“Each atom belonging to me pretty much as good belongs to you,” Walt Whitman wrote an epoch earlier than the Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger examined the quantum situations of existence to ask that pressing, discomposing query: “What justifies you in obstinately discovering… the distinction between you and another person… when objectively what’s there may be the identical?”
It’s not merely that we’re right here, manufactured from the identical matter, sharing the identical unbelievable planet; it’s that the sharing makes us what we’re, every of us a fractal of this immense and indivisible ecosystem of relationship, a golden strand in a tapestry whose solely that means is within the interweaving of its threads.
That regardless of this elemental interdependence we stay riven by battle and division is the good paradox and the good tragedy and nice alternative for redemption.
In his agrarian essay assortment The Artwork of the Commonplace (public library), poet, farmer, and thinker Wendell Berry dismantles the paradox to the constructing blocks of the tragedy and reconfigures them right into a cathedral of redemption.
In what’s nothing lower than an act of countercultural braveness and resistance, Berry indicts the Western capitalist mythos of “self-fulfillment” as the basis of this synthetic and infrequently violent erasure of our interconnectedness and considers its basic logical flaw:
The issue, after all, is that we aren’t the authors of ourselves. That we aren’t is a non secular notion, however additionally it is a organic and a social one. Every of us has had many authors, and every of us is engaged, for higher or worse, in that very same authorship. Let’s imagine that the human race is a superb coauthorship by which we’re collaborating with God and nature within the making of ourselves and each other. From this there is no such thing as a escape. We might collaborate both nicely or poorly, or we might refuse to collaborate, however even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an affect and to have an effect on the standard of the product. That is solely a approach of claiming that by ourselves we now have no that means and no dignity; by ourselves we’re exterior the human definition, exterior our id.
As an example how inaccurate this notion of a person separate from relationships is, Berry recounts visiting the experimental plots on the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and being pointed to an enormous Maximilian sunflower rising alone and other than different crops. The person who had planted it proudly held it up for example of a plant that has “realized its full potential as a person.” Berry counters:
Clearly it had: It had grown very tall; it had put out many lengthy branches closely laden with blossoms — and the branches had damaged off, for they’d grown too lengthy and too heavy. The plant had certainly realized its full potential as a person, but it surely had failed as a Maximilian sunflower. Let’s imagine that its full potential as a person was this failure. It had failed as a result of it had lived exterior an necessary a part of its definition, which consists of each its individuality and its group. Part of its correctly realizable potential lay in its group, not in itself.
In a sentiment springing from the identical defiant recognition that led Albert Camus to refuse the selection of proper aspect and flawed aspect in battle, Berry provides:
To make battle — the so-called “jungle legislation” — the idea of social or financial doctrine is extraordinarily harmful. Part of our definition is our widespread floor, and part of it’s sharing and mutually having fun with our widespread floor. Undoubtedly, additionally, since we’re people, part of our definition is a recurring contest over the widespread floor: Who shall describe its boundaries, occupy it, use it, or personal it? However such contests clearly will be carried too far, in order that they turn out to be damaging each of the commonality of the widespread floor and of the bottom itself.
Echoing Schrödinger’s quantum-lensed koan-like perception that “this lifetime of yours which you might be residing will not be merely a chunk of your entire existence, however is in a sure sense the entire,” Berry writes:
The enterprise of humanity is undoubtedly survival on this complicated sense — a mandatory, troublesome, and fully fascinating job of labor. Now we have in us deeply planted directions — private, cultural, and pure — to outlive, and we don’t want a lot expertise to tell us that we can not survive alone. The smallest attainable “survival unit,” certainly, seems to be the universe… Inside it, every part occurs in live performance; not a breath is drawn however by the grace of an inconceivable collection of important connections becoming a member of an inconceivable multiplicity of created issues in an inconceivable unity. However after all it’s preposterous for a mere particular person human to espouse the universe — a chance that’s purely psychological, and productive of nothing however discuss. Then again, it might be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our kinds and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe… They offer the phrase “love” its solely likelihood to imply, for less than they may give it a historical past, a group, and a spot. Solely in such methods can love turn out to be flesh and do its worldly work.
In consonance with the Nobel-winning poet and thinker Rabindranath Tagore’s insistence that “relationship is the elemental fact of this world,” Berry provides:
It’s only in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a value; it’s only to the individuals who know us, love us, and rely upon us that we’re indispensable because the individuals we uniquely are… Separate from the relationships, there may be no person to be identified.
Couple with Rachel Carson on surprise — that final gasp on the interrelations of issues — as the antidote to our human folly, then revisit Berry on the important thing to mirth below hardship, the peace of untamed issues, and easy methods to be a poet and a whole human being.
