Another Way of Knowing

Laurel Thompson: Things Are Not Us
But They Are Like Us

All that can be seen, heard, experienced - these are what I prefer.

~ Heracleitus ~

It’s been a while since anyone declared that ordinary things like cups and shoes and plastic bags or rocks have magical powers with the capacity to enlighten us about the universe. Initiates to the Eleusinian Mysteries knew that ears of grain symbolize the fertility of the earth. And religions have always had sacred objects - shrouds, masks, menorahs - that had hallowed significance for their followers. But it was not until 1945, when Heidegger uncovered what he called “the fourfold” - earth and sky, divinities and mortals, the different dimensions in which things exists - that someone realized the benefits of not treating the hats and shovels and cardboard boxes around us in the usual way as “objects” but rather of perceiving them as fellow subjects, as indicators, as compasses, to the extravagant phenomenon we are in. This awakening to the mysterious nature of the furniture of our lives was not an isolated incident. It heralded a shift in consciousness that still continues as more and more people learn to “dwell” on earth.

I didn’t know anything about Heidegger when I started experimenting with perception back in 1963. I was a Science major at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, an 18-year-old intellectual hobo obsessed with “seeing” because my family had recently decamped to Jamaica and I was still recovering from the shock of moving from a quiet, well-organized, Canadian suburb to a beautiful, life-filled, tropical island. The quiet, often serious gloom of Toronto hadn’t prepared me for the hot humid flowery violence of an African island in the Caribbean and though I’d come back up to Canada to go to university determined to be a scientist not a professional musician, I was still very conscious of what I’d seen there and walked around finding similar opportunities to be amazed and startled. Like a baby slapped by doctors to get her heart going, my senses had been stung into a new state of alertness by the bold flagrancy of the island.

But while Jamaica changed the picture in my mind of what the world was like, it also made me realize that I didn’t know what was going on, that the world had depths I was incapable of fathoming. I liked the Britishness of the island, its hints of an old established culture whose familiar authors and famous political institutions still factored in people’s lives. I also admired the Jamaican way of life which was peopled by all kinds of characters and customs I’d never heard of. Rastafarians. Pantomime. Reggae. It was the first truly Black culture I’d ever encountered and while I remained clearly outside it, the richness of it intrigued me. Fat higglers carrying huge quantities of oranges, bananas, pineapple, breadfruit on their heads. Donkeys strapped down with cloth-wrapped bundles and baskets going every which way. Jump-up music coming up at night from the candle-lit tin-roofed shacks and shanties at the foot of Blue Mountain. Less intimidating than the wealthy, poor people simply move the things they need to survive around them like props to create a home for themselves.

This partial awakening to what I now think of as the true reality of our situation was constant when I was seventeen. I looked everywhere, around buildings, inside coffee cups, under newspapers, between branches, across waves, for clues about the purpose and meaning of the strange setup in which I’d suddenly found myself. It’s not that I didn’t “know” in Canada that the world was huge and complex and full of life, it’s that I hadn’t seen it. It hadn’t hit me physically. Life was more intellectualized in Canada. There was more order and restraint. People were always trying to do the right thing by each other. Or maybe it was just that in Jamaica there was more spilling out. There was certainly more inequality. I saw people living so close to nature it was as if they were camping, so primitive were their homes and so undeveloped their amenities. Children, donkeys, flowers, music - by flying from Toronto to Kingston I’d moved from one part of a magnificent stage-set to another and the gorgeous showiness of Jamaica floored me like a wave.

So when I first began to think about “things” I was totally unconscious of phenomenology and given my bent towards music and poetry would probably have had a difficult time understanding it, in any case. But I think I found what Heidegger was talking about just the same. Maybe it was in the air. Maybe “things” started to speak up everywhere in the early sixties only to be ignored once more and told to stay put. Though my lapsed United Church of Canada background didn’t encourage me to think in terms like “divinity” and “mortal,” I still knew that what I eventually uncovered by the side of a road in New Brunswick was powerful and extremely mysterious, and if I’ve spent a good part of my life trying to find words for what I did so that others could try it too, it’s because in contrast to Heidegger, my experience was a perceptual not an intellectual one and it’s hard to represent perceptual things. I didn’t conceive a new idea like “the fourfold” when I was eighteen. I actually saw something. What did I see? I saw that where I was, was not where I thought it was. That it’s much bigger and wider and more beautiful and more awe-inspiring. And slapping a word like “divinity” on it didn’t seem to me to be the point.

The difference between an intellectual and a perceptual discovery is important for what follows so maybe I should go back a bit. I first realized that I have two forms of knowledge, not just one, while playing my violin in Jamaica. After hours and hours of practice, I’d grow bored with trying to play difficult notes beautifully and somewhat shamefacedly lay down my instrument to read a book. Though I loved the music I was working on and dreamt one day of playing in a fine symphony orchestra, those orange and blue Penguins and creaky volumes I’d get from the Jamaica Public Library by such old evolutionists as Ernst Haeckel, beckoned to me seductively and I couldn’t seem to ignore them. I couldn’t seem to get them out of my mind. Instead of pouring my soul into the music in front of me or learning how to do spicatto, my mind kept returning to questions about biology and the meaning of human evolution.

This tug of war between music and science only subsided when with much regret I decided against going to Eastman School of Music in Rochester and enrolled in university in New Brunswick instead. The books won. I couldn’t resist the power of ideas. My sensibility was so divided that even though I have strong musical instincts and showed promise as a violinist, my intellectual instincts are even stronger and the language of books kept echoing in my brain. I couldn’t think musically for as long as I could think about ideas.

Now that I’ve lived for many years with the choice I made, I can see better what the dilemma was. I was wrestling with two parts of my brain. One part likes to explore the world perceptually. It picks up on the features of all the beautiful things that surround us, smells their life, feels their skin, listens to sounds changing, harmonizing, unfolding. While the other wants to move concepts around. It wants to substitute linguistic representations for all the ideas and luscious perceptual experiences I have had or read about. Why? So that I know better where I’m going and what I’m doing. It gives me the map I use to see what the world is like.

Both parts are necessary, of course. “Neither taken alone knows reality in its completeness,” William James pointed out. But it’s remarkable how hard it is to keep them in balance. One always seems stronger than the other. Though I continued to play the violin in my spare time and even went on a concert tour of the province with students at the School of Music, the intellectual eventually dominated with me and I went on to get degree after degree until I now have four behind my name. What happened? I’m not sure. But mapping the world interested me and the strong linguistic slant in North American culture, especially Toronto, prevailed against that part of me which loves and enjoys music.

Shortly after moving to Sackville I started to think a lot about “things.” What were these mute presences sitting beside me on the floor or the road? How did they get here? Were they alive? Could they think? Feel?

The absolute strangeness of a world that has both live and dead things in it revealed itself to me in New Brunswick. Perhaps because it was so old and quiet, I found the remote silence of things there fascinating. Fields, farms, wooden fences, ploughs - I felt like an intruder breaking in upon them as I walked in and out of town exploring the countryside and I’d often stare at them for long periods of time trying to soak in their meaning. I’d been inching closer towards “things” ever since I saw all sorts of new “things” in Jamaica. But they became even more compelling when in the stillness of a small town in an underdeveloped province I saw their edges and corners against the backdrop of the huge New Brunswick sky.

After class I would wander down dirt roads and let myself experience the life that was there. The skies were beautiful. There were rarely any people or signs of people. Maybe once in a while an abandoned house or car. Under the weight of so much natural life I began to wonder if I too wasn’t just a thing? If I too wouldn’t live and die and go back to the soil just like these fences and dilapidated farm buildings? The mystery of this astounded me. Why were we here if all we did was grow up, eat a lot of food, get a job, make money, then fall apart? Surely there had to be more to it than that? When everything is so beautiful and when we feel so much?

I couldn’t figure it out. How could it be so silent and gorgeous out here where nature was slowly passing through its seasons and so noisy and purposeful and silly back in the Women’s Residence? What was the connection between these two phenomena? How did human life get to be so different from everything else? Maybe the answer was right in front of me but I just couldn’t see it? All I could see were individual things - rocks, twigs, clumps of grass - and they weren’t saying anything. With the exception of Loren Eiseley, the books I’d found in the Mary Mellish Library didn’t say much about rocks and twigs. So what was I to do? Since “things” were all I had, I decided to look at them more closely. They were in the same predicament I was in - upright on the surface of the earth with no hot wires to Central Office. Maybe I could use them to figure out what’s going on?

You can see where thinking perceptually prompts you to cross some boundaries. The world isn’t divided up according to subjects or owners or jobs. It’s free and whole and irrefutably there. That’s because you’re responding to what’s in front of you, not some abstract entity in your head. You’re responding to the world, not your idea of the world, or at least you’re trying to respond to the world. Because of language, ideas get in the way of perception even when you are determined to keep them out. However, if you work at it you can slow them down, maybe even silence them altogether.

One day while walking along a road that overlooked the marshes, I decided that if I could just see where I was, I’d have a better sense of what was going on. Because things look different depending on where you are, in order to get a better sense of my situation, in order to get a sense of the whole I was in, maybe I needed to bring my knowledge of different points within the universe to bear upon my perception of an individual thing? I picked up a rock. If I could just imagine what it looked like from as many faraway places as I could think of, and if I could bring those points together all at once, maybe I could get a sense of the whole I was in? These points existed - on the Moon, on the Sun, on the roof of a shanty in Kingston, in the middle of a desert in Australia. So in order to realize the physical extent, the grandeur and complexity of where I was, shouldn’t I try to include them all in my consciousness? That way I’d “see” it whole, and if I could see it whole then maybe I’d know what it was?

Though it seemed like an impossible task, I pressed on. The silence of where I was goaded me to use my wits. I thought about all the places on the earth I’d visited, what they looked like and how they coexisted with where I was now in New Brunswick. My mind cast back to photographs and drawings I’d seen as I imagined landscapes in Europe, Asia, South America, northern Canada. Then I imagined sun and the moon and remembered photographs I’d seen of the moon’s surface. So strange and alien and yet part of my “world.” Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, supernovae, black holes. All of these “places” were dragged into my consciousness, some of them with great difficulty, because I wanted to develop a sense of universe and feel it at my back. To test my theory about how different points of view can coalesce into a picture of a whole, I needed to feel it there as I looked at a particular “thing.”

Though hard to sustain for very long, and difficult to do in much detail, the effort to imagine multiple landscapes simultaneously was relatively easy and as I looked at the rock, a strange thing occurred. A door seemed to unlock and a sense of enclosure disappeared. Suddenly the world was more wide open than before. More open. More arbitrary. More beautiful. It’s difficult to put my finger on the gorgeous freedom that surrounds everything when I look at things in this way. It’s as if they had a dusty yellow plastic covering I didn’t even know existed removed and are now reborn into another reality. They themselves are no different. Nothing physical has changed. The rock hadn’t budged from its place in my hand. But I now saw that it existed in a space that was much bigger than I realized. Much bigger, more stunning, more actual, more aggressive, more splendid. The world was actually quite fierce and I’d been a fool to think I could handle it.

I thought about trying to tell people what I had done but then I couldn’t figure out what to say. That “things” could be used as compasses to the universe? That “things” were doorways to another dimension? I could feel the foreheads wrinkle. I decided to keep it to myself for the time being. However, I was still a student and as soon as I returned to class, multiple currents of talk and debate on every other topic but perception soon swept me away. Within moments I’d forgotten what I saw. And though it would return to me at night and I’d lie in bed wondering what I’d done to find the world so unencased like that, so free and gorgeous, the difficulty of finding the right words to explain it was insurmountable. I’d lose my train of thought and sleep would soon overtake me.

Many years have passed since I did my little experiment on the road near the Bay of Fundy and having studied it and repeated it many times, I now think that the problem is language. Language is a representational system as well as a system of communication and while it has helped us take control of the earth and turn it into a habitat for humans, it also inserts itself easily between us and the direct perception of reality, making it difficult not only to see things the way they are but to talk about it too. This is because it’s a system of representation. It’s a system of analysis and control, not a system for apprehending beauty and mystery. It can be made to represent beauty and mystery, e.g. poetry, but its dominant use is as a tool for manipulating reality for human benefit. It’s a human tool so the nonhuman aspects of the world don’t do too well under its dominion. They get ignored or anthropomorphized so that their profound difference is not perceived. Representation is not equivalent to direct contact. As anyone knows who has witnessed a great event then read accounts of it afterwards, not only is there much that cannot be expressed linguistically, closer examination of what’s real reveals that it’s a whole different ballgame.

Switching places with the rock exposed me to something too huge for language to represent. By seeing a “thing” in the very largest context I could imagine, I freed myself from the framework through which I normally see rocks and roads, thereby letting real distances and real powers that are “out there” back into my consciousness. The yellow plastic that I saw is language. Language is necessary for me to have a self, get control over my life and live in a human community. But out from under it, or away from it, the world is no longer divided up into rocks and trees, classes and universities and other separate things but united in one huge phenomenon that dwarfs me and makes me feel very small.

It may seem as if I’m barking up the wrong tree attributing deceptive powers to language. What about poetry and prayer? Aren’t they attempts to go deeper into reality? And what about all the good work done by scientists? Aren’t many of them uncovering aspects of reality we didn’t even know existed before?

These activities are rich and neverending. But they are not direct contact. They may be about direct contact. They may frame in words or diagrams the truths some researcher has uncovered, thereby interpreting them according to the complex system we humans have established to control the world. But they are not direct contact itself. Or at least, they don’t stop with perception. Scientists may encounter amazing phenomena in their research that no one has ever seen before but science like poetry isn’t finished until someone has written a report or poem, until someone has represented it, after which the representation becomes the focus of attention. We only let a little bit of reality into our consciousness. But then the moment it has been put into words, the words generate more words and before you know it the original observation is buried beneath a ton of paper. It’s been swallowed up.

Why do we do this? Why can’t we have both perception and representation? Why would you even need words if you could make direct contact with the amazingly beautiful phenomenon we are in? If you could perceive it for yourself? And if you could perceive it for yourself, wouldn’t you know the difference between that and someone’s skilful representation of it in language? Isn’t it only because we’ve lost contact with what’s real that finding it again through words seems at all attractive? In fact, isn’t it because we allowed words to take the place of direct perception in the first place that we lost contact? Why did we allow language to take over our consciousness? If we’d stayed even halfway perceptual, we’d know there’s something “out there” that’s way beyond us and that can’t be represented.

So how do you stay perceptual? How do you keep hold of your other form of knowledge so that language doesn’t take over?

Start paying attention to things. The table where you are sitting now. The chair. Your shoes. The leaf on the grass. A rock by the side of the road. Pick out one thing from all the many many things that surround you now and focus on its integrity as a separate item. Its weight. Its presence. It doesn’t matter whether it’s natural or man-made, though natural things are easier to work with because they don’t have so many pre-scripted associations. But any thing will do because they’re all here; which is to say, they’re all on the surface of the earth. They’re all illuminated by the sun. It’s their presence on the surface of the earth under the sun that you want to try to catch hold of because there’s some information there that’s important and that may release you from your coffin.

Things are not us but they’re like us in that they too are in the huge phenomenon we call the universe. This means that if you could see where a “thing” is, if you could see a “thing” existing in relation to all the other places that you know exist - mountains, deserts, oceans, other planets, galaxies, supernovae, stars etc., then you could “read” where you are because for all intents and purposes you are just a thing too. Perceptually-speaking you are not much different from a shovel or loaf of bread or a floppy disk. You all occupy space. You’ve got color, shape. You’re illuminated by the sun. You may think you’re more complex than these things because you can move on your own steam and think and talk. You may think that because you are halfway aware and know all kinds of mathematical formulas or can recite Shakespeare you enjoy a “higher” state of consciousness than that box of cereal over there by the window. But from the point of view of someone who is just looking, you’re not all that different from the things that surround you and if you just refuse to be insulted by the comparison, you can do something pretty amazing.

Look at your “thing” as if it were another person. Study it closely and try to appreciate it for what it is as opposed to what you could do with it. This is hard because we’re accustomed to using things and not paying them much attention until they break or are worn out or no longer suit our purposes. Except for a few things in nature or beautiful works of art, our approach to most things is pretty exploitive and we’re not inclined to treat them with much respect. But if you force yourself to take them more seriously, if you slow down your eyes so that instead of sliding quickly over the tops of “things” they scour their edges searching for the place where they meet the air or touch the surface of a table or a floor, you’ll see something pretty startling. You’ll see that you are in something - a place, a situation - that is so real and actual and beautiful you can scarcely stand looking at it.

Once you’ve glimpsed that, once you’ve observed things raw as opposed to cooked, as it were, you may ask yourself what’s going on? Where are you, that such gorgeous vibrant luscious things are pushing at you from all sides? Have they always been doing this year after year and you just didn’t notice? Why is everything so beautiful? This is why Jamaica was such a powerful experience for me. This is what Jamaica felt like to me when I was seventeen. It felt as if I’d entered magic.

From here it’s just a matter of following certain steps to find the universe on earth. The “universe on earth” is what I now call the largest context in which we live, as opposed to the radically foreshortened one imposed on us by language and culture. Because things look different depending on where you are, in order to get a better sense of your situation, in order to get a sense of the whole you are in, you need to bring your knowledge of different points within the universe to bear upon your perception of a particular “thing.” You need to see it in its complete context. Not just the way it looks in your living room or garage but the way it looks given the fact that the living room is part of a house which is on a street which is in a city which is in a country which is part of a continent which is part of a planet etc. (There are several children’s books which go through this exercise to show youngsters where they live but it’s surprising that adults don’t pursue it.) In this way you will use the “thing” as a mirror. If you can see the “thing” in the context of the town in which you live, the region in which the town is a hub, the country in which the region is a part, the continent, the planet, the galaxy, etc., then you’ll be able to see where you are more clearly.

You’re combining your two forms of knowledge, perception and conception. On the one hand you’re going to look at something carefully and try to see it for its own sake. On the other, you’re going to stretch your imagination to conceive as many of the places that you know exist in the universe so that you can see the “thing” in its true context. Just as we observe people within different situations - as family members, as physical specimens, as voters - depending on what we are thinking about at the moment, we can study the things around us in the same way. We can see them as objects on the ground in front of us in Denver. As objects on the ground in Colorado. As objects on the ground in the United States. On the Earth. We can try to imagine how they would look from another planet. From another galaxy. From the outer limits of the universe, wherever these are.

By holding onto your perception of something - a rock, a shell, a book - it’s possible to move your inner eyes, your imagination, to take in all these other places. It’s really a question of holding several things in your consciousness at once, of remembering them all, for as you look at your “thing” all you’re doing is thinking about other points that exist at the same time. Your “thing” is one point and these are some of the other points that exist simultaneously in the amazing phenomenon we are in. The point from which you can see all of India, say. The point from which you can see all of Asia. The point from which you can see the Earth, etc.

But you’ve still got your eyes on a “thing.” You’re not letting yourself fly off all over the place because you’re hooked onto a physical spot, a real thing. You’re anchored. As your imagination encompasses all these other points that exist at the same time, the framework through which you normally perceive breaks open and you suddenly see much more than you saw before. The old categories disappear - bed, table, tree, grass - and things start thrusting at you in at you from all over as if you were a small animal in the forest. You have trouble holding onto your sense of self. A light comes on that takes your breath away. The universe is here.

I’ve been using things to find the presence of the universe here for so long it seems as if I’ve always known that the space I live in is hollow and that the winds that pass through come from far, far away. It’s chilling to know that you exist in such a huge dimension. It means that the distances you normally see are not the real distances. The real distances are much greater; in fact they’re overwhelming and you’d be crushed alive if you didn’t have a way to keep them from entering your consciousness. It’s also chilling to see the set-up. The earth is a stage. But who set it up? Who or what is watching us? These are questions that probably won’t be answered, if they ever are, until more people start looking at what’s around them.

Things are not us but they are like us and if you learn how to look at them in their actual context they become mirrors that reflect back to you the truth about where you are. Try it. It’s very simple. The universe is here. Simply by enlarging the context in which you perceive ordinary things, you will see signs of its presence and expand the ground of your being.