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                STRAY THOUGHTS ON NATURE

Truth’s not behind me yet.  Rimbaud wrote his Bateau Ivre at the age of seventeen.  At a similar age, high on life’s mysteries, I was sitting with a girl one night on a beach near one of Southsea’s two large entertainment piers.  With the lights of the dance hall, a Glen Miller music twinkling on the water, the darkness of the wave-withdrawals scenting the music with a clean, algal odour, this was a moment of synaesthesia such as you get only when you sit out a dance with a girl as poetically in love with life as you are with yourself.  I said to her, our young bodies close—it was so long ago—something like, ‘Isn’t it strange that the meaning of this comes to us only after we’re dead?’

I’m now stricter about meaning of things and do not believe in posthumous exposés.  Who wouldn’t like to see the truth, the nature of things, face to face, not reflected darkly like lights at sea?  Since I am not jumpy with hope, like St Paul, I expect never to.  I make poems out of blurs.  Between the blurs and what’s really going on is a no-man’s-land.

In talking of meaning and intention I am exposing two gulfs.  One is between origin and achievement, as I surmise these.  The other is the gap that separates a poem and whatever unknowable facets of the Thing-in-itself the writing might try to intuit.

I’ve written elsewhere that first-person writing is a mythologising account of someone not quite the same as oneself.  Poeticising the past is like inventing a character from remembered scraps.  No one tells everything.

It would muddy the waters to say more on this subject.  Perhaps the autobiography in these essays, poems and notes splits into memory-stories (in the prose) and mythologised biography (in the poems).  But I won’t labour the distinction.

Does poetry, with its conscripted phrases, its patterns, its juggled themes, take us into an extended-real¹, beyond the edge of the perceivable?  I think poetry and exegesis do take us nearer, though not face to face with, what is, and if ‘what is’ is the truth, we’ll edge closer to that.  Whether or not this assertion convinces, only the poems and comments can tell².

Amateurs, like voters, might be muddled, but we’re here and we have our opinions.  To me Truth and God and Nature are the same.  I’ve conceded at times that I have metaphysical moments.  I’ve said that, in the history of poetry, metaphysical usually means ‘philosophical’.  That’s only half-true.  Some poetry, mine included, still pursues an interest in metaphysics proper.  This is an area which, since Kant’s claim, which I accept, of the unknowability of the Noumenon (the Thing-in-itself), mainstream philosophy has largely abandoned.  However, scientists do airy metaphysics as well as down-to-earth physics, in their quest for GUTs, grand unified theories, and TOEs, theories of everything.  They are our neo-metaphysicians, searching for an alchemical touchstone.

The term most appropriate to my creed is pantheism.  This is the belief that God is not separate from but totally identified with the world, that he doesn’t possess personality or transcendence. God and Nature (as The All) are the same.  In the Hindu Vedic tradition everything arises from the unity of The All, and the perception of multiplicity in Nature is illusory.  I’m not so sure that unity and multiplicity, the One and the Many, can’t ultimately coexist, but one might need a Zen approach to get there.  And I don’t believe in the Vedic doctrine that when subject and object are equated, all distinctions are eliminated and we know Brahman, the fundamental principle of the universe³.  I’ve never been able to make sense of a mystical unity of subject and object.  I’m sure it doesn’t mean that when I look at a refrigerator, somehow entranced, I suddenly intuit the nature of the subatomic world of which the fridge is made, with its pipes and contents, its frozen peas, cans of beer, chicken dish, milk and tomatoes.  To those that use the jargon of subject-and-object unity, it must mean that I as subject die to self, whereupon ‘I’ no longer ‘perceive’ anything.  And there’s no longer anything ‘outside me’, no object, whether refrigerator or stars.  Now, whatever sort of pantheist I am, this is a mental state I cannot in truth induce.  It might be what mystics feel, and it’s supposed to be good for them⁴.

Because it crops up within the notes, I must mention Hermetic literature.  This is a set of writings in Greek and Latin (c. 50 AD–c.300 AD) ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos.  These works concern divine revelation and the redemption of humanity through knowledge of God.  I doubt if they would appeal to me, but who knows?  They are said to reflect ancient Egyptian wisdom and occultism.  Some later pantheists chipped away in these mines.

In the West, the levels of being (emanations) in Neoplatonism⁵ tended toward pantheism.  In Christian thought a form of pantheism is found in the thought of the medieval scholastic John Scotus Erigena, who viewed the universe as a single, all-inclusive system with various simultaneous stages.  He lived c.810–877, an Irish scholastic philosopher and theologian, claiming that God creates all things from himself, and that all things return to the ‘fulfilment’ of God, whatever that means.

Then there is Giordano Bruno, b. 1548, relied on diverse sources, including John Scotus Erigena and the Hermetic literature.  In his On Shadows of Ideas, he pictured Nature in all its multiplicity descending from divine unity to matter.  His insistence on divine immanence, linked with a doctrine of panpsychism (the belief that consciousness pervades the natural world), anticipated Baruch Spinoza.  Bruno rejected the geocentric and anthropocentric universe, believing that the Earth and human individuals are ultimately accidents of a single living world-substance.

Baruch Spinoza, b. 1632, was one of the most important philosophers of the European tradition of Rationalism. The most important modern version of pantheism is his, too, though he is often not my sort of pantheist. I am with him in seeing Nature as infinite, and identical with ‘God’.  I understand that in the 18th and 19th centuries, various forms of idealism⁶ also tended toward pantheism.

Spinoza’s work on ethics aimed to lay out a programme for ‘the perfection of human nature’.  He defines God as the only true cause and the unique substance.  This means that although ideas and bodies appear to be separate in human experience, they are in fact only aspects of the one Divine Substance.  This last part is just what I do not believe.  Animal mind-body is one thing, but keep God out of it.  To me ethical ideas like love, duty, justice, are our own and not Nature’s.  There are two things I think we can say about the All: it exists objectively, independent of perceivers, and gives rise to the content of our experience; not being an animate body, it cannot think.

In the light of quantum uncertainty, I also reject Spinoza’s determinism, as well as his echoes of Descartes’ dualism of mind and body and his notion of the ‘infinite intellect of God’.  I believe in an interdependence of mind and body—Spinoza doesn’t.  However, I do like his idea that we are the slaves of passion, and that by understanding our passions we overcome our bondage to them.

His beliefs that human liberation is achieved by transforming our bodily affections into ‘the intellectual love of God’, and that we can intuit a oneness with God, conferring upon ourselves a kind of immortality, are meaningless to me.

Baal Shem Tov (b. 1700) was the founder of the 18th-century Eastern European Jewish sect of Hasidism, and he stressed religious joy and enthusiasm.  Song and dance, prayer, humility and ecstatic communion with God were the ways to unlock spiritual powers.  His teaching, drawn from the Kabbalah, emphasised the elements of adherence to God through a recognition of the divine immanence in Nature.  Attainment of this adherence demanded the total concentrated devotion to God on the part of the aspirant.

I admit, although I would indeed like to experience a joyful communion with Nature, I have never had the pleasure of anything remotely like it.  If I had such a feeling, I would put it down to a chemical state of mind.  For total release from illusion, what’s wrong with death?

Needless to say, I don’t believe in any kind of transcendence, i.e. that God (Nature) is extrinsic to creation.  That Nature is outside Nature is a self-contradiction.  But it is odd it is there.  So rule nothing out.

I find it easy to imagine, since there is something instead of nothing, that this something, Nature, must follow its own rule book.  I know what we can imagine is a poor guide.  But as I can’t see how things could behave in any at all without intrinsic laws, I rather pathetically trust that natural laws exist, even if some of them imply unpredictability.  Science seems to say that there’s no such thing as nothing, so I see no reason to believe that in essence the discredited Fred Hoyle was right after all, except that it is not stars that are continually popping up, but universes.  The Laws of Nature might be different in different universes, but across the unimaginable infinite-without-magnitude and in the eternal-without-duration which is ultimate Nature, I rather hope that meta-rules of ultimate Nature govern how sets of laws can vary in different universes.  This isn’t to say that mathematics, any more than poetry, is embedded out there, as some hierophantic maths-men say.  It’s just that I assume that what I call Nature must follow built-in rules.  That may be as big a leap as attributing to Nature attributes like Will or Goodness, which I don’t, but faith is inescapable.  There are things I’ve not thought through.  But that we are special, or that consciousness is special, or that there is life after death, no.  Not in my faith.

We love rules.  We model them for Nature, which does not mean we are actually extracting them from Nature.

As far as our brain-patterns, evolved for other purposes, allow, we imitate Nature.  We probably get only a little of it right, and we must surely transpose even less of the perceived into a correct symbolic notation.  I mean this with reference to mathematics, but it must be true of science, art, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, religion, all intellectual activities.

Memory, as a related topic, comes to mind.  We have a stock of memorised folk-wisdom without which we would not get by for an hour.  But I think about memory because I sometimes write personal pieces, often about a mythical past because memory does not serve too well.  The past is an idea.  I play with ideas.  In a sense, since we cannot be in touch with anything as it really is, only as it looks or feels or is remembered, we are always writing about our idea of it.  What critics mean by some writers being too fond of ideas, however, is that we talk about infancy and not about children.  So much for Intimations of Immortality.  Luckily poets do not have to create systems or arguments.  If we play with ideas and create worlds that feel almost tangible and suggestive, we are doing well.

Alan Marshfield

¹ By Reality I refer to the everyday world of perception.  It is that part of unknowable Nature (Truth) the attributes of which we can know by inspection and inference.  (back)

² Incidentally, my extended-real is not usually surreal.  To me the surreal is a lateral, distorting, dream-annexe to the bizarre world we live in.   As  with  the  baroque  and  rococo,  however,  surreal  decoration can bring revelations.  Coleridge’s Fancy and Imagination are not mutually exclusive.  (back)

³ I used to try hard to take in the Romantic and mystical view (of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge) that one’s psyche as subject could unite with Nature as object.  I’m not made that way.  I wonder, too, how honest much mysticism is, or if it’s really what its adherents claim it to be.  (back)

⁴ Mystics such as Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, Jacob Bohme, George Fox, Emanuel Swedenborg have described their experiences.  Then in Islam there’s Sufism;  in Judaism, Hasidism and the Kabbalah;  in the Eastern religions, Taoism, the Upanishads, Vedanta, and Zen Buddhism.  I’ve read very little of these at first hand.  (back)

⁵ Neoplatonism claimed that an individual soul has a direct vision of Plato’s Forms (abstract and perfect blueprints of everyday things).  The Neoplatonists argued that all the world’s different degrees of being are dependent on and created by the One itself, a Form beyond being or thought.  By a process of overflow (emanation), the One generates other orders of being: Universal Mind; the World Soul; and shadowy Nature.  Plotinus (3d century AD) eloquently argued that the human soul feels lost and alien, a stranger in the world.  It dimly remembers and desires a Truer world in communion with the One. Only the purified soul can expect this communion.  To Iamblichus (early 4th century), the levels of emanation were the regions of the gods and demons.  To Proclus (mid-5th century) the different levels corresponded to different logical types (sets and classes) and kinds of number.  A Latin translation of Plotinus greatly influenced Saint Augustine, who gave Christianity an intellectual background for its theological beliefs.  Boethius and Saint Anselm developed the tradition.  In the Near East, Neoplatonism influenced Avicenna.  In Renaissance Italy it touched Marsilio Ficino.  In English 19th-century Romanticism it reached the thought and imagery of Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality.  Ralph Waldo Emerson derived from Neoplatonism an ‘Over-Soul’, dwelling in the natural world and in each individual.  (back)

⁶ Idealism (from ‘idea’, not ‘ideal’), the view that the mind or spirit constitutes the fundamental reality, comes in many flavours.  The one I like is Naturalism, according to which the mind and its values emerge from material things.  I don’t like what I’ve read of Berkeley and his ‘to be is to be perceived’.  Although I like Hegel’s ‘the True is the Whole’, I don’t like his rejection of Kant’s idea that the Thing-in-itself is unintelligible, nor his idealist notion that All is Mind and our estranged minds can return by stages to some ultimate All-Mind.  Hegel seems totally wrong to me, so consciousness-centred, in his thought that Absolute Reality is developing toward total self-consciousness in every aspect of Nature and human history.  When Kant says we have no direct knowledge of God / Thing-in-itself / the Ultimate, that’s exactly what I think.  I also take as a cornerstone of my outlook, for what it’s worth, Gödel’s proof that some mathematical truths can never be proved or disproved by logical means.  (back)

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