As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; ‘myself’ it speaks and spells,
Crying ‘What I do is me: for that I came.’
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Like the glow-worm: dowdy, minute, passive, yet full of mystery to the poet and erotic significance to its fellows, so everything and everybody eternally radiates a dim light for those who care to seek. (Cyril Connolly)
Nature creates and creates unceasingly, and every single new creature that nature creates is absolutely individual (and consequently equal and also perfect). Every one of us – you, me, bacterium or beech-tree – thus has a haecceity, a ‘thisness’ which is utterly unique. Were it not already absolute, I would say that our uniqueness was, over time, reinforced by our experiences because, of course, every life is exceptional too. Just as the pattern of a snowflake is determined by the response of each of its ten quintillion water molecules to the changing temperature and humidity through which it falls, so we are shaped by our own unique and ever-changing experiences.
How strange that all
The terrors, pains and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself.
I suggest that this bears with it a responsibility to be that unique thing, to explore as fully as possible all the qualities that comprise it, because never before and never again will there be a creature capable of responding to the world in exactly the same way we can. Each of us is a once-in-eternity being.
All other creatures are, so far as we can judge, inescapably their full selves (‘For a Lion roars Himself complete from head to tail’); they respond to nature with all of their attributes, leaving no abilities untapped. [Footnote: this is certainly largely true, though whales’ hips and ostriches’ wings, obviously once useful, now seemingly redundant, might undermine the argument if we take the long, evolutionary view. We have seen too how the rhizocephalans ‘rejected’ the gift of consciousness. ‘Use it or your descendants will eventually lose it’ seems to be a law of heredity. Extremely picky neurologists might point out too that many of our innate capabilities are abandoned in a baby’s first year. For example, an infant can at first distinguish 600 phonemes, but very soon limits this to the fifty or so it will regularly encounter. Selective Attention starts early. Interestingly, other animals have the same innate ability, even if they are incapable of language. A baby chinchilla can, it seems, distinguish ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’ better than an adult Frenchman.] Haecceity demands fulfilment of all that one is, individuation. ‘Man can only achieve happiness by using all his abilities,’ says Aristotle. The ancient Greek idios daemon (or Roman genius) is related to this notion of haecceity. It was a personal tutelary spirit that carried all one’s potential: if you dedicated yourself to its service it would become a protective household god, if you ignored your daemon it became a ghoul preying on the living. This belief neatly encourages self-fulfilment without egotism – it is the spirit in you that has all the talent, not you.
Bureaucracy, the media and the ‘nudges’ of technology want to usurp our haecceity. Habit and politeness make us acquiesce. ‘It actually takes a daily effort to be free,’ writes Geoff Dyer. But this insistence on our individuality is not anti-social because, paradoxically, our uniqueness unites us as Seamus Heaney, offering advice to a graduation class, explains: ‘Unless that underground level of the self is preserved as a verified and verifying element in your make-up, you are going to be in danger of settling into whatever profile the world prepares for you … You’ll be in danger of moulding yourself in accordance with laws of growth other than those of your own intuitive being. … The true and durable path through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Because, oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another.’ We are a ‘congregation’ not a ‘church’.
Our combination of individuality, equality and perfection disallows either egotism or diffidence. A pride of lions is as humble as a violet – each exercises its capabilities, neither is deluded that it can, or need, exceed them. Perfection does not imply omnipotence. It is the perfection of our haecceity – Flo is a perfect Flo, that woodlouse is a perfect woodlouse, or a perfect ‘itself’ anyway. [Footnote: it is not a perfect woodlouse because ‘woodlouse’ is only a concept, not a reality. There is no Platonically ideal ‘woodlouse’ of which all real woodlice are sadly inadequate imitations. Indeed there is no such thing as a woodlouse at all, only various unique individuals who, possessing certain common characteristics, we call ‘woodlice’.
While we’re on the subject of ‘woodlice’, we may note that Flaubert didn’t think much of them. Of Madame Bovary, in which he exposed the smallnesses and hypocrisies of French provincial life, he wrote ‘All I wanted to do was render a grey colour, the mouldy colour of a woodlouse’s existence.’ This smacks of prejudice.
A few months ago I spent an evening watching a woodlouse. It came quite boldly through the drawing-room door, not skirting the wainscot but advancing across open carpet towards the sofa where I lay. It ignored the stacks of books (this was not the woodlouse I mention elsewhere who traversed Hamlet, or at least if it was the same woodlouse it was not the same occasion) reached the sofa and began to climb. When it reached the top, it turned to follow the ridge along the back before descending the other arm, and heading for the hearth. The fireplace surround is fifteen bricks high – again it began to climb. The higher it went, the more slowly it went until on the twelfth brick disaster struck and it fell. But miraculously only three inches down it clung (or perhaps I should say was caught) by one leg on the rough surface of the brickwork. There it hung for almost half a minute. Eventually it righted itself and, propelled by ambition, stubbornness, misinformed hunger or who knows what, continued the ascent. On the mantel as on the sofa, it walked along the ridge before taking some time to consider its return. Understandably after its fall it was wary of the sheer descent down the brick face, but it was similarly mistrustful of the smooth paint on the wall. After a few false starts it opted, like a climber finding a ‘chimney’, for the angle between them – left legs on the brickwork, right legs on the wall – and so carefully reached the hearth again at which point I toasted its achievement and went to bed exhausted by the drama.
What its achievement was, what a woodlouse can achieve, from its own perspective I have no idea. It didn’t eat anything or have any sex, which we might rather snootily have assumed constituted the sum of woodlouse existence, but nor, I imagine, could we say it was compelled by a spirit of adventure. All we can suggest is that its own life is in few ways as ‘mouldy grey’ as Flaubert believed bourgeois, hypocritical human society in mid-nineteenth century France to be. Its interiority is a deep, dark mystery to us. For all our knowledge, I suspect we understand little more of a woodlouse’s existence than it understands of ours.] Neither of them can read Portuguese because that is not an element of their haecceity. Perfection does not imply omniscience. There is no point in being smug about one’s original perfection in a world where every other creature was made equally perfect too. At the same time, remembering the innate equality of all things, there is no need for diffidence, which is not a natural, but a social, acculturated invention. Calm, objective judgment should make us humble, recognizing our limitations – how little we are, how little we know – but humility should not be confused with feebleness or faux-modest politeness. Everyone else is limited too. Hiding lights under bushels is dishonest work. Humility is, etymologically and symbolically, of the earth – a STA, not a social, consideration.
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