Questionable Monkey

Nature created a world full of monsters,

consummate bad-asses,

beautiful killing machines.

Bears the size of bungalows

Cats the size of horses
With canines the size of butcher knives

And you, questionable monkey,

You weak hairless fangless ape

you surprisingly turned out to be

the biggest monster of all of them.

Today I spent a little time looking into the eyes of big cats in pictures, and it doesn't take much to imagine the pure horror one would feel to be at the mercy of one. It is a horror that goes deep in our collective unconscious, even more than the subconscious fear of snakes that some people have. Hungry eyes in the forest, in the darkness. And although getting ripped apart by a carnivore might be a relatively quick death, it would be a nightmare death also. It's instinctive to humans, I think, this fear of big carnivores. To this day, as endangered as tigers are, there are still places where they hunt humans as prey. Even healthy normal tigers hunt humans in the Sundarbans mangrove forests in Bangladesh. Leopards very rarely hunt humans, but when they do they are often considered more menacing because cleverer and more subtle. You open a door to a shed, bam, there's a leopard hiding and he grabs you by the neck and runs off with you. Makes a snack of your liver on some nice sunny tree branch somewhere, smiling a leopard's red smile. 

The point is, that while we are unquestionably the most dangerous creature on Earth, buried in our legacy is life as a prey animal. Apes don't generally hunt, monkeys don't generally hunt, they are hunted. True, we've been hunting for a million years or more, but somewhere in some primitive part of our brains, we are the monkey living in fear of the leopard. Somewhere in the backs of our brains is the primitive hominid living in fear of a world where true monsters, genuinely horrific killing machines, are all around. Many of these we have now driven extinct, and some today are on the edge. Tigers are very much on the edge of extinction. Lions aren't doing great. Cheetahs, near the edge. Pumas, not doing very well. Grizzly bears, polar bears, not doing so well. Wolves are coming back from the edge. Some leopard subspecies are endangered, though generally leopards are doing better than their bigger cat cousins.

We have to understand this legacy to understand ourselves. Human-caused mass extinction isn't a new thing, it's been going around for as long as there have been humans with weapons. And we did genuinely evolve in a world full of often beautiful but legitimately horrific monsters. Cave lions, saber-tooths, dog-bears, giant carnivorous monitor lizards. And here we were, these weak hairless weak-toothed clawless things. Who happened to be the only creatures on Earth who could make projectile weapons that kill at a distance. Somewhere in the rearmost mind of the business executive that orders the destruction of a forest for lumber or oil sands, is the primitive hominid who fears the monsters of Nature. Hunter-gatherers feared aspects of Nature too and controlled that fear, but when people started farming and civilizing and building cities, they imagined a world in which those real or imagined enemies could be excluded, boxed out, driven away, vanquished. Our war with nature isn't of recent vintage though. We've been at war for a long time, we caused the extinction of species long before there were cities. We are a weak scared monkey that had been given the evolutionary equivalent of nuclear weapons: our brains, and the tools and weapons it can build. Still inside us though is that weak scared monkey. So we lash out a lot, out of fear.

I think that twenty thousand years ago, if Nature could pass a verdict on us, she would say that we were a really surprising organism, really really successful, and congratulations for a seemingly improbable survival. We thrived in sometimes very adverse conditions. Consummately adaptable, ruthless, and clever. A good monster. Now however it would be more like, enough's enough, knock it the hell off. But we have to understand that we are a monster that evolved on a planet full of monsters, and that unlike almost all of them, we evolved from prey animals not predators. Which means we are the most dangerous kind of monsters: scared ones. 

For most of us, tigers won't come in the night to eat us. But they still live in us, and still mold our outlook. People are still scared of nature all the time, sometimes I am too. Sometimes concern is called for too. Don't go swimming with the alligators, don't feed the polar bears. One dude got his hand nommed off for doing that actually, he was drunk and passed out in a zoo, woke up in the early hours and tried to feed a polar bear a cookie. They never got the hand back. Or the cookie, I guess. 

It's time to call the war on Nature. To the extent that we could ever "win," we won. Congrats. Now our "winning" threatens ourselves too, and more than just our survival. Whatever our mixed relationship with Nature, Nature is a part of us. We are Nature too, just another one of the monsters in the zoo. Even if we could survive on some totally wasted landscape, living like astronauts on our own planet, we will have lost things, a part of ourselves, we can't replace. We are more than just the scared apes with superweapons, repressing the natural with guns and chemicals and bulldozers and chainsaws. More than a monkey with a gun. We are tigers our own selves, and just as threatened. If we lose nature, we lose the only part of us that was really worth keeping. What would be left, would be more machine than human. A real monster, such as tigers never were. 

UNDERWORLD Part 2

"To be, is to be present, but being present

in itself is a sort of luminous self-concealing,

concealing itself behind the being that it

illuminates."

-Daniel Dahlstrom explaining Heidegger's thoughts

on hiddenness and truth.

My posts on the Underworld will probably mutate over time as my understanding of it mutates. Because the Underworld is hidden by its very nature. And yet it is of a whole fabric with the rest of the world: in fact there is no hard and fast line between world and underworld. I see the edges of the Underworld all the time. I sometimes think I am merging into it. The one seeing is the one seen is the one unseen, a Möbius strip.

One of the demons of our age, and in fact it has been a demon of our age for millennia, is the idea that truth is hard and clear and shiny and you can latch onto that and not have to worry about the rest, but every truth we hold casts countless shadows, the things not seen, the things purposely denied perhaps. Truths buried when we wrested our shiny new truth out of the ground of Hiddenness. We are not merely disconnected from this ground, this real Being as it is, but we positively blind ourselves to it so that we can no longer see that it is there at all. We only look at our shiny conceptual baubles. We look, but we do not see anymore. 

Part of this is the nature of truth itself, as Heidegger pointed out. Truth pushes contrast, puts a contrast between the truth and the thing itself. As long as you have some clue that you are doing that, it is not in itself problematic. The problem is when we stop viewing truth as "unhiddenness," bringing something to the foreground, and start viewing truth as "correctness of viewpoint." In other words, we forget and deny the process by which we got that truth and the ground of hiddenness from whence it came. The difference is the difference between, "look, that thing has revealed itself in the world" and "look, this is a true thing in my head." In the one case, the World itself is primary: in the other, concepts in human minds are primary. 

The process is a process of disconnection from the world and everything in it, and also from each other. We can see a parallel with the idea of the Shadow in Jungian psychology. Really in many ways it is the same thing. The 'truth' is the man as he presents himself to himself. The hidden is the Shadow, the truth he denies to uphold that image. You could have a field day just applying this part of Jungian psychology to our world today, but the real trick is that it applies most in the areas which you are likely the least aware of.

And in some ways, to embrace the Shadow in yourself, you have to embrace the Shadow that your closing of vision has put on the way you view the World. You are part of the World Itself.

We can see early roots of these sorts of problems in the way ancient peoples regarded the Underworld in their mythology. Originally, the Underworld was regarded as hugely important, part of the very bone and sinew of how the world works. Over time, especially after Christianity took hold of it but even before, it became an abode of evil. Forgetting completely that decay and growth, life and death, are two sides of the same coin. You objectify your truth as Truth, you objectify your shadow as lies, evil. This objectivity however lies nowhere except in the human noggin. Being itself, this wonderful strange dynamic existence we are part of, is the beginning and end of truth in any meaningful sense and much of that is not up for grabs and it won't fit in your head. You are a part of, and not knowing it. It's the Möbius strip thing I was talking about: I am conscious and unconscious, seer and seen and unseen, dead and alive, the whole of my own reality is hidden as much as it is shown but this hiddenness itself is intrinsic to me too. 

The Underworld is the ocean beneath your feet that you do not see. It is the hidden that forms the manifest. It is the uncarved block of wood before you do anything with it. It is the dreams of the past that haunt the future. It is the dead that gives life to the living. Because these things are to some extent inscrutable, sometimes the best you can do is describe snapshots. Really, although I can describe human myopia pretty well, I cannot describe the Underworld, to the extent that I know it, very well at all. It is intrinsically not susceptible to literal translation, it's hidden by the nature of being Underworld.

Have you ever pondered, I mean really pondered, the alchemy that is happening between plant and soil? Think about it. The soil usually isn't usually made up mostly of ground-up rocks, it's made of the dead. Dead plants, dead animals, dead bacteria. Plants actually can't make use of this all that well, but bacteria can, and they eat these dead things and they themselves die and that presents the plant with easily digestible nutrients. And then the plant goes on to do what with it? Make miracles. Apple trees making apples from the bones of the dead world, water, and pure sunshine. What a miraculous alchemy this is, and death is absolutely of a whole with it. Death is intrinsic to life, it's not just a bum deal tacked onto the end of it. You live now because of death. Plants live and keep us all alive through it. Death is life. There is no separation. There is no separation between World and Underworld. There may be aspects of the Underworld that are totally incomprehensible to you, or me, but nevertheless it is part of you.

Look. Break down the barriers in your head, and see the wonders. 

Rites of Spring

Random cornfield and bicycle to rest your eyes on. ;)

The characteristic feature of farming or gardening, is or at least should be care. If you are not invested in the life of each little plant, at least to some extent, you aren't a farmer or a gardener, just a plant technician.

Many of those who garden, or even farm professionally sometimes, are doing it for reasons that are disconnected from what they are actually doing. The professional farmer farms for money, not food. The ornamental gardener farms for looks, not medicine. The characteristic feature in fact of work and living in the modern world is disconnection. When I buy an Ipod for instance, I am completely disconnected from the way people are living who work in Apple's sweatshops in the Third World, some of whom work 15 hour days for pennies an hour. When I drive my car (which is busted at the moment so I am actually not driving it), I am disconnected from oil spills and tar sands and all the ecological havoc that energy production brings. This is modern, Western, technological culture in a nutshell: it is disconnection. 

Millions of people in the US have functionally no living connection with the living soil or life processes beyond their own reproduction. Some children, poor creatures, live out their childhood never knowing about growing things, never so much as sprout a bean seed. I remember vividly, I could not have yet been seven years old, a preschool project where we sprouted a bean seed. I took mine home after the project was over, I loved the little thing, but I had not then the ability to make it live beyond the sprout stage. 

I'm funny like that, some things I can remember from before an age when I should be able to. In a world where people are completely cut off from nature, completely cut off from the consequences of their purchases and their waste, cut off from life really, what should we expect but disorder? This is the Age of Ghouls, the age of unreality, the age of disconnection.

However, many of those who work with nature are disconnected too. The vegetable gardener who isn't that concerned whether she gets any vegetables. The corporate farmer who is primarily interested in his balance sheet. The forester thinks about planning lumbering and forest management and not about living trees. The lawn care men who run their smoky two-stroke leafblowers and put poisons on the lawns to make them "pretty". I just heard men running leaf blowers outside and thinking that they might be the folks who work on our lawn (I don't own the house or there wouldn't be any lawn men), I hopped out of my chair to try to interdict them from working in the back yard and cutting down all my lovely weeds. They were working on a completely different house however. 

If you don't love the plants, you don't deserve the name of farmer. Real horticulture takes love of the plants themselves. If you do love the plants, you will do what you can to make sure they get a fair deal. Some for you, some for them. Some fruit you take, some fruit you leave on the vine so that the seeds will mature, and the plants will have children next year. No hybrids for me, all open-pollinated. If I didn't let the plants reproduce, I would feel I had cheated them. 

But gardening is fraught with difficulties, and one can imagine the anxiety of the subsistence farmer whose children will go hungry if the plants fail. He is connected to his plants with both love and concern. If the plants flourish, he will. If the plants fail, he will. When he transplants his plants from a sheltered window in his home into the soil outdoors, where the winds blow and the rain beats down and the cold may come, their little lives are hanging in the balance, but so is his.This connection of love and concern goes back millennia in some places where subsistence farming is still practiced. The plants and the human family which tends them, each growing on and feeding and feeding on each other, each reproducing new generations that will feed each other and feed on each other and assist each other in moving forward in life. This connection is at the heart of everything I hold valuable, but it is equal parts love and anxiety. You open yourself to care and anxiety if you farm truly.

I won't starve if my little vegetable garden fails, but I feel that connection. My little vegetable garden can have a very substantial effect on my quality of life, and the influx of fresh organic produce will be much welcomed in a diet often short of veggies. I transplanted my first tomatoes and two Asian Astrakom eggplant (both of which I raised from seed) from their little sprouting containers to the big pots today. The tomatoes I will transplant in stages, some now and some later, in case I might be transplanting too soon or adverse weather affects them. The eggplant plants I have a great abundance of, will be trying to give a lot of them away in fact, but the strong tomato plants are in short supply and I have to be very careful with them. The tomatoes are two kinds, roma and a strange purplish product of Soviet plant breeding, the Gypsy. I got the seeds for the Gypsy for free. I no longer know which is which, I am just going to plant whichever ones are strongest.

The transplantation was quite an experience for me in many ways. I made deep holes in the big pots for the tomato plants and carefully cut the sides of their little containers, all the while sort of talking them and myself through it. A rite of passage, for them especially, but for me too. They were taking their biggest step towards a larger world, the place where they would grow and feed the rest of the summer, but as with all big steps the process has danger. There is transplant shock, various pests, and the fact that the nights can still get fairly cool yet. We won't know for sure how we are doing for some days yet. I uttered some prayers to Mother Earth and reassured the plants as to the purpose we are serving in getting them into the big pot, and carefully lowered them into their holes and covered them up to the lower leaves in soil. I already have had some experience with losing plants to the weather or my ineptitude, I lost all my parsley plants and the first crop of my spinach plants to a late sleet. There was a little rainwater about, and I watered close to the plants with the rainwater and spoke to them about what we were doing and going through, and encouraged them.

It was a very prayerful experience for me, this is my religion really. The circles of life, and the Whole in which these circles turn. A faith of dirt and leaf and water and air and sun and worms. I am truly blessed to have had this primal experience of the Earth, because I know it is an experience many people living in cities and living in a mad dash from car to office to car to home don't have. I feel like these are very ancient experiences, at least from the Neolithic, patterns 10,000 years old. Sun and rain and earth and plants and prayers to Mother Earth to look kindly on us both, plant and Man. We are both born, we both feed, we both live, we both die, we are both reborn. In a way, the seed is my child, and I am the seed's child. We feed each other.

ADDENDUM: I only now humorously realized that if any of my Gypsy tomatoes survived their first transplantation, my tomatoes might be having some funny-looking children. ;) I doubt many of them did, I only planted a few Gypsies to begin with and most from that starter pot didn't make it. If some did make it, and some make it further to get planted in the big pots, there might be some cross pollination going on and hence some future generations of funky-looking purplish roma tomatoes. ;) They might be winners though, so who knows? In any case, the tomatoes which make it to being planted into the big pots will be the strongest of all that I planted, and certainly strength is a virtue in tomato plants. Even if their children turn out funny-looking. A lot of good kids are funny-looking. ;)

Gypsy tomatoes from rareseeds.com

Dodona

Oak tree at Dodona, the oldest oracular site in Greece.

"They used to say, my friend,

that the words of the oak in the holy place of

Zeus at Dodona were the first prophetic utterances.

The people of that time, not being so 'wise' as

you young folks, were content in their simplicity to

listen to an oak or a rock, provided only it spoke the 

truth."

-Socrates to Phaedrus, the dialogue Phaedrus by Plato

In the history of one place in Greece you can learn fairly much the whole tale of the 'advancement' of religion from archaic times to the present day. There are probably a few places like that, but the place I am talking about here is Dodona, the oldest oracular site in Greece, dating back to at least 1100 BCE and more like 2000 BCE according to Herodotus.

First though, a word about the Socratic dialogue Phaedrus. It is quite possibly the most singular of all the dialogues, and the one in which Plato seems for a moment to be meeting opposing viewpoints halfway. First of all, it is the only Dialogue which takes place outside the city, in the countryside, a place for which Socrates himself says he has no interest in. It takes place in the realm of nature spirits, not the haunts of men as would be Socrates' custom. Secondly, it is a flirtation of sorts between Socrates and Phaedrus, although Phaedrus appears to be in love with Lysias the orator. At that time, two men flirting with each other would have been unremarkable so long as one was notably younger which Phaedrus was. Socrates himself seems stuck between roles, taking myths, gods and omens seriously and speaking of the benefits of divinely inspired madness one minute, speaking in the more skeptical dialectic style for which Plato made him famous the next. In this Dialogue alone really is there a sign of a Socrates beyond the near-infallible social and logical irritant and beyond the genial Symposium attendee, friend and dispenser of wisdom. A sign perhaps of the real Socrates.

The core of the Dialogue concerns the transcript of a speech about love from a then-famous orator Lysias which Phaedrus possesses and Socrates wants Phaedrus to read to him. Socrates is initially not keen to hear Phaedrus recite it, which Phaedrus is keen to do, but wants to read the text. Behind this difference is a relatively recent upheaval as ancient Greece transformed from a completely oral culture to a literate culture, and this transformation is seeped through everything Plato wrote. Plato wants to distance himself from the cadences of sound, from the sweet enchantments of spoken rhetoric. In many ways, to Plato and perhaps his mentor Socrates, only the logical and conceptual is real and trustworthy, and the experienced and the sensual is untrustworthy. Here, in the countryside, in the guise of a mildly flirtatious exchange under a plane tree, Plato is attempting to take on the ghosts of the past on their own turf, the turf of the nymphs and gods: the natural world.

Phaedrus: "For you really do seem exactly like

a stranger who is being guided about, and not like a

native. You don't go away from the city

out over the border, and it seems to me

you don't go outside the walls at all."

Socrates: "Forgive me, my dear friend. You see,

I am fond of learning. Now the country places and

the trees won't teach me anything, and the people

in the city do.

The phonetic alphabet gets its name from the Phoenicians, a Semitic people, and their relatives the Hebrews had the first "religion of the Book" in human history. However, literacy evolved organically among the Hebrews and there was always in their use of the written word a certain ambivalence, an evenhanded approach between the conceptual and the sensory, between the literal and that which cannot be expressed literally. The Hebrew alphabet had no vowels, which does not mean that they did not speak them, but rather that the vowels symbolized the breath, the organic living sensory breath of the spoken word, and the consonants only represented the place and way which that breath stopped. It is somewhat in the manner in which God was supposed to have instilled life in the clay Adam through his breath: in this context, the breath is the vowel, the clay the consonant. Consonants only represented the mode of stopping the breath, not the breath itself. And breath to the ancient Hebrews as to many people represented life itself. Hebrew was always meant to be read aloud, in sensory sound, not as words in the mind. The fact that the name of God, YHWH, was never to be spoken, ties into this, and now we do not know what vowels were originally intended.

For the Greeks on the other hand, the phonetic alphabet came as a sort of cultural conquest, albeit one which they seemed to embrace with open arms. It did not evolve naturally among them, it came from without, and when they understood the use of concepts divorced from sensory reality it took them over to the extent that Plato could assert that nothing in sensory reality at all was truly real, that the only real things were essentially grasped through concepts alone. This history is what this dialogue is set against in many ways.

However I have gone far afield from my original topic, so we will take our leave from Phaedrus momentarily. Phaedrus is remarkable though for a couple reasons. The first is that Plato here takes honest aim at his true enemy, which is nothing more or less than the real world. The world of the senses that you and I and everyone else lives in. In this way, the philosophy of Socrates (or at least Plato) is a sort of spiritual ancestor to Pauline Christianity. The second reason the dialogue is remarkable, and the reason which more closely relates to the topic at hand, is that preserved in it are all sorts of passing references to much earlier ways of viewing the world. Indeed these ways were ancient even in Plato's day. People conversing with trees and stones, Socrates even says that the locusts in the trees above his head are talking to each other about the behavior of the two men. While in Plato's time the job of listening to the trees at Dodona was likely delegated to professional priests or priestesses, they remember a time when ordinary people also listened to them directly.

You can read the Platonic Dialogue Phaedrus yourself online:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus

However, in Plato's time (circa late 300's to early 400's BCE), the sanctuary at Dodona was dedicated to Zeus, a paternal male sky god. Originally Dodona was dedicated to an alternate version of Gaia, the Earth Mother. Now there is nothing wrong with male gods per se, but generally the ascendancy of male gods to primacy is correlated to a change in the religion of the people from a nature-centered religion to a human-centered one. Dodona was also originally a very local holy place for the tribes who lived in the area, and was transformed into a pan-Hellenic holy place. This again is a trend that tends to happen as a religion changes from the archaic, nature-centered gods to gods whose appearance is human and whose primary function is within the human world. Either a local holy place is incorporated into the network of a larger culture, in this case Hellenism, or it is destroyed. 

Let us imagine Dodona as it was originally. A grove of sacred oak trees. It was connected with a Mother Earth goddess, but it wasn't the Mother Earth goddess as named in for instance Athens. She was however the Mother Earth goddess, Gaia by another name. The people had their own version of the gods and their own names for the gods, somewhat different from those of Athens or Sparta or Corinth, and there weren't official priestesses but rather ordinary people came to the sacred grove to listen to the trees themselves.

At some point the territory around Dodona passed into different hands (perhaps through warfare), and it may well have been at this time that the worship of Zeus was inserted into the picture. The two events are hardly coincidental. The Earth Mother is a goddess for those who live; who eat and sleep, live and die - she is primarily a goddess of ordinary life. Zeus is a god for warriors and rulers, he has the chariot (a vehicle of war) and the thunderbolts, he is the boss of the gods. Warriors and kings are fundamentally the same sort of thing, kings are the brigands who have stayed to live in the place they are robbing. While Zeus originally might have been a minor feature at Dodona, he predictably took over almost the whole show and sure enough the oaks were called Zeus' oaks by Plato's time, with no mention by Socrates/Plato that the Earth Mother was the original inhabitant. The decay of religion is fundamentally a function of power: kings appropriate or destroy religious sites that are potentially a focus of local sentiments, and then they hand over control of those sites they keep to official functionaries who will keep the worship there in line with the ruling powers. Wherever you see full-time warriors, rulers, hierarchies; there you will inevitably see spirituality perverted. Kings are interested in human power and are very jealous of keeping control of it. Where once ordinary people communed with the trees directly, now that was delegated to professional seers. It was however only around the time of Plato's birth that they worked up the moxie to actually put a temple of Zeus at Dodona, but long before that, the worship of Zeus had taken over. 

Later, King Pyrrhus made Dodona the spiritual capital of his kingdom and put in a much grander temple of Zeus... and put a wall around the holy trees. If people didn't get the message before then, they got it now: "you peons aren't allowed to talk to god." The trees aren't part of the community of ordinary people anymore, they are the province of professionals. Pyrrhus also built plenty of other swell buildings, including a theater, and instituted a festival including sporting events, music competitions and various other carryings-on. Over the next couple centuries the site was ravaged by various wars and by 200 BCE the holy grove was down to a single oak tree. 

During the Roman years the warfare situation at least stabilized, and Dodona remained a part of the spiritual life of Greece until about the year 391. At about that time, the hated (by me at least) Christian Emperor Theodosius closed all pagan temples, banned all pagan religious activities, and cut down the ancient oak tree at Dodona. This was part of an official persecution of Pagans by the Roman Imperium which almost matched the persecutions that Christians suffered at the hands of Pagan Emperors. Christianity had no tolerance for a multipolar world or multiple spiritual paths: all eyes must turn to Rome and all pagan trees cut down and you don't get to talk to God, you talk to priests. But long before this, the heart had been cut out of paganism and the pagan rulers and warriors of Greece and Rome were primarily the cause of it. The Hellenic world had no tradition of staunchly independent religious leaders like the ancient Celts had with their druids, and so political power warped the image of the gods more and more into their own image, and no one stopped them, and soon even pagans were pagan in name only, just apeing the old cults because they didn't know what else to do, and not because of a vital connection with the sacred. 

And now at the beginning of the 21st century AD after a long and often dark reign, the same sorts of things are happening to Christianity, except its perversion is happening at the hands of money and power-seeking ideologues and political action groups and not so much actual rulers anymore. But even if Christianity collapses (still a long way off yet) and there is a resurgence of nature religion, the same things will happen all over again because we have learned nothing. In fact, most people are completely unaware of the history of these things and most forms of paganism today are honestly of the degenerated disconnected sort that collapsed so easily when Christianity came around originally, or else botched reconstructions of a lost way that have more to do with Western Hermeticism and its own power fixations than the living spiritual world of those who first talked to oaks at Dodona. 

They are still speaking, I still hear them. Very very few listen.

Gaia handing off a child to Athena on a Greek pottery container,
circa 460 BCE.

ADDENDUM: I was not being very accurate when I portrayed Socrates as being interested in reading the speech of Lysias rather than hearing it from Phaedrus. In truth the issue was either listening to Phaedrus read the speech or hearing it from Lysias himself, which Socrates much preferred the latter. Socrates is generally a proponent of oral transmission as versus written transmission of information, but this is not because he thinks the speaking per se, the actual voice, is important but rather access to the understanding of the speaker is important. Dialogue with the actual proponent of the ideas is what he wants, coherent with the idea that wisdom is contained in souls not text, and he goes on later in the dialogue to disparage the written transmission of information as liable to be distorted to whatever the reader wants to think. However, Socrates is also a long-time adversary of the Sophists and their emphasis on rhetoric - beautiful words, beautifully spoken don't carry much weight with him, feeling itself doesn't carry much weight with him, only logic and reasoning matter in discussions. So Socrates really stands astride this division between the history of oral communication in Greek culture and the relatively new written word - he mistrusts the written word, but not because of any special regard for the spoken word but rather because he believes in debate, in contact with ideas in the persons of those who defend those ideas.

He really wants to have his cake and eat it too, believing that concepts and reason are the important thing while tacitly accepting that it is not reason itself that contains truth but rather the person, the soul, the reality of a living being that contains it. Socrates is often found arguing that knowledge is not empirical and comes from divine insight alone. He tacitly accepts the idea that reason is merely a crowbar that pries one's understanding of the world from one person to another, or rather pries both their understandings at the same time back towards the original and forgotten truth. This would be in keeping with his idea that all souls were exposed to truth originally and forgot it, and all that was really needed was to excavate that truth from within the soul, using reason as the trowel and the spade. So Socrates is a mystic despite himself, but what he or rather Plato started led to a denigration of the real and an elevation of the conceptual, an elevation of reason at the expense of intuition, literalism at the expense of realism. Socrates himself demonstrates intuition and sometimes outright mysticism on a number of occasions. 

In a sense, Socrates was a prophet in that the very thing he warned against in the Phaedrus seemed to happen to him. Without him being there to clarify his ideas, later thinkers paid little attention to Socrates the genuinely devout follower of the gods and Socrates the believer in many very unverifiable (slightly crackpot) mystical ideas, and almost exclusively focused on Socrates the proponent of reason and dialectic. What could be made literal was equated with the true, the conceptual became the real, but in the beginning it was not quite that cut and dried. In that way, the Socrates I often blame for being at the root of much evil in Western Civilization was not entirely to blame, but rather he fathered a way of thinking that others took in directions he could not have foreseen and likely would not have approved of. Without Socrates' belief that truth only lives buried in souls and that reason is merely a technique of digging up what is already there, he would not have seen any value in the whole exercise of dialogue since he patently did not believe that any truth lay in one's direct experience of the world. This alienation from the world of the senses however is a legacy that can be genuinely laid at Socrates' - or at least Plato's - feet, even if neither intended reason to supplant divine inspiration.

WORLD WATER DAY 2014

ONE WHO DOES NOT LOVE WATER

DOES NOT LOVE HIMSELF.

Strangely enough I actually am often dispassionate on this blog. Really, I sometimes am. Sometimes I treat a subject, despite its ramifications, in a scholarly and unemotional way. Sometimes the subject matter lends itself to that.

This is not one of those times.

I could tell you, in a merely informational way, that more people are killed by unsafe water than all the violent crimes and wars in the world combined. I could tell you that 5000 kids die every day from unsafe drinking water. However, to be brutally honest, I am much more disturbed by the contaminated water itself than by the people drinking it. Humans killed by human-polluted water is what you might call collective payback. Humans caused the problem; humans die from it, makes sense to me. Humans polluting the water to begin however with is more in the nature of a crime against existence.

More to the point for most people who read this blog, I could tell you in a neutral factual way that the average person reading this blog will flush 25 gallons of previously clean drinking water down their toilets every day. They will use something on the order of 3-6 gallons brushing their teeth. They will use around 20 gallons to take a bath or 40 gallons to take a shower - again, previously fresh clean drinking water that goes right down the sewer pipe. They will use 14 gallons to run their dishwasher, and 50 gallons to run their clothes washer. Landscape watering, driveway hosing down and car washing can use hundreds of gallons on each occasion. Were I merely presenting you with some information in a neutral, uninvolved way, I might just leave it at that and leave you to do the right thing.

However, I am not neutral, I am not dispassionate and I am not uninvolved. I am angry. Very angry. Around the world human beings are using water as their sewers, their garbage dumps and the recipient of their damaging mistakes and negligence. Around the world the oceans are filling with our plastic trash and fish and birds and mammals are all dying because of it. I don't know how I can make it any clearer: water is essential to life. Water is most of what you are. I don't give a fuck about your nation or your race or your religion or your ideas, if you contaminate water you contaminate the means for you and everything else to live. What is unclear about that? How much more could I spell it out??

Here in America we regularly use two gallons of fresh water to flush a half cup of urine down a sewer. We use 40 gallons or more every morning to bathe in, in pursuit of a superficial cleanliness. In my mind, there is nothing clean about it. It's filthy. To me, it is blacker than the filthiest hobo to waste our precious water for such a thing every day. Humans smell, deal with it. This is the ultimate in false gods, when we contaminate the very substance of life for the sake of appearing to be something we are not. Water is the thing of real value, not human social constructs and vanity. Water refreshes all beings and allows them to live. And yet we are treating it like garbage.

Woe is you, homo sapiens. May your status-seeking unloving unholy vain children dry up in a land with no water and be lost to the dust, for you have worshiped the most illusory phantoms. Social status. Money. Power. Envy. Pride. 'Progress'. Convenience. When you are able to drink any of these things, let me know.

May the waves drink YOU, homo sapiens, and the flood swallow you and wash you into the ocean like your own sewage, and may you finally poison yourself in such a dire manner that the remnant left over will finally learn. Water is a goddess. Water is our mother. She gives us a lot, life itself, and she is tolerant of our mischief but DO NOT FUCK WITH HER or you will be the one to get fucked.

Do you understand yet, vainglorious MONKEY? How pretty and how important, how civilized and advanced, and how proud of yourself you will be, when you are finally choking on your own filth?

I feel pretty

If I sound harsh, well, perhaps to you she is just a dead substance. A couple atoms of hydrogen tacked onto an oxygen atom. To me she is a goddess, mother, giver and taker of life, and she is alive. Mother Water; along with Mother Earth among the greatest of holy things.

Even I accept that I am not as respectful as I ought to be, though I try. I take showers rather less frequently than the average American. Most of my urine is going on the compost pile now rather than in the toilet. If I do have to pee in the toilet, I don't flush until I use it again. I make do without washing clothes for much longer than most people in this country. I have started keeping a closer eye on the water I use for my vegetable garden, filling food-grade buckets with water and measuring it out from there rather than just running the hose (which can waste water remarkably quickly and in very large quantities. The buckets also allow me to have the water sit for a day or two to get out the chlorine, which the plants appreciate. These aren't difficult things but they are socially unacceptable things, for which the solution is to change people's understanding of acceptability. To waste a hundred gallons of water or more in a day when you don't actually have to, to me that is very unacceptable. 

Mother Water, Friend of Life

Wash away the unthoughtful

May all the plants and animals I love

always have the benefit of your presence.

May your streams and lakes and rivers and oceans

everywhere run clean and whole

Thank you for your gifts

Our love always to you

Mother Water

The Flood

The Kanyakumari Tsunami Memorial. Notice the lamp and flame,
symbolizing the safe, warm and known in the face of the
unsafe and chaotic.

It's the wee hours and I really need to sleep, but I was thinking about what deeper meaning the very common myth of the Flood might have. And then I thought, it doesn't need a deeper meaning. Any early man who ever saw a tsunami or a flood would have shit his loincloth, it's the scariest thing ever, it's a widespread catastrophe. Water eats the land, the unstable eats the stable, the dangerous eats the safe, and there is not a damn thing anyone can do about one when it starts. A wild beast or a human enemy you could theoretically kill, cold can be tamed with fire, but even today floods of various sorts are disasters that nobody can really stop. In the Bible, the Flood is punishment for human wickedness, but I like to think of it as more a punishment for human conceit. We think we are the rulers of the world, we think we can do anything, we think we ourselves are gods, and then the flood reminds us that we are small and silly and not powerful. 

The ocean too would have been a scary thing in its own right. One one side you have the stable and known and solid, and on the other you have the unstable and unknown and liquid, full of monsters. Most cultures that contain a myth about a world flood also contain a myth about a giant sea serpent and gods that do battle with it. Tiamat, Leviathan, Jörmungandr. Chaos monsters, that the gods must do battle with and defeat on behalf of our warm little human circle of the stable and the known and the 'real'. 

But the Chaos Monster was never defeated really, she's still there, we just pretended she was defeated and averted our gaze. As we cross the world in our heavy stable ships of steel, there under our feet is still the Ocean, and she is still waiting there to kill us, and often does. As Japan recently and regrettably discovered, the greatest human technology in the world can still be bested by her when the quaking Earth pushes her into a tsunami. The Japanese knew more about living with tsunamis than anyone, and had massive bulwarks of concrete and steel to fend her off, but it didn't matter. When she is roused, the Chaos Monster still eats you, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. She's been hungry lately.

In our Western science, for a long time the real was considered almost synonymous with the solid and static. Our ancient Greek intellectual forebears thought that motion and change could not be real, that everything real must ultimately be static and unchanging, and the endless flux of change an illusion. For Western scientists at one time, atoms were billiard balls of matter, and when we knew that was a lie, we imagined the billiard balls made of billiard balls, and those made of billiard balls. The static, the precise, the measurable, susceptible to being completely defined by the human mind with nothing left over. We have only recently begun to understand how much is really left over. How unknown really the fundamental stuff of the Universe is.

You may think we long overcame our primal fear of the chaotic and the fluid and the amorphous, but we never did. We still fear it today. We keep pushing our warm little human circle of the known and safe and stable outwards, trying to tame the world with the measured and the known and the stable, but outside that circle is still the realm of the unstable and unmeasurable and slippery and paradoxical. The Chaos Monsters are still there, we just avert our eyes and convince ourselves that they are not. The flood, the seas, the tsunami, are all reminders that this warm little human circle floats on an Ocean of the uncontained, the unsafe, and the unknown, and that our boat can still be swamped. 

In the classic movie Forbidden Planet, the Krell were an almost unfathomably advanced, wise and benevolent race who were completely wiped out by the unacknowledged chaos monsters in their own minds. Monsters from the Id, to quote the classic line. Lest we miss the moral of the story, we are no more invulnerable from the forces of chaos than they are, and just when we believe we have created the perfect city of human enlightenment and have the power to solve all our problems, the monsters of the side of the universe we refuse to accept can tear it to pieces in an instant. Nothing can protect us, from that which we have convinced ourselves we have already defeated. There is a Tarot card that sums up this picture nicely: The Tower. Whatever shining towers we build for ourselves, they will be brought down. However powerful we are, Chaos - the Flood - still has our number and is not fooled.

But despite the horrors that the seas must have held for our ancestors, they still built boats and explored the world. Knowledge and wisdom lie out there in those oceans too, and like the Dutch with their dikes and their polders we constantly claim little bits of that ocean for ourselves, to expand our knowledge and power. But this process of incorporating the unknown and chaotic does not mean that it isn't still there, and our knowledge carries with it the inherent limitations that we are trying to make stable the unstable and trying to make the mysterious known. Which means that blind spots are built into the very process by which we achieve our greatness, and like the Krell, we can but stare utterly astonished and perplexed when Chaos comes to take back what was always hers. 

This is the only deeper meaning of the Flood. Don't be fooled by human vanity or knowledge or all the fancy technological magic we can summon. In the final analysis, we are but children staring at the edge of the Ocean, at the edge of the Flood, building a fire in a cave and gathering round it and pretending that the enormity of the universe isn't really there outside. That we really do have a handle on it all. We don't have a handle on shit. And all the while, the Chaos Monster is outside there, ignoring us one moment, devouring the sand castles of our conceit the next. 

Tiamat, the Chaos Dragon, was never defeated and never could be.

Tiamat vs. Marduk, WWF Mythological Smackdown!

UNDERWORLD Part 1

***************DISCLAIMER***************

I am going into some deep waters in these posts on the Underworld.

Do not look for reassuring certainties in anything I am saying.

If you read these posts, you are understanding that you are

setting sail from the reassuring little circle of the known world
into the dark and mysterious seas of what lies beyond.

Nothing is certain here, nothing is normal here, read if you want.

Reader discretion is assumed.

Here be dragons.

******************************************

"I went to the countries underneath the Earth

To the peoples of the past

But my life was lifted up from the Pit."

-One translation of Jonah 2:6 from the Greek Bible

Before we dive off the deep end, let us talk about the terms Otherworld and Underworld. In various mythologies, Otherworld is considered to be a place in the real physical world where people go when they die. This physical place is, as it were, beyond the horizon. For the Greeks, this was Elysium or the Fortunate Isles, for the Celts these were the Isles of the Blest, for the Native American this was the happy hunting ground. Both the Greeks and Celts and various other Indo-European groups considered the Isles of the Blest to be at the extreme Western edge of the world, far out into the Atlantic Ocean, the place where the Sun sets. The place where the Sun itself goes to seemingly die. The Greeks actually had multiple versions of the afterlife, not all very pleasant, some placed in what they would have considered the Underworld rather than the Otherworld.

Just as the Otherworld was considered a real physical place except out of view, the Underworld was considered a real physical place except underneath the ground, literally. There was not considered to be anything ethereal or insubstantial about either of these places. While the Underworld tended to take on negative connotations over time, as civilizations became more 'civilized' and got further away from their spiritual roots, there was no negative connotation to the Underworld originally. It was considered a critically essential part of the world, just as decay is essential to new growth in the plant world, and just as the Past plants the seeds for Present which in turn plants the seeds for the Future. It was a place where what is old and worn out gets recycled and is reborn in new growth again. A good thing, an essential thing. Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain and agriculture, had close ties to this Underworld and in some cases sacrifices to her were made into pits - portals into the Underworld. Any organic gardener understands this: proper decay is essential to new growth. Death of the old is essential to the life of the new, and the life of the past forms the life of the future.

The thoughts and actions of the past also lead to the present and the future in a continual flow: from Underworld to Overworld, and the Overworld becomes itself recycled into the Underworld continually as time flows. Karma is also essentially a chthonic concept: your past makes your future. The word 'chthonic' for the ancient Greeks meaning pertaining to the Underworld as versus Olympian which pertained to the Olympian gods. However over the centuries as people lost that more holistic view of the world in which life and death were inseparable, the chthonic became more and more despised. The vilification of the Underworld as an evil malign place ultimately had its final twisted fruits in the Christian conception of Hell, which was originally considered to be literally underground. The Christian hell is a degenerated version of the Greek and Roman Underworld.

Obviously I do not believe in literal kingdoms underground. Obviously I do not believe that paradise is a tropical island that somehow has evaded Google Maps. For ancient peoples, these were sensible assumptions about what they perceived about invisible realities, but they aren't sensible now. However, I do think that they were onto something, a lot of things actually, and I do think that we can learn from them about matters to which they were much more sensitive than the average person today is. Yes, I think the Underworld, what I often call the Dreaming, is real and that the Otherworld or Otherworlds might well exist in it. I have reasons for this, but I cannot necessarily make those reasons satisfactory to anyone else. Here is what I think: make of it what you will.

Before I start digging into the Underworld in more detail, which I hope to do in subsequent posts, we need to pause a moment and take a look at time. I have touched on this in other posts as well, but for the sake of conciseness I'll recap here.

TIME:

"Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature 

flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is 

called duration: relative, apparent and common time, is some sensible and 

external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of 

motion, which is commonly used instead of true time.

Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, 

remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable 

dimension or measure of the absolute spaces; which our senses determine by 

its position to bodies: and which is vulgarly taken for immovable space."
-Isaac Newton

Time in the modern Western worldview is viewed as a sequential series of discrete quanta: essentially you get time in this view by stringing together a series of static moments. The fact that these static moments do not actually exist anywhere doesn't seem to bother anyone much, but we can see a parallel between the idea of quanta of time and quanta of matter. The West always wanted to view matter as discrete, easily measurable particles: originally atoms were these particles, and originally they were thought to be indivisible. The fact that atoms could be broken down to smaller particles seemingly ad infinitum didn't seem to bother anyone as long as quanta, individual solid units, could be found at the bottom of the pile somewhere. The Western mind had an instinctive unease with the idea of liquidity and motion: motion had to be understood as a set of static instants on a graph. The mathematician Georg Cantor ran headlong into this desire for stasis when he studied the subject of infinity. Georg was a religious man and sought certainty in his understanding of infinity, seeking thereby to come closer to the mind of God. What he found instead was the disturbing realization that any defined section of an infinity contains an infinity of infinities. The distance between zero and one is a set containing an infinite number of fully infinite infinities. This realization may or may not have contributed to his subsequent mental breakdown, but surely the firestorm of criticism he received from his peers for this did contribute to it. One equivalent of this realization in physics is the realization that particles can appear to be either particles or waves, depending on the situation, and that certainly the idea of particles as purely solid objects does not at all quite fit the facts. What we thought of as solid static particles, we now know are inherently squishy.

What I am saying here is this applies to time as well. The inherent nature of time is not one of stasis but one of motion, and that motion cannot ever be fully broken down into static instants, any more than the distance between zero and one can be broken down into a finite set of tiny units of measure. The yawning infinities between zero and one are just like the inherent fluidity between one arbitrarily measured second and the next one.

Moreover, while we are trained to view time as a linear progression of instants, and it can be hard at first to wrap your mind around a different way of viewing time, if we attend closely to our actual perception of time it is completely different from this linear graph. Our actual perception is this: a fluidity. The past recedes out of view and the future comes into view in the same present. This is another way of saying that the present isn't a static being, it is inherently a becoming. The present overtakes the past in the present: the present is overtaken by the future in the present. The neutral, uniform, objective, mathematical time that Newton spoke of does not exist. Moreover, a non-participatory objective viewpoint from which to view time does not exist: we are inherently participating in this endless becoming, this continuous revelation and hiddenness simultaneously.

Imagine looking at a rotating globe of the Earth through a microscope, so that only a small circle of the passing surface of the Earth is visible through the lens. One can imagine one landform moving to the center of our view and then passing out again and some new landform coming into view. Time is the same way: there is the part you can see and the part you can't see. There are the manifested parts that have moved into the field of vision and the unmanifested parts that are outside it. This is the view of both time and space that native peoples have tended to take: that the world is divided thus into what has come into your vision and what has gone beyond your vision. Which means that the parts that have gone beyond your view still exist in some form, they just aren't revealing themselves to you at that moment. That part that has gone beyond view, is what I describe as the Dreaming: the Underworld. The Underworld includes the past and all the thoughts and actions and ideas and visions and mindsets of the past, which are continually in the act of making the present. Past continually makes present: death continually makes life. Past and present, life and death, are part of a continuous whole. We have spent two thousand years trying to split the universe into little bits, only to realize it can never be split. It is an inherent whole. It is an inherent cosmos in each and every little part. Each part is enmeshed with the whole.

The Underworld is a whole other side of the world that we don't want to see, that we have been vilifying and in denial about for millennia. Finally we turned a blind eye to it altogether and denied its existence. I think we need it as much as we need our next breath; as much as plants need soil and people need food. The world is not whole without it. It is the repository of all our myths and archetypes, as well as the source of the very material substance of our existence. You can't have the world we know without it, the world we have denied. The Underworld.

********

Up to this point, I have been sort of treating the Underworld as if it were itself a static thing, abode of archetypes and the past. I hope to make clear in my next post that I think no such thing: the Underworld itself is dynamic, continually bubbling up, as it were, into the visible world. The Overworld is only our window on the Underworld: the finite perspective of our particular location in it.

*********

The Hollow Men

The Human family is messing with the rest of my family,
and they should knock it the hell off.

We are the hollow men

    We are the stuffed men

    Leaning together

    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

    Our dried voices, when

    We whisper together

    Are quiet and meaningless

    As wind in dry grass

-T.S. Eliot

A couple days ago I was kinda down, and I wondered: why do I write this blog? To what end? To change people's minds?

That would be foolish. If you connect with what I write, you would connect with the same things anyway, you don't need me for that. If you don't want to hear, you won't hear, and I cannot change that. The chains of the human mindscape are strong. I wouldn't even care too much if you heard or not, except for the consequences of such ignorance on the world. 

During the American Civil War, it would happen sometimes that brother would fight brother, and brother would kill brother even. Sometimes a family fights against its own members. Such a battle is a matter of tears as much as anger. I suppose that is what I am doing here in a sense, fighting for my family against my family. Fighting for nature against humans. It's not a very sharp weapon perhaps, words, but it is the only weapon I have. Whether words change anything, is out of my control.

No one should be confused about which side I ultimately come down on. Since humanity has shown almost zero responsibility towards the environment thus far, I would be more than happy to see the human race decimated to a fraction of its former size by disease or economic collapse or whatever would get the job done, as long as there are minimal effects to the environment in the process. Such a stance may brand me an extreme radical, so be it. 99.999% of humans ultimately only care about humans: the world has room for the 0.001% who care about the planet first. Man has sowed the wind, it would not be surprising if it reaped the whirlwind.

But while this is in a sense a fight against my human family, it is a fight for it as well. A fight for its soul. Humankind has progressively alienated itself from everything real and worthwhile and of actual value, in favor of fake gods it has made. The sign of sane life is that it is focused on life. Not, life as in, I am going to a Miley Cyrus concert on this day in my life, or as in I am getting a new Playstation 3 on this day in my life. Life as in the existence, cycles and natural processes of living things and the world in which we live. We have placed our fake reality ahead of real reality, and most people can't tell that it has happened because the fake reality is all they know. There are huge chunks of the real world that people are really oblivious to, because all they can see is the fake human world. 

FAKE WORK:
According to the standards of many of our ancestors, almost everyone today lives as functionally a slave. Even compared to Medieval Europeans, most of which were actual serfs of some sort, we're slaves. However, the external facts of our work do not reveal the worst part. Most of us do work that only pertains to the artificial human world and not to organic life, and so we are naturally alienated from our work. Insurance agents, fast food servers, clerks, soldiers, bank presidents and many more, have their entire working experience disconnected from anything natural or real and transact their work wearing imaginary masks (may I take your order *fake grin*), working in imaginary fields, for imaginary tokens. Serving the imaginary gods of Capital we made. We would have to become machines ourselves not to be alienated by such a world, and many do aspire to be machines. Look at the video below: surely you can see why I call this the Age of Ghouls:

FAKE FOOD:
Food - one of the essentials of existence, a sacrament actually. What is food to the fake world? A commodity, and its actual biological function (promoting life and health) does not matter to its role in the fake world. What matters in the fake world is profit and getting you to repeat the ill-advised behavior of buying their food again so they can profit more. To promote profit, completely oblivious to the real role of food, corporations splice pesticide genes into our food crops and put non-food toxins in our fast food and also promote a system of agriculture that despoils the planet and threatens species. For the sake of a fake imaginary god, and that god is Capital. 

FAKE WEALTH:

What if I told you that you were going to work for me and work hard, and I was going to pay you well, but you would have to pay it all back and die penniless, having accomplished nothing for you and all for me? Would you think that's a good deal? Well that's the deal you get all the time. With one hand, Capital writes your paycheck for your meaningless work, and with the other makes you believe that your only options are to give it back. We buy suburban houses that function poorly as a way of controlling costs for us and work very well for increasing corporate profits, and these are the kinds of houses we are told to want. We buy fancy high-tech cars we can't hope to fix ourselves, leaving us totally at the mercy of some cash-draining company or other. Our suburban houses have front lawns instead of vegetable gardens so that we can support the lawn care industry and incidentally assist them in polluting the environment. We buy electronics that are obsolete the day they are bought. In fact, all these things are offerings to the One True God of the modern world: Capital.

Lets suppose though that the good lord Capital has showered itself in your direction, and you are loaded. Are you any healthier for your money? Are you any happier for it, more well balanced? Do you like your work better? Do you find greater significance in your life? If not, then you have traded real life for poker chips. 

FAKE LOVE:

Since all work activity has been focused on the fake work in the workplace, part of the original function of love and marriage has been undermined. Honestly, poetry and flowers aside, the purpose of a wife or husband through the vast majority of human history has been to have someone who can work alongside you to further your mutual survival and make your lives better. Since the real and practical underpinnings of love have been knocked aside, we come home tired from our separate jobs and either try to connect in the fake human world or just hope that sex makes up for the distance in our actual lives. Or else you argue about your god, which is to say money. The saying goes, you don't really know someone until you have gone camping with them. In other words, until the fake human world has been forcibly dropped away and you are face to face with reality and having to spend extended time and work with the other person.

THE DECLINE OF MAN:

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, humans lived very close to the fundamental powers of life. They had no kings, they had no television, they had no jobs in the sense we think of. Then at some point, some folks set themselves up as bosses, chieftains and kings, and people started worshiping power, and more critically the very tools of discourse started to arrange themselves to feed that power. Kings want you to think that it is not only right but inevitable that they are kings and you are not. They hire intellectuals and image-makers to convince you of this. That was the Age of Power.

We have gone way beyond that age now. This is the Age of Ghouls. What is actually in control is nonliving symbols, institutions and ways of organizing things and people to feed into those symbols and institutions. Even power itself only serves to feed the completely fake and illusory new gods of our world. Fame, glamor, entertainment, scandal, but first and foremost is Capital. A nonliving thing, a nonexistent thing actually, except in the minds of human beings. And so life has finally been harnessed to the nonliving, the living have been sacrificed to the dead, and death has become triumphant. Not even death really, nonentity. The phantoms that shape and organize our world never lived, never were real, but their effect on the minds of humans is destroying the world. It is a machine for eating life and leaving death in its wake. 

I think it would go without saying that we should all resist this machine as best we can.

********

In a way, I feel I have failed to tell you anything but bad news, as essential as the acknowledgement of that bad news is. Partly, it is because I have a hard time finding the words for what it is I am fighting for. I cannot communicate my kinship with the nonhuman world in words. My love of the spirits of wood and water and Earth is a deeply personal matter that eludes precise expression. It is not a matter of rhetoric but of bones; deep in my bones. Perhaps you know what I mean. The real cannot be phrased in the language of the fake, nor can living be expressed in the language of the dead.