Sunrise/Sunset Language: Further Thoughts

Jeff sent me this reply after reading my previous post:

Completely agree with all your points, and yes, as far as I know, all languages basically refer to the Earth, sun, moon, and stars as if we were standing on a dinner plate, and the sky were a concave shell above us.

That said...

Some part of my subconscious has been kicking around ideas about what is 'natural' for humans insofar as we *do* strive to improve ourselves, and in particular to see things from other points of view, and consciously (and subconsciously) change ourselves based on that. There's no question that one of the great strengths of humans is that we *can* (when we try) understand other points of view, and even, to some extent, adopt them. You mention, for example, the coyote: naturally we wouldn't expect a coyote's perspective to be like a human's, and we would not expect a coyote to try and adopt a human perspective (although certain dogs do a very good job of it), and we would not ever expect any human to completely grok a coyote's perspective. But some humans, with years of study, do come to understand coyotes extremely well -- better than, say, rabbits understand coyotes, or bees understand coyotes. And because of this plasticity of mind (which goes hand in hand with the neoteny of our physiology), the question of what is 'natural' for human beings is rather complex.

To be specific: for humans who grew up and lived all their lives on a space station orbiting the moon, it would be completely natural for them to adopt new words for the motion of the sun, words that might have more in common with the 'objective' perspective than what most languages use. (Or perhaps not: they might still use perspective-centric language, e.g. the sun is "coming out", i.e. from behind the Earth or the Moon.) This wouldn't mean that they were unnatural humans, nor yet that they were less anthropocentric. But they'll have adopted a perspective quite foreign to any other species of Earth life.

So... since this is probably rather muddled, let me summarize. I completely agree with you, AND I think it's interesting to note that we humans have this plasticity of mind that makes it difficult to say exactly what is 'natural' for a human being. And as we alter our environment through developments in technology and culture, our neoteny and plasticity will only increase. It will be fascinating to see what strange ways of being human we develop in the next ten thousand years. :-)

Very excellent points. I don't think I have anything to add, other than that I think appreciating the plasticity of human nature and human language means, to a certain extent, explicitly allowing and making room for that plasticity. While that might mean sculpting and shaping our language consciously in some ways, it also means allowing language to evolve naturally. In this case I do not think it means excising certain terms completely and attempting to replace them with others in accordance with a predetermined ideology, especially not one that posits that it is fundamentally problematic to even acknowledge our human perspective.

In the other comments responding to Rua Lupa's post, some readers have offered very poetic alternatives, and poetry is exactly the right place where this type of language play is at its best. (There are plenty of examples where poetry has been the source of new words or phrases, too, so in that way poetry is not only the perfect place for language play, but the most nourishing soil for the evolution and growth of language as well.) I am by no means saying we shouldn't experiment with language or explore its depths or flexibility. Please yes, let's do.

Sunrise/Sunset: Can We Even Be Less Human?

Over on No Unsacred Place, Rua Lupa has a post up that pretty much epitomizes one of the problems with much of modern environmentalist rhetoric: the existential angst of being human.

She is specifically looking at the (supposedly problematic) language of saying "sunrise" and "sunset," which takes for granted an earth-centric perspective rather than acknowledging the scientific fact that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa.

If I'd wanted to be a real dick, I could have pointed out that according to Einstein's theory of relativity, we are in fact perfectly justified in talking about the sun (and indeed the entire cosmos) as revolving around the earth, if that happens to be our perspective. But I restrained.

The real issue is that many environmentalists are still stuck in the inherited worldview that says humans are "naturally" fallen and sinful creatures and can't do anything right. Therefore, what humans do is bad, and the problem with the planet is humans. Not the specific things that humans do, but simply the humans themselves. Thus, you get existential angst (or politically correct righteousness, or both) over something as innocuous as language that describes the sun as rising and setting.

This was the comment I left on the post:

I haven't heard of any ecocentric folks raising objections to the terms sunrise/sunset -- in fact, this is the first I've heard of it being a problem. I happen to agree with "Nobody" in the first comment above.

Acknowledging that humans have a particular perspective and that human language will reflect that perspective is not inherently anthropocentric.

Artificially trying to surpress our natural, intuitive relationship with our surroundings by adopting constrained language is unlikely to fix the problem, either, in my opinion. Language is itself a living, evolving thing, not a construct that we can meddle with and manipulate as we like. That's not to say that trying to craft more conscientious language isn't sometimes helpful, but I have my doubts about how effective it would be to try to force unnatural/awkward phrasings into the language to replace ones that already serve perfectly well. Words, like organisms, fill niches when they are needed, and a word without a niche to fill is not going to survive for very long.

I'd also point out -- and this might be rocking the boat a bit -- that for most of the hundreds of thousands of years since the evolution of the human species, we've largely been ignorant of the facts of modern science. But that has not necessarily resulted in us being worse human beings, or even worse animal citizens of the planet. We don't worry if the coyote has a coyote-centric perspective of the world, and we tend to assume that it does and that this is perfectly fine. In fact, we can't help but have a view of the world that is defined by our own humanness -- trying to have any other kind of view would be, well, inhuman. And one thing the planet does not need us to be is any more inhuman than we already act. (So many of our screw ups have come from us thinking that we can engineer ourselves into being better humans than the species the planet made us.)

Let's root out the actual ideologies that are problematic and destructive and put our energies into deconstructing those, rather identifying our humanness itself as the problem.

I should check this with Jeff, but it might even be that this is a problem specific to the English language (or a handful of related languages) and not universal to all human languages. If it is universal (which, given just how basic an experience it is to not just humans but pretty much everything on the planet, is the most likely), it tells us something fascinating and valuable about how we experience the world. I think we're better off learning from and appreciating that perspective, rather than trying to surpress it.

ETA: I couldn't help but follow up, in response to Rua Lupa asking another commenter to define (without reference to a dictionary) what a sunrise/sunset actually is:

Arguably, the terms "sunrise" and "sunset" refer to the specific event of the sun rising above or sinking below the horizon line from the perspective of a particular point on the surface of the earth.

In other words, the event itself is place-specific, it is necessarily related to a particular location and the perspective of (e.g. the horizon as viewed from) that location. It would be nonsensical to talk about the position of the sun in relation to the horizon without referring to a specific location.

So I'm not clear how you plan to replace these words/concepts with terms that are place-nonspecific. The very attempt to do so is a kind of ideological blinder, an attempt to universalize what is inherently and by definition a localized event.

I've done too much flying this year. I've experienced firsthand that sunrise/sunset is relative to your location, and to try to talk differently about it is bound to cause problems.

Gender Identity Issues in Dianic Ritual

Sun: pisces (water/mutable), 6:57am - 6:09pm
Moon: waning crescent, capricorn (earth/cardinal)
Earth: warmer today and sunny for the most part, and now a thunderstorm has moved in (complete with lightning) and it's supposed to rain all night


I need to go to bed, and this will not be a proper diary post, but I wanted to record a post I made to Facebook today regarding an issue reported on The Wild Hunt about a Dianic ritual held at PantheaCon that excluded transgender women from participating, and the protest-ritual and open discussion forum held in response.

Today's Wild Hunt post was the first time I heard anything about the transgender-exclusionary Dianic ritual held at PantheaCon and the controversy and conversation it stirred up. I wonder if friends here on FB would care to weigh in with the ideas and opinions?

I've been reading an on-going conversation on one of the Pagan forums I belong to, and the main issue seems to be the lack of communication, that the ritual wasn't marked as "cisgender-women only" beforehand and, when it was specified (by turning people away at the door), the phrase "women born women" was used, which has derogatory connotations. There's been a lot of debate about the nature of religious freedom/discrimination at a public convention, the pros and cons of allowing Mystery traditions to hold rituals that may exclude or offend others, whether or not Dianic traditions are inherently bigoted or discriminatory, etc.

So here's where I'm coming from: I am (if I'm understanding the terms right) a cissexual female with no particular feelings one way or another about my gender. I believe in a kind of non-literalish reincarnation and, for that reason, I have worked during this particular lifetime to appreciate being embodied in a way that is biologically female, approaching it as a sacred thing with lessons to teach me (even when those lessons are sucky "you're going to be too ill and in pain to move for two or three days every month" kinds of lessons). But still, when I indulge in more typically "feminine" behavior and dress, it often feels somewhat like a playful engagement in identity-creation that I (and I alone) can step into and out of if/when I like, but that no one else has a right to impose on me. Since I kind of shrug my shoulders about gender, I've never been remotely drawn to "women's Mysteries" and find myself uncomfortable around groups that have that focus because they don't speak to me (kind of like being the only person who doesn't speak fluent French in a Parisian café) - but I don't begrudge them their right to explore such mysteries in a private ritual space or within a tradition with less fluid gender boundaries than what I'm comfortable with. All of that is my background....

These are the points where I'm finding myself a bit stuck about this PantheaCon situation, though:

(a) Even though I consider myself a feminist, and I feel relaxed about sexual- and gender-identity fluidity, and I try my best to be compassionate and supportive of people's right to self-identity definition and creation.... I haven't spent much time formally studying feminism and feminist philosophy. I did not know until even a few months ago that such a word as "cisgender" even existed, and I find that I'm still uncertain in some contexts what it's being used to mean. There seems to be an almost endless vocabulary for speaking about sexuality and gender-identity, and often it's difficult to know which words are currently acceptable, and which have become taboo, and which are in the process of being reclaimed. I did not know that "woman born woman" was derogatory, and in fact, I'd never even heard it - but I know I've probably used similar phrasings (such as the long-winded, clinical-sounding: "someone born biologically female who identifies as female") when I was unsure if there was an appropriate word for that concept or what that word might be. (Although I understand the desire to create gender-neutral pronouns, when I hear people using "ze" and "zir," I still flinch (on a visceral, auditory level) at how similar it sounds to racist, stereotyped imitations of non-native English speakers' "dialect" (eg. a racist stereotype of an Italian saying, "Ze Pope-a! Ze is so-a nice-a!").) People in the forums have complained about the "dogwhistle" use of the Dianic group's name ("Amazon").... but to someone outside of the world of formal feminist studies, many of these specialized terms feel very similar. Often, the language being cultivated and utilized among those who care most deeply about these issues seems to be evolving and changing so rapidly, that a person like myself who is unfamiliar with all the "lingo" feels excluded from the conversation simply because I am so uncertain what to say or how my words will be interpretted. I have had best friends stop speaking to me for making missteps in terminology that I was unaware of even having made. For me, this brings up the real heart of this issue: wanting to be an accepting, open-minded person (heck, even *actually being* an accepting, open-minded person), doesn't guarantee that someone will be familiar with specialized language. So how do we overcome that gap, especially in large public settings? How can we strive for inclusive language that doesn't, by the very nature of its specialization, grow increasingly exclusive in nature? I'd love to hear people (especially those more familiar with these language issues) weigh in on this.

(b) As a Pagan, I strive to move away from spirit/body dualities and to grapple with the Mystery of embodied spirit or soul, i.e. spirit that arises or emerges from physical existence, rather than merely being a "ghost in the machine" that happens to reside in it. On the other hand, as human beings I also think our experience of physical reality is shaped overwhelmingly by our self-awareness and by our creativity, meaning that physical reality is fluid and responsive and can be shaped by the very awareness/soul that arises from it. I'm wondering how this factors into this conversation on Dianic tradition and those who object to it. A lot of the conversation I've seen on the forums rejecting Dianic tradition as bigoted or discriminatory utilizes language about how a transgendered person can feel "born into the wrong body" - but this language seems to take for granted some kind of idea that the spirit/soul/mind is separate from the body and can get stuck in a "machine" that doesn't feel right. While I totally support people in choosing how to describe their own experiences and wouldn't want to say such a description is "wrong," it doesn't make much sense to me trying to work with a worldview that does not rely on spirit/body dualism. Since Pagans are a small minority of the overall population, I would guess that Pagans are also probably a minority of those who identify as transgender, which means descriptions of the transgender experience might be shaped by Abrahamic/monotheistic assumptions..... Are there Pagans out there who have found ways to talk about the transgender experience that do not rely on this kind of dualism? Or does it seem that the transgender experience itself actually appears to confirm this kind of dualism between spirit/mind and body? Or am I totally misunderstanding these explanations?