Being Here, Thisness, and Human Appropriation

      

      Thisness, or often called Haecceity in academia, is the true essence of a thing. However, we cannot truly know the thisness because of how we channel the precision of language into the arbitrary naming of things.

......Yeah I know, I know. That’s existentially vague to the extreme. Just bear with me please; I just finished reading Tim Lilburn’s essay “How To Be Here?” from his book “Living in the World as if it Were Home”. I am still having trouble trying to wrap my head around all of this. *sigh* Alright, alright. Here we go.

      So, in regards to the wilderness, the poet Tim Lilburn states how language can easily dilute the thisness of the natural world due to the appropriation of the human mind! … And.. and.. uh.. Lilburn takes the filtered lens of human sight which perceives and defines the natural world under these appropriations and attempts to unfilter it!... But wait.. he does it through... LANGUAGE?!?! WHAT

My brain hurts

Ok, ok calm down. Just relax…

Tim Lilburn is well known for his "eco-poetry", sharing similar ideas to that of Don McKay. Much like McKay, Lilburn tackles the applicability of human language and attempts to discredit its way of apprehending the unknown wilderness into our known understanding. However, unlike McKay, who takes an approach of poetic attention, Lilburn goes deeper and takes a contemplative approach; he enters a state of wordless contemplative thought, and then translates the instantaneous moments of inward glimpses into poetry (words!) For example, one time Lilburn dug a hole in the ground, covered it with hay, and buried his head under it... So yeah, all you folks that like to take walks in nature for inspiration, try burying yourself in it instead.

Doing poetry right.

      Take for instance his poem “Contemplation is Mourning”; the entire core of it is thisness. He talks about the human world and the non-human world, and how we become alienated from the latter through human appropriations like society, history, etc. It’s a very prolific poem. 

Looking takes you so far on a leash of delight, then removes it and says 
the price of admission to further is your name. Either the desert 
                                                                                    and winter 
of what the deer is in herself or a palace life disturbed by itches and 
                                                                                                 sounds 
felt through the gigantic walls. Choose. 

Light comes through pale trees as mind sometimes kisses the body. 
The hills are the bones of hills. 

      Instead of an appropriative knowledge – an almost solipsist vision of human eyes – of our surroundings, Lilburn takes part in a different kind of knowing that is steeped in ontological principles, realities and the simple existents of things… You know, I guess it’s more like an unknowing of things... 

      Back on topic! The thisness of a thing can be sensed, to an extent, through the vision of the contemplative eye, not the appropriative one. The latter vision is in fact an inattention to the world, while the former can truly come closer to discerning thisness. The world truly becomes an odd and unreachable place once this frame of mind is practiced. I really cannot put it any more simply than this; and after I read Lilburn's essay "How To Be Here", I realized that neither can he:

      “Consciousness walks across the land bridge of the deer’s stare into the world of things. This is knowing… There is only wild seeing, the feel of it unimaginable: I am seen straight through… but cannot say how I am seen” (Lilburn 3-4)