Gnosis Through Taxonomy … or Science Fictions

(What follows is originally from an email exchange with my friend & novelist John Crowley)

Gnosis Through Taxonomy … or Science Fictions

February 2020

John,

I’ve been meaning to thank you for the inscribed copies of your latest book collections (And Go Like This; short stories, and Reading Backwards; essays.) My own work and interests means I have varied stretches of time where all my reading is non-fiction — botany (both “general” and detailed taxonomical work), ecology, anthropology, archaeology, and history. There have been some periods where this has been my exclusive reading focus for years on end. Usually, however, I am seized by an almost visceral need to “balance” this out by immersing myself in fiction. Occasionally I juggle both. Currently I have been in a rarer state of floating between the two– being drawn to both and pondering their intersection or interpenetration. The arrival of Reading Backwards could not have been more timely. I’ve been enjoying it immensely. I’ve been reading it in a rather random/intuitive manner; starting with the last two entries first, next the prologue, then a random scattershot. Most recently I settled onto the beginning of section three (Norman Bel Geddes) and have been carried along towards where I began reading–at which point I’ll need to make use of the table of contents to ascertain the unread portions…
As always I find something familiar and comforting about your prose. There’s also a clarity of thought which is both refreshing and inspiring, especially after reading so many dry academic texts. I hope to one day have the space to write more. My biggest obstacle is a paucity of time for such endeavors (compounded by the seemingly endless cacophony of young girls and their imperial requests! The sudden lack of which can be just as confounding!)
Whenever I read something that touches me, a feel compelled to reciprocate in some manner. I’m not sure why this is, most folks seem to be content with being “consumers” of books. I always feel like it is some co-creative process that I should (though rarely do) take a more active role in. So let me attempt to share at least one small sapling of thought that germinated years ago and got well fertilized while reading some of your essays. I realize it is inevitably incomplete and I would need much more time to fully flesh it out. Yet I think (hope!) you can still make sense of it and will find some amusement in it.

In the piece on Madame Blavatsky you have a wonderful line where you write that Yeats’s:
“The trance principal of nature” might be a good name for the apparently hardwired human impulse to make and become enthralled in fictions.”
This got me musing about the degree to which this “hardwired human impulse”, arguably a religious impulse, is found in the sciences such as taxonomy.
I have an ongoing fascination with taxonomy. Not just plant taxonomy– but the whole human propensity to describe and classify the world– I find utterly bizarre yet alluring. Entrancing even.
I have “discovered” and helped describe through publication several new species of Andean succulent Echeveria in the past decade, I’ve had to key and identify hundreds of plants during my travels or years on as the seed I collected has grown into mature flowering specimens. I make use of these taxonomical systems all the time. Yet I have come to view taxonomy (at least plant taxonomy) as a “philosophical science.”
There are varied philosophical foundations to how one gathers and interprets data, to ones education and beliefs about the endless unfurling routes of evolutionary biology. What constitutes a Genus, a Species? At what moment in evolutionary time, in which exact generation, does a change from one species to new distinct species occur? Is this truly recognizable? Measurable? These are deep philosophical ponderings without absolute physical answers. The recent trend in taxonomy to use genetic mapping has not clarified this as greatly as some would like us to believe. Highly useful in some cases yet there are a surprising number of arbitrary ways knowledge of DNA is interpreted and then applied in classifying genera.
At times the whole affair can seem an absurd compulsion, like trying to describe and order water droplets in a river.
Ultimately our descriptions and ordering always fall short. The map is not the territory. They are a form of fiction (science fiction?) A highly useful fiction that is born from our enchantment with, and need to make sense of, Life (what to best call it? The Real? Nature- I find deeply problematic) At their best these fictions can be a tools that enable us to have more meaningful relations with Life in all its diverse exuberance. Yet many taxonomists are still caught up in the religious impulse of science. Believing in– and searching for– the monism of “Truth.” I found your brief explanation of medieval nominalists versus realists (in the Rosamond Purcell piece) as a useful example of a now subconscious philosophy that still strongly influences the workings of taxonomy. (J. Crowley writes – “Medieval nominalists were opposed to realists, who thought that organizing categories, types, concepts, had a real, not merely a notional, existence; the treeness that all trees share was as real a thing as any individual tree. The nominalists said that such categories were mere names, not realities, a human mental construct, a handy tool; every existent thing was unique in itself, and not just the emanation of some overarching logos.”)

To some of my colleagues what I’ve written would be a form of heresy. I’m sure I could find a train of thought to refute my own thinking here, but for now I’ll just sit with that awareness.
It is so easy for us to get entangled in our own complex constructs, in language itself. Part of why I find some occult and Gnostic systems so compelling is their predilection to recognize us as lost or entrapped within some fiction and the longing to transcend this, to return to our origins.
For myself, this has always been about the fictions we can’t help but impose upon our world through language, through dizzyingly complex architectures of thought and our capacity to also allow such compelling ephemera to disperse and be re-immersed into the flow and tumult of Life…
So what I am realizing while writing this is that, in a sense, I experience some gnosis through taxonomy; it is both an enthralling fiction and a doorway to escape that fiction and return to the arms of the utterly strange yet familiar living world of which I am…
I think this is part of why I’ve found your Aegypt tetrology so deeply affecting; the long journey it charts from the lofty heights of occult enthrallment through to the even more wondrous stars, stones and roses of the quotidian.

saludos,
Ben

Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2020 19:39:02 -0500
From: john crowley To: Ben Kamm

Ben —

Thank you for this perspicuous and actually quite moving piece. I certainly hope you find time for writing — you certainly have the power. Your thoughts in the piece align with mine in some ways: at 77 I can sometimes feel that the world around is somehow insubstantial, even unreal (that it is losing substance in fact is a different feeling). I have been meditating in the last couple of years and (as promised) have had some insights delivered I would not have acquired in other ways — a few days ago as I was remembering some incident in my past, it was made clear to me that the past doesn’t exist. Sort of absurd to say, since it lies all around us, but I think you might know what I mean. The insights granted you in the work you do are like those given me in my work: dealing with matters that have a real and solid yet at the same time so tenuous that they border on the imaginary. It can be lovely sometimes to experience this.

Love to you and the women folk —

John Crowley