Nomad Codes

philosophical error or the mark of patriarchy, but is fired by an intensely lucid yearning for the highest of goals: liberation .
    Wrestling with my own internal tension between these impulses led me to give two lectures at the New York Open Center, and what follows is culled from those talks. In some sense, I’ve written a speculative myth that intensifies the conflict between these modes in order to highlight their distinctions and cut through to the raw and frequently conflicting desires that characterize spirituality. Within societies, religions and individuals, these two modes are clearly deeply imbricated, and even seem to call forth each other. The Neoplatonism I criticize for its over-determined reliance on hierarchy nonetheless served to keep the gods and the ensouled earth alive during the Renaissance. And while Gnosticism expresses a desire to transcend the material world far more intensely that normative Christianity, my favorite image for nature—the ouroboros—is in fact a Gnostic symbol. Perhaps spirituality can synthesize what religion elsewhere drives asunder.

SNAKES AND LADDERS

    My favorite analogy for my own somewhat schizophrenic spiritual explorations is the kid’s game Snakes and Ladders (known more antiseptically as Chutes and Ladders). In the game, you begin at the bottom row of the board and advance square by square towards the top row. If you land on a square that contains the bottom rung of a ladder, you can climb straight up, skipping rows. If you land on a square that has the upper end of a snake on it, you have to slide back down.
    Of course, “getting to the end” is already a component of the linear and transcendent drive towards a goal, and the game is in the ladder’s camp from the get-go. The ladder is a human artifact, a tool defined by the right angles which we discover in their “pure” Platonic form in our minds rather than the sinewy forms of nature. The ladder describes a linear vector, and embodies a hierarchy of rungs. As with a pyramid, the “higher” heavenly powers rule over the lower powers of the earth. Laid on its side, the ladder describes an evolutionary movement through time, both the “great chain of being” that places man as the leader of the pack, and the millennial historical movement of spirit towards a teleological end that exceeds the order of nature.
    But the serpent slips in and upsets this order. The snake is an endless curve, a living beast that hugs the horizontal folds of earth or coils into the ouroboros, the primary image of cyclicity and return. The snake doesn’t step—it flows, and never in a straight line. Its wet tongue whispers of pagan mysteries, of chthonic and sexual powers, of the immanence of embodied spiritual experience. In one common Central American Christian icon, a snake coils at the base of a ladder set beside the crucified Christ. The snake is the “base”—the deepest instinctive life force, the beginning, the original sin. Hindu yogis make their bodies into pyramids and force the creature coiled at the base of their spines up the ladder of their chakras. But others let the serpent lead them, through confusion and resplendent darkness, deep into the cool crevices of earth.

NATURE VS. GNOSIS

    You are an archaic nomad. You are deeply and inextricably embedded in the immanent matrix of natural rhythms, flows, and forces. The earth runs through you, through your food and your shit and the weather and the things you eat and your relationships with other bodies. There’s not even any space you could inhabit that would let you think you were separate from this matrix, no inner sanctum, no clear and distinct Cartesian camera, no immortal soul. You live in a world without settlements, and where there are no settlements there are no walls.
    It is impossible for us to know the mind of such a person, but perhaps something like the following is true. The earth is alive, imbued with a consciousness distributed through animals and plants and rocks and storms. Your budding imagination creates an interface between your awareness and these entities, a magical interface that manifests mutual relationships with these figures. You form alliances with animal spirits, which are both visionary images and actual creatures. You align yourself with Cougar and partake of courage and mystery; you become Coyote and take on craftiness. Perhaps at a particularly pregnant juncture in time, an actual coyote passes in front of you and the