Meant

There may be words for what claws here inside me
But I doubt it
Some ritual might at another time
Have strung it on a line
To be read aloud
And it would not have been a secret
Not to me
Not to anyone who needed to know
And there would always have been
Others who needed to know

What on this shore is broken
Stays only like spume
A momentary tracing of bubbles
Brought from somewhere deeper than me
Farther away than here
Meant
Like I am meant
As seen from above
By some gull’s eye
And I look for all the life of me
Like food

Adam C. Hall
July 19, 2008

Being Arrogant

I can acknowledge this about myself:  when there is something I am passionate about and when I don't find a lot of other people who seem to be asking what I'm asking or moving at something along the same angle at which I seem to be moving, I can come across as being arrogant about that thing, as though I'm the only one.

I myself have a long and deep Christian background.  Being of the age I am, I sought after peace through Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism for a time, as well.  (Isn't it a little odd that all the rest of the religions are 'isms but not Christianity.  I sometimes do call it Christianism, just to get people to notice something they might not otherwise consider.)  I even went through a period of lightheartedly referring to myself as a Zen Catholic.  When I am critical of our human culture's major religions, it is only to draw out the doubts about what these religions' influences have been and are on how we live in the world now.

All these religions have as a major tenet the belief that we as beings are imperfect and that we can only reach our intended and ultimate state of being by transcending the body we are in.  All of them also purport a belief that humans represent some penultimate state of being, next only to the ultimate state of being (read God), even if it is to hold that we actually all are God, usually unbeknownst to ourselves.  Other living beings who share this planet with us are either lesser in significance than humans, are here for humans, or are on their way to becoming humans.  (I am so over generalizing here as to be offensive to most everyone, I suspect.  Forgive me.  There's still a good point to me made here.)  All these hold the belief that humans need to be 'saved' from being human.

Earlier and older human groups on this planet, the hunter-gatherers whose genes still express through our every trait, did/do not see themselves in anyway as separate from the rest of life with whom we share and on whom we rely for our very existence on this sphere.  For these humans, Life, as expressed through themselves, was a gift which ultimately had to be returned.  Just as the animals and plants on whom they relied for their own lives, gave their lives to them, so these human animals would eventually give what they were, what hey had become, back to the planet--perhaps to some other animal as food, certainly to insects and bacteria for their continued life and procreation.

Do you find yourself cringing even just little at that latter image?  If so, welcome to the dominant human culture on this planet.  Welcome to your own unquestioned beliefs.  Welcome to the arrogance of our culture's mythology.

The Tare

In this row of the field

There is a tare

Growing headlong toward the sky

And it is a good and a right thing

To be growing there

In and among the wheat

Food not for the civil beast

The tamed one

The wretched, sad one

But for some wilder thing

Who planted it there

- Adam Hall
August 9, 2008

  

The Lifeboat

As I was composing the entry below, someone came by and shared this thought with me. I post it with his permission:

So much struggling for the best seat in the lifeboat
So much forgetting that we came here to swim

The Fear Factor

Sometimes I have the opportunity to have conversations with students here in the Library, usually across one of the Information Desks, occasionally over coffee. At times I sense a openness to talk about what they think is really going on on this planet and what they think (or feel) we could be in store for...beyond what the voice of Mother Culture (see Ishmael by Daniel Quinn) and the voices of the 'powerful' tell us is going on.

As I get into it, sowing my seeds of doubt (doubt-mongering a friend calls it), I try to be very attentive to how the conversation seems to be going--from the other person's perspective. I'm watching the face, especially the eyes. Generally there's some interest as I speak of the assumptions we all make about being human, relative to other living beings on the planet; the dominant human monoculture on the planet now; our assumptions about history and time. Then as my doubt-mongering proceeds and deepens, when I begin to question our fetish with technology and our personal assumptions about our futures and what we can reasonably hope for, when I begin to press the idea that culturally and sustainably we are already plummeting over the edge of the abyss, that there cannot truly be any political or technological solution for any of the problems we've wrought, I watch as the veil slowly drops over their eyes. I watch as their attention pulls inward, protective; and I know they've reached their personal limit.

I respectfully stop the course of the conversation as I've been directing it and allow them to extricate themselves or shift the topic in some way.

I've seen this happen often enough that I've tried to come to some understanding of what this behavior represents. I know that I need to be respectful of it. I know that the person is doing what they absolutely need to, ...but what is it exactly they are attempting to protect by this closing down?

In my earlier posting about Pandora's box, I rail away at hope. I think what I'm experiencing with these students is the not so subtle way in which our culture is completely reliant on hope (read the future) to continue to function as it does, as it has, as a momentum with a life of its own that wants to continue its existence. Without hope for a better future, the now becomes intolerable for most of us. Without all the noise and distractions that keep the present drowned out, without the hope of something better to come (some brighter future here in this life or an idyllic future beyond this life), the now feels unbearable.

Why? Why is the present of our lives so intolerable that we seem to be willing to do almost anything to avoid being aware of it?

For one, we've created such unsupportable inequities in our culture that most of us are living lives that barely keep us alive (not so much in the industrialized countries but still most of us on this planet) or that allow us just enough things to keep us mollified as we work ridiculously long hours at jobs that usually have no intrinsic worth to us, to pay the 'powerful' and the 'wealthy' for the basics we need to sustain our lives or to sustain what we think we need for our lives.

Secondly, if we cease the distractions for only a moment, if we stop hoping for something better-to-come--for even just a moment--we will feel what our very genes tell us to be true: we are not something separate from the rest of life on this planet; we are this planet, and this planet is us. We breathe in what the plants breathe out and they breathe in what we breathe out. The vapor that makes the clouds in the sky and the moisture we feel in the rain and mist and ocean spray is partly from us, from our breath. At that moment, completely unawares to us, we also feel in our bodies, in our deepest beings, the pain and suffering our culture's existence has wrought on all living things, INCLUDING OURSELVES!

This is what we are trying to so hard to avoid. This is what, if we felt, would either motivate us to end our personal lives or do something to end our personal participation in the continuation of this juggernaut to extinction.

I deeply respect the amount of avoidance and denial that is required on a continuous basis to keep from directly experiencing our own personal share of the madness in which we live and in which we participate everyday. I can only imagine what it must be like to be young in the so called 'affluent west' and to know (perhaps without even knowing that they know) that the very device (hope) which allows them to continue living the illusion they've been taught IS life, and that this vision of a future which cannot ever be has become thin, very, very thin. It simply takes more noise, more distraction, more denial to keep going.

What we were all taught to believe long ago was 'flying' is actually plummeting over the ledge, and the bottom is looming...and it's simply too late to start knitting parachutes. (My apologies to Daniel Quinn for borrowing his illustration.)

Pandora's Box

I've been thinking about this ancient Greek myth lately. I remember it from my childhood in the same way I remember many of the fairy tales I heard or read. Here's the way I remember it:

Somehow Pandora (seems important she's female, like Eve in the Garden of Eden mythology. We'll talk about that at another time.). She has acquired this box from the Gods, and she isn't supposed to open it, but can't seem to help herself because of her intense curiosity. Of course, as soon as she opens it even just a crack, out comes flying all these horrific things, things that supposedly had never existed for humans before: disease, pestilence, famine, war, etc. She tries desperately to close the box before anymore horrors emerge, and just as she is about to get it closed...out flies Hope.

Now, as I remember it, the moral of the story is this: even though we now have all these terrible things to contend with and suffer through in our lives, at least we have hope. This is a good a thing, it seemed. How could we possibly bear all the terrible things there are in life without hope?

Now let's change the perspective a little.... Most, maybe all the 'horrors' released into the world from the Gods on that eventful day by curious Pandora, are really no more than what one experiences by being a living being on this planet: disease, discomfort, tragedy, death, violence (and, we assume, joy, peace, love, connection, fulfillment). What makes this myth significant in my mind is that it persists as a representation of something endemic in our shared cultural dream, going back to the ancient Greeks. At some point, the human cultural group from which evolved the dominant human culture on this planet now, conceived of themselves as not being animals any longer, saw themselves as being something other than, something superior to animals. At some point this human group no longer considered themselves to be a part of the whole community of life (Daniel Quinn term), rather they felt themselves to be apart from the community of life. As a result of this voluntary(?) expulsion from the Eden of being a part of life, there was no longer a context in which birth, life events, and death made sense. Life itself, as experienced and felt by these humans, was an experience of displacement, not-belonging. Life events no longer had meaning in and of themselves.

So, now we have a group of thinking and feeling animals who experience life as angst-ridden and lacking in intrinsic meaning. We now have a group of people who feel an overwhelming need to be saved from their lives; and since the everyday of their lives was always and ever vulnerable to unpleasantness, and since the everyday of their lives is inevitably the now of their existence, then any chance of salvation from all this anxiety would have to dwell in the future, a concept which probably did not even exist in the way we conceive it now before the advent of hope.

Hope automatically redirects the trajectory of peoples' lives away from the now and toward a conceived time that does not, cannot, and never will exist. The future never happens. It is only a mental construct. When the future arrives, it is always now.

The other change that occurred when hope emerged was the loss of place. Now and Here are synonymous. If Now is lost, then there can be no Here. If I do not know when I am, how can I know where I am. I do not know when I am because I reject the present in preference for some hoped for better future. If I am not now, then I also cannot be here.

We rejected being animals, we rejected our interdependence with all other living things with which we share this life. The very biosphere upon which our existence depended was felt as being frightening, threatening, unfriendly...not our home.

...So, get here now, for a moment. Look around you and note how many humans you see who are plugged into one or another kind of electronic device: ears plugged, eyes glued to screens, voices speaking to disembodied presences. All this can only produce one result: these people cannot know where they are. There is no connection via their senses of the here and now. They are distracted by some otherwhere, some othertime. The 'virtual' has become more real.

How could we have done anything other than what we have done to this planet over the last 15,000 years? We don't feel that we belong to this planet. We don't fell that we need it. Our gaze is elsewhere. We're looking ahead. We're hoping. 'It's gotta be better just over the horizon.'

Of all the things Pandora unleashed on that fateful day, only one was a curse. Hope.

Paul Shepard

I just recently came across works by Paul Shepard. I'm surprised I hadn't discovered him before. Here's a quote from one of his books:

In the face of predominant anthropocentric values, the vision of 'natural' humankind seems eccentric, regressive, even perverse. Our idea of ourselves embedded in the context of the shibboleth of growth places us at odds with the notion of kinship with nature. When we grasp fully that the best expressions of our humanity were not invented by civilization but by cultures that preceded it, that the natural world is not only a set of constraints but of contexts within which we can more fully realize our dreams, we will be on the way to a long overdue reconciliation between opposites that are of our own making. The tools we have invented for communicating our ideas and carrying information have actually impaired our memories. We must begin by remembering beyond history.

From 'Coming Home to the Plesitocene' by Paul Shepard

- Adam