God and Me
Hardy called it 'dimmity', the moment when the
certain shapes of the world dissolve. In the emptiness of the Wessex
marshlands, against the twilit mass of Glastonbury Tor, the air begins
to quiver, to fill with dark scribblings. More than a million starlings
are homing in on this ancestral swamp for their nightly communion. They
stream in from every direction, joining, breaking ranks, floating free,
like some black aurora. Suddenly, they become plasmic. They are one
immense organism, pulsating like a single cell. They swing up to the
sky and then skim the reeds in folds and falls of black. They fill out
great parabolas and helixes, with a symmetry you do not expect from
living things. Then, birds again, they fall into the reeds. <It
is experiences like this that are supposed to fill us godless folk with
intimations of the spiritual. A glimpse of the universal geometry that
lies behind the chaos of life, of the workings of a group consciousness
outside anything we can imagine—surely this must bring on feelings of
immanence, a sense of some order beyond the surface of things. The
trouble is, I know these birds away from their dusk rites. They are a
long way from being aerial ectoplasm. They're urchins, opportunists,
prodigious mimics. Mozart had a pet starling, which famously learned a
theme from his G Major Piano Concerto, but jumped it forward a couple
of centuries by changing the G natural to a G sharp. And, like all
living creatures, they're victims, too. I once saw, too close for
comfort, a starling being dismembered by a sparrowhawk. Its beak was
wide open, not to utter a G sharp or even a scream, but because it was
being slowly squeezed to death. No moral context for these birds, no
more blame on the hawk for being what it is than on the starling for
being weaker and slower and so very edible. No sacrifice of the self
for some higher significance—unless joining the great chain of
dependence is itself a kind of sacrament. It's always been like
this for me with spirituality. I catch a whiff of the numinous, and it
turns visceral in a moment, part of the digestive process. The first
time was when I was a teenager. I fell into a state of thraldom to the
hill above our house. It wasn't a particularly special hill, just a
chalk swell that looked out over a wooded valley and a thin
winterbourne that, according to local legend, was a woe-water, which
flowed only in time of trouble. But I thought it was the most achingly
beautiful prospect I had ever seen. It haunted me with some not quite
graspable meaning, like the image of the mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It was an unsettling feeling, edgy, indefinable, a mixture of exquisite
pleasure and butterfly discomfort. At times it turned into an actual
physical sensation that made the backs of my legs clench, as if I was
peering down from a great height. I experienced the same ethereal
feelings singing medieval carols with the school choir in the lamplit
porches of the big houses at the edge of our town, and then at the
ritual reading of Chapter 13 of St Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians at
the end of term: 'When I was a child I spake as a child…but when I
became a man, I put away childish things.' I hadn't the slightest
interest in the religious content of these ancient texts, but they
seemed like a bridge across time, a fleeting glimpse of something
inexpressibly bigger than the shackling routines of school, perhaps a
first intimation of the continuity of life. If any of these blurrily
romantic feelings had depths beyond that, I guess they were in Deep
England, which was beginning to cast its dubious aura over me. Then
about ten years later, something different. I was trying to navigate my
way through the last stages of a long anxiety attack, to get through
the 'glass wall' such states erect between you and reality. I was
suddenly struck by a piercing moment of heightened perception, as if a
lens had been clamped over my eye. I was convinced I could pick out the
minute physical details of the world nearly a quarter of a mile away:
individual bricks, the ears of a man, the discrete eddies in a plume of
smoke. Of course, I'd simply become aware of part of the sensory
processing that I did unselfconsciously every second of my life. But it
seemed, in that moment of hypersensitivity, to be some inexplicable,
supernatural gift. It looked as if 'the beyond', for me, was always
going to be just a few hundred yards away. But the eye ought to
have made me pause. For the religiously inclined it's not only the
mirror of the soul but a kind of portal to the mysteries beyond
evolution. For decades it was thought to be the blind spot in Darwin's
theory. How, even over thousands of millions of years, could any living
structure of such extraordinary complexity have been developed by
chance mutations? How could it all, the light-sensitive iris, the
nerve-transmitters in the retina, the lens, the lids, the tears…how
could it all be coordinated as well? Anne Stevenson's poem
about a new baby ponders the origins of 'the distinct eyelashes and
sharp crescent/fingernails… Imagine the /infinitesimal capillaries, the
flawless connections/of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments…' She
calls the poem 'The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument'. And God perhaps
too exact a watchmaker. What is clear from the increasingly remarkable
revelations about the intricacy of the living world is that Intelligent
Design is a logical impossibility. It's not that God isn't clever
enough, but that life isn't that kind of process. The Reverend Paley's
celebrated vision of the living world as an exquisitely engineered
watch is as inappropriate as seeing Creation as a symphony unfolding
from a written score. What it is like is a vast piece of musical
improvisation, unpredictable, free-form, exuberantly bodged, yet
melding exquisitely with what already exists. And, of course, like all
such music, quite without meaning, just gloriously itself. Isn't this something to have faith in? The stuff
of life, the astonishing, resilient, surreal inventiveness of it all?
The extravagant iridescence in the wings of butterflies. The minute
convolutions of Henle's loop in the human kidney, 'like the meanders in
a creek'. The song of the Albert's lyrebird, which takes it six years
to learn and segues the phrasing of every other bird in the Queensland
bush. At times the gratuitousness of creation, its sheer wild
playfulness, can only understood only as a kind of unscripted comedy. Long
before I knew much about the fantastic domestic arrangements that are
the norm for life in the tropics, I learned about the transactions of
Britain's rarest butterfly, the large blue. Its larvae feed for a while
on wild thyme, and start producing honey on their abdomens. They also
produce a pheromone that mimics the scent of ant grubs. The adult ants
gather up the butterfly larvae, take them off to their nests and look
after them as if they were their own offspring—drinking their honey in
return. All the while the larvae are singing to the ants, echoing the
rhythmic noises of the grubs… Wouldn't it have been simpler, Annie
Dillard enquires in her rodeo-ride of God in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 'just
to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?… The lone ping
into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo, was so unthinkable,
violently radical, that surely it ought to have been enough. But look
what happens. You open the door and all heaven and hell break loose'. Wouldn't
it have been easier, for that matter, to have nothing at all, no lone
hydrogen atom, no first cause? The fact that there is anything is the
one impenetrable mystery. Once there was, the eventual emergence of the
planet's grand comedy of manners was pretty well inevitable. Once
in an interview, trying to sidestep the queries about spirituality that
are always beamed at those who confess a more than scientific
fascination with nature, I suggested that I could be described as a
'transcendental materialist'. It wasn't a very creditable answer, and I
should have had the guts to call myself a straightforward materialist.
But beyond the posing, I was trying to say that, for me, the
physicality of the living world—its veracity, its anciently involved
intelligence, its wit, its refusal to be pinned down—transcends itself,
not into the realm of the supernatural, but into that of the
hyper-real. The true Transcendentalists in nineteenth-century America
believed almost the exact opposite of this, arguing,
anthropocentrically, that the material world was a product of some
mystical, ideal force. 'Nature is the incarnation of thought,' wrote
Ralph Waldo Emerson, their guru. 'The world is mind precipitated'.
Emerson's friend Thoreau called himself a Transcendentalist, but was
altogether more grounded. His epic climb up into the desolate
wilderness of Mount Katahdin is the seminal statement about the
absolute authority of the physical: 'Talk of mysteries! Think of our
life in nature—daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with
it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact!' In Walden,
less frenziedly, Thoreau writes about measuring the depth of his pond.
It's a passage which is both literal and metaphorical, about reality
and responsibility: 'The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two
feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since,
making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small
an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination… While
men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be
bottomless.' The imagination, he is suggesting, needs detail and
finitude, not abstraction, for its full flowering. My one
bottomless pond is the mystery of self-consciousness, a phenomenon
which I suspect is no more open to 'explanation' than the fact that
something came to exist. Pondering it when I was young was another
vertiginous experience. If the sense of self was a product of the
processes of the brain, could there be another 'me', somewhere else,
where the immense possibilities of the universe had thrown up an
identical physical being? And if I couldn't be a self in two places at
once, could I be so in two different times? Might brain chemistry be
the answer to reincarnation? Thankfully I grew out of tormenting
myself with unanswerable questions, but the self remains the chink in
the materialist's armour. And on a very few occasions I've had the
feeling, which I suppose is the one thing common to all so-called
spiritual experiences, that its boundaries are relaxing a little. One
May night especially, listening to nightingales in Suffolk, was
something close to a moment of communion. The setting was narcotic. A
full moon, mounds of cow parsley glowing like suspended balls of mist,
the fen arching like a lustrous whaleback across the whole span of the
southern horizon. The nightingale was a shaman, experienced,
rhetorical, insistent. I sank into its charms, a willing initiate. A
shooting star arced over the bush in which it was singing. As I edged
closer, its song seemed to become solid, to be doing synaesthetic
things with the light. I was aware that my peripheral vision was
closing down, and that I had no sense of where I was in space. And
then, for just a few seconds, the bird was in my head, and it was me
who was singing. Conventionally, one is supposed to feel awe and
humility at moments like this. Not a bit of it. Awe would seem to me an
appropriate emotion for God, viewing the exuberance of the living world
from a distance. But not for a creature caught up in it. I was part of
the home team, on the winning side, fist in the air, cheering in
solidarity. Nor did I feel that my self had shrunk, or grown
insignificant, but rather that bird and landscape and I were at that
moment part of a larger being. It's telling how often music is
the agency for such experiences, and a metaphor for what they mean. The
great American biologist Lewis Thomas wrote often of the sensory
communications which keep the planet working harmoniously, of signals
'informing tissues in the vegetation of the Alps about the state of
eels in the Sargasso Sea'. He once imagined what it might be like if we
could hear the planet's 'grand canonical ensemble', if we could make
out vibrations of a million locusts in migration, the descants of
whales, the timpani of gorilla breasts, termite heads, drumfish
bladders. The combined sound might be a sacred oratorio that would lift
us off our feet.
Granta 93: God's Own Countries
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