We Are Internal
or, Everything Is Embedded...
Quick note to readers: after a year and a half, I’m adding a contributing-subscription option to Leeway. I say “option” because I am not putting Leeway behind a paywall. All subscribers will continue to receive the semi-monthly installment and have full access to the archive. Substack does not offer a “donate” feature; for any of you who’d like to contribute something to this effort, you can subscribe monthly or yearly, and cancel that whenever you want.
I am also launching a Leeway Audio Essays Series of longer, more in-depth pieces on maritime technological history, as audio recordings. These will be available to contributing subscribers; they will require considerably more investment on my part to make. The first episode went out to contributing subscribers last Sunday, 17 December 2023. It’s called “Leeway: An introduction to the contemplation of sail-powered watercraft in human history.” It starts simple and sticks to key concepts related to everyday life; no special background or expertise necessary!
We humans, at least in this culture, have a strong tendency to think of ourselves as external. We conceive of ourselves as discrete beings, to a far greater extent than is actually true. This is abundantly clear in our language, perhaps in no case so obviously as in our ubiquitous use of the term “environment.” Everything that exists on Earth that isn’t us is “the environment.” As if it is basically a stage set for us, the actors.
When Apollo 8 orbited the Moon just before Christmas in 1968, and sent back that immortal photo, “Moonrise,” that one picture gave us a clearer sense that we were all living on this beautiful blue-and-white marble suspended in the infinite blackness of space. Still, visually, that image can easily reinforce the perception that the Earth—with us on it—is external to space. Space is “the environment.”
This is rooted one step deeper even than viewing ourselves as discrete from “the environment.” We have long told ourselves that our consciousness is at least a quasi-separate, if not entirely separate, being from the rest of us. Our everyday language still relies heavily on terms like “the body” and “the mind,” and separates the two, because not only is our current understanding of how consciousness and “the rest of us” work together as part of one being incomplete, to say the least, but only recently has our culture even been willing to accept, to any large extent, that they are, indeed, inextricable. In fact, much of our culture still refuses to accept that reality. That does not help us understand ourselves, to say the least. How often do we hear something like “appreciate your body” or “my body is telling me;” I get that it can be useful to distinguish, metaphorically, between consciousness, especially conscious will, and those processes inside of us that are less subject to the conscious will—or, at least, whose connections to it are unclear to us. But that’s why I object to this language and won’t use it; because we have so much to learn about how we are integrated, that any language or thinking that would tend to reinforce the assumption that there is some sort of division between “mind” and “body” or “consciousness” and everything else going on inside us should be avoided; this is a fallacy that’s still very much with us and that we need to leave behind. When we realize that words matter, that how we talk about something has a direct and strong effect on how we think or feel about it, then we understand that we should be thoughtful about the words we use. It’s like calling erotica “dirty.” It matters.
The truth is, the-rest-of-us is not “external” to our consciousness. The rest of the Earth is not “external” to us. Not only can we not survive without artificial life support if we’re not on Earth; we can’t even survive in a whole lot of places on our own planet without it. Without artificial contrivance of some sort—as basic as clothing—we cannot survive anywhere but within a certain climate zone, on land, with certain food and water resources constantly available, and at lower altitudes. We are just as restricted in where we can live as a freshwater fish. If it’s too dry, we get parched. If it’s too wet, the fungi get after us. We are internal to the Earth. The artificial life-support contrivances we are so good at making are made from resources supplied entirely by the Earth.
The Earth, in turn—and everything on it—is internal to the universe. It may sound corny to say this, and the word “spiritual” doesn’t really mean anything to me, but to say we are one with the universe is actually to say something not only factual, but important to our ability to live worthwhile everyday lives. It’s a challenge to think that way when we’re focused on something like the cold blackness of space, or the baffling invisible monsters we call black holes, or supernovae—or all these other things we can’t even get within a million miles of and survive, even if we could space-travel. Thinking of these things highlights the distinction between us and them. The universe can thus seem like an alien, hostile, forbidding reality.
Yet, everything in us is the same stuff as everything in the rest of the universe, as far as we can tell. There is no “special human stuff” unique to us; just the way it’s put together. That last bit shouldn’t surprise us when we remember that no two snowflakes are alike—and how many trillions of those form and un-form and re-form in every cold place on Earth all the time?
We really are all part of the same universe of matter and energy (which themselves are no more distinct from each other than “mind” and “body”), and even though our lives as organized beings are short, the matter and energy we are using are as close to immortal as anything in this universe. When we cease to exist as beings, we are not destroyed. We are re-organized and re-used in other things. Maybe other beings. We are internal, in every way, to the universe. We can only understand ourselves as such.
Studying what I’ve studied over the years has helped sharpen my awareness of this, and it helps me feel (and that’s the right word) more connected to the universe, whether to what I can see out the window right now or to some image of a galaxy from the JWST that’s so old it doesn’t even exist any more. I know I’ve written about this experience more than once, and I’ll do it again because it was first-level formative. When I was looking at the clear images of the Crabtree Collection models at The Mariners Museum—in my head, not in real life; they’re so striking that they imprinted themselves there—I realized that the very presentation that makes them so memorable is profoundly misleading in an important sense.
For those who don’t know, this is a collection of watercraft models made by August and Winifred Crabtree and donated to the Museum. They are exquisite works. They’re in a dark gallery, and they’re mounted such that they appear to be suspended in air inside their clear cases, in a room that seems lined with black velvet, so that it’s completely light-absorbing. Each model is lit with a focused beam, not too bright, so that if the models were models of planets, the whole display could make a convincing facsimile of a solar system, if properly arranged.
On the one hand, the display draws the viewer’s attention powerfully and immediately. It compels the gaze to linger on each piece, compels the viewer to get closer, to examine the detail, to be held there by enough of a sense of wonder to be in no hurry to move on. That does the work justice, and allows it time to convey all the detailed information it has to convey.
On the other hand, the removing of every bit of context from the model limits, literally, what that model can teach us about what it represents. The model is, literally, floating in empty space. It’s presented as a discrete object, unconnected to “the environment.” It occurred to me pretty early in the process of contemplating a watercraft in this collection that, to learn what I needed to know, I’d have to move on from the Crabtree model. I’d have to find the context.
To understand a watercraft, I have to understand a lot of about the people who made it—why did they make it, and why did they make it this way? I have to understand the water it was used in. Was the water cold or warm? What creatures lived in it? What were the winds and currents like? What was the land like that surrounded it, if any? I also needed to understand a lot about the people who used it, and why; in the early-modern and modern worlds, a large proportion of watercraft were built by one group of people but used by another. What was their business? Trade or war? Both? Catching fish? Killing marine mammals?
No technology is a discrete object any more than any being is a discrete being. We, and everything we make, are embedded, inextricable, internal. It’s all the same stuff, organized a certain way for a limited time, and all part of a universe. Astrophysicists are working on what the universe is and if it has any limits, with the acceptance that that may ultimately be unknowable by us, just as a cell in the big toe can’t comprehend the entire human being (thanks, Dean Churchill). All of us, though, no matter what we do, would do well to open ourselves up to internalizing a deep sense of our own internal place, and that of everything else. It won’t happen immediately, because it requires moving beyond a well-entrenched inherited set of cultural assumptions, but it is key to a true understanding of reality—and, just as importantly, to a sense of peace with that reality. Not a sense of alienation, but a sense of being part of something so vast that we can’t comprehend its vastness. Maybe it’s a ship model in a dark room, or your cat on a windowsill, or a plant in a pot, or your baby—whatever it is, conduits into a more satisfying, and comforting, sense of connection to everything else are, naturally enough, all around us.
Image of the Crabtree Collection at the Mariners Museum:
https://images.app.goo.gl/4UHVwX5RLpXuQqh58