Against Human Nature
by Norman Douglas
“Nature does not make leaps,” said Rafinesque. (Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz — 22 October 1783 – 18 September 1840) We are a part of nature and synonymous with it. There is no magic rod that came down 300,000 years ago and divided our essence from the material world that produced us.
“The importance of that proposition becomes clear only when it’s reversed: What’s true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. That thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious. Rafinesque said, “She lives her life not as men or birds, but as a world.”
— “La•hwi•ne•ski: Career of An Eccentric Naturalist” in Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
“A human being is part of the whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”
— Albert Einstein, 1954
“The tool for describing language is language. And you don’t have to have graduated from Logic 03 to understand that there’s a self-limiting program involved in something carrying out a complete description of itself. It’s a tautology. It can’t be done. Does that mean then that language can only be understood from the vantage of the unspeakable? I think so... the unspeakable is the ground of language."
— Terence McKenna, Esalen Lecture, 1989
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.."
— Strother Martin as the Captain in Cool Hand Luke, script by Don Pearce and Frank Pierson
the world turns, at constant play with its energic dowry. a ceaseless simultaneity of lightspeed initiative infuses the meaty illusion of separate bodies with active life given no directions from the imprecise afterthoughts we exalt as language and — per that divide and conqueror playing ego — ideas. the life raft of our myriad egoist objectives is the indifferent ocean. our barrelhouse guffaws spew the gift of perpetually hydroplaning microplants’ processed light back to us as oxygen, the air we suck. or is this derisive laughter? or the shriek of birth? before the tense present, a name is fixed to a twisting anthropomorphic leech, already ever ready to face the music of this ecstatic dance.
but maw and paw abide conventions. there are rules and strictures and neighbors and dangers that menace. there are limits to this infinite continuum and those boundaries are bounded by the delimitations of inscriptions mechanically reproduced at ten thousand strategic intervals all day. this scary curriculum derives from the meat fear invested in a language that lacks the unstinting ubiquity of indecipherable communications it cannot contain because they are unspeakable. this spooky course endeavors to demonstrate the safety of its prisons, the artifice of its jailers; everywhere, the sign of a semblance of a safe house screaming we are survivors surrounded by the senseless scent of all that is sinister and unsafe. thus, we surrender to a power proscribing all experience approaching energic reality and its swirling hosts of phyla. who would ask such a power for what it does not have? for it is our family that gives this force the weird illusion that it has dominion over all whilst we layer ourselves in a make believe innocence that has none of the strength of our truly humble and partnered ontology.
subscribers of survival suppose such submission subsumes what subverts. exhausted and entombed alive by a self-interest steeped in separation from its self, a sinking suspicion simmers up from a seemingly subcutaneous something. a jargon of garbled alarms alerts one to elephants in rooms, writings on walls, angels passing by when in fact, the hell of it all ripples out from the gutbrain within. that unanswered knock at the door is the diuretic call to unlearn the anesthetic non-sense each infant individual is enticed to swallow, supplanting a vast sensorium it knows precedes any paltry birth rite.
a spectacle of surfaces must eventually expose the pores that draw tight the threads enmeshed in every fabric. surveillance is not mastery accomplished through careful observation, it’s conditioned overwatching, a glut of seeing that sparks the observed to assert its active agency — objects express objections to the subject’s projected subjection. this common communicative partnership plays out the quixotic qualities of morphogenesis that quantum experience reveals. so much looking keeps on proving eyes are seeking without finding any actual ingredient that bestows on them a means to contain and keep what is real. impeded by words that encourage codes to unlock what is never secret, all that is unseen defies definition but not its omnipresence in the playful symphonics of interstellar folding and unfolding.
the popular mimicry bitching about how this convolution takes forever to reach a conclusion is both miscarriage and truth. but timelessness tries patience with disinterest. explanation merely elaborates the imprecision of language, grandparent of metrics. the spatial decimation of kilometers may be as rational as the lunacy embodied in the american foot, but the causes we induce to follow reason are no less imaginary than the deductive pursuit of lucid dreams.
to speak or write of oneness will neither foster nor affirm — nor create — the reality that permits such declarations to do more than scars do when thrust at hogs.opposition and agreement are of a piece; component complements as superfluous as the positive and negative valence of molecular choreographers. pointed indicators like crest and trough obscure the flux of perpetuity nothing finite represents. polarity is a primitive stick figure scribbled past the red margins on a page in a public schoolboy’s primer, a moot misrepresentation of a perfectly impertinent plurality freed from the poverty of possession.
poeisis is the exhaustive becoming that can only pretend to be at rest, a meaningless report compiled after all that never meant for boundless will to ossify in emphatic judgment. even now, we stand in awe, nearly dumbstruck by the synchronous tide of life that persists in burgeoning everywhere, turning the revolutionary force of tireless transformation into a distinctly vain human search for a hope that nothing outside the ego ever needed. our faith in the logic of received ideas confronts our suspect intuition that their mimetic gravity holds a logic that bears no substance greater than the mute fact of their receipt. while there are no detailed maps of a cosmos where no map is clearly ordered, the language-born fear of boundary dissolution chooses to forget that the infant’s attraction to a mother’s breast is the practiced experience of a familiar process absent any fixed picture of the milk it doesn’t see. the science that names the liquid consumed as nutritive is nothing but proof of how language separates things from the natural symbiosis that ripples organically as an interdependent sentience that welcomes flesh as much as bacteria. defined boundaries strengthen separatist behaviors that constrict the self via control mechanisms reinforcing a culture of pathetic dominance and illusory loss.
nature self-organizes without purpose. “the fittest” entities endure grace of indispensable qualities; their cooperation doesn't connote any individual will to perfection. representations of perfection conceive an imperfect present towards a future imagined as a sublime solution never beheld (nor beholden). referencing an unknown future time-space as ideal is a majestic act of faith we might more naturally apply to our immediate surroundings. predetermined ends propose a finite obfuscation of infinity. if humans would participate as humans in the eternal evolution of the universe, then human efforts need redirecting toward awareness of what is indispensable.
with language as the framework of the world as we speak it, let us sideline linguistic value systems that employ notions of expenditure, of sacrificing what is determined expendable (as if this evaluation doesn’t assign the self to such a fate). suspicious of causing our own extinction, why fret about extinguishing that which cradles us? if there are things we fear imperiled by us, then we are imperiled by us. our experience is abundant with fluid lessons that unfold from our ecology (the language of nature), our living and indispensable home.
Author Statement/Bio: Once, a student asked what we do when making art for ourselves. My partner and I paused to look at each other before replying as one: “We don’t make art for ourselves.” How, then, does one sow seeds for a common creative practice? I set up a table topped with a manual typewriter in public. I post signs that read: poems any topic pay what you will People laugh. They point. They give unsolicited advice. And they ask for poems. I write for all comers. Most want love poems — for family, friends, lovers, nature, births, deaths, reunions, loss, gift, memory, fantasy, mystery. Very few want poems about work or politics or money or morality. I get coins, dollars, venmo, paypal. And I get poems. People apologize for not giving me more, though they’ve given a poem. They’ve helped us find a moment of common empathy. Total strangers, we recognize a spark of shared life; like making friends, finding companions. Indeed, I’ve gained new comrades as well as new poems. Most are just people — not artists — although each enjoys, in different ways, the creative energy that feeds us all. This isn’t transcendence. This is unitary.