On an Escarpment Above the St. Croix River (The Ear)

Various species of birds twitter

and whistle, telling something or

other to each other of which

I am mostly ignorant. But

listening in is important because 

it confirms one realization—

communication is not exclusively human.

Birds do it. Trees do it.

Biologists have shown that trees

communicate through the roots.

Communication is everywhere on this planet

even though humans have pretended

for so long that it is their exclusive domain.

Animals are not dumb. Neither are plants.

And I doubt the dirt beneath

my feet is dumb, either.

What's unusual in this world isn't life,

but inertness. Does this concept point

to anything real? Even the air

is alive with microbes. That is clear.

But is the air alive with itself?

Could those molecules—oxygen, hydrogen, 

water, and so on—somehow be

communicating, too? It may seem

mentally imbalanced to think so,

but just a few decades ago 

people who thought trees communicated

were considered a little loo-loo.

Anthropocentrism may have had its day,

but only after exacting extreme

damage on the larger plants and animals

and most Indigenous peoples across

the planet. What is animism?

To me, it refers to someone 

who believes spirit inheres in material

things. Personally, I can't believe

in spirits, and this has, no doubt, to 

do with the accidents of my place and time

of birth. Most humans through history

have believed in spirits, such as

the Judeo-Christian God. So it's normal.

But I can't. Rather, I'm becoming more and more

convinced that something like meanings

subsists in matter, that matter,

of a sort, talks to itself in its way.

First, some humans thought communication

was their special province.

Then they thought meaning

was their special province.

Perhaps neither is. Don't trees communicate

something akin to meaning, thereby

creating it? And if trees do it,

why not the dirt, the air, the light?

What is the moon saying to itself

within itself? I doubt it's actually

talking to us humans: there's no reason

to think we would be central

to its concerns. But we can overhear,

as we overhear birds and their meanings.

And that meaning comes as a sort

of incomprehensible song. Is everything

some sort of complex, multifarious chorus,

where everything sings, with no

conductor, with no center, a kind

of vast, evolving improvisation

with nooks and crannies, eddies and wonders?

If so, humans cannot come close

to hurting the vastness of meanings. We can only hurt

those meanings associated with the

larger plants and animals, such as ourselves.

Things go on perfectly well

without us—meanings will go on

generating forever, if time even makes

sense anymore in such a context.

I am high above the St. Croix River

but back, so I cannot see the water.

Some bird makes a strange gurgling sound

I have never heard before.

Some human visitors to the park

I sit in speak in a language

I don't understand. Human music

is a pale substitute for the

ongoing improvisation about me

and within me. Right now, everything

seems to be singing—the dirt, the

asphalt, my browning apple core—

and the effect is a little overwhelming,

yes, but mostly calming. Am I

making all this up? Am I

projecting my hope for a living

universe upon the inert face of

it all? Perhaps. But to believe

this conventional view would be to doubt

my own ears. I don't want

to do that. I like my ears.

I mean to treat them with respect.

What is this ear that hears

the musical murmurs, these beckonings

toward a home I have always had

but never, until recently, noticed?

It is not one of the ears attached to either side

of my head. It is not even a human ear.

It is outside me, but not exactly,

because it is inside me, too.

It hears everywhere and, because it is everywhere,

it is nowhere, too. It hears without hearing

because it hears. This is the ear

that is not an ear because it is

an ear, subsisting both inside and outside

because there is no inside to this hearing

and no outside, either. This is the ear

from nowhere, hearing everything murmur a song.

Is this projection? Perhaps.

But most humans throughout history

have seemed to sense what I claim

to hear. It is the modern West

that's weird, in its assumption of inertness,

it's sense that most of reality is ultimately

dead, and available for processing.