Outside is Inside

Guest contribution from Andreas Weber

This contribution[1] from Andreas Weber draws together experience and sense making to offer a perspective on ‘biopoetics’, seeing “reality as a meshwork of mutually transformative and meaningful relationships, which are experienced by subjects. From this vantage point, creativity and poetic expression, which since historical modernity was previously only reserved for the cultural sphere, become fundamental elements of reality’.[2]

One morning in late March, I walked into the Grunewald forest. I slipped through the low entrance that leads from the sidewalk into the undergrowth and then widens into a path trodden many times. It was a nondescript day, hazy, gray, but with a promise of sun in the air, like many Berlin early spring days. It was wintry, but the air already felt light.

Grundewald Forest. Photo Andreas Weber

The bushes and trees were still in their winter torpor. While the sides of their trunks facing West were covered with layers of green algae, their east-facing sides were bare. I put my hand on the green layer. The bark with the algae brushed against my skin, cold and damp, unaffected, and yet with a strange sense of subliminal compliance, such as only the surfaces of living creatures have about them.

I strolled on between the trees through the twilight of early spring. Then I stopped again. From the smooth, gray bark of a maple, a light green shoot had advanced. All the other trees appeared rigid, but this one shoot had begun to spread into the light, about an inch long. It was sprouting not in the conventional way, like buds unfold into foliage, but it had broken forth from the middle of the hard, protective bark. Why was the hard skin of the tree, which all winter had been silent like a closed wall, was opening up? Why in this particular spot?

At that moment, a new way of describing life popped into my head: A closed wall that is an open gateway. A living being like this maple is closed to the rest of the world – and at the same time it opens itself at certain points and in specific ways so that it becomes completely permeable. It is both: hermetically occupied with itself, and ecstatically spread outward. On this tree, on this early spring day, I could read one and the other, and also see that neither applies to the exclusion of the other. Both are present at the same time and in confusion. Life is a closed vessel. Life is the unconditional opening to the outside. The way these two diametrical opposites can be realized together is the ravishing and terrifying dance of aliveness.

Budding Tree. Photo Andreas Weber

The bark of the maple is the boundary surface where the body of the tree touches the bodies outside – mine, for example, which also has a boundary surface – my skin – which is also an organ of closure and opening. Every body surface of a living being is as much a protective wall as an embrace. The life that unfolds behind it – yes, strictly speaking just through it – can only exist because it closes itself and opens itself. To get both under one hat at the same time seems impossible; and yet this is the miracle that happens again and again, with every breath, with every blink of an eye, with every contraction of our heart.

I stood in front of the maple, not daring to touch the lush green shoot that pushed through the hard bark. Perhaps I would irritate it? A chaffinch was belting out his triumphant spring song behind a few rows of bare trees. Other creatures were carried up by the tide of spring – as I was. Spring always happens suddenly, and perhaps only one at that moment, every year, when we first feel that the tide has turned. But life also turned; it turned from the inside out.

Because the surface of a being is a boundary and a passage at the same time, it can translate the world into the inner experience of one's own self. If our surface were only a boundary, everything outside it would leave us indifferent. If it were completely permeable, we would merge with the world and dissolve in it: Nothing would matter anymore. But because the skin is both container and opening, it can translate encounters with others into meaning.

Every surface of a being is thus already a nervous system: It transforms the encounter into a message. Specialised sense cells and neurons add nothing to this in principle, only serving to refine a fundamental relationship and to ensure more resolution. The relationship itself does not change: something happens to the matter of which we (we, all living beings) consist, and that this happening makes a difference for us. Because the boundary is also a door, it means a lot whether the door is completely closed, half closed, or wide open. Our original sense of existing in this world depends on how the fabric of our interface this is oriented. When I encountered the maple drive, I stood before a manifestation of life itself.

I stood in the cool, hazy air under the tree, which gave birth to itself so surprisingly anew, and thought. Because it can shift, open and close this boundary, a being is able to determine its contact to this world itself. It experiences the world as meaning for what lies behind the surface and regulates the contact depending on how this meaning shows up. Something tender is let in, something hard remains outside. Because life has a surface, it has an inside.

Here I suddenly saw the same strange concatenation of opposites as on the skin: A boundary with a gate is nothing else than a (material) outside with an (experiential) inside. From this a double paradox emerges: Because life is able to delimit itself, it is able to open itself. Because life is made of matter, it is able to experience itself. So it is essential to look at the matter of which we are made. Not in order to state (like the still-dominating stream of science today) that there is nothing but matter and its mechanics. But to see how this matter turns into an inside. Matter becomes meaning because of, not in spite of, its materiality. Matter is meaning because the world is made of matter, and the world is meaning.

When I stood in front of the tree whose bark had opened to let a piece of new life through, it showed me how inseparably inside and outside are interwoven. And it showed me that inside and outside are not polar opposites, but on the contrary can become understandable only together. In order for a cell to exist, it must separate itself from the world with a protective wall. In an organism made up of many cells, such as a tree, the common protective wall for all cells is the bark. At the same time, the cell must be able to open itself to the outside, i.e., to break through this wall of bark, in order to fill itself again with the substance and energy of the world for each new step in life, i.e., to nourish itself, and also to grow and connect with others.

All these activities are of existential importance for the cell protected behind its wall. They are immensely meaningful, indeed they mean life or death. Therefore, through the interplay of the physical inside and outside, a second polarity opens up. This is not between the physical space in front of and behind the bark, but between the processes and structures that take place in space and time, and the inner experience of how the meaning of these processes presents itself to the point of view of the living being that wants to continue to exist.

The place where these polarities emerge is the skin - the bark of trees and shrubs, the waxy cuticle of herbs, the chitinous shell of insects, the membranes of mollusks and worms, the semi-permeable membranes of the blood-brain barrier of all terrestrial vertebrates. At this boundary, two crucial processes take place: The physical outside transforms into its own body substance (for example, by eating and breathing). With it the bodies of the other beings transform themselves at the same time into the inwardness of the own experience. The body of the world becomes my experience. The I, to be the innermost point of experience, is born out of the other, out of that which is just not me.

Both sides, outside and inside, are inseparable. In order for an inside to unfold, it needs a skin: a surface through which it actively separates itself from the rest of the world, with which it is actually identical in depth. Every inner experience depends on the skin that surrounds it and allows it to come into being in the first place. Our walls are not our boundaries. They are the sense organs with which we feel ourselves, because in them we encounter the others who are not ourselves - by feeling them. Our mind and the world are interwoven. Our mind is the world, from one particular perspective, which we call our self.

We have mind because we are bodies. And we are bodies because we are constantly mixing with the world… it could even be said: we are mind because we are the world.

We have mind because we are bodies. And we are bodies because we are constantly mixing with the world, because we are open to all the rest, because being a body means always being in this openness. We cannot do otherwise: we must breathe and transform the air into our flesh - eat -, must make the bodies of other living beings ours, must exhale and excrete and give our own body back to that of others. Ultimately, therefore, it could even be said: we are mind because we are the world.

One evening in the late summer of the same year I sat in the high grass of a forest clearing while the evening slowly sank down. The sun was slanting over the trees, about to disappear behind their tops. Its late light gave the sky the peach glow only seen around these late summer nights, when the light already contains a hint of farewell. The soft forest grass was in bloom. The stalks with their fine feathery flowers looked like a cloud of energy in the backlight. The grass caught the reflection of the sun and re-radiated it, glowing from within, as if electrified, so that the whole forest floor was a shimmering surface.

Photo credit: Andreas Weber

I sat in the grass, my elbows touching the fine panicles, sending sparks flying. I sat in the grass and saw the sun with the eyes of the grass. I was a panicle myself, electrified and glowing. The glow was inside as well as outside, because my inside was what my outside was, a glow, something set on fire, not being able to stop glowing after receiving the first spark. It burned and burned and burned.

The sun no longer appeared as a celestial body slowly lost in the rotation of the earth behind the horizon, but as an inner principle that gave me life, of which I could at the same time find a clearly visible echo all around me. Everything was sun. Everything was matter and everything was light, everything was flesh and everything was inwardness, everything was everything and everything was me. There was no longer any difference.

1.         Weber, A., Essbar sein. Eine biologische Mystik. 2023: Klein Jasedow: thinkOYA. Translated and abbreviated by the author.

2.         Weber, A., Kurt, H. The Enlivenment Manifesto: Politics and Poetics in the Anthropocene. Kosmos, Spring/Summer 2016.