. . . or: humans in the feedback loop.
Sorting through papers to file them (the family motto being something like debeo ordinare), I came across what was intended as an introduction for an article for the Canadian Journal of Herbalism. The article has yet to be completed, life having interjected its complexities as it tends to, nor can I put my hands on two of the books I refer to in order to amplify on a couple of points, but by setting it down in its fledgling form, I hope to revive it and develop it.
There is a passage in Tree: A Life Story (Suzuki & Grady -- one of the books that is eluding me at the moment) that more than anything I've read about trees, brings home to me a sense of kinship with them in an intimate physical sense. Walking in old-growth hardwood forests, or in Toronto's densely treed ravines, or in arboreta, or in a sacred grove I know where a religious hermit once lived near a stream northeast of the city, I have many times felt the life of the particular community of trees in a powerful way that has always left me wordless.
Our human penchant for abstraction leads us often into dealing with the natural world through metaphor, an attempt to connect with a rich and complex world with a well-chosen and memorable word or phrase. For it's not just our opposable thumbs and the way they handle tools that set us apart (we like to think) from other species, it's our peculiar use of language. Thanks to language, we can make distinctions between tree and fern, city and country, mind and body, us and them, right and wrong, nature and civilization, health and illness. We find it much more difficult to see -- and articulate -- layers, overlaps, interconnectedness, synchronicity, symbiosis, as our language-inflected brains sort and sift. If we struggle persistently with words and their limitations, we might end up becoming poets or mystics or philosophers, but still the way that language shapes our consciousness dominates our lives.
What struck me when reading John Redden's "Letter" from the editor's desk in the Canadian Journal of Herbalism XXV (2) with its eloquent description of the import of the fairly recent field of psychoneuroimmunology was his opening of the door beyond the linguistic compartments into which we categorize aspects of our human orgnaism. At least now, Western models of medicine can comfortably conceptualize linkages between organs and "systems" (cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, limbic, digestive, and so on) usually treated as discrete entities. We now feel more in tune with talking about feedback loops between our conveniently labeled systems and their interactions with our psychological and emotional states. Candace Pert's book, Molecules of Emotion, was a groundbreaking account of her work in what became the new field of "PIN". Six years ago, a wizardly cybernetician friend by the name of Stafford Beer recommended that I read her book, and a quick search for "psychoneuroimmunology" on Google at one point recently yielded 28,300 sites. Doubtless these included a lot of duplications and dead-end references, not to mention hosts of book-floggers, but there was still enough verbiage incorporoating the new paradigm floating around to consume the most dedicated air-ware fanatic.
The site that led the list when I searched was for "The PsychoNeuroImmunology
Research Society" at http://www.pnirs.org/is, calling itself "an international organization for researchers in a number of scientific and medical disciplines, including pyschology, neurosciences, immunology, pharmacology, psychiatry, behavioral medicine, infectious diseases, and rheumatology, who are interested in interactions between the nervous system and the immune system, and the relationship between behavior and health." Rather a self-reflexicve feedback loop with more a splintering of categories than an actual breaking down of the tradional -ologies.
John's editorial in CJH took the paradigm even further by suggesting that herbalists have an important part to play by helping people to "weave people, science, nature and life into a tapestry that is evolving and sustaining."
I feel a need to push it further by saying: the tapestry is already there. Our species is -- has always been -- part of what gets called the feedback loop. It is still our human pattern of behaviour to say: WE will weave the tapestry. WE will take care of the forests. In other words: WE still see ourselves as separate, as caretakers, as stewards, as users, as researchers -- whatever the noun might be that we use to designate ourselves as the supreme beings, the experts, the fixers, when what might be needed more urgently is to begin to see how we as creatures fit into what we call the tapestry, how all the parts are already woven together, and then learn how to act or better yet "not act" in ways that do not rupture and ruin the whole.
The passage in the Suzuki/Grady book that struck me with awe, is a description of Donald Culross Peattie's work in the lab (more than a half-century ago now) to understand chlorophyll -- the life-blood of so much of the plant world -- and to synthesize it. What he discovered was that the resulting green substance was not only in feel and appearance the very replica albeit differently coloured of human blood, but that its chemical composition differed from human blood by one crucial element particular to each. This may be old hat to a biochemist, but for a reader with a sense of kinship with non-human life forms, the implications are resounding and far more concrete than metaphor. When I locate my copy of the book, I'll revisit the passage, try to recapture the impact it had on first reading, and just let the image sink in all over again.
