The humans are too easily fascinated by our own capacity to form nouns. It is as if we became so excited about this ability that we began, and then proceeded, to forget to pay even the most cursory inner attention to anything we could name — except, perhaps, to count it.

Thus, we came to think plants, animals, each other, and living places mere things. Countable items. Commodities, at best. As this myopia proceeded to acquire dominance in our inner and intellectual world, we were rapidly remade in its image. Today, it is unfathomably common to see verbal representations of human beings — what we might humorously understand as linguistic and ideological ghosts — inhabiting, and effectively controlling human beings.

But the beings of the world are not names, objects, functions or numbers, and it is not merely their existence or non-existence that is at question. Even situations cannot be thus. We must remember more than the numero-linguisitc representations we so habitually believe; for it is the living -relationships- among beings and circumstances that form the fundamental mesh of abundances and sentience from which our own bodies, and even the minds with which we acquire and enact these deadly confusions proceed and have their basis.

These relationships, like the beings themselves, may be delimited or discerned by virtue of names and numbers, perspectives on function and value — but they cannot be alive to such an approach, because the world inherent in it is abstract and uninhabitable — even to us. We do not want to become its likeness, either. The universe is alive and responds, like other living things, to direct contact and relation.

The capacity to abstract and represent is compelling in the domain of thought; but it can be quite deadly when translated into the domain of living beings where, indeed, abstraction is equivalent to a kind of killing. A kind that ends with a token which we mistake for what it replaced.

Things, beings and circumstances are invitations to intimacy, transentience, discovery and understanding. These cannot be had by science or abstraction alone. In fact, should we confusedly begin with that approach, we will quickly find ourselves in a graveyard to which our own stone shall too soon be added.