Читать книгу The Woods - Vladimir Bibikhin - Страница 13

If unceasing prayer is the unearthing, the digging down to something that already exists in everybody (‘There is no need to learn it, it is innate in every one of us,’ The Way of a Pilgrim, p. 61, Tr.), integral to breathing, the beating of the heart, eating and moving, then a simple understanding of faith reveals itself to us: it is trusting what already exists. The law of our being is religion in the sense of attentiveness. (Re-ligio means attention.¹) Our primary bond (our belonging, our relationship) is with God. That means we need look no further than within ourselves (there is no need to consult an encyclopaedia or ask anyone else) to know what God is. That is tantamount to asking someone else who I am. It is within us always, although most often in privation, while we are paying dearly in various ways for straying from where our religious nature always is.

Faith is like an exposing of things unseen. We are usually quite unaware of the fact that we are breathing, that our heart is beating, or of eating. If we then decide to regulate our breathing, or our heartbeat, or to follow a special diet, to subordinate them to our conscious mind, that implies emphatically that we are only now making a start, that up till now we have not been doing any of these things. That, needless to say, is a double-dyed, blatant untruth, as if we are trying to get in our alibi in advance. ‘No, no. Where I was – that wasn’t me; I’ve only just now turned up where I am. The reality is that when I was born I, as a human being, cried from fear of breathing, was comforted when my breathing became regular, and fell asleep; then I cried again in a panic when I became hungry, but calmed down when I was given milk.’

But all that was not yet in metric space; it was still in the forest, inside matter and, before that, inside my mother. Respiratory gymnastics and dietary concerns already belong to metric space. An unnecessary binding, an overly metric approach to the things of the forest, a complicated entangling that fetters mind and body – they all have a beginning, so they will all have an end. The practising of unceasing prayer does not fetter but unfetters our breathing. It does not unfetter it in the sense of some ridiculous ‘expansion and liberation of breathing’, which is only going to lead to hyperventilation of the lungs and ultimately to deranging the way they work, but in the sense of leaving the body to do what the body does well. The God with whom people converse in prayer is, after all, that same God who created the body the way it is. We do not know exactly how that is, but we know that as it is we can offer it to the service of God. We are not conversing with God in order to convey our thoughts to him, because he undoubtedly already has plenty of thoughts of his own, but in order to make our confession, to offer ourselves sincerely: look, this is me. People speak to God with their whole being, just as they are, with their whole existence, their very presence. So they do, ladies and gentlemen.

I repeat that what is important for us is that in the school of unceasing prayer there is a clear boundary, a stage beyond which seeking becomes finding. The practitioners of unceasing prayer differ not by the fact that starets (elder) Vasilisk of Turov would remain motionless in prayer for twelve hours at a time and say the Jesus Prayer on a rosary 12,000 times a day, while starets Zosima Verkhovsky, founder and father confessor of the cenobitic convent of the Virgin Hodegetria near today’s Naro-Fominsk, did even more,² and that now we can compare them with the spiritual proficiency of Arseniy Troyepolsky, the Hieromonk of the Pafnutiy of Borovsk monastery, who died in Nara on 7 July 1870.³ What is important is the discovery that all that matters is faith, not in humankind, but in the fact that humans as they are have the capacity as part of their being, not by chance, or some fluke, or by a stroke of luck, but of necessity, for unceasing prayer: prayer tied to their breathing, to their heartbeat, to the food they eat and their eating, but as something integral to their body, which is also called attentiveness.

Secondhand information strikes us as unreliable, and those actually praying say little directly about it and remain serenely reticent. The Pilgrim, as he is known from our reading, might seem to be a fictitious figure, irredeemably anonymous, so perhaps a mere legend leading us in the opposite direction from reality. But he is Russian literature and, moreover, an important event in Russian literature through whose miracle the Pilgrim becomes direct and conclusive testimony, a primary source on unceasing prayer. The fact that he somehow additionally embodies almost every tradition of Russian thought – the Siberian tradition through Zosima Verkhovsky; the tradition of the followers of St Ignatiy Bryanchaninov through Arseniy Troyepolsky;⁴ the official, ‘synodal’ tradition through his final and definitive editor, Feofan the Recluse;⁵ and, indirectly, that of the Optina Pustyn monastery through the attention, if not uncritical, he pays to the experience of Vasilisk of Turov, the teacher of Zosima – that makes the Pilgrim all the more impressive, confirming something everybody in any case senses: that he is authoritative.

If unceasing prayer was achieved in the forest, in the backwoods (Zosima Verkhovsky when he came to the Moscow region from Siberia -and it is through Siberia that the Pilgrim mostly travels – sought out the most obscure and marshy of locations), we need to ask whether it is even possible without raw experience. It is not an intellectual matter but brings us back down to the earth of the heart, to primal matter, to the void at the beginning of the Book of Genesis; since otherwise how does it produce its sobering effect?

Unceasing prayer comes from an encounter with the intimate, real God, and leads us to silence. The strictness of divine attentiveness rules out easy solutions and leads us to confront the irresolvable. And indeed, it is not for humans to define their relationship with something more powerful than themselves. Humans can decide only not to run away, to show fortitude when something comes so near, because returning to the truth of the forest, to the heartbeat, to breathing, is to come closer to the fire. As already in the twentieth century, in the Prayer Diary of the starets Feodosiy of Karulia on Mount Athos, in the entry for 3 September 1937, a month before his death on 2 October, we read,

A heat began … to flare from the heart in my bosom, and became so strong that my heart seemed aflame … and became agitated by this great heat, which began to spread from my bosom down to my lower abdomen … although with great effort I managed not to abandon my prayer, trusting in God, during this time of temptation. The flame in my heart and in all my body gradually passed from this heat.⁶

Returning to the physical is risky; indeed, dangerous.

We may define spirituality as a return to the body, only not to a concept of the body that never advances beyond the fantasy of an inappropriate fusion of mind and body but to the body as our unapproachable double that forbids any flirtation, any commerce of the mind with it.

The woman’s bleeding could be healed suddenly, not by human efforts but by the approach of the divine presence, which always occurred. We read in Psalms, 16: 8, ‘O my soul, thou hast said unto the Lord, Thou art my Lord: my goodness extendeth not to thee.’ The Creator does not move, he is eternally close; neither does the one who sees him move. Does this eternal relationship apply only to the Church, and not to everyone? What is vast attracts by its very weight. If the sun with its storms and flares came close to us, it would certainly be frightening, but not as frightening as the approach of God. ‘The fear of God, bringing about unceasing worshipful prayer to God and ensuring observance of Christ’s commandments, leading to reconciliation with God, when fear is transformed into love and the anguish of prayer, transformed into sweetness, fosters the flowering of enlightenment … the knowledge of God’s mysteries.’⁷ Faith is believing that this precisely is the way everything stands with humankind. One is returning to oneself. From whence? Folly and stupidity say, from freedom to the yoke of unfreedom. No! From the void into history.

Unceasing prayer reveals, then, humanity’s ancient task, through which alone what is truly occurring is revealed. Those who have had faith, those who have achieved unceasing prayer, returning to humankind like seeds of the present, of real history, these are the markers of the history of our land. Those who retreated into silence, who began to envisage their destiny in terms of the moment they would stand before the eternal, the unchanging – St Seraphim of Sarov, Vasilisk of Siberia, the Pilgrim – are more assured in their plotting of the course of history than Russia’s writers within the literary process, although these, too, are toiling in the workshop, their work, too, is illuminated by inspiration. These holy men are guiding stars no less than the earliest sages of the ancients.

The silent contemplatives are like pillars supporting the devotion of the Church [and perhaps not only of the Church, Bibikhin] by their secret continuous prayer: Even in the distant past one sees that many devout lay-folk, and even kings and their courtiers, went to visit hermits and men who kept silence in order to ask them to pray for their strengthening and salvation.⁸

What I would like is to put an end to the separating of faith from philosophy and, more broadly, of faith from culture. Also, of course, of one faith from another. All that is different about them is their different languages. Anyone who claims their faith is ‘better’ than others is a pagan who has not yet noticed that theirs is not the only language in the world, who imagines that the world does not extend beyond their village, their pagus. Whether such benighted people like it or not, everything of significance in their language springs from the same soil as that from which other languages grow. There is no reason to repudiate one’s own language, but not to listen to someone else just because they speak a different language is to be deaf also to one’s own language and, indeed, to oneself, because every person, every day of their life, has their own language. People’s laziness and weariness cause their language to ossify ridiculously even as they cling to it. It only seems that loose language is the opposite of pedantic language. In fact, both have that same inertia, that same parochialism.

The threshold of silence stops bleeding, stops the spattering of blood, assuming, of course, that is what the woman with an issue of blood wants, and is not deliberately spattering it around in the belief that this is somehow a ‘flight of intellect’ or ‘freedom of thought and expression’.

Because genuine philosophy has crossed this threshold of silence and mindfulness, it is the same as unceasing prayer. Mindfulness is also silence. One of the lessons of the Pilgrim: ‘Mindfulness, in order always to keep your heart free from intention, even if it should seem good.’⁹

The Pilgrim talks about mindfulness as faith and religion. One of the narrators, a professor, relates, ‘For five years I was a professor and I led a gloomy dissipated sort of life, captivated by the vain philosophy of the world,¹⁰ and not according to Christ. Perhaps I should have perished altogether had I not been upheld to some extent by the fact that I lived with my very devout mother and my sister, who was a serious-minded young woman’ (199–200).

‘Serious-minded’ is used here as a synonym for pious, and on the following page we read, ‘[M]y sister was preparing to dedicate herself to monastic life’ (201). Serious-minded attentiveness, too, is no different from unceasing prayer. Christian asceticism adopted the philosophical school of attentiveness, and began also to call itself ‘philosophy’, accepting the goal of self-knowledge, in the sense of standing perpetually, not in front of the mirror, but before God.

Christianity is aware that asceticism is identical both in philosophy and in religion, whether it admits that it adopted the philosophical school or claims that philosophers took everything from the Bible. The friends and enemies of the philosophers within Christianity alike accept that the Bible’s ‘Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart’ (Deuteronomy 15: 9) is the same as the Delphic ‘Know thyself’. Unfortunately, this convergence of philosophy and faith in the matter of attentiveness has been forgotten. We are reminded about this in The Pilgrim: ‘Even the most elementary sages have recognized the value of silence. The philosophical school of the Neoplatonists, which embraced many adherences under the guidance of the philosopher Plotinus, developed to a high degree the inner contemplative life which is attained most especially in silence’ (250).

We can resolve the issue of unceasing prayer by noting something to which its belated critics do not always pay attention (calling it ‘technique’, ‘physiology’, ‘primitive’, ‘navel-gazing’, ‘an impoverishment of prayer’). Unceasing prayer in the sense of Psalms, 16: 8, ‘I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved,’ is an old and obligatory philosophical discipline (which can have a variety of methods), both of monastic and of non-monastic ascesis. Its encompassing of a person’s whole being, their body, mindfulness, breathing, the beating of their heart, cannot but bring about a real, rapid, and miraculous change in them, halting the issue of blood. (Mindfulness of the heartbeat and at the same time the heartbeat itself, as also breathing in the sense of a careful entering, a careful probing of matter, primal matter in the earthly forest, in which, moreover, it is impossible not to sense God’s presence. The heartbeat itself, the breathing becomes this forest, although pure mindfulness remains a separate Sophia unlike anything else – and thereby lets in everything else.) A different mission for a changed person is revealed, in effect the only true mission. Here any would-be criticism of unceasing prayer is simply fatuous and shows up the critic for someone who does not understand the issue.

But precisely because other habits than unceasing mindfulness have emerged and become ingrained, in the sense of growing accustomed to the bleeding (and the woman in the Gospel had not just accepted it, she wanted to be healed), because of the unfortunately widespread neglect of discipline, those who return to themselves, the mindful, may face problems. Just because the return to yourself in mindfulness is light and easy (‘Take my yoke upon you … for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light,’ Matthew, 11: 29, 30), it may take a long time for this new spirit to overcome old and ingrained habits.

We need to discriminate. The discrepancy between the promise that unceasing prayer is easy (just a few days of practice will be sufficient) and the lifelong commitment called for by monastic life is only superficially beguiling. Of course, mindfulness should come quickly and easily if it is to come at all. It does not have to be created through exercises: real mindfulness needs only to be recalled. It is of a kind with the way our breathing and rate of heartbeat are changed in the presence of something vast and awe-inspiring like mountains, the sky, beauty, and all the more so the beauty of a human with a body and heart, of humankind, of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. For unceasing prayer all that is needed is to notice where and who we are. Prayer is primal: it does not need practice, it is what we start with. Regrettably, editors excised from the original Pilgrim his clear protest against the notion that special preparation is needed before we can turn to God. There is a powerful section early in the manuscript where the Pilgrim states that, quite the contrary, without prayer it is not possible even to begin. ‘From all the prayers found in the Bible it is evident that they were offered for absolution of sins, and that no absolution of sins was needed prior to prayer.’¹¹ This is accompanied by a quotation from the Bible: ‘And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you’ (Ezekiel, 11: 19). In any human situation, the first thing to do, the first priority, like clutching at the banisters, is to turn, if you have deviated, to unceasing prayer, to mindfulness. ‘[A]fter every fall and sinful wounding of the heart the thing to do is immediately to place it in the Presence of God for healing and cleansing.’¹²

It is monastic philosophy that seems most relevant to this primary, groundbreaking task, which is why the beginnings of Russian philosophy should be sought in The Pilgrim and in Vladimir Soloviov,¹³ to the extent that he, too, is a pilgrim. In the light of The Pilgrim and his unceasing, obligatory praying, most discussions on philosophical topics seem like homeless orphans.

Unceasing prayer, philosophy, and faith in each individual is ontology. The difficulties that the light yoke of work encounters, and the complications it produces, is biography.

Emerging into the presence of the divine is the beginning of the history of the real freedom conferred by the yoke, which is horror at our blindness, at our fear and penitential burden of guilt and shame, and amazement at how free we have become!

Who are people exposing when they pray? Primarily, of course, themselves, the I that is speaking; next, their neighbour, and what is closer to you than your breath, your heart, and that strange, unknown but so intimate thing, your body. Picture not thoughts about your body (‘See how filthy I am, how sensual’); picture not the positions of the body: praying, kneeling, prostrated on the ground, emaciated by fasting, exhausted by sleep deprivation, in the posture of a believer, making the sign of the Cross.

All such facilitating postures of the body are prescribed, defined by detailed rules and considered necessary until not flighty but pure prayer of the heart is achieved. When by the favour and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ you attain this, then, leaving behind many and varied doings, you will be united beyond words with the Lord in pure and not flighty prayer of the heart, without need of these facilitating devices.¹⁴

What is offered is just the body: see, the heart is beating, the blood invisibly circulating, the lungs breathing. Bid your thoughts farewell, abandon them; you no longer have need of them, or of your concerns about yourself, your body, about the world or about God. No one has need of them. You have no need of them if you are genuinely, honestly standing before God; no need even of other people’s thought, other people’s prayers. ‘When betimes prayer in all its purity comes to you of its own volition, you must in no way ruin it with your rules for verbal prayer’ (ibid.). Prayers are also a means: as penitential chains are for the body, so they are for the mind, for exercising it. When, however, real physical work begins, the building of a church, say, the chains should be set aside, your hands need to be free to work. In the same way, for the heart to work it should be equally free both of intentions and of prayers. Mindfulness means ‘keep your heart free from intention, even if it should seem good’ (ibid.).

Standing pure before God is like being undressed, naked before him. Oh, if silence meant only not to be speaking, not to be expressing our thoughts, it would be such a small matter, something everyone already does when seeking to conceal their thoughts. But it is more: we need to still our thoughts. ‘Retaining awareness while invoking Jesus Christ entails looking constantly into the depths of the heart and ceaselessly keeping thought silenced; even, I would say, trying to be empty of intentions that seem good, or of any other intentions, lest felonious thoughts be lurking beneath them.’¹⁵ As they assuredly will be, ready to rob us the minute we stray out of that pure mindfulness in which even our own thoughts surprise us and seem to belong to somebody else. The value of intentions is only that they, too, may be presented, offered, exposed.

Moving away from thoughts and intentions to pure mindfulness is also the teaching of an old school of philosophy (νοῦς). How is it that in our time it has survived only in the form of unceasing prayer, and virtually only in the monasteries at that? That is cause to be grateful to the Church and something that makes the Church indispensable. Is this discipline not now being diminished by being separated from the totality of human experience, the experience of other languages of faith, by becoming specialized and isolated from philosophy and the experience of poetry and music? And similarly, is secular culture not also diminished to the extent that it lacks understanding of the school of unceasing prayer, has not studied but has instead squandered it? It is as if the storehouses and their watchmen were in different places: the storehouses full of fabulous riches but unlocked; the guard incorruptible, competent and vigilant, only nowhere near the storehouses.

How are we to return the storehouses once more to their guards, and return the guards to their storehouses? Neither prayer nor faith can be perfect if the person praying has first decided to be this way or that, and only then to turn to God. There was good reason why this first, and perhaps most important, thesis of the Pilgrim was excised by those who edited him. Unfortunately, the specialization of faith, the transformation of religion into a profession, is a fact. Ecumenism, stripped down to its essence, would do well to remember that the real Church, the Church of faith in the divine, has existed not for 2,000 years, but since the days of Abel and, according to Bernhard Welte, we are in eucharistic communion with the cave dwellers of the Mount of Olives near Cologne.

The natural man arrives naturally at the knowledge of God. And, therefore, there is not, and never has been, any people, any barbarous tribe, without some knowledge of God. As a result of this knowledge the most savage islander, without any impulse from outside, involuntarily raises his gaze to heaven, falls on his knees, breathes out a sigh which he does not understand, necessary as it is…. Universally the essence or the soul of every religion consists in secret prayer.¹⁶ (The Way of a Pilgrim, p. 237)

Faith is the same in every paganism; religion and devout mindfulness are one.

A human being’s most important job is to be mindful. Work? ‘Every hour and every moment let us with utmost diligence guard our heart against all manner of intentions dimming the spiritual glass in which it is meet that Jesus Christ alone should be impressed and imprinted.’¹⁷ Against all manner of intentions: that is, we must fall again and again.

Phenomenology is the showing of what is. To whom? To whomsoever or whatever is manifested, to the extent that they are manifested. Beyond that showing, we should have nothing in mind. Husserl’s phenomenology is pure mindfulness as novelty. A further interpretation and application, in passing, on the value of philosophy: only from this pure standing in the Presence can there arise not power but emptiness and a measure of amazement, of wonder, from which alone one can bypass all traditions and find an absolute starting point. ‘Pray, and do not labour much to conquer your passions by your own strength. Prayer will destroy them in you’ (230). And further,

The man who lives in silent solitude is not only not living in a state of inactivity and idleness; he is in the highest degree active, even more than the one who takes part in the life of society. He untiringly acts according to his highest rational nature; he is on guard; he ponders; he keeps his eye upon the state and progress of his moral existence. (248)

There is a sober awareness that we have no power over the forest, the wolf, and the double. With our body, our heart, our food, merely by eating every day, we belong to the forest, the world’s matter. Presenting ourselves in unceasing prayer just as we are, we present ourselves as creatures of the forest, our own forest. Like the forest, we are created, but as creatures presenting ourselves, as pure mindfulness, as phenomenologists, we are apart from the forest: we are divine. At such a time, what we are doing with the forest is what God wanted. Of course, in order to find out what at that time we are doing, we must try to see what, in religion, we may be.

Why does mindfulness release wonder? Because, of course, it is simply wondrous that I, mindful and observing, am somehow related to my neighbour here, my body that is here and nowhere else, standing and doing what it is doing, breathing and thinking.

Together with my neighbour, my body, I am immediately back in contact with the global forest it is growing into, as are other bodies with which every body is linked in essentially the same way as the parts of one body are linked: in the way bodies are linked to each other, through kinship, relationships, breathing the same air, being irradiated by the same rays, visible or invisible. There is nothing fundamentally different from the way the head is linked to, say, the hand. In St Paul’s comment that the community is like a body, in his addressing it as ‘brothers and sisters’, there is nothing in the least metaphorical. If this kinship has been rejected by the mind, forgotten as an ideal, it is not the kinship we need to worry about. It is not going anywhere, it will simply carry on being what it is. Perhaps, though, we need to be worrying about the mind, what it is and whether, perhaps, it has not gone a bit off the rails and might need to be put right in some essential.

That is why it is not self-centred to seek redemption for oneself. Redemption of one’s neighbour is, first of all, redemption of one’s body, which, through its universal interconnectedness, is at once salvation for all bodies. Any movement, through interconnectedness, moves all matter.

Redemption, that is, putting the mind right, begins with fear, with horror, and that is another merit of a remarkable note passed to me at the lecture on 9 September, which I read too hastily and which deserves better: ‘I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.’¹⁸ Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But is always setting God before us (not imagining him), the seeing of him before us that the prophet David speaks of … is that not something reserved exclusively for the souls and minds of believers rather than for just anyone? For the believer, this is the way out of the forest. God is always before you. The forest, dark, terrifying, dismal, is the condition of any soul, with or without faith. (The soul, according to Tertullian, is ‘in its very nature Christian.’) ‘I entrusted myself to the will of God. My peace of mind came back to me and I was in good spirits again’ (46). Theology teaches us how to find our way out of the forest, and it does so on the basis of past experience. There is no universally accepted image of God or of faith in him (and any imagining of God is idolatry). Imagination is a temptation, when the individual forces himself to picture the heart, the kidneys, veins and fat (things he considers necessary); it is a different matter when in a mysterious way something quite else is revealed to him. He does not know why, and perhaps until his dying day he never will.

Redemptive fear is the most terrifying. People are afraid of fear. One character in The Pilgrim is straying but unable to take the decision to turn to mindfulness. ‘I thought that directly I began to pray God would destroy me’ (187). Fear, or Heidegger’s ‘Angst’, will cripple, destroy, sweep away, only all the familiar, inessential links between body and mind, will cast the body back to the body, and return the mind to pure mind.¹⁹

People remark on how few prayers there are in the Gospels. There seems to be a straightforward explanation for this. Perhaps, speaking of prayers strictly in the traditional sense, there is not a single one, but that is just how it should be: the Gospels are in their entirety a school of mindfulness, of unceasing prayer. I probably do not have to explain further that by that I mean real constant mindfulness and not, of course, repeating the same words a thousand times over. St Feofan the Recluse contemptuously styled such practitioners ‘whisperers’, muttering their prayers meaninglessly; and those who mechanically synchronized their breathing to the words he called wheezers who snuffled through their prayers. For him, these were both senseless external techniques. In The Pilgrim, too, the Gospel is primarily a school of prayer. ‘[The] Gospel bids unceasing prayer. To other acts of piety their own ties are assigned, but in the matter of prayer there are no off times. Without prayer it is impossible to do any good and without the Gospel you cannot learn properly about prayer’ (193).

Mindfulness interrupted ceases to be mindfulness. If prayer is not unceasing, it becomes something entirely different, a ritual.

For the Pilgrim the dark forest was initially frightening and oppressive, but he came to feel at home there and rejoiced in the wilderness: ‘The silent forest is like a Garden of Eden in which the delightful Tree of Life grows in the prayerful heart of the recluse’ (240). The silent forest is the familiar, Russian body of the Pilgrim. Just because it is so boldly, so completely itself, all that is remote from him becomes the Pilgrim’s own. (The dichotomy propounded by Lotman and Uspensky between what is one’s own and what is alien is simply wrong.²⁰ It is based on a loose, conventional understanding of ownership. What is truly one’s own includes everything that is genuine.) The Russian forest merges with the Garden of Eden into a single Tree of Life, which is also the wood of the Cross.

Here we will only touch lightly on this theme, but moving on from The Pilgrim we will need to talk more precisely about the Russian forest.

Mountains, by which I mean high mountains rising above the tree line, pierce heights where, because the air is rarefied, one feels the coldness of space. The sun shines more brightly than down below but the thin air already has almost no mass, and there is no medium to conduct the heat from a blazing hot rock. If a short-sighted alien were to come close to the earth in a mountainous region devoid of forest, he would find the planet no different from a sterile asteroid. He would be unable to understand why there should be air and water lower down, and even more puzzling would be the meadows and forest. The earth might have been an asymmetrical lump of rock if wind, and water expanding in cracks when it froze, had not dragged the mountain peaks down to the plains. The soil settling there from mudslides became almost as smooth as the water that had brought it down. One could imagine that the rocks and mountains were thrown, sprayed at the earth from above, while its roundness resulted from slow erosion by wind and water. The earth may have been thoroughly angular, a hotchpotch of bits of the asteroids which bombarded it over billions of years. How did those bare bones come to be covered in organic tissue? That is an interesting question, but not one we are called upon to answer. The question for us is, could it be that, just as the thing closest to us, our body, almost never comes into our field of vision, so the same is true of the entity on which we exist. Our body is viewed from the outset – we are after all spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings – as a means of attaining ends: for example, by working. May the same not be true of the earth? We have only to frame the question in those terms for the answer to be obvious.

The summits of mountains are snowy, icy, or bare, as if the earth were still being buffeted by the solar wind. It is much the same at both poles. Then suddenly, below a height of four kilometres, the forest begins, it descends from there along with the streams, and would continue down into the valleys but for people. In regions levelled by water, half the forest has been cut down, or more than half, or all of it. Leonardo da Vinci was right: the mountains have been levelled by wind and water. It seemed to him there was something wrong about that: something must have happened to the earth and it seemed to be bleeding to death. The water, draining away, left plains.

Nowadays, great cities stand on those plains in which, thanks to their dwellings, electricity, mains water, and sewerage, a different metabolism has been created. A different luminary shines round the clock and there is a different habitat. Only, as it is so elegantly put, nowadays that habitat is in a state of ‘environmental disequilibrium’. In other words, the city cannot exist without further ploughing up of the soil around it, and further pollution of the soil, air, and water. A major city stands out on the plain like a rash of eczema or an allergy. The forest has been felled so that the plain can be ploughed up so that the city can be fed. In exchange, the city belches out chemicals, radiation, and gases. The mountains are being eroded and levelled to make way for the forest, while the forest makes way for people. As people proliferate, they cut their primal environment down and plough it up. The mismanagement is causing degradation of the soil. Just as the deserts of Arabia and North Africa were caused by protracted human ‘management’, so people nowadays are making a global desert for themselves. Neglect the ecology of the fields and you get a desert.

Using the level ground and the forests in this manner, there is clearly something people have not thought through. Proliferation of great cities has been a mistake, as their planners are themselves forced to admit. It seems that in this respect, too, there is no topic more important than the forest.

The number 2000 appeared only on the pages of newspapers and on screens. Looking down from the air, looking at the great cities spilling over the plains, the number appeared to herald nothing whatsoever. Unless perhaps a glimmer of hope that humans might wake up, at least partly, and open their eyes. What people love – old churches, castles in the mountains – shows that a different way of treating the earth is possible, but they appreciate these things aesthetically, and enjoy holidays in the countryside only then to return to their globalism. To encompass the world ‘globally’ seems now to be the aim of almost everything anybody does, but that focus does not mean any more attention is being paid to the earth itself. On the contrary, it is lost behind plans and screen images as never before. Globalism is a sick imitation of paying attention to the earth, just as the main aim of the comprehensive studying of ‘humankind’ is not to notice what the Pilgrim discovered when he decided to become mindful. He discovered the nature of his own breathing, of his heartbeat, of the way he ate. He noticed what he ate, and how he related to other bodies.

In globalization, a mindful attitude towards the earth is the last thing we can hope for. People are as blithely unaware of the nature of this living entity as they are of the animal that they are themselves, and they will pay no heed to it until it revolts. They regress back to the forest in their tobacco smoking, wine bibbing, and drug taking; the forest, so long dispossessed, thus cruelly avenges the injury directly in the big city centre.

Even a less striking overpopulation in the classical world brought the Trojan War down on humankind, and the earth’s vengeance on the big city will be infinitely more terrible. A return to religion, that is, to philosophy – but not by any stretch of the imagination to that sick counterfeit, religious philosophy – seems almost certain.

Trains, planes, and cars encompass not matter but a pre-identified business segment. Tourists imagine they are broadening their narrow horizons and seeing the world, but in reality they are mere exploiters, blissfully unaware that they are only tightening the grip of industrialization. There is good reason to refer to their activities as the tourist industry. Criticism of civilization, by keeping it in the headlines, only serves to consolidate it.

There is something strangely hopeful and offbeat, something almost of the holy fool, about the lands of Russia and the way that here the sprawling of our standardized cities over the plains is dysfunctional, tentative, as if subverted in advance by our nervous haste, the provisional nature of almost all decisions, and the manifest absence of any trustworthy, long-term strategy such as we find, for example, in America. There is no call for us to envy America its strategy, with its centuries-long perspective (in the conservation of forests, in the deliberate limiting of arable land, and its preference for buying in oil rather than extracting it locally). By contrast, our own strategy seems short of breath, not to say suffocating. Why? Because where exploitation of the earth is concerned it is better not to have a strategy than to have one. The only right approach is to recognize that what matters is not know-how or the lack of it, but awareness that the world’s Sophia is not to be found in technology, however ultramodern and sophisticated. In the absurd rootlessness of our technological invasion of the forest, of which a glaring and literal example is the ridiculous building of opulent villas in Moscow province by people unfortunate enough to have picked up all the money they found lying at their feet (just as the communists had the misfortune to seize power that was theirs for the taking), we seem to believe that, because of a drowsy awareness that it will not be human intelligence that puts everything back in place, all attempts to behave rationally should be shunned.