Week 50: 'Love is concrete.'

Whether you’ve followed this blog through 2012 or just dipped in from time to time, thank you.  Are you wondering, as I have been, about whether there’s any more to it than a way of colouring in Monday morning?  There doesn’t have to be, but I did start it for a reason: to ask whether the experience of wonder matters.  Are wonders and wonderings ways of taking care of one another and the world – ways, in another word, of loving?

‘Loving’?  A friend once told me that of the people who are working for some kind of positive change in the world, some tend to talk about love as a motive; others, truth.  ‘I’m for truth,’ she said.  I decided then that I’d better be for truth, too.  Love seemed an airy-fairy word, which works ok on a warm day when everyone’s being ‘nice’ but blows over with the first cold front.  Truthfulness sounded edgier, forceful, authentic in all conditions.  After all, injustice is not born of a lack of love, but of a lie: Palestinians are not calling for our loving good wishes but for what rightfully belongs to them.

Earnestly 'being for truth' worked well for a while but it’s a little chilly.  It's hard to kick back and relax when everything has to be 'authentically' this or 'genuinely' that.  ‘I love you’ doesn’t quite translate as ‘My feelings for you are authentic’.  So I was having a rethink when I was introduced to the work of Isabel Carter Heyward, who talks about love in a way no-one could call namby-pambical:

‘Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete.  Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward”.  Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.’

Elsewhere, Carter Heyward talks of love as practical commitment to a ‘right relationship’.  Whether with a lover, a friend, a stranger, an oppressed group, society, or our ecology, love is committed to the integrity and flourishing of the relationship.  It is loving, in this sense, to make rhythms from packets of pasta at Tesco’s, ride a bike rather than drive a car, to marvel at how bodies move, give yourself to the freedom of a dance.  In their right relationship, a sperm and an egg love their way to becoming a baby.  And the man who stood in front of a tank in Beijing gave himself in that moment to a way of loving, which the Chinese government so couldn’t bear that they took him away forever.  So this kind of love is also a form of truthfulness or faithfulness.

If these are all expressions of ‘loving’, what is ‘a wonder’ and how do we know one?  The word’s ancient linguistic origins are completely unknown but we get a clue from the evolution of another word: ‘miracle’.  This comes from Latin mirari, ‘to wonder at, marvel, be astonished’ which, in turn, was born from the Proto-Indo-European root smei, ‘smile’.  This bit of linguistic jiggery-pokery suggests that a wonder is something miraculous, which we recognise not thanks to a GSCE in miracology, but in simply finding that we are smiling in astonishment.  Just as it is only our own laughing that can tell us when a joke is funny, so when we feel astonished – and smile – we know we are in the presence of a ‘wonder’.

So does experiencing ‘a wonder’ inspire ‘loving’?  That would be marvellous.  It would make a smashing final scene in an old black and white film, in soft focus with some rousing music, maybe Rachmaninov:  ‘Darling, do you think wonder inspires love?’ ‘Oh yes, I… I think I do, darling.’ ‘Oh… darling.’ Aaaaand CUT!

Let’s pare this down a bit.  All sorts of evil deeds have been committed because someone believed they had encountered ‘a wonder’; Hitler admired the Aryan race (or the idea of one) as a beautiful and pristine expression of humanity’s greatness.  Nor do acts of love depend on a sense of wonder; we don’t need a feeling for wonder to recognise that war is horrific rather than heroic and to resist militarism.

Hm, so if a feeling for wonder is neither sufficient nor necessary for ‘loving’, can we get by pretty well without it?  Sure we can.  We can get by with never seeing a mountain, too, or never tasting a tomato grown in real soil, or never wondering what life in Japan is like.  There’s no reason to do any of these things, except that by things like these, life expands.  A life that doesn’t expand (one way or another) but rather atrophies and shrivels, tends to be poor in love, including for itself.

Wonder, as an attitude, is hospitality for the universe; it lets the cosmos in like a blind drawn up in the morning and smiles at what crosses its threshold, finding it astonishing and giving thanks for it.  Or perhaps wonder is not a host but a wanderer, who sets out into the day like Walt Whitman to meet the world and ask what the grass really is.  I don’t know; I am never sure whether wonder is something I’m doing or something happening to me.

Right now the leaves are falling in the winter breeze and I notice them shiver on their twigs; the water wrinkles in gusts.  Watching this, the first feeling I fill with is not love, but belonging; I can feel my own self ripple in the gusts and shiver on my branch; I am folded into the universe and participate in it.  But then, to belong is to love.  If love is the rightness of a relationship, then watching these last of autumn's acts, I am stirred by wonder into a kind of loving.  Sometimes, just to notice is a way of loving.

I feel stirred in the same way watching Eva Szasz's film Cosmic Zoom, listening to Ricardo Gallen play Bach, or hearing Hannah Hauxwell say that when she eventually leaves her home in the hills for a house in town, most of all she’ll miss the moonlight on the water.  I even feel moved in the same way when Peter Mugridge talks about his love of trains: ‘Some people like fast cars; I like trains.’

In each of these the presence of life can be felt, for all these are ways of loving.  These are human stories where life is allowed to be itself.  A friend once said that life is like mushrooms; it doesn’t need our help, it just needs us not to get in its way so it can do its thing and grow and grow.  I suppose we could say life just needs us not to build Oxford Street on top of it.

By ‘life’ I mean a kind of aliveness to the world; holding an attitude of curiosity; wondering.  In this body-and-soul aliveness is an openness to humanity, a feeling for being related to others, even to all things.  We admire someone whose smile exudes warmth, or who faces down adversity with resourcefulness, or who can strive hard and still consider the people around them, or who applies their intelligence to a passion for justice.  Perhaps this is because we can sense the life in them, which reminds us in turn that we are alive, too.  In other words, it’s possible to be more or less alive and the more alive we are, the more humane we become.  I don’t know whether this is always true, but that it may be true even sometimes is a wonder.

It is interesting to wonder whether aliveness, when allowed to express itself, leads to ways of loving.  Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan wanted their science education work to inspire in the public a passionate curiosity in the cosmos.  Humbled as we would be, they hoped, by the ‘great story of the universe’, we would then see the grandstanding of the Cold War for the anthropocentric presumption it was.  More than this, we would feel spurred on to express ourselves politically.  If that had been true, all scientists would also be activists, so we can't draw a straight line between someone's passionate spirit of enquiry and an active interest in political affairs, or indeed any other kind of loving.

All the same, I think Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan were onto something.  Although Carl Sagan (not sure about Ann Druyan) was quite sceptical of religion, his hope would make sense to many religious people.  For people of faith, choices are guided, and more than merely an expression of their personal appetite for this or that.  One way of understanding a faith commitment is in being guided by experience of a truth deeper and wider than one's own life as an individual.  The question of what leads our choices and how well they are guided really matters, especially given the problems we are now inflicting on each other and the Earth.

Our society’s ideology is mistrustful of anything that might impinge on individual choices.  Among the extolled virtues of both capitalism and democracy is the freedom to choose, upon which stands their most powerful critique of communist dictatorships.  In the ideology of the Eastern Bloc, individual freedoms were always trumped by the prescribed needs of the collective (unless you numbered among the elite and could exempt yourself from your own ideological rhetoric).  The results were often profoundly oppressive (although not always so).

But our version of capitalism skews the freedom to choose, assimilating it as far as it can into an economic system built on consumer choices.  You can have this car or that one, this career or that one, this wife or that one, and so on.  It’s as if we’re in a vast sweet shop and we can choose anything as long as it’s fancily packaged sugary fat of one kind or another.  Even charity gets packaged up as a consumer choice.  What’s more, you can have your metaphorical Mars Bar immediately, there is no cost apart from to your own pocket, and there’s no theoretical limit to the amount you can amass.  Apart from the light brake of taxation and the framework of a liberal law, our version of capitalism has no rules.  Its principal axiom is: if you are able to, then you are entitled to.  After 9/11, when George W Bush told everyone to keep shopping in order to preserve the US economy, the mantra became: if you are able to, then you should.

As has been said many times in many ways, problems crop up when we expect to obtain something without having to wait and work; when we assume the only cost of a thing is financial and not social, ecological or cultural; and when nothing is around to remind us that it is possible to have too much, just as it is possible to have too little.  So the choices the great sweet shop offers are an illusion; for all its tinsel and bling, it’s also quite boring.  It is also an illusion of democracy when we imagine that we the people get to decide how we are governed; the system serves up a few narrow options every five years, that’s all, and mainstream politics stays pretty much the same.

I want to suggest that this is why a feeling for wonder is important; it can help enrich our choices, forging them into ways of loving, and it can do this whether our worldview is mainly scientific, religious, both or neither.  I'll try to illustrate this...

I met someone at a wedding who likes to go shooting.  I wondered what that’s like.  It’s out of this world to feel the power of the gun, she said, and much more exciting it is to hit a real bird than clay.  I can believe that, but this was the week I had been researching the Monday wonder on bird migration and flight.  As my conversation partner spoke I fell into a reverie of a bird in flight, each of its feathers rippling as it felt out the air beneath it.  I could almost feel the swept line of the feather’s leading edge, the flexing lightness of its hollow stem, and wondered that this structure embodies more knowledge of air’s movement than does the scientific research of two centuries.  I imagined the feather ever closer up: the vein and the rachis, the barbules and millions of hooklets.  And then I watched the shot rip through the lot, and the still-flapping bird fall to earth.

My thought was not one of sentimental pity for a bird, nor a moral question of right and wrong – I would probably kill a bird, too, if it were my only meal.  My distracting and rather inconvenient reverie led to something else: a feeling for the dignity of the bird’s being, of which killing it for fun seemed a particularly wanton violation.  (Rural economies now rely more heavily on this kind of thing, but we have to ask about the justice of poorer people in the countryside depending upon the sporting habits of wealthy, mostly urban people).

A few weeks ago this blog was marvelling at soil.  There are all manner of ecological, economic and social reasons to conclude that topsoil loss has been the most ignored form of serious human damage to the Earth.  These are cause enough to preserve the soil we have remaining, but a sense of soil as wonder could  deepen and enrich that commitment.  That is, when we know soil as a complex living community which takes millennia to form and embodies in its unity a reflexive natural intelligence, it’s difficult to go back to thinking of it just as raw material for plants.

This feeling for the dignity of being – the peculiarly human ability to witness the universal in the particular, find integrity there and cherish it – can inspire choices which we could describe as ‘good’.  The attitude, perhaps, is one of honouring something as an end in itself, not just as a means to one.  Soil again provides an example.  It is our parent in Nature, to which we owe our being.  If we truly honour our mother and father, it is not for economic or practical reasons, nor is it due to the insistence of some moral calculus or social norm, nor is it just because they may be good people.  The special kind of honour due to loving parents is that through them we have come to belong to the world.  The same goes for soil.

The Kalahari bushman honours the kudu he has killed by wiping its saliva on his face and offering a prayer.  Anthony Pisano honours the stranger by welcoming him or her into his New York home.  P V Rajagopal, whom I hope we might meet on this blog before it finishes, offers a prayer to the land, the forest and the water before each meeting of nonviolence activists in India; this honours the things on which their lives and wellbeing depend.  Baaba Maal honours the elders of Kirina for welcoming him under the mango tree and carrying the wisdom of their community's history: ‘Everything did start from here.’

These are all ways of loving.  They are ways of seeking out or making a flourishing relationship: humane, life-affirming, life-giving, and which recognises our common relatedness and belonging.  Wonder can inspire such a commitment as this.  Rather, it can disturb us into one – that is, stir up our assumptions of order, rearrange our lives, awaken and refresh our aliveness.

What about the sweet shop?  Wonder, a feeling for the dignity of being, honouring our relatedness and committing to ways of loving together creates a palpable tension with the great sweet shop of capitalism and its tag-along illusion of democracy.  So wonder can culminate in politics; in joy, too, for it's an exciting way to live.  Just look at the RBS activists protesting against tar sands extraction – they’re having a ball.

We are under serious threat of ecological collapse, economic collapse, and the social collapse that is war.  We are violating the Earth, creating behemoth corporations, making billionaires and leaving paupers on the streets and substituting politics for economics.  I think it's fair to say in general that we have little sense of our own history, little feeling for the ecology to which we belong, little sense of common belonging in general.  Most of us don’t really know what we’re eating or how it got there, some young people in cities have never seen the countryside, we watch an average of 3.9 hours of TV per day, few people have much autonomy in their work.

All the same, there are exciting things happening.  Groups, usually small, are trying to live in more creative ways, building communities of place and interest, and giving their time and energy to movements of social change (about which, more in the next two weeks).  I don’t know how significant these movements will become, but I want to belong to them anyway; I’d rather do that than get stuck in the sweet shop!

Whatever we identify as – educators, activists, lovers, learners, friends, parents, artists – cultivating a sense of wonder meets life with life and honours it.  A child will look at the moon and wonder at it, but that child needs adults around who wonder along with them.  A school student needs to know how to analyse and conceptualise Shakespearean plays and crystal formations, but not as much as how to wonder at them.  A young adult choosing how to live, what work to do, what they have to offer to their community, will be helped by a feeling of wonder which grounds them in a sense of what life can be about.  Wonder is a way of loving.

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