Embracing Nature’s Complexity

Letting meaning run away with itself

The bias I have towards the world is a linguistic curve; I see words poking out of the soil among roots; poetry draped across the back of a chair as a lover plays with the hair of his sweetheart; words giggling in the silence, bunching themselves together like a flirtatious flock of sparrows. I believe humanity is a symbolic species, both liberated and bound by those symbols, navigating an existential tightrope amongst the forest canopy from which we so readily fall, wrapping ourselves in dogma as if words can turn the rocks below into dust. 

And, in a sense, words can. Words alchemise the world around us, and us with it. I have often wondered if what Eve and Adam found in the garden was language itself, the essence of story, and so they covered themselves with leaves because the words bustling within us pushed the very hairs out of our bodies. Words, to me, are alive; they seek to enter the world; any poet will tell you words arrange themselves on the page, as if intelligent, as if conscious. Language lives with us, in us, and births us as much as we birth it, yet another signature of this planet’s symbiosis. We find parts of ourselves in the arch of the letter A, or the crucifix of the T, built as they are from our own DNA; we trace our evolution not only of the world, but our understanding of the world, and thus ourselves. 

We can see what was left behind, and what was lost by force when we grabbed on too tight to the world around us rather than letting it slide through our grasp like poetry, like water; eternal wellspring of momentum and possibility. We dammed the word ways like we dammed the waterways. Poetry, dammed. Souls too.

It is no surprise to me that the extended attack on nature coincides with an attack on language. I could give many examples of authoritarian regimes prone to extraction from populace and natural resources banning books, but I also refer to first the ugly atomisation of language as we moved from prizing poetry to prizing technicality, and then on to the very mistrust of metaphor which has resulted in the suspicion of truth itself, as if there ought not to be vagaries in the world, no mysticism or surprise, no meaning as it speaks to each of us individually. No, no vagaries are to run through these capillaries; the word ought to be boundaried tightly, like the land itself. Meaning must never run away with itself; what use are wild horses?

Meaning is a part of nature like wildness is a part of nature. There is no meaning without wildness for meaning is that which sprawls, which spills, which creeps and entangles and appears; meaning is the daisy pushing up through a crack in the pavement; it is the bush pushing through the fence; it is the sound of birds through triple-glazed windows and the wind waving the trees. Meaning is the world bursting at material seams, the relationship between, that which would be so much easier to manage if we could keep separate: our hearts, our ideas, the needs of nature itself from the needs of our own. Imagine, just, if we could breed meat without Life; a food supply without the need for care. Yes, the world would be much easier if it stayed to its boundaries; but it would be utterly meaningless, made tame. 

Language, made tame, is meaningless. We, made tame, are meaningless. Our industrialised populations with our seemingly limitless knowledge and energy abundance and machinery which alchemises anything we need from the earth cannot seem to figure out how to save it from ourselves; yet indigenous populations who make up just 5% of our species steward 80% of the world’s biodiversity. They do not have the technology, the energy, the engineering know-how, but their libraries are in the forests, their data carried in the DNA of their languages, languages bursting with verbs and metaphor and poetry, language which sings and dances and winds underneath the canopy; language that welcomes complexity to wrap itself around the world, fluttering under the sun, whereas our own seeks to pin it to the wall, butterfly wings gathering dust: preserved. 

Preservation in this context is prescient, for we preserve that which is dead, binding bodies in cloth out of loyalty to a past that no longer exists. Bound, again, and we wonder why the seams fray, we wonder why life, hobbled, collapses into Herself, toes curled underneath the ball of her feet as she was forced to move quietly through the world so as not to disturb death. 

Tamed, de-natured, neutered. This is violence. 

In English, we speak of “senseless violence”, violence for which there is no reason. Yet, violence is only sensed; we feel violence sparking across out nervous system, our limbs tremble before it, its scars line our bodies and our brains with maps of where we have been and where we must escape. Violence comes back to the body, always; always back to the senses. And so, how can a thing that is sensed be senseless? How can we make sense of the senseless? Is this the original chasm where meaning falls at the very tip of my tongue? 

Language has no words for violence for it is the loss of meaning itself; it is senselessness made sensed; it is the sound of a scream on the wind; metal teeth tearing into soft flesh as the ancient beings are felled, one by one, hectare by hectare, ecosystem by ecosystem. Timber, renewable, sustainable, profit, owner, ours, mine. 

The biota is a breathing archive, a living library, the organs of complexity which sustain Life on this planet; organs which are wild, cells bursting at their own seams to grow in complexity, unravelled, they stretch to the moon and back. Wildness is the complexity which grows over the boundaries with which we surgically divide the world, syllable by syllable. To speak of complexity we need a new syntax; one that crackles like the forest floor and sighs like the canopy and giggles in the thicket and reverberates in communion. A syntax that makes a commons of the whole, wild world.

Modernity has no words for the crimes it commits against the world, for it was tamed, along with us. Language was boundaried and terrorised and territorialised, the land impaled on the flagpole and language reduced to a torn banner flapping in the wind like a bird desperate to escape. This is preservation; captured meaning, bound, petrified. 

It would be ironic if we had the words but Cerebros’ tail became his tongue and the world was undone. It was said yesterday that we cannot care for what we do not see; but we cannot see what we cannot speak: complexity, reduced, made meaningless. 

This is violence in the commons, the great symbiosis of Life reduced to symbols, made meaningless when wielded in the name of violence; violence made possible by the emptiness of symbols: a sea of stumps shaved into submission, upturned to a cloud who no longer recognises where to lay herself down. And us with it. 

We are nature. We are nature, territorialised, impaled on the flagpole, flapping in the wind like a bird desperate to escape. We are bound in the meaningless, preserved in death, lost in a world that doesn’t make sense anymore, without language to speak of the harm, without language to heal the harm. The violence we commit upon the natural world is a violence unto our own body, wrought in the name of preservation of the human enterprise and so utterly meaningless because we have lost our capacity to feel it.

Preserve. Conserve. Sticky fingers in the jam pot, fattened on sugar, teeth stained red, then whitened. 

We need to rewild the commons. We need to rewild the land and ourselves and our language so we may feel what we are doing to the world around us, so we may feel what we are doing to ourselves and to each other. We need to rewild the linguistic commons so we may find meaning and a way out of this economy of death that territorialised the living world. Such meaning is anti-violence, a nature that communes, which grows by interweaving relationships and dependencies, which flourishes and decays, which evolves dynamically through time, which bursts at the seams and pokes through the fence and whistles through the triple-glazed windows. We need an anti-violent language to reclaim our anti-violent nature, a language that is full of meaning so we may see all we cannot, and feel all we cannot, and learn all we cannot.

Nature demands liberation from from tameness; wildness demands liberation from the word; the world demands liberation from violence. The annihilation of meaning is one method of achieving certainty, cocooned in modernity as we pass one another leading frictionless lives. But friction is the source of all Life, and we need to invite in the unknown, in the gaps between these words I present to you now, as part of our rewilding. We need to confront the limitations of human understanding, the limitations of scientific method, of cognition, of communication, and make space for all that may be, in the moment between, when the lung contracts in order to expand. 

It is why I chose poetry today. Because measuring does not always lead to understanding and understanding does not always lead to meaning and it is these spaces between that can either become wild and flush with Life or empty chasms from which death spills. Because I want to evoke the earth twisting around the flagpole until it is become forest again. Because we do not merely face scientific challenges but structural conflicts made invisible by language until Nature unbinds her feet and runs wild through our dictionaries, leaving tracks those wise enough to follow know lead us only to ourselves. This is nature returning to herself; this is the world blooming with meaning; the commons un-tamed, the word ways un-dammed and the water given back to the skies as we laugh under the canopies, fallen but held in the web of all there is.

I delivered this speech to scientists in April at the Embracing Nature’s Complexity conference in Munich.

---