Here we face heart’s electromagnetic fields (and field’s electromagnetic hearts) imagined as Venusian forests into whom patterns dissolve and recombine… patterns we might call temenos, umwelt, mitwelt, memory, dismemberment, topocosm, mandala, selves, knot, wound, or even Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term, cathectible divinity field (energies who move and thus change boundaries, which are those of soul, our ability at any given moment to exist with marvelous as affinity, correspondence, coherence).
Plants discuss ripples like stones passing through water, drifting throughout ecosystems, of course, they have been speaking with us for a long time.
In ancient Greek physiology, heart was organ of sensation, they were also imagination’s hearth, as felt in their fractal pulse. Heart received and transmitted sensory impressions, neither sensing world, nor imagining world, were divided in aesthetic responses of heart.
We might say then, to sense penetratingly, we must imagine, and to imagine accurately, we must sense.
A living sense of world requires a corresponding living organ of soul (both ensouled and ensoiled) by means of whom living world can be perceived.
Heart is not just a physical pump or personal chamber of feelings. We need avoid, where we can, physiological literalism.
Heart is reciprocity, co-making, ecological, metaphorical, psychological.
Aphrodite was enthroned as reality principle in Sappho’s work (as well as Plotinus, Simone Weil, Charles Fourier, Marsilio Ficino, and many others), held to be planetary figure of world soul.
In such an perspectives ethics we feel Aphrodite as allure of each subject, she who calls forth, a poetic vision of cosmos who fulfils soul’s need for placing their selves amidst vast galvanic weave.
James Hillman says that to move with heart toward world shifts a field, such as psychotherapy, from identifying fully as a science to also imagining under and overlying aesthetic activity, lingering on what, where, who, and which, not so much why, how come, or what for...
A certain Neoplatonic understanding of beauty is manifestation, display
of phenomena, appearance of anima mundi. Aesthesis (breathing in and with world, with world-selves as much as self-worlds, interiority not solely mixed with human subjective experience, radiating along and through heartwaves and sensate imaginations, not solely physical nature or emotional capacity, but imagining heart, speaking and listening through slow amateur reactions) is a way we come to know world, Aphrodite’s lure of beings and symbols, as they appear to and with sensuous imaginations.
This requires a multi-scalar sensibility, plenum of their sounds, smells, shapes, a speaking to and through heart’s reactions responding to tones and gestures of beings we move with as we consider how our understanding of subjectivism has been influenced by objectivism’s presence, as agonists and antagonists, parts separate and static in listless seemingly irreconcilable relation.
An aesthetic response to particulars akin to radical, wormlike, slowness.
In Henry David Thoreau’s Journals, Thoreau often writes about a desire to distance his senses from ideation, association, and disposition, adopting a immanent continuum of transmission and reception.
Thoreau held a need to perceive these very transformations, detached from forms. In one entry he writes of wishing to see earth translated, green passing into blue... of walking more with free senses... often held by attention’s habits to such excess that his senses get no rest, suffering from constant strain.
Be not preoccupied with looking, he writes, go not to being, let them come to you. What I need is not to look at all, but a true sauntering of eye.
Thoreau practiced a listening akin to walking, traversed by those he claims are intrinsic to sound, trying to undo his habits of recognising sounds whom his listening has contrived.
If noone else I feel this to be a curious exercise in going visiting, going within and diffracting habit, unsettling those who have lodged themselves in our sensibilities to the point that we don’t hear them when we’re listening.
Thoreau’s attempts to open up senses (he would say free them) of a demand to recognise world as someone instantly and always known and classifiable, from recognising’s constant strain... this practise, of not saying who beings are, but that they are, found a home in plant’s world, where Thoreau said that if you are to make acquaintance with ferns you must forget their botany, attend to moss who grows over nature’s triangles.
Thinking with moss who grows over nature’s triangles leads us to lichens, who have been a ‘model’ for symbiosis for over 100 years now, a partnership of both a photosynthetic algae and fungi, and yet, it’s been found that there is actually a third presence, a triangle, if you like, embedded within lichen’s cortex, wherein we encounter yeast.
Lichen produces basidiomycete yeast, who repels microbes and other predators, and this rings with a certain Goethian pitch in an Aphroditic greening of world, and yeasts, as third symbiotic partner, comprise a whole lineage hitherto ‘overlooked’...
This overlooked notion (overlooked by whom..) is so often a symptom of separation, and if we turn to Robin Wall Kimmerer, we hear intimations of otherwise.
Kimmerer says that for millennia lichens have held a responsibility of building up life and in an eyeblink of Earth’s history we have set about undermining their work to usher in a time of great environmental stress, a barrenness of our own making. Thinking of Umbilicaria, a lichen highly sensitive to air pollution, she predicts that lichens will endure, and that we could too, if we listen to them.
Umbilicaria will cover our time’s rocky ruins long after our delusions of separateness have relegated us to fossil records, she says, a ruffled green skin adorning power’s crumbling halls. Umbilicaria is also known as stone’s ear. So we imagine them listening... to wind, thrush, thunder, or as Kimmerer says, to our wildly growing hunger.
Plant’s speech is concomitant to amateur perspective and delicate empiricism, a term coined in relation to Goethe’s botanical experiences, but one that reaches as far, and further back, than humans, back to humus, and back and back and back.
I’m sure they’re a term most of us have encountered prior to any encounter, as implicate action, a way of living as a way of being, a flicker. Said term was introduced to me whilst studying with Shelley Sacks, who led me to Goethean scientists Henri Bortoft and Arthur Zajonc, in essence, science who becomes alike subject, like seeking like, perhaps we might say science capable of entraining, science as seance. This is my rendering of course, as Bortoft writes of a science whom makes themselves utterly identical with subject. Another way we can feel our way amongst such lingual vines and roots is with Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, who writes of interweaving with green, with alder, a tree who themselves seeks to balance nitrogen contents in soil, strengthening river’s skeleton.
A quick word regarding separation in relation to certain fields with whom I have been shown home.
Of course seperation’s ‘idea’ permeates scientific thinking and medicine, but this ‘idea’, that (for example) a person giving medicine is separate from a person taking medicine, seems to me utterly erroneous. Think of information stored in our energy bodies as bio-fields, fields shared by all life, and correspondences, pitches, the ways they perceive us, and we them, and we perceive ourselves, and they themselves.
This gulch is akin to holding a mirror up to a mirror.
In a classical, mechanistic paradigm, if you go small enough you can predetermine who will happen to whole person, everyone being made up of solid ‘objects’, separate from one another. Our bodies, solid, and separate, firmly boundaried.
Whilst I don’t want to deny this as part of reality, such a part is among, they are not all, there is much more. Treatment, participation, is dynamic exchange wherein there is no such ‘thing’ as a a staunchly objective reality, we’re part of everyone, we can go forward and backward in time.
Amateur perspectives do not so much seek principles and laws but possibilities and probabilities, likelihoods… In this light, agency is not a quality who someone necessarily ‘has’, to varying degrees, not a property of persons or ‘things’, but an enactment, a matter of possibility and accountability, a roving relation. As Báyò Akómaláfé says, we cannot continue to claim that world is a corpse graciously animated by our presence.
To work against this is to work against our selves.
A ‘Goethean scientist’ does not lose themselves in nature as much as they realise nature within themselves as themselves within nature, in fully conscious experience. Rather than a dimming of consciousness, which such absorption could imply, a delicate empiricist is utterly awake (especially when asleep). Conscious participation means just that, a synergistic condition in which humanity and nature co-create together, each becoming more fully themselves in relation, through mutual enhancement and coherence.
It’s fitting that there is no single way to define such a fluid experience as delicate (tender, gentle, sensitive, devoted…) empiricism, and Arthur Zajonc I feel, has a much more grounded (though I find Bortoft’s comprehension just as helpful) articulation of delicate empiricism, which he relates to efforts to understand a ‘person’s’ meaning through prolonged empathetic looking and seeking grounded in direct experience.
A note on ‘person’ here (whom I have written about elsewhere and will eventually publish here, particularly in relation to the work of Eduardo de Castro), as I feel this term to be implicated with living in a universe composed of a wider universe of beings, thus requiring an extension of personhood beyond human.
In other words, humans are not the only persons.
Personhood is very slippery.
Zajonc quotes Goethe in saying (and here I’ll paraphrase these mud puddles) natural subjects should be sought and investigated not to suit observers, but as they are respectfully, as if they were divine beings, and Goethe wrote extensively of methods and recording apparatus of conventional science separating student from study. How difficult it is, he says, to keep the ‘object’ alive before us instead of killing ‘it’.
I’m not saying swapping out object for subject is really any better, but there is still a wonderful irony at work here, each phenomenon in nature, ‘rightly’ observed, wakens in us a new organ of understanding, one so lovingly emphasised in the work of Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, who writes of depth as speed of light, being able, slowly, over time, to move into coherence with bio-photons of plants, generating feeling in response.
As plant collapses their boundaries, person widen theirs. Person collapses, plant widens. This for me is akin to the Goethean conception of becoming more at home with phenomenon, understanding them with greater concern, and respect, with increased slowness. Where rate of perception slows down, says Mei Mei, because of their complexity.
Plant and person widening?
I’m not trying to pinion Mei Mei’s work onto a Goethean fold (I’ve also toyed with the notion of how deeply Hermetic her work is), I’m simply enamoured with parallels, wherein, as Goethe wrote, there may be a difference, between seeing and seeing.
It’s not as if such rate of perception is ‘actually’ Goethean, such a practise, of talking with plants, listening with them, is ancient as light.
We are lucky in this regard, to be surrounded. If we look at geneticist Barbara McClintlock’s life, she says we must develop a feeling for organism, predicated, poised on a threshold of intermediate distance and intimacy, a love relationship who does not annihilate difference, listening instead, for propinquitous veins with whom knowledge inosculates in order to make someone personable. Not seeking to control, but enter, and go about.
We are offspring of plants, just as they are offspring of humans. We are all people, there is no property here. Ambrosia once (and still) means giver of life, and now, certain plants in the ‘genus’ ambrosia, notably ragweed, are categorised as ‘invasive’. How does this correlate? Categorisation has much to teach us about ourselves. If we categorise plants as invasive, what are we saying, what are we being told, about ourselves?