The Sentences Tell Me the Way

I wanted to write something, perhaps even a series of essays, on The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, bringing in ideas from Stephen Harrod Buhner and others. However, I realised that it would be far too premature to do so straight away. Not only do I need time to let the new ideas settle, I also want to read McGilchrist’s more recent (hefty!) two volume work, The Matter with Things, before I come to any conclusions (even provisional ones), and to revisit a number of related books too. For McGilchrist has given voice to much that builds upon what I already know, as well as providing new insights that are too significant to delve into without careful thought and attention. 

Having this motivation, to return to and deepen my understanding of things I have forgotten or not fully understood, and to go beyond towards what is as yet just a glimmer of the unknown, is a wonderful and enlivening change. But it’s also daunting. This means months of work, if not more, and I cannot say what I will find on the other side, if anything worth sharing.

Yet to delve into what may seem to be a great deal of ‘intellectual’ work, to me, is profoundly creative, and has physically embodied effects. Ideas can be stimulating precisely because they are alive, and thus unpredictable. Creative work, as process, can lead to unexpected places. And McGilchrist’s worldview is fundamentally based on embodied and relational reality. It is holistic, and encompasses the four ways of knowing that he considers to be essential: science, reason, intuition and imagination. This is, therefore, not going to be an abstract cognitive exercise (for all that it is philosophical), but a potentially visionary task that expands my understanding of the world, and enhances my connection with it. 

One of the core arguments McGilchrist makes is that the way we attend to the world creates the nature of the world we experience:

Our attention is responsive to the world […] the process is reciprocal. It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but that the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find […] Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it and in what way. (The Master and His Emissary, p. 133)

This isn’t new information to me, but the way in which this is described in terms of right and left hemisphere function, lends it greater complexity, providing a neurological explanation for perception (and how it can go wrong). It was also a timely reminder to pay more attention to my own disposition towards myself and the world. A new way of thinking and seeing can make all the difference as to whether life is enjoyable or miserable—even if the specific conditions of it don’t actually change. The change is in the attention itself, which alters the world we experience, and opens up new possibilities.

I have a pile of books—about mind, perception, time, myth, wildness—that I want to return to over the coming months as I explore the implications of McGilchrist’s work, including some that were incredibly influential to me when I was making my first attempts at writing. I have already reread Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) by Susan Griffin, for which I am grateful. It’s a challenging but also beautiful and astonishing journey of a book. And I wonder now whether the section called ‘The Cave’ had seeped in to my consciousness such that it emerged just a little in my story Heartbeat.

I have already been writing a little, slowly and tentatively as yet, but as if I am remembering the process, and the wildness it gifted me, as well as the grace of my own understanding. To be lost to the self is a great hardship; to find paths back to the self, however obscure and winding, is a joy.

Will this journey also result in visual art? I do hope so, but I can’t be sure.

But thoughts are beginning to live, flowing and growing. There is no destination as yet—nor should there be. But the sentences are telling me the way.

Image from If Women Rose Rooted, by Sharon Blackie