STRETCHING LANGUAGE INTO AN ANIMATE WORLD

 

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem 'Pied Beauty' starts 'Glory be to God for dappled things' - things counter, original spare, strange. Hopkins was that most rarefied and terrible of spiritual creatures, a Jesuit priest, an unusually sensitive soul, genuinely tortured by several forbidden desires, physically frail, and crashingly depressed. When I read him in my youth, I was uplifted by his joyous feel for the world around him, and the way he stretched language so it sang all by itself. I did not know about how different a soul he was, or how cruel his life. 

 

Hopkins played fast and loose with language even outside of poetry, and he had his own term for the specific essence of things. He called it 'inscape'. What I find valuable here is the idea that we experience inscape through specificity, and through the senses. The inscape of a tulip is experienced by appreciating its characteristics, such as the delicacy of its petals: that tulip, those petals. God makes everything unique. The experience of this is called instress, and our own experience is as unique as the thing we are experiencing. Thus, non-ordinary reality is immediate, here and now, and not an abstract thing at all. Hopkins, tragically for him, was wedded to God and his truly dire attempts to vanish into the approval of a fearsome deity juxtapose with this delicate specificity when it comes to experience and the world of nature. Here is that juxtaposition in 'The Starlight Night'. His animist soul is naturally uplifted, as if by the sudden discovery of a glorious peopled reality,  but then he must be drawn away to contemplate the religious life before reaching a temporary equilibrium.

• The Starlight Night

• Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
• O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
• The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
• Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
• The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
• Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
• Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—
• Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
• 
  
• 
  
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• Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
• Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
• Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
• These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
• The shocks.   This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
• Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

 

How fortunate I am to have fewer spiritual inhibitions. My inhibitions are all my own, in fact.

 

 I think the animistic world view lends itself to a kind of panentheism, where we experience the divine as entangled in the world. The world is not divine, nor is it separate from the divine. It is imperfectly manifest. When we feel we are one with it, as we sometimes do when we explore it in a Shamanic state of consciousness. that does not make us perfect or even wise. It is more that this is a natural state, from whence we begin. The beginning is thus with our relationship with the world, this entanglement with the world. It is outside us as well as inside us. Working with a world outside of us helps ground us, literally. No, I don't make all my own reality, as the new agers and the chaotes think.

 

Dappled light is my favourite. It moves all the time, stochastic. It is best seen sideways, like the small beings who move in it. There, I can feel the different paces of light, from the shuttle of sunlight between leaves, to the lengthening of shadows, to the slow source of the sun. I have taken to giving homely offerings to forests on my walks. The light returns the gift over and over.

 

 

THE DOOR OF PERCEPTION

Do you go through, or do you go around? 

I was walking in a forest and I came across this door. As you can see it was right in the path, and it had this picture on it of Thing One throwing away a key. It took up only a little of the path, and there were signs that people had gone through it, and gone around it, although presumably not at the same time.
 

A door is always magical. A door is a cause for a pause. You can't go through a door without a shift in consciousness, even if it is too slight to be noticeable in the business of the day. A door is always a portal, and if induction is as impoverished as Hume says it is, you never really know what is on the other side, even if you have been through it a thousand times.

It is no wonder that the door is such a potent magical symbol. Doors lead us to other realms, Narnia or secret gardens or whole other realities. There are forbidden doors in castles. Open the door and you will never be the same again. Behind the door is always knowledge, whether you want it or not. Entheogens may open psychic doors for us, as may meditation or autonomic driving such as drumming. In songs there is a door to your heart, and maybe even a key. New feelings may live behind that particular door.

 

When I came to the door in the forest, I could have walked around it without breaking stride. Many others had done so. What do you think I did?  I turned the door knob, of course, and walked through. And the forest laid itself before me, and I walked for three hours in it, and there were rocks and a stream and honeydew on the black beech trunks, and sunshine and shade, and it was good. 

 

ON MICROGREENS, THE GARDENS OF ADONIS, AND BEING TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LIVE

I have been pretending to garden. I am not by nature a gardener. I am suspicious of gardening, as it hints to me of bourgeois Victorian positivism. Weed that soil! Trim those edges! Match those colours! My ancestors were the worst types of colonialists. See a tree? Cut it down! See a baby seal? Well, even my great grandfather couldn't cope with that one. So I am convinced after generations of unsuitable mangling of the land in order to turn it into some weird green and pink simulacrum of the ghost of England, that Gaia does not garden and neither do I. I do have a yard with some plants and I am beginning to develop a feel for them. Most of what I plant is edible, or native, or friendly to bees. I have 15 different edible things. But it is not gardening as such. Nothing in rows, nothing really pruned, no annuals, no peasants falling in the haha. (Ha ha!)

I have been helping microgreens to grow. These are Amaranth Red Garnet. I was very excited by them. The instructions were to sprinkle the seeds in the soil and cover them, and wait for three days. I was peeking at them an hour after I had watered them. I knew they would not have sprouted yet but it was all too exciting. They duly sprouted and now they are this vivid dark pink, too bright to be real I sprinkle a libation of water on them in the morning and I carry them around the house. Too pretty for the kitchen, they grace my room at times as I pay them daily homage. 

In classical Athens, women celebrated Adonia, or the festival of the death of Adonis. Adonis in myth was a beautiful young man who was the lover of several deities, and who came to a sad end being gored to death by a boar. Adonia was not an official (read:civic, public, respectable. Read: male)  festival, and it was celebrated by only women, and all women included the disreputable. Women planted quick-growing grains and vegetables in shards of broken pottery, The plants sprouted, then were left to wilt in the sun, and died. The women of Athens then repaired to the roofs of their houses to weep and mourn the brief beauty of Adonis and his gory death. And after that, they took to the streets. They carried their tiny dead gardens to the sea, and cast them in.

There is scholarly debate over the meanings of the gardens of Adonis. Sir James Frazer saw the ceremony as the standard death and rebirth vegetation rite. Anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow in their excellent book 'The Dawn of Everything' feel that the rites denoted pretend gardening, and I can relate to pretend gardening so I like their idea. They describe the backwards and forwards in and out of agriculture that many societies did over thousands of years - playful gardening or temporary gardening or pretend gardening was a way of tipping a cultural toe in agriculture without commitment. Other later scholars of mythology have considered the rite to be a great taking of the piss out of serious fertility ritual. These Athenian women mocked the death-and-rebirth-of-the-male-god rituals by doing something entirely playful and trivial. Maybe they also expressed communally the fragility of life and the power they as women had over it. If I can plant a flower and kill it, what else can I do? There is an incipient threat here.

The 'gardens of Adonis' became an expression to mean something trivial and temporary. Hang on a minute. Brief beauty, the fragility of youth, the thing that cannot take root, how death is a just a day in the sun away. These things are not trivial. Philosopher and economist Georges Bataille described something similar as 'the accursed share'. He was interested in luxury, in what people do with the time, energy and resources they have left over from necessary toil. The point of the accursed share is that it must be spent, in unproductive activity such as ritual, or non-reproductive sex, or spectacle. It must be spent on something you can't get back, you can't invest in. It is destined for waste. What we do with this luxury characterizes our societies. 

Related is Jacques Lacan's (and Zizek's)  idea of jouissance. Jouissance is enjoyment or pleasure beyond itself, or beyond the instinct for enjoyment. It is a form of enjoyment that is destabilizing, subversive and potentially destructive. For Lacan, jouissance is not just too much enjoyment. It is enjoyment that has tipped over into pain, or suffering. This kind of painful, rapturous, mystical enjoyment speaks to me of ritual, trance and merge.It is the state you get in the mosh pit at a metal gig, or a political protest, or in the throes of passion (passion meaning pain after all ) - all of which can be transgressive places.  It is not for nothing that the Shaman endures hours of dancing, days of fasting, and spiritual peril in order to attain the state where they can merge with their helping spirits and become more than human. Consider the hook suspension practices of the Plains Indian Shamans, where extreme pain is used to change consciousness. 

Mourning can also be ecstatic. I imagine the women of Athens on their rooftops, weeping for Adonis, a kind of over the top performative rapturous agonized weeping that is above all knowing. We know what we are about, we know the gods are watching us, we know we have left behind the necessities of toil and we are in this wildly overflowing state of emotional luxury. This is what we do with the accursed share. We know we are wasting it; that is the point. And the men don't get it and can't stop it, because rapture, passion and the pain of passion and rapture are not for them, at least not in public, at least not in Athens.

My microgreens are a waste. They are crazy beautiful. Their beauty is far greater than their usefulness although they do make a pretty garnish and they are probably quite rich in antioxidants or whatever. Short-lived, doomed, like Adonis, too beautiful to live. 

When I said they were too beautiful to eat someone said to me, why would you eat anything less beautiful? I got to thinking, what if we ate only beautiful things? What if eating was an act of jouissance, an aesthetic feast? If every meal was a psychological potlatch, a celebration of the desire to eat rather than the base need? I am imagining eating only the best food - not the most expensive or fashionable, but the best and most beautiful. One shining leaf of silver beet still wet with rain, or the three blushing blueberries that just came ripe this morning. As a good animist, what if I treated my food as if it were alive?