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?
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?
No comments:
Post a Comment