Vis Medicatrix Naturae

Like everyone else I’m still trying to come to terms with the new social reality imposed on us as a consequence of the Covid 19 pandemic. Presumably we are in the very early stages of this crisis and there is no clarity or certainty about how this will all play out. I am myself only on the third day of this self isolation, or social distancing regime but I have decided that I will continue my normal routine of a 30 – 40 minute walk each morning. I live very close to the graveyard where the Shropshire writer Mary Webb is buried and I am intending to head over there each morning. I can’t visit the graveyard without pausing for a moment at Mary’s grave, and this seems to be the beginning of a new sacrament for me.

Although best known for her novels Precious Bane and Gone to Earth (which was adapted into a film by the divine partnership of Powell and Pressburger), Mary was also an accomplished nature poet and essayist. One of her most powerful essays, Vis Medicatrix Naturae, has for quite some time felt to me to be a lost classic; a forgotten plea for a new (yet eternal) way of being within nature whose message has increasingly urgent relevance but which is unheard. In the midst of this strange new quarantine Vis Medicatrix Naturae (which means ‘the healing power of nature) can provide both solace and reproach. It represents a path that we might have chosen to follow but which, in our hubris, we spurned. We can only hope that it isn’t yet too late to learn.

At the age of 20 Mary suffered from the symptoms of Graves’ disease, a thyroid condition that sadly caused her neck to swell and her eyes to protrude. As well as making her seriously ill, the disease also resulted in the already shy Mary perceiving herself to be ugly and she would generally shun social situations, preferring to spend her time in the Shropshire countryside.

Her confinement through illness taught her a valuable lesson about the abundance of nature. In Vis Medicatrix Naturae she wrote: “It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small account in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life. Dawn, seen through a sick woman’s window, however narrow, pulses with the same fresh wonder as it does over the whole width of the sea. A branch of flushed wild-apple brings the same joy as the mauve trumpet-flower of the tropics. One violet is as sweet as an acre of them. And it often happens – as if by a kindly law of compensation – that those who have only one violet find the way through its narrow, purple gate into the land of God, while many who walk over dewy carpets of them do not so much as know that there is a land or a way.”

In this time of neo-quarantine these words will give some solace to those who might be suffering from understandable anxiety or worry. But further than this we should also pay attention to Mary’s insights even if and when the current threat from Covid 19 has disappeared (or diminished) because she offers a view of nature that will need to be developed as we enter the Athropocene.

The contemporary mindset, more or less, will divide the natural world into two camps: resource and threat. Animals that can be eaten or otherwise exploited for their natural functions, through dairy production for example, are resources. Untameable animals and viruses like Covid 19 are threats. It might seem reasonable and natural to see the world in these terms. Like other animals we have evolved to be able to distinguish between resources and threats. But the big problem that we face (and which we have caused) is that the human perspective on the world has become aligned with a global technical machine (capital) that is accelerating its way through the Earth’s natural resources in ways that are fundamentally imbalanced. As we race through the resources with apparently no restriction or obstacle, it generates a feeling of invulnerability and separation from nature so that when something like Covid 19 suddenly appears it confronts us as an existential threat.

Our hubris has caused us to posit ourselves as outside and separate from nature: as God. But even this perspective on the situation is in error. Because God should not be seen as an entity outside of the natural world. To turn to Mary Webb’s Vis Medicatrix Naturae again: “Here is a kingdom of wonder and of secrecy into which we can step at will, where dwell nations whose very language is forever unknown to us, whose laws are not our laws, yet with whom we have a bond, because we are another expression of the life that created them.” The human has developed unique faculties (at least they are unique so far as we know) and has delved into some of the most profound mysteries of the universe, positing theories such as the big bang and quantum fields. But in doing so we have also hypertrophied the human perspective on the world. Yes, it is natural to have an instinctive fear of threats and an instinctive appetite for resources, but we have abstracted those perspectives through the mediation of technical devices. We see the world through these devices and we have come to believe that these screens seal us off from the rest of life as though they were our own form of PPE (personal protective equipment). Our meat is packaged in ways that distance it from the killing that produced it. And we think that our belief in science immunises us from archaic diseases, at least in the west, so that deadly viruses are always threats that appear in distant, undeveloped parts of the world. Covid 19 has violently ruptured the abstracted, distancing mechanisms that modernity has encouraged us to employ when thinking of our place in nature.

If the current period of isolation begins to nurture a different way of being in nature then it may turn out that Covid 19 is our redeemer. When looked at in one way, Covid appears as a defensive measure produced by the Earth to protect itself from the machinations of man. Certainly, it would be well to keep in mind that if we want to get into conflict with our planet then there is only ever going to be one man standing at the end of it. Somehow, we need to begin to dissolve our hubristic stance towards life and gain a new understanding of our place as one part of nature amongst an almost infinitely varied surfeit of other lives. Somehow, we must begin to live in a way that would allow us to recognise even something like Covid 19 as belonging to the same order of being as us. To turn to Mary one final time: “And because those who most need [life’s] influx have only the least of earth’s graces to watch, this book is concerned with muted skies, minute miracles, songs of the night, and the proud humility of the germ that holds in its littleness the Lord of Immortality.”