In a message dated 1/20/99 5:51:29 PM Pacific Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< Yep, nonsensical sounds good to me! >>
Ok, if you are going to be so flippant as to throw this word around, I think
you need to establish the Criteria of Sense by which you are determining this
as nonsense, for what you are in fact doing is marginalizing, which is a
violent act, and an arrogant one, as it assumes the centrism of the discourses
you have taken as your own. I challenge you, for whenever we find something
"silly", we are up against the edge of Unthinkables in our culture ... there,
embarassment and ridicule lurk ... But one of our jobs is to transform
Unthinkables into Thinkables, through daringness of thought, and engagement
with the Other.
I suspect that your judgement of this way of speaking as "nonsense" stems from
some sort of logic whereby a plant " = "just" a plant", and then you place
this being into some scientific classification of insensate vegetation. But
your choice to affirm your society's taxonomy is not a neutral choice, and
represents a cutting or de/in/cision of reality to the benefit of the dominant
way of thinking. Sartre reminds us that reality is always transcendant to any
schema we can place upon it, and therefore there are always remainders to
realities which we try to box into categories. Thus is may be that there is
more to the tree than what Linnaeus and his successors had to say.
This isn't to say that the scientific taxonomy I don't find useful within
certain parameters. Within certain parameters, it is a lens that will help me
draw out certain truths from the Larger Reality which is this Tree.
But when I come into the presence of this tree, when I have an encounter with
it, I find that my experience simply does not fit into the available
categories, including our ways of speaking. I encounter this tree as a Being,
a Being just as much as you or I or a dog is a being. It is a radically
different type of being, a being for example with no observable nervous
system, that stays rooted in the ground, etc., but a being nevertheless. I am
not going to Negate my Experience on the grounds of a common sense which is
often nonsensical.
Do you think that this "common sense" is a historically static subject? Au
contraire, it changes throughout history. In fact, amongst preliterate,
preChristian communities, the naming of a plant as a "plant-being" seems about
as sensical as one can get. It is only within the context of a desacralized
civilization that this would seem such nonsense. Religion divided the world by
cleaving it into "sacred" and "profane" (or "secular"), when in fact the world
was a mixture where both and neither of these terms applied. In facing
phenomena, people once experienced awe. But religion monopolized and
redirected that awe into particular social formations. Later, science came
around and "debunked" the sacred, leaving us with only the "profane" ... in
this (d)evolution, the sense of wonder and awe in and about the world was left
behind ... this is why philosophers have time and again tried to return us to
a wonder about things, and encouraged genuine encounter with the world,
challenging our ordinary conceptions.
When I go into my back yard to pick some oregano leaves for cooking, I grasp
the plant, and ask it for those leaves it is willing to give. I gently pull,
and do not yank against resistance. I move around the plant, and those leaves
that gently remove themselves I take, saying "thank you" to the plant each
time, and touching the branch from which I have pruned leaves, connecting my
lifeforce with its.
Now this practice is practiced amongst a wide variety of nonliterate cultures.
It is a way of respecting the life around us.
One might rebut, how are we supposed to do that when it comes to the
industrial usage of plant material?
Indeed, that is a very good question, perhaps one that is ultimately critical
of the industrial pace itself ... how different indeed a factory if the
workers insisted upon giving proper respect to all bodies entering therein,
taking time ....
So I will continue to call plants "plant-beings", perhaps even radically
"plant-persons", because this usage draws attention to certain ways of
approaching the plant which I wish to encourage.
(un)leash
