THE TASTE OF SKY

An upward gaze as the first human act

A few years ago I had the opportunity to take part in a safari trip. Observing animals in their natural habitats had never been a particular ambition of mine, especially as wildlife documentaries seemed to do it so well on our behalf. Nevertheless circumstances conspired to make the trip possible, and I’m very glad they did, for the experience made a lasting impression on me.

Among the many marvellous moments of those few days, one has remained especially vivid. Our driver had spied a pair of cheetahs in the far distance, and as we drew closer their shapes became more defined. The two stood on their forepaws at angles to each other as they gazed over the savannah before them.

They were quite immobile. As such they formed a strange contrast to the bunch of us humans loaded into our jeep, with our heads bobbing and our telescopic lenses twisting about for the best angle on the scene.

There they were, as we drew cautiously closer, still motionless in their far-gazing impassivity. Even from a few hundred yards one could sense the exquisitely honed functionality of every nerve and sinew, all subordinated to a taut beauty of poise. It made perfect sense to me then that the ancient Egyptians, along with so many other archaic cultures, could have envisioned their deities in theriomorphic form.

Still the pair gazed into the distance, unaware of the jeep and its curious cargo of neck twisters and lens adjusters. It felt as though the two great cats owned all they surveyed, but not in our human sense of the term, as something separable from ourselves: it was rather as though they owned it by being it, by expanding into it.

These two cheetahs mastered the panorama simply by being what they were, alert yet at rest. Regal was a word that came to mind. It made me think of how kings in ancient times were habitually likened by poets and bards to lions or to other great felines, not just in the fierceness they were meant to display in battle but in their impassive composure when at rest.

Still not a move from either of them. It felt as though they could have stayed there just as they were for hours, until hunger eventually roused them to prowl their domain. Meanwhile the jeep’s cargo had settled down a bit, our own hunger for snapped images having been sated for the time being.

An interval arose in which we too could do a bit of contemplating. It occurred to me then that this was something you could never get from a wildlife documentary: the duration, the timelessness of it all. Maybe there is still a sense of it in the footage as raw material, but it’s cut down soon enough in the editing. For while the subject matter is animals in the wild, the presentation is for humans on their sofas, time-bound humans taking a few moments out from a busy routine.

That’s not to put down wildlife documentaries, or their viewers (which would include me). They can be wonderful, among the best things that our screens make available to us. And yet they cannot easily convey two key elements of the live experience: the spaciousness in which it takes place, and the almost timeless quality through which it unfolds.

Space and time: two quite distinct parameters for us, and yet here they were almost blended into one. It was as though time had emerged out of space only just far enough to constitute the diurnal cycle, yet hardly existed beyond that. Which was why those two cheetahs could cast such timeless gazes over that great amplitude of space.

But then something else occurred to me as I cast my own gaze over the scene. Maybe it was because the earth was so level and the space so vast and the cheetahs’ heads were turned so placidly yet implacably straight ahead, that the realisation came to me just then.

Animals never look up.

Of course in one sense they do look up at a lot of things. It could be at overhanging fruit, or a prey escaped up a tree, or in a more domestic context a dog looking up expectantly at its master when its lead makes an appearance. But an animal only ever looks up because… because something or someone makes its head turn.

This was part of what felt godlike about those two animals, the sense that they were eternal, that they would never change; that their predecessors had gazed in just the same way as they did now, and their offspring would do likewise.

Yet the domain of these marvellous creatures was circumscribed: somehow it was inconceivable that they could raise their heads even a couple of degrees from the horizontal. To do so would be to break the spell they exerted over their surroundings, a spell that also worked in reverse to hold their masterful gazes forever on a level.

Seeing the cheetahs there at rest was to sense that the sky was a dimension that simply did not impinge on them or enter their purview. Even when rainclouds gathered and storms broke they would respond to the consequences that those things had on the plane of earth, but not to the celestial phenomena themselves.

Only one terrestrial being has ever responded to the heavens. And it is no coincidence that the being in question is unique also in being bipedal. Scientists debate the point at which man truly became human - when he started fashioning tools, when he developed the rudiments of language, when his existence in groups acquired some kind of semi-conscious organisation.

I would suggest a different and far simpler criterion. Man crossed from the animal into the human domain when he first looked up. When he first turned his face to the sky, not to focus on something specific but simply because he was able to do so. When he first took in what he saw, not with some immediate gain in view but for the sake of it, the wonder of it. That was when he became man, with that simplest of gestures - and one that cannot possibly have left any material trace behind.

This criterion suggests something else about our human nature. We have a relationship to the heavens in a way that the animals do not - the birds of the air no more than the beasts of the field, for the air is simply the unreflected environment for the bird just as the earth is for the land-bound animal or the sea for its fish.

We have a relationship to the heavens, and by the same token, by virtue of that first implicit polarity, we have a relationship also to the earth. Like the animals we arise out of the earth, but we are not bound by its contours nor entirely determined by its topography. And we are not so bound or determined because we have the sky above us, counterposed to the earth; the sky as an explorable dimension rather than as a limiting condition, as it is for the animals.

Thus from a very early stage there has been the intuition that man is the middle term of a ternary relationship: heavens-man-earth. Bipedal posture has always been the physical complement of that new vision. It is this posture which invites the upward tilt of the head, somehow making it natural for man to look up, and in so doing to open a new dimension on his world.

Physically we see in a way that is not so different from how animals see, but we also do something which animals cannot do, which is to behold. Without any utilitarian end in view, man beholds the heavens. “Once you have tasted the taste of sky, you will forever look up”, says Leonardo Da Vinci.

Once you look up, and become aware of up, you look down in a different way, because now you are aware of down. Once you look out, and become aware of the world in its otherness, you can also turn a notional gaze back on yourself. You become cognisant of an inwardness, a selfhood, which the animal also experiences but cannot recognise.

Consider then man as he has become in our own age. How often, apart from checking the weather, do we look up to take in the sky, simply because we can do so, and because we can enlarge ourselves in so doing? For that matter how often do we look within, directed there not by some discordant jangle of thought and feeling, but out of a responsiveness to something deep and beautiful within us awaiting discovery?

Instead of that, our dominant directions are out and down. These are the two directions we share with the animals, even if the content of our attention is different from theirs. Our outward look expresses a harassed fixation on externalities, while our bowed heads, absorbed in preoccupation, are constrained by personalistic concerns.

It is time to find again within ourselves the taste of sky. Even as a visual phenomenon, so expansive when we turn to it from our cluttered human world, it is already a balm. But beyond the visual there is the boundlessness it represents, which is also an image of what lies boundless within us. Although blocked out most of the time by our subjective clutter, that inwardness is there available to us in its vastness and peace as surely as the sky is there above our heads.

To rediscover those dimensions above and within us will mean loosening the spell of the downcast look. That look doesn’t even connect us to the earth we tread, but simply weighs on us, making us unseeing, as though collectively ashamed of what we have become as a species.

And yet the taste of sky is still there somewhere, waiting to be revived in us. The Earth depends on it. For the Earth can be healed only when the polarity with the heavens is re-established. And that can happen only through the fruition of Earth’s own consciousness as it has become embodied in Man.

But what is this Man? Not the human who still doesn’t know who he is, and is fixated on the ground beneath his feet as though to find an answer there. No, Man is what we have not yet become. It may be that we are in the throes of that becoming now, against all appearances to the contrary, and that we can yet fulfil the promise of that first upward gaze.