On being an animal

What I really wanted to say in my last was: “I am an animal”. The intended piece got hijacked by its own introduction, if you can believe that. “I am an animal” sounds like an oxymoron, requires an explanation before you can make sense of it. “I am . . .” implies awareness. “Animal” implies lack of human awareness. But I don’t know of an event in evolution where animality can be supposed to have fallen away, letting us think of ourselves as disembodied minds, with all the other bits replaceable by prosthetics. Before Darwin, to call someone an animal would be to call them subhuman. Perhaps naïve creationists still think that way. Perhaps we all do, when we think in clichés. Most discussion of humanity, specialized or otherwise, takes it as given that humanity has transcended “the animals”. I can’t say that any more. I say “the other animals”. I owe them respect and even reverence, just as I do to the eight great-grandparents I never knew. And by extension, I owe as much respect to every distant cousin. I always think of a favourite example, the charmingly humble slug, so defenceless yet such a doughty survivor. How do I know that it doesn’t live “in Eternity’s sunrise”?

I first said “I am an animal” in a post of that name I wrote in 2006. This was before my discovery of two books which deepened my understanding of its significance. The first of these is Becoming Animal by David Abram, which claims that we’ve been “taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance.” He continues: “This book subverts that distance, drawing readers ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth.” *

Though I endorsed his words wholeheartedly, I found myself resistant to taking them as primary truth. To do so would be to hold my own recent experience of the world at a distance. So as I read his book, I found myself arguing with it, and sometimes indulging the fantasy that I could have written parts of it better. For I felt that there is no way to “draw readers ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore from within . . .” In retrospect my resistance arose from rejecting the notion of a teacher, and specifically any sort of self-help book. Rejecting the teacher was the turning-point of my life. I followed a self-styled guru for more years than I care to admit. By the time I walked out, I’d spent half my life following his injunction to practise meditation by “turning the senses inwards” in a narrow prescribed way. Opening David Abram’s book at random, I find this quote from John Muir:

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

That was the walk I should have taken, but it took a long expedition into alleged spirituality before I could see it. We are animals because we are bred from this earth. The process of evolution has ensured that our native habitat—“we” referring to all creatures, whether slugs, rats or ourselves—shaped the way our species has developed, or we could say designed, just as boats are designed to ply the rivers and oceans. We are in constant provisional symbiosis with what surrounds us. Symbiosis is a fancy term for co-synchronous adaptation, which is a fancy abstract way of saying that the bee and the flower have evolved at the same time for mutual co-operation. But it’s all provisional. In the vastness of time, space and interactions on the surface of Earth, we may find islands of tranquil stability but everything is prone to catastrophe. For all we know, the Big Bang was itself a catastrophe, which destroyed everything before it so that everything could start again. Nature is flawed, just as every attempt at theology is flawed. Even perfection, existing in our imagination, is flawed.

The detailed mechanics of evolution are poorly understood, by me at any rate, but more expert minds have traced the existence of Man back to the time when all creatures with backbones lived in the sea as fish. Three hundred million years ago, a certain type of fish was in danger of becoming extinct. I’ll let Loren Eiseley take up the story, from his book The Immense Journey:

It was a time of dizzying contrasts, a time of change. . . . The pond was doomed, the water was foul, and the oxygen almost gone, but the creature would not die. It could breathe air direct through a little accessory lung, and it could walk. In all that weird and lifeless landscape, it was the only thing that could. It walked rarely and under protest, but that was not surprising. The creature was a fish.

There have been many species in the lineage from fish to man. How does speciation (the formation of new species) arise? Though Darwin is most famous for writing The Origin of Species, he was never able to guess an adequate answer. Much research has since been undertaken in the laboratory with fruit flies, which can reach adult form in as little as seven days from conception. Then, as little as eight hours later, they’re ready for sex and the cycle repeats. Technicians don’t even have to wait patiently for random mutations to occur. They can induce them, using radiation, chemicals & other forms of interference. That’s how evolution is studied. The same experiments on humans (God forbid) would take millions of years. As I said in my last, evolution is not a suitable subject for teaching young people science. Let’s call it a creation myth and move on. But it’s a worthy topic to include when creation myths are discussed.

Another thing worthy of life-long study is how the human equivalent of a cub, puppy, chick, kitten, calf, kid, lamb, tadpole, foal, joey or cygnet can develop into a wise adult. In my experience, enlightenment cannot be taught. We each have to make our own path. Sometimes I think I wasted thirty years of my life going off in a direction unsuited to my own nature. It seemed like a catastrophe, but for all I know it was the shortest route from there to here. I have learned to heed hints and whisperings from within, instead of conforming to the crowd. It’s not an easy thing to do.

Having missed the swinging Sixties, I got tangled in the Age of Aquarius, ending up stranded in a hippy commune. Refusing to admit I’d lost my bearings, I hitched a ride on that guru-bandwagon, convincing myself that Destiny had planned it so. Indeed it was spiritual, in the sense that it scorned the material and physical, all the better to focus on the divine. My body, being that of an animal descended from animals, never gave up protesting. I got ill, it wasn’t hepatitis as I’d assumed, but one of those chronic conditions which medical science wanted to deny, finding no evidence of physical dysfunction or mental illness. I was like that fish which Eiseley describes: “the pond was doomed, the water was foul, and the oxygen almost gone, but the creature would not die.” It metamorphosed somehow into a new species. I too was in some sense reborn, out from spirituality and into what I knew not. My cure, occurring thirty years after the onset, was instantaneous. A healer asked me a question, told me to ask my body, via memory, for the answer. I felt a subtle shift inside. I was released, and knew it

The newborn chick of a greylag goose follows the first thing it sees, its species instinct gambling on the odds that this will be its mother. So it was with me. From the healing moment onwards, I took on the notion that symptoms are messengers; the mind can play cruel tricks on us; body-wisdom can be trusted. But the therapy which engineered my cure had its own mumbo-jumbo. After escaping the guru, I’ve been wary of mumbo-jumbo, try to keep it at bay. The world is so choked with it, people declutter themselves of one kind whilst filling the empty space with another, imagining themselves now free. Needless to say, I too am “people”. There is nothing in this universe unflawed, only our fine words, which cruelly deceive us. Reducing the clutter to its minimum, leaving my excess baggage at the airport terminal, I feel myself to be an animal. Perhaps I mean a hunter-gatherer, but it doesn’t matter. To step out the door, on a mundane errand or for aimless wayfaring, is often enough to connect. I touch the world, it touches me back. It’s enough. It’s everything.

After writing the above words, I thought, “OK, I could end here,” but then I suddenly remembered a loose end left hanging from the beginning of my second paragraph above. I mentioned “the discovery of two books” and went on to mention the first, Becoming Animal, by David Abram. The second is Theory of Religion, by Georges Bataille (translated from French in my edition). Chapter 1 is headed “Animality”. It immediately becomes clear that he talks about animals so as to distinguish their sense of self-versus-other, if any, from the human sense of self-versus-other. Then comes his oft-quoted sentence:

That one animal eats another scarcely alters a fundamental situation: every animal is in the world like water in water.

So he says that “animals” (he could never say “other animals”) don’t have a sense of self at all, even when eating one another or being eaten. And in his next section he says that it’s a poetic fallacy to imagine that animals are in any way like us, or we like them.

Nothing, as a matter of fact, is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended.

At least he acknowledges the basic theory of evolution. French intellectuals don’t get any weirder than Georges Bataille, I suspect, and his theory of religion doesn’t repay the enormous effort of trying to grasp what he’s saying, and why he thinks it’s worth saying. (Perhaps he didn’t: it was published posthumously ten years after his death.) But his famous saying: “every animal is in the world like water in water” illuminates my own sense of oneness with every animal. For when I am in this awareness, knowing my cousinhood to the slug, buoyed by mother earth, canopied by the sky, grateful for the air, I too am water in water. It’s a sense of ecstatic oneness. Within this awareness, I see it reflected in everything else. Intelligence wasn’t evolved in the human brain so much as enslaved and domesticated by the human tyrant from its wild and flourishing omnipresence. We have tamed the universal mind just as we tamed nature with fields of wheat and cattle. We human beings can only see how things truly are in moments when the separating sense of self, the “I”, dissolves.

The fall from Eden describes the birth of agriculture and the enslavement of our brains in the anxious clamour of separation. To become animal is to regain Eden. This is why I don’t have a use for the word “spirituality”.

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* Becoming Animal, David Abram: previously mentioned in three posts—Falling into Place, Infinite are the Depths and Becoming Animal.