Rigorously Local

A current theory holds that dogs were not domesticated; rather, it was they who inserted themselves into human society. How did they do this? By being cute, endearing and ingratiating, as well as useful and loyal. (Here is a good use of the passive voice, by the way, a construction that keeps the topic of interest, dogs, first and foremost in the reader's attention.)

This idea leads me to think that perhaps something similar happened with plants. Of course, on this Michael Pollan has already given us so much in The Botany of Desire, and I might come back to some of his thoughts later.

What interests me now is to consider how the rigorous localness of plants might have inspired human beings who by nature were always on the move. Might they have looked at a tree, perhaps while resting beneath it, and wondered how they too might be able to stay in one place? If trees are able to do it, why not humans?

Of course, there is nothing less at stake in this discussion than a deeper understanding of the origins of agriculture, which through its place-based productivity permitted the stasis that lies at the base of civilization, at least in one conception. I agree with scholars such as Vilem Flusser who claim that nomadic societies were far more sophisticated than the 'agriculture = culture' model allows. Migrant people have always been the world's first cosmopolitans.

So, following the theme of my opening point, perhaps it was not that humans domesticated plants, but that plants, again alla Pollan, not only inserted themselves into human society, but introduced and facilitated the development of a new mode of living, a model of civilization, or at least the framework for a place-based and static culture, a new genre de vie.

I am not thinking so much that a wild wheat stalk suggested the idea of the cultivation of a wheat field, but that the permanency of the forest, as mutable as it was and is, and the static resilience of an individual tree, might have planted, in what I imagine were mobile and frenetic societies, the idea of being similarly static and similarly resilient.

A Cognitive Cuddle

One of Rupert Sheldrake's more charming examples of morphic fields lies in the idea of joint attention. Children, it seems, are especially amenable to and desirous of such collaborations, at least in my experience. And I think Sheldrake's theory of morphic fields offers intriguing insights into the dynamic, because the relation formed is not so much the formation of a connection between two or more observers, but an entry into a zone of attention by those concerned.

For example, there is no denying the special feeling one gets when stooping down to examine a flower with a child. The practice of examining something with another person, especially a child, imparts a feeling that is different from doing it alone. How does this sharing take place? Materialists would point to some known agent or mechanism: maybe an airborne chemical or perhaps to a cultural of social construction based upon proximity and direction, or to notions about vision and other senses and related cognitive and somatic responses.

My question is if the proposed scenario is a dynamic or a trinamic, if you forgive the coinage, the first involving the adult and child, and the second including also the flower. Is there a field into which both or all three participants enter and is it responsible for the special feeling that accompanies such encounters? Again, the so-called morphic field that Sheldrake proposes is similar to others with which we are already familiar: gravitational, electro-magnetic, et cetera. I think the morphic field theory is actually more intriguing in the scenario I propose rather than one in which the flower is replaced with a cat or dog, for example, which would likely generate more common explanations, such as one involving some kind of chemical or psycho-social relationship.

There is no denying that this special feeling exists, whatever its cause. Sigmund Freud referred to it as an 'oceanic' feeling and saw it as key to understanding the ubiquity of religion, this feeling of being immersed in some larger force. Sheldrake's contention is that these forces exist but are simply a part of everyday nature, not some kind of imagined or supernatural phenomenon. The ability to sense that one is looking at you, another manifestation of his morphic field theory, would have had a clear function in the evolution of predator-prey relations: prey that had it would be more likely to escape in time and would therefore have emerged as the better adapted and therefore surviving species.

I have no doubt that when people speak of 'communing with nature' that it is this same feeling of immersive relation to which they refer. It is definitely place-based, to use a geographer's term; it is not a feeling of being connected so much to individual elements in nature, but to the vastness of nature, and what better word to use to refer to a natural vastness than 'field'? In the case of the flower, or the dog or cat for that matter, I am speaking of an individual, their status as elements of nature depending upon where you draw the line between nature and culture, which is ultimately irresolvable.

Michelangelo Antonio does a wonderful job of depicting this sense of immersion in the final scene of L'Eclisse, which you can view here.

Translation, Fetishization and Alienation in Cross-Kingdom Context

This morning, I was listening to a news story on narcocorridos, the ballads that celebrate and extol the lives and adventures of Mexican drug dealers. There are other kinds of corridos, such as those that tell the mostly bitter tales of migrants who cross the Sonoran Desert in a clandestine and desperate attempt to enter the United States undetected, corridos migrantes.

The convention of rendering such phenomena in italics marks them as strange and exotic. We do not have narcocorridos in the United States. They are a Mexican thing. Or at least, that is what we are supposed to believe given the mode in which we are introduced to them, with the italicized font signaling that the idea is of another world, or at least of another culture, in any case, something that is beyond our understanding or at least our complete understanding. Italicized words, and concepts, live in a middle ground, a neutral zone, a purgatory, a bardo.

A great example of the fetishization that such renderings impart upon words and ideas comes from the development of Sigmund Freud's concept of the id and its subsequent adoption into other languages. Freud took it originally from Latin, the third person pronoun meaning 'that', as a translation of the German Es, which translates into English as 'it'. Freud and his translators must have sensed a general and elemental earthiness and simplicity in the third person pronoun, taken from Western Civilization's proto language, that captured and communicated the sense of a basic human instinct.

What might the word have been had Freud spoken English as his mother tongue? The 'it', the 'pit' the 'core'? In any case, had the word originated in English, which is just as apt as German to go to Latin for its technical terminology, or should I say nomenclature, and had it been rendered in English, would Freud's ideas have carried the same weight and rhetorical force, or was the exotic nature of the terms, id, ego, superego, with 'id' being the sexiest, key to their power and popularity?

Although I appreciate the sentiment that lies behind the practice of using foreign language terms in a news story that is otherwise produced in English, I wonder if in fact the fetishization that is an unfortunate part of the linguistic and cultural preservation that is being privileged does not in fact do more harm than good. After all, if the story had spoken about 'drug dealer songs' instead of 'narcocorridos', might the English-language listener might be more likely to feel that the story was a part of his or her world rather than something happening in another place? Is not the more mundane 'migrant songs' more likely to root the problem of illegal migration in domestic rather than foreign soil, and souls?

And so when we speak of plants, do not the special terms of the botanist, gardener and arborist - stamen, pistil and corona, for example - lead humans to believe that plants are stranger than they really are? Is not bark just a kind of skin, after all? Chickens and pigs have skin, but cows and horses have hide, and it seems valuable to make this distinction, but does not this focus on difference obscure a similarity that is equally present and evident, if not more so? What effect would there be, for instance, if we were to speak of a plant's eyes and ears, of its brain, and of its soul? Or indeed, about its life?

Go Ask The Plant

The title of this post is taken from a comment upon an article on self medication among animals that appears today in the New York Times. It is a response given by a Native American elder to a person asking how to choose wild plants for their medicinal properties, specifically how to choose the right plant for a particular ailment.

For anyone with a materialist view of the world, the recommendation immediately poses a problem. How does one talk to a plant, since they do not appear to speak and listen in the same way that humans do? That is, they do not seem to have the ears and tongues and other parts that we usually associate with the verb 'to talk'.

In the kind of late night rumination to which I am prone, I arrived first at the phrase 'self reciprocating mutualism' and then 'self-reflecting symbiosis' to describe how a materialist would have to consider most if not all forms of interspecies, not to mention cross-kingdom, communication in which there was any hope for an equal exchange of information. In other words, the conversation would have to occur principally if not exclusively in the mind of the approaching interlocutor, at least if one were to adhere to a materialist understanding of communication as a mutual exchange between or among all participants that occurs through vocalizing the the reception of vocalizations with organs that are sensitive to vibrations carried through air or water. In this sense, the phrase 'go ask the plant' becomes something like 'be open to what the plant is telling you' by way of its silent presentation.

But just as most people would agree that animals, particularly pets, speak to humans in their own way, through barks, twirls, head tilts and other forms of nonverbal communication, with no vocalizations, with a little contemplation, I think they would agree that plants do the same thing, with open flowers, drooping leaves and other manifestations. After all, even communication between two human beings has a large and important nonvocal component.

These displays would not seem to offer the specific medical information that would be needed, however, so perhaps the essential communication would come through means other than hearing or sight, specifically through taste, scent and touch, senses that have been greatly diminished in humans, at least through cultural neglect and degradation. This would be a form of communication but not what we would consider to be talking. If we engage Sheldrake's idea of morphic fields, the conception of communication opens even more, even radically so.

Considered in this way, the communication between humans and plants is not contained at all within the mind of the human being, but is a truly mutual activity. This idea of mutuality figures prominently in my ongoing meditation upon the nature of host-guest relations, which will be the topic of a future post.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/magazine/the-self-medicating-animal.html?comments#permid=22577805

Monica Gagliano in the Huffington Post

Here is a link to a nice piece on the work of Monica Gagliano on how plants use sound to find water:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/plants-hear-water-insects_us_591dfe4be4b03b485cafea50

Her finding has been evident for some time, but it is a nice sign that the popular media are now starting to cover what I call 'plant consciousness'.

EXCERPT: Davos (6)

There was the black plastic tube hanging from the branches, obvious now that Franco had seen it, like a trick in a puzzle that takes forever to find but then once found stands out like it is no trick at all. The tube, who knew who had put it there, carried water from a fountain high up on the hill, filled by a spring that rose up out of the ground, fed by a hill above it. Franco found the end and filled his bottle, afraid to drink from the end, not because he thought he would catch some germs, but that he would spread his own, fearing the censure of the locals more than the chance that he would pass out from thirst, despite the sunny coolness that surrounded him. Once his bottle was filled he raised it to his mouth and took a deep drink, relieved but sorry to be washing away the vestiges of his trance that had put him in such delicious relation with that tree, that nameless, type-less tree that had emerged for him from among all the others. This is what he needed to do at Davos. It was not trees that mattered, or whatever they wanted him to talk about, it was seeing a tree that was important. How was he supposed to say that?

Rupert Sheldrake and Morphic Fields

I have been reading and even more so watching a lot of Rupert Sheldrake these days. One of his key ideas is that of morphic fields, which he posits as being similar to other fields such as gravitational and magnetic fields.

Schools of fish, flocks of birds and packs of wolves, so his theory goes, are bound by these fields and this allows them to stay in touch with each other both while in close proximity and stretched over great distances. How else, he suggests, could these groups behave in such complex physical and social ways without being connected by some kind of overarching structure?

The prevailing explanations, a kind of domino theory that fish and birds in huge groups turn tightly in perfect unison by simply responding visually and tactilely to their immediate neighbors, or that wolves maintain contact by scent or hearing are, he reports, not supported by evidence or experience. (One of his favorite methods of investigation, in addition to formal experiments, is to talk to people such as hunters, wildlife photographers and security personnel who are frequently immersed in situations in which something like a morphic field seems to be present). So he has developed this idea that all animals, including humans, but also plants, because his formation as a biologist is principally in botany, and even much smaller entities such as atoms and molecules, reside in a morphic field that stretches over space and time, even globally and even in deeply historical ways.

He is highly erudite and is a wonderful speaker, so I find it easy to generate enthusiasm for his ideas. This is not to say that the nature of his ideas is wanting for empirical evidence; many or most of them exist in a well-substantiated but still, it seems, partial and tentative form. Because or in spite of this, they are highly provocative and very stimulating.

The idea of a morphic field fits well into contemporary studies on plants. The sensitivity of plants to gravitational and magnetic fields, as well as sonic and chemical influences in and through soil, air and water, supports the idea of the existence of a field that connects beings across great distances, and which forms the structure of complex ecologies.

He is well worth searching for online. You will be delighted and excited by his ideas.

Che cosa fa, lui?

Several years ago I was at the home of a friend of mine in Italy. We were sitting at the kitchen table with his younger daughter, who was no more than two years old at the time. She had just finished eating something messy and I instinctively and gently dabbed around her mouth a little. She immediately looked up at her father and said 'Che cosa fa, lui?' Or, 'What is he doing?'

The same question popped into my mind as I exited the freeway just a few minutes ago. There is a man, dressed in civilian clothing, who for the past several weeks or months, or so I realize now, has been carefully planting various shrubs and flowers in the strip of earth that runs alongside the off ramp. Who he is and if he has authorization to do it is one question, but another question is, appunto, 'What is he doing? 'Che cosa fa?' And asked not only by me, but by the plants themselves. I imagine, that like the little toddler in Italy, the plants, in their own way, may very well be wondering, if you will permit my use of that word with reference to plants (but why not?), 'What the (bleep) is this guy doing?'

Plants, our most beleaguered of beings, are surely used to other beings messing with them. We talk of the birds and the bees in essentialist terms, but where would they be without the plants who suffer their ministrations? The activities of humans must be particularly strange. At least the birds and bees (and bats and other pollen collectors) have a specific instrumental purpose behind their visits and manipulations. Understanding what the human is doing, however, is a bit more mysterious. Che cosa fa, lui?