And I have felt a Presence … something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
(Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’)
Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that every Thing has a life of its own, & that we are all one Life. A Poet’s Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature, and not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of forced Similes. (Coleridge)
It’s not surprising that the Romantic poets provide both epigraphs for this section. Theirs was the first generation to recognise how industrialization and urbanization, were alienating us from the world and our own natures. Their effortful stridency (and mine) reflects the struggle to forge feeling and thought back together and to attain a congruence with nature that had come almost unthinkingly to Skelton, Chaucer and all preceding generations stretching back to the complete unthinkingness of our earliest ancestors. But though it be difficult, it must be possible.
If this STA world of physical things is real, and if we are inseparably bound up in it, indeed not existing except as a part of it, and if this can provide us with a sense of belonging, of home-coming, of reassurance, so that we are not left observing from the gallery but caught up in the dance, then all that is required of us is acceptance. We can understand the world, not through an accumulation of facts, but knowing by affinity – that is, by our unifying imagination that sees with a broad, sacral empathy the equal relationship between all creatures co-existing, co-habiting, and co-creating the world, subject to the same forces and engaged in the same business – the effort to persist in their own being. This oneness with the universe is achieved not mystically or by reprogramming our brains with drugs, but by peeling away the crust of acculturation so that we can be ourselves.
Our affinity is entirely natural. We – all of us, one creation, woodlice, humans, storks and dandelions – are born with all the revelation that we need. It is present in us as the dazzling colours of the autumn are latent in the summer leaves, though unrevealed until the green chlorophyll ebbs away.
There may be accumulated intellectual, social, psychological lumber we complicated human adults need to clear out of the way before we can realise this, but I am doubtful that our affinity is like a great enlightenment at the end of an arduous road which can only be attained, if at all, by years of preparation. In one Hindu myth, Indra spent 101 years in meditation, internalization of ritual, good, humble ahimsa living to achieve knowledge of brahman. Are we born inadequate and have to work for so long to understand? Indra was lucky to get such a good crack at it. How many creatures are privileged to live so long? Are all the rest doomed? Is 99.9% of the creation buggered before it begins? What a rubbish universe that would be! This is the philosophy of a hierarchical society – the enlightened few, the hopelessly benighted masses – and the notion of unworthy creatures struggling towards enlightenment is another version of the ‘Progress’ story which I hope we have all now agreed is a fantasy. It is a linear interpretation of a non-linear universe. [Footnote: Indra, of course, is a God and so may be able to achieve otherwise ineffable knowledge. Our task, by contrast, is less seeking the ultimate, universal Truth either outside or hidden deep inside ourselves than keeping our good, natural wisdom clear of acculturated grime – more like dusting than questing.]
There is another tale told about Indra:
‘When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in that web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists or has existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true – every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy – is a pearl in Indra’s net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel in the net. Everything that exists in Indra’s web implies all else that exists.’
This is a magical image of the interconnectedness, and from that I think, the interdependence of everything that is. It shows an exquisitely balanced, infinitely complex, sufficient and sustaining universe. It is perfection and needs nothing from us but wonder.
The infinite reflections dazzle our limited perceptions; this should make us wary of judgment. The desire to understand is a valiant, even a noble one, but to claim that our knowledge is more than partial and anthropocentric is transparently over-ambitious. Many creatures have sharper senses than ours, many creatures have senses that we altogether lack (but which we have cleverly identified). So we must accept the possible existence of other senses of which we are totally unaware, which we have never even imagined. And we know that feelings and thoughts are not subject to accurate measurement, that love and music and the emotions they evoke are real, even physically real, having real effects on matter and energy in our bodies, but that what little can be measured gives no semblance of the reality. We are made of the very thing we are trying to understand and we have reached our opinions by the very processes that make up every other link in the web – the electrical impulses, the action of matter, of the individual microbes working in us, and the effects of all those previous actions of cells and genes, and the environmental influence of all the other links in the net which have made us what we are at this moment, which could have been so very different, as everything else in the universe is different, but nonetheless this is us and we’re here, and from this point only can we understand our surroundings. For all our valiant efforts, achieving astonishing discoveries and turning some of them to great benefit, we cannot obtain the necessary distance to comprehend. ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth!’ cried Archimedes. There is nowhere else to stand – we’re all here in the middle of it, and way over our heads.
But the man eager for knowledge, gazing around him at Indra’s net, reaches out as far as he can and with his scalpel cuts through the fabric of the net. He hurries back to his research centre and examines what he has – a small circle of perceptions with himself at the centre. Infinite reflections and connections have been lost and only those which his limited senses observe can be assessed.
The analytical approach is hopelessly constricted. Anything can be dissected – an engine, a sonata, a frog. The engine may be scrutinised and assessed with almost complete accuracy. However complicated it may be, it is dead and no more than the sum of its physical parts, so, at least as much as anyone can be said to understand anything, we can understand everything about it. You can technically analyse a sonata, but the crucial part of music is its effect on human emotions (including the composer’s) and you cannot exhaustively or accurately analyse that. And the frog? When you have run every test – chemical, physical, neurological, psychological or behavioural – that you can devise, and have read all the notes, when you have filmed the frog 24/7 and published your research paper, you still will not fully comprehend the frog. That frog’s experience of being itself, that haecceity by which everything it perceives is mediated, the very essence that makes it what it is, will be beyond you, because your perspective is still inescapably your own. And that it, being entirely unique, could have afforded you only more or less gross generalisations to extrapolate on to other frogs, is another rebuke to such analysis. And that it, now an assortment of bloody pieces being swept from
the laboratory table into the waste receptacle, will have no more experience of being itself is a rebuke to your humanity and your co-being, a testament only to anthropocentric ambition. Though how a study of the universe taught you either anthropocentricity or ambition I could not say.
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