Kaleidoscopic Empathy by Sophie Strand

I found this article very moving and timely as we all look for ways to maintain resistance and hope in these horrific times. It was posted on our Kinship Ray Facebook group by Basheera, and originally posted by Sophie Strand who responded in the comments and asked that as the author we include this info on how to find her work and her books at  www.sophiepstrand.com or @cosmogyny

Kaleidoscopic Empathy

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn,” writes T.H. White on the education of the young King Arthur. Arthur, like the sixth century Bard Taliesin, learns not by book, but by becoming. The sixth century poem attributed to Taliesin, reads, “I have been a blue salmon,I have been a dog, a stag, a roebuck on the mountain… A stallion, a bull, a buck, I was reaped and placed in an oven”. In order to become a storyteller, an advisor to kings, and a spiritual intermediary, Taliesin has had to live other lives, other stories. But the most important overlap between the young Arthur and Taliesin is that they learn not by becoming other human beings. They learn by entering into badgers and fish and insects: the minds of the more-than-human world.

The best thing for being sad is interrupting your individuality. Imagine lengthening, feeling your skin polish into sheerness, crystal into glass, your mind fluid, placid. You are a cup of water. And then slowly, purposely, pour yourself into another mode of consciousness. Take on what biologist Jakob von Uexküll called a creature’s “umwelt”: their particular somatic body map, their situated sensory experience of world. Western materialism warns against anthropomorphism. And I agree that the exercise will necessarily fail. Unlike an octopus, my nervous system is not concentrated in my arms. Unlike the mistletoe, I do not know what it is like to parasitically, intimately, invade the body of a cactus. But that does not mean using our imaginative muscle for greater empathy is unimportant. I think, in fact, it is the most important skill for us to be developing as storytellers, artists, scientists, activists, and anyone anguished by escalating extinctions and ecological collapse. The best thing for being sad is practicing being more-than-human.

The injunction against anthropomorphism seems like a misdirection to me. Believing that the world is mindless, mute matter might be more dangerous than believing that a housecat has a personality, and that a mountain could possess its own lithic eroticism. In fact, it could be argued that the fictional “objectivity” of material reductionism is a grander type of anthropomorphism. Everything belongs to the human. Everything is blanketed by capitalism, our predetermined expectations, our teleology. Everything isn’t necessarily made human, but seen as made “for” humans. Everything is our standing reserve. This is not a universal belief. Indigenous cultures the world over had known that animals, insects, fungi, landscapes, and weather are other “people”. They don’t behave like us. They don’t even live on the same timescales. But it is deeply important that we tell stories about their experiences. That we actively try to inhabit their wants and needs, so we are not always making decisions from a singular, human perspective.

Everything we do is entangled with our ecosystem. Every breath we take loops us into relationship with the trees and grasses and soil around us. It only makes sense that we should try and understand how our decisions might feel and live inside another species’ body.

What if every time a logging company proposes to cut down a forest, they had to log an intimate story of the experience of every animal, fungi, insect, plant, and stone in that area? Each “chapter” would take into consideration the sensory apparatus, the scientific studies, the indigenous lore, the behavior of each being and then attempt to inhabit it and to experience what the clearcutting would feel like to that situated perspective. Then every logger, every investor, every person involved in the logging operation would have to attend a many weeks long conference where the report was read aloud.

There is much talk, these days, about neural plasticity and neurogenesis. We are concerned with keeping our brains limber and adaptive by challenging them with new tasks and by creating new neural pathways with the aid of psychedelics. Why not also practice empathic plasticity? I tend to like the metaphor and the visual play of the kaleidoscope. Invented by the Scotsman David Brewster in 1817, the optical instrument has been remarkably good at avoiding inclusion in usefulness. It is still, to this day, seen as a marvel and a child’s toy. I have a strong intuition that it is these tools of marvel and beauty, that as John O’Donohue writes, remain “immune to our strategies”, will be of the most help going forward. Kaleidoscope derives from the Greek word kalos for beauty, eidos for form, and skopéō meaning to consider. Kaleidoscopes tilt mirrors towards each other at an angle, situated within a tube that often contains loose colored cells. Every rotation of the tube provides a stochastic arrangement of the cells, repeating the reflection to create a visually disorienting and stunning display. The view through the kaleidoscope is unpredictable and ever-shifting. Kaleidoscopes ask us to consider the mutable forms of beauty. And they ask us to do this without expectation and without aim. The kaleidoscope is a plaything, a child’s toy. It cannot be easily coopted by dominant paradigms.

I want to offer Kaleidoscopic Empathy as an important exercise for an age of ecological collapse and extinction. The aim is not to “perfect” or “correctly” inhabit another being’s experience. The aim is to play. And to strengthen the muscle of empathy. Practice, whenever you enter into a forest, or go on a walk, or sit by a river, pouring yourself into the mind of every bird, fly, bumble bee, bindweed, grub you see. Center yourself in the wind-buoyed swiftness of the kestrel and then rotate the kaleidoscope, slip into the shadow of the sturgeon below the river surface, beginning to feel the chemical prickle that will lead the fish upstream to spawn. Then again, faster, condense into a Wolbachia bacteria riding inside a mosquito.

Get comfortable with being other beings. With considering their experience not just intellectually, but somatically. Go outside and lie down on a patch of grass and melt into a thousand hyphal strands, weaving embodied appetite into the soil. Imagine what it would be like to hear with your whole body, to eat with your whole face.

The aim is not to accomplish anything. The kaleidoscope teaches us agility and play. The aim is to expand our scope for empathy. If, like the boy Arthur, we want to care for the kingdom, we must know what it is like to “be” the kingdom. We must pour ourselves, empathically, curiously, into the world.