Grasshopper Spirituality

 

The other day I came upon a remark by a neuroscientist at the University of Lund who studies insects: ‘One of the main functions of all brains,' he writes, 'is to take sensory information, use it to generate an estimate of the current state of the world, and then to compare it to the desired state of the world. If the two do not match, compensatory action is initiated, which is what we call behavior.’

This is true not only of insects, of course, but of all life-forms, including humans. We all have desires, ambitions, fears, grievances. The world—perhaps it would be more fitting to say "our personal world"—is never quite right.

I would quibble, however, with this eminent neuroscientist's way of describing the significance of this unending disparity. Dropping into the passive mode heavily favored in the scientific community, he suggests that whenever this mismatch between reality and need occurs (which is often) "compensatory action is initiated." That's an ugly phrase, and it also happens to be untrue. It suggests that life is a process of replacing things that are missing in an effort to maintain homeostasis.  

If something is lacking in our life (or a dung-beetle's life, for that matter)  we might be inclined to "compensate" by seeking out an inferior but perhaps more readily available substitute, but more often, we seek out the thing we're lacking itself. And it often happens that the lack we feel, the thirst we seek to quench, is a lofty one that has nothing to do with basic bodily functions. Often we don't know quite what we're missing, but it seems to be something big. 

Where do such lofty aspirations come from? Who knows? But they're endemic to life, and they go a long ways toward explaining why life-forms have developed rather than merely "hanging in there" over the course of the eons.

The better part of Plato's philosophy is devoted to exploring the significance of the fact that we can, and often do, envision, desire, and seek out things that are better than anything we've actually experienced. How could that be? For Plato (in a nutshell) the source of those impulses is divine eros, and the result is the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. 

Our no-nonsense Norwegian entomologist, in his own pithy way, focuses our attention on the same disparity between reality and desire, but for him, the result can be described in a single glamourless value-neutral word: "behavior." Such a expression is clearly inadequate to describe what's going on. That disparity can produce any number of emotions--desire, frustration, anger, aspiration--and such emotion sometimes (though not always) lead to the activities directed toward summoning the values Plato has explored so carefully. But bland though it may be, the word "behavior" has at least the merit of acknowledging a fact overlooked by many philosophers--namely, that life is a matter, not only of thinking, but also of emoting, and of doing things in response.   

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Just now five or six heavy construction vehicles rolled past outside the window. The city is in the process of scraping off an inch or two of the street and resurfacing it. One of the workers told me they can do the entire neighborhood in two days. We'll see.

Late June Normal

The lindens are blooming. Have been for a while.

It's a heavenly scent, less well-recognized, perhaps, than the lilacs of late May. And also less reliable, which makes the bloom that much more interesting. Some years a given tree doesn't flower, though I haven't figured out why. On the basis of this year's production, I think we can rule out "dryness" as an inhibiting factor.

I have noticed in conversation that many people don't know what a linden smells like. Often, when the scent arrives, I have to look around for a minute to locate where it's coming from. I was introduced to the scent from a bar of linden soap that our friend Mary McDill brought back from Bordeaux many years ago. We happened to have a linden in our front yard, and started to pay more attention.

Incidentally, the linden tree is also referred to as a basswood. I suspect most of the trees planted in suburban neighborhoods are lindens (tilia cordata). The native basswood, (tilia americana) has larger leaves, but looks basically the same.

Meanwhile, we lost the top half of one of our maples the other day. It had been dead for years, and more than once we'd considered having the entire tree removed. We were afraid a big branch might fall on someone; on the other hand, the woodpeckers liked it. And from here at my computer I often look up to see what's passing up and down the trunk and lower branches. Once or twice a year we get a brown creeper, and on one occasion recently I spotted two flickers and two pileated woodpeckers at the same time, enjoying the bugs that have made their homes in the rotten wood.

Last year a red-bellied woodpecker nested in the dead part of the trunk. This spring he moved down the street—wise decision—and we hear his pleasant shriek more faintly, and less often.

Lucky for everyone concerned, our neighbor was vacationing in Ocean City, New Jersey, when the upper trunk crashed across her driveway. Hilary and I dragged the pieces back into our yard, then over to our driveway, where I spent a few days sawing up the narrower branches with a hand saw. A pleasant task, like going on a little camping trip in the cool of the morning, in the shade of the linden tree, with neighbors passing by on the street from time to time and occasionally stopping to chat.

I'm not sure what we're going to do with the two largest chunks. They're beginning to look like handsome pieces of sculpture to me, sitting on the concrete next to the recycling bin. This, of course, is just laziness settling in. But they are sort of handsome. Maybe Hilary's brother, Paul, can make a coffee-table out of them.

One of our neighbors volunteered to come over with his chain saw and chop the logs up into manageable chunks, and perhaps we'll take him up on the offer. But just the other day he helped me wire a new light onto the side of the house next to the front door, and I don't want to lean on him too much.  

The arborist who arrived a few days later assured us that the remaining branches of the now truncated tree were structurally sound, but suggested we might want to remove the other maple standing nearby, which was, he said, root-bound. The estimate he finally presented to us didn't mention either of the maples, but listed three or four other jobs that seemed largely cosmetic to us.

(The tree company has probably put a note in my file: "Likes to talk about trees; never wants to cut them down.")

It's always fun talking trees with an arborist, but Sam was stumped by one of our specimens: a mulberry tree that has never produced berries. I looked it up just now and found that there is a fruitless variety (morus alba chaparral). I can't imagine how it arrived in our back yard, but there it is at the fence-line, thirty feet tall.

Meanwhile, post-Covid entertainment has included a daring foray with friends to the Ice House to hear a local country band called The Sapsuckers. Not bad. 

Meanwhile, the remote entertainment continues. The other day we tuned in on a Rain Taxi-sponsored interview with the poet Arthur Sze. I'm glad we did. Checked a few of his books out of the library. I'm might even buy one.

The Existential Threat to Existentialism

 Word usage changes over time, with new words appearing and old words getting bent out of shape due to ignorance or convenience until, in time, they settle into a new pattern of meaning. In a single work Sir Thomas Browne coined the words “electricity,” “hallucination,” “pathology,” and perhaps a dozen more that we still use today, including "approximate," "aquiline," "cadaverous," "causation,"  "coexistence," and "elevator."

It's interesting to be reminded that the words "conscience" and "conscious" were once synonymous, although one seems to be a noun and the other a verb.  How could that be?

More distressing, perhaps—though some might consider it an honor—is to be a witness to the wanton appropriation of a useful and perhaps even poetic word for use in a new and vulgar way.

We all have our pet peeves. One of mine is to hear the word "existential" dumbed down, battered out of shape, and put to an utterly banal use. This happens every time a newscaster makes use of the phrase "existential threat." Such a remark is meant to suggest, I think, that the thing or concept being referred to is a threat to our existence, or to the existence of whatever is being specified. For example, "Rising seawater poses an existential threat to all coastal cities worldwide."

It would have been far clearer, more accurate, and also more vivid, to have said, "Rising seawater threatens to submerge and destroy the waterfront of many major coastal cities." Don't you think?

Yet the phrase "existential threat" has a trendy and ominous aura that draws what strength it has from the disquieting concept with which it shares no real affinities, namely, existentialism itself.

Existentialism is a, to put it bluntly, a form of romanticism. On the other hand, it's highly prolix and intellectual, as may be suggested by the voluminous tracts produced by Soren Kierkegaard or the two-inch-thick tomb, Being and Nothingness, in which Jean-Paul Sartre masticates at great length the notion that things either are or are not. 

But at the same time, existentialism also tends to be vague. The three concepts with which it's most closely associated are ennui, anxiety, and dread. It might be said, in fact, that existentialism, like romanticism, is less a philosophy than a mood. But whereas romanticism rolled in on the surf of the French Revolution,  exhibits a hopeful or idealistic sheen, and often inspires meaningful activity,  existentialism gurgled up from the quagmires of the First World War, came of age along with the Holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation, and therefore, at a loss as to what to DO, dwells in passivity, fog, and depression, or at best focuses its attention on what has become known as "the gratuitous act."

Nowadays both moods are prevalent during adolescence, and there's a lot to be said, both at that stage and also later in life, for brooding, yearning,  and aspiring. The detachment such thoughts foster allow an individual to reevaluate things and change direction. The problems arise when such ruminations become an end in themselves, a badge of identity, or even a self-bestowed mark of distinction.

And this has been the fate of much existential literature.

As early as 1934, the Italian philosopher Guido de Ruggiero wrote:

Human life, when it is normal and balanced, is a synthesis of individual and universal elements, of freedom and discipline, of immediate spiritual movements and of abiding values, of existence and essence. When this vital synthesis is broken, one of the elements affirms itself to the detriment of the other and undergoes a pathological growth damaging the health of the whole organism. This is precisely what we find in the existentialist philo­sophy which, as a reaction against universal concepts and values, gives a pathological development to the individual and contingent element of existence by lifting it to a ruling position and making it the measure of all values.

This is somewhat of an overstatement, I think, but it does underscore the fact that existentialism is better considered a mood or a platform of inquiry than any sort of full-fledged doctrine. Philosophy in the guise of poetry, let's say. Beatniks and Parisian boulevards at its best, gulags and concentration camps at its worst. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, who is sometimes credited with coining the term, soon rejected "existentialism"  as a label for his own work, preferring to associate his thought with broader currents of Socratic dialog. The essay "On the Ontological Mystery," which appears in the nifty paperback collection of Marcel's essays titled The Philosophy of Existentialism, would be a good place to begin an exploration of his subtle, questing, and fruitful approach.   

There was a time when I enjoyed dipping from time to time into an essay by Heidegger, a religious tract by Kierkegaard, or a clutch of aphorisms by Nietzsche. Though I seldom agreed with the ideas being advanced, I wasn't sure I really understood them, and I got the impression they'd arisen from a deep-rooted anguish or a need to untangle the seeming contradictions of "existence." In recent years I find myself lingering in those forests less often, having become convinced that the initial frisson such radical critiques provide is the best thing they have to offer.

Nevertheless, I cringe whenever I hear a journalist associating existentialism, albeit inadvertently, with pandemic, global warming, or some other looming disaster. Existential threat? Never. Existential crisis? Perhaps. Existentialism is a land of theory and poetry that we enter of our own free will in an effort to diffuse the fog, confusion, and distress we sometimes feel in the face of existence, and perhaps, find a way out.