19 August 2012

Week 34: 'What is is that unsettles us?'

Wonderdate: 1970
Wondered into being by: Evolution (and/or something else), Frederic Rossif and others.
Wonderspan: 10 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

This week we look at three different ways of answering wonder.  Do we marvel at it, try to explain it, or just allow it to unsettle us?  There's a clip for each one.  They're all wonderful, I think, but if you only have ten minutes, skip to the last one.

I - 'The marvel of existence that is us.'

So we've just had the Olympics - the greatest show on Earth.  Or is it?  What, to you, could be described as the greatest show in the world?  Could it be this?
It seems to me that the wonder that Alexander Tsarias feels is such that he wants to resist an explanation for it.  Perhaps to explain is to explain away, and while we might think an explanation can comprehend a wonder, it might just be a way of swerving around it.  Perhaps Alexander Tsairias, doesn't entirely trust a scientific explanation to take full weight of his wondering experience, which is too rich for him to discount the possibility of the miraculous.

II - 'Nature, unaided by a designer, could produce an organ of seemingly miraculous complexity.'

But then some are keener to push science and see what kinds of explanations it can cough up.  Let's not be naive, they say - yes, nature is full of wonder but it's not magic.  Once you break down its complex processes into their many parts its wonder-full complexity can be comprehended without recourse to 'divinity' and 'miracles'.  For example:
III - 'What is it that unsettles us?'

The way of wondering I most want you to see today is of another kind altogether.  In the 1970s, Frederic Rossif worked with the musician Vangelis to create a series of documentaries about the natural world.  These films are full of a kind of wonder that just isn't safe - either to marvel at euphorically or to explain coolly.  They inspire awe, and so their main effect on a domesticated consciousness (and as human beings we all have one of those) is to unsettle it.  In the face of such awe, the rational mind does not become wrong, it just loses its purchase; scientific explanations are possible but seem trivial in the face of the too-much-reality of the experience.  At the same time, it seems feeble merely to marvel at nature's awe, as if it were enough to say, 'How wonderful it all is!' as we might when calmly observing it from a distance.  (I think this is what we do when watching the tamer BBC Natural History Unit productions which, to put it bluntly, dumb down the killing).  The willingness to marvel and the will to explain are ways of responding to an experience we know what to do with - they belong to the realm of the expected.  I think what Rossif manages to convey in his rough film is something altogether wrong-footing: call it the wild.  To experience the wild is to feel drawn towards it and become afraid of it in equal measure.  This primal mix of curiosity and fear is a response to what we were not expecting; it is a visceral experience which both warns us not to get too close and yet also stops us from taking flight.  Witnessing nature in this way, we might actually feel we are in it or, even scarier, that we are it.

Here are the first ten minutes of L'Apocalypse Des Animaux.  It's all in French!  It works without the narration but if you can understand it, the text is extremely beautiful (and unsettling).  Early on, we are shown a fossilised fish skeleton:
‘And what is it that unsettles us, in discovering the fragile destiny of this fish, its demise written in stone 170,000,000 years before?’
 Unfortunately the full documentary isn't online.

Extra...

More Rossif:
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www.waysofloving.com

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