The web
I don’t know what she did during the next few minutes, I wasn’t watching. At junctures like this, you leave people alone, turn your attention elsewhere, and give them a little room to work in. When she was ready, she started talking in a low, firm voice—and I unobtrusively switched on my tape recorder.
“I’ve told you I’m dying,” she began. “I know it makes you unhappy to hear this, Louis, but the closer you come to understanding it, the less unhappy you’ll feel. By the time we’re finished here today, you still won’t feel good about it, but you’ll be able to bear it. In any case, this is where I have to begin. You want to understand me and you want to understand what’s going on, and that’s what we’re going to look at right now. If I were someone else, I’d try to console you with a fairy tale like the one they tell about Santa Claus every Christmas. I’d tell you that Mommy’s going to be taken up to heaven to live with God and the angels, and from there I’ll look down and watch over you. The truth is better than this—partly because it is the truth.
“Let me begin with the great secret of the animist life, Louis. When other people look for God, you’ll see them automatically look up into the sky. They really imagine that, if there’s a God, he’s far, far, far away—remote and untouchable. I don’t know how they can bear living with such a God, Louis, I really don’t. But they’re not our problem. I’ve told you that, among the animists of the world, not a single one can tell you the number of the gods. They don’t know that number and neither do I. I’ve never met one or heard of one who cares how many there are. What’s important to us is not how many they are but where they are. If you go among the Alawa of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa or the Navajo of North America or the Kreen-Akrore of South America or the Onabasulu of New Guinea—or any other of hundreds of Leaver peoples I could name—you’ll soon find out where the gods are. The gods are here.”
For the first time B looked directly into my eyes as she spoke.
“I don’t mean there, I don’t mean elsewhere, I mean here. Among the Alawa: here. Among the Bushmen: here. Among the Navajo: here. Among the Kreen-Akrore: here. Among the Onabasulu: here. Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied truthfully.
“This isn’t a theological statement they’re making. The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, ‘Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.’ The Kreen-Akrore are not saying to the Onabasulu, ‘You have no gods, only we have gods.’ Nothing of the kind. They’re saying, ‘Our place is a sacred place, like no other in the world.’ They would never think of looking elsewhere to find the gods. The gods are to be found among them—living where they live. The god is what animates their place. That’s what a god is. A god is that strange force that makes every place a place—a place like no other in the world. A god is the fire that burns in this place and no other—and no place in which the fire burns is devoid of god. All of this should explain to you why I don’t reject the name that was given to us by an outsider. Even though it was bestowed with a false understanding of our vision, the name animism captures a glimmer of it.
“Unlike the God whose name begins with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb—silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble—but not dead, not wholly extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days that place will be pulsing with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to take care of that place. It will never be what it was befo
re—but nothing is ever what it was before. It doesn’t need to be what it was before. You’ll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process.
“Here, I’ll tell you a story. When the gods set out to make the universe, they said to themselves, ‘Let us make of it a manifestation of our unending abundance and a sign to be read by those who shall have eyes to read. Let us lavish care without stint on every thing: no less upon the most fragile blade of grass than upon the mightiest of stars, no less upon the gnat that sings for an hour than upon the mountain that stands for a millennium, no less upon a flake of mica than upon a river of gold. Let us make no two leaves the same from one branch to the next, no two branches the same from one tree to the next, no two trees the same from one land to the next, no two lands the same from one world to the next, no two worlds the same from one star to the next. In this way, the Law of Life will be plain to all who shall have eyes to read: the rabbit that creeps out to feed, the fox that lies in wait, the eagle that circles above, and the man who bends his bow to the sky.’ And this was how it was done from first to last, no two things alike in all the mighty universe, no single thing made with less care than any other thing throughout generations of species more numerous than the stars. And those who had eyes to see read the sign and followed the Law of Life.
“Do you understand that story?” she asked.
“No, I don’t think I do.”
“No two things alike in all the mighty universe, Jared. That’s the key. That’s why everything here is on the way and not in its final form. I told you this yesterday when I was talking about the mites that travel with the burying beetles. If you put these mites under a microscope to study the final form of this species, you’ll be defeated, because the closer you look at them, the more clearly you’ll see that no two of them are alike—and if no two are alike, what sense can it possibly make to hold up any one of them and say, ‘Here, here is the final form of these mites’?
“This is what I mean by abundance, Jared: Even among these apparently negligible mites, no two have ever been made alike in all the mighty universe, and not one of them has ever been made with less care than a neutron star or a galactic cluster. The brain in that precious human head of yours is not more wonderful than one of those mites.”
“I know it,” I found myself saying.
“Would the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God have sent his only-begotten son to save those beetles and their household mites, Jared?”
“No.”
“But the god of this place has as great a care for them as for any other creature in the world. This is why I knew you could benefit from seeing those beetles yesterday. Those beetles are a manifestation of the gods’ unending abundance and a sign to be read by those who have eyes to read. I wanted you to see how the gods lavish care without stint on every thing: no less upon a beetle whose supreme achievement is burying a mouse than upon the brain of Einstein, no less upon a mite whose favorite dish is a fly’s egg than upon the eye of Michelangelo.”
“I do see—or I’m beginning to.”
“Where are we going to find this god, Louis?”
Since she’d called me by my own name just a minute before, I was momentarily flummoxed by her reverting to Louis. As time went on, I saw that she could address me either way without derailing her train of thought. Sometimes her message was specifically for Louis (and for me incidentally), sometimes it was specifically for me (and for Louis incidentally), and sometimes, I suppose, it was for both of us equally. In any case, my answer to this particular question was a blank look.
“I’m not asking you to make a leap here, Jared. I’ve already told you where we’re going to find this god … but I’ll come back to it later. We’ve got plenty of other things to talk about. You and I, Jared, always come back to vision. Louis and I always come back to the meaning of death.
“Every creature born in the living community belongs to that community. I mean it belongs in the sense that your skin or your nervous system belongs to you. The mouse we saw didn’t just ‘live in’ the park community, the way you might live in an apartment in Chicago or Fresno. Every molecule in the mouse’s body was drawn from this community and eventually had be returned to this community. It would be legitimate to say that this mouse was an expression of this community the way Leonardo da Vinci was an expression of Renaissance Italy.
“The individual lives in dynamic tension with the community, withdrawing to burrow, hive, nest, lodge, or den for safety’s sake but never totally self-sufficient there, always compelled to return and make itself available, as this mouse did. This tension is a phrase of the law, inspiring the trapdoor spider to seal its burrow like a bank vault and inspiring the spider wasp to become a safebreaker.
“Nothing in the community lives in isolation from the rest, not even the queens of the social insects. Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life is on loan from the community from birth and without fail is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt or excused. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest. As you saw yesterday, nothing is wasted, not a drop of water or a molecule of protein—or the egg of a fly. This is the sweetness and the miracle of it all, Jared. Everything that lives is food for another. Everything that feeds is ultimately itself fed upon or in death returns its substance to the community.”
She paused and gave me a look, which I took and gave back.
“Every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Does that make sense to you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Where will we find the god of this place?”