in the with and as the with

   

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We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. 

Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. 

Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were. 

We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature. 


—David George Haskell

The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

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Everything, then, passes between us. This “between,” as its name implies, has neither a consistency nor continuity of its own. It does not lead from one to the other; it constitutes no connective tissue, no cement, no bridge. Perhaps it is not even fair to speak of a “connection” to its subject; it is neither connected nor unconnected; it falls short of both; even better, it is that which is at the heart of a connection, the interlacing [l’entrecroisment] of strands whose extremities remain separate even at the very center of the knot. 

The ‘between’ is the stretching out [distension] and distance opened by the singular as such, as its spacing of meaning. That which does not maintain its distance from the “between” is only immanence collapsed in on itself and deprived of meaning.

[...] Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.

—Jean-Luc Nancy
Being Singular Plural
We are Meaning 

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When you are ripe, 
you will let go of yourself 
and the part of you that is fruit 
will fall and be happy 
and the part of you that is branch 
will tremble in the wind.


—Jamie Sabines
from Adam and Eve, 1952

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