for the love of all

Written by Chris Robey

As a freshman in college, I heard that one pound of beef requires something like 1,800 gallons of water to produce, and subsequently had the misfortune of watching the documentary Earthlings late at night. I swore off meat entirely after that, and have remained a vegetarian for over ten years now. I was strict about it, too, for a good, long while. Of course, things once firm inevitably soften—this is as true of Georgia granite as it is of the skin around your belly button. In my case, I married someone who loves sushi. 

I can forgive myself, now, for enjoying a little tuna or salmon every now and then. But I will not kid myself by placing fish within a chain of being that implies some greater or lesser degree of sentience. I know better than that, at least—my dad taught me to hunt and fish, and while I’ve never had the heart to pull the trigger any time a deer has crossed my sights, I have reveled in the thrill of hooking a trout and pulling it from a mountain stream. That first experience of watching the light go from a trout’s eye is enough to teach you that flesh is flesh. 

Personal ethics aside, it is that choice to pull the trigger, sink the hook—whatever it is you might do that will affect another life—that I want to linger on.  

There are teaching moments that help you know better, and there are thoughtless moments that show you how much damage you are capable of. The specific insidiousness of the latter is that, even if you swear never to do that thing again, you know now, and can never unknow, the fact that you are capable of it. At these moments, you catch an awful glimpse of the fluid superstructures on which things like chains of being are based, and are reminded, again and again, that the bent for dominance is a human artifact—a designed thing, a learned thing, a thing that is passed on—and that we each, by virtue of this inheritance, enact greater or lesser degrees of it. 

The particular experience of asserting dominance and observing its effect on another life has recurred enough in the time between my boyhood and budling mannish-ness that it now assumes the mantle of something like a revelation, albeit one that descends in slow spirals. The angle of that revelation’s descent can be measured by the shadows it has cast. If there were a way to read such shadows, I suppose they would say something of senselessness and an innate capacity for harm. Some call this sinfulness, others ignorance. Whatever it is, the litany goes on, and it is enough to convince oneself that you, specifically, are the reason for a dearth of mercy in the world. 

I have been baptized twice, the first time when I was newborn and the second time when I was about twelve. By that point, I had absorbed the idea that sin was a stain that baptismal waters could wash clean. That stain never did come out, so I’ve shifted my yearnings from freeing myself of the stain to learning to live with it and forgive myself, occasionally, for the mess it leaves behind. Such lessons are the work of a lifetime (maybe more) and being not-quite-thirty my own efforts at learning them have been sophomoric at best. For the time being, then, I am leaning on the experiences of others who have walked the Earth longer than I.

One teacher I have turned to time and again is Wendell Berry. Recently, while reading his newest book, The Need to Be Whole, I was struck by a passage near the end of the fourth chapter, which deals broadly with sin. The passage reads as follows: 

“It is our recognition of sin, of the real and absolute wrongs made possible by our dominance, that brings us to recognize the need for self-denial, temperance, prudence, mercy, neighborly love, repentance, and (we had better hope) forgiveness. The virtues, I think, are not limited or confined to Western tradition. They amount, in sum, to the condition of love. The real virtues, in opposition of real sins, work against self-righteousness, division, and exclusion in favor of the real happiness we may find in life responsibly shared—in conviviality.”

This passage follows, among many threads woven into this chapter, a reflection on Lynn White Jr.’s 1967 essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” to which Berry attributes the lasting infamy of Genesis 1:28 (be fruitful and multiply, etc.) as a Biblical justification for the Anthropocene. Berry’s qualms with this essay mostly have to do with the role that it has played in enabling other writers (mostly academics) to get away with using Genesis as a proxy for the Bible as a whole when discussing the relationship between Christianity and the environment. I’m sympathetic to his qualms, and open to his counterpoint that there are as many verses in the Bible urging stewardship of the Earth as there are justifications for dominion. 

His reflection on the essay is brief, however, and I mourn the fact that he does not linger on it long enough to recall the other half of White’s thesis—namely, that it is Saint Francis’s insistence on humility and the equality of all creatures, human and nonhuman, that offers an alternative to the axiom of dominion. Had he done so, I think he would have found a useful analogue to his invocation of conviviality. 

As The Need to Be Whole is above all concerned with the cultivation of neighborliness in place of prejudice, Berry’s connotation of “life responsibly shared” with conviviality aligns the term toward this end. And if White’s calling on Saint Francis is any indication, it would seem that he and Berry are more or less in agreement, differing takes on Genesis aside, that enacting conviviality means learning to be a good neighbor, to all living beings as to other people.

Saint Francis, as depicted at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Sants Fe, NM

Photo by Chris Robey

Both, I think, would find further points of agreement in Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, published just a few years after White’s essay, wherein he, too, invokes conviviality to distill a vision for a post-industrial society based on “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment.” Though chiefly concerned with the way people use technology, Illich’s work offers a mutual touchpoint in its aspirations toward autonomy through the recognition and honoring of interdependence. Illich’s vision is also remarkable for its radical humility. Take this snippet as an example:

“Values abstractly stated are reduced to mechanical processes that enslave men. This serfdom can be broken only by the joyful self-recognition of the fool who assumes personal responsibility for his folly.” 

Slaves to abstraction, we are only free so long as we are able to root in and call our own bluffs. 

Bearing in mind that Illich’s view of technology was expansive enough to include all purposefully designed instruments, “be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators,” this particular rule, to my mind, seems a vitally convivial tool in itself. We might regard its underlying virtues, like humility, as convivial tools as well. 

Berry crucially reminds us that neither virtue nor its exemplars are confined to Western tradition (thank God, or what have you), and we needn’t look far to encounter any one of the multitudes of kindred spirits who make up Joseph Campbell’s thousand-faced hero. There are, for example, the twenty-four Tirthankaras of Jainsim—those wayward souls who, as the wheel of time spins on, have forded the waters of samsara and left a wake for others to follow. 

If there were a Jaina equivalent to Saint Francis among the Tirthankaras, it would be Mahavira—so declares Laxmi Mall Singhvi in his 1990 essay “The Jain Declaration on Nature.” Singhvi specifically upholds Mahavira as an exemplar of ecocentric living and draws on some of the supreme preacher’s many aphorisms to bolster his case. One stands out to me in particular:

"There is nothing so small and subtle as the atom nor any element so vast as space. Similarly, there is no quality of soul more subtle than non-violence and no virtue of spirit greater than reverence for life."

Here Mahavira is invoking the central thread of Jainism—ahimsa, or non-violence—as well as the collective teachings of the Tirthankara lineage in sum: life is divine. These tenets encapsulate a dizzying array of insights and practices, from which Singhvi plucks a select few to further align the Jaina way of knowing with the dawning recognition of humanity’s frayed relations with our Earthly neighbors. Of particular note is another aphorism, drawn from elsewhere in Jain scripture: parasparopagraho jivinam, meaning “[a]ll life is bound together by mutual support and interdependence.” The underlying sentiment is beautiful in itself, but it is Singhvi’s summation of it that really captivates me. Being Jaina himself, he testifies that Jains view life “as a gift of togetherness, accommodation and assistance in a universe teeming with interdependent constituents.” In other words, Jainsim is a lifeway that daily yearns for conviviality. 

That we exist in a web of interdependent relationships with other beings, and that this web of being comprises anything like a constituency, can be utterly mystifying when considered at arm’s length. If we get close enough, however, I think we’ll find that the tools we need to understand these truths are already at hand. It takes a while to learn how to use a tool, however, and in the course of our fumbling we may well brush up against our capacity for harm. 

I was reminded of this myself just the other day. Having just switched a load of laundry from the washer to the dryer, I was walking back from the shared laundry room of the apartment complex that my wife and I live in. It is a garden-style complex built in 1938, one of the last such complexes still standing in Silver Spring, and as such has a great multitude of trees at its center. The complex is situated in a wedge between two busy roads and a more modern tower-style complex. During our initial search for housing in Silver Spring, my wife and I started by touring the apartments in that tower. I remember standing in a show unit on the 12th floor, looking out toward Bethesda, just northwest of Washington, D.C., and being struck not by the skyline but rather by the patch of trees arrayed at my feet. Save for nearby Rock Creek Park, it was the only such patch around, all the rest having been given over to development. We toured several other apartments thereafter, but truthfully I don’t remember much at all about them. My heart was already dead-set. 

Our complex is made up equally of apartments and townhouses, all of which face toward the street and form a kind of walled enclosure. The trees and the slope they’re rooted in are sheltered by this enclosure, which also buffers the noise coming from the streets and nearby Metro station. A little creek flows down this slope—it is heavily urbanized, with deeply incised slopes held up for most of their length by gabion bags, and serves more or less as a storm drain for the complex and its surrounds. But, it is trickling water nonetheless. The path from my building to the laundry room follows this creek, and it is usually pleasant to walk. 

At a juncture along this path, there is a crooked bitternut hickory that, until that moment, I had not given much thought to. As I approached it, I noticed that its leaves and branches were covered in fruiting bodies. At first, I thought they were ripening hickory nuts, but as I leaned closer I could see that the placement and shape were all wrong. They were too wart-like and hairy. Honestly, they kind of looked like edamame—bright green and clustered but with ruddy patches and neat, freshly-drilled holes in the sides. The holes were no larger than a pinprick.  

I have friends who are familiar with galls, and upon seeing those holes immediately remembered examples those friends had pointed out to me. I got excited then, and scurried back to the apartment to see if I could figure out what I had been looking at. 

After a burst of research and cross-referencing, I arrived at a likely answer: the hickory leaf stem gall aphid, or Phylloxera caryaecaulis. These insects are not true aphids, but rather a closely-related genus generally referred to as phylloxerans. Though there are 29 known species of phylloxeran, there is still a good deal of mystery bound up in their identification. Keys are available to differentiate between the galls they form—which is how I made my guess—but few, if any, have been developed to distinguish between their different species or the various forms they take over their lifespan.

Aphids are a family of pinhead-sized insects that often employ plants to support their reproduction, hence the formation of galls, as shown here.

Photo by Chris Robey

The lifecycle of Phylloxera caryaecaulis unfolds over a single year. They specifically inhabit hickory trees—mainly bitternuts, pignuts, and shagbarks—and first emerge from eggs that have overwintered in the bark crevices or the wizened relicts of the previous year’s galls. The timing of their emergence varies by locality, but typically falls from mid to late April, just as the hickories are beginning to leaf out. From each egg emerges a young fundatrix, or stem-mother, who then latches on to the ripest, juiciest part of the hickory that she can find, usually along young twigs, petioles, or the main vein at the bases of leaflets. This induces the hickory to begin forming a gall around the fundatrix wherever she may have latched. The gall encloses her and becomes her den, wherein she continues to draw nourishment from the hickory’s cell sap. Over time the gall becomes bulbous and knobby, eventually growing to about the size of a grape. Initially a pale, yellowish green in color, it gradually develops ruddy patches as the fundatrix approaches plump maturity.

The fundatrix then does something miraculous. Sealed within the gall, she reproduces parthenogenetically—literally, this means “virgin creation”—and deposits thousands of eggs around her. In late May, a hoard of glassy nymphs hatches from these eggs, every one of which is female and genetically identical to her stem-mother. Several generations of stem-daughters may cycle through a single gall over the course of the summer. In late July, the galls finally burst, at which point the stem-daughters sprout wings and crawl to the undersides of the hickory’s leaflets. There, they immediately lay another clutch of eggs. Depending on the size of the stem-daughter, the offspring that hatch from these eggs may be male or female. By summer’s end, these offspring will have mated. The fertilized females will go on to lay a final clutch of eggs in the bark crevices or old galls, from which next year’s stem-mothers will emerge. The males go off to be eaten by something else, presumably, or otherwise drop dead.

Though the galls are conspicuous—globular and bright when in use and lingering for years afterward as dark, knotty warts—they are not usually lethal to the host tree. Leaves carry on photosynthesizing as before; cambial tissues continue to deliver water and nutrients. At worst, the tree may drop some of its leaves prematurely. This can be an issue for young trees that are still getting established, but most mature hickories are hardy enough to withstand it.

If it wasn’t apparent before, you will know by now that I am fairly curious. Having learned so much about phylloxerans, I should have been satisfied, and for the remainder of that evening I was. But in between bites of cereal the next morning, I found myself wanting yet further affirmation that I had guessed correctly. It wouldn’t be enough to check buds or leaflets, or compare the pictures I’d taken of the galls with what I saw in all the guides I’d referenced. My fingers rapped the table. The acrid smell of hickory tannins lingered in my nostrils. I wanted to split something open and see what was inside.

So, I put on a jacket, loped out into the brisk morning air, and again approached the crooked hickory. Standing on my tip-toes, I took hold of a low-hanging branch, plucked a cluster of leaflets with a gall at its base, and brought it back inside with me, sniffing my fingertips along the way.

Back at the breakfast table, I split the gall apart and pried it open with my pocket knife. I would like to say that I wasn’t expecting anybody to be home, but the truth is that I had guessed that a fundatrix would be inside the gall well before the knife’s edge ever touched its skin. Sure enough, I saw the slightest hint of movement from inside and knew that I had found her. I pressed the knife further into the gall and extracted her, then held her squirming under the lamplight on the tip of the blade. She was no bigger than a blackhead.

I would also like to say that in that moment I was concerned with more than just being right, but I wasn’t. I was, in fact, reveling in it.

Of course, of all the questions that had led me out into the morning air, there was an important one that I had not considered: now what?

The gall was split, its contents exposed, and there was no putting them back. The fundatrix’s chances of survival were now functionally nil. There would be no more miracles, not from this one.

So, I panicked and squashed her between my thumb and forefinger. Unsure of what to do about the stain, I wiped my fingers on my jeans as if she had been so much mustard.

In common usage, the word “gall” is synonymous with impudence. But, pray tell, which is more impudent: a creature making itself at home in the only way it knows how, more or less harmlessly, or my exerting eminent domain to satisfy a boyish urge? And it is specifically a boyish urge, the kind that encourages peeing from high places or kicking puffball mushrooms. It has also driven grown men to light forest fires, shoot passenger pigeons, and point $3 billion disco sticks with propellant capacities of 1,200 tons at the sky.

That urge is very much a tacit thing, not usually put to words. But there are, in fact, many words for it. The one I tend to use most in writing is “hubris.” If I could give it an axiom, it would be “we can, so we do.” Conversationally, however, I usually just call it fucking around and finding out.

What I found out that morning is that my curiosity can get the best of me, and that when it does I am quite literally willing to kill to satisfy it.

Jains are wise enough to know that you cannot make it through this life without killing. They recognize vegetarianism as an imperfect abstinence and do not necessarily equate the fact that fawns occasionally get chewed up by the combines that harvest soybeans with a lack of mercy. By their standard, it is not necessarily the act of killing that constitutes a sin, but rather the intention to kill. Mahavira had an aphorism for this, too: “You are what you intend to hit, injure, insult, torment, persecute, torture, enslave or kill."

So.

I recognize that there are larger catastrophes, which is exactly why I felt the need to tell you this. Now, more than ever, we should be yearning for conviviality. Considered at a distance, the breadth of that word may seem overwhelming, but up close I think we’ll find that it amounts to neighborliness, no more and no less. But even learning to be a good neighbor can be daunting—Berry has spent a lifetime working at it—and people are tricky. The learning curve grows steeper or gentler depending on who your neighbors are.

I would say that there is no harm in starting small, but that is not what I have found to be the case. There very well may be. But, it is in recognizing our capacity for harm that we realize the necessity of things like self-denial, temperance, prudence, mercy, neighborly love, repentance, and forgiveness. Having recognized this in myself, I can at least venture an alternative axiom for those moments when I am again lulled by boyish urges: “you could, but for the love of all please don’t.”

This piece was written by Chris Robey, who also writes as tumbleintheroar. You can find more of his work here, and on Instagram.