Reciprocal life
Great crested grebe still with adolescent young in January
“We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the renowned phenomenologist philosopher, pointed out that we can only touch things with our hand because our hand is itself a touchable thing and therefore completely part of the tactile world. This may seem absurdly obvious and yet this fact is widely overlooked and is more profound than it might appear. Similarly with our other senses, this can serve as a way into a much fuller participation with the world; a participation whereby we moderns no longer see ourselves as some kind of objective observer. Bear with me, and maybe I can shed light on this insight from my own experience on my regular walks.
I walk around my local area most days and tend to be engaged with everything around me; it feels like to do so is the least I can do, out of respect for everything. I know my locality very well, yet on each walk I always seem to be surprised by something or other.
On one side are the sky high financial towers of Canary Wharf, silvery and otherworldly in the morning light, while down here I walk past the pop-up food bank with packets of white bread rolls and cornflakes laid out on the floor, free for those in need. I often used to walk around the glitzy canyons of Canary Wharf laid out among the watery channels of the docks; but my interest was to see the local seal, who lived in the docks there for many years, and who was known as Sammy. I can’t forget the stunned sense of suddenly coming face to face with a huge fellow being when she would poke her head out of the water and hold your gaze. When she passed away not so long ago, the whole area felt empty to me. There was no longer any special allure in Canary Wharf as she was by far the most valuable attraction to me in all that banking glamour. But I never tire of walking along the dockside: sometimes reflectively still, the water today is very animated and splashes and slops and slurps against the quayside, seemingly talking to me, its mood an enigmatic blue gray restlessness, shimmering in the wan sunlight.
The regular flock of goldfinches are tinkling to each other in the lime tree above on their daily round, which includes the feeders full of sunflower seeds that I put out all winter in our backyard. They love each other’s company and maintain a constant chatter among themselves. A “charm” of goldfinches is the very apt collective name for them, and the vivid flashes of gold, red and black as they flit together is a charming sight, especially in winter. Their mood uplifts me such that I can almost feel myself up in the air with them. Goldfinches are simply more collective than they are individuals.
I bump into a local guy who has been invalided out of his job as a London tube driver; he’s often out and about and likes a chat, and he remarks how he misses the work and the people. There’s always a warm feeling to our little interchanges. But just then, my nose quivers at a rich scent which is overpowering in the chill air and my senses are intoxicated. Then the thought arises, ‘How can a perfume be so rich and sweet in the middle of winter? My eye alights on the sulphur-yellow spikes of flowers nearby: the mahonia shrubs have come into bloom as they always do in mid winter.
I walk along the dockside and always look out for my grebe friends. Their rudimentary nest, built on a floating plank, kept getting disturbed during the spring and summer and it was only in autumn when they somehow managed to precariously build a nest on a rope in the water tethering the floating Chinese restaurant. But then they managed to have two late broods and even now at the beginning of January they still have two teenage young grebes, who incessantly cry for fish from their parents. Each parent takes responsibility for one offspring and I’ve been hoping they will make it to independence before we have any winter freeze.
The wet stone in a nearby wall glints with myriad crystal flecks; looking closer, they sparkle like a galaxy of far distant stars. I touch the rock and feel its great immovability and immensely longer sense of time. Entering my local park and allotments, the robins are singing, it being such a mild winter’s day. The robins are responding to each other and while unmistakably it’s a robin’s song, they’re varying their language in response to each other; it’s not like playing ‘song of the robin’ on a bird song app, they’re communicating uniquely. My local robin comes up when he sees me coming to my allotment. He cocks his head to one side and our eyes meet, his liquid black eyes always attentive. It’s a meeting we are participating in together.
When I had a short chat with the tube driver earlier, he of course is a sentient subject just like me, and I’m an object in his gaze, as he is to me. Nothing remarkable here, you may say. Each of us is both subject and object in relation to each other; the perceiver and the perceived are interdependent, sentient and able to be sensed. Well, isn’t the same just as true for my robin friend who has his own sentience and responds to my slightest movements? I’m an object in his gaze too.
I sit under the overhanging evergreen bay tree which shades my allotment shed and touch the gray brown trunk of the tree, feeling its smooth yet rough bark. My hand is only able to touch the tree trunk because my hand is a touchable thing and is itself totally part of the tactile world. I am touched by the tree in my touching of it. We can only touch, feel, hear or see because we are fully part of the sensible world; we are in it, part of it, not disembodied observers. Here we’ve come to Merleau-Ponty’s insight. He emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, as opposed to the philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other.
My point is that we are embedded in the world and not external observers. My body feels, hears, sees, smells and touches with its native intelligence before there are any concepts. Our bodies have evolved in and along with everything in nature for millions of years. It’s only in the merest blink of an eye timewise that we moderns have conceptualised ourselves out of Nature, out of the world, as if we were located at some removed vantage point surveying the scene. Bodily perception always comes first and is prior to any concepts about what we are perceiving. Perception is participation, as the phenomenologists say. To perceive is to enter into participation which is always reciprocal. It is through the body that we know the world. To the body with its senses, nothing presents itself to us as totally passive or inert. Perception animates everything. Everything is in some sense alive as indigenous peoples across the world for most of human history and prehistory have always felt. At the level of direct bodily perception you can say that we are all animists.
For the last several years it’s become a kind of conscious practice of mine on daily walks to re-engage the senses, to experience afresh; to smell, hear, touch, see, more directly – and most of all to feel; to allow myself to be touched by myriad impressions. Of course, it means no headphones, or looking at social media or ‘thinking out’ issues while on the walk, but I find that a welcome relief. I notice so much more: the moods, taste and feel of the wind; the mercurial shapeshifting water of the docks; the conversations of the birds, the ever changing light; the mysteriousness of shadows; the sparkle on a morning dew drop on a spider’s web; the impossibly green greenness of grass. Over time I do sense some shift in my default orientation. There is so much more happening in the more-than-human world when I don’t cut off from it, and it’s both enlivening and grounding. It makes it very difficult to feel alienated from nature any more. Also in the reciprocity with the life world, in a very real sense, you are never alone again.
In Nan Shepherd’s, ‘The Living Mountain’, her exquisite account of decades hiking in the Cairngorms, she writes at the end:
“As I grew older, I began to discover the mountain in itself. Everything became good to me, its contours, its colours, its water and rock, flowers and birds. The process has taken many years and is not yet complete. Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing…It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own.”
*Acknowledgements to David Abram, eco-philosopher and anthropologist, for his inspiring gift of re-envisioning our place in the more-than-human world.
