Welcome to the second issue of The Familiar, a bimonthly paper exploring the world-view called ‘STA’, and many thanks for the warm response to our debut. Every two months The Familiar will offer an essay about different aspects of STA accompanied by pictures, scraps of verse, quotations, all of which, we hope, will encourage you to ‘STA ET CONSIDERA MIRACULA – stand still and consider the wondrous things’ around us.
This issue emphasises the simplicity of STA in a world we have complicated. It examines what nature has to tell us about our individuality and interdependence, why we ignore it, and what might happen if we didn’t !
MOSS BRO
I suppose you could call this a family photo – scores of moss plants and me their cousin, represented by a clumsy finger. We’re distant genealogically, of course – it’s about 1.5 billion years since we shared a grandparent – but closer in practice. I’ve seen this moss more recently and often than my great-aunt’s kids in Chichester.
Unlike me, busy writing my little essay, the moss has no pretensions to thought, but each individual plant has its own perspective, responding to changing circumstances, growing, retrenching, doing whatever is within its power to ‘persist in its own being’, as Spinoza puts it. It would be too much to say it had a ‘will’, but it has its agency. (Scientists, somewhat condescendingly, call this ‘minimal cognition’, though it’s all the cognition moss needs.)
There are twelve thousand species of moss: neither the plants nor I care which this is. Moss feels no special affinity with its fellow species members nor even with those closer relatives three feet away. It is here, and its here is very small. It attends instead to the siblings and cousins jostling against it, the harebells bursting through it, the birds who rifle it for bedding and food, the microbes snug within, the insects bustling across it, the weather it endures, the minerals it needs, the ponies that deluge it with mountains of manure. It is tremulously alive to its ambient reality.
This diverse multi-species community is its world. ‘Community’ is the wrong term, though, suggesting a common goal. The essence of this is place. Perhaps the Welsh word bro (plural: broydd) is best, a loosely defined neighbourhood, the patch to which one belongs simply by having made a life there. Belonging does not imply ownership. The moss doesn’t own, nor is owned by, the moor. Doubtless some pension fund or posh whoever has legal deeds to the land, but property is a fiction; mosses only do reality. The moss belongs; belonging is intransitive. It is all there – no fragment of its activity occurs outside the area framed.
I, however, am not all there, only that finger. More significantly, as the fact of my taking a photo at all shows, I am not committed to this place or this moment so completely as the moss. I am looking at the screen, planning to go somewhere else and look at this photo, to show it to persons unknown, accompanied by exquisitely phrased meditations about moss. Now, weeks later, I am thinking about the past – looking at this picture – and the future – the completion of this essay and its reception. I pause for a moment and see that I am lying in bed with a cat on my chest, that it’s almost light outside, that my T-shirt is on back-to-front. This is the present reality, and very nice it is too, but I’m not all here. I have a bad case of ultrolatry.
Ultrolatry – ‘the worship of what is beyond’
Ultrolatry (pron. ul-TROLL-a-tree)1 is the conviction that what is ‘over there’ is more significant than what is ‘here’, that the future and the past are more important than the present, even that things that do not exist are more important than things that do. It sounds absurd but, among humans at least, it’s gone viral, and affects every aspect of society so completely it’s passed almost unnoticed. When our first instinct in the morning is to check ‘the news’, when we stare at screens, whenever we abdicate our agency and rely on a remote source – scripture, peer pressure, celebrity endorsements – for guidance, that’s ultrolatry. Capitalism is deeply ultrolatrous: advertising’s first aim is to make us so unhappy with the present that we’ll buy its dreamy future. Businesses seek expansion; ambitious employees want promotion, the rest long for weekends, holidays and retirement. Everyone wants to be somewhere or something else. Homo inquietus The Restless Ape.
Religion is saturated with aboveness and beyondness2 – the afterlife privileged over this one, enlightenment to be found only at the end of a long and difficult quest. (Mosses don’t quest, even arctic terns don’t quest – their migrations are routine, not escapes to ‘a better life’.) Many scientists too are ultrolaters, convinced that what we see through a microscope or telescope is somehow truer than the evidence of our naked eyes. It is not; it is the same truth seen at different magnification. The discovery of black holes and neutrinos does not overturn our intimate, experienced link to reality, though it can distract us from it. If I am an innumerable mass of sub-atomic particles (and I don’t doubt that I am) I am that as well as not instead of being me. Complex systems like the human brain (and even the moss) are not simply the sum of their parts; they are dynamic, generating their own agency. The quantum world is in no sense more real than lived experience.
The germ that infects us with ultrolatry is, of course, our imagination. That remarkable attribute which invents The Iliad, The Virgin of the Rocks, The Goldberg Variations and fuses disparate data into metaphysical or scientific theories, has this unfortunate and overlooked flipside: we are the only creatures who can ignore reality. And we do.
There’s something grandly tragic about this: our greatest glory is our deadliest danger. This portrait of the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe bears the Latin tag Quod me nutrit, me destruit. ‘That which feeds me, destroys me’. It was true enough of his creations Doctor Faustus and the Jew of Malta, perhaps true of Marlowe himself, murdered in a lodging-house brawl in his twenties. Their destruction seems the inevitable consequence of their characters.
Now it’s only a tag, not a prophecy about the fate of humanity, but perhaps it’s worth bearing in mind. The most dangerous ultrolatry is our habit of seeing the world through the tinted filters of ideas and categories we have ourselves invented (what STA calls ‘attributed realities’ – see below). Climate chaos, pollution, deforestation, wars only exist because we think in terms of made-up concepts – money, progress, nations, status etc – rather than by close involvement with physical reality. Ultrolatry distances us from the rest of nature which, like the moss, lives entirely in the now and here of its bro.
QUICK now HERE NOW ALWAYS A condition of complete simplicity Costing not less than everything Little Gidding, (T.S. Eliot)
The Oregon timber trade is not in the vanguard of environmental thinking. Vast areas of old growth forest have been butchered and the millions of creatures that depended on that moist, mossy habitat are dead. But the authorities, recognising a problem, stipulated that in each devastated hectare one venerable tree should be left standing, like the Ancient Mariner alone on deck amid the corpses of his shipmates. This, it was thought, would reseed the plantation with moss and lichen spores, but the poor old mosses, newly dazzled by the sun, suddenly assailed on all sides by the elements, bereft of the neighbours they had always known, sickened, shrivelled and died.
Half a world away, the peoples of southern Africa share a philosophy which might have helped. Different languages give it different names, but it is best known to us in the West by the Xhosa term, Ubuntu. There it is a specifically humanist idea, but now that Darwin has shown that humans and the rest of creation are all one family, there is no reason not to extend its remit. Ubuntu – I am because you are. It is a beautifully simple expression of our interdependence. I am because you are – you, mosses and trees; you, neighbour walking past my door; you, pollinating insects I’m afraid might sting me; you, small weed in my garden whose precise contribution to ensuring my existence I cannot quite pin down but whose indispensability, as I watch the floods and storms and droughts and wildfires and extinctions, watch them scrolling across the screens of dead technology whose glowing lights and pixels we mistake for life while we disdain our living kin, this small weed among them, I cannot afford to doubt.
Had the foresters recognised Ubuntu and left a spinney large enough to retain some moisture, cast some shade and baffle the winds, conserving the essence of the bro, the mosses might have survived. Their attention is very parochial. Although the web of our interdependence stretches across the world, its individual strands are short. Simplicity is the fabric of complexity. One resolves itself into the other, just as our lofty ‘maximal’ cognition is the complex product of infinite ‘minimal’ cognitions in our brain. Ubuntu is not a theory, nor a fluffy aspiration. It is a statement of how things are. Present indicative. I am because you are.
The moss has its genuine agency, but it cannot exist without the bro – the same applies to us. We are each unique and all inter-related. Know thyself, say the ancient sages. They might as well ask me to explain the cosmos. We are embodied, situated creatures – we cannot be studied out of context. It is in our ceaseless interactions with the diversity of the bro we inhabit – the ground we’re standing on, the microbes inside us, the people we meet – that life happens. I am because you are. As Marilynne Robinson writes, ‘All we really know of who we are is what we do.’
If we are to accept our individuality and interdependence and be agile enough to negotiate life new at every moment, we must travel lightly; we will only be encumbered by borrowed ideals, social customs, should, oughts and preconceptions. So, STA sets aside ultrolatry and looks squarely at the bro. STA et considera miracula – Stand still and consider the wondrous things. It makes two basic assumptions – that the world is real, and that evolution is true. From these simple beginnings, it arrives at the seven starting points listed at the end of this essay. Among them is the acceptance that we are a part of nature, not separate in any way. STA’s aim then is not beyondness, but utterness – to exist as fully as possible in the real world around us.
How do we begin? STA is astonishingly simple. There are no initiation ceremonies, exams to pass or fees to pay. You need not, for now at least, plumb unexplored depths of your being or enter some ‘spiritual realm’; you just try to set aside all preconceptions and look. Let everything you see settle on your mind with the full heft of its reality. That reality will exceed all the words or thoughts we apportion it. We produce words to ‘make sense’ of what we see but, of course, it makes sense already, whether we understand it or not. The world is not an element of our consciousness. It is the necessary reality.
Look at any living thing and Acknowledge its Reality, Beauty, Otherness, Relatedness (‘ARBOR’ – see below). How wonderfully it reveals itself when you give it due attention, an individual creature co-existing with you, one of gazillions of all shapes and sizes – trees, woodlice, window cleaners – othered by genetic happenstance but sharing the bro, feeling the same needs, involved like the rest of us in the life-long business of keeping itself going.
STA is not much interested in the accumulation of knowledge. Instead, it’s after involvement, fellowship, relish. It is not (dear God!) our knowledge or our cleverness that is our greatest gift – with all our tech and sophistication we cannot make a blade of grass from scratch. It is our being and belonging, like our clamorous participation at an amazing gig (The Pogues at Brixton Academy!) or rugby match (Wales winning the Grand Slam in Cardiff!!). Only the arseholes jump up on the stage or invade the pitch – ego-achievement misses the point. The point is the being there. Here.
I want my monument to be composed of light as you might say
so you can see it friend not things themselves but the seeing of them
the light stopping on the tree I adore you I adore you world.
If All the World and Love were Young (Stephen Sexton)
Light, like STA, shows you the particularity of ‘things themselves’, but also the unity of all light-blessed things. This is the context of our existence. We know by this affinity. The artist David Jones insists: ‘The painter ... must only deal with what he loves, and therefore knows, at any given time. He will come a cropper if he tries to be more understanding or inspired than he really is. Let him love more and more things.’
When I watch Phlo hunting, she seems at first like the epitome of focus, concentrating all her attention on rustling in the tussocks that might mean mouse. But she’s not so narrow. If I approach, she turns to see what I want, if a dog barks, she judges whether it’s a problem. Hers is the inclusivity of awareness, rather than the exclusivity of deep focus. She is not in ‘a world of her own’ (cats are not ultrolaters); she is watchful of everything in the single world we share.
Stand still and consider. How banal it all sounds – you could hardly design a degree course and charge kids £10k a year to tell them that. Perhaps this highlights the problem. We have long been steeped in ultrolatry, the assurance that truth is hidden away, guarded by gurus, priests and professors, that the universe is an intellectual puzzle our minds are designed to solve, or a mystery only grace can reveal. But firstly, it’s our home, which we love and understand by intimacy not analysis. After all, we know our friends by hanging out with them, not dissecting them!
And though STA’s reliance on everyday experience must seem unadventurous, its implications may be radical – taking control of our own experience, rejecting the preconceptions that colour our discourse, and the institutions grown fat on them, looking afresh at things not words. Once you realise that a clump of moss is a more reliable guide than the Church of England, the Labour Party, the United Nations or Plato’s Theory of Forms because it alone has a necessary reality – all the rest are imagined things – who knows where you might end up? But the place to start is here and now, with the loved and known, in the bro.
‘I am tired of looking for hidden things,’ says the gardener, Marc Hamer; ‘the things that matter are all there, just to be had, lying on the surface. The fragments that I can hold and carry with me. The hidden things can remain where they are, because their truth too is hidden and vague and unfathomable to be of any daily value.’
* * *
THE RUDIMENTS OF STA
SEVEN STARTING-POINTSSo far as I can see, if we accept that evolution is true (and that the world is real rather than an illusion) and we ‘stand still and consider the wondrous things’ around us – the things themselves, not our words and ideas about them – then we logically end up with the starting-points I summarise briefly here (all worked out and explained in much greater detail at sta-serial.com):
1. Nature is real and the basis of our lives.
2. We are wholly involved in it and not separate in any way.
3. We generally ignore this affinity with nature, focussing on our own inventions (e.g., shopping, politics, football, TV etc) but …
4. ... a rewarding sense of belonging is available to us if we accept it.
5. Nature unceasingly creates new, unique individuals.
6. Nature is perfect, by definition; its only purpose being to do what it does (though this, of course, may not suit our personal interests).
7. As each thing is unique, all things must be equal; individuality-with-interdependence is the basis of relationships in nature.
ARBOR
ARBOR is a useful (if perhaps annoying) mnemonic for our relationship with other creatures. Acknowledge Reality, Beauty, Otherness, Relatedness. Every creature is unique (and therefore Other in some way; also Beautiful because it is wholly itself and a once-in-eternity being) and yet, as we know from Darwin, all living things are Related, descended from a common ancestor. To see this is to align ourselves with ‘nature’s view’ of the world, rather than an invented and ever-changing cultural attitude.
NECESSARY AND ATTRIBUTED REALITIES
An example may help to explain this crucial distinction: the Sun and the river Amazon have a necessary reality. They exist whether and whatever we think of them. If we all close our eyes and pretend they don’t exist it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference – the Sun still shines, the river flows. They do not rely on our acknowledgement. The ‘newspaper’ The Sun and Amazon.com, by contrast, have only an attributed reality. They have a physical existence – in fact, you can hardly avoid them, but if we all ceased to recognise them, they would soon disappear like countless rags and retailers before them. Their reality is dependent on ideas.
STA suggests that the necessary realities are the more reliable foundation.
STA ET CONSIDERA
Stand still and consider. Work it out for yourself. Don’t take anybody’s word for it – mine included.
STA is explored at length at sta-serial.com and more visually at sta-website.com. Do Not Call the Tortoise is a book of essays showing how the world looks from a STA perspective.
Stunning – full of revelatory beauty’ (Katherine May)
‘I am a great believer in STA. It is more than a book and has enriched my life deeply.’ (Max Porter)
‘Wonderful, funny and profound’ (Jay Griffiths)
‘Beautiful and singular’ (Horatio Clare)
‘A shrine to thoughtfulness and the rich, neglected virtues of reflection.’
(Adam Nicolson)
‘Vital, prescient, kind and companionable.’ (Charles Foster)
Available from bookshops or sta-website/shop £10
The Familiar, published by The Cyrus Press. Text by Gareth Howell-Jones
You can read The Familiar Issue 2, in its original format, via our archive.
sta-website.com sta-serial.com gareth@sta-website.com @sta.et.considera
Shakespeare, Coleridge, Browne added so many beautiful words to the language; I’m ashamed that my first coinage should be so extra-ordinarily ugly. If youdon’t like ‘ultrolatry’ (and who could?) you could try elsewhere-ism? or over-the-rainbow-ism?? or grass-is-always-greener-itis???
Perhaps it is worth saying briefly that I do not at all deny the possible existence of beyondness – heavens, after-lives, whatever. How on Earth should I know? I’ve never seen them, but then I’ve never seen sub-atomic particles or Venezuela either. I’m simply sceptical of ultrolatry which prioritises beyondness over the here and now. I suspect that if there be a path to heaven,
(whatever that may mean) it will lead through this world and not through intellectual abstraction. We’re told that it was when Doubting Thomas touched Jesus’s wounds that he came to recognise ‘My Lord and my God’ – by experience, not by theory; not even by faith.
Wow! Really hard to find the words to describe how this essay is making me feel. So grateful for the links and the books as I’d be bereft at waiting another 2 months for the next instalment. Thank you so very much Gareth and thank you Katherine May for the restack or whatever it was you did to bring this jewel to my attention. Thank you thank you.