the raven

I’ve just submitted this to Touchstone, so we will see if it gets printed… Anyway, I thought you might be interested in a preview.

During the early part of my Ovate work, I was given the sense that along this portion of my journey, I need to spend more time looking beyond words. It is a strange thing, for I have, like many of us in this highly literate culture, spent much of my life wrapped in words. I am at home in the rarified air of academia, possessor of some mathematical ability as well as an appreciator of poetry and literature, and a fairly sophisticated user of words. Yet for at least 10 years, I have been unravelling their hold on me.

I began to see the limits of words when I read the work of Carlos Castaneda. I saw a vision of the fractured reality he describes, the shaman passing through gaps within the things which all around believe are real and solid. At the time, I was working on my Ph.D., which centres on an attempt at a mathematically precise definition of what it means to have beliefs or knowledge about things. The attempt at precision is perhaps the essence of modernity. Now, as those of you who have studied some mathematics will know, algebraic equations have their visual representations as graphs. Much symbolic mathematics can, for those who find it useful to think this way, be related to some type of image. And among the formal symbolic logic I used for my Ph.D., I found an image which looked a bit like Carlos Castaneda’s fractured reality!

I saw a mystical marriage between the world and each person who lives in the world, and its offspring were the ‘things’ each person believed were real and solid. These ‘things’ are rather slippery. Imagine an experiment where an electrical signal is applied directly to some part of a target person’s brain. Suppose this person sees the image of a book whenever that electrical signal is applied, just as if the book was there, in front of their open eyes. They cannot in any way distinguish the case when the book is ‘really’ there, from the case when the electrical signal is switched on. They may only find out what happened if they are told afterwards by others. If they believe what they are told, they will know that some of the books they saw were ‘real’ and some were not. But I see the possibility of things which are different, but which all humans experience as identical. An omniscient being would, by definition (all-knowing), know these things were different. But for those of us poor humans who were deceived by thinking them all identical, there would be nobody who could ever tell us any different. These are the absolute limits on our ability ever to determine the workings of the universe.

I saw that nothing is real. The things we believe in are based on our own experiences of the world. Place us in another type of world, assuming it is one we could still live in, and we would believe in utterly different things. Yes, it is true that there are things people mostly agree about. But there are many things, such as the difference between turquoise and green, which people have difficulty agreeing about. Some things partake mostly of the world, yet others partake rather more of the person than the world. There is a continuum, where the reality of nothing can be taken for granted.

And paradoxically, in the way of the Ovate and of the Druid, I saw that everything is real. The things I hear, see, feel, smell, taste, within and without – they are everything. Some of them have no names, no words to describe them. Some of them I may invent my private words to describe. And I may try to explain them to others, and in some cases others may say “Yes, I, too have experienced that!” So I may agree to share my private name for that experience, and that name now stands for many people’s experiences, each of which may be subtly different. And over time, that name may come to be shared by many thousands of people, some of whom live quite far apart and rarely speak to one another. Each local group of people knows what the name means to those around them, but has little idea of what it means to those who live the other side of the world. Over more time, something happens which brings these groups back in contact with one another, and each is horrified at the beliefs of the other. For with one group, that name has grown to represent a range of experiences which is greatly different from those which it represents for the other group. They use the same names, but they speak of something different. At the same time, each group has probably developed a different name for the set of experiences that is no longer described by the original name. Here, the groups use different names but speak of something the same. So everything is real, whatever we call it.

Such is the human condition, wrapped in words we gain from others, but with no knowledge of the experiences those words represent for others. We learn our words by being pointed at things that they stand for, or by hearing the ways in which they relate to other words – hopefully ones we already know. By this highly imperfect means, we come to a means of communication that for many practical purposes works very well. Yet when it comes to speaking of things which cannot often be shared at the moment of experience, like spirituality, philosophy or politics, it seems to me that we have the highest duty to attend to its imperfections.

As Druids, we already recognise the different elemental natures of words and direct experience, as Air and Earth respectively. We honour the Bardic arts of poetry and rhetoric as they honour the nature of words as signs and pointers, bearers of multiple connotations, full of ambiguity – and therefore honest to their nature. This use of words is the opposite of scientific, which aims to hem in the meaning of each term it defines so tightly that there can be no ambiguity whatsoever. This scientific use of words is an equally honourable method, yet one which tends to construct such complexities of definitions that it enforces a specialisation of knowledge, and fractures each person’s ability to describe the whole.

We honour also the arts of music and dance, and yet I feel their place within the heart of our wisdom is sometimes overlooked, allowing them to be perceived only as content for the occasional Eisteddfod portion of one of our gatherings. Music is movement – of the voices and instruments which make the music, and also of the inner ear and body of the listener. Much music inspires us to move in time with it. The experience of music and movement seem to be intimately coupled in a way which makes it hard to find a boundary between them. Movement is managed, and therefore music must also be present, in the ‘animal’ part of our brain: the part we inherit from our oldest ancestors. We hear it in birdsong, in the cries of the wolf, the purring of a cat. It is physical, it is Earth; in hearing the music of another soul, we begin to resonate with it. We move with the other, we (literally) are moved by the experience. This is the deepest communication there can be, and it is wordless. My Ovate guides are calling me to listen to the Earth’s music, and dance.