Living with Tiny Aliens by Pryor Adam;

Author:Pryor, Adam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Living-Into Presence, Wonder, and Play

In Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, she recounts a scene in a special sort of pre-school where the children are gently corrected for their possessive tendencies: That’s not your blanket, it is the blanket you are currently using. The scene occurs in her rich description of a society on a moon where ownership and possession are made to be morally reprehensible in contrast to the society on the neighboring planet where these capitalistic values matter most. In the society on the moon, Le Guin explores both the beauty and tremendous sacrifice entailed by living in a society where a fundamental sense of shared responsibility and accountability is essential to meaningful personhood.

We can imagine this world, in fiction, but in practice generating this sense of empathy, shared responsibility, and shared accountability—critical values for enacting the sense of imago Dei as a planetary phenomenon—is no easy task. As the close of the previous chapter suggested, though, we must consider this issue if we take seriously the definition of the imago Dei offered here. I have contended that knowledge is not enough, but how do we inspire a sense of felt empathy for the technobiogeochemical cycles of which we are a part? How do we inspire others to meaningfully re-orient their world around the disorientations of the Anthropocene and the fulfillment of opening new possibilities of meaningful existence to creation? And, why might such a process happen more readily for some people than others?

Here, I suggest three pivotal themes for affecting others such that they become more attentive to participating in the imago Dei (not directly being it as an individual): presence, wonder, and play. The order that I present them in here is not meant to be serial or sequential. These themes are equiprimordial existential structures that aid us in ordering our human experiences. It is not as though one always achieves presence first and then pursues wonder and finally enacts play. If anything, it might be that, practically speaking, we reverse these: We play, which gives a proclivity for wonder that can be formalized into a disposition of presence.

Though equiprimordial, these three existential structures are intimately related but hardly equivalent. Presence, broadly speaking, is a disposition or orientation; it names an existential commitment to being aware of the intra-active, non-separable difference that subtends our lived experiences of being a self in the world so that we do not fall apart. It is a commitment to expose ourselves to others as part of the elemental flesh.

Wonder is a mood or an attitude. It allows the world to appear to us with an openness or “making proximate” of those desires that are askew to our predominant, norming orientations: an attentiveness to disorientations. It names the continuous need to be aware of how the orientation of presence might need to be redirected toward those desires: making what was once unreachable proximate in a new way of being-with while resisting the temptation to simply put these askew desires in line with our normative orientations.

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