In the Ground of Our Unknowing

Writer by David Abram Illustration by Lina Müller and Luca Schenardi

Facing the paradoxes and ambiguities enmeshed with the COVID-19 pandemic, David Abram finds beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. As we’re isolated in this uncertain time, he writes, we can turn to the more-than-human world to empower our empathy for each other.

R ight now, the earthly community of life—the more-thanhuman collective—is getting a chance to catch its breath without the weight of our incessant industry on its chest. The terrifying nightmare barreling through human society in these weeks has forced the gears of the megamachine (all the complex churning of commerce, all this steadily speeding up “progress”) to grind to a halt—and so, as you’ve likely noticed, the land itself is stirring and starting to stretch its limbs, long-forgotten sensory organs beginning to sip the air and sample the water, grasses and needles drinking in sky without the intermediating sting of a chemical haze. The reports of abundant fish returning to the effluent-clogged canals of Venice may not be true—mostly, it seems, the usual murkiness of the canals is clearing due to the circumstance that ceaseless boat traffic is not churning up those waterways, and so it’s become possible, for the first time in ages, to glimpse schools of fish who’ve always been there swimming through the suddenly pellucid waters. But if we can see those fish in the long quiet of these days, then those finned beings can also see us, can see the sun and the gleaming moon in ways they’ve not been able to for decades. Gray Whales and Humpbacks in the Pacific Northwest can suddenly hear one another’s hundred-mile songs and calls echoing through the depths, uninterrupted by the incessant mechanical whine of boat engines—since the whale-watching tours that hound them have stopped indefinitely, as have the growling propellers of cruise ships and the whirring of most pleasure boats (an underwater cacophony that’s been steadily intensifying over the years, monopolizing the exquisite auditory conductance of the aquatic realm, and confounding all those who communicate in buzzing blips and pings and singsong descants through the fluid medium). Just as, in multiple cities, the profusion of birdsong is becoming evident, no longer hidden by ringtones, honking horns, piercing car alarms, and people yelling into their phones (by all the giddy roiling thrum of business as usual). And right now, late at night, a child is stepping outside her home in the suburbs of Shanghai—as another child is doing in Mumbai, and another in Madrid just before dawn. The child in Shanghai is walking the family dog with her father. The girl stretches her cramped limbs, leaning her head back—whereupon she notices something surpassingly strange. Her eyes widen in wonder: a glimmering river of light is coursing above the silhouetted buildings!Numberless points of light (she knows they are stars) gleam and wink at her along the margins of the overhead river, while near the central current those lights seem to fold into a churning froth of bright cloud. “What is that?” she asks her father. He follows her gaze upward. “Oh,” he says, “that’s the Silver River.…” In Mumbai, the boy’s grandmother says, “Oh c’mon, you know that: that’s the Ganges of the Aether.” In Madrid, the father looks up, and then replies to his son: “That’s the Milky Way. Don’t you remember learning about it?” “Yeah…,” the boy answers. “I just didn’t know that you could actually see it.” The father looks back up, then removes his glasses. They both stare and stare.

LUMINOUS BEAUTY IN the midst of shuddering terror. with someone providing those skills free of charge. In fact, Interpersonal solidarity—layer upon tearful layer of by the time of this writing (in late March 2020) analogous empathy for one another—in the midst of enforced place-based mutual aid initiatives are sprouting up in solitude and loneliness. The paradoxical, ambiguous localities pretty much everywhere around the world—wild nature of this moment is so confounding, so bewildering! harvesting needed herbs, providing childcare for doctors, I mean, how excellent that our arrogant species receives delivering food and pharmaceuticals and equipment, this collective slap-in-the-face reality check, waking us offering skilled counseling (by phone) for folks freaking two-leggeds up to the simple truth that we are not at all out, setting up sanitation systems in rural areas with in control, have never really been in control, that we live at scant water, handcrafting masks and protective gear. the behest of powers—of a complex interplay of powers— What a wonder! Yet at this same moment, the very same far beyond our ability to fully fathom, to predict, or to catastrophe that’s teaching us to bring our attention back steer. What hubris to have imagined we could do whatever to the local and nearby, forces us to take distance from we want with this exquisitely interwoven wonder of a every person in our vicinity, and to connect only via the world!And yet how awful that this lesson must come most mediated and disembodied of ways, speaking at the expense of so many unsuspecting only via the phone and the computer, human lives, so many innocent souls now exchanging information via FaceTime and shivering with fever and fright as they Zoom and Twitter. struggle to draw breath. We’re finally being Even a neo-Luddite like me has to Here’s another ambiguity. We’re finally being forced to recognize forced to recognize that admit that the online and internet world has become a huge boon and that no top-down institution, no top-down institution, blessing in this tenuous time! less governmental or otherwise, governmental or otherwise, efficient world of flesh-and-blood can fully ensure our safety. That our deepest insurance against can fully ensure interactions?” In The New York Times one columnist suggested that once , disaster is going local—by getting our safety we’ve learned how to conduct most to know our actual neighbors and college courses over the internet, checking in on one another when we why would we ever want to go back can, participating in our local community to sitting and lecturing in classrooms? and apprenticing with the more-than-human Meanwhile, my son in tenth grade is jumping terrain that surrounds and sustains us. Eating more of out of his skin with boredom at the doldrum dullness what grows locally, and learning to grow some of these of screen-imprisoned classes, and my daughter—abruptly foods ourselves, reduces the long supply chains that forced home from her blissful freshman year at college—is bring not just foods and products from far-flung places despairing at the drab inanity of college seminars without into our lives, but also pathogens that would otherwise the delicious bustle of seeing, hearing, and especially be way more limited in their circulation. Here in northern feeling her classmates as they reflectively tussle with New Mexico, youth climate activists have in the last two one another and with the professor while puzzling out weeks established a thriving and rapidly growing mutual problems together. She’s missing the (let’s face it) erotic aid system, whereby individuals are offering all sorts of goodness of real learning that happens in direct physical gifts and skills to the wider community, wherein anyone interchange with one another, when so much of what can request needed help and be matched, fairly quickly, is really discovered happens at a bodily-felt level below the strictly cognitive layer of the words. The completely conscious layer of learning rides on that depth like ripples on the surface of the sea. Wisdom arises—whether within a student or a teacher, or within the awareness of an entire class—when the verbal, cognitive layer of learning is awake to its rootedness in the emotionally charged dimension of our corporeal and intercorporeal life with one another, in the palpable rooms and landscapes we inhabit together.

So while I trust that there’s a lot we’ll be learning from spring will be exploding out of all those budded branches. the strangeness of these days in enforced isolation from each other, I sure hope that we’ll not be drawing upon this time to swivel huge swaths of our public and private life permanently into the virtual sphere, away from the necessarily fraught and vulnerable world of fleshly encounter in the thick of the sensuous—which, I hasten And that is a goodness. If you live anywhere near a wetland, pay it an evening visit—see if you can join your voice to the gurgling chorus of frogs without shocking them all into silence (it takes practice, sure, but I promise it’s doable). to add, is the only world that we share with the other Sit down for tea with a lichen- encrusted boulder. animals, the plants, and the blustering winds. I mean, do Excellent. Now get over your shyness, wander over to the we really wish to render education even more abstract bank of the river that courses through your town, and and aloof from the perspectives of other creatures, from invite the gushing current to dance with you. If it accepts, the intricately entangled wetlands and rivers, from the you needn’t plunge in (maybe save that for the summer), many-voiced forests with whom we share this round but rather gaze and listen and feel into the flux as you world? Do we really need to render ourselves still more move—let its wildness tumble downstream through your oblivious to the reality of other, nonhuman muscles, coaxing the river into rapport with your own lives? If so, then by all means let’s all pile sinuous moves and meanders, experimenting online, and look to conduct more till you find the right rhythm, the right and more of our lives in virtual syncopation for the erotic rock and roll of spaces.… But the cascading catastrophes of climate change, Estranged from direct its alluvial groove. Sure, it’s mighty important to keep and our apparent inability (or human contact for a brief apprised of the human news. Yet we unwillingness) to alter our lives in response to those cataclysms, while, we’ve a chance to can draw unexpected nourishment by walking away, now and then, from suggest that it might be salutary open a new intimacy with the screen-mediated sphere of our for us to replenish our direct, sensorial contact with the wider the wider world exclusively human concerns, rekindling our animal senses and rediscovering our community of beings wherever solidarity with everything else. we live. We might wish to reacquaint ourselves with the other denizens of our SO SOME OF us are now learning to listen in locale. to and maybe even converse with the elemental utterances of things that don’t speak in words, tuning After all, while this plague enforces a temporary our ears and our skin to the discourse of multiple otherdistance from other humans, there is no reason not to than-human beings: each redwing blackbird or storm lean in close to other beings, gazing and learning—for cloud or naked chunk of sandstone jostling with the rest instance—the distinguishing patterns of the bark worn of existence. And every one of us is now shuddering with by each of the local tree species where you live. No reason inadvertent creaturely empathy at what’s befalling so not to step outside and pry open your ears, listening and many of our human sisters and brothers who abruptly find learning by heart the characteristic songs and calls of the themselves unable to draw breath, their lungs ravaged, various local birds; no reason not to apprentice yourself their bodies cut off by plastic enclosures and pumps from to a spider as it weaves its intricate web in front of the the touch or even the sight of their loved ones. porchlight. Or to practice recognizing and naming—as I have been—the different types of clouds that are We breathe for each other. We feel each other’s feelings conjured out of the blue by the scattered mountains in shuddering through us—we cannot help but do so! Yet this region, the wispy brushstrokes and phantom ridges is this because we’re all human, because we share a basic and clumped clusterstha t congregate and dissipate in the commonality of body and mind, because our species has high desert sky. its own autonomy and autonomous integrity, such that all of Humankind is a single collective Body that flexes and Estranged from direct human contact for a brief while, reverberates in each one of us? we’ve a chance to open a new intimacy with the wider world we’re a part of, with coyote and owl and aspen. Such is our common assumption, but actually … no, I Soon enough, if it’s not already happening where you are, don’t think so. If we consider the extant and far- flung span

of our collective human flesh—if we consider the actual living Body of this biosphere, breathing. That’s us. spatial shape of this hopelessly spread out thing we call humankind, we will notice, I think, that its shape is that of a sphere. STILL, THERE’S THE rising tide of human happenings reaching us through the media, much of it sad beyond reckoning. One massive matter that this virus is abruptly Because it is the vast and spherical Earth that gives us our making visible, for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t see it actual shape and coherence as a species. before is the dumbfounding injustice—the outrageous And if we ponder the activity of any individual human at this very moment, we’ll notice that he or she or they are breathing (or struggling to breathe)—each of us drinking this unseen elixir that’s granted to us, ceaselessly—by the innumerable rooted, leafing, needled, stemmed, trunked, or algal beings that are also breathing in our vicinity. We have no autonomy, no integrity as a species separate from the other species of this world, no collective existence as a creature apart from the animate Earth. We can understand ourselves, and feel what it is to be human, only through our interaction and engagement with all these other, nonhuman beings with whom our lives are so thoroughly tangled. And yes, of course we can and coldheartedness—of the way our societies are currently structured, such that some persons seem always able to avail themselves of protection from the devastation of illness (having ready access to tests, and fine doctors, and all the necessary machinic support) while crowds of others are tossed aside or treated grotesquely. Like the undocumented immigrants currently crammed into overcrowded detention centers here in the US: how can we keep the virus from running rampant in such spaces? Or overseas: how can we protect, from the spreading contagion and death, countless half-starved Syrian refugees now stranded and stateless? Or the laid off workers in India now trying to make their way back to their rural villages in overstuffed buses or on foot We have no autonomy, no integrity as a species separate from the other species of this world indeed do feel a deep solidarity through a gauntlet of regulations with one another, and with the rest and club-wielding police? And here at of our kind. Yet we cannot stretch that home: how can we protect our brothers bodily empathy out to all of our single and sisters doing time in private, for-profit species except by way of the more-than- prisons without even minimally adequate human Earth. We cannot extend our senses to the sanitation? Or the many who are homeless and whole of humankind without the sensitive and sentient destitute, usually through no fault of their own? Earth getting us there. It is this vast and sensitive sphere, glimmering with sensations, that grants us that ability to feel and resonate with one another, to ache when another aches—whether it be a small girl hospitalized in Healthcare, as both Sanders and Warren proclaimed over and over, ain’t a privilege: it’s a basic human right. We instinctively feel that everyone deserves respect and the right to live out their days, that no human should have to Iran or a young elephant whose mother was killed by forfeit their life simply because they’ve only ever earned poachers, whether an old man struggling to breathe minimum wage, or due to their skin color, or their age, or in China or an aging sea lion snagged and tangled in their refugee status. a fishing net. Our real collective Flesh is not that of “humankind” as an autonomous abstraction, but is the But as this pandemic swells and breaks like a colossal tsunami across the land, it strips away the flimsy facades, exposing all the god- awful structural violence of this winner-take-all society, leaving most of us feeling astonished and ashamed that we could have allowed such hideous disparities to grow and grow without struggling steadily to rectify them. I reckon we’ll no longer be able to easily hide or paper over much of this structural violence after the virus has had its way with us. At least I pray that we won’t. We

will have to change. In ever so many ways, we’ll have to change. (Dear Gaia, let us PLEASE not go back to fucking “normal.”) But what shape, what mode will the changes take? Will we simply go back to the rickety Rube Goldberg contraption of “Obamacare” and just extend it to cover a few more people? Might we begin to notice that a person’s health depends on having a range of real relationships, on face-to-face community, on reciprocity with a robust and flourishing ecology? Or will we strive now to make our lives ever more antiseptic, engaging not only our social interactions but more and more of our education online, so we’ll not have to risk contamination through physical contact—so we’ll not have to tangle with the always unpredictable muck of the real? Will we all be so desperate to have everything go back to “normal” that we’ll rev and rev and ramp back up our overly addicted fossil-fueled economy, injecting gobs of crude oil back into our veins like strung out junkies, throwing the megamachine into overdrive? And in this way consign our own and every other remaining species—those we’ve not already crowded and kicked over the brink of extinction—to the irreversible hell of runaway climate change? Or will we recognize the coronavirus as a fierce but relatively gentle harbinger of something far more calamitous, a teacher kindly sent to slap us awake to our actual circumstances?

Much that influences the future shape of our societies will ride on how we emerge from this crisis—assuming we do emerge—how we transition out of the strangely suspended dreamscape in which we suddenly find ourselves adrift. Governments and their administrative agencies will play their roles as best they can, each trying to claw or engineer its way back into the daylit realm. But the textures and tastes that eventually come to predominate, the rhythms of community in our bioregion, the generosity and convivial ethos of the larger body politic—or the robotic and bureaucratic rigidity of that body politic—will to a large extent be determined by the choices each of us makes in this cocoon-like, shape- shifting moment. The future will be sculpted, that is, by the elemental friendships and alliances that we choose to sustain us, by our full-bodied capacity for earthly compassion and dark wonder, by our ability to listen, attentive and at ease, within the forest of our unknowing.

Writer

David Abram

David Abram, PhD, is a cultural ecologist and philosopher. He is the founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. His books include Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World.

Artists

Lina Müller

Lina Müller is an illustrator based in Central Switzerland. She studied at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, Zurich University of the Arts, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. She is the recipient of numerous awards and was nominated for the 2017 Swiss Design Awards. Luca Schenardi

Luca Schenardi is a Swiss-based illustrator and artist. He studied at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. His illustrations have appeared in international newspapers and magazines, including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, and Rolling Stone Magazine.