Dwellings of Forgetfulness
Last week I finished a lovely brief book (or long essay) from Ivan Illich entitled “H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness.” Like nearly everything from Illich each page could fill a book club meeting; the footnotes alone deserve essays.
It was while watching my children develop their own sense of world-making that the first pages of the essay particularly struck my heart. Illich writes:
“To dwell means to inhabit the traces left by one’s own living, by which one always retraces the lives of one’s ancestors…From day to day dwellers shape the environment. In every step and movement people dwell. Traditional dwellings are never terminated. Houses constantly grow; only temples and palaces can be ‘finished.’ Dwelling means living insofar as each moment shapes a community’s own kind of space.”
Our collective deep sense of malaise and restlessness is illuminated in these words. “Active dwelling has become nearly impossible,” he says shortly after.
Throughout the past 500 years we’ve undergone a top-down revolution in how we interpret reality. The servants of this revolution, tools and the process of enclosure, have brought us to a point of severe disengagement of the body. Hands which were made to engage in shaping our surroundings are deliberately de-skilled. The only ‘hands’ allowed to shape our surroundings are machines, which serve as a wall between reality and ourselves on behalf of the the minds leading the technocratic revolution.
Our hands ache with nerves. They long to do things. This is, at least according to me, among the terrible inversions of purpose brought about by the mystery of iniquity.
We are made in the image of God, and as J.R.R. Tolkien noted in several of his lesser-known works, part of that image is our role as subcreators.
It is amazing how children illustrate this capacity to be subcreators, and it should be a powerful motivator to anyone interested in children’s development (and thus humanity) that this capacity is continually eroded in favor of passive consumption.
Children create their own languages. They ever yearn to know more stories. More stories is more to adore. They begin to be architects of dream houses, adding on more rooms for more friends. They sketch a street and wish to fill it. They begin to be map-makers. They people their worlds with talking animals or flower spirits. A history begins to emerge: ah yes, the year the fireflies rode to the rescue of the clover flowers who were under attack by the lawnmower.
The full fruit of this world-building is gifted to the public in the works of Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, C.S. Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, or a Beatrix Potter.
This capacity to shape our living space into a world with a history, an origin, and a pole star, is different than animal instincts. Illich writes:
“Animals are born with the instinct which dictates their behavior. The nest or the web, the den or the hole are created by the animal in the harness of its genes. Dwellings are not such lairs for breeding; they are shaped by a culture. No other art expresses as fully as dwelling that aspect of human existence that is historical and cannot be reduced to biological programs. But just as dwelling is not a special spot determined by a territorial instinct, it is also not a garage.”
As someone who holds to a Goethean, participatory view of science, the task of subcreation is not something I believe we can outsource without consequence. We reduce it to an animal urge which can be replaced with video game controllers and a pre-packaged story line.
A child’s capacity to play and build turns into the adult’s ability to participate in their culture and cultivate a dwelling space. The attention it requires of us to build with purpose, slowly, in harmony with a living Creation, will in turn call us along the path along which leads to the Beatific Vision.
The neglect of this interpretation of the pursuit of knowledge and the maiming of our creative capacities lead us to a society in which we are passive recipients of artifacts disconnected from our ultimate Good. Our collective anxiety and ill-health attest to this. This curtailment of our embodied capacity to dwell, shape, create and steward is what makes the neglect of participatory science by the Church so distressing to me. The more we accept a reductionist, mechanistic interpretation of Creation, the more our capacity for communion is diminished.
On that note it’s time to draw maps of our own!