Expect Poison from Standing Water

On disembodiment and re-membering.

‘Expect Poison from Standing Water.’

As I read these five words from William Blake’s Proverbs from Hell, it felt as though each word dropped within a brimming basin whose boundary quivered with each drop. Upon that fifth and final drop—‘Water’—I felt the pores lining the basin walls give way to a chorus of relieved sighs, as the main basin poured forth its song in gushes to those below it, whose pores also sighed in response and so set off a cascading symphony of relief as ideas once divided now exchanged, altogether forming a brilliant, breathing network of ideas.

Or, that’s how it felt. In reality, as I laid in bed and read those five words, I think my eyebrows might have raised a little as I said to myself ‘Oh, interesting’, and, after pausing for a moment to let it sink in, carried on reading.

Today, I’d like to try to convey why this statement resonated with me, some of the channels of thought it set in motion, and some of the ideas it brought together.

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There once wound a creek within a gloomy wood. The creek was clear and hummed gently. One frightful night, a storm rolled in, carrying an abundant downpour. The creek surged as muddy water flooded beyond its channels. The overflow wandered waywardly along the forest floor and found rest in pockets of depressed soil. As morning arrived and the sun shone bright, the creek sparkled with clarity and sighed with delight. The wayward channels meanwhile dried up, leaving the scattered pools alone with their glut. At first, the pools were clear like the creek, their glittering surfaces reflecting the branches of trees up high, whose reflections beckoned birds to come and bathe. But as time passed, the motionless pools grew stale and muddy, so the waving treetops could no longer be seen and the birds no longer visited.

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           IN the midway of this our mortal life,
           I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
           Gone from the path direct
           — Dante Alighieri

Born of abundance yet divorced from its exuberant source, many of us find ourselves astray. Once the channels that guided us through childhood relax, life carries us away waywardly where we risk pooling into a limbo of perpetual self-absorbed passivity, our once youthful and playful clarity muddying into an angsty adolescent confusion.

The way I see it, two pernicious features prepare the table upon which this poisonous confusion feasts: passivity and isolation. Much of our time these days is spent preparing this table, as we stare at screens whose shallow content crosses the reflection of our glazed eyes like clouds on a puddle’s surface. Between us and our digital feeding troughs lies a spatial divide, stretched like the distance between puddle and sky, leaving us chewing on oblivion while wondering why we feel so empty. There also lies a temporal divide; what our screens display to us are flattened audiovisual re-presentations of past events. And although the content on our screens do move in time, we are no more moved by our screens than is water by the movements in its reflection.

These two disconnects, from space (isolation) and time (stasis), prevent the purifying properties of exchange and motion to wash over us. And despite some narrow optimists assuring us that we are becoming more connected, the sober realist in Dostoevsky, writing in the late 19th century, offers an evergreen retort:

We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united…by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a union of people. Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display…I ask you: is such a man free?¹

While the quantity of relationships may be growing, their quality is dwindling. The quality-rich stream that once intimately bound us is diffusing into a quantity-rich floor of fragmented puddles. For the analytically minded, this growth in numbers is cause for celebration. But despite the rise in these lifeless abstractions, our spirits seem to be falling. What about those immeasurable qualities to which the poetically minded are more attuned: love, truth, and beauty?

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The enfouling isolation downstream of this Great Disembodiment evidences what Iain McGilchrist diagnoses as a left-hemispheric (LH) disorder at scale. For those unfamiliar, McGilchrist’s work suggests that the abstract reductionist in us finds its home in LH cerebral activity and the experiential holist in the right hemisphere. While both are necessary, he suggests that modernity is becoming increasingly characterized by the worship of the former at the expense of the latter.

Take the trend towards ever-increasing bureaucracy. Those of us involved with administrations face an increasingly dissatisfying limbo as requests pass through a faceless maze of administrators (themselves holed up in a maze of offices, another life-sucking limbo). For the sake of having every interaction accounted for and every anxiety addressed, the quantity of administrators is growing, administrative responsibility is diluting, and the quality of life is being drained out of every party involved. Jerry Muller, author of The Tyranny of Metrics, describes this obsession with accounting and measurement as a moral signal that yields the illusion of progress; yet, as Muller reminds us, ‘the quest for numerical metrics of accountability is particularly attractive in cultures marked by low social trust’. If we are to trust Saint Augustine’s claim that ‘the measure of love is to love without measure’, then the bloodthirst for metrics seems to imply a dwindling of love. This seems to me be the case, more on this later.

Another example is the devitalizing nature of the modern commute. After a brief brush with Nature from doorstep to parked car, we sit motionless in a vehicle that transplants us from origin to destination. No longer are we exposed to the elements, wildlife, or fellow humans that make up the Nature we inhabit. As uncomfortable as this exposure is (hence why we avoid it), over time its abrasiveness etches its signature deep into our being and polishes our outlook with an appreciative clarity. As Seneca once said, ‘A gem stone is not polished without friction, nor is a man without adversities’.² We’ve been shifting towards transplantive motion that allows us to move without moving (and thus accumulate poison) at the expense of transformative motion that polishes us as we move.

Other symptoms of the Great Disembodiment that come to mind are modern food culture, suburbia and skyrises, and AI, which at their worst cleave intimacy from some of the most fundamental facets of life (eating, habitating, and thinking). We’re forgetting who we are. Philosopher James Carse suggests that’s the point of technology. When technology works perfectly, it disappears. You forget about your phone while watching a video and suddenly remember it when the video buffers. But as the technology disappears, so do you: you forget yourself while watching a video; you’re reminded of yourself when it buffers.

This isn’t such a problem for something like losing oneself in a well-crafted novel. In this context, the technological³ relationship is intimate, inasmuch as the relationship demands earnest engagement of author and reader alike as each submit themselves to the story streaming through them. There’s a reciprocal inhalation and exhalation—a reciprocal communion and kenosis⁴—a true exchange, as the three active participants (the writer, the reader, and the spirit of the story) swim in a poetic stream that allows each to rediscover themselves anew through a sort of mythical baptism.

Rediscovering anew is the key here. A Greek word commonly translated as truth, aletheia, literally means unforgetting or unconcealing. This is truth as a verb: a process, rather than truth as a noun: a thing. In this sense, aletheia can be seen as the rich, pulsing, implicit field of truth that impregnates the pencils that jot down the ordered, static, explicit articulations of truth (e.g., logos) that we find in physics textbooks and holy scripture.

When you become lost so that you can find yourself anew, then, with more of the wonderous whole accommodated within you, it seems to me that you’re brought closer to the truth. As McGilchrist says, ‘The whole purpose of a division is to enrich a union’.⁵ We forget so that we can unforget. We dis-member so that we can re-member ourselves to a richer stream.

Losing oneself in the mindless drone of short form content, on the other hand, is pure dis-memberment; a detaching of oneself from the inconvenient everflowing stream and instead inhabiting a stale puddle of ignorance. The problem with short-form digital media (and the materialist economy in general) is there’s just not enough intimacy to encourage a genuine bringing together (a re-membering). This is the bunk ‘union of people’ Dostoevsky warned us about. In the materialist arena, consumer and provider alike demand everything of the other and little of themselves. All inhalation, no exhalation, leaving everybody breathless.

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           Can he keep himself still, if he would? oh not he!
           The music stirs in him like wind through a tree.
           — William Wordsworth

In the early 90s, an ambitious experiment called Biosphere 2 aimed to simulate a self-sustaining ecological system that could support human life during space travel. Led by a group of scientists with billionaire funding, eight humans entered the sealed system along with a number of hand-picked flora and fauna as they tried to make themselves comfortable for the next two years.

Staying comfortable proved to be difficult, as the mission ended up serving as an elaborate reminder to expect poison from standing water. While sealed, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels fluctuated wildly in response to ecological imbalances, and the idea of a closed system had to be abandoned to inject additional oxygen. Meanwhile, ant and cockroach populations boomed as they outcompeted other organisms, and plant species were threatened by the extinction of pollinating species. That’s all not to mention the political conflicts between the human participants.

It turns out that deracinating species from their local environments and transplanting them into artificial environments doesn’t bode well for those species, a project that, by the way, humanity is currently undertaking at scale as we plunge further into the digital. To be fair, organisms really do seem separate from their environments due to their discernable uniqueness. But organisms are nevertheless interwoven with their environment, so that when we attempt to abstract (literally to drag away) them from environment, some (if not all) of that organism is lost in the process. And, evidently, it is exceedingly difficult (if not impossible) to reconstruct that environment brick-by-brick (or pixel-by-pixel); rather, it perpetually makes itself anew atop an unbelievably complex yet stable foundation.

Speaking of stability, I’ve left out one last detail from the experiment. Around halfway through the experiment, trees began to collapse under their own weight. It was later found that these trees lacked the strong structural tissues that would normally develop from exposure to stress-inducing winds. While Biosphere 2 as a whole demonstrated the difficulties associated with environmental severance, this detail illuminates the tragic consequences of the perpetual peace ensuing dis-memberment—our final key towards understanding the Great Disembodiment.

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           The tree whose core does not defy
           Kisses not the infinite sky.

When intimacy withers, we separate into isolated, static parts whose motion is but internal; a motion that cultivates a metastasizing sludge useful only to ourselves. But we nevertheless long for the purifying intimate stream to wash over us and rid us of our filth. Many, for example, are being drawn to digital livestreams, live news, and live sports, longing to close temporal gaps. At lunch, many of us are drawn to watch videos while we consume our food—one of the most intimate acts we engage in, as something other than us enters inside and becomes us—because we long to share our moment of communion with others; we long to close that spatial divide. But as a flame to a moth, these means of connection merely leave us encircling ourselves in perpetual dissatisfaction.

Which reveals a paradox, in that the reason so many of us dis-member is so that we may rest on the sidelines in self-satisfied peace. To immerse oneself in the experiential stream is inconvenient; it strips us bear, molds us anew, and demands earnest participation. It calls us to come to life. But life is hard, so why not pursue what’s easy? Why not pursue peace?

Because prolonged peace is poison. As Hegel writes

Just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual peace’.⁶

This is a fairly robust socioeconomic finding. In his book The Great Leveler, historian Walter Scheidel discovered that so long as nations remained peaceful, their wealth inequality would rise. It was only when forcibly shaken up—either by mass mobilized warfare, political revolution, or natural disaster (e.g., pandemics with substantial mortality rates)—that a nation’s inequality leveled. The disheartening conclusion drawn from his work is that it seems unlikely that peaceful democratic processes can reduce inequality as we’d like to believe they can.

In a similar way, a corrupting inequality ferments within you when you attach yourself to peace. Self-medicating with peaceful short-term wants impoverishes both your past self (the one who longed to become an astronaut) and your future self (the one who longs to be surrounded by loved ones on their death bed). Extending further in time, you impoverish your ancestors by squandering their efforts, and your descendants by plunging them into a confusing, murky filth.

If passivity and isolation prepare the table upon which ignorance feeds, the main course is, I believe, the fear of fear. A delectible array rich in lifeless predictability, fear of fear is indistinguishable from an attachment to peace, and, contrary to popular belief, it is not fear that kills minds, but fear of fear. The mind is actually quite active when fear is held near; it is when insulated from the vicissitudes of a dynamic and dangerous existence that your mind shuts off—but along with your mind, so goes your life. Fear of fear is a fear of life; love of peace is a love of death.

Because experience is inherently dangerous. The ‘per’ in ‘experience’ literally means something like ‘to go through’, similar to how a stream winds through a gloomy wood. ‘Per’ also finds itself in the words ‘peril’ and ‘perish’, hinting towards the inherently dangerous nature of being. As the dangerous ‘per’ embeds itself into the word experience, so ‘experience’ describes our subjective immersion within a dangerous, mysterious world.

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           Full many a gem of purest ray serene
           The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
           Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
           And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
           — Thomas Gray

Insofar as our lives are precious, then, so is experience and the fear associated with it. Within our fears nestle ‘gems of purest ray serene’ and ‘flowers born to blush unseen’, and it is only through encountering those places we’d rather avoid—those ‘dark unfathom’d caves’ and desolate deserts—that the joys of life are revealed to us. To come alive, to encounter the brilliant glitter of gems and flavourful fragrances, requires loving fear, not with reckless abandon but with tender care.

Recall that truth as a process (aletheia) describes a ceaseless flow of unconcealings, of unforgettings, of re-memberings. Therefore, to honestly pursue truth, you can’t know what’s hiding behind that veil. To fulfil your potential, you need to approach that daunting, mysterious, pregnant field of potential everlooming beyond your horizon with love. This is what it means to me to be God-fearing: to fear this dangerous, pulsing, Ocean of potential enveloping us, yet to nevertheless love it anyways; to sit upon His broad lap in all your meekness and have faith that He is Good despite His monstrous potentiality; because to love fear is to love life.

In those same Proverbs from Hell, Blake writes ‘Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.’ Your joys seek release but need your sorrows to bring them forth; if you try to escape your sorrows with mindless distractions, your joys come out stillborn.

That Ocean yearns for you and you for it, in all its glorious melancholy. That pang of sorrow you feel when called to shed that old cherished self and step into the unknown—embrace it! That’s the weeping murmur of the stream calling you, and it pains to see you slowly evaporate on the forest floor. It yearns for you to re-member. As all streams return to the Ocean, all veins return to the Heart.

1. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1879)

2. This quote also gets attributed to Confucius and chinese proverbs. I wouldn’t be surprised if it has bubbled up elsewhere.

3. Here I mean technological in its true sense: something crafted (the Greek techne translates to something like craft).

4. Self-emptying.

5. McGilchrist, The Matter With Things (2021)

6. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820)