Pishiboro

Imagine what it would be like to have a god like Pishiboro - a foolish god, a laughing god, a fallible god, a god whose body is our landscape, instead of the God that most of us have, more or less, inherited.   What a relief to have such a god! Not to have a world-conquering god, a god of purity and perfection and power, who knows all and is always watching.  What a relief to have a god that dies and gives back to the earth, a god that decomposes, a god that is dirty and subject to the stings of the smallest creature and that knows pain and death without making a big drama about it.  If we had a foolish god, perhaps we could acknowledge and forgive ourselves and each other for all of our foolishness.  If we had a god whose body went back to the earth perhaps we might be at peace with the naturalness of our own bodies.  Perhaps if we had a god that dug holes, we would remember him when we were digging holes.

A Story about Living and Dying (And Laughing and Sex)

This is another piece from Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' The Harmless People; it is a story told by the old man Ukwane of the Gikwe  about their god Pishiboro.

Pishiboro was digging a hole.  When he had finished he told his wives to go to look at it while he went out hunting in a different direction, but instead the two wives went to get tsama melons.  They found one melon, brought it home, and, taking out the seeds, were grinding them to powder when Pishiboro arrived.  The two wives had taken their own genital organs and mixed those with the melon seeds which they were grinding.  Pishiboro ate the mixture, which he thought was very nice, and he jumped to his feet and asked his wives where they got such nice meat.
"Oh," They said, "we told you when you left that you were going in the wrong direction.  You should have come to the hole with us because when we got there we found a baby giraffe inside, but we could not get it out, so we cut pieces off its feet, and this was the meat you found so good."
They slept, and the next day they all went to the hole.  The two wives had, in the meantime, defecated into the hole until it was full.  When Pishiboro leaned over it to look for the giraffe, they toppled him in; then, laughing and shrieking, they ran away and climbed into a camel-thorn tree.
From the depth of his hole, Pishiboro looked up at his wives in the tree, and as he looked it came to him what wives were for, and he climbed up the tree and possessed them, and they conceived, and when the children were born they dropped from the tree like fruit.
Then the whole family came down, and as they were walking away Pishiboro found a night adder's home.  Only the baby snakes were there; the parents were gone out.  The Pishiboro family laughed at the baby snakes because they had such ugly faces, and when they had laughed all they could they went home to their scherm.  That night the baby snakes told their mother what had happened, and in the morning, when Pishiboro returned for another laugh, the baby snakes were dancing and the mother snake was hiding in a little hole she had made.  Pishiboro, too, began to dance, and when he danced by the hole the mother snake jumped out and bit him, and although he ran away the poison was working in him, and soon he was ill and in great pain.
The omarambas, the dry valleys in the land, are furrows that Pishiboro made on his way home because he suffered so much, and the hills at the sides of the omarambas were made by his kicking feet.
Pishiboro died from the snake bite, and now all the water that flows in the rivers in the north, all the rain, and all the water that collects in pools is the rottenness of Pishiboro, liquid made as his dead body began to decay.

Un-civilization - Butchering a Gemsbok in the Kalahari Desert with the Gikwe Bushpeople

"Next the two men removed the rumen, the first stomach of ruminant animals, where the grass they bolt hurriedly is kept in quantities to be coughed up and chewed thoroughly when the animal is lying in the shade.  Ukwane lifted the rumen out carefully, like a great water sack that might burst suddenly, and hurried with it to the pit lined with the skin.  There he slit it and water gushed out, every drop saved by the skin.  Ukwane and Gai removed handfuls of its contents, a yellow, pulpy mass of partially digested grass, and they squeezed each handful dry into bowls, tsama-melon rinds, and ostrich egg water containers that the women had brought forward.  They did not mind two great white worms that were discovered living in the rumen, for as soon as enough water was collected, the people all had a long, satisfying drink.  Some was pressed on me by Tsetchwe; I could not bring myself to drink it, but I did taste it and found that it was not too unpleasant, although it tasted strongly as intestines smell.  It was fresh, however, it was only the liquid from grass, and I thought that if I had no other water I too could drink the water of rumen."
From Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' The Harmless People about the ways of the Gikwe hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari who have no access to water for eight months out of the year.

Civilization

How do we become un-imprisoned without rejecting a civilization that is all we know?

By turning the purpose of civilization around so that it gives back to nature rather than just taking everything (without so much as a thank you!) Or at least attempts to gives something back, conscious of the need for balance, and that the long term survival of ourselves - our own self-interest - require a more balanced way of living.

By turning all of the powerful capabilities of civilization away from ruthlessly exploiting all other life on this planet towards nurturing life and building habitats not just for ourselves but also for the incredible wealth of life that we are so fortunate to live together with and upon which we depend.   By coming to see ourselves truly and accurately - scientifically - as the primates that we are, primates in a living landscape, and not as the gods or children of gods that our religious traditions imply (valuable culturally and morally as these traditions are,) and in that seeing, coming to know that we can’t just keep on taking without contributing to the landscape in which we live.

We can’t so much reject civilization but work to re-direct it, to clarify the purpose of civilization, such that we may again be its participants, rather than its victims, as so many of us seem to be, even the most economically successful or celebrated.  

There is a a sacrifice to be made, a giving up, because that is necessary.  We can’t have it all, if we are to live honestly.  What we must give up: the sense of entitlement to infinite supplies of food, shelter, transportation, health-care, entertainment, security, and even information that is so common in the First World.  Mostly, what needs to be sacrificed are delusions - comfortable delusions, delusions of comfort - which are being ripped away anyway.

And in exchange for sacrificing these delusions, we might have a shot not just at a more accurate understanding of ourselves but also a more reasonable way of living.  A way of life with a future to it, and not that Blade Runner future. 

This is not to say that by sacrificing our delusions that we will be assured of a viable future.  This is not about bargaining with the destiny our current civilization has us set up to meet. There is nothing sure or certain in this world.   It is simply to say that there will be sacrifices to be made. The future is not cornucopian.  There are real limits which can’t be wished away.  But there are paths that are more viable than others, attitudes that are more or less constructive, perspective that are more or less useful.

Being a “doomer” is not particularly useful.  But trying to see ourselves and our predicament clearly and having a framework by which to act upon that clarity of vision is useful, a framework which is bigger than the common humanism/anthropocentrism, such that we act in ways that benefit not just our own species but other life-forms as well.  Also, useful is a framework that does not reject the countless generations worth of work that has gone into building the civilization that we more or less comfortably inhabit, but instead turns our best capabilities toward better goals and the profit, the excess that we generate back to where it belongs, the larger system of life.  

The New Question

What can we, as a species (or a nation or a state or town or a business or an individual), contribute to the community of life?

It's always been about what can we take, more efficiently than anyone else.  It's always been about EROI (Energy Return on Investment), and how much extra we can suck out of the system by all our cleverness, bunch of monkey grifters that we are.

Maybe it's time to have a little pride and think about giving back.  About making something that's good for everybody: microbes, rodents, coral reefs, elephants, and all everything in between.  Imagine what that might be like, just to think that way, and then start living the question.  

Of course there are many wonderful people who already are living the question, such as my friend Megan Lamson, who has been leading coastal beach-cleanups for years.  Cleaning up after ourselves is one step in growing up and towards giving something back to the community of life.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

One of the greatest barriers we have to understanding other life-forms is the burden of misinformation we carry in our heads.  - Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in The Hidden Life of Deer.

I don't know what I'm doing, but if there's one thing that I consider my job, my calling, the thing I'm supposed to do, it's trying to understand other life-forms.  That's why I'm a rancher, that's why I'm in agriculture, because I get to spend my days around other life-forms, and also because I don't think you can understand other life-forms without understanding how we are bound to each other in life and death, in feeding and in eating.  It's not enough to have some academic or intellectual or scientific or otherwise symbolic knowledge about the ways we are bound together as bodies, as matter.  It's necessary to be entangled and impure, in the middle of the struggle for survival, as close as possible to the transactions that keep us alive and to know, to see what that costs.  Otherwise it's too easy to forget and not see, to live in our entirely human world.

Here's another great writer to whom we will all be indebted if we are so lucky as to negotiate a way out of dystopian ruination that we seem to be headed towards so inexorably - the anthropologist-ethologist-novelist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.