Guest Writer
My Life as a Pantheist
By Sharman Apt Russell, 2-06-07
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| Photo by Heather McKee. | |
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This is the second chapter in Sharman Apt Russell’s next book, tentatively titled My Life as a Pantheist, to be published by Counterpoint Press in 2008. It explores the history and worldview of pantheism – the belief that the universe is an interconnected whole that human beings can rightly consider sacred. This chapter, a work-in-progress, first appeared in the winter edition of Camas, a literary magazine published by the University of Montana environmental studies graduate program.
From inside my house, which serves as a blind, I am using binoculars to watch the greater sandhill cranes fifty feet away. This family group, a female, male, and adolescent, are digging through a flooded field of clover for insects and grubs. The greater sandhill crane is about four feet high, not as tall as an emu (six feet) or an ostrich (eight feet) but impressive enough to make you pause. Birds shouldn’t be this big. Birds are tiny, modest, brown blurs flitting from branch to branch. Birds don’t reach up to your chest with wings stretching out in a vampyrian cloak and a dagger-sharp bill that could gut a coyote. The two adults in my field have slate-gray plumage brightened by a white chin, cheek, and upper throat. The juvenile’s head is tawny brown with a mottled body of brown and gray. Suddenly the female gets excited, perhaps by a bull snake in the grass, and the patch of naked red skin on her forehead turns brighter red, engorged with blood. I can actually see this through my binoculars. She raises her wings, and the red patch is hidden. She jumps slightly, an awkward hop into the air. I wonder if she is about to dance. The juvenile bird moves back, as if scared or warned.
Cranes have a long adolescence, not breeding until four years or later. They mate for life. Although few in the wild live for more than twenty-five years, a male Siberian crane in captivity was believed to be eighty-three when he died, the proverbial game old bird still fathering chicks into his late seventies. Theoretically, the female I am watching now could have been coming to this field, every year, for half my lifetime. Nothing much has changed from her point of view. The Gila River shifted course, some cottonwood trees grew taller, other trees fell down. This year, a big box appeared on the land, a woman inside watching.
To my disappointment, the female does not dance but folds in her wings and holds still. Cranes can look oddly human, with their long legs, erect stance, and series of well-considered actions: one foot carefully in front of the other, a lowering of the neck, a jab at the ground, a raising of the head, a stately movement forward. Ten birds in a field resemble a scene of peasant farmers, efficiently going about their task. Fifty birds look like a convention. There is an air of gossip and professional opportunity, a constant and subtle flow, exchanges over territory and status, significant preening, a single wing stretch, a double wing stretch, an alert stare. If alarmed, the entire convention will spread their wings, flap, and fly away—their gurgles, knocks, and rattles filling the air. Family members, in particular, keep a constant vocal contact, staying together in the confusion of take-off. Any allusion to humanity is now dispelled, for the sound of cranes is distinctly inhuman, weird and prehistoric.
I hear that sound daily now, in mid-November, as small groups like this fly here and there, looking for a better field or just a change of pace, something different. Ornithologists describe the call of the sandhill crane as a bugle-like garroooo-a-a-a or more simply gar-oo-oo, which is absurd. It doesn’t sound like that at all. It doesn’t sound like anything I would be able to describe. The word throaty comes to mind, but that seems obvious. Still, something tracheal, vibrational, jazzy is going on, like the Latin American instrument guiro used in bossa nova music and played by sliding a wooden stick across the grooves in a carved gourd. In his seminal book Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold side-stepped the issue and wrote instead, “When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution,” referring to the fact that sandhill cranes have been around for nine million years, our oldest known living bird species.
The female changes her mind about something, lifts her wings again, and still does not dance. Instead she takes a running start into the wind. With wings fully extended, she springs upward, flapping strongly, the upstroke more rapid than the down as she gains altitude. The male and juvenile follow. This family and their flock will stay in the Gila Valley about four months, defining our winter. In late February, they will fly north again, stopping for nearly two months in southern Colorado before ending up, if lucky, at the same nesting site they chose last year. Home is an extended range of over 2000 miles. Home is a loop, a cycle of scenery, a rhythmic motion back and forth.
Aldo Leopold also wrote, “The physics of beauty is one department of natural science still in the Dark Ages. Not even the manipulators of bent space have tried to solve its equations. Everyone knows that the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead.”
Subtract the greater sandhill crane and the Gila Valley—with its coyotes, foxes, bears, mountain lions, bobcats, javelina, deer, cows, horses, dogs, cats, skunks, beavers, raccoons, porcupines, coatimundis, rabbits, hares, gophers, mice, packrats, wrens, sparrows, thrashers, woodpeckers, flycatchers, owls, hawks, eagles, and innumerable insects—would seem empty.
The early Greeks had a fondness for cranes, which they captured and domesticated. The Greek word for cranes, geranos, comes from the myth of Gerania, the leader of a tribe of pygmies doomed to wage war against these birds as punishment for neglecting the gods. Apollo himself liked to turn into a crane. Mercury invented the Greek alphabet after watching cranes fly. As a flock, cranes have a flexible formation. The chevron pattern undulates and changes. The lead crane moves back. Another crane drifts ahead. A new letter appears in the sky. Individually, cranes can look like letters, too. The long legs of the bird usually trail straight behind, the long neck pointed forward, amazing flying sticks! (In cold weather, young birds sometimes tuck their legs against their bodies.) But on landing, the legs drop, a sudden weight directed down. The crane cups her wings and spreads her tail, falling like a parachute and flapping quickly at the last moment to break her descent. A reverse L, gamma in Greek. An inverted V or lambda.
In a story from the sixth century B.C., the lyric poet Ibycus was attacked by bandits and fatally wounded. Dying, he saw a flock of cranes pass overhead and told his murderers that the birds would revenge him. Later, in the Corinth marketplace, one of the robbers saw the same flock and cried out, perhaps as a joke, “Behold, the avengers of Ibycus!” Overheard, the man was questioned and confessed. “The cranes of Ibycus” became a Greek proverb signifying the discovery of a crime through divine intervention.
The sixth century B.C. also saw the rise of the philosopher-scientist, the beginning of Western science, the first known pantheists. These men were concerned with the physical structure of the world, and they rejected mythology as an explanation. They didn’t believe in Apollo or Mercury or the cranes of Ibycus. We know them mostly from the writings of later historians, including Aristotle who described them as physici, interested in finding logical principles within nature, as opposed to theologi, satisfied with the rule of supernatural beings.
The multitalented Thales—philosopher , astronomer, statesman, engineer—came from Miletus, a city-state on the coast of what is now Turkey. He was said to have predicted the eclipse of 585 B.C., which gave him considerable cachet among the sea-faring Greeks, always interested in what the heavens were doing. Thales determined that the world consisted of one unifying substance, and that substance was water. Perhaps he meant that everything came from water or perhaps that everything, ultimately, was made of water—in the way that vapor and ice, gas and matter, were once liquid. Thales further reasoned that the earth floated on water, an idea which he used to explain earthquakes. Although he is quoted as saying, “The world is full of gods,” a likely interpretation is that he saw the world as infused with a life-force that was powerful and eternal and therefore divine.
A pupil of Thales, Anaximander believed that the basic stuff of the world, “the principle and element of existing things,” was not water, air, fire, or earth—or anything we can see with the naked eye. He called it apeiron, and he considered this basic stuff to be powerful, eternal, and divine. According to Anaximander, animal life on earth also began with a “separating out” from slime or moist matter heated by the sun. The first men and women grew from embryo to puberty inside fishlike creatures—or possibly were themselves similar to fish—from which they emerged, able now to survive on land. The philosopher’s account of human origin is the first on record to be rational, not mythological.
My husband’s favorite philosopher is Heraclitus, who came after Thales but was still active in the sixth century B.C. Heraclitus was more interested in the inner world than the outer. He is commonly known as a misanthrope, a riddler, and a literary stylist. His pithy sayings include, “I went in search of myself,” “One can not step twice into the same river,” and “The way up and down is one and the same.” The epigrams require some pondering, but if you have ever read any philosophy at all, you will only feel grateful to this man for the brevity of his language. In the work of Heraclitus, a basic doctrine is that all things change. Life is flux. Therefore, conflict is inevitable. “War is father of all and king of all.” At the same time, Heraclitus believed in an ultimate unity which reconciled opposites. “God is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger.”
For Heraclitus, the task of a human being is to seek wisdom through listening to the logos, a word for the basic principles or law underlying the universe. Although Heraclitus’ sense of the divine is pantheistically vague, logos, fire, god, and Zeus are all expressions he uses to describe the ineffable, ever-changing, ever-divisive oneness of life. “Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.”
What we know of Heraclitus is based on a few remaining fragments and the perceptions of later philosophers who didn’t like him. Some version of this is true for all the early Greeks; our history is another kind of mythology. The sixth century B.C. involved a paradigm shift, a new way of thinking and seeing which would be interpreted by Plato and Aristotle nearly two hundred years later and by Plutarch and others hundreds of years after that.
Twenty years after the death of Heraclitus, Democritus was born. Democritus believed in tiny indivisible atoms or atomos, which careen about in empty space until they collide and bond and become those things which are familiar to us: dirt, ants, Uncle Lou. Similarly-shaped atoms tend to attract each other, perhaps with little hooks to help them attach. Everything is made of atoms, constantly bombarded by other atoms, and constantly leaking atoms. We hear and see and smell as a result of small amounts of atoms entering our body to be processed by the collection of atoms which is our body—and our mind. When we die, our atoms disperse and go on to bond with something else. It is all about the motion of extremely small, invisible particles.
As one wag said, “There is almost no view so crazy that you can’t find some Greek philosopher who held it.”
Democritus (460-370 B.C.) and the better-known Socrates (469-399 B.C.) lived in the same time period, although they did not have much to say to each other. Democritus is labeled a pre-Socratic, as are Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximander, and many other philosophers. The term pre-Socratic sounds diminutive, as though these men were a kind of opening act before the Real Philosopher takes the stage. In fact, their intentions were simply different. They were interested in the nature of the world, Socrates in how men should live in the world. They were interested in science, Socrates in ethics.
From my house in the Gila Valley, in the early winter sunsets of November and December, I watch the long-legged, long-necked sandhill cranes fly across the field like slow-motion arrows. They rattle eerily. They call to each other, garroooo-a-a-a gurgle-gurgle-khrrrr-khrrrr-khrrrr. The mated pairs especially do not want to lose each other in the darkening air as they navigate to where they will roost for the night, standing in shallow water, one leg raised.
The sun sets to my right, west, the light behind the cottonwood trees pinking and yellowing, pearly-white, like the inside of certain shells. A few clouds gloom the east, blue-black rolls with a stern demeanor. In front of me, south, is the panorama of sky above Bear Mountain and Telephone Mountain and the more distant, rumpled Black Hills. The color blue deepens to cerulean, a hint of turquoise. A cloud flares orange. It is a landscape painting, a Constable moment, different every day and night, every moment of day and night. The light fades. The planet Venus remains, unblinking, unfailing, like a good friend.
I have come to live here, in the country, for this sky. The Greeks were intensely interested in the weather, the movement of sun and moon, the changing stars. I am also interested but not for any practical reason. I do not have a ship to navigate or an eclipse to predict. Mainly I need to look at the sky in order to feel there is a reason for getting up, making the bed, going to work. I think it is that important, to see something grand and beautiful every day, to feel some part of me relax and loosen into that space.
This sky, like all the skies I have ever seen, holds no grief or suffering, no emotions except the ones I create, the gentle pleasure of personification—those furrowed brows to the east—the childlike innocence of puffy white balls, the majesty of flat-bottomed ships. Similarly, the philosophy of Thales and Anaximander and Heraclitus holds no grief or human drama, no tears or laughter. We do not know if these men ever had brothers or sisters, married, had children, loved these children, lost someone they loved, anguished, doubted. It seems only that they thought about the world, sauntered along the beach, poked at a tide pool, and came up with some theories. The world is made of water. The world is made of air.
Of course, that is not how life is. That is not how we live. My own life was shaped by the death of my father, a Kansas farm boy who went off at seventeen to World War II, joined the Air Force, and became a test pilot. In a profession that takes bravery for granted, he was known for being brave. In 1956, he tested the X-2 rocket plane and set a speed record, climbing high into the stratosphere, high above the clouds, moving three times the speed of sound. In the descent, the plane went out of control, and he died in the crash. I was two years old. My sister was five. My father was thirty-two. Almost immediately, my mother had to leave the military base and make her way as a single parent. Many years later, when my own children were almost grown, she wondered out loud how we had survived all that, how she had walked about like a zombie, barely functional, hard on her, hard on her two daughters. She never remarried.
I was too young to know my father. But my sister remembers a dream shortly after his death. He came into her room, sat on her bed, and told her everything would be okay. She felt comforted, a dream that would last all her life. I found comfort, too, in my father’s decency and heroism. He had been a good son on the Kansas farm, stringing popcorn for the family Christmas tree. Once he had saved a man’s life by smashing open the canopy of a burning plane, despite the danger of the plane exploding. (The man lived but lost both feet.) Even so, my mother protested, he was a normal fun-loving adult, the sort who drank martinis and wore a lampshade on his head at Air Force parties.
In my own childhood, growing up in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, single parent households were not common. I felt different, and I dramatized my father’s absence. When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, I wept more than the other fourth-graders. Later I read about my father in my grandmother’s scrapbooks, articles and pictures about his death, and I internalized him, the Hero, the purer and more ideal Form. In essence, he came and sat on my bed. He told me he loved me, would always love me. Everything would be okay.
At the same time, of course, I should be ready for death. It would come quickly, at the most inconvenient moment, say when you had two small children. You would never really recover. You would grieve and grieve for what could not be. You would taste bitterness and bile all your life. This kind of loss could break you. It could harm your children. God was a sniper in the sky, impersonal, like one of those soldiers in Bosnia. Look, a red kerchief. Bang. Too bad for her, crossing the marketplace at the wrong time.
From that date, 1956, until now, fifty years later, nothing very bad has happened in my life. No one I love has died. No one I love has a degenerative disease or been in a terrible car accident. It really seems remarkable to me. Obviously, this run of luck can not continue. Eventually I will get breast cancer. My husband will have a stroke. A truck will turn left without signaling. If this seems morbid, it is also true. This is what happens to people. We all die.
The pantheism of the pre-Socratics had little to say about death. But two other schools of early Greek philosophy, Epicureanism and Stoicism, did.
Epicurus began teaching some eighty years after Socrates. Like most philosophers of this time, he was concerned with how men should live their lives. The goal for Epicurus was tranquility, “freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.” In the commune he established in Athens, this meant a simple life, with a simple, plentiful diet and little indulgence. A man should not go hungry, but nor should he overeat, since eventually that would reduce his tranquility. A model of moderation, it is a linguistic irony that his name evolved into the word epicure, a mild pejorative for someone who excessively enjoys food.
In many ways, Epicurus foreshadowed modern ideas. He adopted the theory of Democritus and taught that nothing existed except atoms and the void in which they collided and bonded and collided and dispersed. He expanded this view by suggesting that atoms occasionally swerve, making an unpredictable sideways jump. This unpredictable swerve helped atoms bump into each other and brought into nature a certain randomness—changing a mechanistic universe to something much more interesting, full of chance and opportunity.
In such a universe, which was infinite and full of infinite worlds, complex forms naturally arose. As one Epicurean explained, given enough time and space, atoms moved and met “in all manner of ways” and all possible combinations. Eventually these became “the beginnings of great things, of earth and sea and sky and the generation of living creatures.” To explain the well-ordered designs of nature, the followers of Epicurus took up the theory of an earlier pre-Socratic who had described a version of natural selection: good biological designs tended to survive and reproduce, and bad ones did not.
For the most part, Epicurus was a practical man who thought we should trust our senses. Otherwise, life would get too confusing and untranquil. But we also needed to exercise judgment. Our perception of the world could be distorted. The gods were a good example of this. Epicurus acknowledged that they might exist, since so many people had seen and talked about them for so long. But immortal creatures such as Apollo or Mercury were not likely to be what we imagined, for as they entered our senses—in thin streams of ethereal atoms—we processed them imperfectly into stories and dreams. In truth, the gods were blissful beings who had no interest in us. And no power over us.
By this time, philosophy was less for the elite and more for the common man (but not woman or slave). For Epicurus, philosophy should make you happy. First, physically, you needed to be well-fed, warm, and comfortable, and not much more than that. Psychologically, you needed to be free of fear, anxiety, and confusion. This was especially true of death. Tales of an unhappy after-life were propaganda and scare-mongering. Neither the mind nor soul survived death. The atoms simply dispersed. There was nothing left to suffer. Only sensation causes suffering and death is a cessation of that. Since we will never experience death, why should we fear it?
As Epicurus advises, “There is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.”
You may be thinking what I am thinking. This makes sense from the perspective of the dead. But to lose a wife or husband or child to death can be painful, and full of sensation, unpleasant and untranquil. In the remaining writings we have, Epicurus says nothing about this subject. He does, however, speak of physical suffering, which can be extended to the emotional: “Great pains quickly put an end to life; long-enduring pains are not severe.” In short, by definition, unendurable pain is not endured. We die or recover. Chronic pain can be endured, and with the help of philosophy, moments of happiness will begin to dominate.
A second system of philosophy, more clearly pantheistic, also appeared in the third century B.C. The Stoics shared some important beliefs with Epicurus and his followers. Both promoted virtue as central to a good life and downplayed conventional success such as fame and fortune. Both prized equanimity. Both thought the world was composed of one substance and rejected Plato’s idea of two (one material, and one immaterial, those pure and ideal Forms which include the human soul). Both were materialists who denied the existence of an after-life.
Their differences were more significant. For his material substance, Epicurus saw atoms swerving randomly. The Stoics believed in a matter interpenetrated with energy, or a fiery breath, the combination of which was the body and mind of God. Borrowing from Heraclitus, this God or Providence or Destiny was also called the logos, and because the logos was rational, beneficent, and perfect, so was the universe. Everything was working just as it was supposed to work. Everything was fated, even our pain and suffering, which was not really evil—there could be no evil in the body and mind of God—but just what is. No harm could be done a man except the harm he did himself by not following the logos within him, by acting without virtue.
Since everything was interconnected, virtue included duty to the human community. The Stoics believed in public service. Moreover, just as our inner logos reflected the larger logos, so the Universe-as-God was made with us in mind. Plants and animals had been created for our purposes. The human task was to be grateful. Whereas an Epicurean would avoid pain and seek pleasure, a Stoic would accept both, cheerfully, without undue emotion. A Stoic was also interested in reason and in knowing the logos better. Accordingly, the early Greek Stoics developed complicated systems of logic and natural science which are virtually unreadable.
As for death....death was a comfort. Death reminded us of our fleeting existence and the unimportance of worldly success. Suicide was a good option if things got too seemingly unpleasant, although for obvious reasons (such as public service) suicide should not be overly encouraged. Still, one Stoic philosopher asked rhetorically: What is the highway to freedom? And answered: any vein in your body.
The Stoics also had an answer for personal loss or grief: “Never say of anything, ‘I lost it,’ but say ‘I gave it back.’ Has your child died? It was given back. Has your wife died? She was given back. Has your estate been taken from you? Was not this also given back?”
Nothing we have is ours. It is all temporary. It is all on loan.
Most modern-day pantheists would feel an affinity with Epicurus and the Stoics, although we might argue with some of the details. We also try to avoid fear and confusion. We also seek tranquility and acceptance.
In an article in the magazine published by the World Pantheism Movement, a pantheist writes about the death of his twenty-one-year-old daughter. The ritual of grieving was important. The parents insisted on a green funeral, burying their child in a wooden casket where she would naturally decompose and return to the earth. The Unitarian minister, carefully referred to as a panentheist (believing that God is immanent in the world but also a presence outside the world), spoke of how this young woman would eventually become the dogwood flowers, the dew on the branches, and the caterpillar drinking the dew. Next the mourners walked through the woods near the grave site, startling up a doe and fawns, enjoying the sun and wind, what the father described as “the divinity of nature.” When these parents visit their child’s grave, they listen to the sound of owls and coyotes, to the hoarse rumble of a bullfrog, and “We know where Chez is. She is the spider web, the circling hawk, the butterfly, the sunset painted by west Texas grass fires.”
There are other ways for a pantheist to grieve. In a New York Times interview with novelist Carlos Fuentes, the author speaks of the death of his two adult children. “You go on. You go on. You bring the person you love inside you. That is how you cope. You make him or her live within you. The whole experience I had with my children is in me. It is nowhere else I can see…the experience of having them within myself is what matters.”
You bring the person inside you. I understand completely. No one did it better than I, given the opportunity so young to build my own mythology, the Hero Father, the man soaring into the clouds, and falling from them, too, never a disappointment, never a cross word between us.
I look at these grand skies in the Gila Valley, this brilliant blue turning deeper cerulean, trails of water vapor flaring pink, the dark roll of stratocumulus traveling north to drop snow in the Mogollon Mountains. I stand in this grace, space and light, and I do not think consciously of my father, Mel Apt, dressed as I have always known him in the 8x12 black and white publicity photos from Bell Aircraft: a balding man wearing a flight jacket, posed before a rocket plane, his smile genuine.
I do, however, feel a connection. I know he loved clouds. In home movies, my father panned over my mother and the two little girls she held by the hand to focus on a storm drifting over the Grand Canyon. He was drawn instinctively to that beauty. He wanted to watch, over and over, what the sky looked like in 1955.
It looks much the same as today. It has no human sorrow or drama, no history, no meaning except what we give it, our overlay of nuance and myth. We tell ourselves stories about the world, and I have no quarrel with that. Metaphor is how we think and play. Thinking and playing are who we are. My science is not a denial of that. My pantheism is not a denial of human emotion or of how these emotions entangle metaphorically with all those atoms colliding and dispersing and reuniting.
“There are gods in everything,” Thales said. He did not abandon the story of his time but referred to it affectionately. Apollo is in the crane. And our beloved daughter, our much-missed child, is in the spider web, the hawk, and the butterfly.
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