Speaking of flying!
I was going to write something - with a few pictures - of hawk viewing. In a nutshell, it was fun, but the really big flights never materialized this year for observers on Mount Wachusetts. There's still a chance, I suppose, but this is looking like the worse season in decades. In any event, I got distracted by the flies - the ones from Australia Dom writes about so well in a recent email:
Have you ever seen the Australian Salute? Among salutes, it is the sloppiest and vaguest. The action is a mix of Hitler's palm up salute combined with a gesture fanning away a bad smell. The Salute season arrived about three days ago, and millions of Australians have already flexed their wrists and elbows.
Flies. Yes, flies. They appeared, suddenly, in the millions from nowhere. As we got out of our car at the park they landed on our faces to lick sweat. We drove them away with the Australian salute. A little later we noticed that the moist backs of walkers were landing fields for squadrons of flies. Unseen, they stuck on for mile after mile, taking a free ride and enjoying a salty drink.
These vastly irritating creatures, strangely, command my respect and admiration. They are among the greatest aerobatic performers I have ever seen. To keep away flies, some of us wear hats with twenty or so bottle corks dangling by strings from the brims. As we walk, the corks create a swinging anti-fly shield. Well, the top-guns among the flies perform fantastic aerobatric manoeuvres and get past the dancing corks.
A fly (if I remember correctly) vibrates its wings about 300 times per second. I am awestruck at the sheer mechanics involved in this. The wing muscles (I've never seen any on a fly!) must flex 300 times a second. That's a figure I accept mathematically but can't comprehend physically. If I extend my arms and pretend to fly, I can't get faster than 3 beats per sec.
Another feature for me to admire is the fly's eyes which can brilliantly assess and predict the erratic dancing of the cork and pass the message to the wings. In 500th of a second the wings change beat and pitch to create wing patterns for the fly to dive, loop and somersault to get past the moving obstacles. Wunderbar!
Believe me, I see more wonders of the Great Spirit in the course of a nature walk than from nine Sundays of chanting in a church! I have always considered Christian theology to be half-blind in ignoring nature. A theology that ignores nature is like a triangle with two sides only. (comment from Daphne: What about the "lilies of the field who neither sew nor spin and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these"?)
At University I spent two years in studying logic, which also ignored nature. Logic got its knickers in a knot on obscure issues, ignoring study of the reality presented by our eyes and ears. Perhaps I went to the wrong university. I should have gone to Queens College or Princeton or Rockefeller or Chicago to study under Donald Davidson who died the other day. According to the the obituray, Davidson "coined the term 'triangulation' to describe the complexities of the relationship between the individual, all other people and the non-human universe. Language and thought, he argued, are created by all three interacting with each other." That sounds close to my attitudes.
Donald Davidson was born at Springfield, Massachusetts ... your neck of the woods. I have a feeling you would have had empathy with his thoughts had you met him. He is considered to be one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century.
Fascinating - I agree with you completely vis-a-vis nature and Christianity, despite the occasional Biblical reference. The problem, of course, is that the Judeo-Christian tradition separates man from nature, giving man dominion over nature. Blame it on Genesis. I think we owe political policies such as the Bush attitude towards the environment, oil, and global warming to this point of view. It's our God-given right - nay, responsibility - to exploit nature. I think it's wrapped up in the Eden myth as well, but that's anothe side-trip. In any event, I guess that's why, as I walk, cracks in the highway with grass growing in them fascinate me. It is one more humbling reminder that if we vanish, nature can move in and in the blink of an eye, redecorate the place!
As to the fly - incredible! And think about the nervous system that controls it all. And we think we're pretty good at minaturization!
In any event, we don't dominate nature - we're part of it and "sin" is separation from God and to me that starts with separation from nature. (The Buddhist do much better with all this.) I think this is a far more profound topic than many understand. It's not simply loving the cute animals - it's understanding how it all fits together - including us.
Dom, reacting to my hawk watching pieces, asked recently how a "dove' could be so interested in hawks. It's a good question. It took me a while. I used to love only the "good" parts of nature - the beautiful birds and the soft bunnies and the warm puppy. It was a challenge for me to fit the aggressive hawks into this picture - especially when they captured doves at my feeder staining the pure white snow red. My coming to grips with that was in many ways parallel to my understanding that some part of me loved war while most of me rejected it. It's too much to go into here - but the point is this relationship of us to nature goes way beyond the bird-feeder stage. I've moved to the point where I can feel at one with both the hawks and doves, though I still instinctively flinch at an attack.
But flies - there Dom is taking it one more step, at least from my perspective. I don't see flies as either cute (like bunnies) nor magnificent (like hawks). My instinctive reaction is disgust. And it is at this point I always come back to the Ancient Mariner who wantonly kills the innocent albatross and later looks on the still ocean and complains:
The very deeps did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy Sea.
And later still he complains:
The many men so beautiful
And they all dead did lie!
And a million million slimy things
Liv'd on -- and so did I.
But the problem isn't with the slimy things, or for that matter, the flies - but with our own point of view. The defining moment - in the poem and in our lives -is when we discover this. But Coleridge tells it so well:
Beyond the shadow of the ship
I watch'd the water-snakes:
They mov'd in tracks of shining white;
And when they rear'd, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watch'd their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black
They coil'd and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gusht from my heart,
And I bless'd them unaware!
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I bless'd them unaware.
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
I didn't know about Davidson, nor had I heard "triangulation" used in that way, but I like it. Again, I think the first step towards ending our separation from God is to recognize - no, celebrate - the relationships between the elements in Davidson's triangle - the individual, others, and the world. For me, I'm getting myself and the world into perspective, but I have a long way to go in terms of applying this to others. I still am much too judgmental when it comes to man - and I think that, too, is born of the ethic that puts man above nature. When we adopt this ethic it's easy to expect too much of ourselves and others and so be unforgiving.
Finally, it's one thing to see all this clearly with the left brain - but somehow it has to pop into view with the right brain - be intuitive, in much the way the mariner suddenly discovers it - not through any rational effort he can identify. As he said:
A spring of love gusht from my heart,
And I bless'd them unaware!
I've known such moments. They are rare and precious. I don't know how to generate them. They are that amazing grace.
Posted by Greg Stone at September 25, 2003 08:02 AM