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Contents of Part 3
4.4. Jiddu Krishnamurti
5. Sartre, Reid, Jaccottet, Dillard
6. A Nature Mysticism Delineated
7. A Pedagogy
8. Conclusions
References for Part 3
4.4. Jiddu Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti (1896-1986) was universally
known as a teacher, but is rarely considered a nature mystic despite the
fact that this dimension of him is often noticeable. His obstinate refusal
to adopt poetic terms or traditional Hindu terms (thought he knew them)
gave his message an unusual strength, but the beauty in Krishnamurti's writings
comes from his serenity of mind, and never more so than when he wrote about
Nature. Perhaps the best of his many 'notebooks' is The Only Revolution,
which introduces each section with keenly observed natural scenes, though
not observed in the way that a naturalist would. Here are some examples:
The sun wasn't up yet; you could see the morning
star through the trees. There was a silence that was really extraordinary.
Not the silence between two noises or between two notes, but the silence
that has no reason whatsoever the silence that must have been at the beginning
of the world. It filled the whole valley and the hills.
The two big owls, calling to each other, never
disturbed that silence, and a distant dog barking at the late moon was
part of this immensity. The dew was especially heavy, and as the sun came
up over the hill it was sparkling with many colours and with the glow that
comes with the sun's first rays.
The delicate leaves of the jacaranda were heavy
with dew, and birds came to have their morning baths, fluttering their
wings so the dew on those delicate leaves filled their feathers. The crows
were particularly persistent; they would hop from one branch to another,
pushing their heads through the leaves, fluttering their wings, and preening
themselves. There were about half-a-dozen of them on that one heavy branch,
and there were many other birds, scattered all over the tree, taking their
morning bath.
And this silence spread, and seemed to go beyond
the hills. There were the usual noises of children shouting, and laughter;
and the farm began to wake up.
It was going to be a cool day, and now the
hills were taking on the light of the sun. They were very old hills probably
the oldest in the world with oddly shaped rocks that seemed to be carved
out with great care, balanced one on top of the other; but no wind or touch
could loosen them from this balance.
It was a valley far removed from towns, and
the road through it led to another village. The road was rough and there
were no cars or buses to disturb the ancient quietness of this valley.
There were bullock carts, but their movement was a part of the hills. There
was a dry river bed that only flowed with water after heavy rains, and
the colour was a mixture of red, yellow and brown; and it, too, seemed
to move with the hills. And the villagers who walked silently by were like
the rocks.
The day wore on and towards the end of the
evening, as the sun was setting over the western hills, the silence came
in from afar, over the hills, through the trees, covering the little bushes
and the ancient banyan. And as the stars became brilliant, so the silence
grew into great intensity; you could hardly bear it.
The little lamps of the village were put out,
and with sleep the intensity of that silence grew deeper, wider and incredibly
over-powering. Even the hills became more quiet, for they, too, had stopped
their whisperings, their movement, and seemed to lose their immense weight
[53].
For Krishnamurti, nature's appeal is in the silence that resonates between
him and it. He, like Jefferies, was glad for the minimum of modern intrusion
on nature, so that the human blended with it and did not jar. In the next
extract it is clear how people and their obliviousness to nature pained
Krishnamurti.
On every table there were daffodils, young,
fresh, just out of the garden, with the bloom of spring on them still.
On a side table there were lilies, creamy-white with sharp yellow centres.
To see this creamy-white and the brilliant yellow of those many daffodils
was to see the blue sky, ever expanding, limitless, silent.
Almost all the tables were taken by people
talking very loudly and laughing. At a table nearby a woman was surreptitiously
feeding her dog with the meat she could not eat. They all seemed to have
huge helpings, and it was not a pleasant sight to see people eating; perhaps
it may be barbarous to eat publicly. A man across the room had filled himself
with wine and meat and was just lighting a big cigar, and a look of beatitude
came over his fat face. His equally fat wife lit a cigarette. Both of them
appeared to be lost to the world.
And there they were, the yellow daffodils,
and nobody seemed to care. They were there for decorative purposes that
had no meaning at all; and as you watched them their yellow brilliance
filled the noisy room. Colour has this strange effect upon the eye. It
wasn't so much that the eye absorbed the colour, as that the colour seemed
to fill your being. You were that colour; you didn't become that
colour you were of it, without identification or name: the anonymity which
is innocence. Where there is no anonymity there is violence, in all its
different forms.
But you forgot the world, the smoke-filled
room, the cruelty of man, and the red, ugly meat; those shapely daffodils
seemed to take you beyond all time.
Love is like that. In it there in no time,
space or identity. It is the identity that breeds pleasure and pain; it
is the identity that brings hate and war and builds a wall around people,
around each one, each family and community. Man reaches over the wall to
the other man but he too is enclosed; morality is a word that bridges the
two, and so it becomes ugly and vain.
Love isn't like that; it is like the wood across
the way, always renewing itself because it is always dying. There is no
permanency in it, which thought seeks; it is a movement which thought can
never understand, touch or feel. The feeling of thought and the feeling
of love are two different things; the one leads to bondage and the other
to the flowering of goodness. The flowering is not within the area of any
society, of any culture or of any religion, whereas the bondage belongs
to all societies, religious beliefs and faiths in otherness. Love is anonymous,
therefore not violent. Pleasure is violent, for desire and will are moving
factors in it. Love cannot be begotten by thought, or by good works. The
denial of the total process of thought becomes the beauty of action which
is love. Without this there is no bliss of truth.
And over there, on that table, were the daffodils.
(page 145)
This is vintage Krishnamurti, and not primarily a description of nature,
but is included because it shows many of his concerns and how he related
them to nature. In the daffodils he 'forgot the world'; for Krishnamurti,
more like Jefferies than like Whitman, was not the 'rough' type that allows
for the common, coarse and good-natured. The following passage shows again
Krishnamurti's sensitivity to nature (he is speaking to Asit Chandmal):
"Have you noticed, sir, " he said,
"that when you enter a forest, for the first time there is a strange
atmosphere, as if nature, the trees, do not want you to enter. You hesitate,
and say 'It's alright,' and walk in quietly. The second day the resistance
is less. And the third day it is gone."
I do not communicate with nature, and so this
was something I had never discussed with Krishnamurti [54].
5. Sartre, Reid, Jaccottet,
Dillard
Before pulling together the strands of nature mysticism discussed so far,
it is of interest to consider what a specifically 20th century contribution
to it may be. Krishnamurti's writings do not have the usual literary or
poetic motivations; his nature writings came partly from a spontaneous engagement
with nature, but may also be seen as a vehicle for his teachings, given
that he has rejected en masse the language of mystical traditions
(he could easily have spoken of himself as jnani, or used the language
of the Cloud of Unknowing, or that of Socrates, Vivekananda, or Ramana
Maharshi, to give just a few examples). Sartre, Reid, Jaccottet and Dillard
represent a random selection of writers of the 20th century who also use
Nature; what is of interest is that we can characterise their work in terms
of alienation instead of the romanticism of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth,
and Tennyson for example, or the transcendentalism of Thoreau, Emerson,
and Whitman.
In Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea we have perhaps one of the best expositions
of this uniquely 20th century alienation (it has always existed of course,
but one could say that with its coming-of-age in this century it has taken
on a defined shape). Nausea's key scene takes place in a park where
the protagonist, having come to a dead-end in his romantic and professional
life, experiences what is commonly understood to be an inversion of the
mystic experience, but one triggered by Nature, and so of interest to us.
The likely genesis of the entire story is a bad mescalin trip that Sartre
took in 1935 (recorded for us by de Beauvoir [55]), a theory supported by the
frequent references to crabs and polyps in Nausea. The park scene
is consistent with other descriptions of drug-induced states, but focuses
on his natural surroundings, in particular the root of a chestnut tree,
which he becomes. For Sartre (and most authorities, including Sartre,
agree that it is autobiographical) the mystical experience of union is horrifying,
characterised in terms of a sticky glue that permeates the park. He rejects
it finally in favour of an immortality gained through literary striving.
Forrest Reid, an Irish writer, includes several 'nature-mystical' scenes
in Peter Waring, one of which is quoted by Zaehner. Here are a couple
of extracts:
And then a strange experience befell me. It
was as if everything that a moment before had been all around me and external
were now suddenly within me. The whole world was within me. It was within
me that the trees waved their green branches; it was within me that the
hot sun shone, and that the shade was cool [56].
The earth beneath me was living and breathing;
and obedient to some obscure physical promptings I turned around and pressed
my mouth against this dry grass, closer and closer, in a long silent embrace.
It was just as well, perhaps, that there was no one to observe this exhibition
of primitive and eternal instinct. I felt a passionate happiness and excitement.
My head was hot; the salt sharp smell of the sea seemed to have set all
my nerves thrilling and tingling; and I unfastended my shirt that my flesh
might be naked. The past had slipped from me, and I lived in this moment,
squeezing out its ecstasy to the last drop, as I might the juice of some
ripe fruit. It seemed to me that I was on the brink of finding something
for which all my previous existences had been one long preparation and
search: I was fumbling at the door of an enchanted garden: in a moment
it would swing open: already the perfume of unknown fruits and flowers
was in my nostrils [57].
We are reminded of the oft-quoted passage from Whitman:
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer
morning,
How you settled you head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my
bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace
and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters
and lovers,
And that a kelson of creation is love,
('Song of Myself', v. 5)
Sadly Reid's novel gives us only a few glimpses
of nature-rapture: the second extract, as with a third beautiful passage,
is brought on partly by the blooming of the protagonist's first-love for
a young woman; when his romance fails he then attempts suicide by lying
on the grass by the sea to catch pneumonia. The novel is a useful 20th century
example of failed nature mysticism; we do not know why the experiences provide
no lasting strength for the protagonist and suspect that their presence,
though most likely an authentic record of the author's experience, was influenced
by Jefferies (Jefferies' Bevis is mentioned in the novel). The form
of alienation expressed in the novel is a mild one compared to that in Nausea
(Reid's novel was first written in 1902, but rewritten under a new title
in 1936, the time that Sartre was writing Nausea). We do not have
a vocabulary or taxonomy of alienation in 20th century literature, but Reid's
is at the honest/disappointment end of the spectrum if one did exist.
Philippe Jaccottet's alienation is of a different and more subtle order
than either Reid's or Sartre's. The translator of his poems, Derek Mahon,
refers to him as a secular mystic and says: 'Jaccottet's symbols are the
elemental, pre-Socratic ones: tree, flower, sun, moon, road, mountain, wind,
water, bird, house, lamp.' [58] Jaccottet's Nature is poorly-lit, usually at dawn,
giving glimpses of elevation, but too ham-strung by a fear of death (absent
in Sartre and Reid) to be called a nature mysticism. In a sad low-key way
Jaccottet does communicate some of the beauty and eternity of Nature, but
it is like the bloodless Christianity of the C. of E. transposed to a secular
setting. He may be as subtle and obscure as Krishnamurti, but he is lost:
perhaps this makes him more appealing.
Annie Dillard shows us a bolder and brighter Nature than Jaccottet; her
alienation a little like Sartre's but more comfortable. There is a revealing
passage in the introduction by Richard Adams to Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek:
"If she were to feel much more deeply the misery, futility and waste
of Nature which she describes so tellingly, she would go out of her mind;
so would we all." [59] This reminds one of 'nature red in tooth and claw',
which she does describe so well: perhaps the chapter on the weasel in Teaching
a Stone to Talk is a good example. In it she comes face-to-face with
a weasel and for a brief moment enters its fierce soul; she finishes by
wishing that, like the weasel who bites into the neck of an eagle in its
death-throws and whose jaws remains fixed there even when its bones have
been bleached by the air and sun and dropped away, she could do the same
with the sublime. Unlike the timid Jaccottet she is bold enough but cannot
in the end do so: perhaps her sense of suffering is too strong (as shown
in a passage about a burned man). Whatever the cause her alienation from
Nature is shown most lyrically in 'A Field of Silence': she experiences
the kind of silence that Krishnamurti described in the extract above, but
finds no comfort in it:
I do not want, I think, ever to see such a
sight again. That there is loneliness here I had granted, in the abstract
but not, I thought, inside the light of God's presence, inside his sanction,
and signed by his name [60].
Further on we find a resonance with Nausea:
When I turned away in this manner, the silence
gathered and struck me. It bashed me broadside from the heavens above me
like yard goods; ten acres of fallen, invisible sky choked the fields.
The pastures on either side of the road turned green in a surrealistic
fashion, monstrous, impeccable, as if they were holding their breaths.
The roosters stopped, All the things of the worldthe fields and the fencing,
the road, a parked orange truckwere stricken and self-conscious. a world
pressed down on their surfaces, a world battered just within their surfaces,
and that real world, so near to emerging, had got stuck. There was only
silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed
[61].
This could easily have been from Nausea in fact: 'choked', 'monstrous',
'stricken and self-conscious', 'stuck', 'caught in the act and embarrassed'
is exactly Sartre's language. But as well as the anthropomorphism we also
find animism (both of Mercer's concerns!): she later describes the experience
in terms of angels.
6. A Nature Mysticism Delineated
Traherne, Jefferies, Whitman, and Krishnamurti are mavericks and stand outside
of tradition (it is only a literary convenience that Whitman is grouped
with the American transcendentalists). However between them they delineate
a nature mysticism that the other examples looked at in this essay can only
make a minor contribution towards.
What has not yet been introduced and which may be useful in this discussion
is the Oriental concept of 'suchness', and its Western equivalent in Eckhart:
istigkeit ('isness'). If we were to ask Krishnamurti what we get
by the continued practice of his 'choiceless awareness' his answer could
easily be (if he cared for the term): 'suchness'. If we were to characterise
the base experience of the nature mystic we could again say: 'suchness'.
Why though is Nature any better for an experience of 'suchness' than in
a room, or with one's eyes shut? The characteristic of Nature that Krishnamurti
dwells on is silence, and this silence is surely just as obtainable in a
monk's cell as in a forest.
Or is it? Is there perhaps a certain silence in Nature that has nothing
to do with sound or the lack of it, that resonates deep within the observer?
Krishnamurti clearly thinks so. However, to reach this silence the 'suchness'
of Nature has to penetrate many layers.
Traherne teaches the 'elemental' base of Nature mysticism: a thankfulness
for air and light. Although he recommends us to enjoy the residue, even
to the point of insatiability, the requirement is to be content with next
to little. By clinging to 'air and light', like the Taoist clinging to the
Tao, the residue is present in its naked form, without the 'poor mirror'
of the mind that Underhill is so aware of. We are then presented with 'suchness.'
Jefferies and Whitman both suggest Nature in its more complex forms: trees,
skies, and brooks, to penetrate the many layers of our conceptualising and
bring us to silent 'suchness.' For Whitman there is an indolent relationship
with Nature; Jefferies however has to stride for many hours for Nature to
bestow its 'suchness' on him; Krishnamurti simply took his own 'suchness'
out to Nature.
The (greatly misunderstood) phenomenon of the silent mind is at the heart
of mysticism, and if it comes through Nature then we may call it nature
mysticism. The obstacles to the silent mind are legion, but in nature mysticism
a hurdle that must be overcome, or come to terms with, is the perception
of nature as 'red in tooth and claw.' A sensitive personality on the one
hand a good candidate for nature mysticism is, on the other hand, quite
likely to find the eternal drama of predator and prey abhorrent. Anthony
Freeman seems to be of this view, though we do not know from his book of
any more detailed reason for his rejection of Nature: perhaps it is simply
part of the general Western outlook since the Enlightenment. The scenes,
familiar to television-watchers of recent generations, of a lion pack killing
and devouring a zebra, with their cat-muzzles soaked in blood and gnawing
at the torn remnants of gristle and bone that used to constitute a shy herbivore;
all this is too much. Our own pain and death have become so remote and obscenified
that we can no longer contemplate them, and neither can we contemplate them
in Nature. Looking again at our four main protagonists we find no fear of
pain or death in any of their writings, though it is Whitman who deals most
thoroughly with the issues. Here he talks of pain:
Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded
person,
My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
(Song of Myself, v. 33)
This is not an easy passage to deal with, particularly
the image of him leaning on his cane and observing. However, his long and
selfless tending of the Civil War injured in the field and the hospital
he helped many a soldier die in a more thankful and easy state of mind than
would have been possible without his attendance and ministrations lend a
legitimacy to his almost callous statement. Of death he repeatedly
sings his indifference or even pleasure at the prospect (like Socrates);
here is an example:
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of
mortality, it is idle to try and alarm me.
To his work without flinching the accoucheur
[midwife] comes,
I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.
And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure,
but that does not offend me,
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish'd breasts of melons.
And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings
of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)
(Song Of Myself, v. 43)
This passage points to a possible knowledge
by Whitman of reincarnation, and certainly for the Oriental religions reincarnation
is a way of dealing with death. Dillard however clearly finds pain difficult
to deal with, and perhaps Sartre's indifference can be put down merely to
an indifferent constitution generally (either to his own or others' pain).
There is a morbidity in Dillard however, and this is perhaps simply a part
of modern alienation. The opposite tendency, that of romanticising Nature,
has different problems. In a typical Romantic view the problems of pain
and death are merely glossed over and the sublime and aesthetic dimensions
predominate. There is also the possibility that Nature becomes the escape
(perhaps more with Shelly than with Wordsworth for example) and that 'simple'
Nature will not suffice. The view from a grimy city bedsit window of a single
tree with two pigeons in it is a microcosm of Nature, surely sufficient
for the nature mystic, while the great vistas of the Alps are just more
of the same. (We saw earlier that Whitman pointed this out: for Whitman
the simple human activity of building a house, fishing, or even hard to
take a slave auctioneer at his work, all these also were his 'suchness'
and part of Nature.) Krishnamurti on the other hand, a pessimist like Jefferies,
saw Nature in contrast to the human: his daffodils more precious by far
than the consumers of meat and swiggers of brandy in the restaurant.
The occult nature of a teacher like Rudolf Steiner represents yet
another view of Nature that is problematic. There is not space here to go
into this in detail other than to mention his view of incarnation generally
as a kind of 'fall' (consistent with Anthroposophy as esoteric Christianity).
Another problem with Steiner is the anthropomorphic view of natural entities
as 'sleeping' human entities: Mercer is worried by any kind of anthropomorphism
in Nature mysticism. Our four main protagonists certainly do not promote
such a view, though Whitman seems faintly sympathetic to a animist outlook.
Blake, Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme also have 'occult' views on Nature and
need to be compared with each other and Steiner.
7. A Pedagogy
If we pick up on Mercer's contribution of reflecting on how a nature mysticism
may be pursued then what could form the basis of a pedagogy in it? There
is only space here to venture a few remarks on this, but we could begin
by imagining a purposeful placing of oneself in a 'natural' situation: it
may only be a city park, but preferably a less-populated area of the countryside,
perhaps with woods, fields and streams. What would turn a walk in the park
or country into a fruitful exercise in nature mysticism? We could turn first
to Traherne to lose our preoccupation with the tinsel and baubels of the
world (whatever these may represent to one), and to be grounded in the air
and light. We might consider Whitman's 'Lessons of a Tree' and his 'sociable-silent'
relationship with them; if our mortality is preoccupying us then we might
recall his contentment to become manure, and to 'reach to the polished breasts
of melons.' With Jefferies we might look at our own limbs and see them as
the distillation of the 'designless loveliness of the trees,' and also feel
somewhere within a soul that 'cannot be dipped in time.' With Krishnamurti
we might look at the hedgerow, with its harmonious balance of the living
and dying that make eternal Nature, and fall deep into its silence.
8. Conclusions
Mystics of the first rank are rare and often misunderstood: nature mystics
of the first rank are even rarer. This makes any delineation of nature mysticism
problematic, though its undercurrent in secular life is strong and helps
support its definition. We have seen that concepts such as 'suchness' and
silence of the mind are relevant; the outlook of the nature mystic as related
to the via positiva is useful, though not necessarily implying optimism.
Nature can teach a simplicity; it also teaches a lesson of the immortality
of the Whole through the birth and death of individuals: this means a deep
contemplation of one's own pain and death however.
Nature mysticism has boundaries with the occult and paranormal, with the
sublime and with the aesthetic: these boundaries need to be explored in
more detail. Its relationship to other forms of mysticism need to be explored:
for example a nature mystic with a devotional orientation (Traherne and
perhaps Whitman) differs from a nature mystic with a jnani orientation
(Jefferies and Krishnamurti). While a full-blown nature mysticism is rare
its presence in a nascent form is widespread in the world's literature,
and the reasons for its failure to blossom are there to be discovered in
that literature. Anti-nature also needs to be explored, including Huysman's
Against Nature, D.H.Lawrences' attacks on nature in Studies in
Classic American Literature, and a whole range of modern writers including
Quentin Crisp.
References for Part 3
[53] Krishnamurti, J. The
Only Revolution, New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1970, p.24
[54]
Chandmal, Asit, One Thousand Moons - Krishnamurti
at Eighty-Five, New York: Abrams 1985, p. 19
[55]
Beauvoir, Simone de, The Prime of Life, London:
Andre Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962, p. 169
[56]
Reid, Forrest, Peter Waring, London: Faber
and Faber 1937, p. 47
[57]
Reid, Forrest, Peter Waring, London: Faber
and Faber 1937, p. 95
[58]
Jaccottet, Philippe, (Trans., Derek Mahon), Selected
Poems, Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1987, p.11
[59]
Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek,
London: Jonathon Cape, 1975, p. xvi
[60]
Dillard, Annie, Teaching a Stone to Talk, London:
Pan Books, p. 134
[61]
Dillard, Annie, Teaching a Stone to Talk, London:
Pan Books, p. 135
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