The meek don't inherit the earth, but maybe they should. There's more to goodness than truth, and right action. There's more than all this bloody talking. All these different groups with their engaged members thinking they're changing the world when what they are doing is peddling more snake oil.
Oh I sound bitter.
I was rereading last night a paper by the somatologist Elizabeth Behnke. She calls it "the prectise of peace" and she explains it in terms of phenomenology. Behnke had an issue with her cat and a stray fighting. She had tried to help the stray but he remained semi-wild and did not get on with JoJo, her house cat. She realised that when she went out, after hearing the preliminary squeals, she was anxious and afraid. She assumed a cat fight was about to break out and she wanted to control the situation. It didn't work, so she tried something else: grounding, softening her gaze, opening her heart, and having a mindset of not-knowing. Behnke found that the cats responded, through their shared corporeality in that shared space.
She writes of grounding:
[L]etting weight settle can be a lucidly lived "act" or "gesture"30 that moves through me as a whole and grounds me more fully in the situation rather than withdrawing me from it and shunting me into the status of a spectator. And with this, my body is neither a mere point of view on things nor an objective mass overÂagainst "me" (N 287), but a situated reflexivity, a "sensing sensible" (N 286). For to sense myself bodily in this way is simultaneously to be related to something other than my own mass (N 270): it is to have a position in the world (N 287), on the EarthÂground, with my fellow creatures in a shared field.
On softening her eyes, she says:
[I]f I soften my eyes and heighten proprioceptive, kinaesthetic awareness from within, I am not only relieving some of the tension within the interkinaesthetic field, but am displaying a less confrontational style of intercorporeal comportment within our shared communicative field.
The open heart is really interesting:
In a series of studies, James J. Lynch found that our blood pressure fluctuates during conversation: it rises when we speak and falls when we listen,38 as though a shared tide ebbs and flows across the communal body of the speakers. Even babies had higher blood pressure when crying than when quiet.39 Furthermore, persons with "Type A personality," who are apparently at greater risk for heart disease, typically speak rapidly, loudly, aggressively, and "with a certain breathless intensity," often interrupting and speaking over others.40 "Rather than listening," Lynch tells us, ''our hypertensive patients appeared to be preoccupied, thinking about what they wanted to say next, almost as if they were continuously engaged in a contest or fight rather than in a comfortable dialogue."41 And whereas a normal person's blood pressure falls, sometimes even below the baseline level, when attentively listening, the hypertensive person's blood pressure may fail to fall back to the baseline level, and may then rise even higher the next time he or she speaks.42 In contrast, people talking to their pets—typically, talking softly, gently, and slowly while stroking them—did not display the usual rise of blood pressure while speaking.43 And the heart rate and blood pressure of dogs varies significantly with the presence of a human being and the quality of the interaction.44 All of this leads Lynch to challenge the Cartesian physiology of irrevocably separate bodies and to propose that we are linked in a larger, "communal" body.45 Or to put it in Merleau-ÂPonty's own words, we are "like organs of one single intercorporeality,"46 "coÂfunctioning" as one body,47 participating in a shared flesh.
Finally:
I am no longer the observer of what I have instantly, preÂreflectively perceived and reacted to as an "incipient cat fight," but a coÂparticipant, along with my fellow sentient beings, in a fluid situation—not only one in which "what will happen next" is not determined in advance, but one in which "what kind of situation this is" is open in principle to transformation. In this way a local, situated moment of openness allows "something else" to emerge, inaugurating a "new dimensionality" (N 268), a new style of intercorporeal comportment, with attendant new sensibilities, new "readinesses," new interests, and a new sense of the "kinship of all life."6
This is how I relate to the young blackbird... because I think she models this way of being for me.
Comments