View at Epsom (Tate Galleries)
John Constable’s tutor loved the pastoral scenes of the old masters, quite unaware that the sepia tones he revered were merely caused by discoloration of the varnish with age. He said that a landscape should be the colour of an old Cremona violin. His young pupil placed a violin on the grass – looked – and went his own way.
Culture is a direct response to nature. What I term acculturation is a response to culture, a response to a response, a cumulative process which soon buries reality deep under increasingly irrelevant behaviours. To borrow a horticultural image, art, and all our activities, should root through this mulch of culture (which itself enriches reality) to be sustained by the reality of nature beneath. If they root only in the loose surface mulch, they risk being parched or blown away by the changing climate of fashion.
Creeping acculturation – this layering of fantasy upon fantasy widening divisions between ourselves and the rest of nature, between ourselves and ourselves – happens so slowly that we barely notice it. It has been happening for millennia. It was not (and is not) inevitable, mostly it was not conscious and a thousand exceptions could be found in every age but here is a very brief outline (15,000 years told in less than a page) of how it developed and came to distance us from STA reality: [Footnote: for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that this is the only or somehow ‘truest’ narrative of human history. Other stories – general, technological, political, social, artistic – are available too.]
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ACCULTURATION
Nomadic hunter-gatherer life is superseded by settlement and agriculture which demands a less acute sensitivity to environment, and also introduces the notion of property. This process is later accelerated by town-living.
- The inventions of writing and numbers lead to an enumerating, bureaucratic mindset, and further foster notions of property.
- Alphabets substitute arbitrary symbols for the hieroglyphic pictures of things themselves.
- The gods are similarly systematized and so become more abstract and remote from the things they originally represented.
- As knowledge grows and technologies develop, the world comes to be seen as ordered and comprehensible by humans, rather than completely capricious.
- The greater control of nature manifested in agriculture and town-building leads humans to regard themselves as exceptional and ‘above’ nature, which is seen to be provided for our use. [Footnote: this belief, most overtly stated in Genesis, is one part of Judaeo-Christian thought still openly accepted in the secular West. We have rejected its divine authority, and replaced it with no scientific or philosophic justification. In fact, we just exploit and destroy nature because we can, and we enjoy the profits. It is debatable whether this constitutes intellectual progress.]
- Monotheism introduces a single, easily-personified God who can seem detached from the world – transcendent rather than immanent – isolating humans further.
- The Renaissance rediscovers and utterly misinterprets ancient Greek culture as something coolly rational.
- The Reformation rejects the mystery of art, music and Latin, placing a greater trust in literature and argument, with an increasingly literal habit of interpretation (failing to understand that words are images of reality just as much as pictures are).
- The Scientific Revolution sees the rise into favour of empiricism/materialism, previously regarded as inadequate and untrustworthy. Soon, it comes to dominate Western thought as the applications of the Scientific Revolution remould society during the Industrial Revolution. Imperial rapacity imposes the idea across the globe.
- Mechanisation and the division of labour produce a separation between daily work and the results of that work, a process exacerbated by office-based employment which often has no evident, tangible results whatsoever. Work, like money, becomes conceptual.
- Virtual reality and AI, undermining our direct relationship with the world, (and which, until recently, would have been seen as dystopian) are accepted as inevitable.
What T. S. Eliot identified as the ‘Dissociation of Sensibility’ was just one stage in the long, slow drifting apart of feeling and thinking. Eliot wrote, ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for his work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of the cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes,’ but he saw how ‘the mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience’ – bodily, intellectual, emotional, spiritual – somehow broke down in the seventeenth century. Presumably, causes include the shock of civil war and regicide, the rise of empiricism leading to the formation of the Royal Society and a Puritan preference for simplicity stripping language of intricacy and nuance, but whatever the causes [Footnote: Ted Hughes adds ‘the inter-conflict of upper & lower classes in England, the development of the English gentleman with the stereotype English voice (and the mind, set of manners etc that goes with the voice’], the evidence is clear enough. Read the poetry of Donne and Herbert and then that of Dryden and Pope. The difference is not merely a matter of fashion or incremental changes in technique – there is a difference in the way they experience the world. Henry Vaughan, right on the cusp of this change, is the laureate of lost sensibility:
I cannot reach it; and my striving eye
Dazzles at it, as at eternity.
[[[[Footnote: to see the same effect more generally dispersed, compare tombstones from the early seventeenth century and a couple of generations later. It would be unjust to suppose the latter did not mourn quite as deeply as their grandparents, but they have lost the power to think and feel simultaneously, and so their lamentations read unconvincingly. Evidence of this is clear in my favourite local church, St Mary Magdalene, Turnastone.
The inscription for Richard Parry d. 1626 reads:
It is no matter who lies here
Thou shalt lie thou knowest not where.
Lend this silent pave thy tongue,
’Twill sadly sing a dead man’s song;
How wild youth wanders on to age,
Thus ends the tedious pilgrimage.
What remains of us besides
Time devowred, oblivion hides,
Except this owld man’s charity.
Who hath bequeathed to churches three
Above his means; and here atends
Dooms busie day among his friends.
By 1688, the epitaph (one of two in a similar vein) for Mary Tranter could read:
Beauty enricht with vertue Witt and Grace
And all perfections Lodge here in this place.
She was too good to live out halfe her time
Which made Sterne Death Arrest her in her prime.
Great is our Loss, But Greater is her Bliss.
For She doth live and Reigne in Paradise
Her Soul is gone to everlasting glory
Where Angels do rejoice to Sing her Story.
The rhyming couplets are the same but the humility and sincerity and godliness are gone, the inventiveness gentrified into a new greetings card slickness, quite unconcerned by the presumptuous fancy of a heaven lucky to have Mary’s patronage.]
Although since that time, there have been oscillations between ages of ‘feeling’ and of ‘thinking’ (and, of course, these are generalisations from which various individuals might be excluded), it has become rarer for the two states to exist simultaneously. (And the rise of academicism, seeking to analyse and taxonomise, only exacerbates the division.) Eliot and his contemporaries were seeking answers to their disillusionment after World War I, and the failure of the scientific/technological/capitalist revolutions to provide any emotional or spiritual satisfaction (‘On Margate Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing’). They rediscovered and championed the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets who still seemed to possess the wholeness of experience they lacked.
Little has changed in the century since The Waste Land in spite of all the giggling excitement about technology (‘but improved means to unimproved ends’, as Thoreau had warned). The potential catastrophe we face is different from that faced by our great-grandparents in the balmy days before World War One, but the complacency with which we underestimate it is the same. We still regard thinking and feeling as two separate states with different functions – one for practical matters, the other for love, music and suchlike. We speak of people ‘led astray by their emotions’ but seldom ‘led astray by their intellects’, which may happen just as frequently. We have compartmentalized, and so distorted, a unified world.
But this Dissociation of Sensibility is not physiological. (I doubt that young children suffer its effects.) It is a cultural phenomenon and therefore, potentially, reversible. One of the wild, hilarious ambitions of this book (a task for which my abilities are risibly inadequate) is the reunification of thought and feeling so that we might experience the world with all our faculties, feeling bodily and emotionally, sensing spiritually, thinking intellectually, not separately or in sequence, but simultaneously in one great fullness.
(Jung, among the Pueblo Indians: “I asked him why he thought all the whites were mad. ‘They say they think with their heads,’ he replied. ‘We think here,’” beating his chest.)
STA is a rational animism. It acknowledges all the stages of dis-integration enumerated above and notes their implications but, keeping its eyes steadfastly fixed on the unity of world around it, makes its own judgment: that feeling and thought, united in a focus on reality, inevitably produce wonder and love, and thus can safeguard all our futures. [Footnote: ‘can safeguard all our futures’ is a grandiose claim but not, properly understood, I think, unjustified. It will not be something initiated by governments or organisations; we each need to make the effort ourselves, but anyone who does is, from a STA perspective (though not necessarily from a social, liberal capitalist perspective) ‘safeguarded’. And who knows how that might ripple out? The entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan offers a speck of hope: ‘It is characteristic of complex systems that small actions can make a disproportionate impact. You just don’t know, won’t know, until you try.’]
Sometimes I feel the world desperate; then walk the downs
(Virginia Woolf)
I can, I think, identify three kinds of thought that have gone into the making of this book so far. The first – the process we generally think of as ‘thinking’ – has been the conscious business of puzzling an idea out and hammering it into shape.
But most of this has been written at dawn. Woken by Ipsy, I have fed her, made a cup of tea, headed back to bed, and written paragraphs almost as though from dictation. Presumably my subconscious had been working on things overnight and now, unbothered by social considerations or even by conscious intentions, could employ me as amanuensis to my own mind. I have very often been surprised at what I was writing, having no idea that I thought it until I wrote it down. These pensées trouvées form the second kind of ‘thinking’ (and it requires the editorial effort of the first kind to try to ensure that I’m not just spouting nonsense).
The third has most often occurred when out walking, when thought has been neither a sedentary, willed, cerebral thing, nor something given and presented to my mind, but a whole-body experience – the physical movement, the play of sensations and the conscious activity seemingly inseparable from each other. It is a balanced state – the body engaged and active, but not so over-exerted that it demands conscious attention. This, I suppose, approaches the hoped-for uniting of thought and feeling. It doesn’t happen every time. Mostly I miss the mark, busy-brained and unappreciative, thinking about work and replaying conversations; but sometimes …
Comments