My OperaGENIUS LOCI
Tuesday, February 20, 2007 12:41:29 AM
Perhaps I am not a very cosmopolite person, but some days ago I was deeply impressed by the image of river Kelvin in a moment of increased turbulent flow. If I was from a city by a river, or by the sea, it would perhaps not impress me as much as it did, but the experience of that image is pervaded by local flavor, which may be, for somebody from the tropic, something similar to a lack of flavor.River Kelvin, going through the middle of Kelvingrove park, is some 10 meters wide, and its waters look green, more because of vegetal residues than by the growth of Spirogyra algae that use to dye tropical waters when the flow is slow enough to allow for a good and placid exposition to sun light.
This bulk of slightly green water goes below the bridge at some 10m/s in a rather vigorous and turbulent flow, with the noise as if there were big animals splashing about. I was mesmerized for a moment (I do not know how long) looking at small mountains appearing and disappearing, slowly but with an intimidating strength, sometimes topped by a little comb that in a certain moment went off by a droplets explosion.
It was really an hypnotic spectacle, but not monotonous. The waves shaped like mountain chains fixed themselves again and again in a very ordered way, that in few seconds gave rise to a completely different pattern. And in the middle of them, as if it were a diver that goes vigorously out of the water, a bundle of bubbles forced their way strongly to the surface, nobody knows where from.
When I was finally able to get rid of the spell of the turbulent water, I continued my walk, and suprised myself thinking of how natural it is to attribute a conscious cause to the forces of nature; be them some kind of fairy, the "genius loci" or the guardian spirits, that practically every culture called by us as primitive has used to explain the nature. But my body, mi wholeness, feels as if he had shaked hands with the spirit of the place.
After studying chemistry and physics in a reasonably exhaustive way, I know that what I saw in the river can be reproduced by parts in the lab, be modelled in a computer, to be put apart and join again at will, but in some way, all that knowledge does not get even near to what the nature of the encounter with the "spirit of the place" that is only possible when one stops thinking. Maybe, in the same way that all the physiology or anatomy one can learn, cannot undo the be bewitching of certain stares.
On my way home, I walked by some trees that regardless of the absence of foliage, exerted enough resistance to the last gale and were deprived of big branches or cracked their trunks. He who is not fried enough to greet the spirit of a place, could be to accept the spirit in a tree. Trees are not endorsed with a nervous system, but are already an organism with very complex chemical and physical processes that are perfectly well integrated, and allow us to delineate the precise bounds of the tree's organism. The life of trees has a time scale that is very diffrent from that of humans, and the tree's reactions towards stimuli are to slow to be witnessed for a human, unless he undertakes a certain effort to behold it. However, I have yet another experience that led me to think in something as a "spirit" of the plants. In a yagé (ayahuasca) ceremony, I experienced a quieting of my mind that seemed to open the access to slower time scales, and the oblivious absence of my habitual attention to percive allowed me to see, without any startle, a plant-like structure that extended beyound a shrub, and got entangled like a cocoon around me, as if embracing and protecting me. My knowledge of neurochemistry is not exhaustive enough to describe the exact way DMT and other componets of ayahuasca altered the processing of the information gathered by the senses, but I strongly suspect that such an explanation is totally possible. But in spite of that, I do not feel the slightest inclination to neglect the subjective experience of the meeting with the shrub.
