RAINBOW keeps falling on my head

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I’m learning to read the windAnd the wall of weather over Skye

Will be here in minutesThe water in the air

Is pushing rainbows at meFull arches

Buttresses left and rightA new palette to paint

New things with.

First – particles of ice on the in-breathScouts and heralds

Then – an exhalation of hail or snowEach point of white

Pursued by a line of tailThe trace of motion inscribed on my retina.

Across the sea, the Cuillin hillsDance in and out of view

In pale garmentsYou can refract a rainbow from.

I spent dawn to dusk alone, fasting, in contemplation somewhere around Doune on the Knoydart peninsula. Staring out across the Sound of Sleat at Skye and further to the small isles. And I watched a series of weather fronts come in on the North wind. In between the blocks of cloud the strong sun clashed with water vapour and I saw rainbows.

I stared at the rainbows, watching them fade away trying to place that exact moment when it ceased to be visible, ceased to be ‘there’. Oddly this proved more difficult than I had imagined, just as I thought it was gone I caught some hint of indigo here or violet there – but concentrating on that splash of hue I could not be certain that the colour was there at all – was I imagining it? And how would such an act of imagination differ from any other act of perception? Did the rainbow occur out there, or only here in my mind?I thought I had a pretty good (if schoolboy) understanding of the science of rainbows, the matter of their formation. But it couldn’t entirely explain or contain my experience here. I was aware of how quantum physics taught that the observer affected the observed but this, also, did not seem to contain what I then experienced as a participation in the rainbow. The rainbow and I seemed part of a field that also contained sun, rain, sky, sea and a million or more other elements. Later I discovered I was not along in these feelings, I randomly encountered a book by Owen Barfield and read ‘[a]nd now before it fades, recollect all you have ever been told about the rainbow and its causes, and ask yourself the question. Is it really there?’ [Barfield, 1957].

The story science tells of rainbows is that they form when sunlight is refracted and internally reflected by raindrops. The angular radius of the primary bow is 42º. The colours, red on the outside, violet inside, are due to dispersion in the water [Collocott, 1971]. But this story seems to leave something out, something primary and visceral about the experience of a rainbow.

Looking into the scientific story of rainbows took me straight to the heart of the modern Western worldview and to the work of Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton. Both of these men made important contributions to the understanding of rainbows and prismatic light. Descartes is also notoriously parent to two ideas, which have defined the modern worldview of nature – the interpretation of the world as a mechanism, and the dualism of mind and body which it has been argued is the basis for the split between human consciousness and the rest of nature in Western thought. These concepts were further developed and validated by Newton through the use of mathematics, and the pursuit of quantification [Winter, 1996].

In his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Searching for Truth in the Sciences Descartes described the mathematics and mechanism of how a rainbow is formed:

"Considering that this bow appears not only in the sky, but also in the air near us, whenever there are drops of water illuminated by the sun, as we can see in certain fountains, I readily decided that it arose only from the way in which the rays of

light act on these drops and pass from them to our eyes. Further, knowing that the drops are round, as has been formerly proved, and seeing that whether they are larger or smaller, the appearance of the bow is not changed in any way, I had the idea of making a very large one, so that I could examine it better.

"I found that if the sunlight came, for example, from the part of the sky which is marked AFZ and my eye was at the point E, when I put the globe in position BCD, its part D appeared all red, and much more brilliant than the rest of it; and that whether I approached it or receded from it, or put it on my right or my left, or even turned it round about my head, provided that the line DE always made an angle of about forty-two degrees with the line EM, which we are to think of as drawn from the centre of the sun to the eye, the part D appeared always similarly red; but that as soon as I made this angle DEM even a little larger, the red colour disappeared; and if I made the angle a little smaller, the colour did not disappear all at once, but divided itself first as if into two parts, less brilliant, and in which I could see yellow, blue, and other colours ... When I examined more particularly, in the globe BCD, what it was which made the part D appear red, I found that it was the rays of the sun which, coming from A to B, bend on entering the water at the point B, and to pass to C, where they are reflected to D, and bending there again as they pass out of the water, proceed to the point ". [Descartes, 1637]

Sketch of how primary and secondary rainbows are formed from Descartes’s Discourse on the Method .

Descartes’s ready decision that a rainbow “arose only from the way in which the rays of light act on these drops and pass from them to our eyes” did not seem to entirely encompass my experience of the rainbow, it did not seem to me that this is “only” what was occurring when I saw a rainbow. The Cartesian method of searching for the ‘truth’ seems to privilege some truths over others, the mind/body dualism prevented incorporation of my consciousness within nature. Deep ecologist Arne Naess has written challenge of saving the planet from further destruction requires the widespread formulation of ecological selfhood and he proposes that “[t]he ecological self of a person is that with which this person identifies” [Seed et al, 1988]. Considered in this light the Cartesian philosophy with its design of dis-identification appears dangerous as well as incomplete.

In considering exactly how my experience differed from, or was broader than, the Cartesian explanation, I turned for assistance towards a phenomenological approach. In the work of David Abram I found some affinity with my felt sense, Abram quotes the philosopher Merleau-Ponty:

“…[a sensible quality, like the colour blue,] which is on the point of being felt sets a kind of problem for my body to solve. I must find the attitude which will provide it with the means of becoming determinate, of showing up as blue; I must find the reply to a question which is obscurely expressed. And yet I do so only when I am invited by it; my attitude is never sufficient to make me really see blue or really touch a hard surface. The sensible gives back to me what I lent to it, but this is only what I took from it in the first place. As I contemplate the blue of the sky … I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me,’ I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue….” [Merleau-Ponty, 1962 quoted in Abram, 1996]

The phrase “thinks itself in me” stood out for me in particular, being reminiscent of that feeling I had as I watched the rainbows fade out. This seemed to describe my sensation of the relationship between mind and world evidenced by the rainbow. Merleau-Ponty’s description did not persist in distinguishing consciousness from nature but accepted the participation of both.

If the rainbow of the Cartesian and Newtonian worldview is another alienated reduction then what alternative mind is available? What other stories of the rainbow are there to tell? Perhaps we can turn to toward indigenous, vernacular cultures. Do they have a vision that includes our participation? Do ‘they’ in the myriad of various cultures

subsumed and reduced to that ‘they’, have an alternate view that might speak a version more in synch with an ecological self? The anthropologist Levy-Bruhl and the psychologist Jung both refer a ‘primitive mentality’ and to the concept of ‘participation mystique’.‘[Participation mystique] consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity.’ [Jung, 1921]. This echoes my rainbow experience, when my participation in the event became apparent and I now longer felt distinct from what I was experiencing, the split between inner consciousness and outer nature dissolving.

“We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we have gained by prying into that matter” [Twain, 1880]

“I must question whether anyone who know optics, however religious he may be, can feel in equal degree the pleasure or reverence which an unlettered peasant may feel at the sight of a rainbow” [Ruskin, 1846]

Are the “savage” or the “peasant”, these obscure figures of Twain and Ruskin’s imaginations possessed of a deeper connection with, or participation in nature – or are they, as these authors seem to imply, in a bliss born of ignorance? What exactly has been “lost” that Twain’s “savage” has, whence the “pleasure” of Ruskin’s “peasant” or the “reverence” experienced by both? In order to try and grasp this I needed to know something of their stories about rainbows. Across indigenous, vernacular “unlettered” oral societies there appeared to me to be two archetypal aspects of the rainbow that stood out.

Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent , by Jimmy Njiminjuma, c.1985

Illustration showing Bifrost the rainbow bridge from Northern Antiquities by Oluf Olufsen Bagge (1847).

In the first type the rainbow is considered a bridge between the terrestrial and the divine – a connector force, an agent of communication between base and higher concerns. In Western mythologies this is most well known through Bifrost, the rainbow bridge of the Norse mythos that connects the world of the gods with the world of men. Rainbow bridges also appear, however, in myths as far apart as Japan and Mesopotamia [Heinberg, 1990]. This bridging aspect might be considered an attempt to move beyond dualisms, a resistance to a Cartesian style split of consciousness from nature.

The second mythological or archetypal aspect of the rainbow that seemed pertinent is its appearance as a creative force. This is most evident in the stories of the rainbow snake or rainbow serpent in Australian Aboriginal cultures. In these stories the rainbow snake appears as an agent of the act of creation, of the construction of world, the formation of the space in which we engage. David Abram writes of how the Australian Aboriginal conception of the Alcheringa or the Dreaming is of a realm from which our world is continually manifesting, emerging into our visible present and that “the rainbow is perceived as the very edge of the Dreaming, as the place where the invisible, unconscious potentials begin to become visible.” [Abram, 1996]. This is reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty, when he wrote of finding the attitude that would provide “the means of becoming determinate” and my own experience watching a rainbow traverse the uncertain edge between visibility and invisibility.

How, I wondered, could these ideas sit alongside the Western materialist, mechanistic, dualistic mindset that I had inherited and which shaped the culture of which I am part? How could these concepts be bridged?

Newton’s Optics – anonymous engraving

Newton by William Blake (1795)

I was aware that I was perhaps making a false binary of “Western” and “traditional” worldviews forcing another dualism. The Western mind was not entirely convinced by the Cartesian/Newtonian approach, there were dissenting voices within my own tradition. Prior to the Enlightenment there was a widely held sense of the spiritus mundi or soul of the world in Western thought, a unifying field that was the source of activity and movement [Winter, 1996]. Even at the time of the Enlightenment and after there was a contestation of its mechanistic worldview. William Blake famously depicted Newton, the great systematizer gazing at his own geometric designs of the world and facing darkness, while the colour-full world lay at his back unconsidered. Elsewhere he would attack the quantifying mind that reduced the world, writing ‘He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only’ [Blake, 1788]. In The Book of Urizen (your reason) he vilified the figure of Urizen, a personification of an alienating and oppressive reason [1794].

In The Prelude William Wordsworth described the scientific mind-set as a substitute, a “succedaneum”, for a lost connection with the natural world, the ‘unity of all’.

Science appears but what in truth she is, Not as our glory and our absolute boast, But as a succedaneum, and a prop To our infirmity. No officious slave Art thou of that false secondary power By which we multiply distinctions, then Deem that our puny boundaries are things That we perceive, and not that we have made. To thee, unblinded by these formal arts, The unity of all hath been revealed, And thou wilt doubt, with me less aptly skilled Than many are to range the faculties In scale and order, class the cabinet Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase Run through the history and birth of each As of a single independent thing. Hard task, vain hope, to analyse the mind, If each most obvious and particular thought, Not in a mystical and idle sense, But in the words of Reason deeply weighed, Hath no beginning. [Wordsworth, 1888]

Chellis Glendinning reads Wordworth’s use of the word ‘infirmity’ to describe a psychospiritual sickness, the scientific worldview’s disassociation of mind from body, intellect from feeling and human from natural world [Glendinning, 1994].

The later Romantic poet John Keats made a direct attack on western materialist science’s vision of the rainbow and the explanations of Descartes and Newton. In his poem Lamia,

the author despairs at the scientific explanations, which he describes as the unweaving of rainbows:

Do not all charms flyAt the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:We know her woof, her texture; she is givenIn the dull catalogue of common things.Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—Unweave a rainbow…[Keats, 1884]

This reading of the scientific description of rainbows, a reaction to Newton’s prismatic experimentation and resulting ‘cold philosophy’, appears to find fault primarily with its attitude of explication. The fault of this cold philosophy is its murder of mystery – its enslaving of this poetic form of nature within a prosaic cage of definition. Keats perhaps prefers what John Ruskin calls ‘ignorant enjoyment’ to a domesticating catalogue of details.

For most men, an ignorant enjoyment is better than an informed one; it is better to conceive the sky as a blue dome than a dark cavity, and a cloud as a golden throne than a sleety mist. [Ruskin, 1846]

Or even the ‘ignorance’ promulgated by Edmund Burke:

…there are reasons in nature why the obscure idea, when properly conveyed, should be more affecting than the clear. It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little. [Burke, 1766]

If Keats’s intention is to reject scientific knowledge all together, then he offers only a net reduction in our understanding of our relation to nature. The scientist Richard Dawkins offered a critical rebuff to Keats in his book Unweaving the Rainbow:

My title is from Keats, who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. Keats could hardly have been more wrong, and my aim is to guide all who are tempted by a similar view, towards the opposite conclusion. Science is, or ought to be, the inspiration for great poetry.[Dawkins, 1998]

But we could read Keats differently, see the ‘unweaving’ he chastises not as the act of explication but, rather, as an act of abstraction by reduction. In this sense, the unweaving he criticizes would be the separation of the experienced phenomena into a series of

aspects or qualities engaged in a mathematical association. The phenomena is separated into isolatable elements “woof”, “texture”, rays, wavelengths, raindrops, angle of incidence, position of the Sun, position of the observer et al. This is a form of explanation, which distinguishes and alienates the elements by seemingly making each discrete. The relationship of the elements, the ‘woven’, what we actually experience, is thereby rendered secondary to the separate identity of the enumerated constituent elements. It is a view that in Wordsworth’s phrase ignores the ‘unity of all’ in favour of treating each part as ‘a single independent thing’. Such a reductionist approach (a ‘philosophy’ which ‘clip[s]’) runs counter to an alternative holistic vision which rather than being a mystification, might offer a mystery we could like Merleau-Ponty ‘plunge into’.

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