Photo by me.

“These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.” —Anton Chekhov, A Day in the Country.

I have been watching old man heron on the Glamorgan Canal, of late. And a dainty little egret at Llandaff Weir. Their organic curves and soft feathers lull me into their lives. I long to communicate with them, if only by brief mutual gaze.

I try to imagine being Ardean; hollow-bone legs feeling the bite of cold in the shallows, and my neck long and lythe. I extend my wings and feel a sharp lift from a northerly breeze, whilst peering deep, with one eye, into a shadow I cast. If there is a silver flash in the black, I will tuck-in my wings, slowly extend my neck until my bill is stock-still for the kill.

A heron’s life may at first seem pragmatic, embracing hunting with a quiet determined grip. Lauded by old masters of our economic system founded on the protestant work ethic, pragmatism is the hard work upon only what is known, the empirical only, a practical boundary to action. That is, until, something better comes along. But from where does this ‘better’ come from? And then we have to shift. Are we ready?

Pragmatism. I hear it from many science-oriented souls. This or that goal is to be achieved only by what is known to them, rather than by what could be. Such a limiting view of what it means to be alive.

Look again at heron and little egret. They are searching, looking for something better in the deep flow of life. Today, I will overestimate heron and little egret. And here’s why.

They aim high for their catch. Always. And higher still. This is not rooted in pragmatism, but in patience as beyond-perspective.

Relay to humans. As Frankl says,

“If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. But if we overestimate him … we promote him to what he really can be. So we have to be idealists, in a way — because then we wind up as the true, the real realists.”

In the rain below the weir, little egret finds her own pattern in the chaos. She’s perfect. Her white chest feathers ripple to the volatile air whilst she prowls around, looking for a meal. She’s a carnivore of the shallows, of molluscs, small fry and rock-borne insect life. In the lee of this cacophany of liquid weight, she’s light on her stilt-legs across rocks and recovering foamy streamers flowing south. Heron has his skills. But she is quicker. I rapture in adaptations ~ they require imagination and foresight.

This way, that way. The flow of the water. The ruffle of a breeze. Slip-rocks, and deep pools.

She has her own beat as time whirls around her. I am captivated by her simple strategy. In order to catch fresh food, her patience is dynamic. She uses her bill to its fullest, all the senses available to her right now through to the beak-end and its alignment to potential or actual prey. It is her knowing of body to perfection. It is her niche and she lives it, dasein-daily. (Heidegger)

“From a sensory ecology perspective a bird is best characterized as “a bill guided by an eye.” (GR Martin 2017).

At the weir, there’s a dialectic underway. There’s cacophony and whisper, the smash of a river rolling over man-made edifice and then, little streams pulsing through rocks to shingle hemlines around willow islands. There are plastic sheets and childrens cars and balls and other city objects tangled in the wash-through. Tweavelets weave monofilaments of polymers as well as duff. We leave our marks in anti-fluministic ways. And yet little egret is fluministic in her devotion. Her binocular eyes are wide open, and key is alignment to a potential, the beak and beyond, like a snooker player staring down a fine-crafted cue to an imaginary, glinting ball ready for a pocket.

She is patient. Patience is a verb. It is not incapacity. It is not nothing. Neither is it death. It is keeping the opposite alive. Senses are alert to the main chance not yet happened, deep in the flows ahead. The process of patience requires imagining ~ the vision of seeing in advance the potential and most efficient main chance in space and time. Imagine all the little fishes…

In the slowness of the canal, there are potential fish in the shallows old man heron can skewer with his face-spear. But he has to remember and imagine what he is looking for. He has to find the best spot to find the right fish. He’s devoted to it. Watch him! This is his dasein-daily, a primal nature of ‘being’, simultaneously engaging with this world. After a while, it’s time to move on and he seeks to fly upstream to a better spot (with such elegance). How do better things come, were it not for this vision inside his head for a better spot, and a compulsion to fly there, freely? He imagines what he is looking for ~ all the little fishes ~ then goes to find them. It is an essential part of his act of patience in survival.

Patience is not simply the ability to wait. One has to be observant, present. It requires memory and imagination. It requires beyond-perspective. There are multiple things going on. Patience can even be endurance, a painful dasein-daily, for a richer state of being in the longer run (pati – latin, to suffer). If we are never tested, how do we know ourselves fully? Right now, heron and little egret own a deliberate sense of expansive perspective on the scale of things in life. Hunting fish is patientism- what I do now has consequences – I am fed and the fish is dead. The efforts may pay off in results, a full belly. But I am also patient in observation, presence and hunger; a virtue, but with great reward (given abundance due to me). Heron and little egret are applying themselves, in duty and with hope, within and without, to the ever dynamic flow of interconnected life.

So, no thank you. In being always pragmatic is to always compromise (in consequence and in virtue). To always compromise is to lower expectations. Sometimes, compromise is no where near enough. One needs to raise the game to beyond-perspective. Like the heron and little egret.

That patience is beyond-perspective.
That patience is not waiting idly, but putting phenomena into beyond-perspective.
That beyond-perspective becomes a state of daily-dasein.
Potential obstacles can be the instrument of action (the bill, the beak).
That heron is patient in stealth.
That little egret is patient in dynamism. She adapts to her own beat.
That humans may learn from ardean patientism.

Humans may learn from ardean patientism ~ be ready to the fullest in the river, to strike for that main chance. Look for better, fuller, abundant places to be present. Aim for a great deal more than the limitations of pragmatism. Even in the smallest of things.

Pope Gregory the Great expressed patience as the guardian of all virtues. We might consider that in our anxiety to complete goals, we forget about this valuable point of view. Ecologism, fluminism, cultivation of love in space/time means the integral beyond-perspective required in being patient. Think big.

The dialectic is there too, yes, setting out to save what we continue to destroy, because we are a society of reaction and not of considered response. We can change this too, by being patientist. Realise that accute ardean potential within us all, primed for imagining the moment of exquisite action in the flow of all life. Patientism.

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(Dissertation extract, in continuing the ideal of co-operation, symbiosis and mutualism into, and of, language.)

6.0 Language of Flow: Fluminism, Introducing Spring Theory.

6.1 The Need for Neologisms.

Two particular yet simple words, love and ecology, are my inspiration in the creation of my own neologisms ~ fluminism, and then sanguimund and praximund, the latter two as constituent parts of the former.

As to both words, love and ecology, as lexicons combined, they are complementary. One word is a positive emotion and the other a rational science. Like life itself, it is the combination of both affect and rationale which our brains assimilate as moral constructs and in the choices we make every day. The word fluminism brings them both together, and from it flows an ethic by which we may choose to live.

As part of my research into the meaning of these words, I have investigated the philosophy of language. What are words in relation to reality, experience, meaning or truth? How does a word (or two), become an action? Wittgenstein and Searle said human experience and language are structurally linked. Words are integrally part of experience. Searle once quoted early French philosopher, La Rochefoucauld, famed for his acidic aphorisms:

‘There are some people who would never have fallen in love, if they had not heard there was such a thing.’

I’m not so convinced. If one is blind and mute, does love never come? Culture does influence experience, there’s no doubt, and language is also a part of culture. Like all, love and meaning are both ‘nature and nurture’, with no separation.

I do not think language between any living species makes this world. Rather, all are a part of the same world and interconnected. As a form of life, neither is language some- thing separate (Wittgenstein). I do not see language as transparent either, as Russell suggested. We are not transparent because of our ability to communicate in words, far from it! There will always be hidden depths where unique identities and consciousness are concerned and there is beauty in this complexity.

In Wittgenstein’s later work, then Austin and Searle, a distinction between meaning and intention via utterances began to emerge as a focus. Objectifying, naming, categorising, taxonomising; these are functional to us, how we humans interpret life, or as Searle put it, the systems of representation we bring to bear upon things. Words are neural con- cepts, but they do not singularly define language. Once formed, there is a kind of closure of an openness, as Hilary Lawson asserts in response to Rorty and Derrida’s works on relativism, in that they crystalise into a headline, or as he describes… ‘language closing the world into things.’ Lawson’s video art movement demonstrates the openness side, which I interpret (ironically), as a state of inquiry without resolution. Words may only attempt closure in collective meaning, by officiates of companies that publish dictionaries or taxonomists working on genetic data sets. Words, like species themselves, have a certain porosity about them, in nuance and imperfection of full meaning, again a beautiful thing in itself.

Yes, by grouping words together, we can be more or less certain about clarity of meaning, and all is related to intent and consequence, even the absurd. A poem may be deliberately open. But a key to a map must indicate, at least, some closure on what the words mean. They may also seem closed in our own unique minds and verbal expressions.

If I write or say the word, “table,” and you read or hear me, you’ll probably envision your own idea of what a table is. My idea of a table will be transformed by your own memories and experiences. It may create a feeling. I can’t help but feel (feel, being key), that feelings and emotions have been set aside in the analytics of language. My grandmother’s table had a certain smell, of bees wax and lino and the word table makes me think of toast for breakfast in her kitchen. Your idea of table might make you feel very different. The word, “dog” may mean pure, unconditional love to me. But to others, it may instil fear.

In psychology, particularly in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy 84, this may be referred as cognitive fusion, where words come preloaded with meaning and effect be- haviour. Sometimes these feelings are invalid in relevance to our states of being in the present. They can be distressing or deceiving. But by understanding the brain is plastic and neural connections can be either thickened or thinned, behavioural therapies, such as action and commitment or cognitive behaviour can help shift either the meaning of words or the feelings that arise from them.

Each person, therefore, holds language both uniquely and in common; a dialectic. The same word swapped into the mouths of others transforms. It is a kind of flow of under- lying meanings and feelings. I cannot agree with Lawson, therefore, that words are clo- sure. Words are, instead, like magnets, attracting, repelling, fusing and defusing emotions from each person and their life trajectory. There is evolution, and over time, the culture and meaning of a word can inherently change beyond recognition. Language is a living thing and connects us, like mycelium networks in the woodland floor, in multiple, dynamic patterns. It can also be something to which we devote for the good of the biosphere. We can approach language as fluminists.

Making the interconnections is what is most meaningful. Language is connectivity, relationship, whether it be verbal, body movement, chemical or electrical. When it is for good, not bad, then it may then be argued as a flow of love. In unison with my ethic, fluminism, I perceive language, like music, as flow. It is a living thing (the dead neither speak nor read).

Art and artistic expression, musical pauses, or the hidden meanings beneath the subsurface of poetry can keep to the idea of openness (Lawson) or mystery. But I think, with affect, all is never completely closed.

Together, the words love and ecology create something compelling, larger than the sum of each word. It goes to the root of what I understand. In creating neologisms, the potential is even greater. They are like linguistic finger posts, in that they convey hope in the focusing of minds to a new or previously overlooked idea. I create the word fluminism from my own deep understanding of love and ecology as interconnected life flow, but I pass it on to others and hope for boundless contributions to intent, meaning and consequences.

6.2 Introducing Spring Theory

Neologisms are not only ‘speech acts’ (Austin, Searle. 85), in declarations, but also loaded in potential, like compression springs. A word is formed, deliberated, received, where- upon as the ‘other’ is attracted and jumps on it, meaning springs forth in different directions each time, or by chance, the same. Different interpretations are ‘felt’ (affected), because each have lived different lives. Before long, we are realised (Weir) within our own understanding, and living as fluminists by simply ‘being,’ as in the existence of the universe. I would like to call this ‘Spring Theory’.

Heaven knows there are enough theories. But in physics, string theory is where point- like particles are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. It describes these strings propagating through space-time, interacting with each other. Flow. In fluministic Spring Theory, I wish to plant seeds of ideas, evoke imagination and hope. 86
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84. Hayes, SC et al. Action and Commitment Therapy 2nd Ed. Guilford Press, New York. (2012) p 20

85. Searle, J. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press: Cam- bridge. (1969)

86. Snyder, C.R. The Psychology of Hope: You can get here from there. Simon and Schuster: New York. (2010)

I have decided to publish my complete Masters dissertation on environmental ethics here, the culmination of years of research and thought. But it’s just the beginning…

FINAL_2018_Dissertation_Ginny_Battson_Adrian_Davis

Awarded: Distinction

I have decided to publish my complete Masters dissertation on environmental ethics here, the culmination of years of research and thought. But it’s just the beginning…

Photo by me.

FINAL_2018_Dissertation_Ginny_Battson_Adrian_Davis

awarded: Distinction.