After the Apex

In the bright waning days: sunlight, cedar shingles, and a Finnish epic poem.

As July ends, we are on the other side of the sun’s apex in the northern sky, about a month after the solstice, in the bright but waning days of summer. The light over the past few weeks has been paler, with an almost bleached quality that reminds me of the seashore. Even on clear, hot days, the sky has more white in it, the blue is more muted, than in the days closer to the solstice. A breeze in the forest seems to bring a message of transience, reminding me that life only comes from death; but I don’t dwell on this message, though I acknowledge it, because something inward is still burning brightly from the sun’s apex, like a log, past the combustion stage, still licked by vigorous flames.

* * *

Perhaps because I myself left academia (and don’t regret it), I am drawn to people who write and think outside its borders. One of these is Jeremy Naydler. By avocation a philosopher, in the broadest sense of that word, Naydler earns his daily bread as a gardener. I imagine that spending much time in the garden grants him some perspective on our tech-obsessed culture, which he has written about in two books, In the Shadow of the Machine and The Struggle for a Human Future. In the latter volume (the more recent of the two) Naydler addresses the damaging effects that digital technologies continue to have upon the human race. While many authors have done the same, Naydler’s approach to the topic is particularly illuminating. Critical appraisals of technology in our time tend to investigate the effect of technology on the brain as a physico-chemical organ. Naydler, in contrast, views it in the context of the whole human — body, soul, and spirit.

The book offers a sobering peek into a dark future, one that humanity is heading toward at frightening speed. Yet there is hope; in fact, resisting that possible future depends on hope. At the end of the book, Naydler addresses the pressing question of how we ought to respond to the anti-human impulses embodied in digital technology. While he makes an argument for what Paul Kingsnorth calls tech ascesis — stating in an interview that he himself will never own a smartphone — he goes beyond mere avoidance. He gives two suggestions as to how we can cultivate a truly human spirit in ourselves, a counter-force to the controlling powers of technology. The suggestions are perhaps surprising, and quite profound; and although it’s been several years since I read the book, they still live with me as challenges.

The first is to practice the arts — not as a commercial enterprise but as an exercise in soulcraft. In moments of creativity, freed from utilitarian concerns, we uncouple our souls from the calculating and consumeristic forces of technology. Painting, music, poetry, sculpture — and one could add some of the more practical arts as well, such as breadbaking, weaving, stonemasonry, etc. — return us to ourselves as homines fabri, “making humans.” Immersed in online adventures, our souls are set adrift from our bodies, floating away on an endless tide of clicks; and it is often only our fingers tapping on the keyboard that keep us from complete disembodiment. In practicing an art or manual skill, we reconnect the soul to the body, sewing back those threads that came undone during our time online.

Engaged in the creation of beauty through the practice of the arts, we bring into the material world a slice of transcendence. In that moment, our body-soul connection becomes a mediator between the material world as a whole and the spiritual realm of the transcendentals, the generating source of material form. We find ourselves again as creatures possessed of both spiritual and material aspects. Instead of leaky buckets, dispersing our attention in a thousand worthless pursuits in a disembodied limbo state, we become lightning rods for spiritual impulses, conducting heaven down to earth.

Naydler’s second suggestion is one that I have taken up more and more of late: giving attention to sunlight. Although I have emphasized our homesteading activities in these short dispatches from the Vermont woods, I provide for our family’s needs by working an online job that keeps me glued to a screen for most of the workday. Opening the laptop, I think of myself as entering Plato’s cave. The light behind my screen, casting the images of online life before my eyes, is the fire in Plato’s allegory, casting the shadows of things before the prisoners chained there. While I hope to remember who I am as I descend into the cave, I usually forget after only a few minutes, drinking in my social media feed like the waters of Lethe.

Of course. when we live among online images, we are one remove from the process Plato depicts in his allegory. He would have us turn our gaze from the enchantment of visible things to the invisible realities that are their source, from outward to inward. But those of us entranced by online images must first turn our gaze from these shape-shifting chimeras — analogous to images seen in a mirror or reflected in a pool in Plato’s allegory — to the natural world, regaining a right perspective on material reality before we can turn to spiritual or ideal realities. For Plato, the visible sun is an image of the transcendent Good, source of all being. The sun stands in relation to the earth as God stands in relation to all creation. The first step, therefore, in turning back toward ultimate reality is to begin giving attention to this visible symbol of the Good.

Naydler asks his reader to recover a relationship to sunlight, a relationship that our human ancestors had instinctively. Our ancestors depended on the sun’s localized life-giving power for the food that fed them and the fuel that warmed them in the depths of winter. The theme of light animates all the great religious feast days of the year, both pagan and Christian, and the timing of the feasts on key solar days reveals that the material and the spiritual were not separate realities to our ancestors. As I have said before in these pages, the story of the earth’s year and the story of Christ are two aspects of the same reality: that life comes from death. The timing of the ancient feasts — Christian, pagan, and Jewish — whisper this story to us if we listen closely enough. How many of us, in contrast to our ancestors, barely give the sun a second thought, while shuffling from one air conditioned, windowless building to another? If we do happen to go out in the sun, we cover ourselves from head to foot with synthetic clothing and chemical-laden sunscreen, seeing the sun as an enemy to be feared rather than a source of life and health.

Naydler suggests some practices that can bring us back into relationship with sunlight. For example, we can simply focus our awareness on the quality of light at a particular moment of the day. Where do the shadows fall? What is illuminated at this moment and what is in shadow? Is the light bright and clear, or pale and wan? Do shadows stand out sharply against the edge of light, or does light fade into shadow, muted by clouds? How does the landscape appear to us at this moment, due to the angle and quality of sunlight?

As we begin to be aware of sunlight, we can hold those images in our minds, gathered in moments of attention while the sun completes its arc across the sky, and begin to notice changes throughout the day. How does the landscape change under the shifting angle of sunlight? We can broaden this to the sun’s yearly course — for those of us in the northern hemisphere, beginning with the sharply angled light in the dark days after the winter solstice, an angle that grows wider and wider as the sun climbs north across the horizon, reaching its apex at the summer solstice.

The attending to sunlight’s quality that Naydler recommends is deep soul-work. We are trained by our culture’s materialistic scientism to see natural phenomena exclusively in quantitative terms. Attending to quality brings the world back to us as phenomenon, which means, literally, “that which shines forth.”

In all of this, I am reminded of my favorite quote about technology, from Stephen Talbott’s marvelous essay “The Deceiving Virtues of Technology”: “technology is our hope if we can accept it as our enemy, but as our friend, it will destroy us.” In other words, rather than wishing technology away, or immersing ourselves in it while forgetting our nature, we can see it as a challenge, requiring us to return to our authentic humanity. Like a weed that thrives in land denuded of intentional cultivation, technology has sprung up in places where we have allowed our souls to grow barren. The cure, therefore, is not to blame the weed, but to attend to the conditions that allowed it to flourish. I’m grateful to Naydler for providing some practical suggestions for how to accomplish this.

* * *

In my last dispatch, I mentioned our plans to finish the roof of our cabin with cedar shingles. The process was easier and quicker than I thought it would be, and I’m very happy with the result. I love the variation in texture and color of the shingles; being split rather than sawn, when the sun shines, they reflect the light in a lovely way.

Rain brings out the cedar’s colors: deep reds, browns, and ochres. Added to this beauty is the satisfaction of knowing that the interior of the cabin will stay dry, no matter how much rain falls.

* * *

On the bedside shelf:

Some books I read very slowly, some I devour. In the slow category is the Finnish epic Kalevala, in the nineteenth-century translation by Kirby. It is called an epic, but the Kalevala does not have the same narrative tightness as the Homeric tales, being a somewhat loose collection of didactic and adventurous songs connected by some key characters. It was stiched together by polymath Elias Lönnrot in the nineteenth century from folk tales collected in the Finnish and Estonian countryside. Kirby replicates the meter of the Finnish original, and he does so relentlessly. Unlike Iambic pentameter verse, which English speakers find very natural to our rhythms and intonations of speech, Kirby uses trochaic tetrameter verse, which emphasizes the first beat of every two-syllable foot:

I am driven by my longing,
And my understanding urges
That I should commence my singing,
And begin my recitation.
I will sing the people’s legends,
And the ballads of the nation.
To my mouth the words are flowing,
And the words are gently falling,
Quickly as my tongue can shape them,
And beneath my teeth emerging.

While some readers would likely find this monotonous, I find it mesmerizing. If thje rhythm sounds familiar, this is because the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow borrowed it for his long narrative poem Hiawatha:

Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations
As of thunder in the mountains?

Like Longfellow’s poem, the Kalevala breathes the odour of northern forests, thick with pine, spruce, and birch. I’ve long been an appreciator of the southern, sun-lit myths and stories of the Greco-Latin world. With the Kalevala, I’m attempting to branch out into an understanding of what C.S. Lewis called “northernness,” that is, tales that transpire the crisp, invigorating air of the boreal world.