Wild.
OK. So, I’m not quite sure what to say about this, but I recently finished reading Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything, by Barbara Ehrenreich. I was mesmerized. The book gets a little crazy toward the end, but ….wow…. something happened to her…I don’t know what it was, but it sounds a whole lot like the Enlightenment experiences I’ve read about:
“Something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels, and words. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, that’s what I would have said I was doing, but the word ‘tree’ was gone, along with all the notions of tree-ness that had accumulated in the last dozen or so years since I had acquired language. Was it a place that was suddenly revealed to me? Or was it a substance–the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed-upon world arises as a fantastic elaboration?
“I don’t know, because this substance, this residue, was stolidly, imperturbably mute. The interesting thing, some might say alarming, was that when you take away all human attributions–the words, the names of species, the wisps of remembered tree-related poetry, the fables of photosynthesis and capillary action–that when you take it all away, there is still something left.”
***
I don’t know what else to say.
Except: Read the book. It’s fascinating.
And beautifully written, besides.
(image by Lucy Williams)
