Taxonomy as Prayer

Apologies for the title, because I am not going to write about either taxonomy or prayer, which will probably come as a relief to you. The phrase simply captures a dynamic and process that I do want to explore, which is the phase shift that occurs when intense engagement with the physical world evolves into a a more abstracted involvement. Sigmund Freud called it the 'oceanic feeling', if I am correct in aligning my simple thought with one of the many insights of such an original thinker. As a young researcher, he took to dissecting the brains of mice in an attempt to discover the origin of the soul, finally abandoning that approach for another that eventually came to be psychoanalysis and psychotherapy achieved through talking, which involves essentially the same shift from the concrete to the abstract which I have in mind.

I remember once, in a graduate seminar, expressing my desire to break down a house into its myriad components, using a simple tool such as a spider diagram. I was immediately and roundly chastised by one of the professors present, saying that a house is not a home, and that my approach to understanding the house would be overly reductive. Well, yeah. That was the whole point. Or one of the points. My instinct was to break down the house - into doors, siding, windows, latches, nails, et cetera, down to the most infinitesimal piece imaginable, decomposing also the raw materials into their constituent elements: fiber, vapor, molecules, atoms, electrons . . .

By doing so, my aim was to completely exhaust the material nature of the house, just as I suspect that Freud was trying to completely dismantle the physical structure of the brains of those poor rodents, with the feeling that once that was done, the spiritual will become accessible. It is clearly a Baroque exercise, looking for truth in the irreducible. It also has its Romantic version, however. Many times over the past year, as I have toiled away at refurbishing my house, I have fallen into faint revelries in the midst of one task or another. I recall standing on a ladder while working on some pipes, struggling with a wrench to fit a length into a tight space, gaining a fraction of an inch with each turn, all while making sure to not lose my balance, but so absorbed in the task that I felt perfectly comfortable, pipe and fitting here, pipe dope there, feet planted firmly on the ladder, the wrench a mere extension of my arm . . .

Then I looked up and saw the clouds scudding across the sky, and there it was. That revelry. That feeling. Probably the thing that Freud felt as he sat hunched over his work.

It happened another time when I was snaking out a sewer line in my driveway. Seated on the concrete, I struggled to get the snake up the mainline to clear it, again gaining an inch or two with every turn. There must be something in the rhythmic nature of the work that sets one up to shift from one phase to another. So after minutes - hours? - of wrestling with this snake, I was prompted to look up, who knows shy, and gazed into the middle distance, immersed in that same intense feeling, of somehow being connected to something much bigger or markedly different from everyday reality.

Who knows. Maybe this is just the same as a runner's high, something which I have also experienced. But its source is somehow rooted in a different place, more cognitive somehow, because as demanding as the pipefitting or drain snaking was, I was not at all exhausted in a physical sense, and there was no rush of endorphins.

But back to the house. My idea, or my instinct, was to pulverize the house to the point that the constituent elements both disappeared and also then perhaps blew away or recombined to produce something new, something of a new order, in a new phase. From dust you came and to dust you shall return. Had the professor been more patient, I think he would have seen how I got from house to home by destroying the house, or at least by breaking it down so methodically and exhaustively.

So to do this with plants would, I think, help enter that new phase of understanding, helping to discover that ultimate container that I mentioned in my earlier post. Trunk, branch, stem, leaf, fiber, cell . . . Not to do this materially necessarily, but in one's imagination, and to do it to oneself also . . . Again, I think this is what people are talking about when they speak of being at one with nature, when they go hiking or fishing or whatever . . .

This idea gets at the point of an even earlier post in which I talk about walking in the Oakland Hills and was looking for some possible point of juncture with the trees that surrounded me, as fellow beings. What is that common core?

Unequal Equality and the Need for an Ultimate Container

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The quote above is from Animal Farm by George Orwell. It came to mind when I was thinking of my gradation of multi-ontological personhoods, the idea being that every or most things can be a person, according to various scientific and philosophical understandings, but that they are, by virtue of their varying natures, different kinds of persons. In other words, I have posited a gradation, spectrum or range of personhood, organized not by value but by characteristics - by qualities but not by quality.

It is all a bit of a cheat, or at least a potential cheat, because what is the point of creating a category of something if all of the things within that category are in fact radically different, or inhabit the category for radically different reasons? What I need is a bigger container in which I can put my personhood container, in order to provide an overarching rationale or model of personhood, but of course that does not really solve the problem, since I would in turn need another container for the that container, and so on. 

I noticed the same problem when listening to a cosmologist give a year end summary of the current thinking about the beginnings of the universe. It all came off as kind of funny to me, because apparently the reigning ideas are that the universe came from nothing, that it has its own rules, that the stuff inside the universe is not like the universe itself, that all of our physics breaks down before the Big Bang, and that we should not be surprised if the universe turns out to be unlike anything we have ever known before. In other words, the container that we have needs to fit into another container to give it a rational and meaningful context, and so on. So it is the same problem.

I suppose what resolves the rational contradiction for me is that it all just feels right. As a teenager I developed this idea of a sensual morality. Something is wrong if it feels wrong. It was the argument I used for being a vegetarian. Of course, now that I know more about plants, I feel bad about eating them too. So the new task is to somehow reconcile the idea that somethings have to die in order for other things to live. This is the central problem of being human, and in my view the central problem, or one of the central problems, that animates religious, philosophical and scientific thought.

There are many ways that this is done, but as far as I can tell they all suffer from the ultimate container problem.

Christmas Trees and Cut Flowers

Let's talk Christmas trees, shall we? And also cut flowers. I'll start with Christmas trees first although much of what I say about Christmas trees applies to cut flowers, and even in some cases animals.

I think cutting down a tree, bringing it into the house, and stringing it with electrical wires and light bulbs, is weird. I have always felt this way, or at least that is how it seems now, but it might be the case that as a child I accepted the common wisdom that this was a good thing to do. I am pretty sure, however, that I had an instinctual feeling that it was wrong, just as I was sickened every time I went into the meat aisle of the supermarket as I tagged along with my mother when she went grocery shopping. As a young adolescent I turned this feeling into an intellectual argument, but I think the feeling has always been with me, and always sincerely felt.

As I mentioned at the start, the I had the same feeling toward cut flowers, although I think I arrived at this position somewhat later than I did with Christmas trees, and for somewhat different reasons, at least initially. As a young boy, I was alienated from the aesthetic. Highly gendered, cut flowers were for girls. I could admire flowers growing outside, but the world of stems in vases was a bit out of my ambit. This sentiment, too, later evolved into an intellectual lament: Why kill beautiful flowers, who were happily growing outside, only to try to extend their life by putting them in water, often with aspirin or some other additive that was supposed to help preserve them?

I now feel that having any kind of plant in the house, even living ones in potted plants, is strange and unhealthy. As much as I like plants, I generally feel that they belong outdoors, rooted in the soil, in the earth, and not inside. I think the same is true of animals. Don't get me started on the idea of birds in a cage. As a teenager I was an avid aquarist. No more. I was happy to read several years ago that the Italian city of Bologna had outlawed keeping goldfish in bowls. Bravo.

The Disarming Nature of Babies

This is a photo of the cactus I have had half-a-mind to remove for the past year or so. But as soon as it started to produce 'babies' I just couldn't do it. There is something about the act of producing, or reproducing, that I find disarming. The same is true for my rose bushes. I am so pleased with the lush green grass that the winter rains have brought, so I view anything that is sharp and spiky as less than desirable. But the roses also have put out new buds - I counted 23 the other day - so they too are going to stay, I suppose until they have reached the natural end of their life. At the end of the season, I don't feel bad about raking up the dried remains of the grass and weeds. They have lived their lives, and I feel it is okay to remove them and send them to the yard bin without feeling that I am doing anything wrong. The cactus and roses have earned their place, even if at times I feel cross with them.

EXCERPT: Davos (3)

Here are the next two paragraphs of Davos, the first book in the Franco Fasiolo series, which recounts the adventures of its eponymous protagonist, who is a forensic botanist and reluctant cosmopolitan. I hope you enjoy them!

Eventually Franco reached some curves, just a small cluster of switchbacks, but welcome nonetheless to relieve the monotony of the long slow trudge up the bituminous slide. Franco wished he could see inside of his lungs. He could feel them but he could not see them. He looked out and down to where he had come from and could see the layer of moisture he had passed through. He could feel it in his lungs, the heavy cloying moisture that coated and soothed but also congested them. What would it be like to have lizard lungs, hot and dry, with fine strong veins that soaked up the oxygen without having to extract it from water? How fast and light his body would be, like a balsa wood airplane passing through thin summer air. He regretted his jacket already, and it was not even nine o’clock yet, but this was always the way. There seemed to be no escaping it. When he had stepped outside the door the cold had surprised and delighted him, but already he felt the sweat on the back of his neck, either sweat or moisture from the air. Was there a difference? Who could tell? When did one become the other?

What would he say at Davos? What would they ask? Franco always tried to prepare but no more than a few minutes in, he would abandon the effort, overwhelmed by the infinite number of considerations that could sway his testimony one way or another, or another, or another. His idea was always to use these walks to collect his thoughts, but without the ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum of the train, and its rhythmic slowing and speeding, he had no mechanism to order and propel his thinking, except for his heartbeat, footfall and breathing. Wasn’t that enough? Too much? No, the problem was his brain, with neural circuits that ran like highway overpasses, with entrances, exits and overpasses, cloverleaves that produced sudden and unplanned proximities, enlightening tangents. His body had been replaced by the world, especially by the city, the urban world. ‘I can’t not read words in front of me’, a woman had said, not to him but to another woman she was talking to. Franco thought of people he knew who read deliberately, and with effort. It was not natural and ineluctable for them as it was for that woman and as it was for him. What were their brains like? How nice it must be to decide to read something, or otherwise to be able to ignore it. Is this what he liked about the goat and the donkey, the poor sad cow, the fig tree, the stone that sits in the sun and rain, indifferent to the world of words? Davossssss. It was too late for Franco.

Plants as Placemakers

Corpus torrentis in locum signat. 

The body in the river marks the spot. For some reason I worked up this phrase in a febrile hour of tossing and turning in the middle of the night. I then spent the next hour - or perhaps just several intense minutes, who knows - spinning this idea out to larger Baroque ideas about the nature and scale of reality. Briefly, according to Kwa Chunglin, one can contrast two ways of engaging the world: Romantic, in which one sees a large and inclusive system that extends above and beyond the viewer, and the Baroque, one that contains worlds within worlds that repeat endlessly downward and inward. Romantics use telescopes; Baroques use microscopes.

And so we have a body (of a person) floating in a body (of water). It is a Baroque image to be sure. One could extend the perspective to see bodies within the personal body: colonies of bacteria, for example, and even viruses that inhabit the bodies of the bacterial bodies. Complicating the scene is the fact that the body is floating, and presumably moving because the river itself is moving. So what we have is a body that marks a place, always the same place, that which is informed by the body, but also different places, because the body is always moving. So the river itself is a body within a body: call it the land, the earth or what have you.

What does this have to do with plants? Well, as I have remarked before, I find the sessile nature of plants to be among the most characteristic and charming of their features. Corpus terrenus in locum signat. (Let me confess at this point that my Latin is at best shaky. A genuine Latin scholar would surely do better). The body in the earth marks the spot. No form of life is more rooted in the earth than plants. Are they then the first and ultimate makers of place (in general) and places (in specific)? No, I would give the pride of place to the earth and elements of it (stones, et cetera) and then plants, which means that humus plays a special role, being the decayed remnants of defunct plants that add their own uniquely organic component to soil, that most special kind of earth.

All of this leads me back to the notion that plants are the great translators of the universe, mediating between Earth and its denizens on the one side and the Sun on the other.