Our Deeper Bodies, the Pagan Christ, and the Defeat of the Machine

A child wakes on an early autumn morning in a world long-vanished: the world of the henge-builders in southern England. She listens to the song of migrating birds, tastes the first chill in the air; she sees the sun rising through a bank of mist over the forest, whose mantle is just turning crimson, that covers the land beyond her village of thatched, wattle-and-daub huts. She drinks water from a waterskin, brushes hair back from her forehead; she watches, for a moment, her grandmother as she sings a prayer and kindles the hearthfire, hears the lowing of cattle who she knows will soon be culled for winter and the joyful squeals of children as they play, absently cradles a corn dolly.

I am imagining it — but there really was such a girl. She is gone; her life — her growth, her sicknesses, her joys, her loves, her children, her labor, her wonder, her death, but more, infinitely more, the felt, experienced reality of all these and of her entire life-world bound into an unfathomable whole called her “soul” — is forgotten, lost in an absolute abyss of time. My spiritual and imaginative labor to grasp it consciously, when I consider it, has spanned my whole life, from my childhood awakening of feeling for and curiosity about ancient things (enflamed first of all by the traditional music of Brittany, Scotland, and Ireland), to my own travels in the lands of my ancestors, to all the accumulated knowledge and experience that has provided the canvas on which my imagination can invoke her. A life’s labor — true, such a joyful and deeply desired labor that it hardly seems appropriate to call it “labor.”

As I awaken this vision in my heart and mind, it feels so tenuous, like the barest glimpse caught of a ghost — fleeting but heavy with feeling — out of the corner of my eye. Even reading some of the great imaginative masterworks of historical fiction that can evoke lost worlds with such poignancy and power can still feel pale compared to my own present embodied reality.

And yet I have a deeper connection to this girl. She is a grandmother. Between her and me, there is a literal, physical continuity. But there is more than a merely physical continuity, and a soul-link deeper than my own imaginative power.

What Is Real?

To divert for a moment into a piece of pragmatic metaphysics, I believe that the final realities of the world are qualities, and that the original and final mode of knowledge is feeling, not thought (though in the roots, it is probably impossible to disentangle thought and feeling — or perhaps, “thinking” in its integrity is merely a specific kind of feeling). When moderns judge qualia in the philosophical sense to be “epiphenomena” of an underlying “reality,” this is precisely an inversion. The logical, cognitive, rational, and in the case of modern science, mathematical “realities” are derivative; they are abstractions from reality. Reality is what is experienced, what appears, what is felt, what manifests itself to us.