Forest Poetry

“The ruler of the South Sea was called Light; the ruler of the North Sea, Darkness; and the ruler of the Middle Kingdom, Primal Chaos. From time to time, Light and Darkness met one another in the kingdom of Primal Chaos, who made them welcome. Light and Darkness wanted to repay his kindness and said, “All humans have seven openings with which they see, hear, eat and breathe, but Primal Chaos has none. Let us try to give him some.” So every day they bored one hole. On the seventh day, Primal Chaos died.”

-Chuang Tsu

What is our understanding of Chaos? Certainly, for the modern mind, chaos is there to be avoided, in the search of an order which grants humankind a controlled distribution of all economic and cultural affairs.  This order has not the properties of equilibrium that we would expect from the divine harmony, but it is a pursuit which seeks to avoid risks and sufferings, through the implementation of rationally planned strategies. Therefore, chaos is understood as the opposition of human made order, and being obscure, in opposition to the light of reason.

Human is just a form that the Heaven gives, not an ultimate object which as to be understood as a peak of the universe. But in a humanist mindset, human is the highest being, as the world must be transformed according to his humanly made values. What’s beyond his own humanity, must be ordered, this is to say, that uncertainty must be eliminated, and passions rationalized. In this regard, a Nietzschean perspective of the “enlightened” man who is afraid to give a gaze to the abyss comes to mind, as one man who fears nature in himself, and the unfathomable strength of nature to move us.

From a postmodern perspective, denier of structures, chaos is a state of uncertainty that sinks man into his material conditions. Chaos is horror and fear and a shameful sinking in apathy and despair. This vision of Chaos, has not the insightful properties of the Taoist vision, but it makes chaos a justification of solipsism and individualism, in the universal validity of moral perversion. Chaos is misunderstood as random idiocy in art, chaos becomes fatalism in daily life, a fail that it is pushed to others in the pretext of the purposelessness of the universe. Chaos is not wishful order, but it becomes wishful disorder of how man must desist and fail on all transcendental and organic purpose.

This way, the only accurate understanding of Chaos is through reverence. Our reverence comes from the recognition of our limits as species and as agents, we revere nature because nature is more powerful than us, but, it sustains us and fills us with wonder to keep living… Chaos, wild yet divine, inspires us to higher ends, beyond our senses.

I can’t revere God otherwise than wholly, because otherwise, I would revere an illusion.

Here’s Rumi, “Say I Am You”:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

-William Wordsworth

We are too much in the world, and so, the world is too much with us. Alas, there’s no glory, peace or reconciliation in this union, because it is not an union, but an imposition of our human desires into the world. We crowned technique and tamed the world to make it human, to make it safer to our desires. We  transformed the world, and now the world is so human, that there’s no place for reverence to be there between man and nature. The world is too much with us because we made it to assimilate us.

But when we stand there, in the night, with the innocent eyes of a pagan, the world seems to be so far from us, a world in the stars, a world in the untamed wind and lighting, so beautiful, powerful and savage that it does transform us and embrace us, in a way that no humanism and safety desire could ever force the entire world to be inside our narrow humanity.

That is wonder, and without wonder the world is all already known.