My paradigms are not shifting. It is as if someone else is confirming a paradigm that I didn't know how to express. But I was aware of it, without words, and because I couldn't name it it was full of hoarse sorrow. As I am reading the Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram, I am feeling grief for the loss of a larger sense of connection to the community of life. I can feel the nerve endings that were severed when I or my predecessors were cut off from the nonhuman world. My ancestors robbed me of my heritage, this valuable sense, with a vicious and painful separation that is today manifesting everywhere as pollution, degradation, physiological disease and psychological disorder.
I'm beginning even to question keeping houseplants, as it separates a single organism from coexistence and interaction with all others (gee, kind of like us! I don't need ants or bird, wait, do I?). It is cruel to put a fish in a bowl, not because it hurts him, but because it denies and cuts him off from all elements and forms of knowledge, experience of life and life forms, and with this codependence removed, his life is now meaningless, without context, and he is gasping just as surely as if he was taken from the water.
No wonder I am ill. Not like in Madagascar, violently, but this is more a malaise, my head blocked up with a sinus migrain of the spirit. I lost 11 pounds due to dysentery, but I gained 15 back due to anxiety at being again rootless from the material world upon my return to my own culture. Even when I was there, I could feel the way missionaries and colonizers and aid workers had wrenched from the land some meaning, forcibly, with language and science as primary weapons.
I am frustrated by the huge barriers to sensitivity and sensation that exist in our civilized, high-tech culture. And also that people who are in need of life-saving solutions embrace these imperialist, colonialist and violent technologies which will unwittingly sever their ties to any life-source, imprisoning them in the tomb of the individual existence.
I want something so badly, but I can't articulate it.
Now I understand why the spiders upset you so! For me, reading a passage like that, I get the same sense of connection and continuity, the interconnected nature of life ... but I also see the spiders spinning as though none of them have even noticed each other, and that definitely reminds me of humans more than anything else. What sticks with me from the passage, though, isn't the blindweaving spiders or even the collection of webs altogether but the writer's witnessing of it. That's what I remember: the experience of one person placed, almost by force, in a small corner of the world and slowly growing aware of the complexity and interaction of the forces at the edges of his normal awareness. Yes, there are barriers, and they won't be overcome by many people because they have to be overcome by choice; but, those barriers can be overcome by choice. All it takes is the sight of the world - any part of it - and a willingness to watch. Isn't that a message of hope?
ReplyDeleteThere's a book called Salamander Room in which a boy brings home a salamander and wants to keep it. His mother asks, "Where will it live? Where will it play?" The boy brings in some dirt for the salamander to play on and some leaves for it to hide beneath. Then he brings in some plants to grow in the dirt, and some worms to make the dirt rich. He finds moss for the salamander to lie on and stones to hold pools of water so that it can drink. He lets in some insects for the flowers, brings saplings to grow and give them shade ... some birds to perch in the branches and sing and eat the worms ... and by the end of the book, his room is just open to the woods, with a floor of fallen leaves, a roof of stars, the boy, his bed, and the salamander.
- F.A.R. out
The spiders did not upset me, the spiders made perfect, beautiful sense, and what upset me was how rare that amazing feeling of affirmation really is. And it uncovered how much I wanted to feel the connection all the time, a desire that is usually present but suppressed as a dull background ache, but at this particular moment, I let it become a vital wound piercing me deep inside.
ReplyDeleteI'll give you sensation and sensitivity in twitter-sized bursts.
ReplyDeleteThe fact is that there has always been (italics) something (un-italics) that keeps being from feeling sensations or from being sensitive. Before internet, it was TV. Before TV, it was ... who knows. Fear of Communists. Serfdom. Fear of mammoths. The quests for legitimate connections and legitimate sensations is always riddled with obstacles and much harder than anyone is willing to admit. Most people don't care enough, so they embrace the distraction. Let them. They deserve as much.
Also, you damn well know you can articulate it. In fact, I bet you're just waiting to scream it out to the right person. I dare you to.
ReplyDelete