Towards an Ecology of Being
There are not first things and then interactions with other things. All things are intertwined with others from the get go—not later, not eventually, but from the start. We see this everywhere we look (including at ourselves). Meanwhile, our language, knowledge, and thinking remain mired in the image of an immaculate being that becomes sullied by the world. An ecology of being alters the very way we make sense of the world.
I love the way the internet—from a certain angle, mind you—has become a site of knowledge confetti as all these little dings, pings, fragments, and tidbits of information rain down upon us. Now, whether said information is accurate is another matter which, for our purposes here, isn’t relevant. Knowledge is art (and vice versa)—except when it’s not, of course.
As a rhetorician and not, say, a philosopher, my answer to most questions that seek absolute answers—answers that persist regardless of circumstance—is, usually, it depends. Circumstance, it seems to me, is not extraneous or external to information. What we claim to be true remains a claim—and claims are necessarily situated. They don’t hover over existence, unsullied by the machinations of mortals, beasts, and earth. Every claim bears a voice and all that entails. And despite appearances, this is not a digression — not that there’s anything wrong with digressions.
I spotted just such a strand of confetti where, in a pithy post of pictures and caption, I learned of crown shyness. I mean, c’mon — crown shyness as a caption to pictures like the one above is art! I saw the picture, saw the phrase, went back to the picture, and immediately saw this drama unfolding—the scene of these trees, seemingly proper on the surface but beneath, the seething stress of shyness stirs. It’s cute to me that the scientist-poet-artists who coined this phrase saw the trees keeping their distance and uttered shy. A curmudgeon might have called it crown disdain.
It made me think of an essay I wrote 10 years ago (fuck, I’m old!) inspired by a walk along San Francisco’s Land’s End when and where I was struck by the sight of these cypress trees. Like their shy brethren, they wear their environment so explicitly, letting us see the ecology of being, as if the cosmos itself was grabbing us by the head and making us see the way of things. Look, you morons! It’s right in front of you! Being is ecological! I mean, just look at that tree. It’s part wind. And those shy crowns? Their very constitution includes the neighboring trees. At some point, we can’t separate it from its environs.
Sure, you could look at the same trees and say, Those trees are bent that way because of the wind. It’s simple cause and effect: the wind blows, the trees bend. It’s linear, before and after. Duh. And, from a certain perspective, you wouldn’t be wrong.
But now take a river. Its flow is determined by the land at the very same time the land is shaped by the river, what the great poet-sophist, Lohren Green in his brilliant Atmospherics, calls a seam, a site of co-becoming where you can and can’t separate land and river. As Green proffers, there is a complex dynamics to becoming-with — a calculus, physics, and chemistry along with term and operations both imaginable and not.
Now look at those trees again. You can’t separate how they go in the world — their internal mode of self-production — from the wind, a so-called external element. They didn’t grow then bend. The wind is constitutive of the tree’s way of going just as sun and rain are. It would seem a bit silly, after all, to say that the trees grow because of the sun. The sun may be an essential component in their growth but is neither sufficient nor causal. The same is true of the wind. One is not nutrients, the other circumstance (and yet both are external). Everything is nutrients. The wind — with both a long and short i— is constitutive of the tree’s becoming.
Botanists may not find wind when that tree’s under the microscope. But that’s a limitation of the scientific imagination and its tools. Microscopes let us see what we can’t with our naked eye; but they can’t always see what we do see with our naked eye. Like all instruments, microscopes frame knowledge in a particular way. Use only a microscope and you’ll miss much. So, sometimes, we need to use other instruments such as, well, our own eyes. Weird that that needs saying. Anyway, when we look at those trees we see the wind in how they wind. We see a what as well as a how—and a how rarely fits on a petri dish.
We Are All Possessed
This is all to say that being — who you are, what a tree is — is a process of taking up other things both material and not. I am not just flesh and blood and a set of instructions embedded in my cells. I am this particular way of taking up all sorts of things: flesh and blood, no doubt; DNA, yes; then there’s Deleuze, Burroughs, bacteria, kisses, psychedelics, my brother, the ocean, certain ideas, gin, language, desire. I am, as all things, less a thing than a metabolic engine.
Sometimes, we can feel these ways streaming through us. I’ll be telling a story to a group when I’m suddenly possessed as I feel my brother speaking through me, as me, as himself — his cadence, his gestures, his way of going. It’s downright uncanny. We no doubt all experience this with family, groups of friends, lovers, books as we begin to take on their gestures, go as they go—from words and gestures to posture, humor, gait, modes of thinking, desires.
We are made not just of other things but of other ways of going. Everything and everyone is a multiplicity of bodies and ways. A litany of ghosts, we are each of us a seance, a conjuring, a possessing. Those cypress trees are part wind, even on the stillest of days. If you cut anything open, you’ll find traces of the other things.
To Be Is to Become Inside Out
What throws us off is that we have an inherited, intrenched belief in a delineated inside and out: I am here and everything else is over there, outside me. We tend to imagine a thing begins with itself—ta da!—and then deals with the world. But, as Lear says, nothing comes from nothing. Everything is made of other things. Or, better, everything becomes with other things.
If we look at the very beginning of anything, we don’t find some pristine being unsullied by the world. We find other things, an entanglement, a multiplicity, strands of sundry sort. The great French historian and theorist, Michel Foucault, proffered that there are in fact no origins, only beginnings that are always multiple. “What is found at the historical beginning of things,” he writes, “is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity.”
Certain philosophers—Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida—tell us being is not being at all but is an act of becoming, not in the sense of transforming from this to that — boy to man — but of ceaseless change. Becoming in perpetuity. Those trees are the process of taking up all sorts of things including the sun, rain, and wind. To be, then, is to become inside out.
For the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, there aren’t really things, only becomings—becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-wind. That is, modes of metabolizing the world, making sense of it, consuming and processing it that may or may not be tethered to the body that bears its name. We’ve seen the videos of puppies becoming-rabbit, cats becoming-dog, dogs becoming-human, men becoming-women. We are all run through with the ways of other things.
And, no, I’m not talking about imitation. To imitate a cat is different than becoming-cat. The critique of imitation would take us too far astray so I’ll keep it to this: you can see that those cypress trees are not imitating the wind. That’d be a silly thing to say.
Note, please, that I’m not talking about the absurd, facile conception of social constructivism which somehow has been framed as an identity shopping spree: I’ll take this from her, this from him, and so on. The absurdity, if it’s not obvious, is that it begs the question who’s doing the shopping?? No, you are becoming-other all the way down.
Becoming-with is not a matter of going out and finding things and taking them for yourself. That just reifies the logic of being, of something primarily distinct from the world that then comes to the world. But we come to a world already in progress as a process already in progress—metabolizing amniotic fluid, noise, our DNA. We will never have been discrete.
Those cypress trees are wind just as they are sun and bugs and the knife carvings of adolescent lovers (human becoming is not external to the cosmic ecology). The trees’ exaggerated posture shows us what’s happening everywhere, visibly and invisibly. What it is to be those trees is to take up the wind just so. What it is to be the wind is to take up earth, water, sky, temperature in a certain manner. What it is to be the ocean is to take up, in a particular manner, the moon and the undulations of the earth’s spin and tectonic shifts. After all, we all take up those things but only the moon moons.
Our Language Doesn’t Want to Speak Becoming-With
Becoming-with is not a matter of rational selection but happens in the middle voice, neither active nor passive, both active and passive. Which, alas, is not a grammatical construction we have in English. We have subjects which precede any action — I, you, him, Igor, Eli — and then there’s the action—writing, smiling, loving. When I write, I write, I am positing an I separate from writing, a being separate from action. English mandates a being that precedes becoming.
Now, the French use the reflexive which is a kind of middle voice. Rather than saying, I am Daniel, the French say, Je m’appelle Daniel — I call myself — which makes the speaker both subject and object. But, for the most part, we are stuck in the language and grammar of being rather than becoming.
It’s not easy to speak the language of becoming. Take the seemingly simple sentence I am Daniel. Who’s the I in that sentence?? We can’t escape that dratted, insidious verb to be. We can’t escape the grammar that posits a doer separate from the deed, a being before and separate from its actions, from its environs: I run, you speak, they dream — a being that simply is and then goes about doing things. Our grammar doesn’t like becoming.
Some have tried to break free of this ontological imposition. Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida are known to cross out the verb to be in their writing, what Derrida calls a sous rature (under erasure, more or less).
William Burroughs breaks grammar at every turn, refusing the stability of a subject/agent who acts on the world. Nabokov moves language from description to reverie, from ontology to affect. Lispector makes language swirl and move. Pynchon, Melville, Merleau-Ponty write long winding sentences that are endlessly qualified and extend themselves, turning grammar’s ontology into an ontology-defying braid. An ecology of being kindly requests a different grammar.
Becoming-With as Pedagogic
But perhaps none of this need be so esoteric. I mean, we all know we come from both a mother and father (in the biological, not familial, sense as not everybody has, needs, or wants a family). And maybe this multiplicity is an advantage, allowing us to see, understand, know, and experience the world from multiple perspectives because we are multiple perspectives.
“The happiness of my existence,” writes Nietzsche, “its unique character perhaps can be found in its fatefulness: to speak in a riddle, as my father I have already died, as my mother I still live and grow old. This double origin taken as it were from the highest and lowest rungs of the ladder of life at once decadent and beginning — this if anything explains that neutrality, that freedom from bias in regard to the general problem of existence which perhaps distinguishes me. My nose is more sensitive than any man that has yet lived as to signs of ascent or decline. In this domain I am a true master — I know both sides for I am both sides.”
The French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argues that it is only because we are constitutive of the world that we can come to know it. It’s not from what a certain strain of science dubs objectivity that we know things; on the contrary, it’s from our participation, at the most fundamental level. We are made of the same stuff so there’s no caesura to cross (see Socrates who argued that it’s impossible to learn something we don’t already know…but that’s because he assumes a primary distance between self and world). We know things because we are things — things made of other things.
