Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

All life is animated.  Each and every living being -- from the smallest of microbes to the largest of mammals -- carries a desire for satisfaction relative to the situation at hand.  This desire is her "spirituality" and also her "animality."  Spirituality and animality are not two.

Animality, then, is what links us with our closest biological and spiritual kin: the other-than-human animals.  It links us with an Animality at the heart of the universe, whom some address as "God" and others as "the Soul of the Universe" and still others as "The Tilting Toward Love."  All of these realities, the animals and the Tilting, are flowing through time.   This flow is not always harmonious.  Sometimes it is fractured and abrupt, painful and violent.  But always it is flowing, changing, moving.  The cat on the left is not just looking at us.  She is also flowing.  And we are flowing as we look back into her eyes, too.

Are we two realities -- we two instances of flow -- so different from one another?  We both have emotions, subjective aims, and attitudes about the world.  We both struggle to survive with satisfaction relative to the situation at hand.  We might like to think that life can be divided into a binary: "the human" and "the animal."  But the actuality of being alive in the moment, whether in feline or human form, is more fundamental than "feline" or "human."   At least this is how Whitehead sees things.  He thinks concrescing in the moment -- experiencing and responding to a world -- is the heart of existence.  It is life. 

The Korean post-colonial theologian, Jea Sophia Oh, speaks of Salim (Life) as the place where the sacred is found in life.  In her writings in JJB she invites us to recognize that Life is more fundamental than any ism we can imagine: religionism or atheism or modernism or postmodernism or humanism.  Life can never be contained in our ideologies, and yet it is always concrete, as enfleshed in the lives of living beings like the cat.  Like us.

To be alive in the moment, then, is to be a concrescing subject.  As a subject each of us is a "you" and not simply an "it."  There is a place -- a psychological and bodily landscape -- from which we perceive the world.  And as a concrescing subject we are an activity of experiencing our environments and, in the experiencing those environments, making a complex world of the many realities we experience.  Living cells make worlds, and so do microbes.  Even the quantum events within the depths of atoms are, for Whitehead, moments of subjectivity rather than bare objects.   They are acts of world-making.  Wherever there is energy there is subjectivity.  Wherever there is subjectivity there is world-making. 

Of course the worlds that we make are not reducible to our perceptions or projections.  As the cat becomes part of our world, she remains herself, looking at us, albeit hybridized in her consciousnes by our lives.  And as we become part of her world, we remains ourselves, too, albeit hybridized in our consciousness by her life.  Whitehead sees the universe itself as filled with entities that prehend other entities and make worlds for themselves: worlds which are partly composed of the other entities themselves.  There are no isolated egos, cartesian or feline.  In JJB we call this network of subjective mutuality pan-prehensionality.  It might also be called pan-psychism.  Whatever words are used, the point is simple.  Everything is alive in one way or another.  Even the Soul of the universe -- the Tilting toward Love -- is alive.  Her body is the universe itself.

Jan Harrison, the artist whose work we share in this article, is especially attuned to the world-making subjectivity of our closest biological and spiritual kin: the other animals.  She knows that their subjectivity cannot be separated from their bodies; thus she speaks of animals as body-souls.  This makes good sense to those of us who are influenced by Whitehead's philosophy.  Whitehead says that wherever living beings on our planet happen to be, they are always with their bodies, and their bodies provide a sense of location, a vantage point.   This is part of what he means by the withness of the body.  They -- we -- are not bodiless souls; we are embodied souls.  Our bodies give us our vulnerability, our sense of location, our capacities for self-expression, and much of our wisdom.  They are the most intimate part of our world.

Whitehead's philosophy also shows how we can know the subjectivity of other body-souls, even if they belong to different species.  Consider the cat on the left.  On the one hand we can approach her from a third-person point of view, in which case she is one about whom we might claim some knowledge.  This is the kind of knowledge a biologist might seek.  But we can approach her as a concrescing subject with whom we have rapport.  This rapport is a kind of knowledge, too.  But it is a knowing with rather than a knowing about.  Jan Harrison is interested in the second kind of knowing: knowing with other animals.  She is interested in inter-species communication and, still more deeply, inter-species communion.  As a Whiteheadian might put it, she is interested in how we can prehend the feelings of other animals empathically: in how we might feel their feelings through experience in the mode of causal efficacy.  

Experience in the mode of causal efficacy is Whitehead's way of talking about experiences, conscious and unconscious, in which we received feelings from others and are inwardly moved by the feelings we receive.  In the reception the others become part of us, even as they are other than us.  They become our bodies, too.  This means that our own flesh is not reducible to our skin.  It includes the feelings of others, too.  This is what we know when we know with others.  The colors Jan Harrison chooses are part of the withness of their bodies -- and thus their feelings -- in us.

In order to know with another animal, we need to have a sense of the animal's modalities and rhythms.   Consider the black cat who is looking at us now.  She is experiencing us.  There is a fire inside her eyes, revealing a kind of wildness.  We contain within us a kind of wildness, too.  As the cat looks at us she is our teacher.  If we ever lose our wildness, we become zombie-like. 

But of course the cat is her own person, too.  Some western philosophers speak of her as an irreducible singularity.  They use the word singularity refers to the fact that she cannot be contained by our categories or, for that matter, by her own past memories or future possibilities.  She is the unique individual who looks at us from her immediate vantage point in her here-and-now.

Whiteheadians appreciate singularity.  Every concrescing subject is indeed unique and unsubstitutable.  If we take away this black cat and replace her with another, thinking that she can be replaced, we have missed the point.  Each living being is an each and not simply one among all.  In the language of Buddhism, each living being is a Buddha, replaceable by no other Buddha.

But this uniqueness is not the unity of the number "1."  In the cat as in us, singularity is a living and manfold reality which includes our felt relations to the many worlds around us and within us.  In the case of the cat, we ourselves are part of her world.  There is a transfer of energy and feeling between us and her.  We are folded into her singularity and she into ours.  Buddhists call this inter-being or, perhaps better, inter-subjectivity.  We might also call it mutual enfoldment.  Things can be folded into one another and still be different. 

But the very word enfoldment can be problematic, if it suggests a completed act.  The cat's singularity is not static.  It is an activity which takes time and makes time as it occurs: feline time.  Feline time is one of many kinds of time. There is also atomic time and microbic time and plant time and divine time.  What time is it?  It depends on who we are asking.  Time, too, is a construct created out of the timing -- the rhythms -- of different creatures as they live their lives.   

In the last century the philosopher Heidegger wrote a book called Being and Time.  Whiteheadians might like to rename it Being and Rhythm.  The theologian Mayra Rivera Rivera notes that, in Caribbean cultures, the idea of rhythm has priority over that of ground.  We live and move and have our being in rhythm.  There is a certain kind of groundlessness in rhythm, because it is always moving.  The black cat's singularity is moving, too.  As we move, she moves, even as she stays in the same location.  She is not many or one, but rather the many becoming one.  Her singularity is the becoming.  Here Buddhist language helps: she is neither being nor not-being.  She is pure becoming, moment by moment.

Just as there are many times, so there are many worlds.  Some are visible but most are invisible.  Microbes are part of the universe, but we cannot see them with our physical eyes.  Dreams are also part of the universe, but they become visible only in dream time.  Our physical eyes are wonderful but imperfect tools for taking into account the multiplicity of worlds to be perceived.  Inside the body-souls of each animal there is a universe - no, a multiverse - of worlds.  Part of wildness is the multiplicity itself.  It cannot really be tamed, even when placed in a cage. 

What animates all of this wildness?  According to the Hebrew Bible calls the animating spirit of the world, the divine Breathing.  This Breathing is in the cat, too.  Wherever there is the breath of life there is the breath of the Breathing.   Whitehead says that this Breathing is present in the cat as her own innermost lure to live with satisfaction relative to the situation at hand.   This is the way it is with all flesh.  We are always seeking satisfaction relative to the situation.  The divine Breathing is present within each creature as the creature's desire for satisfaction.  The Breathing is found in the desire to live, and then to live with satisfaction.

In human life the Breathing has an ethical side, which may have parallels in the moral lives of other animals.  When we experience the breathing we feel called to live wisely, compassionately, and creatively.  This is how we express our wildness.  But the calling is also in other creatures, including the snow leapard.  She, too, has a felt relation with the Lord of creation.  She, too, has her way of walking in the love.  Her calling is to be fully herself.

The dog on the left also has a calling.  If we look carefully, we know that there are worlds inside him: worlds of consciousness, of feeling, of dreaming, of wisdom.  He is making worlds but he is also being made by worlds.  As are we all.

With his capacity for loyalty and affection, this dog may well be at the leading edge of the loving arc of evolution -- way ahead of most of us.  Christians say that the love of God is revealed in Jesus.  Surely love is revealed in the unconditional love of dogs, too.  Jesus may simply be a way of helping humans become more dog-like.  One of the first messiahs may have been canine.

Still, through the dog's presence, including his eyes, we receive wisdom and energy for life.  We can share moods and feelings.  We can share vulnerability.  We are kindred spirits in the way of all flesh.  

This flesh is more than our skin.  It is our embodiment.  It includes our surface membranes, but also our psychological membranes: our feelings, our hopes, our desires, our aims.  Every instance of flesh is unique and yet every instance shares in every other instance. 

Every creature is hybridized flesh.  We are being hybridized by the presence of one another.  We include one another within our worlds, even as we are also different from one another.  All people who are claimed by dogs know this.  They know that they could not be human without the dogs: that the dogs are part of, in Whitehead's words, the objective constitution of their momentary selves.  To be embodied is to be incarnated by other beings.  Our flesh does not simply belong to us.  It belongs to the world which is enfleshed in us.  Sometimes then enfleshedness is profoundly painful.   When the dog is harmed by others, her flesh is pain.  And when people are harmed, their flesh is pain, too.  Flesh is a source of pain and delight, tragedy and beauty.  If there is life after death, it will be enfleshed, too, in some way.  There is no life without flesh.  The fear of death, then, is not really a fear of non-being.  It is a fear of fractured relations, fractured flesh.

How far does flesh go down?  From Whitehead's perspective, hybridity goes all the way down to microbes and molecules and atoms.  Every actuality is an act of making a world out of the multiple influences that shape it.  Whitehead calls this activity concrescence.  

Fred, for example, is a concrescing subject.  His concrescing includes his gazing at us, and through this gazing, we become incarnate in his life.  We are part of his objective constitution and also his subjectivity.  As he gazes into our eyes, and as we gaze into his eyes, too, we are mutual becomings.  We are becoming together, even if not in parallel fashion.  He knows our odors and also our feelings.  We are part of the withness of his own body.

Jan Harrison stands out as one who understands -- and helps us see and feel -- this inter-subjectivity of mutual becoming.  She helps us listen to animals with our eyes, our imaginations, and, with her Animal Tongues, with our ears.   Thus her art points us in the direction of beloved community, because it helps us love, and learn from, our kindred spirits in way of all flesh.  If beloved community is to be filled with love, it must include an affection for the Fred's of our world, a sense that they, too, belong to the families from whom we gain sustenance.  People today like to talk about sustainable futures.  At JJB we agree completely with them.  But for us sustainability is connected with the word "sustenance."  A sustainable future must be one where people play and dream and share in the way of all flesh.  It must include the sustenance we receive from our animal kin.  And it must include a sustenance -- a respect and love -- that we give them, too.   Jan Harrison's artist's statement helps us understand all of this better.  Hear her words:

"A lifelong kinship and identification with animals has created empathy with the life force, and has helped me to express what it is to be here as a flesh and blood being. Through a close relationship with animals, I feel as if their bodies are the same as my body. The myth in my art is intuitively known in my body, and not based on recorded mythology. We are animals....Animals are within us. Animals are symbolic of the natural world. They possess knowledge and innocence, darkness and light. Their eyes invite us into their world.

Coming from sensual/spiritual desires, a metamorphosis happens as I caress the surface, using pastels, wax, and clay, and working the surface with my hands. Simplifying the recent paintings and sculpture to portrait-like heads has revealed their essence as an intimate connection. In “The Corridor Series,” animals exist in both ecological and psychological corridors. They are taking a stand, vanishing and returning. They are on the outside, inviting you to either join them, or to invite them into the viewing realm. “The Corridor Series” is both autobiographical and universal, having to do with personal feelings of various states of empowerment, and, expressing the similar states and plight of the animal nature."

So much contemporary scholarship in the West is based on other texts, particularly written texts.  We get the idea that myths from come from the spoken word or the written word.  But Jan Harrison makes us wonder if myths might not also come from our own bodies.  Of course these bodies are only part of our flesh.  Whatever touches us is part of our flesh, and however we touch it is part of our flesh, too.  Books are flesh.  Images are flesh.  Sounds are flesh.  But it is possible that myths and stories can come from impulses within our own bodies, not unlike the way that feelings come from our own bodies.  At least this is what Whiteheadians will suggest.  The withness of the body as an everpresent reality in our lives.  We experience it as a feeling of the feelings within our body. 

If we can feel the feelings in our body, might we also feel the stories in our bodies.  Indeed, don't our bodies already carry within them many stories: the stories carried in our genes, in the events of our lives as remembered in our brains and stomachs and muscles, both traumatic and beautiful?  People who have suffered from physical abuse know that their bodies contain memories which their minds might wish to suppress.  Perhaps their bodies contain anticipations of the future, too.  Anticipations that, with the support of life and community, with the support of clean air and healthy food, the mortal life can be lived fully, until death provides its end, at least to this phase of the journey. 

Can a body-soul continue even after death?  Might there be flesh after death, too?  Might there be dimensions of existence in which body-souls continue in other kinds of bodies, perhaps even speaking back into this very plane of existence?  Might we humans, and other animals as well, enjoy continuing journeys into that good night of death, until we discover some kind of completeness, some kind of full rappart, some kind of love, some kind of deep time which is also a listening?  And is it not possible that, in this deep time, the animals already dwell, at least partly, in their innocence, their vitality, their dreaming, their companionship, as flesh among flesh?  Are they not emissaries of the Listening?

What is the wisdom we seek?  Surely it is to listen in the deepest of senses.  To listen with our eyes, our ears, our hands, our minds, our hopes, our fears, our dreams, our trust.  In the listening perhaps we can hear a calling within our own bodies and within the bodies of others: a calling to live with respect and care for the community of life, to respect the wildness, to allow our own wildness to come forth in the arc of love.  Perhaps we can even hear a deeper listening, a divine Concrescing, everywhere at once, who is engraced by the splendor of the world, and who shares in the world's sufferings, like a slaughtered sheep.  And what would be the flesh of this Concrescing?  The flesh of the divine Concrescing would be each creature and all creatures, on our earth and on any earth, in our galaxy and in any galaxy, however large or small.  Microbes would be the flesh of the Concrescing.  Quasars would be the flesh of the Concrescing.  The owl would be the flesh of the Concrescing.  And so would you and I. 

And what would be its rhythms?  Perhaps they would be the many rhythms of the multiverse itself: the timing of each pulsation, on its own terms, as indebted to the past and anticipating a future.  The Concrescing of the universe would be like a really good drummer: poly-rhythmic.  In the beginning is not the word, it is the rhythm and the rhythm is with God. 

But of course we must speak, too.  Perhaps this Concrescing beckons some among us to remember old languages -- those of the other animals -- who do not speak our tongues, but who speak in so many other glorious ways, like the call of the magpie or the hooting of the owl.  Jan Harrison enters into this kind of speaking, in ways that are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes delightful, sometimes mysterious, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes frightening, and always true.  Not true to the canons of orthodoxy, but true to the canons of what one theologian, Catherine Keller, calls polydoxy.   Is there a glossalia of, and from, the animals?  Can the liberated tongue be a vessel through which the callings of our kindred spirits find blessing?  Here...let's close with a prayer.

 

The comments above have been sparked by the eyes of the big cat, by the art of Jan Harrison, and by the hearts and minds of participants in a Transcdisciplinary Theological Colloquium held at Drew Theology School in Madison, New Jersey, held from Sept. 30 through October 2.   The conference was called Divinamality: Creaturely Theology.   The essay is a gathering together of insights from many participants.  There are too many to name, but I am especially grateful to Stephen Moore, Laurel Kearns, and Catherine Keller, our academic hosts.  The conference began with these words, and it seems fitting to end with them as well:

Human-animal relations are emerging as an ever more important focus for academic engagement with the more-than-human world. The heterogeneous academic field that has resulted has attracted various (non-synonymous) names, including "animal studies," "animality studies," "posthuman animality studies," and "zoocriticism." The Eleventh Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium attempted to triangulate these vital reflections on humanity and animality with reflections on divinity.

The resources for a "creaturely theology" are considerable. All Christian scripture and most Christian theology predates the epochal Cartesian realignment of human-animal relations in terms absolutely oppositional and hierarchical, as do Jewish and Muslim traditions. Prior to the Cartesian revolution in philosophy, posthumanist zoocritics are claiming, there were no "animals" in the modern sense, and hence no "humans" either.

"We have never been human," Donna Haraway hyperbolically but incisively insists (When Species Meet). A contemporary creaturely theology might begin with the recognition that the concepts of the human and the animal inherited from the Enlightenment are best construed as the epiphenomenal products of a particular historical moment—albeit the formative moment for almost every aspect of western culture, including the academic discipline of theology itself—bracketed by a pre- and posthumanism that think the human/animal distinction differently, and hence, potentially, the divine/human/animal distinction in addition.

All images © Jan Harrison