Belden Lane, Backpacking with the Saints
Words and language have always fascinated me. Ever since I can remember I've always wanted to get to the bare roots of language, pare it all down and see/feel its essence. In a way, to paraphrase a fellow teacher who remarked insightfully one afternoon that 'teaching, sometimes, just gets in the way', language too can be a big red herring.
Man has tendency to over-complicate things, a tendency to show off (like a rooster shows off), and to over-use language to get his point across. Though I might not conform to a lexicon of just three words (as in Robert Lepage's oneiric film Possible Worlds), I am of the opinion that we don't need that many in order to 'essentialize ourselves'. Words just get in the way.
At any rate, tapping in to words, following their roots down to the source (or as near as one can get), is a fascinating activity. Words emerged from the land after all. And from our interaction with it. Language was natural back then, salted with seaweed, and flavored with rain. Now, so much artifice gets in the way that some words need to be positively and absolutely strip-searched in order to reveal their essence. Some words, such is the backwardness of modern man, have come to mean the opposite of what they were intended (look no further than, idiot, individual, demon, human etc..).
Other words are so transparent and simple that often we just use them without really knowing what we are saying. In other words, the over-use leads to ab-use, and when we abuse language we might as well abuse the land and ourselves with it. (Which of course we do).
The word here I want to highlight is the word Belden uses in the epigram that opens this post. The word 'become'. Now we all know the word 'come' which derives from the same Proto-Indo-European root as the word 'go'. It's simple enough. But stick a little prefix in front of it, in this case be- and we have a slight shift in meaning. To come to something is one thing, to become this something is quite another. When I go into the hills, I come to the hills, and in so doing become them. This sounds rather freaky I admit, for I do not look like a hill. I am still very much in the shape of a humanoid. Yet, I am also mind as well as body, and though my body may still appear to be that of a human, my mind is very much in the shape of a hill.
In other words, the mind is shaped by the body's workings. If the body spends its time sitting at a desk performing duties that merely serve to put money in his pocket and little else, this will manifest itself in the mind. The mind will become boxed in, alienated, and calculative. If the body, however, spends its time exerting itself, spending its being in the rarefied air of the hills, listening to nature by way of our solitude and spaciousness, then the mind will become likewise.
And it's all in this little word be-come (I prefer it with a hyphen for its upsets the usual form to the point where we do a double-take). To become a saint one must go to saintliness. But what is saintliness?
It is no coincidence that the word sanity and saint look alike. Sanctitude is sanity. Sanity of course is Health with a capital H; in another word, wholeness. And of course wholeness is holiness. So, a saint is a Healthy entity, one which is systemically bound in to everyone else,whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral. One who is open to the earth, who recognises his humus composition and his roots... that go way down. That bind him back into the great matrix thatg he so eagerly wants to leave behind. This is the nature of religion, from the Lstin re+ligio meaning to restrain or to bind back.
A saint is someone who uses his own locomotive force in order to 'arrive'. Who restrains his self from being carried. Indeed, one might say that a saint is an 'arriver', one who arrives at places by virtue of this locomotive force and of a bodymind negotiating the land and the elements that gave rise to him.
It is an active participation in the Earth's own flows. In the modern era where cars are a ubiquitous form of 'travel', we have been blindsided once again by language and those who ab-use it. Car, let's be honest, is short for 'carry'. And yet, there are few car 'drivers' who would admit to being carried, who would, through the ab-use of language, probably say that driving is an active event. And in a way, it is. But the backbone of it is undeniably passive. One has abandoned one's own locomotive force (and thus any possibility of arriving, and of place). Locations become non-places as a result, or packaged spaces, there but for the good of you. Roads themselves, especially motorways, display an unnatural form of straightness geared for speed. Runways where man does not run.One has given up one's active moving, and yet I know of no other animal (that hasn't been tamed, imprisoned, injured, or dead) that will allow itself to be carried. Man, one could conclude, is the only animal that has give up life. Maybe this is why he is fascinated with death so much.
At any rate, I'm careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I do realise that the car can be a very handy device. Nevertheless, like a powerful drug, cars need to be kept in check. But we are addicted to being carried. Man has been made into a big junky baby who is pushed around in a big pram. And yet he cannot see this.
Take my word for it. Be-come the hills. You don't know how lucky you are if you live in Glasgow to have hills, gentle hills, on all sides. There is remoteness, space to listen, space to see. Space enough to be-come your Self.
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