Many of my recent experiences and thoughts on our cultural and individual relationship to the land never formed themselves into words. They did not seem to want to be written here. So I have not posted for a while.
I picked up a book called THE ANIMAL DIALOGUES by Craig Childs. I have only read a little of it, but already it has my attention. Here is a great quote from the introduction, and is referring to the authors encounter with a great blue heron.
You can not look at this bird and decide who is superior and who is not. The encyclopedic vocabulary of a raven is no more admirable than a red-spotted toad's ability to drink through its skin. The human penchant for deciphering the world has no greater merit than the unusually large eyeball of a pronghorn.
This is essentially an animist outlook on the world of wildlife around us. I dunno if Craig Childs would bother calling himself an animist, but this statement fits the bill anyway.
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2 comments:
Filip,
You wrote: "This is essentially an animist outlook on the world of wildlife around us. I dunno if Craig Childs would bother calling himself an animist, but this statement fits the bill anyway."
Right now I'm having a hard time understanding what Childs was saying in the last sentence in the quote you posted. It will probably click for me later when I'm doing something else. But I'm curious to hear what you heard him saying in that last sentence?
Getting back to your quote above. I find that when I am percieving things with an "animist outlook"(which hasn't been to often lately)it gets me out of my head. The "I" shrinks so to speak, and I like it. Labeling and categorizing definately has its downfalls. One of them, I think, is that we have fooled ourselves into believing that this type of knowledge is power. Does this make sense?
What I understood from what Craig was saying is that the feature that we as modern western people hold to the highest value (our ability to decipher the world and solve problems) is no more incredible than the sense of smell of a black bear or the tapered, built-for-speed wings of a falcon.
These things are just features of each animal that allow them to survive as part of the natural world. I think his statement can be seen as leaning in the direction I mentioned because this kind of thinking (regarding other life forms as equal and yet noticing their uniqueness) is to me essentially part of animist thought.
Yes, I agree that our culture penchant and obsession for labeling and categorizing the world gives us a sense of power... specifically power OVER things. This is an illusion, of course, but its a mighty persistent one none the less.
You make perfect sense in your final paragraph.
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