In the Belly of a Whale
In this piece for Unpsychology Voices, Susan Holliday explores what nature teaches us about our own dimensions through the experience of awe
“Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests”
Gaston Bachelard ~ ‘The Poetics of Space’
The preoccupation of psychological thought since Freud has been with the content of our inner worlds, rather than with how we experience dimension, proportion and capacity. Why does this matter? And why might it matter particularly right now?
I am standing in the twelfth century nave of Tewkesbury Abbey, heart pounding. Ahead of me a birth passage of darkling depth disappears towards a distant vanishing point. Either side, an avenue of mighty pillars presses down into the earth and reaches up towards the ribs of a starlit vault. In this moment I am no longer an observer standing on the shore looking at the beauty of this medieval church. I am swallowed up inside her. I am standing in the belly of a whale.
Opened to the enormity of space beneath, beyond and above me, the cells of my body seem to stretch out, as though exploring a newfound realm of possibility. All at once I seem unsure of my own dimensions. An absurd thought crosses my mind – the whale is also in me.
* * *
Struck by the immensity of this vaulted nave, I am touched by a deep resonance, as though these extended dimensions are known to me somehow. They are. Somewhere in the depth of somatic memory I recognise that the inspiration for these early sacred spaces came from the ancient greenwoods and dark star-strewn skies which once graced these lands. Connecting earth and sky in the felt sense and imagination of my ancestors, the descendants of these mighty forests have pressed the immensity of their presence upon me since I was a child.
Yearning for an experience of space and time beyond the narrow edges of certainty and definition, I have long sought out spaces in which to experience myself in relation to these extended dimensions. As a child, I remember looking up into the soaring canopy of mature woodland and wondering what it might feel like to be the furthest tip of a branch touching the sky. I was equally fascinated by the crown of the root where the tree first emerges from the soil. These liminal spaces seeded in me the possibility that there might be more to the tree than meets the eye. Years later I found these childhood inklings articulated by Einstein, who wrote:
Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But there is no doubt in my mind that the lion belongs with it even if he cannot reveal himself to the eye all at once because of his huge dimension.[i]
The lion of which he speaks is not, it seems to me, just ‘out there’, in the infinite space above the branching canopy or hidden beneath the surface of the soil, it is also ‘in here’ in the depths of everyday human experience. We catch glimpses of the lion within (or the whale in our belly), through tangential thoughts and insights which arrive ‘out of the blue’, or in curious dreams and unbidden surges of grief, longing and wonder. These intimations are neither self-evident nor preconceived. They are essentially unforeseen. The temptation is to discount them.
Of course, as William Blake reminds us in his poem ‘Auguries of Innocence’, immensity can also be experienced through our encounters with the very small. We can ‘see the world in a grain of sand’ and ‘heaven in a wildflower’[ii]. Scientists estimate that a typical grain of sand contains more than 10 million trillion sub-atomic nuclei[iii]. Something of this sense of my own quantum capacity strikes me as I stand in Tewkesbury’s medieval nave. Like Blake’s grain of sand, it dawns on me that I am both part of a world that stretches far beyond any human dimension. At the same time, I contain the unfathomable within me.
A spirit bowed
Reflecting on my experience in the abbey church, I realise that the resonant power of the building concerns both space and time. I am moved not only by the stretch of unboundaried space, but also by the sheer reach of eight hundred years of continuous worship, spirits of countless ordinary men and women bowed before the unfathomable dimensions of mystery. It is how space has been inhabited over time which creates resonance. Space and time are the real temple. This is why forests, mountains and cathedrals speak to us so deeply.
This sense of expansion in time and space is encapsulated in the very roots of the word ‘temple, originating as it does in the PIE root *ten, meaning ‘to stretch’. This same root gives us ‘tender’ and ‘tendon’, words which speak of the longing of the embodied self to reach out beyond the cemented smallness of our individual identifications towards a web of being which far exceeds the limits of our comprehension.
In his poem ‘Forest Hymn’[iv], American romantic poet William Cullen Bryant reminds us ‘The groves were God’s first temples’:
And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven
Mingled their mossy bows, and from the sounds
Of the invisible breath that swayed at once
All their green tops, stole over him, and bowed
His spirit with the thought of boundless power
And inaccessible majesty.
This sense of ‘spirit bowed’ before the immeasurable expanses and immaterial presence of the natural world is perhaps what Arne Næss, mountaineer, philosopher and founder of the ‘deep ecology’[v] movement, expressed when he wrote about his experience of the ‘greatness’ and ‘dignity’ of mountains. Næss conceived his ‘Ecology of Wisdom’[vi] in the mountains of his native Norway. In a short essay, "Modesty and the Conquest of Mountains," Næss articulated an essential paradox at the heart of our experiences of awe:
The smaller we come to feel ourselves compared with the mountain, the nearer we come to participating in greatness.[vii]
Encounters with immensity impress upon us the vital truth that life is always ‘more than’ we can possibly comprehend. This realisation can be both devastating and transformative. Experiences of awe open us to the existence of a greater whole by dissolving our identity as separate beings. No wonder awe connects us to terror and dread (to something ‘awful’), since it calls forth a death of sorts, the demise of our narrow identifications, which have made us smaller than we need to be. This attachment to living a smaller life is perhaps an inevitable consequence of our dislocation from the ‘boundless power and inaccessible majesty’ of mountains, oceans and forests. Uprooted from this greater whole, we settle for a shrunken life. We wed ourselves to identities in which we are uniquely set apart from the wider web of life.
What I encounter in the abbey is the sudden collapse of these internal walls of identification, a falling away of foreground clutter which allows the true scale of my participation in a larger story to flood back into my awareness.
Being in the world
The preoccupation of psychological thought since Freud has been with the content of our inner worlds, rather than with how we experience dimension, proportion and capacity. Why does this matter? And why might it matter particularly right now?
A clue lies in the word ‘depression’ which dominates our account of contemporary experience. Looking beyond the diagnostic abstraction of this ubiquitous descriptor, the term contains the idea of flattening, compression and contraction. It suggests that what we may be experiencing, in our ‘de-press-ion’, is a kind of existential claustrophobia. Our lives increasingly lack height, depth and a sense of potentiality, in part because we forget that we belong to the immensity of life itself. We are woven into a living world which stretches out before us, around us, beyond us, and within us.
Perhaps the time has come for us to recall that our health as human beings rests not only in mending the brokenness of our childhood wounding, it also depends on restoring us to the whole, by re-locating us within the larger story of life itself. Standing in the nave of a medieval cathedral, walking in a forest, gazing up into the night sky, or looking into the quantum interiority of a flower, are gestures in which we search for a lost primal belonging; for the umbilical thread that binds us to something greater than our separated selves.
In his 1945 masterpiece ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’[viii], Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us of something which indigenous cultures have not forgotten: human existence is essentially spatial and situated. He defines the primal reality of human experience (the existential structure itself) not as ‘being’ but as being-in-the-world (‘être-au-monde’). From this we understand that there is no unilateral, detached or purely external relationship with the world. The ‘world’ is interwoven in every moment of our experience in a reciprocal communication between the living body and the living world. Seen this way, the body is no longer an object situated in space, but rather an embodied consciousness inhabiting space. As the lived body, we are expressions of space, not objects in space. It follows from this that our relationship to space is fundamental to our experience of ourselves.
This relationship is two-fold. As instruments of impression, our bodies absorb experiences of space. As instruments of expression, our bodies project our relationship to space and shape the world in which we live. Where our experiences of external space are shallow, cluttered, or narrow, it is likely that the experience of our internal realms will shrink too. Only of course the space within does not actually shrink, it is only our perception and capacity to experience immensity that is diminished.
In the West we have come to fear the enormity of space as absence, nothingness, barrenness. We are quick to adorn and decorate space so that our attention has something to grasp hold of. In contrast, many eastern traditions continue to emphasise the pregnancy of space, its fullness and potentiality. In Japanese culture the concept of Ma[ix] celebrates empty space as a field of emergent possibility. To this day, architectural design in Japan leaves the interior space largely empty of decorative fixtures and ornaments. What matters here is presence and potential rather than content.
In much the same way, medieval abbeys and cathedrals, despite the enormous weight of their materiality, were built to manifest the intangible and the immeasurable potentiality of being. Long before we decorated these places of worship with statues and paintings, and filled them with relics and tombs, they were spaces cleared of clutter and stretched beyond human dimensions, to create for us a visceral experience of unbound immensity. The stone masons who built these extraordinary cathedrals were essentially sculpting space. Their mission was to fashion a container, a vessel in which we might encounter the Larger Story of our existence.
In recent times the acceleration of the world has contributed to a profound loss of spaciousness, depth and expanse. As a photographer I am aware that shutter speed and depth of field lie in inverse correlation to one another. Similarly, the faster our lives flow, the more cluttered they are with foreground detail, the less spatial depth we are capable of experiencing. Digital media allows us to be everywhere and yet it prevents us from being somewhere (from being-in-the-world). Eyes trained on the flat screen, we cease to experience our embodied existence in space. We feel increasingly flat and empty. No wonder we try to consume our way back to fullness and capacity.
Cathedrals of possibility
In the weeks since my encounter with the arched enormity of Tewkesbury, I have felt somehow altered, like a rose released from its bud. This reacquaintance with my own ‘immensity’ feels both longed for and overwhelming. Alongside the joy of expansion, I am aware of feeling exposed to grief and vulnerable to shame.
As I stretch out into the expanded sense of capacity within my being, I become aware of a silent spring of sorrow. I am confronted with unlived dimensions of my life which have not been, and can no longer be, realised. Steeped in a childhood injunction to avoid appearing ‘too big for my boots’, I have spent most of my life playing small, finding bushels behind which to hide my light, secreting away my experiences of awe, my affinity with the wildflower and the whale. This recent encounter with immensity has felt like a blessing beyond any claim to deserve, or capacity to comprehend. Who am I, after all, to host a whale in my belly?
Then I remember the plea from Marianne Williamson (often misattributed to Mandela):
Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. [x]
Fortified by this reminder (‘It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone’) I feel encouraged to speak of my experiences of immensity, my conversations with forests and mountains, my visions of heaven in a wildflower. I dare to suggest that there are cathedrals of possibility within all of us.
The risk involved in coming out of smallness (stepping beyond the bounds of socially prescribed ‘modesty’) has become worth taking since I realise that the expansiveness which I experience is not mine. It belongs to the ‘greatness’ and ‘dignity’ of life itself. Again, it is Arne Næss, through his enduring relationship with mountains, who understands this reframing of our sense of proportion, when he writes:
modesty is of little value if it is not a natural consequence of much deeper feelings ... a consequence of a way of understanding ourselves as part of nature in a wide sense of the term.[xi]
As I stretch out into the larger sense of possibility which Tewkesbury has evoked in me, I realise there is perhaps an even more fundamental reason, beyond grief and shame, that so many of us remain tight in a bud. It is because encounters with immensity call us into a relationship of responsibility to this experience of ‘being-in-the-world’. Understanding ourselves as part of nature ‘in a wide sense’ ignites a desire to realise the potential of our capacity and to protect, cherish and tend the wider ecology of being. Awakened to this responsibility, I can no longer avoid the imperative to reorder my life.
* * *
There is perhaps no deeper way to know the greatness and dignity of the living world into which we are woven, than to experience the body in relation to space. Walking in a forest, climbing a mountain, or stepping into the nave of a medieval cathedral, we are healed (made whole and restored to the whole) not just because the experience of space feeds our five senses with ‘content’. These encounters are transformative because they relocate us within the immensity of being-in-the-world. Stepping out of our boxed dwellings, we see into the distance. We follow the flight of birds as they arc across the vastness of skies. We encounter the more-than-human scale of trees, recognising that we too are earth-born and sky-bound.
As the horizon widens beyond us, it also stretches out within us. Open to awe, we are no longer passive observers looking out at an ‘environment’. We are involved, enveloped and immersed in a vaulted web of being which arches into immeasurable distances. We stand in the belly of a whale. And the whale stretches out her immensity within us.
Image ©Susan Holliday: The nave at Tewkesbury Abbey, consecrated in 1121, once part of a Benedictine Abbey set in the rolling hills of Gloucestershire
END NOTES
[i] Einstein, A. ‘Essay to Leo Baeck, 23 February 1953’, The Albert Einstein Archives.
[ii] Blake, W (1757-1827). ‘Auguries of Innocence’ in William Blake Selected Poems, Penguin Classics (2006).
[iii] Department of Energy. Retrieved from https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsnuclei
[iv] Bryant, W. C. (1824). ‘Forest Hymn’. American Verse Project, University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. From https://name.umdl.umich.edu/BAD0508.0001.001.
[v] ‘Deep Ecology’ rests on a perception of nature as a whole interdependent system in which human beings participate. In contrast ‘shallow ecology’ understands human experience to stand apart from nature. It promotes technological fixes (like recycling or carbon offsetting).
[vi] Næss, A (1912-2009). The Ecology of Wisdom, Counterpoint (2008).
[vii] Næss, A (1912-2009). ‘Modesty and the Conquest of Mountains’ in The Mountain Spirit, Michael Tobias, ed. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press (1979).
[viii] Merleau-Ponty, M (1908-1961). Phenomenology of Perception. London : New York : Routledge & K. Paul; Humanities Press (1974).
[ix] Matsumoto, K. (2020). MA - The Japanese concept of space and time. From: https://medium.com/@kiyoshimatsumoto/ma-the-japanese-concept-of-space-and-time.
[x] Williamson, M (1952-present) A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles. Harper Thorsons; Thorsons Classics edition (2015)
[xi] Næss, A (1912-2009). "Modesty and the Conquest of Mountains" in The Mountain Spirit, Michael Tobias, ed. Woodstock, N.Y. Overlook Press (1979).
