5 books and a party

I'm reading five books right now and loving them all - each is wonderful when read in the right mood:

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie - A Britt's dark sword and sorcery revenge fantasy

The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind by Michael S. Gazzaniga - A neuroscientist with fresh ideas on the evolution of consciousness

Swann's Way by Proust - A gay, dead Frenchman, nostalgic after eating a cookie

The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, translated into modern English by Nevill Coghill - A 14th-century courtier's collection of short story poems, framed by a pilgrimage

For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism by Freya Matthews - an Aussie environmentalist challenges the basic assumptions underpinning Western philosophy and science, arguing for a new metaphysics that recognizes nature as aware

As you can probably tell from the length of my summaries, the one I’ve been most in the mood for lately is Freya Matthews’ book on Panpsychism. So, thanks for the rec, Ezekiel!

The writing is fearless and limitless. For example, this is from her introduction:

I [argue] that space and time and the existence of a universe at all can only be explained if subjectivity is taken as fundamental to the nature of reality. I then track the implications of panpsychism as they ripple out from this cosmological point of reference.

Whew! Several implication-ripples later, Matthews gets to the personal: her argument that nature should be encountered rather than investigated - that is, treated as a presence, one with an inner life, however different from ours.

She argues that the way to encounter that presence is a secret hidden in plain sight, passed through the generations in the form of faerie tales and other stories told mostly by women, mostly to children. She argues that those stories are really about transformative communication with a universe that is aware and active as presence and a force in its own right.

But faerie tales show nature doesn't just open itself up to anybody, real communication, real encounter isn’t a given - it’s a prize to be won only after meeting nature on its own terms, sacrificing something of the personal, giving up the iron grip on the self. A lesson the West has firmly rejected in favor of domination and "investigation" of nature as an object to be studied. And she argues it's destroying our sense of meaning and even the earth itself in the process.

This is familiar territory to any Jungian, but Matthews puts it in terms of philosophy rather than psychology. Where Jung uses the term the "unconscious" to describe the strange presences that come to us in the darkness, Matthews uses the term "nature" - cutting out the middleman and arguing it is not archetypes in our brains we are encountering but the real, live, "subjective" inner life of nature itself.

It's a bold and thrilling position to take. As I told Rachel, the book is so ambitious, I was bound to disagree with something in, but it took me fifty pages before that happened, and - oddly, the bit I didn’t agree with Rachel did —

But more important than the specifics, I believe in her basic premise -- Jung's too -- or, at least, one adjacent and compatible with them both: there is more to brains than the merely physical, at least as we understand the physical currently, and it is likely there is something inside brains connected somehow to something bigger outside -- or that inside and outside are somehow the same thing -- or that imagination is reality somehow on a level more fundamental than we understand.

That is, I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I do think it’s not what we “know” now, which is really not knowledge but an assumption and a belief mixed up together and passed off as the only unspoken frame to any legitimate question - that is, a weird insistent on believing we live in a dead world ... just because we don't understand what makes it so alive. Because it is alive. I mean, just fucking look at it.

*

So! Anyway, speaking of Rachel: I love her.

She and I threw a lovely party this week. The idea was to have a party for people we want to get to know better, rather than people we see all the time. So I got to meet and re-meet all sorts of wonderful people, and it took me from quite a dark place to quite a nice place and I just think that parties are a great thing and maybe a big part of the purpose of life is to have parties. Like, what are you doing if you aren’t having or going to parties?

And if you want a citation on that, see supra re: encounters with the other.