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"Show me something snaky":
Reflections on Eric Voegelin's theory of consciousness and consubstantiality
and the experiences of the naturalist
(with specific reference to the work of Loren Eiseley)
I would like to begin with two anecdotes that remember human encounters with animals. A
friend, Rebecca Dodson, who lives on a subsistence farm near Saltillo, Texas told me the following
story.
I was sitting down at the branch with my bare feet dangling in the water. After a while a water
snake swam along. I tried to achieve a quietness that eliminated everything except the snake and me.
Then I thought: “Show me something snaky.” Slowly the snake swam toward my ankle and rubbed his
head on one side, and then he swam to the other side and rubbed my ankle. Now, I thought maybe I had
a responsibility to show him something human. I didn't know, however, but what I already had.
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David James Duncan, a novelist, writes of his experience with a Coho salmon when he was six
years old in his book, My Story as Told by Water. I quote the story at length here for what I hope will
become obvious in the quoting:
Kids tend to befriend creeks the way adults befriend each other: start shallow, and slowly work
your way deeper. . . .
Then I came to water too deep to wade, too deep to see bottom: a shady black pool, surface-
foam eddying like stars in a nebula. And though I wanted to keep exploring, though I’d barely begun,
the big pool proved a psychic magnet . . .
Its surface was a night sky in broad daylight . . .
Its depths were another world within this one . . .
The entire frenetic creek stopped here to rest . . .
I was 78 percent water myself . . .
I felt physically ordered to crawl out on a cantilevered log, settle belly-down, and watch the
pool gyre directly beneath me. . . . Pieces of the mental equipment I’d been taught to think I needed
began falling into the pool and dissolving: my preference of light to darkness; sense of rightsideup and
upsidedownness, sense of surfaces and edges, sense of where I end and other things or elements begin.
The pool taught nothing but mystery and depth. An increasingly dissolved “I” followed the first verb,
gravity, down. Yet depth, as the dissolved “I” sees it, is also height.
Then, up from those sunless depths, or yet also down from foam-starred heavens, a totem-red,
tartan-green impossibility descended or arose, its body so massive and shining, visage so travel-scarred
and ancient, that I was swallowed like Jonah by the sight. I know no better way to invoke the being’s
presence than to state the naked name:
Coho: . . . And as it eased past my face not a body’s length away, the coho gazed—with one
lidless, primordial eye—clean into the suspended heart of me: gazed not like a salmon struggling up
from an ocean to die, but like a Gaelic or Kwakiutl messenger dropped down from a realm of gods, Tir
na nOg, world of deathlessness, world of Ka, to convey, via the fact of its being, a timeless message of
sacrifice and hope. . . .
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Recounted to me by Rebecca Dodson, December 13, 2002.
Convention