One of the great challenges of our time is to understand science as a field of knowledge discrete to itself. Science has been captured by politics and business as a lever for gaining wealth and power in the world.
My conversation with Professor Alan Rayner speaks about a perspective that he calls “natural inclusion. “ When I first heard Alan use the term, “natural inclusion”, I was unsure what he meant. My imagination was stimulated to consider whether my own perspective about the centrality of nature as a context of relationships could be a touch-point with his view. His understanding brings science and art together to create an imaginative way of looking at the world that is inviting.
The fascinating thing about Alan’s life as a leading scientist is that he is also a painter and a poet. After the video, I have included three of his paintings with commentary, one of his poems, and a link to another on YouTube.
Enjoy my conversation with Alan Rayner.
Fountains of the Forrest (Oil on Board, 1998) by Alan Rayner.
This was painted for the British Mycological Society, in my year as its President, to depict the dynamic interrelationships of trees and fungi. Within and upon the branching, enfolding, water-containing surfaces of forest trees and reaching out from there into air and soil are branching, enfolding, water-containing surfaces of finer scale, the mycelial networks of fungi. These networks provide a communications interface for energy transfer from neighbour to neighbour, from living to dead and from dead to living. They maintain the forest in flux as they gather, conserve, explore for and recycle supplies of chemical fuel originating from photosynthesis. So, the fountains of the forest trees are connected and tapped into by the fountains of fungal networks in a moving circulation: an evolutionary spiral of differentiation and integration from past through to unpredictable future; a water delivery from the fire of the sun, through the fire of respiration, and back again to sky, contained within the contextual boundaries of a wood-wide circulation.
‘How Compassion Fruits’ (Oil painting on canvas, by Alan Rayner, 2008).
Life, love and suffering spring from the same source of receptive space that is present within, throughout and beyond the earth, air, fire and water of inspiring and expiring natural flow forms as energetic configurations. These natural figures dynamically balance receptive negative influence and responsive positive influence through the reflective zero-point core of their local and non-local self-identity.
Holding Openness (Oil on Canvas, 2005) Alan Rayner
Alan Rayner’s Poetry
Light as a dynamic natural inclusion of darkness continually brings an endless diversity of flow-form to life.
You ask me who you are
To tell a story you can live your life by
A tail that has some point
That you can see
So that you no longer
Have to feel so pointless
Because what you see is what you get
If you don’t get the meaning of my silence
Because you ain’t seen nothing yet
You ask me for illumination
To cast upon your sauce of doubt
Regarding what your life is all about
To find a reason for existence
That separates the wrong
From righteous answer
In order to cast absence out
To some blue yonder
Where what you see is what you get
But you don’t get the meaning of my darkness
Because you ain’t seen nothing yet
You look around the desolation
Of a world your mined strips bare
You ask of me in desperation
How on Earth am I to care?
I whisper to stop telling stories
In abstract words and symbols
About a solid block of land out there
In which you make yourself a declaration
Of independence from thin air
Where what you see is what you get
When you don’t get the meaning of my present absence
Because you ain’t seen nothing yet
You ask of me with painful yearning
To resolve your conflicts born of dislocation
From the context of an other world out where
Your soul can wonder freely
In the presence of no heir
Where what you see is what you get
When you don’t get the meaning of my absent presence
Because you ain’t seen nothing yet
You ask me deeply and sincerely
Where on Earth can you find healing
Of the yawning gap between emotion
And the logic setting time apart from motion
In a space caught in a trap
Where what you see is what you get
And in a thrice your mind is reeling
Aware at last of your reflection
In a place that finds connection
Where your inside becomes your outside
Through a lacy curtain lining
Of fire, light upon the water
Now your longing for solution
Resides within and beyond your grasp
As the solvent for your solute
Dissolves the illusion of your past
And present future
Now your heart begins to thunder
Bursting hopeful with affection
Of living light for loving darkness
Because you ain’t felt no thing yet
Evolutionary ecologist, writer and artist, exploring the philosophy of natural inclusion
Author - The Origin of Life Patterns: In the Natural Inclusion of Space in Flux
Occurrity - https://occurrity.com/alanrayner/