ANIMISM
Late into the night I sit on the back porch of this cottage at the base of Mother Mountain. Besides the brook, that has snow in her, as she swifts and chatters on her way to become sea. Wraiths are odd, though. And there are a lot of them although they were absent most of the season. Some illumine the willow like car lights passing but there are no cars. And besides, I have sat in cunning, to enable me to tell the difference (because a road cuts the track up, now, so yes, people pass in their pods. But the light is other). Some are gossamer in the limbs of willow on the bank opposite me, ragged as fog, but not in dissonance, more like lace with a design alien to my understanding of pattern, as is the me I think I am.
They were absent last winter but they’re back now. I’m a rationalist and, for a mystic, also, I retain a chunk of scepticism just to keep me sane, because potholes of confused ideas abound and I must decipher and decipher like a never-ending abacus.
I know that calling these phenomena “wraiths” is appropriate, so I’ll sit on the word. As I wonder. Who are you?
This speculation sometimes yields diamonds. I understand, or think I do, what night shows, that day can’t. With or without mist and fog and cloud night is crusted with stars. Whether we can see them or not. I breathe in, I breathe out. My eyes adjust to the light because night is never dark but is simply other than day. It is daylight that obscures, I contemplate, by nearnessing how far we can see.
The shock was there and gone, when I breathed one in. It happened so quickly but was unmistakable. I was washed in instantaneous comprehension. I didn’t realise it would almost kill me with the following illness, so certain was I that I am clever and these wights are benign.
I will admit to you that this is simply an epigenetic awareness. But. What if everything that earth is, in continuity as light bound in greens and blues and whites and blacks, informs our first indrawn breath at birth? Flooding our nervous system, merging, symbiotically, with who we are to become, other than animal flesh, in order for earth to know herself? Like an infinity of pores? That every aspect of earth—all perceived 4.453 billion years of our paltry calculations suggest (when in actuality we were everywhere, anyway, before ever gravity caused ellipse and spiral galaxy) forms our thoughts and the multitude of threadlike bytes of enlightenment that rise from seeming nowhere, some inner fathomless ocean, to provide excitation—an awareness of belonging—hence a pre-emptive to action and art? Hence consciousness? That it is not simply a matter (excuse the pun) of individuality as mutuality, but that because of the sheer endlessness of symbiosis, cannot be comprehended in entirety? Yet. That we reunite with this family of dance and infinitely huge, infinitely small light upon the thread, at the time of externally-observable death?
None of this denies instances of grief and sadness. Or confusion. Or self-doubt. None of it explains away the seemingly-odd behaviour of clusters and biological zap, but it’s the observation, isn’t it? The humanity, the individuality, that seems to die and compost down. Either singularly or as the result of a volcanic plume, a nuclear bomb, an avalanche of mud, or a starvation of millions. Extinction is impossible, you see? Isn’t it? What about thought, though? Where does the wellspring of inspiration come from and go to? For art, for revolution, for love? What if the wraiths are intelligence? What if each is a note in an impossible symphony, seeking vessels, planting difference, notes upon a keyboard so huge we are unable to comprehend; that compares itself to itself so that it’s voice will but heard, for a second, in what we call life?
An unquantifiable bigness that is home.
My question rings of, I realise, an almost intelligent design-like idea, but of an earthy, atmospheric, atomic—no wait—they’re all too large—kind. What if there is a ness in our genetic soup that attracts unique, vast, eye wateringly unexpected, wide, deep information that forms and shapes destiny Life to fulfil that which is impossible to comprehend other than by singularity?
What if wraiths are atmospheric things? That the mechanistic, Victorian-era machination of reductionism that allows destruction without thought.
What if, however, despite scientific rationalism, other?
And that each of them is, for lack of a more explicit explanation, entwined within the synapses of our flesh and brains and saliva and core, that when felt ‘inwards’ juxtaposes externalities with itself and therefore refracts back into earth’s self an equation of beauty when the flesh wears out?
Because no one cannot sense beauty; cannot recognise, eventually, a threat. The recognition may be unique to each individual but imagine, for a split second, if that’s all we ultimately realise.
Whether the person is three or a hundred and three.
Animism is the knowledge that all things are significant. Are themselves. Rock, sand, bed bugs, rivers, noise, violets, camels. They all exude stories. Memory and atom are woven together. They make tomorrow. No one thing has precedence, yet all will do what is their nature to do.
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