RAINBOW keeps

falling on my head

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I’m learning to read the wind

And the wall of weather over Skye
Will be here in minutes
The water in the air
Is pushing rainbows at me
Full arches
Buttresses left and right
A new palette to paint
New things with.

First – particles of ice on the in-breath

Scouts and heralds
Then – an exhalation of hail or snow
Each point of white
Pursued by a line of tail
The trace of motion inscribed on my retina.

Across the sea, the Cuillin hills

Dance in and out of view
 In pale garments
You 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 fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In 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’.
Bibliography

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