What is the grass?

Response to Arthur Haswell's Pan-Pathism

When I turn away from world-weariness, the child in me finds room to wonder,

What is the grass?

Is it the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven?

Is it a scented gift designedly dropped by God?

Or, is it the beautiful uncut hair of graves?

Walt Whitman was a cosmic optimist, but he was not naïvely so. Having been a stretcher bearer during the civil war, he knew the shapes of broken bones and the stench of death. He knew the struggle for existence and the many offspring taken out of their mothers’ laps.

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

Pan-pathism: an alternative antiphysicalist attitude

I must express my thanks to Arthur Haswell for his essay, “Pan-pathism: an alternative antiphysicalist attitude: Why there is no need to be too happy about a conscious world.” It provoked me to realize how wrong it is for panpsychists to refer even ironically to “dead matter” as part of our protest against physicalism. If physicalism is true, matter is not even dead. Only a living universe knows death.

Matter that was not once alive cannot die and is not dead.

So, strangely, panpsychism is no more nor less a philosophy of death as it is of life. Animism ensouls the cosmos, and who better knows how to die than a soul?

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Physicalism often pretends it is not a metaphysics, that it does not need philosophy. Steven Weinberg once wrote that for philosophers to tell physicists anything more than the laws of physics might be required to explain nature “is to tell a tiger in search of its prey that all flesh is grass.”¹

But we know: all flesh is grass. All tigers return to dirt. And we know, with Georges Bataille, that “the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.” What on Earth does that mean? Its meaning exceeds even the circumference of this planet.

The Sun sacrifices its own photonic flesh to give away excessive currents of energy to Earth without any expectation of return.

“Men were conscious of this long before astrophysics measured that ceaseless prodigality; they saw it ripen the harvests and they associated its splendor with the act of someone who gives without receiving.”²

Not a single quantum of energy could be transacted among living beings upon Earth’s surface without the Sun’s primordial generosity. This is as true of the monetary transactions of the human economy as it is of the ecological transactions of soil microbes, fungi, plants, and animals. Life is given, not earned. Evolutionary speciation is a celebration of divine surplus, not a competition amidst material scarcity. Life is not just a struggle for existence but an expression of erotic excessiveness. We only exist because the joy outweighed the genocide.

But there is no question: Life is suffering.

The cosmos overflows with feelings. But it is full of more than angels and faeries. It is full of aliens and demons, too. And even the angels and faeries are already fierce forces not to be trifled with. They do not come in what we, comfortable in our convenient certainties, call peace. They come to awaken—to wake us up to death, which is not life’s other but its brother.

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34)

This grass is very dark. Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths, so many uttering tongues, and they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

“From his mouth came a sharp sword.” (Revelation 19:11)

“To see the nature of our reality as somewhat Dionysian (chaotic, mad, insatiable, and lurching between ecstasy and despair), as many pagan traditions indeed have done, seems more in keeping with the experience of living in this world to the pan-pathist. Indeed, perhaps ironically, such an understanding is what gives Christ’s Passion its plausibility and makes it so powerful. If there were a divine, equanimous being full of love and compassion who tried to save humanity, it seems entirely likely he would be tortured for hours and then trussed up on a crucifix. But this is not evidence of all things bright and beautiful.”

-Arthur Haswell

Panpsychism, animism, and the current proliferation of panentheistic Christologies are all at risk of becoming sentimental unless they tarry with the tragic, not just with dead children but species extinction, even world annihilation. The Sun sacrifices itself for us today, but tomorrow it will swell insistently until we join it in self-sacrifice. The Earth, too, will be turned to ash. There is no escape from the depths of incarnation. The Solar Logos descended into the dark soil, was born from woman’s womb and born again from stone tomb. “Bright and beautiful” the passion was not. A cosmos full of feeling is not automatically a friendly cosmos. This grass is dark.

“Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb.” (John 20:1)

“She saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’” (John 20:12-13)

Jesus appeared, and Mary mistook him for a gardener. But was it a mistake? Tenderly, Christ cares for the many-tongued, curling grasses. “Do not cling to me.”

To die is different from what any one supposed.

We live and die amidst a dense field of agencies, appetitions, hungers, wounds, invitations, refusals, ancestors, demons, angels, faeries, parasites, predators, and gods. The very solar generosity that feeds us will destroy us. Gods are terrifying.

“The powers of the stars are the fountain veins in the natural body of God in this world.”

-Jacob Böhme (The Aurora, 2:28)

Aztec human sacrifice is a terrible mimicry of the Sun. But let us not pretend that our own civilization is any less sacrificial merely because its heart-harvesting is concealed in overseas supply chains, hidden behind prison walls and foreign wars waged by automated drones. The Aztecs knew with militant liturgical clarity that civilization, like all growing organisms, feeds on death.

Bataille insists that the human economy cannot be understood apart from the general economy of the cosmos. Restricted economy assumes scarcity and so produces only utility calculation, alienated wage labor, and private accumulation. General economy begins with excess.

Our economies always mirror these cosmic energies, whether pathologically or productively. The surplus must be spent, whether as war or as art, with a pile of slain bodies or a festival jubilee, mass extinction or evolutionary transformation.

Chaos and creativity are not two different processes. They are difference itself, the trembling tension in the weave of the real, always threatening to fray at the edges. Creation is not the imposition of order upon a dead matter. Creation requires the risk of relation. Birth is never a one man show. And there is no renewal without exposure to rot. Crucifixion is the cost of creation.

Which is why animism and Christianity need each other.

In my humble opinion!: resurgent animism may do without institutional Christianity, but it needs Christ—specifically, a cosmic Christology—if it is not to collapse into mere aesthetic re-enchantment, into the charming thought that clouds, rivers, stones, and forests are alive while leaving untouched the extractive, heart-harvesting metaphysics of capital that continues to devour them. We must “come to perceive [the] connection between religious behaviors and economic ones.”³ And Christianity needs animism if it is to recover the living creation it too often helped mechanize in the name of an impossibly impassive God projected beyond the rim of a fallen world, ruling by fiat rather than suffering and rejoicing with us from within.

My mycologist friend Merlin Sheldrake once called himself a Christian neopagan. It’s catchy.

Don’t cling to “Christ is king.” Christ is not a border guard, a patriarch, an imperial mascot, or a metaphysical cop.

Christ is kin.

Christ is the lure toward communion even amidst the ruins of coercion. Christ is not an escape from incarnation, but the full, transfiguring embrace of Dionysian dismemberment as the only way light might shine in darkness, so that the darkness might remember it. And what glories unfurl in the rainbow spectrum meantime!

The child in me asks, Is it safe?

No, child. But it is Good.

Kinship with Christ is not a mood or an attitude. It is a total renewal of the economy. A commitment to giving without expectation of return, for that is how life and death go round.

There is real, concrete import to this whole panpsychism versus physicalism discussion. It matters ecologically and culturally where we land on such questions of ultimate concern. We do not need a Christic revival of animism to justify our delight in walking in the woods. For we will all be hung on trees one day. We need such a turn, a metanoia, because our civilization’s reigning image of reality is crushing the rose too quickly. It has barely begun to bloom.

But what to do about death denial? Is not all ancient and modern civilization but a revolt against it, celebrating it only in a desperate attempt to placate it? Might not reincarnation be the most radically immanent response? Reincarnation offers no escape from life. It refuses escape.

What has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.

There is no final exit from becoming. Death unties the knot but our threads of relation remain. We are eddies that unwind only to continue downstream. Our tongues have spoken many languages and will speak many more. Our tongues are languages, as each blade of grass is a uniform hieroglyphic bearing the owner's name someway in the corners.

Grass is death made green by sunlight. It feeds a buzzing democracy of winged pollinators and mycelial decomposers. Resurrection underfoot. The dead do not disperse, they photosynthesize.

A conscious cosmos is not necessarily a consoling cosmos. But neither is it meaningless. To be intimate with excessiveness is dangerous. It is not safe, child. Belief in a happy ending is not enough. Worse, it tempts us into the terror that sacrifice of others might win divine favor. But with practice, and many lives to learn, belief may be reborn as love, not as sacrifice of self for other, not as optimism or pessimism, but as an affirmation of relation.

If the world is alive, if we really know and feel it to be true, then it must change how we eat, build, teach, fuck, farm, mourn, spend, and pray.

Remember the dark green creation underfoot, rotting, blooming. Let it decompose you. Trust that to die is different from what any one supposed.

1. Dreams of a Final Theory (London: Vintage Books, 1993), 21.

2. The Accursed Share (1967), 28-29.

3. The Accursed Share (1967), 68.