Don’t you find that an encounter with art often provokes? Well, I do. On a recent trip to the Ile d’Oleron I wandered amongst the gorgeous, brightly coloured old fishing huts which have been transformed into artists’ workshops. They look a bit like this….
Beautiful, huh?
Let’s get back to the point of this post – the photo I used at the beginning. Here it is again, in case you don’t want to scroll back….
What I love about this image is that it depicts an encounter. A meeting of two creatures. Not two people, but a girl and a sea creature of some kind (not entirely sure what kind of sea creature!). Clearly, they are swimming towards each other. They have formed a relationship. A particular kind of relationship. A loving relationship. They are about to kiss. It feels like that. It looks like that.
So, that provoked two trains of thought for me.
First, about loving encounters, which create the most important kind of relationship in the universe – a loving relationship.
Why do I say that’s the most important kind of relationship? Because a loving relationship creates, and is created by, the formation of mutually beneficial bonds. These are a special kind of bond. They are “integrative”. They bring together people, organisms, energies, particles, every kind of phenomenon you can imagine, and, if they really do work in a mutually beneficial way, they create. They are the basis of growth, development and evolution. They produce novelty, unpredictably. They are the source of emergence, that phenomenon in the universe where what’s created could not be explained or predicted by examining only the parts of the previous state.
I do believe these are the most important kind of bonds we can create. At any level.
Second, about kisses. This image immediately reminded me of a passage in one of the physicist, Carlo Rovelli’s books.
The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not stones.
Isn’t that beautiful, too?
I love to think of the world this way. Not as a collection of events but as a network of events – “of kisses, not stones“.
Striking bird, huh? I’d never seen a “hoopoe” until I came to live here in the Charente. I still find them very exotic. It’s as if the bring a touch of far away into my garden.
Every Spring a couple of them turn up, then a little later, I’ll see them together, mum, dad, and a rather large offspring. I don’t know where they nest so I don’t see the young bird till he or she arrives in the garden hopping quickly here and there to wherever mum or dad find a worm or a grub. Beak open astonishingly wide to receive the newly discovered food.
At first, the young bird just seems to hang around watching and waiting, but after a few visits begins to drill that long beak down into the grass searching for food itself. Never seems to find any though! So still rushes across to the parents every time they strike lucky – which they do with amazing regularity.
Then a time comes when the young bird is there in the garden by themselves, drilling down here, drilling down there. I’ve seen them do this for literally hours without seeming to find a single thing. The first time I saw a day like that I got worried that maybe the young bird would never learn the skill of finding food….and then what?
But you know what? They stick with it, and, finally, start coming up with the goodies. I’ve no idea how they do that. Seriously, if you’re a bit of an expert in birds, can you tell me? How does the hoopoe know where to drill down into the earth for food? Clearly it’s not random. Well, actually, I think for the young bird, that at first, it is pretty random. But then they learn. I wonder what they learn? I wonder what they sense and how they develop that sense?
Well, yesterday was the First of September, and the weatherman said it was the first day of Autumn here. He explained that meteorologically July is the month with the hottest average temperatures, so that’s considered the height of summer, making June, July, August the summer months. January has the coldest average temperatures, so that’s the depth of winter, making December, January, February winter. Spring and Autumn fit in between those two trimesters. The Equinox, when the number of hours of daytime exactly matches the number of hours of night, falls on September 23rd. That’s when it will usually start to feel like autumn here.
Still, after a week of blue skies and warm days, the 1st September was grey and a bit rainy. As if to say “I told you so”. (Although, the sun is back out again today, the 2nd)
One change I’ve noticed though, is that the hoopoes have gone. Haven’t seen them for two or three days now and I suspect they’ve headed south. They spend the winter months in Africa before coming back here next Spring. By the way, how do they do that?? How do they find their way to Africa then back to the same garden here in the Charente? How much energy does it take to fly all that way? Honestly, I’m finding Life more amazing every day. It’s just full of things to wonder about!
So this feels like a marking of a new cycle right enough.
If you’re reading this in the Southern hemisphere of course, you’ll be seeing winter fading away and the early signs of Spring appearing. Isn’t that amazing too?
These rhythms feel ancient, deep and fundamental to me. There is something so pleasing about these natural cycles. It seems important somehow to be aware of them, and to adjust, to adapt, to tune in, to get in harmony with them. Doing so seems to add to the feeling that life is good.
Here’s a small basket of the tomatoes we picked from our garden this morning.
What strikes you about these tomatoes?
Well, what strikes me is their diversity.
They are a huge range of sizes, colours and shapes, partly because they come from different plants chosen because they are different varieties.
I SO prefer this to a packet of same-size, same-colour, same-variety tomatoes we can buy in one of the local supermarkets. Even just to look at….but also to taste! Here’s a simple plate from yesterday.
Only tomatoes, a drizzle of olive oil, a touch of salt and pepper. That’s it! Mmmmm….
I could leave this post right here. It’s enough, isn’t it, to celebrate colour, taste, freshness, locally sourced food, and the simple pleasures which make a day delightful.
But I’m not going to.
Because what strikes me about both of these images is the issue of diversity. We live in mass society – mass production, mass consumption, mass conformity. This last element is necessary to ensure the efficient workings of the first two. Without mass conformity, mass production and mass consumption go belly up. (yes, I choose my words carefully – he! he!)
There are enormous pressures to consume in this society, and equally enormous ones to produce. A lot of value is attached to both. Did you ever come across an old black and white comedy, “The Man in the White Suit”, about an inventor who creates a totally indestructible fabric? The lead character is a scientist whose discovery industry immediately tries to suppress, because it would mean people could have clothes which would last a lifetime…..and sales of clothes would plummet!
I remembered this old film the other day when I took my car to the garage to have worn-out shock absorbers replaced (ouch!). The mechanic told me that shock absorbers used to last 100,000 km but now they last only about 80,000 km. Guess that’s progress!
Jacques Ellul, who lived, researched, taught and wrote in Bordeaux, produced an astonishing analysis of mass society in his lifetime. I’ve just finished reading two of his main works (in English) – “The Technological Society” and “Propaganda“. Although both were published in the 1960s, they are extremely pertinent in 2019. He shows how a focus on “technique” – by which he means setting goals, then creating measurable processes to achieve them – brings a whole host of improvements and progress to human life, but, inevitably, is accompanied by widespread and deep de-humanisation. Plans, judgements, decisions, resources, all become grist to the mill of mass production and mass consumption. Mass society needs conformity, controls, rules, regulations, norms and standards. There is no room for “variance”, “diversity” or “uniqueness”.
He also showed how mass conformity is produced through targeted propaganda, focused on the “individual”. Now, doesn’t that seem a paradox? Don’t we tend to think of “mass” at one end of a spectrum and “the individual” at the other? Well, it turns out that apparent paradox is the key to mass control.
Long after Ellul published these works, the world saw the birth of a new politics, represented clearly by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. It was Thatcher who famously said “there is no such thing as society”. The new politics became known as “neoliberalism”. With the spread of neoliberalism society became increasingly atomised. The idea was that everyone was on their own and in competition with everyone else, and through “the market”, and a form of “social Darwinism”, the weak, the inefficient, the failures, would die off, and the strongest, “best”, people and methods would win the day.
It’s a toxic mix. Mass plus individualism.
But, hey, I hear you say, I AM an individual! I am NOT the same as everyone else! I’m not just a robot, a machine, a cog in a greater machine!
I hear you.
But here’s my take on that – individualism divides us. It sets us against each other and ignores what we share and what we have in common. It feeds the divisions, prejudices, hatred and fear of “the other” which have become all too common. But I don’t want to be just a data point in Cambridge Analytica’s memory banks. I don’t want to be a mere pawn of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram….my details harvested to target me with highly crafted propaganda to make me conform, or to support a small group who have, and want to hold onto, riches and power.
How do I resolve that paradox? I sure don’t have it all figured out but I have some thoughts…..
I don’t think we need to subscribe to either of these extremes – a data point in the mass, or an individual ego, disconnected from the rest of the planet. I think there is a third option.
Uniqueness.
Isn’t that the same thing as individuality? No, I don’t think so. For a whole host of reasons, but, for starters, because “individualism” prioritises separateness and difference. It’s a form of what the English philosopher, Mary Midgely called “social atomism” – see her “The Solitary Self” and “Science and Poetry” for her analysis of this problem. Uniqueness, on the other hand, demands an examination of contexts, of circumstances, connections and environments.
To fully experience and understand the uniqueness of this moment, it helps to see it as a dynamic, changing-before-your-eyes, event. I am unique because of the myriad of connections and flows which make me who I am. I have emerged from a particular family with it’s family tree, in a specific place, at a specific time, and continue to grow and develop through a unique and personal chain of experiences which I weave into a story I call “being me” (or better “becoming me”!)
Every single day at work as a doctor I’d meet patients who came to tell me their own, unique, and personal, story. It’s how I got to understand them. It’s how I made diagnoses, offered treatments, therapies and practices to help them re-experience health again. No two patients ever told me the same story. Not in a lifetime of practice.
And here’s the key – the way I revealed their uniqueness (to myself, and often, to themselves too), was by uncovering the connections, the flows, the contexts, environments and events of their lives.
I never wanted them all to be the same. I never wanted them all to become the same. In health, as well as in sickness, every person turns out to be unique.
OK, this is a personal bee in my bonnet, but I have a hunch that if we tipped the scales a bit, away from a focus on the mass, away from a focus on the individual, and towards uniqueness, that we might begin to create a better world. Maybe it would draw us away from competition and division towards cooperation and connection.
Does this make sense to you?
I mean, it’s a bit of a leap from a basketful of tomatoes!
But before I go, here’s one of my favourite Mary Oliver poems, The Summer Day, which doesn’t use the word “uniqueness” but it seems to me to be all about it…
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
In a recent article about advances in microscopy, a truly incredible innovation, the ability to look inside living cells will give us (according to the journalist who wrote the article)
Seeing the shape and structure of biological molecules is important because they are the cogs and wheels that make living things work. They work inside and between cells, which are the building blocks of human life.
“cogs and wheels”, huh?
See that photo at the start of this post? That’s a photo of cogs and wheels. You don’t see these inside cells. Living creatures are not “built” from “building blocks” – walls and machines are.
Here’s a machine.
Would you ever be fooled into thinking this was a living creature?
I don’t think so.
In fact, in the footage from this imaging technology that I’ve seen so far, the most amazing and striking thing is that everything you see is on the move. The inside of a cell is full of bustling activity and movement. Not cogs. Not wheels. More like even smaller creatures inside the living creature we call the cell. They seem more like what we see outside of the cell – in whole organisms, like in our own bodies – teeming communities of tiny creatures which we call cells, co-operating and collaborating to function as a whole.
The biologist, Lynn Margulis, developed the theory of endosymbiosis, which described how bacterial sized organisms may have evolved together to become the highly specialised structures inside each, and every, living cell.
In 1966, as a young faculty member at Boston University, Margulis wrote a theoretical paper titled “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells”. The paper, however, was “rejected by about fifteen scientific journals,” she recalled. It was finally accepted by Journal of Theoretical Biology and is considered today a landmark in modern endosymbiotic theory. Weathering constant criticism of her ideas for decades, Margulis was famous for her tenacity in pushing her theory forward, despite the opposition she faced at the time. The descent of mitochondria from bacteria and of chloroplasts from cyanobacteria was experimentally demonstrated in 1978 by Robert Schwartz and Margaret Dayhoff. This formed the first experimental evidence for her theory. The endosymbiosis theory of organogenesis became widely accepted in the early 1980s, after the genetic material of mitochondria and chloroplasts had been found to be significantly different from that of the symbiont’s nuclear DNA. [wikipedia]
We are not machines. Machines are not alive, and they don’t evolve. Crucially, machines don’t show “emergent properties“. They are predictable because they are not alive, and they don’t develop new, impossible to predict, behaviours and characteristics.
I think we do Life a huge disservice when we think of creatures as machines.
We are actually infinitely more complex, more amazing, more puzzling, more wonderful than anything that tired old metaphor can come up with.
So, can we move on please? And talk about Life without reducing it to something inferior – a machine.
The Ile d’Oleron is a small island not far from where I live. I visited it a number of times. There’s a pretty village called Chateau d’Oleron with brightly coloured old fishermen’s and oyster farmers huts which are now mostly artists workshops and stores. On my most recent visit I came across this bridge with dozens of oyster shells hung on it, each one inscribed with a wish. The first thing I thought of was the padlocks fastened to the Pont Neuf in Paris which I saw many years ago.
When I looked closer to see what people were wishing for I realised that these oyster wishes were indeed very like the padlocks.
I remember seeing love wishes in Kyoto too –
In fact, most of the wishes I read were for love or happiness, and many of them weren’t really wishes at all, but, more like the padlocks, simply a public declaration of love….two names and a heart, or a date.
Not all the wishes were for love or happiness though. Some were much more specific –
“One house here”!
Which got me wondering about this whole wishing thing.
What’s it about?
Mostly, these are not requests, in the way that a prayer might be. Although some certainly are. I saw a wish for marriage “soon”, no names, just a wish to be married. I saw a wish that a particular child would remain happy forever. Or two names a a hope that their love would endure. But not all were like that.
Most were statements of love or happiness. Declarations of love or happiness. Maybe in some way these were “performative” wishes. By simply, and clearly, stating something, you bring it into being. A sort of focusing. Making love, or happiness, or wellbeing more than just a wish, but a reality, a totem of some kind.
One was even more expressive by making a drawing the centre point, instead of words.
This one says “The song of love”.
I spent quite a while browsing these shells and what, at first, seemed a bit strange, became all the more charming.
After all, don’t they say “The world’s your oyster”?
So, what would you wish for? What would you declare on a padlock, an oyster, a star, or a tree?
I took this photo a long time ago up at the Bracklinn Falls in Scotland. As you walk through the woods from the car park, you hear the roar of the water long before you can see it. Once you reach its banks, or stand on the bridge, the “new” bridge from 2010, the “old” one having been washed away by the power of the water in a storm some years before, you can hardly hear each other speak for the noise.
There’s a hint about the power of water in the volume of the noise. There’s another hint when you learn the history of the bridge, see the height of it, and wonder about the day the stream turned into a torrent and destroyed the old one. I’m old enough to remember standing on the old, iron, one. I never imagined it could be washed away. The new bridge, is, I think, even more beautiful than the old one.
What caught my eye in that first scene, was the shape of the rock.
It looks like there is a giant mouth opening up to swallow the water.
In fact, many of the rocks here smoothly sculpted by the power of the water. They are beautiful. The water itself does not run smoothly over this section of its path. It is never still, never quiet, and constantly breaks into foam and bubbles. It’s sort of counter-intuitive to think that water can shape rock, yet it’s obvious too because we see that all around us, whether we are looking at cliffs along a coast line, the rocks along the banks of a river, or even stones which lie at our feet.
One of the things which so delights me about these scenes is realising how the rock has become the shape I’m looking at only by interacting with the water.
It hasn’t grown to that shape all by itself.
Because it reminds me that nothing is the way it is all by itself. Everything we see, everything we are, emerges from an infinity of experiences to become the way it is today.
When I look at these beautifully fashioned rocks I see a relationship. I see a history of water and rock. I see continuous motion.
Which isn’t what you’d expect to see when you look at a rock!
What do you see when you look up at a sky like this?
The first things to catch my eye are the patterns in the clouds. I just love seeing these ripples, waves and swirls. I can delight in densities and the transparencies. I love how the blue beyond shows through and appears as lakes, streams and rivers in the white land of the cloud.
Then the next thing that happens for me is noticing that some of these patterns here look familiar. They remind me of something else, in the same way that sketches and doodles do, in the same way that paintings and photographs do. My eyes are drawn to the blue zone in the cloud which I can easily see as a pair of lungs – well, I’m sure that’s at least in part due to my working as a doctor all my life – but the idea of a pair of lungs breathing this cloud into existence delights me! Bear with me for a moment longer, because, and this comes and goes for me, I can then see what looks like a head above “the lungs” with a face looking out towards the right hand side of the image. Sometimes that looks SO clear to me that it almost spooks me out! And then I look again and I just can’t see it.
If you’ve been reading the posts on this blog for a bit, you’ll know what’s coming next……the image sets of a train of thought for me.
This time what I start to think about is creation.
I love to see clouds emerge, change, and disappear before my very eyes. So often they look like a work of art, like a piece of performance art. I see it happen and it amazes and delights me.
This, I think, is the essence of the Universe – creation.
The Universe has been creating since its beginning. As best we know, first elements, like hydrogen and helium, then clouds and densities which form into stars, those sources of all the elements we know….and so on, with the rest of the Universe Story…..right up to the creation of the Earth – as far was we know, the only planet like this in the entirety of existence – yeah, I know, people tell you that there are chances there are other Earth-like planets out there somewhere, but we haven’t found any yet.
And on this Earth, creation continues, with the elements forming into molecules, molecules combining and synthesising to create cells, and so to living organisms, no two organisms living identical lives……to the most complex of living organisms in the universe (as best we know)….human beings, no two of whom have ever been, or ever will be, identical.
And so to this day, this day which has never existed before, and will never exist again, where every event, every experience, every body, is new today.
Creation. It’s the essence of the Universe. It’s the essence of Life. The constant, never-ending, creation of novelty, of emergence, of uniqueness.
Yep, all that from a cloud…..how’s that for a creative thought?
Sometimes when I look out over the vineyards I can see the rain coming. Like a swathe of grey chiffon dropping down from clouds in the sky to soak the green vines below, or like the wet fingers of the rain gods lightly stroking the face of the Earth.
It’s quite beautiful.
It’s like change manifesting itself, the future showing its hand.
Of course it means it’s time to take the washing in from the line, or to head indoors until it passes, but sometimes, it just appears, then disappears again. I can see it just there on the other side of the vines, then within a few minutes it’s gone, never having come this way at all.
It’s a daily reminder that the future is not predictable.
The French philosopher, Michel Serres, wrote that human beings are creatures which anticipate. He said we are always looking ahead, imagining what might be there, what might be coming our way. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. I know that if I stop to watch my thoughts for a while, some of them are memories, some are old patterns of thought passing through again. But often they are anticipations, thinking ahead to later today, to tomorrow, to next week, month or even the years ahead. None of which exists yet. None of which I can be sure of.
In fact, I’d say that even when I am practising a focus on the present I discover that much of the here and now content of my mind is anticipation – planning, expecting, wondering what if this, and what if that, anxieties or fears, hopes, desires or longings.
Isn’t it strange that we give such attention to the unknown, and unknowable, future?
Yet, isn’t that perhaps one of our greatest strengths? The one which gives us not only the ability to plan, but the power of creativity? The one which enables us to imagine another world? Isn’t that where we get our ability to be prepared, as well as our ability to be active agents of the future?
Wondering what’s coming next isn’t necessarily all about worry and fear. It can enable us to cope, to adapt. And it can allow us to manifest our own creations.
I noticed this little profusion of diversity at the edge of a pavement the other day. Now that I’m reviewing the photo I see really stark contrasts between the natural and the built environments.
On the right hand side here we can see a drain cover cast in heavy iron and imprinted with regular rows and columns of slightly raised boxes. It even looks heavy. It looks rigid. Fixed. You would bet that these covers were produced in a factory. It’s likely that thousands of these almost identical objects were churned out from a production line using a template, or a mould, so that they are as similar as possible. If the factory has “quality control” it’s likely that any which are significantly different from the others will be rejected. The goal is standardisation, efficiency, same-ness.
Human beings are great at this kind of work. We take raw materials from Nature and beat them into the products which we can mass produce. These things are useful. Look at the other useful things human beings have made in this picture. The concrete poured to create kerb stones, drainage paths, and gutters. The tarmac laid and levelled to make roads. The houses built with stone, cement, wood and glass. These are just some of the things which make up our built environment.
But taking centre spot in this image is Life. Bursting out of this manmade environment is a flourishing, a profusion of colour. A tiny, micro-system of flowers. Somehow we know nobody planted them there. Nobody sowed the seeds there. They got there of their own accord, blown in the wind, dropped by animals, carried along by streams of water after a rain. Then they took their chance and growth kicked in. First of all just small green shoots, which grew quickly and diversified. Each developing according to the typical shape of a plant of its species. They look chaotic, disordered, different. You know they haven’t been manufactured.
It doesn’t take long for wild unpredictable nature to make its mark. That’s the essence of Life. That’s the underlying truth of all organisms, including we humans. We grow in unpredictable, diverse ways to create complex communities of Life.
You know, don’t you, that we need all of this. The ability to act on opportunity, the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, the ability to form complex networks of relationships, and the ability to create the environments in which we live.
It’s 50 years since a human being set foot on the Moon, so there’s been a lot of reminiscing recently. There’s no doubt that journey was more than a great technological achievement. It suddenly made the distance between the Moon and the Earth seem much smaller. Human beings have imagined trips to the Moon for centuries now, but, in that “One small step for Man….” the journey became a reality.
However, the change in perspective which has impressed me even more, is one which, although it is at least as ancient as imagining Moon trips, is represented by the famous photograph taken of the Earth rising above the horizon of the Moon.
This was taken by one of the astronauts on an earlier mission. It gave a powerful and striking impression of the concepts of “Spaceship Earth”, “Blue marble” and other terms people have used to describe the Earth when seen from afar.
I got thinking of this partly because of the coverage of the moon landings, but also because I happen to be reading a book by the French philosopher, Pierre Hadot. The essay I read is about the “spiritual exercise” of the classical philosophers which involves using your imagination to make a trip up into the skies. There are two elements to this exercise. The first is referred to as the “view from on high”. Think of a time you’ve looked out over the landscape from the top of a high hill. You can see the rivers, the forests, the human habitations of individual houses, villages or towns. One of the things you get is a profound change of perspective. By seeing the greater whole, you see the contexts of the elements. You get an understanding of how there it a tree line, a level on the slopes of the mountains above which no trees grow. You can see the scale and the scope of the rivers, and maybe even see the traces of where the rivers used to run before they changed to their current paths.
Go a bit higher now and imagine one of those photos you’ve seen taken from orbiting satellites or the International Space Station and now you can see whole countries, even continents. You can see lakes which have dried up, jungles which are shrinking, deserts which are expanding.
Higher again, till you see the Earth in the distance. That beautiful, but impossibly small, “blue marble”. You see the swirls of cloud formations, the spirals of hurricanes, you see the oceans and the landmasses. You know your home is down there somewhere on the surface. You know the country of your birth is there, but unless it’s completely bounded by water, you can’t see the borders between it and any other country.
Now go higher again, and sweep out through the Solar System, off through the Milky Way, heading at the speed of thought, that speed which is not limited the way the speed of light is, and see our galaxy shrinking to a cluster of stars, a single galaxy amongst millions of others, some larger, some smaller, some about the same size as “ours”. This it the second element. The ancients called it “the cosmic voyage”. You begin to get a sense of the vastness of the universe, and of the smallness of our own little neighbourhood of planets revolving around a single star.
The Epicureans saw this as a liberation from the boundaries of terrestrial life, and a way of connecting to, and immersing yourself in, eternity and infinity. They described it as a “divine pleasure”.
The Stoics said that to find peace and serenity, you should contemplate Nature and everything you find in her; that you should explore the earth, the sea, the air and the sky “attentively”; that you should follow the Moon, the Sun and the Stars with your thought; that you should keep your feet on the ground but let your spirit soar high to discover the “universal laws” and the “powers of the universe”; and that, in so doing, you would become “citizens of the cosmos”.
How beautiful is this? How enchanting? How much more positive that Theresa May’s jibe that those who wanted to belong to more than one country were “citizens of nowhere”!
Plato said that aligning the movements of your spirit with the movements of the stars in the cosmos brought harmony and well-being. Whilst some would interpret that astrologically, I understand it as a call to realism. I see it as a counsel to live harmoniously with the natural laws, of both this planet, and of the cosmos.
Hadot stresses that this exercise can have a double effect. It can produce feelings of happiness and serenity by immersing yourself in Nature, and it can allow you to enjoy a certain distancing which lets you re-evaluate the life and judge things differently (not least by seeing them within their contexts)
Seneca said that when you see how tiny the Earth looks from Space you can see how human beings share the planet with sword and fire. He says you can see how “risible” the frontiers are, and how laughable the luxuries of the rich are.
Lucien applies this exercise in the context of time rather than space and recommends it to historians. He says that when historians take the “view from on high” they can observe with impartiality, courage and a positive regard towards everyone ie to opposing sides in conflicts. He recommends that these same values, impartiality, courage and a positive regard, also influence the way historians report “the facts”.
That reminded me of the historian, Rutger Bergman, who wrote “Utopia for Realists“. I heard him say that becoming a historian allowed him to see how nothing lasts, how great cities and civilisations come and go, and how so much in human life is an invention – money, laws, borders – and that made him optimistic because the historical perspective showed him all these things can be changed. One of his key themes in his book is the abolition of borders. He points out that passports became a common practice only after World War One, and that the only countries which had them before that were the Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
It also reminded me a book I recently purchased which describes the kings and emperors of France over the centuries. Each entry includes a map which shows the territory that king, or emperor, commanded. In the process, you see the emerging shape of the country we now call France. You can do that for any country really. We tend to forget that the modern nation states are an invention.
I love this exercise, and I think our more recent discoveries about the history of the universe, about the complexity of the cosmos, and of the complex adaptive nature of all living organisms, have revealed all the more that everything is connected and that everything changes, just as Marcus Aurelius wrote all those years ago.
I welcome constructive criticism and suggestions. I will not, however, tolerate abuse, rudeness or negativity, whether it is directed at me or other people. It has no place here. ANYONE making nasty comments will be banned.
Heroes Not Zombies 