Falling Up

Many things have fallen only to rise higher.
–Seneca

There is an old saying in the American South: “If you find a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by itself.” This is as if to say one should look more deeply, see through the apparent phenomenon the world presents, question why things are as they appear to be, and from such an encounter–the starting point, so to speak–seek deeper truths. Such deep looking, rather tangentially, I admit, links turtles to falling–specifically, to falling up. That is, after all, one possible explanation for how the turtle found itself atop a fence post: it fell up there. But first, consider a few other things, through which I hope to make the relationship between turtles and falling up more distinct. There is a very old joke, and as to its origins I am unsure, but I will present it here as I have heard it told so many times:

A disciple asks his guru what it is that supports the earth, and the guru replies that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies “Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down.”

Another familiar version of the story is this:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called a galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

The notion of turtles or tortoises supporting the earth is an ancient one (the turtle itself is an ancient animal, existing in some form on the earth for the past 150 million years), and figures prominently in a remarkable, and remarkably diverse, assortment of mythologies from around the world. In many Native American myths, the earth is supported on the back of giant turtle who in turn swims the cosmic sea, and for the Sioux particularly, the earth is itself a huge tortoise floating on the celestial waters; in Hindu mythology the god, Vishnu, assumes the form of a turtle and carries the world on his back; when attacking fortified redoubts, Roman centurions fashioned a protective formation they called the tortoise by holding overlapping shields above their heads; in ancient China it was said that the turtle’s shell formed the vault of heaven while its four legs signified the four cardinal directions or the four corners of the earth.

Interestingly, the Chinese also equated the turtle with the yin principle and the element of water. Why it might be related to water is easily deduced, but a somewhat more puzzling question is, what is the turtle’s relationship to yin energy? Yin has traditionally been defined as the energy of the feminine as opposed to Yang, the energy of the masculine. Yin is a softer, more yielding, a more supple energy; the word itself variously translates to shady place, North Slope, cloudy, overcast, and south bank of the river. Yin is frequently described in watery terms: slow moving, fluid, tranquil, streaming. It has qualities of preservation and darkness (interestingly, turtles have notoriously bad eyesight and find their way primarily by feeling their way around land or through currents). Finally, if you separate the turtle’s shell from its owner and turn it over one may easily imagine a vessel–a dish, a bowl, or a container–and from there, it is not at all difficult to imagine the turtle’s shell as a biological container, a womb.

From this point on when speaking of turtles, one is no longer able to only discuss literal turtles; now conversations about turtles necessarily include one’s awareness of all the unconscious and archetypal elements of turtles as well. Turtles have become metaphor and symbol, a way of seeing more deeply into the world of phenomena and material presence, and thusly seen, “turtleness” is no longer a hidden element of an encounter with an actual turtle, sauntering about and barely contained under the surface of its own literality, and our’s. Meaning beyond a literal turtle is produced, and the “meaning” of turtles may now be found everywhere. Meaning, or meaningfulness, is a funny thing; there is no meaning to be found in a single thing or set-of-things. But if multiplicities of “thingness,” or sets of non-literal meanings arise, an inner significance or inner substance may be sensed or intuited–but probably not articulated–which may radically alter one’s world.

In this spirit of thought experiment, I began to wonder how turtles fall after I encountered a poem by Kay Ryan, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, entitled, simply, Turtle (please note that Ryan’s turtle is a female):

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.

Turtles it seems, are unable to fall down, if only by virtue of already existing so close to the surface of the earth. Even if they do freefall the one or two millimeters of space that exists between themselves and the ground, it is most probably of no great consequence to them. If, barring a fall into a well or off the edge of an abyss, they are to end up in “serving dish” posture there must be some element of falling up, a necessary direction if a turtle is to end up on its back.

Ryan tells her readers that the turtle “exists below luck-level” and has little capacity for imagining beyond the literal life she daily experiences. But this is where the archetypal and metaphorical qualities of turtles fundamentally alter the turtle’s (and alters anyone who sees beyond the turtle’s literality) mundane existence. The hitherto hidden antediluvian history and mind-numbing significance of “turtleness” raise it up far beyond its humble, individual domesticity and point by the example of its archetypal nature to esoteric forces that are quite capable of “turning her load of pottery to wings.” The levitating force, the inverted gravity that makes one fall up, is equanimity, or patience as Ryan calls it–an intensely mindful awareness and acceptance of things as they are–combined with chastening.

Chastening is a marvelous word for the poet to have used as it means to correct, restrain, or to purify; and judging from the way the word reverberates in this poem, she most likely intends all three meanings at the same time. Most, if not all, individuals eventually reach a point at which chastened is the most poignantly descriptive word one has with which to describe the wisdom that accumulates, often painfully, along and through the course of a life. Always attached to such hard-won wisdom is an untold abundance of images also accumulated over years of living and now have become fixed in the individual. The totality of consciousness (consciousness + unconsciousness) is like an eye that is able to see into the most distant, dark spaces and espy the images comprising the totality of human experience. And these images are not simply dreams, memories, or reflections, but are instead tremendously powerful psychic factors that impinge upon and inform one’s life in the same manner “reality” does.

In one of his letters, C. G. Jung pointed out that all things are “as if” they were real, and that even those things that people and cultures routinely consider to be real are, in truth, the effects of some thing or things that cannot be known. Why, then, dismiss and force out of one’s mind the notion of falling upwards as something physically impossible and irrational, even though the thought of it may persist and even seem to draw one into some deeper experience of oneself and the world? Instead, one should look more deeply into such a compelling image and find what the world, indeed what one’s life, might be trying to communicate. The feared danger of losing touch with reality is diminished by cultivating patience and by the chastening quality intrinsic to life, which paradoxically concentrates and leavens consciousness at the same time bringing cosmos, good order, to inner chaos. Without allowing the light of consciousness to fall on the inner world, a full understanding of the outer is not possible, regardless of the technological sophistication brought to bear upon it.

However, submitting to such inner work is generally thought of as a liability: phrases such as navel gazing, wool gathering, and far worse are used to describe it. Our collective culture seems unable to tolerate falling down; the inner work, equated to an intolerable vulnerability, threatens the hyper-valued phallocentric structures of thinking, problem solving, and planning. Falling down is synonymous with a demonstrated lack of stamina, a lack of skill, and (horrors!!!) impotence. If one watched even a few moments of either national political party’s recent conventions with an even mildly incredulous eye, this sad fact was shockingly apparent: the conventioneer’s insistence upon splitting themselves off from the myriad problems this country faces was consistently reinforced by a fragile, self-satisfied superiority framed in self-congratulatory rhetoric specifically designed to discourage any sort of introspection whatever. Because to focus on anything but the positive, to move in any direction other than straight ahead, is to shatter the Edenic unconsciousness this culture insists upon at this peculiar moment in history. Individuals are no less prone to this kind of psychic inflation than the collective. It is no different, and no less delusional, than Tantalus insisting he spends his days in retirement, lounging in his summer home in the Hamptons. This virulent variety of willful unconsciousness denies anything is wrong even while one is plummeting, falling farther and farther, into the abyss.

Eventually, in spite of all efforts, conscious or not, to avoid it, everyone arrives at a moment in life when the appearance of truth draws well nigh; when, to follow the thread of this essay, there begins to form, in the dimmest glimmer of a notion, the realization that if one can become more conscious of falling, one stops falling down and begins to fall up. But this invites, if one is honest, a distinctly discomfiting feeling of the uncanny, as if to ask, “What is this, and how can this be?” But that uncanny sensation is an unavoidable presence when encountering something unexpected, say, a turtle atop a fence post, precisely because the uncanny is what always accompanies a move outside a domestic, predictable experience of life. The uncanny is not a threat, but rather it is a calling, perhaps even a seduction; it invites one to fall into its mysteries, and while falling, to rise up and explore it; most of all it is an invitation to discover transformation, the transformation of the sort that changes pottery into wings.