Enmeshed - Jan 6 2021

 

Enmeshed

Jan 6 2021

I live by myself.

I don't mind being alone

and have lived most of my life this way.

Yet I wonder

about the path of least resistance

and lazy comfort zones.

About complacency,

and what I may be missing

having been so long on my own.

But as I learn more

about the human body

I realize that this sovereign being I call me

is a kind of conceit.

That my gut contains more bacteria

than there are stars in the galaxy,

that 40 trillion creatures

inhabit me.

I am not one, but many;

entangled and enmeshed, despite myself.

So where do I begin and end?

Is there no such thing as independence?

And don't get me started

on the question of free will.

How humbling

that I contain such multitudes.

Even though I always knew

that in a society

as civilized as ours

there is no such thing as singular,

that as well as depending

on others to survive

we rely on the kindness of strangers.

Because there are no organisms

there is just ecology,

unheard-of creatures

all at once

breathing, growing, decomposing

and filling every space,

entangled

in fights to the death

and symbiotic nets

and closely balanced truces.

Perhaps lonely

and even longing

but never truly alone.

I suspect that this poem has been fermenting in my subconscious for a while, but my discomfort with confessional poetry kept it there. The spur to write came from a brilliant book called Entangled Life – How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds, & Shape Our Futures, and written by a man whose name sounds like the ultimate parody of Englishness: Merlin Sheldrake. Fungi are the neglected kingdom of biology, and Sheldrake is a biologist whose writing and thoughtfulness entitle him to the name by which scientists used to be known: a true Natural Philosopher. He is not just a brilliant synthesizer; he is a careful, compassionate, insightful observer of human nature and the natural world. Not to mention a fine writer with the ear of a poet. A philosophers as much as a scientist.

The poem is informed by his general world view, one I increasingly share. But two facts and one insightful thought I lifted directly from him: That my gut contains more bacteria / than there are stars in the galaxy, / that 40 trillion creatures / inhabit me; and there are no organisms / just ecology.(I'm trusting his numbers!)

In this understanding of biology, I see a strong overlap with sociology: the conflict between libertarian ideology and the realization that we are inherently social creatures; and in modern industrial society – a system as complex and interdependent and therefore as vulnerable as any – this survivalist fantasy of the heroic individual is just that, a fantasy.

And I also see a strong overlap with certain kinds of spirituality: the idea that our personal boundaries are artificial constructs, and that true enlightenment depends on dissolving the boundaries of ego and self. We naturally think of this as expanding outward. But the microscopic lens of this poem reminds us – in an instrumental, if not a spiritual sense – that the dissolution of this sense of self works in the other direction as well.