I admit to a love of this world, in all its mess, complexity, pain, and challenge. It tries me at times, but I love it.
As often as in its joy, I find my love in its pain and challenges. This isn’t a simple world, as I imagine we all know, and it’s often not the most kind. This is as true within the human element of our world as within all the rest of it. I’ve written time and again here of some of the failings I see in how we humans live here, in and on our home, upon this planet that will surely be our only one. We have some particularly egregious failings at this point in our history, though I hesitate to claim them more egregious than at other times. I wasn’t there; I don’t really know. (Or if I was, in some past life or another, I don’t remember it well enough to pass judgement.)
Yet, I can’t stand behind the idea of original sin. It never has made much sense to me. Maybe that’s as much due to the way I’ve heard and read it represented, seeing as I have no strong background in Christian theology (aside, of course, from its pervasive threading throughout my culture.) But in how I understand it, the idea holds little appeal to me. We humans are flawed, without question, but I can’t come to see it as an inherent failing.
— ∞ —
This is, in some ways, a review of Dean Koontz’s book Innocence, though it’s more than that, too. It’s a response, I suppose, and an explication.
Growing up, Dean Koontz proved my second favorite author, behind only Christopher Pike. Even as my taste in reading began to shift away from genre fiction and more toward literature—and, eventually, a healthy mix of nonfiction in with that—I still read Koontz. I still read horror and other genre fiction in general. The better works are grand entertainment, and the right ones can emotionally strike me just as well as any lovely work of literature. Koontz didn’t always strike me emotionally, but he often did a fine job of entertaining me and proved a strong linguistic practitioner. I enjoyed much of what he did with words, though every now and again it would feel too luxuriant. Who am I to complain about such a tendency, though?
A few years ago, I grew tired of his new books. They kept putting me off, not so much because of the writing (though he did release some mediocre ones) but more because of the sensibility behind them. His tropes came consistent in every book, and they started to wear thin. Thus, I stopped reading him and relegated his works to fond memories from my childhood, such as voraciously reading Shadowfires while camping. But then I heard some good things about his new book, Innocence, and I decided to check out a copy from the library and give him another shot. Maybe he had worked his way through the phase that so put me off and come out the other side to a place I would find more appealing, more in line with what I loved of his early work.
Or perhaps not.
What I found instead was a well-written and mostly compelling read that, ultimately, placed into sharp contrast the reason why I had grown disillusioned with Koontz’s more contemporary works. It came down to a question of world views, of where I am with how I live today and what I think about humanity contrasted with where Koontz appears to be coming from. And to fully explain it, I’m going to have to delve into complete and extensive spoilers for Innocence, so if you have any intention of reading the book, I suggest you stop reading now.
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An entry in Encounters
I already wrote about the abundance of life here on the farm. It’s evident everywhere you look: the plants tall, bushy and vigorous, the crops yielding fruit and leaves, flowers and roots, the earth crawling with tiny creatures, winged friends singing and flying all over the place and the sun presiding over it all. Yet, while the macro is impressive, the micro yields still more to see. In fact, it presents the details–a face that in some ways is perhaps more true than the broad view of the beautiful fields and towering trees. That broad expanse is a picturesque one, fitting into a societal standard of beauty, suitable for framing and for the common oohs and ahhs. On the small scale, though, amongst the cracks and crevices, the more intriguing realities come to the forefront and the reality of just how rich and diverse the life is here becomes apparent.
A moment ago, I heard a commotion in the seedling house attached to the western wall of the main house. Inside this small greenhouse we have seed trays of fall starts sitting on shelves and raised beds on the ground, currently filled with our eggplant. There are three raised beds, one in the middle and then one on each side, with a few inches of space between the raised bed and the greenhouse’s wall. The motion that attracted my attention came from the bed to the left of the entrance and I could immediately tell it was a bird flying amongst the eggplant.
Curious, I stepped inside and knelt down to peer into the plants in search of the bird. I couldn’t see it at first and thought it had found its way out of the eggplants and into a corner, but then it revealed itself within the plants, clamoring away from me, back toward the front of the greenhouse, its movements erratic as if the bird’s body was broken. As I found its position and was able to focus on the small creature, I could tell that this was indeed the case. It lay on the ground, close to the edge of the raised bed and near the greenhouse’s western glass wall, breathing fast, faced away from me but its head turned so that it could keep an eye on me. Its legs spread out flat behind it, seemingly broken. I spoke to the bird for a moment and then–and I don’t know if this is defensible–took my camera out of my pocket and took a picture of the bird. It continued to watch me, wary. I spoke again and thought about the cats, that one of them likely had done this to the bird.
Unsure what to do, I stood and moved toward the bird. I would have to pass it to exit the greenhouse anyway, and I thought perhaps I could pick it up and take it outside. Upon my movement, though, the bird attempted to fly forward again and fell into the couple inch space between the raised bed and glass wall. It was now out of my reach. The bird’s fate was its own–which seemed appropriate, anyway.
Still curious, however, I moved up to the front entrance and peered into the space between the raised bed and the southern wall, to see if the bird had moved far enough forward in its space to be seen from that angle. For a split second, I thought it had, but then I realized it was not a bird I was seeing, but a chipmunk. It crouched silently in that space, facing forward, about a foot in from where I stood, staring at me while very still. I watched it for a few moments, meeting its eyes through the tangle of cobwebs dotted with dirt and small bits of plant debris, the emptied husks of caught insects. The dry body of a familiar caterpillar dangled right at the edge of the space. A few inches further in, a spider waited, curled up into a ball and pressed against its egg sac. In this small space, the chipmunk–normally such a small animal when seen in our more familiar open spaces–was a hulk, a strangely-large beast hunkered down but still filling an inordinate amount of its limited area. From this perspective, as well, I could feel myself as a giant. I ceased to be the below-average, five foot five inch human being and became instead something massive. Peering into that space, I actually entered it and became–for a moment–that chipmunk, peering back out at me through the crisscrossing cobwebs, this strangely-thin insulation. I became a mass, giant and threatening, my head alone far bigger than the chipmunk. I lost myself in that moment. My change in perspective–with the orientation of my view so much closer to the ground than normal and my up-close view of the cobwebs growing them to a size far greater than I would normally perceive them–and my discovery of a new place far more complicated and full of mystery than I had anticipated transported me into the body of another creature, into a view of the world not my own.
There was a magic in that moment spoken of by David Abram in an interview I had just read earlier this morning. In the interview, conducted by Derrick Jensen and published in How Shall I Live My Life?, Abram spoke of the importance of using magic to alter our perspective and jolt us into a renewed awareness of our interplay and interconnectedness with the living world. A sleight-of-hand magician, Abram said that “magic is an experience. It’s the experience of finding oneself alive inside a world that is itself alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between oneself and something that is profoundly different from oneself: a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web. . . . Magic is that astonishing experience of contact and conviviality between myself and another shape of existence, whether that be a person or a gust of wind. It’s that sense of wonderment that arises from the encounter with that which I cannot fathom, with something that I cannot ever fully exhaust with my thoughts or understanding.”
The surprise of seeing that chipmunk–what is she doing there?–shocked me as a sleight-of-hand trick might, causing me to question the world around me and my knowledge and awareness of it. I went looking for a bird and found, instead, a chipmunk–and a spider, and cobwebs, dirt and debris, drained insects, and more. I discovered an entire other world and–left unbalanced by the surprise of an unsuspected presence, my perception altered so that small things seemed bigger and a tiny space that could not fit me filled the entirety of my vision–I entered that world. Through a co-authored magic born of contact, I fell into the chipmunk, the primary focus of my attention, and entered into an otherworldly alteration, discovering my place anew and seeing myself as the other, as something astonishing.
It was not only an experience of wonder, but a subversive moment, as well. As humans, we spend so much time in a human-centered world. We tend to live in human-built buildings, exist in human-built environment, transport ourselves in human-built devices. We speak with other humans but rarely speak with nonhumans. We see, constantly, as humans, and rarely take the time to attempt to see as nonhumans. But this is not an impossibility. An alteration of perspective, a sudden surprise, the magic of the unexpected–these experiences can transport us better than any car, subverting our human experience, opening a door into the nonhuman world and reminding us that not only does that world exist, but that it is the world and we are simply of it, within it, not separated from or above it.
Today I was transported in just such a manner. I discovered a bird and ended up becoming a chipmunk. It was an astonishing trip, brought about by a special kind of magic and grounded within the sudden contact between human and nonhuman, between myself and the other, between two manifestations of life–both of them unique, authentic and valuable, both of them with their own perspectives of the world. I’m grateful that today I was able to experience both those perspectives, rather than just my own. I’m grateful that today I peered into a small, forgotten space and discovered magic.
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Of The Hands 