The Field of Beans and the Limits of Perception
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Breakfast in the Ruins, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
Aaarrgghhh… who forgot to turn off the cell phone alarm for weekdays? On holiday this week, and no need to get out of bed at 6:00 a.m. on Korean Children’s Day… when will I learn???
Slouching into the big room in my new apartment – the one with the computer and the books and other shit all over the floor because I need to buy some new furniture (to replace all the mouldy stuff I left behind in Daegu) – as I checked the mails and messages from the previous night, up popped a link at the “Lunar Barbecue” group page (thank you to Pedro Ribeiro for that) to the following YT vid about Terence McKenna called “Aliens and Archetypes” (from the “Thinking Allowed” TV series, dated 1990)… but what follows is really only tangential to his topic and a brief statement of a thought or two, being the result merely of my reaction to one of his remarks therein.
It has to be admitted that Mr. McKenna always had something very interesting to say about so many things, and whilst I was watching this I caught his brief remarks about communication within and with nature, which made me think: how is it that we ceased being able to do so? Could it be that what we have laughingly called “education” for so long is actually the inculcation of prejudices which make such communication (or even the sensibility thereof) impossible, simply by denying the possibility of such things, and therefore dulling our possible perception of them?
There have been, over the last few years, and especially recently, a flurry of items about how plants communicate via both the air and the soil coming through from various sources; this seems to be an active area of research. It makes me wonder what people will end up eating in the future, as it slowly dawns on everyone that plants are demonstrably sentient, like animals. Some say that eating meat is murder (although some of us just call it “food”), so what does that make eating fruits (often the reproductive organs of plants) and vegetables (their flowers or other storage organs)?
Of course, we would then go on to put on our biologist’s hat (well, I would, at any rate) and ask: “Well, if raising meat in broiler houses and the like is considered bad because it turns animals into products in an unnatural environment and is inhumane, then what are we to make of (say) a broad field of wheat, or a rice padi?” – if battery farms are unethical, then what can we say about a field of beans?
For a long time, I have been thinking that each grain of wheat or rice, each bean in the pod, is a life which has the potential to grow; its nutritional value lies precisely in the fact that it is one of the plant’s reproductive structures, in which energy and nutrients have been invested for the future survival of the species, just the same as (for example) a hen’s egg. The difference, however, is that parthenogenesis in a hen’s egg is a relatively rare event (although it does happen sometimes) and hence is rarely encountered in an egg cup or frying pan because, of course, there is no requirement to fertilise the egg before it becomes useful; its nutrient value for the human consumer would be wasted if the egg started to develop into a chick before delivery [1]. In the case of plant seeds, these would not exist without fertilisation, so we have a situation in which – unlike tubers, roots or even hens’ eggs – it is actually necessary to engender new life in order to reap the nutritional benefits of the plants’ labours, a fact to which we turn an eternally and conveniently blind eye.
Perhaps the tragedy of human existence – in the correct and original meaning and intention of the Greek term tragoidea (“goat song”, of a great person brought low by fate) is that humanity has become thoroughly enmeshed in a lifestyle where it exists purely as a result of squandering both itself and the world which supports it; yet being conscious of the full truth of its existence would cause impossible levels of angst at the thought of eating anything, and so its senses have to be dulled in order to make that existence bearable. Thus, it slowly destroys everything, including itself. It is doubly tragic that this exists alongside a patently untruthful inculcation about the past of humanity, which is used to keep us in a psychotic state and which allows us to be controlled more easily.
However, there are times when we need to be reminded of these things, even if only in passing, as here with the much-missed Mr. McKenna, as well as, perhaps, a nod to Aristotle in being able to express our psychological maturity by considering topics which we might otherwise find unpalatable [2], and perhaps, also, to reflect upon what level of difficulty we might have in actually communicating with aliens when our minds have already been so prejudiced against it on our own world. We have at least been fortunate to have occasional bright lights like Terence McKenna to illuminate our darkness with flashes of insight.
Notes:
[1] Unless you like to eat a balut, of course: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(food)
[2] “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”: see https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/f1/5f/48f15ff7949996f4e65454b4b129fa29.jpg
