That vital spark from inanimate matter to animate life happened once and once only, and all living existence depends on that moment. We are one tribe with bacteria that live in hot springs, parasitic barnacles, vampire bats and cauliflowers. We all share a common ancestor. (Richard Fortey)
HOORAH! After pages of picking over our shortcomings and rediscovering, quite unexpectedly, that sin (aka pechod) is alive and kicking, snuck under the radar of our secular society; after pages of peeping through the Hedge of Ineffability, wondering if that was God or just a trick of the light, it is a relief to be back in touch with strong, healthy certainties, back in the bosom of one’s family with cousin barnacle, cousin bat and cousin cauliflower. There is no whimsy, no hippy-shit about the unity of all creation. It is as blatant as a buttercup.
We are a constituent part of nature, and in no way separated from it. Our self-awareness, fancy and intelligence raise particular issues for us, but they do not exile us from the family. We are governed by the same laws.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age
For those who like numbers, we are 98% chimpanzee, 60% fruit-fly and half banana.
This was recognized thousands, even millions, of years ago. Inevitably, it was understood by the first humans because it was the understanding of all the creatures who led up to those first humans, and it remains the experienced reality for all non-human creatures today. ‘All things that are born with life in them ought to be treated as kindred,’ says Pythagoras. ‘We are all born from the same celestial seed,’ confirms Lucretius a few centuries later. [Footnote: and of course, the atoms of which we and everything else are made are entirely indifferent to gender, species, life or deadness, gloriously pluralist and as happy in a bat (vampire or cricket) as in a barnacle. Just as our creativity imaginatively unifies the world, blurring the distinction between things by remaking them in different form and material, so the atoms unify actually and physically. (Even as I write, some of them are slipping from me to try their luck with the paper, the sofa, the air.) So long as my physical body is understood to be ‘me’, I may have been present at Wounded Knee or the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Once, perhaps, I was Sappho, a comet, an ice-cream cone in Rhyl. My sympathies are wider than Terence’s or Montaigne’s: Sum, nihil a me alienum puto. I am, and think nothing alien to me.
The medieval poet, Taliesin – perhaps I was Taliesin too – knows this:
I have been a blue salmon,
I have been a dog, a stag, a roebuck on the mountain,
A stock, a spade, an axe in the hand,
A stallion, a bull, a buck,
I was reaped and placed in an oven;
I fell to the ground when I was being roasted
And a hen swallowed me.
For nine nights was I in her crop.
I have been dead, I have been alive.
I am Taliesin.]
Zeus and Europa by Adam Dworski
Our self-awareness, fancy and intelligence – that trident capacity by which we have distanced ourselves from the world – need not be an instrument of isolation. In recent history it has produced our sense of individual identity, but this again need not be isolating. The historian of individuality, Larry Siedentop, writes, ‘the inwardness of the individual is by no means a sphere of silence. It is a sphere of dialogue, of conversation with God [or Nature, at least. He is writing about Augustine, so the language is theological but applies equally to a secular interpretation]… Inventing the individual – in the sense of acknowledging the equality of humans in the face of their maker – is not an exercise leading to isolation. Indeed, it is the creation of a self-consciousness that undercuts merely social identities.’ The discovery of individuality takes us out of tribe, family, race and puts us back in touch with the larger, earlier, deeper unity with all people, with all living creatures. Society is a convention, a contingent reality if you like – often good, sometimes bad – but behind it there are the basic facts of individuality (which we would not recognise without our self-awareness) and unity. STA is a resolutely pre-social way of thinking, uninterested in spurious taxonomic divisions, universal rather than tribal.
‘No Man is an Iland.’ I appreciate Donne’s sentiment but take issue with his geography. Every Man is an Iland – we are all utterly unique, and there is always a strait, a depth of incomprehension, wide as an ocean or narrow as a gutter between us. Even as we talk and I look in your eyes, I can see other thoughts in your mind to which I will never be admitted, and can tell that you don’t interpret what I say in exactly the way that I mean it (and how could you? our lives have given us different perspectives, and try as I may and sympathetic as I am, I know that I don’t understand what you say with all the resonance it possesses for you). But no island floats – the seas that divide us are never bottomless, and everyone is at root the same solid earth. Roger Deakin notes that the people of Jura talk about being joined by the sea to other islands. Every Man may be an Iland but we all share separateness as we all share unity.
This awareness of the oneness of creation was borne in upon me one day in the matchlessly banal setting of Gatwick Airport. I had been visiting a friend in a romantic seaside town in old Calabria and left under a vast and beauteous moon. To my astonishment (my ignorance is stupendous) that same full moon was also beaming down when I arrived at Gatwick Airport! I had vaguely assumed that the moon’s phases somehow differed geographically, but there it was, admittedly making little impression on the surrounding ugliness, but still shining, and more effectively as I drove west, over fields and Cotswolds and Wales. Thirteen times a year the whole world is treated to the sight. So long as the clouds keep off, seven billion people (and trillions of other creatures including dung beetles, of course) can see the full moon, a global audience that makes LiveAid look niche. It should be celebrated across the planet as a symbol of the unity of all creation or, if that’s asking too much, at least the unity of all mankind. A secular Angelus, perhaps.
This simple truth of the unity of Being would be immensely reassuring if we let ourselves believe in it. To quote W. H. Hudson: ‘We are not aliens here, intruders or invaders on the earth, living in it but apart, perhaps hurting and spoiling it, but with the other animals are children of Nature, like them living and seeking our subsistence under the sky, familiar with the sun and wind and rain.’ And we’ll include microbes, fungi, plants &c with the animals too. ‘We are not aliens here’ – in fact, there are no aliens, no immigrants, no outsiders. We all belong, we are all related, and that’s worth celebrating.
Comments