Bounded by Darkness

What were they thinking? "This is a real beauty spot, what

should we put here? I know, a nuke plant!"

Top two: pics from my 2005 trip to Mt. Nebo State Park, Arkansas.

Bottom: nearby Arkansas Nuclear One

I was watching a very important message from Survival International, which you can see here:
http://www.survivalinternational.org/awa

It's about attempting to protect one of the planet's most endangered tribes. Anyway, in the video Colin Firth said, "every paradise is bounded by darkness." And I thought that was so true. And it made me immediately think of one of my favorite places on Earth, Mt. Nebo State Park and nearby Petit Jean State Park in Arkansas, and the fact that some dullard thought that that right nearby was a great place to put a nuclear power plant. You can see it very clearly from the top of Nebo, sticking out like a steaming sore thumb. I am not an avid anti-nuclear sort really, I understand that people need power and that assuming it doesn't melt down (which they have been doing with frightening regularity and destructive power these days) that it can be a carbon-free power source. But you don't go sticking one right there. 

And generally speaking it is true, all paradises are bounded by darkness. The Earth in general is a paradise bounded by darkness, forgetting for the moment about the malignant effects of human beings. In a cosmic sense it is, bounded by the vastness of outer space. But also it is a rather dark paradise too. This tremendous diversity and complexity and beauty and fun and play comes on a planet where pretty much everything is fighting and eating everything else. In an ultimate sense, we all eat the dead of the Earth and in the end the Earth eats us. That carrot you are eating might have been nurtured by the bones of your dead ancestors. You might in the end become food for carrots. In a lot of ways, the suffering of animals, humans and plants is an omnipresent fact of life on Earth. As computer people would say, it's not a bug, it's a feature. This really kept me from becoming an animist for a long time. Buddhism and gnosticism and to an extent Christianity all say that the world is in some sense a really bad place, a place of suffering, and I was like, "ya I can see that." I can completely understand that point of view.

But it's us. It's not like the planet is separate from us, we're a part of it. It's like being married to a wife who has some utterly spellbinding and precious qualities, but sometimes she's a real bitch. ;) The illusion that we can get away, that we can in essence escape from ourselves, is the failure of the otherworldly religions. Otherwise I would be all for them, sign me up, but it is equivalent to escaping from yourself. You can't do it. What you wind up doing is being utterly alienated from your own real self, which is inextricably a part of the wind and the trees and the soil. We are the Earth. It is us. 

And this alienation promotes another form of the bounding of paradise in darkness, which is human-caused destruction of wilderness. Because we cannot see that in so doing we are destroying our brothers, sisters, ancestors and the future of our descendants. We don't think that this world has anything really to do with us, so we feel okay about destroying it.

I read something recently written by a conservative who was ranting about environmentalists wanting to give rights to nature and putting the rights of nature and people on an equal footing and the entire time completely oblivious to the fact that human beings cannot live without nature. I was thinking the whole time, "where the fuck do you think you are going to live if you don't have a planet?" Of course none of us really have rights. We don't. People don't, plants don't, animals don't. What we should ask for, is not rights but respect. All the legal rights in the world cannot compel respect, and respect is what is really needed. I'm not against people eating animals for instance, though it is not very healthy for them, but I do it. What I am against, and what is making me migrate more towards vegetarianism, is that is is not right and not respect to fuck up an animal's life in the meantime. You want to eat chickens, eat them. Wring their little necks and heat up the fryer. Just don't put them up in warehouses of cages so that their feet grow around the bars and they live in their own filth. Let them live natural lives, and all the other animals we eat too. I can't ask anything more for myself really. If you have a genuine biological need to cap my ass, do what you must but don't mess with me in the meantime. ;)

All paradises are bounded in darkness. Maybe it makes the light more precious, or it will if we really see things clearly. But if we don't recognize that we are just an extension of the world, what happens is that we reject both light and darkness and walk around like the walking dead, only counting money and things and not counting life, love or happiness; counting on a nonexistent future and a nonexistent other world and living in this one like a zombie. Where are you going to go without a world? Can you go somewhere without yourself? The world is you.