Michael Pollan, Marian Animist

Happy Wednesday.

I write to you, supine and Proust-like, from my bed where I have succumbed to the aftermath of a yellowjacket sting. It is an unrequited love story, for although these f-ckers love me, I am allergic to them. For the second year in a row, they have targeted the tender flesh of my right leg and the entire region under my knee looks like the red balloon emoji. I am supposed to keep it elevated.

If I were a metaphysically-inclined person, which I am, I would ask myself what message this sting is meant to carry. I believe in messages from the animal world, and that nature speaks to us. Apparently, the great nonfiction writer Michael Pollan shares some of my beliefs. His new book A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness shows a remarkable aptitude for spirituality, although he spends most of it talking to scientists. I reviewed it for The Metropolitan Review, and you can read it here:

In one paragraph, I make a provocative case that Pollan is (or could become) a Marian animist. In the Catholic imagination, an animist is someone who sees the spirit of life in all things, and recognizes that God is infused in nature. A Marian is someone with a special devotion to the mother of Christ. An excerpt:

In the most boundless vision of the Blessed Mother lies the notion of Blessed Mother Earth — something Pollan obviously has feeling for, given his many books about gardening, food, plant medicine, and building himself a writing hut far in the Connecticut woods. His intuition that “everything alive is sentient” is not too far removed from William Blake’s “everything that lives is holy.”

Pollan, of course, is not writing from a religious perspective, although he does stay in a Buddhist cave at the end of his book. It was disappointing to see him omit any possibility of speaking with someone from a Western spiritual tradition in his quest to understand consciousness, but the book overall is lovely and points in the right direction. I talk about a paper on consciousness by a theologian named Terence McGoldrick, and how it echoes Pollan’s exhortations for a new scientific approach:

Perhaps a New Science is needed, one capable of taking into account the spiritual dimension of human life without reducing it to a solely materialist view. McGoldrick intriguingly calls this interdisciplinary approach neurotheology. What else could it be called? Mystic biology? Enchanted somatology? Pollan speaks excitedly of such an idea, suggesting that we will “have to broaden our conception of science.” He mentions that Evan Thompson, the philosopher who studies sentience, has collaborated with Buddhist thinkers. “A new science of consciousness will likely be a hybrid enterprise,” he contends.

I hope you enjoy it. It’s not a “demolition job” (as one reader called it) like my review of Kingsnorth, but sometimes one has to put one’s stinger away. Especially if the book is lovely.

What else have I been reading in my confinement? In between making grocery lists for ill-advised, hobbling treks to the store (eggs…Benadryl…after which I concluded that Eggs Benadryl would make an excellent rapper name), I, like everyone else, imbibed the latest salacious news about the Graham Platner campaign. Ugggggh. And I decided that I really, really, really do not like Graham Platner. Or anyone of his archetype. I suppose I am just tired of the politics and rhetoric of grievance. Not everything is the fault of the “oligarchy,” the “Deep State,” computer nerds, or any other shadowy entity. I’m tired of hearing about it. Sometimes the consequences of one’s foibles are simply the consequences of one’s foibles. And those consequences are not the result of the fabulously wealthy, or anyone else, conspiring to keep others down. Enough is enough! Platner managed to sneak through despite his unsavory past, insisting as the finish line approached that “they continue to try to stop us. With money. With lies. With anything and everything they can throw at us.” I’m not sure who they is referring to here, but I’m pretty sure his (if one gives credence to the accounts of his exes) abusive past is his own responsibility.

I’m also put off by the claims that his military experience explains his behavior toward women. Not every brave veteran with PTSD is a womanizer, physically rough, or emotionally controlling. And I’m sick of hearing justifications like “if we want to have working class people in politics, we have to accept people who aren’t perfect.” This is insulting to the working class. It’s offensive to insinuate that because a person is working class, he isn’t capable of being faithful or upstanding. This certainly doesn’t reflect the lives and choices of the working class people I know and love.

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m longing for a return to decency. What’s next, someone with chopped up body parts in their fridge running for Congress, and any opposition is framed as “the oligarchy” trying to keep them down? Enough. I never want to hear the words “late stage capitalism” again — especially from the people in my neighborhood slurping $18 cocktails at The Green Zone.

The good thing about taking responsibility for one’s own shortcomings is that it’s actually empowering. You don’t have to wait for anyone else, or any system, to change. You can change your life now. Today. It is liberating. The other option, as Yuval Levin says in his foreword to Ian Rowe’s excellent book Agency, is to “suggest that social change must always precede personal change, so that no one can really transform his or her own life. Instead, all we can do is wait for others to effect broad systemic change or seek somehow to make ourselves part of such change through political action. . . But systemic change without personal change is hollow and dispiriting, and ultimately cannot work.” What’s needed, instead, is a “recovery of agency” and a belief that one has the power to make decisions.

Accountability is a blessing.