SNIP!
“Well, strictly speaking, from an evolutionary perspective, our only purpose in life is reproduction. Ok, you’ll feel a slight tug here. Three, two, *snip*”
So said the guy who did my vasectomy when I was 28. I never wanted babies. They get in the way of sex in the kitchen. I also knew that given my life goals and the instability that being in business meant while I was growing up, that I’d never be able to give a child what it deserved. Plus there was the whole population explosion, and what that means for the ecosphere.
But certainly there is more than just making copies of ourselves, right? Don’t some of the things we do, serve an evolutionary purpose outside reproduction? A few sentences in a short essay in Gary Snyder’s “Turtle Island” changed my life. Under “Our Own Heads” he said “Love, Love-Making, a man and a woman together, seen as the vehicle of mutual realization, where the creation of new selves and a new world of being is as important as reproducing our kind.” Making love, in my experience is about connection. Social cohesion, protection of the vulnerable ones we love, the joy in staying alive for more joy, and thus more chances for reproduction. That too serves an evolutionary purpose.
“Life teaches life
From Gaia Consort’s “Evolve” (c) 2004, by Christopher Bingham
We are a glance in a great eye watching
Life teaches life
Through every mind the seed is passing…”
Writing IS Magic
Once the evolutionary lens has you, it is very hard to view the objective universe in any other way. Evidence has a way of holding out against wishful thinking. We are the most proficient of all mammals in the use of tools, but as best as I can tell, we are far more advanced at using ideas. And writing, is a technology that allows the communication of those ideas is, as Asimov so eloquently put it, is about as “sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic” as one can get. But most of us take it for granted. Written language requires “merely” rudimentary training and some version of pointy sticks and clay or charcoal on bark. Fire a piece of clay, or carve a stone, and with the right training, any creature that has the brain, ears, eyes, and can speak, can decipher a recipe or a story, or a poem or an entire worldview, that is thousands of years away in time.
The gods / goddesses that most modern Pagans, (and any religious believer) invoke are ideas that people wrote about hundreds, often thousands of years ago. Those are the ones we know about. It’s reasonable to guess that there may have been many more, before we discovered writing.
The body makes the “magic” possible.
“Deep in the seed that moves between us
From Gaia Consort’s “Evolve” (c) 2004, by Christopher Bingham
The shape of the meaning as cells combine
The weave of the dream before we see it
Leaves trace elements of your hand in mine…”
So there is the great body of information in our genes, and a great body of work in our minds. Our bodies adapt over eons but our minds adapt in the moment. 63 years of experience, lead me to believe that feeding that body of knowledge “is as important as reproducing our kind.” It’s a lovely paradox that our experience of objective reality depends on our subjective imagination to understand the experience. And we could not understand the subjective experience without out objectively existing brains. The body makes all our thoughts possible.
“I hear the voice of the Dreaming
From Gaia Consort’s “The Green” (c) 2007, by Christopher Bingham
I feel the pulse of the stone
And ALL – shining and alive through the Green…”
“If I could say it I would not have to dance it.” – Isadora Duncan
Which gets me to music. Music conveys emotions in ways that spoken words do not get across, but is ultimately a language. I just spent a glorious 5 minutes listening to a harpist play a piece that was written around 325 years ago, probably exactly as Bach would have intended it to sound, except on harp.
I can only imagine he would have been delighted to hear how the harp actually exposed the intricate eloquence of his thinking in ways the big, rumbly church organs actually hide.
What absolute joy to be able to be touched by the mind of another human centuries before our birth! One big reason that keeps me making and writing music, is that maybe some century after my death, some other human will find some value in conveying the ideas in *my* music – that it will give them some sense of joy and awe and wonder at our place in the universe.
“I hear the voice of the Dreaming
From Gaia Consort’s “The Green” (c) 2007, by Christopher Bingham
I feel the pulse of the stone
And ALL – shining and alive through the Green…”
Back to co-evolution
“Dig in where you are
From Bone Poets Orchestra’s “Digging In” copyright 2014, Christopher Bingham
Let your tale be heard
Put your boots on, dip your hands in
Speak the shining word…”
In my early life, I made a choice that the best use of my life to our co-evolutionary experience would be writing and making music. I hope I’ve added something worthwhile, or least something that opens people up to the awe that I experience living on this great green earth, with these delicate creatures, floating in an unfathomably huge universe.
Whatever face you use to describe it – the myriad gods and goddesses of the ancient human experience, folk music from the British Isles, or Elvis singing “I can’t help falling in love with you” – I hope your lives are filled with joy and awe, and you write about it. Teach your kids how to do it. We’re all co-evolving together.
New songs coming this year:
- “Hang Up Your Body” – Feb 2024
- “Surfacing” March 2024
- “Bigger Than Us”‘ later in 2024
Bounce into https://www.gaiaconsort.com to check whats up! Join the e-mail list for in frequent updates about Gaia Consort, Bone Poets Orchestra, and Christopher Bingham.
For more information about Christopher Bingham, including his collected articles here on Pagan Song, his bio, and links to his Bone Poets Orchestra and Gaia Consort sites on the web, check out Chris’s page on Pagan Song.
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