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.

Saturn Return: Weekly Meditation (Crossing Ascendent)

Days of Note: Saturn crosses Ascendent

Sun: sagittarius (mutable fire), 7:26 AM - 4:54 PM
Moon: *waxing gibbous, aries (cardinal fire)
Earth: cold, in the mid-to-low 40s most of the day, starting out quite sunny but then fading to gray, cloudy weather; not that I would know, as I spent pretty much all day inside working on various things, but mostly writing


Last night I had a dream that my aunt Tricia, who works from home as a baker of wonderful homemade cakes, cookies and pies, etc., had decided that she wanted to quit baking and go into taxidermy. (Apparently, this dream was probably inspired by a scene from an episode of X-Files that Jeff and I watched together last night, which I was only half paying attention to at the time and must have gotten into my subconscious.) Anyway, in the dream, my aunt decided she really wanted to be a taxidermist, she was fascinated by it. But the only tools she knew how to use were things like blenders and egg beaters. I have some vague visual impression in my mind of some poor animal carcass being tamped down into the thin, tapering container of a blender, the lid fitted on nicely and the switch flipped, resulting in that lovely whirring and the spinning of blood and bone and fur and bits all into a uniform pinkish paste.

This might not have anything to do with anything, but I thought I would jot it down.

I started writing this journal entry at 11:11 PM, though I doubt I'll be finished with it until what is technically Sunday morning. I'm wide awake and not feeling the least bit tired - which is indicative of my sleep schedule these days, where sometimes I feel so lethargic I can't pull myself out of bed before 10 AM, and other days I'm awake before dawn (which, as dark as the days are, isn't really that hard anyway) with plenty of energy to spare. This morning, I woke up at around 5 AM and tossed and turned a bit before finally giving up and getting up entirely at about 6:30 AM. Jeff had to leave to get the kids, and I fell back asleep for another few hours, so I suppose it all evened out. We'll see how I am tomorrow morning. (Jeff, who slept downstairs on the futon because he'd been snoring a lot lately, hardly slept at all last night because of various worries about this weekend, so now he's excused and sound asleep despite me still being awake.)

I hadn't planned to do much work today - or rather, I'd planned to at least try to clean and organize the basement some in preparation for our up-coming move. But two of the four kids were sick with some kind of stomach bug (which had them on a bland diet of food, though neither of them really acted all that sick - it was a nice excuse for everyone to stay quiet and relaxed in bed reading or drawing for much of the day), so thoughts of trying to organize some kind of cleaning extravaganza were out. At one point I sat down to check out John's recent post on No Unsacred Place, which was excellent as usual, and that was the kick in the ass I needed to sit down and work on the piece I'd wanted to do for this coming week about the recent news coming out of the science journals about LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, being a single, planet-sized mega-organism very similar to a "living ocean" of genetic soup. A pretty cool concept. So I spent all day researching various creation myths from different cultures and drawing comparisons between these and the scientific evidence they have for LUCA, pointing out some of the common themes of primordial chaotic waters, a moment when separation and individuation begins to occur, and the idea of a god being dismembered and the parts of his (or her) corpse being used to actually make the world.

So even though I didn't have any time really to do some formal Saturn Return meditation as I'd planned, I ended up doing quite a bit of contemplation on some of those primordial ancient themes about dissolution, death, separation, limitation and the power of form. Some of the Greek myths actually involve Kronos/Saturn himself, so... there's that.

I find myself really connecting to this idea of a common genetic ancestor in the ancient primordial oceans as a living being that is both an ancestor and a god(dess). This just really jives for me. It works well with my more animistic sensibilities which can sometimes shy away from being overly metaphorical or psychological about the gods and would rather rejoice in and celebrate the Actual Sun Right There See There It Is than in some idea of a sun deity in the abstract. On the other hand, though, it also gives some context to Manannan as a "son of the sea" without having to bear the burden of being the literal sea itself. Manannan mac LUCA, perhaps. Manannan has continued to be an important god to me, and I think I've reconciled myself to just him and Brighid for the time being as a working pair who play nicely together. Manannan is a god of the threshold, the liminal space of the mists, the psychopomp who leads the dead into the other realm, the trickster who will turn things upside-down just for the sake of teasing and challenging. I think there are definitely some parallels here between Manannan (and Manawydan from Welsh mythology) and the figure of Saturn. And strangely enough, while I think of Saturn primarily as a planet and, after that, as some kind of psychological archetype and energetic influence, I find it a lot easier to think of Manannan as an actual god, personified, and able to help me with the Saturn Return. I have no sense that he is Kronos/Saturn, any more than Jeff is, say, Commander Samuel Vimes. But the "real" god Manannan has some understanding of the character/nature/influence of the psychological archetype of Saturn and can give me some insight - like we can have a discussion about it and share our perspectives, in the same way Jeff and I can talk about the characters in Pratchett's books and he can give me insight into what it's like to be a father, something I wouldn't know as much about.

One thing that I was reflecting on just now while I was reading and trying to fall asleep was the nature of Saturn's recent transit through my twelfth house in Libra, the sign and house of my natal moon. I think it was Arroyo who said that Saturn can have a lasting influence when passing through the sign and house of the moon, even when it's not in exact or close aspect to the moon itself. I don't remember precisely when transiting Saturn was exactly conjunct my natal moon, but I do know that the moon is associated with a lot of "mommy issues" - coming to terms with the mother's influence in the family and the inner archetype of the mother in the psyche, as well as grappling with ancestral influences of all kinds that have been "inherited" on the psychic or psychological level. With my moon in Libra, I wonder if I have a particular sensitivity to concepts of fairness, justice, balance and beauty being manifested in the role of the mother - whether by myself or by other "mothers" in my life.

Saturn has been transiting my twelfth house for about two years now, I think. It's soon to cross my ascendent and enter my first house. In fact, looking up my chart just now (at 11:48 PM on Saturday, December 3) I see that transiting Saturn is within 13 minutes of my ascendent and the cusp of my first house. So... maybe that's why I'm suddenly feeling a certain amount of energy and clarity around these issues.

Anyway, as I was lying in bed I suddenly saw all the various ways in which the energy and influence of the mother had been manifesting in my life in ways that provoked my anger or frustration over a sense of violated fairness or justice - in particular in my relationship with Jeff's ex-wife and biological mother to my stepchildren, who has consistently attempted to act in the role of controlling "Mama Bear" figure to both me and Jeff as well as the kids. It hit me that I had been grappling with two issues that were often put at odds with one another.

On the one hand, I wanted things to be Fair - both in the sense of being just and balanced, and also beautiful and harmonious. This led me to a lot of conflict on Jeff's behalf when I felt that his rights as a father were being trampled on or ignored, when he didn't get "his fair share" of time with the kids (even when him having more time with them, and the struggle to get and keep that time that was often involved, left both of us feeling worn out, exhausted and stressed). I also made a lot of judgements - emotionally and ethically - about Emily choosing to stay home and be a "mom," even going on to have another child with her new husband, instead of stepping up to be an "equal partner" in both the divorce (by pulling her weight with joint debt from the previous marriage) and in her own new marriage (which, I will be the first to admit, is none of my business, though I sure do have opinions about it). This judgement - and I won't say it was judgmental necessarily, but it was a judgement, certainly - often had me worrying about the kind of example she was setting for the kids, and my own response was to push back - to balance out her example by becoming even more ambitious (Saturn!) in my own role not as a stepmom but as a "career woman" and female adult role model to the kids. This was me pushing back against the figure of the mother - both in external form and my own potential role - and seeking instead another kind of authority. That has Saturn's influence written all over it.

On the other hand, I also had already learned the lesson - which Saturn had helped teach me before - that to find a harmonious balance it is often important to let go, to release certain emotional blockages or stubborn opinions and to give up being the kind of person who has to control every little thing to make sure it all comes out alright. This was a lesson that I actually learned from my own mother, by bad example. Seeking too much control in a world that is by its very nature so much bigger and more complex than you could ever possibly understand is the very recipe for out of control stress and paranoia. This is what happened to my mother to some extent (though I have to admit that in recent years, perhaps because of the change in her career and my brother and I no longer living at home, she does seem to be improving on this in small ways). The whole thing was, in fact, a lesson all about boundaries and limits (hello again, Saturn old friend!), learning to understand the extent of your own control and when not to push beyond them but instead accept them and trust in the greater harmonies of the universe (there's Saturn, straddling that liminal space between the concrete manifestations of the inner planets and the influences of fate and cosmic force of the outer planets). This was a lesson I knew very well, and something that I continued to affirm to myself consciously. But I was completely piss-poor at actually following through and listening to my own better judgement.

So here were two urges that were definitely working at odds to one another. The urge on the one hand to make sure things were fair and just and balanced - and the desire on the other hand not to become like my own mother and like Jeff's ex-wife, both of whom were excellent examples of the immaturity and stress that characterizes a "control freak" who uses their good intentions to justify their paranoid manipulations and micro-management of everyone around them (essentially being a "mother" to everyone and not being able to trust others to do what's fair or harmonious on their own). Confronted with the glaring evidence that Jeff's ex-wife had no interest in being fair - I think mainly simply because she was incapable of stepping outside of her own perspective in order to see how what she wanted was unfair - it was an incredible challenge for me not to respond by trying to control her.

My response, and something I had to work on with Jeff a lot, was a process of affirming our personal boundaries. It took a lot of push-back and a great deal of stress and hard work every time we were confronted with Emily's tendency to act entitled to private information about our lives that were none of her business or to bombard Jeff with unsolicited emails full of advice about issues of which she had little to no actual knowledge. We worked hard, as a couple and equal partners in the matter, to help each cope with that stress and reaffirm our right to establish clear, healthy boundaries. But mostly, it sucked. I've been getting down on myself a lot over the past couple years about my feelings of having failed at this work, or at least of having responded in ways that were not helpful or healthy. And definitely there were times when our attempts to establish strong boundaries crossed the line into an attempt to control or compensate for Emily's disrespectful or manipulative behavior. But looking back now, I actually feel like we did an okay job. One recent change came about when I broke down and asked some folks on an internet forum if they had any resources that might help. One person responded and pointed me to the "Ten Commandments for Low-Contact Parallel Parenting with High-Drama Ex's." (The idea of having a short, authoritative list of simple rules to follow.... yeah, Saturn, you bet.) Jeff and I read this over, saw a lot of ways that we were already following the techniques suggested and a lot of other places where we could improve. So we started following the rules, and we sent a copy of them to Emily asking her to abide by them as well. (This was after we caught her in a bald-faced lie about one of the kids' health issues, which for us was the final straw and, in some ways, a relief that her manipulation could no longer be denied or explained away.... though of course, that didn't stop her from trying.)

That was about two months ago now, I think. Today, Jeremy confronted Jeff when he went to pick up the kids to let him know that two of them weren't feeling well - and for good measure threw in his own two cents about how "this silent treatment isn't having the effect we [Jeff and I] were hoping it would have." The comment had Jeff fuming when he got home, but he and I talked about it and were able to laugh off the continued arrogance and immaturity. I pointed out to him that our stress has definitely gone down and we don't waste nearly as much time in pointless conflict with Emily; meanwhile, we have more energy when we do have the kids and less anxiety over every little issue that might somehow make its way back to us, so our time with them is more enjoyable than it was before. Whatever Jeremy and Emily think, the technique is most definitely doing what we'd hoped it would do on our end. Jeremy simply declaring that it wasn't working - without asking Jeff's feelings on the matter - was just one more example of why the Low-Contact Parenting techniques were a good idea after all.

One of the things that I think was most helpful about the Low-Contact Parenting was that it helped us to recognize when we were crossing the line from "affirming healthy boundaries" to "pushing back and trying to control others." With rules that restrict our email use to only short messages pertaining specifically to the kids themselves and that avoid intentionally provocative language, for instance, we're forced to catch ourselves before we shoot off that obnoxious letter that we secretly hope will smack Emily back into her place and divest her of any delusions she has about our opinion. The rules work because they ask us to turn a critical eye back onto our own behavior and to recognize when we're demanding something that we should probably just not expect given what is and is not within our reasonable ability to control. These rules give us a structure whereby we can learn how to find a balance between our sense of fairness and our need to appreciate our limits. (And I'm using "we" a lot here because it's something Jeff and I have mostly worked on together, but in many ways this is a lot about my own issues.) But all of this only came after we had done the difficult work of establishing boundaries that could safely secure at least a minimum amount of real fairness and equality between Jeff and his ex when it came to the kids - including giving us the legal ground to stand on in order to negotiate for a fair and workable schedule for child custody after our move. If we hadn't done that necessary work of pushing back and establishing boundaries first - especially in Jeff's case, I think - we would have been in a position where an attitude of "it's out of our control" would have left us open to manipulation, exploitation and a certain amount of guilt.

So here I was being hard on myself about how we handled it when, looking back, maybe we did pretty much the best we could given the circumstances. We weren't perfect, but I think we've found some long-term sustainable ways to find that necessary balance and we were able to bring our more unseemly responses into check before they got out of hand and went too far. At least, right now I'm feeling hopeful and optimistic and so that's my present understanding of the situation. I'd love to hear what Jeff thinks of all of this. (He's asleep now - maybe I'll have a chance to talk to him tomorrow about it at some point.) I'm sure his perspective will be a bit different, considering the influences going on in his own chart right now. And maybe I'm completely wrong about this - I'm kind of making it up as I go, really, and he knows more about astrology than I do.

In any case, what began as a day spent contemplating the "primordial mother ocean" has ended up with some pretty startling thoughts about the energies of the moon-as-mother in relation to my Saturn Return. Perhaps leaving the twelfth house and crossing the ascendent means that these issues are be resolved, maybe "coming to light" in a more conscious way now that I'm moving out of the house of mystery and mysticism. I don't know. I hope so. I think it must be a good sign that I just happen to be awake and thinking about this during the time when transiting Saturn is coming into exact aspect with my ascendent. That has to mean something, right? Like my willingness to be awake to this and open to it, to face it instead of just wanting to "go back to sleep" and ignore the lessons. I hope Manannan can help me stay open to the lessons I need to learn, and in the meantime help me to maybe not be quite so hard on myself if things seem like a struggle or I have to work hard. I think it's a really important insight, that coming to terms with our boundaries and limitations (Saturn) is also about learning how to trust in the greater universe. I just read an old tale about Manannan that someone randomly posted online the other day, about a shepherd who is on his way home with his sheep one evening when he runs into Manannan, who teases him about his certainty of the way and pulls down a confusing mist that shrouds his eyes and makes him lose his sheep. After bumbling about in the dark mists all night, Manannan finally relents and lifts the mist, for the shepherd to find that he was only a few yards from home with all his sheep safe and accounted for by his side - and Manannan joking that sometimes he just likes to play a prank for the joy of it. Sometimes I wonder if I'm in a similar position - stumbling around in the mist all night only to finally realize once the veil lifts away that I've been close to home all along and in no real danger. But I also have to wonder if maybe, if I didn't bumbled around quite so much and fret quite so loudly (and maybe sometimes comically), if Manannan wouldn't consider me quite so worth his attention. ;)

So with that thought, I'll call it a night.