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Spirit
By Allen Wheelis
from On Not Knowing How to Live
Harper and Row 1975


We come into being as a slight thickening at the end of a long thread.
Cells proliferate, become an excrescence, assume the shape of a man.
The end of the thread now lies buried within, shielded, inviolate. Our task
is to bear it forward, pass it on. We flourish for a moment, achieve a bit
of singing and dancing, a few memories we would carve in stone, then
we wither, twist out of shape. The end of the thread lies now in our
children, extends back through us, unbroken, unfathomably into the past.
Numberless thickenings have appeared on it, have flourished and have
fallen away as we now fall away. Nothing remains but the germ-line. What
changes to produce new structures as life evolves is not the momentary
excrescence but the hereditary arrangements within the thread.

We are carriers of spirit. We know not how nor why nor where. On
our shoulders, in our eyes, in anguished hands through unclear realm,
into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation, we bear
its full weight. Depends it on us utterly, yet we know it not. We inch it
forward with each beat of heart, give to it the work of hand, of mind. We
falter, pass it on to our children, lay out our bones, fall away, are lost,
forgotten. Spirit passes on, enlarged, enriched, more strange, complex.
We are being used. Should not we know in whose service? To whom,
to what, give we unwitting loyalty? What is this quest? Beyond that which
we have what could we want? What is spirit?
A river or a rock, writes Jacques Monod, "we know, or believe, to
have been molded by the free play of physical forces to which we cannot
attribute any design, any 'project' or purpose. Not, that is, if we accept
the basic premise of the scientific method, to wit, that nature is objective
and not projective. "

That basic premise carries a powerful appeal. For we remember a
time, no more than a few generations ago, when the opposite seemed
manifest, when the rock wanted to fall, the river to sing or to rage. Willful
spirits roved the universe, used nature with whim. And we know what
gains in understanding and in control have come to us from the adoption
of a point of view which holds that natural objects and events are without
goal or intention. The rock doesn't want anything, the volcano pursues
no purpose, river quests not the sea, wind seeks no destination.

But there is another view. The animism of the primitive is not the
only alternative to scientific objectivity. This objectivity may be valid for
the time spans in which we are accustomed to reckon, yet untrue for spans
of enormously greater duration. The proposition that light travels in a
straight line, unaffected by adjacent masses, serves us well in surveying
our farm, yet makes for error in the mapping of distant galaxies. Likewise,
the proposition that nature, what is just "out there," is without purpose,
serves us well as we deal with nature in days or years or lifetimes, yet may
mislead us on the plains of eternity.


Spirit rises, matter falls. Spirit reaches like a flame, a leap of dancer.
Out of the void it creates form like a god, is god. Spirit was from the start,
though even that beginning may have been an ending of some earlier
start. If we look back far enough we arrive at a primal mist wherein spirit
is but a restlessness of atoms, a trembling of something there that will not
stay in stillness and in cold.

Matter would have the universe a uniform dispersion, motionless,
complete. Spirit would have an earth, a heaven and a hell, whirl and
conflict, an incandescent sun to drive away the dark, to illumine good and
evil, would have thought, memory, desire, would build a stairway of forms
increasing in complexity, inclusiveness, to a heaven ever receding above,
changing always in configuration, becoming when reached but the way
to more distant heavens, the last ... but there is no last, for spirit
tends upward without end, wanders, spirals, dips, but tends ever up-
ward, ruthlessly using lower forms to create higher forms, moving
toward ever greater inwardness, consciousness, spontaneity, to an ever
greater freedom.

Particles become animate. Spirit leaps aside from matter which tugs
forever to pull it down, to make it still. Minute creatures writhe in warm
oceans. Ever more complex become the tiny forms which bear for a
moment a questing spirit. They come together, touch; spirit is beginning
to create love. They touch, something passes. They die, die, die, end-
lessly. Who shall know the spawning in the rivers of our past? Who shall
count the waltzing grunion on the shores of ancient seas? Who shall hear
the unheard poundings of that surf? Who will mourn the rabbits of the
plains, the furry tides of lemmings? They die, die, die, but have touched,
and something passes. Spirit leaps away, creates new bodies, endlessly,
ever more complex vessels to bear spirit forward, pass it on enlarged to
those who follow.

Virus becomes bacteria, becomes algae, becomes fern. Thrust of
spirit cracks stone, drives up the Douglas fir. Amoeba reaches out soft
blunt arms in ceaseless motion to find the world, to know it better, to
bring it in, growing larger, questing further, ever more capacious of
spirit. Anemone becomes squid, becomes fish; wiggling becomes swim-
ming, becomes crawling; fish becomes slug, becomes lizard; crawling
becomes walking, becomes running, becomes flying. Living things
reach out to each other, spirit leaps between. Tropism becomes scent,
becomes fascination, becomes lust, becomes love. Lizard to fox to mon-
key to man, in a look, in a word, we come together, touch, die, serve
spirit without knowing, carry it forward, pass it on. Ever more winged
this spirit, ever greater its leaps. We love someone far away, someone
who died long ago.

* * *

"Man is the vessel of the Spirit," writes Erich Heller; ". .. Spirit is the
voyager who, passing through the land of man, bids the human soul to
follow it to the Spirit's purely spiritual destination."

Viewed closely, the path of spirit is seen to meander, is a glisten of
snail's way in night forest; but from a height minor turnings merge into
steadiness of course. Man has reached a ledge from which to look back.
For thousands of years the view is clear, and beyond, though a haze, for
thousands more, we still see quite a bit. The horizon is millions of years
behind us. Beyond the vagrant turnings of our last march stretches
a shining path across that vast expanse running straight. Man did not
begin it nor will he end it, but makes it now, finds the passes, cuts the
channels. Whose way is it we so further? Not man's; for there's our first
footprint. Not life's; for there's still the path when life was not yet.

Spirit is the traveler, passes now through the realm of man. We did
not create spirit, do not possess it, cannot define it, are but the bearers.
We take it up from unmourned and forgotten forms, carry it through our
span, will pass it on, enlarged or diminished, to those who follow. Spirit
is the voyager, man is the vessel.

Spirit creates and spirit destroys. Creation without destruction is not
possible; destruction without creation feeds on past creation, reduces
form to matter, tends toward stillness. Spirit creates more than it destroys
(though not in every season, nor even every age, hence those meander-
ings, those turnings back, wherein the longing of matter for stillness
triumphs in destruction) and this preponderance of creation makes for
that overall steadiness of course.

From primal mist of matter to spiraled galaxies and clockwork solar
systems, from molten rock to an earth of air and land and water, from
heaviness to lightness to life, sensation to perception, memory to con-
sciousness-man now holds a mirror, spirit sees itself. Within the river
currents turn back, eddies whirl. The river itself falters, disappears,
emerges, moves on. The general course is the growth of form, increasing
awareness, matter to mind to consciousness. The harmony of man and
nature is to be found in continuing this journey along its ancient course
toward greater freedom and awareness.


Excerpt from
On Not Knowing How to Live
Harper and Row 1975

Gratefully scanned from
THE MIND'S EYE I Fantasies and Refelctions on Self and Soul
by Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett
1981 Basic Books

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