because life is irreducible
Outside the window overlooking the orchard, the apple trees, impossibly green, foliage riotous, first fruit held high to ripen, a chorus of voices
blackbird
wren
garden warbler
chaffinch
sparrow
goldfinch
nuthatch
robin
chiffchaff
Sparrow and blackbird competing for the solo parts above another chorus line, human voices drifting from the tourist gite along the path into the forest, the burble of the river through the garden. Beneath the trees, ox-eye daisies, yarrow, plantain, the youngest elder, sturdy now, splaying umbrels of ripening berries, drinking in light.
On my desk a bottle of infused oils: comfrey, daisy, calendula, a few drops of the essential oils of black pepper and yarrow. A blend for joints. Summer, and the gallbladder diet, have deepened the dryness of my terrain. Softening herbs, moistening herbs, call my name
marshmallow
violet
cornflower
comfrey
rose
I’m spending this month with comfrey, a herb that puts us back together, another in the web of my relations. Who are yours? People, other-than-human animals, plants? Do you think together?
The brain is essential for thought; damage to particular brain regions profoundly alters cognition. And yet even cognitive science increasingly recognises that thinking is deeply shaped by body, environment, language, interactions… not only with people. Whether we describe it as extended cognition, embodied cognition…cognition more than neural activity, supported by our engagement with tools, places, other minds, other creatures…
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left and just this is the answer.
wrote Wittgenstein in proposition 6.52 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
It is not only that scientific questions and existential problems are distinct categories, but that life is not reducible to facts. Think of grief. No explanation of the chemistry of tears will take it away. Yet over time, with no change in the facts, we might come to inhabit the grief differently. Or think of how mystics move beyond asking questions to resting in paradox.
Of course, there is then no question left and just this is the answer.
But Wittgenstein goes on to end Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
And for a long while he left philosophy, later believing that meaning was not something underpinned by a hidden logical structure but something found in use.
Something found in interaction, in relationship, in connection. Existential matters not resolved by explanation but by rhythm, attention, presence. Our ethical, aesthetic, and mystical lives not additional facts to be unravelled, but experiences that resist reduction.
Story-tellers know this. Think of Proust who immerses us in memory, sensation, involuntary recollection, jealousy, art, love. How a single taste of a madeleine or a shaft of afternoon light contains more than psychology or physiology can exhaust.
The bird party outside my window swells with the day
thrush
blue tit
crow
bullfinch
wood pigeon
magpie
great tit
collared-dove
dunnock
We live in a world of so much information, yet still our species struggles with grief and wonder,love, meaning, mortality. The more-than-human world lives with the ‘just thisness’ of each moment. Not every question has an answer, but there are stories for our longing, tales of what beauty asks of us, poems that evoke the scent of hawthorn in May, returning us to childhood… Stories that tell us why attention itself is a way of knowing, a prayer to the web we inhabit in this unfathomable, messy, inexhaustibly particular, irreducible life.
We lose so much when we reduce love to hormones, memory to neurons, forests to timber, herbs to constituents. And haven’t we already lost enough? What if our moral and spiritual life depends on forms of attention that cannot be reduced to mere technique or theory, that have to be lived? Attention that isn’t forced concentration, but loving, patient, generous being with; attention that sees the other and finds itself seen in return.
We are back with Proust. While Wittgenstein says, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, story tellers reply, Let me spend pages describing how the light falls. We see this ‘being with’ in this passage from Virginia Woolf’s early short story, ‘Kew Gardens’:
The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.
Such absolute attention. The kind of attention that Iris Murdoch points to in her essay ‘The Sovereignty of Good’ in Existentialists and Mystics when she describes morality not as heroic choices but learning to see clearly.
Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
The task isn’t to impose meaning on oak, hawthorn or owl, on grief or the person we love, but to attend to what is revealed.
The irreducible thing isn’t simply ‘life’ in the abstract, but the reality of other beings, the animate world that always exceeds our explanations. And, for all who want to tell a different story, such irreducibility leads to endless possibility…
Along the forest path
rosebay willowherb
candy clouds of thistle-down
purple heather
drooping ragwort
browning foxglove towers
agrimony turning
valerian feathering to seed
…leads to wonder.
Gather with me
Alchemical gatherings are a way of working with me with minimal commitment and maximum accessibility. Four 2-hour workshops, 12 Calmly by Candlelight gatherings and a 12-day course with a final gathering all for just £25/€28/$30 for the year.
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