Nature and all the creatures in it were not, of course, labouring under their own inadequacy until, in the seventeenth-century, we invented microscopes and chemical equations. Knowledge is a great blessing and I am very grateful for what knowledge I have. But it is not essential in either meaning of the word. Affinity is essential in both. This, the deepest truth – that we are all one equal creation – is available to us without study, Socratic dialogue, reading books like this or any other paraphernalia of the human intellect. A new-born baby does not know that it is different from its mother.
For us, the paradox is that we grown-up, socialised, propertied, salaried, wine-bibbing twenty-first century folk must endeavour again to discover the wisdom we were born with. ‘How can a man be born when he is old?’ asks Nicodemus. [Footnote: you would think me cheating if I were to interpret Christ’s answer – ‘of water, and of the Spirit’ – as the STA answer, meaning ‘by the simple things of nature, and our openness to them’, so, out of consideration for your sensibilities, I will put this in a footnote.] At the perilous risk of sounding trite, I don’t think it’s impossible. Although study, meditation &c may perhaps transport you to some higher peak of truth, I suggest we begin at a more elementary level – Key Stage 1 Affinity. (A baby, after all, quite literally has entry-level knowledge.) We are all one undivided creation. This is true, and these are not difficult words to understand. Believe it, and acknowledge it with every creature you encounter and, er, that’s it. We all have time to learn that. It is not mediated by saints or priests or any organisations. No-one need be excluded – the sophisticates (comme moi) are not privileged over the rest.
All we need to do is to show willing, to say ‘Fiat mihi’. Faith is the acceptance of reality and like all faith (a fact somewhat lost in Western tradition when religion became politicized) is a matter of observance and not of assertion. In everyday life, for example, we all show our faith in the physical world with every step we take, confident of the earth’s solidity and the air’s permeability. We assert nothing – we simply walk about. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’: it is our behaviour that counts.
Affinity is the Golden Bough leading us out of the shadow-world of isolation and divisiveness so that we can rejoin the community of all living things in the upper air. But what might this sense of affinity feel like if we trusted ourselves to experience it?
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Stanley Spencer - Christ in the Wilderness: The Scorpion
There have been times as I have been walking on the hills near my home when I have felt attuned to my surroundings, quite as though (silly as it may sound) my head were a plug I could insert into the socket of the earth, completing the circuit to feel the universe flowing through me, with the possibility too of my transmitting as well as receiving, which of course I do because the sheep, the larks, the bracken and moss (yes, the plants too) all sense my presence, the stones are eroded and the wind deflected by me, everything affecting, and affected by, me – a highly complex, total thrilling experience. I have felt that if you stripped back my scalp and stripped back the turf, you could see the same impossibly intricate interactions – of neurones and synapses, of mycorrhizal fungi, bacteria, roots and insects. I am not a bloke going for an afternoon stroll in the countryside – that is a social, acculturated view, which treats the earth instrumentally as a human leisure resource. I am a piece of nature (as are we all) passing through nature, unceasingly and inevitably involved with everything around me.
That, at any rate, is how I have experienced it. And it is no delusion. As Plotinus wrote, ‘In order to direct the view aright, it behoves that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform, neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty.’ You can only interpret the world outside you by finding some point of reference within you – the sun-like eye, the beautiful soul. No experience annexes something new to your mind; it quickens something already present but hidden into unfolding and revealing itself.
Affinity is, I suppose, that ‘third way of thinking’, knowing by imagination; thought, feeling and intuition re-united in a single, holistic receptivity and enquiry. How broad and how deep does it run? With how much can we identify? Wittgenstein tells us that if a lion could speak we could not understand it. Charles Foster, in his engagingly quixotic book Being a Beast attempts to disprove him by living wild as a badger, a fox, an otter, a swift among other creatures as far as his human bulk will allow, hoping, with very varying degrees of success, to understand their ways of living, and even to think as they do.
from March
What did the thrushes know? Rain, snow, sleet, hail,
Had kept them quiet as the primroses.
They had but an hour to sing. On boughs they sang,
On gates, on ground; they sang while they changed perches
And while they fought, if they remembered to fight:
So earnest were they to pack into that hour
Their unwilling hoard of song before the moon
Grew brighter than the clouds. Then ‘twas no time
For singing merely. So they could keep off silence
And night, they cared not what they sang or screamed;
Whether ‘twas hoarse or sweet or fierce or soft;
And to me all was sweet; they could do no wrong.
Something they knew – I also while they sang
And after. Not till night had half its stars
And never a cloud, was I aware of silence
Stained with all that hour’s songs, a silence
Saying that Spring returns, perhaps tomorrow.
Edward Thomas
‘Something they knew – I also while they sang.’ The question is one of intersubjectivity. There is no objective measure of this (and I am doubtful that counting neurones is a valid way of measuring the quality of an experience any more than counting calories tells us the quality of a meal. Nor is it simply a matter of genetic similarity. I will not necessarily empathise with a sibling better than with a cousin or any other person or creature.) Attitudes will be influenced by character. The glass half-fullers will see our common ancestry as essentially unifying. The glass half-emptiers will point out that none of us sees a rainbow the same as any other person, that all of us experience the world uniquely. They will add, if they are of a facetious turn of mind, that when Wittgenstein speaks, we cannot understand him.
We are each unique and yet are all one related creation. There is multeity in unity and unity in multeity and you can never quite put your finger on the position and momentum of any circumstance in the multeity and unity matrix.
William James is wise enough to arbitrate without taking sides: “We understand nothing of a dog’s experience of the rapture of bones under hedges, of smells of trees and lamp-posts. They understand nothing of ours, when for example they watch us stare interminably at the pages of a book. Yet both states of consciousness share a certain quality: the ‘zest’ or ‘high’ which comes when one is completely absorbed in what one is doing. This tingle should enable us to recognize each other’s similarity even when the objects of our interest are different.” We all tingle, and our common ‘tinglability’ (‘tingularity’?) is one of the most persuasive reminders – more personal than the abstract things we share like life, reproduction, death – of our kinship with all living things.
But it is perhaps worth noting that if I fail to find much inter-subjectivity with, for example, a beetle, this does not devalue or invalidate it. The validity of other creatures is not dependent on their similarity to me. ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ says Protagoras. Well, we know that isn’t true. Nature is not limited by my perspective, so the breadth of my love should not be limited by the narrowness of my imagination or empathy. In any case, there is no creature so alien that we cannot recognise the same existence in them, and our shared needs for the right nutriment, climate and conditions to survive, our shared individuality and interdependence.
We understand, not by distancing ourselves from creation and offering opinions about it, but naturally and effortlessly by the affinity of our co-being.
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