Creatureliness
Or, the earthly bewilderment that humans have grown very good at obscuring.
“What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?”
— Annie Dillard
Recently, I enjoyed a pinch of psychedelic and spent most of the day reading Richard Powers’ The Overstory. The combination reminded me of one of the most primal, delightful, and bewildering feelings. I’ve come to think of it as “creatureliness.”
The trouble with describing creatureliness is that language usually points in the wrong direction. Words are all strung along an underlying grammar, an unseen logic that shifts our sense of the world for uncreaturely ends. Alan Watts says that “to comprehend mysticism you must also follow some type of sadhana, or discipline in nonverbal perception,” bypassing the snares of language altogether and allowing consciousness to unfold its wordless expanse.
Creatureliness is not quite mysticism, and not perfectly impervious to language. It’s more like being stripped down to the flesh and reminded that we’re just another species inhabiting the earth, living and dying by the billions, surrounded by dramas unfolding along timelines measured in millennia. And thanks to some evolutionary marvel, we can hold the inscrutable facts of existence in our minds. We can gaze at them, and puzzle over them. So far as we can tell, there is no real beginning or end, no center or boundary. Just an infinite mystery that surges so far along the axes of space and time that they fail to contain it. Theologian Rudolf Otto calls it the mysterium tremendum, awe-inducing and terrifying all at once. The mystery spills over, engulfs us, and strips away culture and social norms like a spiritual acid.
Creatureliness is to perceive the world stripped bare of narrowed human contexts. It leaves us to consider any of the trillion details of our improbable existence against the sprawling backdrop of undulating mountain ranges, swaying forests, and the stillness of eternity.
The mundane bits of life we encounter — a flower, a building, a bar fight — are jettisoned from the everyday milieu that cloaked them as ordinary. Each is made nearly incomprehensible in their unlikely existence, becoming a sort of ode to the mystery that exceeds us. Creaturely awe. We may or may not live in a multiverse, but we can see how a flower tilts towards the sun, and charms nearby bees. Or a child riding a bike, giggling as her velocity builds. Imagine that! Here in this unknowable expanse, such strange treasures. Every moment is an impossible gift. Or senseless cruelty.
The science writer John Horgan, in his book Rational Mysticism, notes:
“Seeing life against the backdrop of infinity can evoke joy, madness, terror, revulsion, love, gratitude, hilarity — or all of the above at once. You may delight in the world’s astonishing beauty or despair at its fragility and insignificance.”
However you react to infinity, it bathes all our human goings-on in a funny, creaturely light. The flowers tilt and pollinate. Beavers build dams. Mountain ranges swell and shrug. We construct niches and tribes and technologies and ideologies, all of which have a way of making us forget.
Horgan, quoting Otto:
“Religions, Otto argued, do not reveal the mysterium tremendum so much as they shield us from direct confrontation with it. ‘They are attempts . . . to guess the riddle it propounds, and their effect is at the same time always to weaken and deaden the experience itself.’ Theology ‘often ends by constructing such a massive structure of theory and such a plausible fabric of interpretation, that the ‘mystery’ is frankly excluded.’”
Theology isn’t alone in this. Labor markets, insurance payments, recreational soccer leagues — humans have constructed such a massive social apparatus that we forget our basic creatureliness. We forget, as Powers’ novel implores the reader to remember, that while our species is maybe 300,000 years old, trees have been on the scene for some 400 million years. Ours are not the only stories playing out here. Powers: “This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
Maybe that’s the only way any of this — modernity’s industrial apparatus, economic growth, prosperity for a growing population — works. Maybe a constant state of creaturely remembrance, of reverence, would doom the productivity we’ve grown to depend on (our own form of soil). Maybe we’d just die out, a blissful blip, organisms that marveled and gawked at our own creation but failed to build the institutions that would keep us around to continue doing so (though modernity’s more industrious civilizational logic appears to be pointing us down troubling paths anyway)1.
Annie Dillard, who I’ve written about before as a sort of tortured bard of creatureliness, asks:
“Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer…will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?”
Such is the power of creatureliness. She continues,
“We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”
Wake up, and then what? Just sit back and watch the show until we die out? Rather, can we rebuild our massive social apparatus — theologies, labor markets, sports leagues — to sustain rather than suppress a sense of creaturely wakefulness? Or is creatureliness the price of modern civilization?
A quick logistical note: I recently joined Vox's Future Perfect as a staff writer, where I'll write about the budding field of consciousness studies, political economy, & important but under-covered ways we might navigate the future of each.
I'll write something up on the transition soon. But for now, as readers of this newsletter, you're probably somewhat acquainted with what I tend to write about. I'm always open to hearing any thoughts around what, from my basket of interests (or otherwise, why not), deserves more coverage or consideration among large, general audiences.
My first piece was on measuring the complexity of consciousness and experiential richness, and two forthcoming are on what an attainable form of "post-scarcity" could mean today, and efforts to engineer quick access to the advanced meditative states known as jhanas for the masses.
Point being, I have a pretty wild freedom to roam into the weird, and I look forward to using it. Future Perfect is unusual; our ethos is to write about important and tractable ideas regardless of their newsworthiness. In fact, the idea is to cover exactly those topics that are generally left out of the news. So what's missing in our mainstream conversations around consciousness and economics?Adam Smith held this view, that the obstruction of wisdom in our youthful years (or, the obstruction of a sustained sense of creatureliness) is necessary to make us into industrious citizens that do the necessary work of reproducing society. If we all just learned to wonder at the world, civilization would stagnate and collapse. Economic anthropologist Gustav Peebles has an incredible short essay on Smith’s view, and I interviewed Gustav on my podcast here. I think Smith is dead wrong, but it’s interesting to engage with nonetheless — that perspective is alive & well today.
Great ideas as always 🔥
The Overstory is such a wonderful novel. It's been a few years now since I read it, but I've actually considered revisiting it to write a piece about it. I think about that section with Nick and Olivia living in the branches of the giant redwood at least once every few days.
You write excellently, by the way. I found your Substack as a recommendation from Symbols & Rituals, very glad to have found it.