The Nine
Realisations
1. this is what is.
That we all depend in every detail, at every instant, as a Christian would say upon God, or even an agnostic would say upon existence and the nature of things, is not an illusion of imagination; on the contrary, it is the fundamental fact which we cover up, as with curtains, with the illusion of ordinary life. (G.K. Chesterton)
That January morning I saw that what actually IS was not the thoughts that were pre-occupying my mind, but the physical things arrayed around me and jostling in on me. That THIS IS IT. That there is an is and this is what it is, this humdrum stuff suddenly blazing into beauty like the old crone revealing herself as the Goddess in disguise.
This business of sun and mist and earth, the physicality and existence of things, is real and universal. It is not contingent on anything else. It just is. It is what is. It exists because it exists – it is its own justification. It is untroubled by motivation or how to be. It does not in any way depend on us (though we are part of it). It existed long before us and will continue long after us, whether we define ‘us’ as individuals, species, or life itself. We didn’t invent or initiate it. Like all the other creatures, we are along for the ride and whoever is at the steering wheel (if, indeed, there is one), it certainly isn’t us. [Footnote: even in so man-made an environment as a window box or commercial polytunnel, it is the plants that do the growing. ‘Grow’ is an intransitive verb. We can sow the seed and provide the ideal conditions but, strain as we might, we cannot make plants grow. They stoke their own engines and steer by their own compasses.
Even what we have indisputably made ourselves is beyond our control, as Anne Ridler’s poem For a Child Expected confirms:
But the birth of a child is an uncontrollable glory;
Cat’s cradle of hopes will hold no living baby,
Long though it lay quietly.
And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born
It compels humility: what we began
Is now its own.]
By contrast, our cultural and social world exists for a conscious human purpose – or rather, several often conflicting human purposes. It is meant, and its productions are limited by our consciousness. (A partial exception is our creative life when our unconscious – the thing we consider as part of us because it rooms in our body, but which is only half-sibling to our conscious personality – collaborates, rather like the shoemaker’s elves, doing most of the real work, but allowing the conscious personality to take the credit.) Schools, advertisements, darts leagues, Kalashnikovs exist as the applied opinion of some number of human beings. This is not necessarily to devalue them, merely to acknowledge that they stand or fall by the social requirements of the moment. A school, even a hospital, is not an end in itself. But nature is. And, that being so – it being, so far as we can judge, an end in itself and the real foundation of all we know – it is what is most important. It may not be all there is, but everything that is that we can perceive, we perceive through it. It is what is most certain. [Footnote: the sun and the river Amazon, for example, have what we might call a necessary reality. Their existence does not depend on our acknowledgement. ‘The Sun’ and Amazon.com, by contrast, have only an attributed reality. If we all ceased to recognise them, they would instantly disappear (like all their forgotten forebears).]
We are so wedded to our social, cultural and working lives that, as Chesterton pointed out at the start of this chapter, it can be difficult to see how completely they are dependent on this deeper reality. Injury, illness and bereavement quickly remind us, but even these (perhaps because they seem so dramatic) we often think of as aberrations, pesky intrusions into the well-plotted narratives we make of our lives. But nature is the basis of it all.
A couple of weeks ago, on a glaringly sunny, still, cloudless day, I was standing on Hay Bridge across the Wye when something caught my eye in the willows that grow on the Radnorshire bank. A tiny shadow dancing across the leaves. I looked up to try to find the cause, and saw a little ball of thistledown drifting high above the water. The utterness of nature is astonishing. Because, I suppose, it has built itself up from sub-atomic level, there are no gaps, no hiatuses, no doubts or uncertainties. It is a complete system – no detail is skimped or omitted. The 'slender hairs cast shadows, though but small’. And thistledown casts shadows on trees thirty yards away with a purposeless necessity which yet had its infinitesimal impact on the atoms in those willow-leaves. As C.S. Lewis says, ‘What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. Experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.’
And yet in this so, so solid world, nothing in itself is sure. It is only because our senses are so coarse that what we see appears the same even for a moment. The particles that make up every object are in perpetual flux. Everything is ever-changing; the thing you saw is no more, and because it is no more there are other things that could have been but now never will be.
It is only by the unlikeliest chance that you and I have ever existed at all. For every baby, how many sperm are born to blush unseen and waste their sweetness somewhere other than an egg?
The utterness of nature is shown in Hooke’s Micrographia (1665). Imagine the astonishment the pioneers of microscopy must have felt seeing a universe in a grain of sand, and realising that the world was not exclusively constructed for raw human senses to appreciate. Because nature builds up from the smallest particles, its products – like Hooke’s famous flea, shown opposite – are perfect at every degree of magnification.
The works of human culture, shown below – a needle-point, a printed full-stop and a razor’s edge – work perfectly and practically at human scale. But under magnification they are shown to be ragged things. The ‘sharpness’ of a needle’s point is caused by the bluntness of our senses. These cultured items are acceptable because they are instruments to serve our purposes. But nature plainly is not.
Nature is not a countryside-and-pretty-views phenomenon, all daffodils and nightingales, nor a consolation for the ‘miseries of human existence.’ It is everything that unconditionally is, including us. Its wonders are not an escapist distraction from all the terrible things people do to each other. On the contrary, the terrible things are a distraction from the central fact of the marvellousness of creation. ‘Let those who are weary of the clash of warring nations turn their attention to the silent life of vegetation … and remember that the earth continues to teem with new life’, advised Humboldt. And
reality. The soldiers, tragically, were only chasing dreams.
Anthropocentricity – the notion that this planet exists principally for humans – is the conscious belief of probably very few, but it is the daily working assumption of almost all of us. Society, culture, media are all exclusively anthropocentric. STA reality, without which they cannot exist, is not. It is a strange, strange irony that the more science reveals about the smallness and ephemerality of our ‘species’ in the universe, the more we insist that our wants must be pre-eminent, blithely destroying everything around us on a whim. Anthropocentricity is profoundly irrational and unscientific. It is merely extruded egotism. No cat is anthropocentric, nor ailurocentric either. [Footnote: and the more science reveals about human littleness (by which I do not mean to decry our ‘species’ – we are astonishing beings, but so are all the others) the more some noisy factions in the scientific world become more anthropocentric, insisting that only what can be verified by human observation or logic can exist, making anthropoid attributes the yardstick of the universe. They are, of course, entitled to express their opinions, but the qualification that has given them a media platform – their scientific knowledge – is not particularly relevant to philosophical or social issues. That a best-selling author and neuro-surgeon doubts the ‘soul’ exists because he has never seen one during his investigations into the human brain, is no better evidence than that of a dentist or a chiropodist from their investigations of teeth and toes. If a soul exists at all, there is no reason to suppose it material (or if it were, which seems unlikely, that it should be located in the brain). Augustine, I think, supposed the soul was immaterial and diffused throughout the body.
The media, as eager to stir up a fight as a boxing promoter, are much to blame. Every scientist is asked if he believes in God. No footballer is. Yet the question affects them equally and their respective expertise gives neither of them the advantage in answering. If God does exist, there is no reason to suppose an astrophysicist is more likely to know it than a goalkeeper.]
‘All the world’s a stage, and all…’ Well, no it isn’t. I’ve always thought this one of Shakespeare’s flattest speeches – a tapestry of phrases babbled by an idiot. (Part of Shakespeare’s genius is to let his bores be bores, albeit eloquent in their tediousness. He would never have given this speech to a man of action, a king or a contemplative soul with a working brain like Hamlet. This is bar-stool banality.) But not only is it flat, it’s plain wrong too. The world, the globe, is not a stage built for humans to perform on. It did not exist for four billion years like an empty theatre waiting for the bacteria to morph into an upright ape and make a little speech. The world is not a stage. It is a real thing. A whole world, in fact.
In the atlases we had at school there were always two maps of the world: one, the land mostly green and brown, called ‘Physical’; the other, much more exciting, intensely patterned with straight-edged shapes in sweetshop colours, called ‘Political’. Both, obviously, were representations – the former attempting to show what was really there, the latter to show an agreed human fantasy. (I call the two approaches ‘culture’ and ‘acculturation’.) The former is more certain – there is still a strip of water (which we call the Bering Strait) between two landmasses, but the political fantasies of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia have gone the way of Elmet, Deheubarth and the Holy Roman Empire. In spite of this, most of our time is spent taking the candy-coloured map of our fancies as the genuine one; and the real, physical glaciers and forests of the actual world are disappearing as a result.
As the Chinese musician Wu Man says, ‘There is no East or West; it’s a globe.’
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