“Everything you are not stares back at what you are.”
Adam Nicolson, from The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters
“In the very earliest time
When both people and animals lived on earth
A person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen—
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That’s the way it was.”
Nalungiaq, Inuit woman interviewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen in the early twentieth century.
Liminality is one of the most defining aspects of our existence. The frontier between what is and what is not structures our view of all with which we interact.
There are few sensations closer to the sublime than gazing at the inaccessible landscape, the places where we may not go, or only go in spirit. The edge of the sea or a precipice, high mountain or fleeting light we cannot retain but must rapidly savour; the impossibility of doing aught else but gaze places us squarely in the paradox of our presence: the view is beautiful because it is all we are not.
Nicolson places his acute observation in relation to Homer’s “unharvestable sea,” when the traveler stands looking beyond the tamed and bountiful land at one’s back, to the hostile expanse that must be traversed.
In a wider context, we tend to disassemble what we see into manageable portions: the geologist sees strata, the farmer sees land that is tillable or not, the traveler measures the roads and distances. We rarely appreciate the whole of the landscape, which is present principally in myth and poetry, the former by rendering incarnate ocean, sky, earth or seasons as a pantheon of divine beings, the latter through metaphor and symbol.
Liminal places. Where the dialogue is reduced to a few elements, the conversation is clearer
Selflessness of observance requires that we omit ourselves from our view, even though it is unique to each of us. In this, myth and poetry can provide a guide.
The fundamental distancing of humanity from nature does not date from yesterday, and I would in no fashion imagine we can somehow turn back time to a nostalgic and perfectly harmonious past which likely never existed. Nonetheless, it is worth reminding ourselves what happened. With the initial shift of most of humanity to agriculture, our ancestors left behind a world where dialogue was everywhere. Given the fundamental equality of existence of the rock, the river, the fish and the fisherman, everyone talked to everyone. The fish lured to the hook by prayer was thanked as it was eaten.
With the gathering of humans in larger communities and the cultivation of food rather than the gathering, humanity took a step outside nature and created its own version: condensed and potentially bountiful. Humanity also took a step outside of the dialogue and addressed prayer no longer to the grain itself, but to a god on high, who, if pleased, would ensure that the harvest was plentiful. Gods became humanity’s agent and intermediary to the world.
Places in between. The ebbing and flowing conversation of tides and shores.
Humanity took a further step from nature when monotheism granted us dominion over all things, making us creatures of exception. All other creatures, deprived first of speech and now souls, were no longer part of the conversation[1]. We had only ourselves to talk to, so of course we talked about the world, rather than to the world. We have done that ever since.
In fact, we have become quite good at it. We are, however, not very good at listening. That dialogue is behind us and forever lost. Nonetheless, myth offers clues. Imagining the world as an entity and not simply a sum of constituent elements[2] would offer it not only a voice, but also a regard. To imagine that when we are enraptured in a landscape, it has the capacity to return our gaze. From there it is but a step to re-imagine voice and dialogue.
Tidal pool. Patient water waiting to rejoin the restless sea.
By this, I of course mean epic, mythic and poetic dialogue, a vade mecum to considering what is not us as a whole, interconnected, in constant conversation. The dialogue of the world with itself escapes most of us; while the butterfly batting its wings in the amazon was a useful metaphor, if only as a thought-provoking conceit, it does not go far enough.
When the Indonesian volcano Tambora erupted in 1815, provoking the famous year without summer, when well-to-do expatriate ennui sparked the writing contest that was to bequeath us Frankenstein, the millions of tons of dust that rose into the atmosphere did not simply make the world uniformly colder. Portions of the world suffered drought, ocean currents were modified, the world stuttered.[3] Naturally, the dust settled, and after three years, the rhythms resumed.
Tambora highlights the unexpected interconnectedness and causality of climate and change, a reminder that we need to learn to listen once again, in the manner of the once-endless dialogue between us and everything that is not.
Rock and algae. Dialogue of greys and greens
In 2015, the Whanganui River in New Zealand was granted the status of a legal person. It is considered a living entity, with representatives who may act and speak for and on behalf of the river. The goal is to safeguard the river’s social, cultural and economic well-being. It is a first step: giving a voice to an entity to which we are no longer willing or able to listen to.
Mess with that river, it will take you to court.
While this offers more efficient legal protection, it also firmly sets out the idea of the river as a living entity, from source to mouth. This is not the anthropomorphizing of a natural feature, it is the enlargement and diversification of our recognition of beings that deserve to be listened to with respect.
Strata. Ongoing conversation between stone, waves and tides.
Myth is simply religion in which people no longer believe, in which religious fervor is no longer invested. Nevertheless, myth and its wilder offspring, poetry, are there to remind us of not only what we humans once thought, but what we should be thinking. Giving a voice and lending an ear to the natural world is one of those things.[4] We value our interior wild spaces – they are where art lives and thrives – we need to value in equal measure that which is not us. Inside, outside, it is all about borders.
Why liminal spaces and thresholds, edges and frontiers? These have traditionally been the places where the exchanges – between cultures and peoples, myths and epics, have always been the richest. Exchange contains change, enhancement, enrichment; things do not simply pass liminal thresholds intact. They may diminish, they may gather complexity as they pass. Stories barter their way from culture to culture, negotiate, make changes as they go. On the edges of things are the best place to stand and gaze.
Vertical and horizontal: a dialogue of rust, rock and sand.
When I stand on the edge of a landscape, especially one that I cannot simply walk further into, where I must stand on the edge of where I cannot go, I am deafened by the voices and music. A landscape is not unlike an orchestra or a choir. These are the voices of everything that is not us. Everything is speaking, singing, chanting. I wish to understand and be part of the exchange, but cannot. I don’t understand those languages any more. They have been speaking to us for a long time, we have just not been listening. It is time we do.
Windswept. The dialogue of tenacity and relentlessness.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This extended to other humans, those who belief assured us had no souls, therefore justifying slavery no longer as the spoils of the mighty, but also as being in the natural order of things.
[2] It is not that hard, we see ourselves as individuals and not an assemblage of parts.
[3] And Turner painted many famous sunsets. See “Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World” by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, and “The Year Without Summer” by William K. Klingaman
[4] Designating the natural world as “natural” shows how far we have divorced ourselves from it.
More reading:
THE MIGHTY DEAD: WHY HOMER MATTERS by Adam Nicolson, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2015
TAMBORA: THE ERUPTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Princeton University Press, 2015
THE YEAR WITHOUT SUMMER: 1816 AND THE VOLCANO THAT DARKENED THE WORLD AND CHANGED HISTORY by William K. Klingaman & Nicholas P. Klingaman, St. Martin’s Press, 2014
SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND by Yuval Noah Harari, Vintage Publishing, 2016
HOMO DEUS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW by Yuval Noah Harari, Vintage Publishing, 2017
