The Descent of Man

Life in the snake house appears a squandering of forms without style and without plan, where all is possible, and animals and plants and rocks exchange scales, quills, concretions. But among the infinite possible combinations only some-perhaps actually the most incredible-become fixed, resist the flux that undoes them and mixes and reshapes; and immediately each of these forms becomes the centre of a world, separated for ever from the others..and in this finite number of ways of being, each identified in a monstrosity of its own, and necessity, and beauty of its own,lies order, the sole order recongnizable in the world...is theirs a boundless patience or a desperation without end?What are they waiting for, or what have they given up waiting for?In what time are they immersed?In that of the species..or in the slow cooling rays of the sun? The thought of a time outside our experience is intolerable...
----Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino

How to begin, who am I, what am I..the old questions. But origins and the centre do not interest us latecomers anymore; decay and displacement, the Fall and decadence hold us enraptured, spellbound. We want to tell a story that ends all stories.

Do I have to become a shaman to recover my original state, or has the mind strayed too far from nature, escaped her closedness, her cliches, to answer that? And in these times any search for noble origins runs the risk of faltering along the lines of Pascalian pessimism: he who who plays the angel, ends up playing the Beast.

The quiet desperation of not being known, not even a name with God. From where did that first spark of consciousness arise, from within Being itself?How did we break out of the circle?The trees hold all the truth: the goddess of nemos , that stand of trees that enclosed the first temple..the first parliament (thinking in the open), polar symbolism, do we under-stand that, do we rememeber that?Mnemosyne. But the cosmos was only a message from itself to itself. How can one talk of the "desire" to be known?

At first we were tree shrews. Our first two fears have stayed with us:the fear of falling and snakes. Birds: how they hate the snakes. Snakes and ladders is our first and only cosmic game. Birds and snakes haunt our first religious imaginings in Mexico, Hinduism, and the 'ancient battle'; even the bible preserves vestiges of the memory of this ancient mythology: the duplicitous serpent that leads to the Fall (but, also, "be ye as wise as serpents"). The first gods are sky gods.

Then we learnt to swing:"if you ain't got that swing,you ain't got a thing"..brachaition. The other apes didn't make it. Flexibility, readiness, is all even as we grew heavier and moved down the tree. Swing loosens up our being. But that was six million years ago. Still, a straightening torso, outstretched arms, and a clear space in front of our eyes:mind-eye-brain. From now on we could see the lover face-to-face. The world could be objectified, could become a concept. But as we moved down-for what?more food?-others moved back up, resisting, taking flight: cousin Gibbon. Flying through the treetops and even today grace and mastery still wow us. Flights of imagination. We look up at them and are reminded of the oldest dream of man: to escape earth, to become a bird,to grow wings, to be an angel: the trees map our history. Like the birds, who are all sight and sound (love at first sight) we learn of the spirit's animosity to the body. But singing. How they sing. The 'language of the birds' is our first speech. A language we still try to re-call. A medieval chant is nothing but an attempt to achieve weightlessness, even as we grow slower, brainier:the ambiguity of gravitas; the gothic arch, the stained glass windows,a re-drawing, a re-vision of how we once saw the earth. And what of man's best friend?He knows only how to smell, but even he has to be domesticated. We can tolerate the sight of death, but not its stench.

The gibbon moves in small groups of 3 or 4 in vast areas close, apolitical, non-violent with no social complications. An angel, a world of little desire(unlike the others: if you're rich (well-fed) you're promiscuous like the chimps, if you're hardup (like the desert baboons) then you have a harem and if you're desperate then you pair-bind (marry!)). The lack of surplus, the inability of power to radiate out from the centre to the periphery, means that there is no 'king'; every man is his own prophet and this is mirrored in the fiercely independent nomadic and mountain alternative. Property is power. 'Stateless' societies held together loosely by myth and ritual and always in the shadow of exit. The options seem to narrow: to become earth bound and go for bourgeois prosperity (more food) or look up to the aristocratic Gibbons. Dissent or descent. But in truth, nothing is really lost. Aborted selves continue to live on in us, haunting us, inspiring us. The human possibility, because of its centrality, contains all other possibilities at the horizontal level, as it were.

And then the savannah cleared and we took our first fateful step. Our hands were freed up:to symbolize, to hold and carry food, to pray...but also to hold weapons. Ibn Arabi could say that we were fashioned by God's two hands, which is why we bear the imprint of the temporal and the eternal. But from 6.5 to 2.5 million years the chimps (we?) were mainly gatherers, living by the lakes. Were we Eloi then? A marxist utopia, only occasionally hunting. But we were not natural predators and had no fixed pattern of doing so. So, why?The frenzy of the kill, to lose oneself by going 'beserk', our coat of the bears.Dionysus.The lure of madness is like no other, except , perhaps, the intoxication of music, the sea. We have nothing to say about sanity. Discontinuity, the nomadic breaking-up of stable patterns and routine still fascinates us now..art is a broken circle (Iris M); the sublime:incompleteness, music that doesn't come 'home'.

The Eloi have no conception of labour and, therefore, of time. Life is a day, a day that is repeated ad nauseam, without memory. There is no continuity and therefore no need for books. Is this the return to animality in the post-judgement days, a life where consumption and leisure are intertwined and indistiguishable from one another?

The reptiliean cortex of the brain that has instinctually diffusing mechanisms (play-fighting) gets confused since we now have the neocortex as well. Already,we're double minded. But to stay cool under pressure. Cold blooded. Keats: 'If'. Cool and composed. But why this turn to hunting then?The chimps are the cleverest and therefore easily get bored. Fort da: absence of mother is the womb of invention. To create and detroy forms. We throw of linearity, aiming for radiality or, rather, we preserve it for politcal order and what amounts to the same thing, classification and the law. Curiouser and curioser...and "idle hands...But we weren't pros, like the lion:that takes millions of years."


Different from our normal day-to-day routine, the strangeness of it(later, cultural man would call it a taboo to control it) but for now, rage, the unknown , infinity, is something that bewitches us. The Greeks sink a few mathematicians and build their rational cosmos and even now we enjoy the chase , enjoy the catching and are restless at the thought of keeping what we find. What explains this bloodlust?Chimps poke the dead body if they don't eat it. They hesitate, ponder, reflect. Are these the first intimations of mortality?Stillness in a world of constant change. Is the wonder that the world is flux the root of philosophy? The need to eternalise the moment, the poetic, a way of killing its hold on us, before it kills us? Perhaps the first philosophy starts with death (Rosenzweig:death is the point of all points).

But the neocortx grows and we learn to imagine: politics,play, hunting are our new forms of aggression, new styles of loving(grooming). Already we have the taste for blood, war becomes a ritual for cleansing : the rite of Spring (Stravinsky). War becomes an art, a way of renewing oneself through mutiliation. Why should the blood of another, sacrifice be a path to salvation?But what makes it so exciting is the fact that it was so unscripted, so different from our monotonous gathering and consuming- a way of tearing oneself away from oneself.

By stepping out of nature we de-monstrate the monstrosity and the beauty of the human condition, a range of being that is unsurpassed. But we can never forget that this too is part of the order of Being.

(passages and ideas lifted from Dudley Young's 'Origins of the Sacred')