Had one of those convergence/synchronicity moments today. I was reading a 2006 article by British anthropologist Tim Ingold, referenced in Pantheologies, called "Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought." Ingold defends what he calls the "animic perspective" against the views of western anthropologists as well as scientists. This condition of being alive to the world experiences the world as one of continuous birth (a phrase from a Wemindji Cree hunter), all of us helping form a meshwork as we go our various ways, something which western thought fundamentally misconstrues as an "environment" outside us.
Importantly, all of us includes not just people and animals and plants but celestial forces, too, sun and moon and especially wind and thunder.
In the animic ontology, what is unthinkable is the very idea that life is played out upon the inanimate surface of a ready-made world. Since living beings … make their way through a nascent world rather than across its pre-formed surface, the properties of the medium through which they move are all-important. That is why the inhabited world is constituted in the first place by the aerial flux of weather rather than by the grounded fixities of landscape.
Our actual living is concealed from us by imagining the earth beneath our feet as solid but inanimate material and the air above as inanimately immaterial, with us, part material and part immaterial but somehow other to both, in but not of the world. We could learn from animists to notice everything interacting in its pathways, and how at every moment to respond to the flux of the world with care, judgement and sensitivity.
Good stuff! But then he wrote
In this world the earth, far from providing a solid foundation for existence, appears to float like a fragile and ephemeral raft, woven from the strands of terrestrial life, and suspended in the great sphere of the sky.
and I was flying, I was reminded both of my favorite line from G. K. Chesterton's book on Francis of Assisi (whom Lynn White thinks the closest thing to a Christian animist), how he has a vision of Assisi as if suspended in air... And my favorite line from Willa Cather's Death comes for the Archbishop, describing the wondrous sky of New Mexico: Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. Suspended indeed!
And then Ingold went on
far from facing each other on either side of an impenetrable division between the real and the immaterial, earth and sky are inextricably linked within one indivisible field, integrated along the tangled life-lines of its inhabitants. Painters know this. They know that to paint what is conventionally called a ‘landscape’ is to paint both earth and sky, and that earth and sky blend in the perception of a world undergoing continuous birth.
Painters! Ingold paraphrases Merleau-Ponty's praise of Cézanne's painting - His vision is not of things in a world, but of things becoming things, and of the world becoming a world - and quotes Klee too. But I was of course thinking of Monet, and that poem of Lisel Mueller's, which I discovered, entirely unrelated, just two days ago:
"Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought," Ethnos 71:1 (March 2006): 9–20
