were intimately connected or were felt to be by the people concerned – I refer to the Magical systems under which it was not possible to plow the ground without a prayer, to eat without a blessing, to hunt an animal without a magic formula. To build without a sense of glory.’
We have learnt a lot since those days: we know that the prayers and formulae of that ‘Magical’ society didn’t really improve the fertility of the soil or the likely success of the hunt. But perhaps that was never the point. We flick a switch and a light comes on, we turn a key and the engine starts – cause and effect are tightly bound together in our mechanical world. But in the natural world where ritual began the fuses are longer, trailing out of sight and tangling into inextricable mare’s-nests of complexity. The ploughman’s prayer was not simply currency traded for a bushel of grain. Instead it was (or began as) the spontaneous effusion of an articulate creature alive in an animate world and striving for his sustenance. As natural as birdsong. Over thousands of generations, however, hardened by habit, the rituals became more codified, diverging further and further from reality until at last they fell out of use, shamed by logic and empiricism.
But the ancient rituals spoke to a deeper knowledge of the world than empiricism. They reiterated and so reinforced the connection between things. In his prayer the ploughman acknowledges his reliance on a power outside himself. The domestic shamans, blessing their food, are acutely mindful of all that has gone to make it, that great web of interdependence without which they could not exist. The ritual embedded awareness, the awareness of the world which is a pre-condition for taking care of it; and in this more indirect way the ploughman’s prayer did improve the soil’s fertility. As all religions know, repeated behaviour reinforces belief. And that is how, in our own time, the daily ritual of heating a ready-meal while watching the news reinforces our estrangement from the world, even at the moment we think we are engaging with it. The land, the food, the animals, the buildings – we have no relationship with them except that of consumer. We have voted to leave the community which the rest of creation continues to enjoy, and our habits deepen the divide.
That old ‘Magical’ system was vanishing from Europe even before the Industrial Revolution and was certainly extinct when Jennings was writing in the 1940s. Superstition had been eradicated, but so had affinity; one kind of ignorance had been expunged, to be replaced with another. Great gains had been won, but there were perhaps unnecessary losses too – above all, the sense of a unified life and world.
On a trip to Burma at this time, Jennings felt he may have glimpsed a culture which retained the unity long gone from the atomised West, a Buddhist society where every action ‘from the weaving of the basket in which men carried their vegetables to market, to the burial of the dead, was … informed by a sublime metaphysical vision’. Perhaps it was so or perhaps he was just a starry-eyed tourist, eager to romanticise the Orient, but either way the unity he sought, which was the same unity of that ancient ‘Magical’ society and the unity that monastic orders of many faiths have striven consciously to achieve – that unity continues to be practised, right under our very noses, by every other creature in the world – daisy, earwig, birch-tree, buffalo. For them, what they are and what they do are never in conflict; in fact, they are synonymous. Means and ends are inseparable. The thing at the heart of their lives is being themselves. A tree is. It is what it is and is never distracted. It goes on ‘is-ing’ 24/7. It doesn’t waste a second of glorious ‘is-time’ on anything else at all. Whether growing or shedding leaves, flowering or fruiting, it follows its clear single vision.
We, however, do things differently. We have unwittingly built ourselves a disintegrative culture. We lead fissile lives.
Take a man setting off for work in the morning. He might, if pressed, say that the most important value at the heart of his life was his love for his wife and children. But active caring, or even the feeling of love, play little part in what he actually does. Instead, his entire day is spent in competition – with other commuters, rival firms, sometimes with colleagues, a series of low-level, barely-felt antagonisms founded on nothing but the artificial conventions of business. The attempt to outdo someone is at the core of all his actions (and he’d probably get sacked if it wasn’t). Without even noticing he leads a self-contradictory life. The values he holds dearest – what he most deeply believes himself to be – and what he does all day have almost no connection. Means and ends are poles apart (and this may be stressful and mentally harmful). He might protest: ‘Well that’s how it is. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. The law of the jungle.’ But dogs do not eat dogs; that isn’t how it is. And the law of the jungle is about more than competition – it embraces interdependence, collaboration, symbiosis. If it were merely a competitive environment, the strongest would make it a monoculture; but nature produces no monocultures – they are human impositions.
We are more complex than a daisy or a buffalo, of course. We have a dazzling variety of opportunities, but we need not be confused by them so long as our thoughts and actions grow out of a clear vision of ourselves and our place in the world. It is only unity of vision that distinguishes a palace from a builder’s yard.
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It is not an agreeable feeling to be criticizing individuals and society (and myself!) for what I see as our blindness to reality. I can hear Goethe telling me off for mentioning it: ‘the end of all opposition is negation; and negation is nothing. If I call bad bad, what do I gain? But if I call good bad, I do a great deal of mischief. He who will work aright must never rail; must not trouble himself at all about what is ill done, but only do well himself. The great point is, not to pull down, but to build up; in this humanity finds pure joy.’ I like pure joy as much as the next fellow. I don’t want to be negative – I’d rather just celebrate the trees. But if I did I’d look like another of the ‘New Nature’ writers (and a particularly ignorant one). You can’t see the bookshop for the books on trees at the moment (in fact, you can’t see the bookshop because the internet and the end of the Net Book Agreement have closed it down), and the point I am making is not that trees are wonderful, beautiful, intelligent, essential blah blah blah, true as all that is. The point is that a tree has an incontrovertible reality the World Bank, the Conservative Party, the Daily Mirror, the Premier League all lack, as evidenced by the witness of non-human creatures. All but the tree are phantasms, collective hallucinations, the Emperor’s New Clothes – and it’s altogether too chilly a morn.
Pointing out errors seems didactic, open to attack as ‘preaching’. My father was a minister (as were both my grandfathers and some great-grandfathers) and preached thousands of sermons. He was always disappointed when someone came up to him after the service and beamingly said, ‘Excellent sermon, minister!’ because he knew that he had failed to make the congregation question themselves, had left them feeling self-satisfied about their spiritual lives, confirmed in their virtue for another seven days. Like icons, like the sayings of Laozi or Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the purpose of a sermon (and of this book) is not to persuade, not to wrestle with the congregation and come out victorious, but to spark thought and feeling. Acceptance and rejection are equally irrelevant terms. To root deeply and securely, any idea must germinate afresh in each person. Caveat emptor. Doubt wisely. Treat every book as a whetstone to hone your mind to a scintillating sharpness, not as roadstone to fill up the potholes in your head.
The pictures and poems in this book are, as I have said before, here partly to break up the text but also to complement it. They are another reminder of the necessity to mix feeling with thought, like the two parts of an epoxy glue. The ineffability of experience is as poorly conveyed by the ant-file linearity of language as the exhilarating particularity of thought is by anything other than language.
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