Peat

perfuming the paradox of cyclic time

Originally posted 6 Nov 2020, slightly updated today

As part of my research for PocaHauntUs, I read F. David Peat’s book Blackfoot Physics. And I loved it. It felt like coming home for a few reasons. He was about my father’s age, maybe a bit older, and a man with a mind for maths and physics, like my father who taught both. The difference between my father and Peat though, in degrees of mind, is that Peat was a colleague of the more-widely recognized physicist, David Bohm.

Peat said that Bohm felt relieved and affirmed in later years when he met Algonquin elders and learned that the Algonquin languages are verb-based. From the vantage point of our noun-based Western language paradigms we struggle to even conceive of how this would work. Just as we struggle to wrap our measly minds around quantum physics - which was why Bohm was relieved to meet these elders. Their language is a process, or verb-based, one. What he was trying to convey in quantum physics, which is more a wave-based science than a particle-based one, required the mind (and therefore the language) to see the world as such.

They say if you think you get quantum physics, you’re nowhere near. Kinda like Zen.

Kind of like Arrival (one of my all-time favorite films) and the short story behind it -

how the language operates, is the culture…

Another reason reading Blackfoot Physics felt familiar and comforting to me was that I felt I was reading my own language-ing, without realizing that prior to that moment of mirrored recognition I felt I had been translating with most everything else. Rarely have I had a sense of my own way of thinking reflected back for and to me. Because of this, my main comfort in communications has been in writing and studying.

The familial sense was there - of being re-cognize-d - and, also, it turns out we actually share a birthday, though a few decades apart. So maybe something in the patterning of our beings is similiar, however you want to frame or language that patterning, based on your own generally-unseen cultural and paradigmatic patternings, as reflected in your “first” language.

Anyway, it felt like how I think was affirmed by reading him.

Not that I’ve lived his world and had his thoughts, but something about how he sees, and groups, and relays his perceptions felt familiar to me. And maybe again, that word familiar indicates the related-ness I took comfort in. Maybe I can feel this difference, that I see reflected back to me through his writings and being (I got to meet him at his home in Pari, Italy!), as the mind that—for whatever reason—grapples with bridging divides. Seeing wider patterns, across “disciplines”.

So all that to say I trust him. I feel like “I” make more sense, reading him.

Last night he came into my awareness. Nothing in particular at first - I was simply aware that he exist/s/ed. And it occurred to me to take down his book. Initially I recalled the purple one, the Pari dialogues, but it was Blackfoot Physics that felt right to locate. And I opened to this:

“The moment of time of the ceremony is like a stone thrown into a still pond that creates a ripple that will spread out ever wider. And so the ripples of the ceremony reach into the distant future and call back into the past. They reach us in our “now” and call us to prepare and move forward to meet the ceremony. In the paradox of cyclic time this moment did not exist until the ceremony began, but once it had been created it made its influence felt within the cycles of time that stretch back to the days, weeks, and years that precede the ceremony.”

p. 204 Blackfoot Physics, “Time, Number, and the Mayans”

In that exact moment he came to mind I hadn’t been asking whether to commit to a very intensive ceremony, but it had certainly been evident all around of late, as a question to be answered. Whether or not to commit myself again, and so soon, to the rigor of purification and devotion requires a commitment for now, coming up in a few months, and also for years to come.

Pre-commitment waffling. Once I’m in I’m in, but ya gotta let me waffle a while. These days there’s not much waffle room.

Even more directly and immediately it had come up in conversation just an hour or so before. Would I dance?

There’s an inevitability. That’s the sense I get from Peat’s passage, and from the ceremonies themselves. Or like a fellow dancer said, “aren’t we just marionettes?” The ceremony has happened, somewhere/sometime in space/time continuums, even though we as semi-conscious beings herenow haven’t yet “experienced” it.

We just haven’t arrived yet, but the dance is on for sure.

I feel so often like I don’t fit into any of the camps wholly. Unless it’s the camp of singular fringe-ites. The scout, the hermit, the whore, the scarred, the ostracized. There’s all sorts of outliers, with their lone-ness in common. Combine that sense of being able to, to some extent, slide into any camp, yet only feeling fully free solo - combine that with a pattern-seeking mind that hangs out in physics labs and you have a meta-patterner I guess.

How I feel is more verb-based. Feeling flow is more how I go. Yet language, which I love, is noun-based in the world I was raised in.

Translating my experiences into conversation becomes an on-going attempt to squash full bouncy flesh into sharply delineated cracks. Things get damaged along the way.

Only recourse I’ve found is to learn both languages and attempt, with my very existence, to marry them.

In Ireland, a country I visited more than any other, and love for its fast paced chatterings, peat was a thing. It was burned to give a smokey flavor to the water of life. Laphraiog. The acidic nature of the peat bogs also preserved sunken treasure for generations beyond.

Thank you F. David Peat, for grasping me earnestly by my front paws and nearly dragging me down the hall of your home to show me a small piece of your world, your ways of relating.

Thank you for showing me that not-fitting has a place too.

May the rich, flagrant, and far-seeing ways you’ve been, continue to bear forth treasure for the generations beyond.