Flowering in Tar

the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed

flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing

the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief

—Adrienne Rich

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Imagine for a moment that your five senses—touch, sight, sound, taste, smell—and your sixth sense of intuition are six thick ropes, each extending from your body down, down, down to the center of our planet where they anchor tight to the core of the world, a place filled with a metaphoric substance that Annie Dillard calls “holy the firm,” a substance “in touch with the Absolute.” You can imagine “the Absolute” to be anything you want: a semi-molten iron-nickel alloy, gravity, time, silence, space, fire, energy, light, God. It can bear any name you prefer, or you could allow it to be nameless. 

From this core, imagine now tracing these six ropes up through the earth’s layered body—through fire, bedrock, soil, sand, water, and air, and imagine the ropes merging with your veins, extending tendrils to your skin and muscle and bone, to your mind, senses, and heart. You are socketed into the living world through your senses. Can you feel this deep mooring as a gift?

Geohaptics: the extreme intimacy of ecological entanglement, via the air, water, and matter we take in and continually re-become. 

—Erin Robinsong

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The invitation of our time, a time of climate chaos, of unprecedented socioecological crisis, is an invitation to become geohaptic, to touch and be touched by the living earth. We are each invited to be the blue energy piercing disbelief, a weed flowering in tar. We are invited to shift from despair to creative possibility, from isolation to collective purpose. We are invited to feel less apathy, more love. Less numbness, more feeling. Less malice, more care. Less loneliness, more connection. Less speed, more slowness. We are invited to “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway writes, and indeed to understand the trouble as an urgent form of aliveness. The trouble wants you, us, to feel our own imperfect aliveness bound to the earth’s imperfect aliveness. 

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My body is a lens

I can look through with my mind. 

—Ama Codjoe

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When was the last time you were able to feel in this way? Maybe it was a shared moment of emotion with someone you love. Maybe it was biting into a sun-warmed tomato. Maybe on a walk in a quiet place, you felt the sky enter your lungs. Or maybe on public transportation, you felt yourself buoyed by the current of civilization. Anytime this feeling of enmeshment with the rest of the living world occurs, it’s a gift, however fleeting. And it is a gift that expands, however incrementally, our hearts and minds, which, in turn, is a gift not just to ourselves, our families, and our communities, but to the entire world.

It is a gift because it opens us, enlivens us, undermines the deadening we learn to accept. To be sensorially alive with the world in this way is a subversive act. The most basic aspects of daily life—making money, getting from one place to another, procuring and consuming water and food—essentially demand that we stop fully feeling and thinking, stop understanding ourselves as living entities bound to the heart of the living earth. In the words of poet Lia Purpura, we are commanded, starting when we are children and reinforced daily in countless ways, to “never mind.” She writes, “‘Never mind’ means silent and agreed upon, and that I must want, more than anything, to get through the day, and so should assent to go along. Glance. Turn the page. Turn away from a scream, and the place from which a scream would rise, if cultivated by attention paid. Subjects one might avoid: ruined land, ruined animals. Because the issues of the day can begin to feel old, and people get tired of feeling bad.” Using Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream as an example, she describes how Munch’s painting has been emotionally eviscerated by its endless reproduction on coffee cups, T-shirts, tote bags, etc. We learn to see it but not feel it. Because our world is so busy, crowded, fast, and sensorially demanding, the same evisceration occurs in our experience of our own lives. We skim along the surface, see the shapes of things but fail to feel much. And between these two experiences is not just a sensory gap but an ethical chasm.

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We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things. 

—Mary Ruefle

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This tendency away from feeling isn’t a personal failing. It’s not your fault that you can’t feel the horror, the metastasizing, catastrophic consequences of every plastic bag you’ve ever thrown away. To feel in that way would make life unlivable. But maybe you remember feeling the quotidian horror of a plastic bag once, perhaps as a child. Or perhaps you were pierced by that feeling for a moment the other day and then, just as swiftly, the feeling passed. That’s a geohaptic moment, an opening, a bloom. It’s the earthbound ropes of your senses being plucked to song. It’s an invitation to an ancient, familiar way of being alive that we all already know. 

It’s far less important to buy the thing with compostable packaging than it is to feel that half moment of grief with the plastic, or to feel a shared light with spring’s first scintillant trillium, or to feel your heart gallop alongside the toddler-like rollick of the snowmelt-swollen creek. It’s far less important to position yourself as a particular type of consumer than it is to feel yourself as a living citizen of the living earth.  

Because once a thing is felt, it’s hard to unfeel. Lucille Clifton’s compact, stunning elegy for her husband is a paean both to the man she loved and to a way of living and loving:

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The Death of Fred Clifton

11/10/84

Age 49

I seemed to be drawn

to the center of myself

leaving the edges of me

in the hands of my wife

and I saw with the most amazing

clarity

so that I had not eyes but

sight,

and, rising and turning,

through my skin,

there was all around not the

shapes of things

but oh, at last, the things

themselves.

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What distinguishes the world’s shapes from the things themselves? What differentiates essence from shell? One key difference is the infinite, inextricable linkages—the biome, rhizome, web—the way the things themselves are always linked to everything else. Another difference is the symbiotic attention, the two-way street of perception offered by the living world. When we are fastened to the world’s core by the ropes of our senses, we don’t just perceive the world, we are perceived by it. In the words of Simone Weil, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” To be absolutely attentive is to be fully sensorially aware. This type of attention allows us to touch and be touched by life itself in all its searing aliveness, and to feel that there is no distinction, that it includes you. 

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 Meeting the universe on its own terms is the end of suffering. 

—Maria Popova

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Dedicated sensory immersion is a powerful antidote to the colonial and extractive illogics wreaking havoc on our planet. It’s a way to realign our cultural and biotic systems, a realignment that begins now, here, with each of us choosing, again and again, to inhabit our world and our lives.

It begins with being vulnerable, patient, and brave enough to sense the things themselves: consider the mango grown in Ecuador that you purchased in a store made of Canadian fir with a piece of plastic made of fossilized animals who breathed and died millions of years ago in a hot, distant swamp. Consider how the mango’s sweet juice slides down your porous chin, and how the tart, gold sugar that lands on your tongue touches both deep time and your specific life in one transversal instant. There is both profound violence and profound beauty in that instant, a weighty, weightless invitation straight down to the holy firm, the living core of our living senses, that shared liability and gift.

This type of instant is actually the only type of instant. When we are able to sense the depth of being alive, when we are able to wrench ourselves from the numb comfort of never minding, we find that our subjective experience connects us to the objective. We find, in other words, that the self is actually everything else, that our bodies are shards of and conduits to the earth’s shared, larger body, and that we are a part of a swarming, blooming, capacious yes, a living love. 

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We are each already a part of a collective, ongoing transformation of our planet. In the words of Howard Zinn, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” This transformation is heartbreaking. It’s also a potential source of collective and personal meaning, an invitation to heighten our capacity to sense, think, empathize, feel, and take action. Hitched to the earth’s core, you are invited, compelled, to participate in the most urgent questions of our time: Living in the midst of climate catastrophe, how can we refuse despair, apathy, and overwhelm? How might we instead choose to fully inhabit this transitional time in order to move ourselves, our loved ones, our culture, and our ecosystems from lovelessness to love, from injury to health, from grief to wonder? How might we turn this planetary pivot into a portal to new, better human natures? Can we allow the faded flowers to wither and channel our sugar and water to nurture new blooms?

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it is this time

that matters

it is this history

I care about

the one we make together

—June Jordan

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Munch’s The Scream depicts an actual road in Oslo and an actual sky that Munch witnessed in that place. Of the moment that inspired his painting, he wrote in his journal on January 22, 1892:

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I went along the road with two friends—

The sun set

Suddenly the sky became blood—and I felt the breath of sadness

A tearing pain beneath my heart

I stopped—leaned against the fence—deathly tired

Clouds over the fjord of blood dripped reeking with blood

My friends went on but I just stood trembling with an open wound

in my breast trembling with anxiety I sensed a scream passing through nature 

it seemed to me that I heard the scream

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While Munch’s experience and his resultant painting certainly contain terror and grief,
his was not an entirely joyless scream. His scream was a sublime moment, a sensorially and emotionally complex moment, imbued with a full spectrum of feelings. It was a moment in which Munch flowered in the tar, wild and wholly alive. 

The philosopher Timothy Morton asks, “What would it look like if we allowed more and more things to have some kind of power over us?” What would it look like if we, like Munch, entered into an empathetic contract with the world, the whole world—the gum wrapper, the change in the cup holder, the firewood, the plastic bag, the river, the sidewalk, the cedar, the salad, the tulips, the water, the wine. The art, the music, the poetry, the loss, the grief, the love. What would it look like?

Because, as neurobiologist and environmental journalist Clayton Aldern points out about The Scream, “it is not the figure in the painting that is doing the screaming. All we have there is an open mouth. The original German title for the piece is clarifying: Der Schrei der Natur (The Shriek of Nature). A screaming comes across the sky. The subject covers their ears. […] The painting does not show some unbreachable, walled-off person, suffering internally without context. There is something happening outside the figure’s head. […] Munch’s point was always the screaming in the sky—and what it is capable of shattering within us. It is no surprise that when the world breaks, we break along with it.” 

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I tried to wish this shattering away for a long time, until I simply could not. Once I accepted it, and accepted that I was never going to find the fabled, stable, unshattered haven, I was able to embrace the brokenness that had occurred and, I understood, was going to continue to occur. I was able to inhabit my shattered self. 

And what I found, to my surprise and consolation, was that the shattered self wasn’t hopeless or apathetic, and she also wasn’t worn out by constantly seeking a nonexistent escape from the shattering. She was broken not like a broken machine, but like a seed that’s broken open, fastened to the planet’s mantle and ready to start anew. 

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There is another world, and it is this one. 

—Paul Éluard

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This shattering moment through which we are all living could be characterized as a collective scream. Climate change is a daily, ongoing reality, and it hurts like hell. It makes sense for us to want to look the other way, to never mind. But pain is a story, and, like all stories, it demands to be shared. Pain is cultural glue, a way to be alive together. There is an urgent personal and cultural need to share our pain, image by image, word by word. We’re just beginning to do so. 

When we share our stories, a transformation occurs—we do not simply reiterate the brokenness. Because if you go deep enough into the brokenness, you find the love that lives at the core of all grief. As a culture, we are collectively beginning to understand this vital truth. Inside the broken seed of each of us is a sensuous ecology of feeling, an open question, a blueprint of light, a bud. We shatter—and we refract wider light. We shatter—and stay bound to the six sturdy ropes by which we feel.

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