EVERYTHING SPEAKS: MEDITATIONS ON THE ANIMISM OF LANGUAGE

David Abram and Robin Wall Kimmerer write of the tremendous power of language to shape perception and, therefore, our relationships and our reality. This has been a theme throughout our program and is something widely agreed upon. We similarly agree that we want to live in a more broadly sensitive and meaningfully connected world (not just with other humans via Twitter or Zoom.) From there, we talk with force about our pressing concerns related to climate, extinction, and justice and in doing so invoke systems thinking, multiple perspectives, modern and ancient Indigenous knowledges, as well as the latest quantitative analysis. All great. We talk about how profoundly alike and morticed into this seamless, undulating, multidimensional tessellation we call Being we all are; and how the holonic systems therein are integrated, interdependent, and sacred. We also note how such systems tend to be fragile or merely prone to perturbation in ways known and unknown. Great. However, even as we talk in this way, I feel we actively undermine it all. With our syntactic spells, that world-altering magic that is language, we almost maximally segregate and decontextualize (and then, naturally, we complain about the proliferation of evermore deeply felt disconnection.) Seeing this has been a threshold experience resulting in a shift in my perception – and describing it has caused limitless consternation in others.

Previously, I’ve referred to this schismatic habit as our linguistic lingchi: the thousand semantic and semiotic cuts I perceive us performing daily to reinforce not merely our separation but our substantive distance from One-Another (sometimes called Nature or Being). We do it subtly and in ways more overt. We are not careful with our language or with how we frame (or dislodge or smash) bits of our whole-world mosaic; and, worse still, I don’t feel we ever repair or replace the damage that’s done. And this must have serious repercussions, especially when even the most sensitive and skilled among us do this all while suggesting they are attempting a careful reconciliation.

A set of examples closest at hand is David Abram, in his book The Spell of the Sensuous. In his preface, Abram sets out main two goals: to (a) give us a conceptual toolkit for making sense of “our current estrangement from the animate earth” and to (b) “provoke some new thinking … in response to the rapid deterioration of wild nature, the steady vanishing of other species, and the consequent flattening of our human relationships” (2017, p. X). All this feels like standard fare within Environmental discourses; yet, for me, deep fissures form and steadily widen even here, despite Abram and I being just about as alike and similarly oriented as two beings could be. Perhaps more troublingly, I’m not exactly sure where we disagree.

Because I wholeheartedly agree with Abram’s insistence that we cannot become the shaman, borrow their method, or even honestly take their medicine without all the layers of genuinely embedded context, I would throw this back at him. Doing so, I would also offer that language doesn’t merely have the power to psychologically detach us from Nature, as he argues, but can remove us from ourselves and our own stories – which also belong to Nature. For instance, what does he mean by “rapid deterioration of wild nature”? Each idea within this statement confounds. Though it seems unlikely, Abram and I appear to disagree on Nature’s nature. (Otherwise, how could he compose this sentence?) That’s a significant conceptual gulf. To my mind, either we include all collective phenomena, known and otherwise, into our definition of Nature, or something nearly as broad, or we break this wholeness into countless fragments and struggle, forever failing, to keep those bits separate and organized. Still, if we somehow converge on a common meaning, adding the term “wild” is no manner of bridge-building. What is “wild”? We know all organisms have myriad relationships and many of those are radical or even darn cruel exploitations. Just in the ant queendom alone, for example, we could talk about aphid and fungus domestication – neither of which are meaningfully different from human forms (see Branstetter et al., 2017; Oliver et al., 2007). These fields of fungi won’t grow without the controlled setting and exhaustive labour provided by their tiny specialized farmers. Would Abram label this fungus wild? (And was it the ants that domesticated the fungi or was it the other way around?) I don’t know; however, if we arrive at conciliatory definitions of both “wild” and “nature”, and then their radical combination, I would still be stuck trying to make sense of “rapid deterioration” (and how this idea synthesizes as it harmonizes.) Abram and I surely agree that, from volcanoes and meteors to ice ages and more, the order of things is the regular and swift ruination of habitats and entire ecosystems – often orders of magnitude more rapid, comprehensive, and unrelenting than anything humans have done or are ever likely to do. As a result, I don’t see how or why Abram would use this phrase. Still, if we can make sense of all these parts on their own, what do we think Abram intends with their assemblage: “rapid deterioration of wild nature”? I presume he means activities such as the human alteration of forests; yet we know the deepest Amazonian “wilderness” or most “pristine” Australian rainforests and grasslands have been highly modified by humans (clearing and continually burning areas as large as 60,000 hectares) and probably for as long as we’ve been present – so much so in fact that we might think of these environments as anthropogenic (see Maezumi et al., 2018; Fletcher, Hall, & Alexandra, 2020). But maybe Abram is instead talking about something far more recent and invasive like the wholesale paving over of swathes of land, as seen in the previous century. Well, just the last glacial period alone seems to ruin this concern. There seems to be agreement that nearly everything in Canada starved, froze to death, was buried under a sheet of ice up to three kilometres thick, and then slowly ground into dust eon after eon after eon (see Wisconsin glaciation, 2020). Do we disagree about this context? If not, how is it incorporated into his set of motivations and prescriptions?

“Steady vanishing of other species” feels no less detached from my reality. Further, it feels like a doubling down. Yet, of course, continual calamities brought by Mother Nature have resulted in the extermination of every species she has birthed, which will continue in an endless deluge of localized genocides and global extinctions. I don’t believe we could possibly disagree here, either. So then what work is being done by segregating Earth from Nature, animals from Earth, humans from animals, and then assessing this one species’ record (but not by comparison to anything else)? Yes, we could go still further by differentiating modern from ancient humans or distinguish one tribe from the next. Doing so strikes me more as confusion, shattering, all while ensuring oblivion than avoidance or mitigation of these. Ours is a large omnivorous species with a significant footprint even at our most naked, timid, and frugal. And all our movements across time have always been felt throughout the web of life. Would Abram not agree that the fossil record tracts significant extinctions (the steady vanishing of other species) following our ancestors’ departure from the Horn of Africa to every continent and region around the globe, beginning a hundred millennia before civilization or literacy (see Chen et al., 2019; Malhi et al., 2016; Van Der Kaars et al., 2017)? Surely not. And would he disagree that, past or present, human perturbations are effectively identical to those set off by goats and ants and algae (volcanoes or meteors) – all of whom self(ish/less)ly and fundamentally transform the world-system? Would he disagree that it’s only through an exceptionally low-resolution black-and-white snapshot that anything like harmony can be framed? How could he? But how then do we talk in terms of systems and wholes while disregarding so very much of this critical context? And how does this language help get us to the heart of things?

The other features he describes are no less perplexing and disorienting. I don’t know what “our current estrangement” or the “flattening of our human relationships” mean. We can extract cute anecdotes and tell ourselves that this is the whole story or the true wisdom to be found but doing so only feels like more detachment. There are myriad examples known, and doubtless many more unknown, of small clans or entire vast civilizations whose infusion with the living, breathing, speaking Earth enabled them to effectively destroy their entire universe (the fullness or their culture and even the sumptuous biome that birthed and sustained them.) Popular, though always contested, theories for civilizational collapse tend to settle around one or a combination of overpopulation, overhunting, degradation of arable land, introduction of non-native species, and/or rapid deforestation resulting in localized anthropogenic climate change. So, far from exotic, this is closer to a typical human story and is certainly not limited to: the Ancestral Puebloans, Cahokia, or Classic Lowland Maya; the Easter, Pitcairn, and Henderson Islanders; the Fertile Crescent societies or those in the Harappan Indus Valley or Great Zimbabwe; Mycenaean Greece, the Western Roman Empire, Greenland Norse, or Khmer Empire (see Diamond, 2011). As such, where others see something modern or Western (maybe one by-product of literacy or communication technology, capitalism or the Enlightenment … or René Descartes) I see the standard operating procedure of our species – and probably countless other species (see Kurzgesagt, 2019). Moreover, I would argue that our ancestors sacrificing every animal they could find, and/or all their many captives and slaves, and/or an entire generation of their own youngest children (not swiftly and painlessly but most horrendously, to maximize their pain and tears and to milk them of their blood, as was so often the custom) with the aim of appeasing a temperamental spirit-daemon and winning a single bountiful harvest is not somehow less estranged from the beauty and succor of the animate Earth than ones twenty-first century child thinking her vegetables come from the supermarket. I’m sorry, no. And, relatedly, the decline of violence (from animal cruelty to bullying, domestic violence, corporal punishment, war, and more) and what appears to be a broadening capacity for empathy in recent centuries does not feel like the simultaneous flattening of human relationships either (see Pinker, 2012; Singer, 2015). None of the above is to suggest David Abram's work isn't inspiring, well-informed or well-intentioned, or that it isn't worth reading; instead, I feel there is a serious disjuncture between what Abram intends and the work his words, so alive as they are, do.

(This is why I asked him during his recent talk about common misconceptions of his work. His response was as he has written and shared in past interviews: that folks mistakenly believe he’s being divisive. I don’t think it is possible that people are so confused. I believe he is intending to be cohesive and healing, but his words have a different nature.)

Troublingly, we don’t just do this fracturing subtly or as an almost unavoidable consequence of our less than perfect language. In our final reading for our course, a selection from Braiding Sweetgrass, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) writes, “Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking. That’s hard for scientists, so fully brainwashed by Cartesian dualism, to grasp” (p. 123). Sentences like this are ubiquitous throughout Environmental discourses. Yet no part of this quote makes sense to me. We know Dr. Kimmerer cares deeply about language. We also know she has not thoughtlessly blurted these words, maybe while at a party and after three drinks, but has instead put them to the page. More than that, we know she crafted them with the help of an editor and then shared them as widely as she was able. We can be sure, then, that it was with great care she avoided writing “scientists of yore” or “most scientists” or a more vague and generous “some scientists.” Instead, Dr. Kimmerer wrote (into what has become a wildly popular bestseller) “scientists”. That alone is interesting; but what does it transmute into when we note that Dr. Kimmerer is herself a scientist – and more of one than almost any in history? (I would argue she has a better and broader science education, practical science training, and science teaching practice than Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein combined!) And yet this uber-scientist has herself broken what she deems an impossibly wicked Cartesian spell. She also reports no difficulty at all grasping the spirit-matter simultaneity of the garden, its gardener, or the syncretic act of gardening. So then, what, does Kimmerer not care about language? Is she not a scientist? Is her aim not to harmonize but instead to undermine? What is Dr. Kimmerer up to? How are we to read all of this?

If we resolve the above paradox, we still have another in the same sentence she offers us. What is to be made of this notion of Cartesian brainwashing? A cursory glance at just the Wikipedia page for René Descartes yields a well-known quote that suggests the man himself saw the common commingling and fusion of matter and spirit. (And that’s without noticing he wrote about little more than God, souls, and the sacredness of everything – and only really became animate after a religious pilgrimage inspired by three supernatural visions from an angel about the divine synthesis of all wisdom…) He wrote in his Meditations on First Philosophy: in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated that, “...nature also teaches me that I am present in my body not merely in the way a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am most tightly joined and, so to speak, commingled with it, so much so that I and the body constitute one single thing” (Ariew, 2000, p. 136). So, in accordance with Catholic law and his sensorial correspondence with nature, Descartes saw humans as the unification of spirit and matter. Not only does this comport with most modern and archaic beliefs in souls but sounds as inoffensive as a description of the sea or salt or water (at minimum, a synthesis of distinct yet happily collaborative holons; in the case of water: hydrogen and oxygen). If so, then where does this cold mathematician perform his most unique and unreasonable amputation, the one being called out centuries after his death as a world denying or universe destroying force? I do not know and it is not explained.

All this said, let’s go farther than Dr. Kimmerer. Let’s say that science has not merely bamboozled scientists but has been the most bitter and divisive of all human endeavors. Then let’s agree that scientists have been and remain the most closed off, the least sensitive and sensorial and sensual. Worse still, let’s insist that all of them, alive and dead, have been deeply misogynistic, Eurocentric, and even white supremacist. And, just for good measure, let’s pack every other idea and trait we despise in there as well. (Science is commonly spoken of as being synonymous with or enabling of the worst elements of Western culture, capitalism, modernity, imperialism, and more...) Right. So where has all of this horror landed us? Well, the old story I grew up with was that my greatest-great-grandmother was African; and not just me, but every person I know and every person I’ve seen and every person there has ever been belongs to one big human family with her as our common ancestor. And I was told that we know this because of a deep animism in which the living earth and the living rocks and the living bones speak together with one consilient voice to tell us so. Deeper still, and more recent, this story has been enhanced by another ancestor tale. And it is not one found locked away in a dusty library or being whispered in the halls of a monastery or buried in some ancient tomb; instead, it’s the most intensely personal story: one that we all carry around in our own hair and flesh and blood. And, most beautifully, our elders tell us it comes in the form of a paired, four-letter-based helical poem not less than three billion lines long. (And that every one of the countless copies of this epic poem that you hold in the hearts of every one of the tiniest bits of you is written in a sacred alphabet composed by the stars in the night sky in the time beyond time.) Further, to read this epic poem is to learn not just that we’re one big human family but that all life we know of has just such a familial relationship: that much of what I want to call “me” is identical to that of things as seemingly different as a humpback whale and a daffodil.

What’s important here is not just that this story I’ve been told is a good story or merely the greatest ever told – one of layer upon layer of fundamental, boundary dissolving connection that every one of us can see, feel, understand, and confirm – but that it may stand the test of time as the most beautiful and meaningful story of connection that can be told.

In this light, what does it mean when a scientist, and a biologist of all people, asserts that science is a form of blindness preventing us from comprehending real beauty and interconnectivity? And what does it mean when we simultaneously claim (or infer through our word choice) that science is so categorically different and so egregiously blinded and blinding as to be corrupt, while in the next sentence call upon every branch of science to argue in support of, say, climate action? I don’t know but this feels like what we’re up to. To me, we insist upon humans’ mysterious and manifold differences and egregious estrangement, from one another and the wider world, while claiming we need and are actively seeking harmonious connection and ultimate unification. As such I don’t believe we are offering a holistic and kincentric view that corrects our forgetfulness; instead, it feels like the opposite. This is the threshold I’ve crossed. And then I’m left asking if – without adding or outlawing words or despoiling or decontextualizing – we could take seriously our magic, recognize all its dimensionality and see it as alive and doing real work and, then knowingly, language all of this another way? I very much hope we can.

REFERENCES

Abram, D (2017). The Spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. Vintage.

Ariew, R. (2000). Descartes: Philosophical essays and correspondence. Hackett Publishing.

Branstetter, M. G., Ješovnik, A., Sosa-Calvo, J., Lloyd, M. W., Faircloth, B. C., Brady, S. G., & Schultz, T. R. (2017). Dry habitats were crucibles of domestication in the evolution of agriculture in ants. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 284 (1852), 20170095.

Chen, L., Qiu, Q., Jiang, Y., Wang, K., Lin, Z., Li, Z., ... & Su, W. (2019). Large-scale ruminant genome sequencing provides insights into their evolution and distinct traits. Science, 364 (6446).

Diamond, J. (2011). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. Penguin.

Fletcher, M. S., Hall, T., & Alexandra, A. N. (2020). The loss of an indigenous constructed landscape following British invasion of Australia: An insight into the deep human imprint on the Australian landscape. Ambio.

Kurzgesagt. (2019, September 29.) The billion ant mega colony and the biggest war on earth [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqECNYmM23A

Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants, Milkweed Editions http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/royalroads-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1212658.

Maezumi, S. Y., Alves, D., Robinson, M., de Souza, J. G., Levis, C., Barnett, R. L., ... & Iriarte, J. (2018). The legacy of 4,500 years of polyculture agroforestry in the eastern Amazon. Nature plants, 4 (8), 540-547.

Malhi, Y., Doughty, C. E., Galetti, M., Smith, F. A., Svenning, J. C., & Terborgh, J. W. (2016). Megafauna and ecosystem function from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113 (4), 838-846.

Oliver, T. H., Mashanova, A., Leather, S. R., Cook, J. M., & Jansen, V. A. (2007). Ant semiochemicals limit apterous aphid dispersal. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 274 (1629), 3127-3131.

Pinker, S. (2012). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Penguin Group USA.

Singer, P. (2015). The most good you can do: How effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically. Text Publishing.

Van Der Kaars, S., Miller, G. H., Turney, C. S., Cook, E. J., Nürnberg, D., Schönfeld, J., ... & Lehman, S. J. (2017). Humans rather than climate the primary cause of Pleistocene megafaunal extinction in Australia. Nature Communications, 8 (1), 1-7.

Wisconsin glaciation. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wisconsin_glaciation&oldid=950497082