West is not the opposite of east
Tags: Philosophy, Indigenous, Science, Earth

West is not the opposite of east

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. — Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Dictionary of the English Language (1755) Words are eggs. Brood over them, warm them, and they will hatch. — Anon.

The west is the place where the sun goes down. The sentence betrays our anthropocentricism. The sun never sets, Grandfather Sun is always at work. He rises each day for work, leaving the House of the East, and climbs up the steep stairway of the sky sweating, showing us his face, and biting us with his teeth. He rests briefly, not moving, at the Top of Sky. He then falls longingly into the arms of Grandmother Earth and they embrace, hidden in the House of the West. With the prayers of the People that our Heavenly Father may not tire in his journey, the world is renewed each day so that life may jump up and live.

Instead of west we could say, or “There is the-sun-going-down-place,” pointing, like the Zulu, with the elbow not the finger as a mark of respect for the mountain or the river. Or we could glimpse the small rodent that lives in burrows, calling it “disappearing-over-the-hill-with-teeth” but known mundanely in English by the noun “groundhog”. The Cape Dutch and their Boer descendants have always been farmers and the word boer is Afrikaans for farmer. The closer the people, language or culture is to the land the less removed and abstract are descriptions of everyday happenings — and here I resist the temptation to write “everyday things” and fix the process in the formaldehyde of time and space.

What’s the difference? An object here, a subject there. Meh! The particular kind of consciousness that gave rise to English and other similar languages turned the “sun-going-down-place” into the “west”. Just as with the rise of monotheism and the People of the Book (the Torah, the Bible and the Koran) the word obliterated the process, matter was relegated to second place, words became things-in-themselves divorced from the essence of what they described, and we took a step away from the world and into our minds. And hairs became easier to split.

In all the monotheistic religions the Book, and its exegesis and commentary, is at the root of the tradition. The quoting of the Bible, chapter and verse; the endless spats over its literal interpretation; the close adherence to what is written in the Torah or the Koran; all worship the Word, literally. This biblical literalism is paralleled by scientific literalism, although the latter prides itself on its neutrality and atheism. But close cousins they are, joined at the head. One adores the Book, the other the Evidence. I use the word “adore” intentionally as it points to the intimate, aroused and haloed relationship each has with the object of its affections. This relationship is called “belief”. Poke the bear a bit and both groups get surprisingly heated and emotional (scepticism with science, evangelism with religion). Or they pull up the drawbridge of belief and retire behind its walls.

Historically, the ground was well prepared for a swing to the opposite, the emergence of another close family member — the modern, nihilistic writings of post-modernism. It is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. It’s sceptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. Interpretation is everything and reality only comes into being through our individual interpretation of the world. There is no objectivity only subjectivity.

Between obedience to the Word (or the Evidence), and obedience to one’s own interpretation there is no mediating third, or what Jung called the transcendent function, just a polarised, oscillating debate between two archly human opposites that, over time, change into the other. One says, “One size fits all.” The other says, “No size fits all.”

Our Western distance from nature and experience allows us to slide unconsciously to the place where we substitute a word, a vocalisation, a belief, some ink on a page, a philosophical proposition, for the reality of what happens in the world. It is easier to say, “The west is the place where the sun goes down,” than “The place where the sun goes down is called the west.” But notice the subtle shift, we have lost the medicine, the mana, the essence of the “the all-spirits-go-there place, the sun-going-down place, the love-making, Grandfather Sun-dying-in-the-arms-of-Grandmother Earth place.” Instead we say west.

The 2000-year-long, chronic, degenerative, and now terminal, disease that is our Western culture has made us cross-eyed, unable to see reality right-side up, and incapable of looking at human experience from the outside. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was an English writer and lexicographer and a major figure in 18th-century literature. His writing was largely in defence of reason against the charms of fancy and emotion, and he championed the values of the aesthetic, humanistic and moral order. His statement that I quote at the beginning is an example from the 1700s when the underlying disease process worsened and Western culture took another step toward the west. The collective consciousness of the time thought it was taking great leaps forwards in science and exploration and rather than a step toward death. So I would reverse the Johnson quote to read, “Words are the sons of heaven, and things are the daughters of earth.”

Do not misunderstand me. There is nothing wrong with language except its limitations. Without language I would not be writing this book, we would not have the beauty of Shakespeare, the art of Maori oratory or whaikorero, there would be no poetry from Blake and Keats, no Bhagavad Gita, no legend, myth, no story. However, there are human experiences that cannot be quantified or captured in the net of words. Words literalise, flatten and shrink our deepest experiences. Why so much written on love? Because it’s hard to describe. The best writing touches a face of the many-faces of our experience, it comes close but is never the experience itself.

Music and dance are much better at this. These experiences are beyond the realm of description and can only be experienced or pointed to. They are ineffable, indescribable, or too sacred for words. But here is the problem. These experiences can happen to anyone (pretty much). The “who” the experience is happening to makes the difference, not the experience. The more unconscious, complexed, or mass-minded the person is the more they will be swept away by the ineffable and will go found a religion or find one to follow. Their obedience to the archetypal forces (I’ve found Jesus. I’ve seen the light. I am now guided by X or Y. My life is in the hands of Z) and their willingness to tell everyone who will listen about their profound experiences, lights them up on the rationalist radar. But because the experience cannot be replicated, is unique, and meant for that person only, it always fails the rationalist test. Smugness follows — on the both sides.

Nevertheless, words are good. They are psychic eggs. If we brood over them long enough, give them warmth and attention, their unremarkable shells crack, and they hatch and reveal their origins and meaning. Whether the masculinities of the mind like it or not all things that are physical are born from the earth a la Johnson upside-down. The Maya represented speech by a glyph coming from the mouth that meant flower or water. All things are born, live and die. They are not immortal, that is not their nature and their gift. We are a recyclable life form. Death is the transference of life. It is the mortal gift of the physical world that spirit, in its permanence and immortality, can only wonder at.

The word “west” comes from the Latin vesper meaning “evening” and, further back, the Sanskrit word avah meaning “to go downward.” The west has always been associated with ending, death, change, twilight and the transition from light to darkness. To the British Tommy in World War I to “go west” meant to be killed and the Ojibway say it is “the place where all spirits go.” When we come to the remains of the day we are reminded of endings. All things are born in the east and when they die they go west.

In the West there is death sown deep. Our culture is full to bursting with innovation, progress, expansion, growth, development, and advance such that there is no room for death, contraction, retraction, pause, backwardness, regression, failure and retreat. So, much denied, these things must make room for themselves. Most expansions or colonial movements went from east to west — the Roman Empire, the Vikings, and European colonisation — and took with them the seeds of their own death and transformation which we are now beginning to reap.

Cleanliness, said John Wesley in a sermon in 1778, is next to godliness. Being clean, physically and morally, not like those dirty savages, is seen as a sign of civilisation. The Western obsession with sprays, deodorants, disinfectants, and its sanitisation of waste is putting lipstick on the pig of its pollution of the body-of-the-world it inhabits. And my apologies to all pigs. Robert Wolff writes about the Sng’oi of Malaysia who clean out the village, spiritually and physically, every two weeks at the new moon and the full moon by reenacting the battle between Ragda (the chief leyak or witch) and the Barong (a protective monster).

When a culture loosens its attachment to the earth, it begins to die like a great tree that has been uprooted. And when it begins to die it will go west. So all the great migrations, diasporas, resettlements, emigrations, relocations, exodi, journeys, voyages, and treks almost always went west. Or to put it another way when a people are severed from the land there is death and loss: both physical and spiritual. Then we travel west.