The Headlong Fall and Exile from the Garden of Eden

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1

Res ipsa loquitur. (A legal term referring to a self-evident truth literally translated as 'the thing speaks for itself').

Names kill!

This is not merely a reaction against my botanist/ornathologic friend's pathology of naming every plant or winged creature he sees twice (in English and in Latin) but a statement against the ever-decreasing mind of an increasingly scientistic and logical positivistic society that cannot get beyond segregation and objectification, and the ruling modes of thought of logic and reason. To be sure there are some very eloquent names out there, even some rather poetic Latin binomials - Saxifraga rotundifolia, Circaea lutetiana canadensis, Carlina acanthifolia that are not entirely logical or reasonable, but there is a danger that the name, instead of becoming a door which is opened onto a wider world, is a wall which stops and separates the observer from realising a fundamental truth. [In all fairness to my obsessive compulsive botanist friend, he realises this, that the name is a door and not a wall, and that, as the Physicist Richard Feynman once said, the name is just one step away from knowing nothing].

I recall reading a poem by the Scot Alisdair Reid called Growing, Flying, Happening in which he laments the pathology of naming, reiterating what many natives before him had already said, that to name was to miss the essence of what was being named:

Say the soft bird's name, but do not be surprised

to see it fall,

headlong, struck skyless, into its pigeonhole -

columba palumbus and you have it dead,

wedged, neat, unwinged in your head.

Aboriginal names, the (pre) Celtic or Druid tongue which might reveal something greater (and more inviting) than just an oftentimes banal and self-important name. But he can't. And it is here that I believe something vital has been lost, and covered up.

It is true that native peoples (are we not all aboriginals who have lost their way?), whether the Hopi, the Inuit, or the Tengri, the Druids, Celts or Picts, who are still connected intrinsically to the environment (and not ostracised from it as we in the developed west have become) do not have 'names' for 'things', rather, they have 'descriptions' for 'connectors' (there are no 'things' per se): the tree that oozes the yellow gunge; the plant that paralyses and heals the skin;  the ice that speaks and is not walkable. For these indigenous peoples who embody their terrain and effectively co-evolve with their environments as a single evolutionary organism, to exile their selves from the land that fed and sheltered them was to die. [The word exile itself gives you a clue to this death, from the Latin ex + solum, away from the soil]. The environment they inhabited was an immune system which served every purpose possible: medicinally, metaphysically, and nutritionally. In the so-called developed west, the 'advances' of medicine and psychiatry, food science and physical education, are just large (and expensive) woolly covers that have been pulled over our eyes to distract us from the fact that in allowing our selves to be separated from our environments, in transforming our environments from living breathing immune systems into lumber yards and theme parks, having degraded our soils (and thus our souls), we have effectively killed our selves, and are thus now the posthumous, walking dead. Names too, scientific or other (emphatically non-con-scientious, that is, standalone and unlinked to anything else) have contributed to this mass suicide of the self. Moreover, education as a whole, as Masanobu Fukuaka writes in The One-Straw Revolution is simply there because we do not know how to behave harmoniously anymore.

Whether this is down to Newtonian mechanics or Cartesian dualism, Galilieo or Copernicus, or Thomas Edison or Tesla, is neither here nor there. It is no use persecuting the dead. Rather persecute those who have followed it through and who for the life of them cannot see beyond it. The conspiracy of exile is so thick that man is blind to the truth of his self (Forgive them Father for they know not what they do). Man himself has become a mechanism, mechanical in his automated responses to his increasingly meaningless and banal hedonistic lifestyle, a standalone, skin-encapsulated entity, emphatically called 'Me',  that is in fact a parcel of walking, yet mostly sitting, dead flesh.