Addictions

I came home yesterday after dark, after a day in the city, and one of the month-old puppies had climbed into a bucket of water and drowned.  His mother had pulled him out, it seemed, because I found him dead next to the bucket, but she was too late. I tried to revive his limp, chill body, but I was too late as well. My sleep was haunted by guilt, sorrow, and inchoate terrors. 

The mom dog slept by her baby all night, chasing her other pups away.  I wonder if she too, amid the misery of loss, also feels the mystery of it - death - that sense of passings and transformation that tinges the horror and pain with a kind of wonder. As if another kind of time operates there at the edge, but one is helpless to grasp its significance. Perhaps she knows its significance better than I do.  All night she slept by her baby where I had placed him in the grass, periodically licking his face and body.  In the morning I dug a very small hole and buried the puppy on the hillside where his grandfather and great grandparents also lie.   

Losing the puppy is just this week’s knife edge of sorrow, unexpected in its particulars but familiar in its raw exposure.  I live and work on a cattle ranch, which means that I make a direct living on the life and death of animals. There are the joyful, anxious months of calving, where the pastures are dotted with fresh and shiny babies, and there are the years of overseeing their growth to maturity, and then the day when they are shipped off to be slaughtered, where I send them to their death.  I don’t like the death part, no, I don’t like to think about it, but there is a very big part of me that needs it, like an addictive drug or an obsessive cause.  I need death to be there lurking in my life, or I would have to find something else to substitute for it, like alcoholism or jihad.  

This could just be a defect of my personality, as I’ve always had an above-average fixation with altered states of consciousness, intensities, extremes, and other sorts of follies and ridiculousness. I do a decent impression of solid citizen these days, when necessary, but I’m always a bit ragged around the edges on closer inspection.  I live too far out there to not be marked by a certain awkwardness.  Out there - out here - is where I can feel the systole and diastole of death and life rolling through me without impediment.  It is my secret drug, my secret well of renewal.  An open secret, secret only because I can’t explain it at all well or pass it on, as one is supposed to do with human culture.   

So, this is just another story of addiction, which is to say a story of quiet rebellion against the social order, or capitalism, or repressive standards of behavior, or civilization itself.  I don’t know anymore - perhaps it is the kind of rebellion that just makes order stronger, and I’m OK with that.  Social cohesion is something to be treasured; that is one of the lessons that we must very reluctantly learn from the Arab Spring and its aftermath: that even a repressive order might be preferable to the free-for-all of destruction and murder that can take its place.  

But I think my addiction has deeper roots and is the most conservative kind of rebellion possible.  I want what we always had until not too long ago: that atavistic world, so unjust by liberal humanist standards, but absolutely just along longer ecological timelines.   I want my life entwined with the lives and plants and animals because their lives are a truth deeper founded than the tangles of philosophy.  

Those are luxuries I have claimed for myself, the luxuries of sharp-edged experience and open spaces; they are unpopular, nearly free for the taking, however strenuous that taking might be. Digging the hole into which to put the puppy I weep inside for all of us, that we might die, that we have to die, that we must go on, and that it is so hard to hang on to what is essential.

Innovations without a city

Civilization has always been practiced in cities.  It's right there in the word itself.  But a city might not be fundamentally necessary for the practice of civilization anymore, what with the web and all.

The model of civilization has been city-centric for few millennia now.   As in, the produce of the countryside is sucked into the city, to fuel the business of civilization, in all its self-involved glory.  The cities have justified this by citing the innovations they produce: political, economic, scientific, technical innovations that raise the whole system up.  

But what if we've taken that pattern to its logistical and logical limit?  What if all of the innovations of the cities have run their course, and no longer produce any marginal returns for the whole?  What if the pattern of city-centrism has done everything it can do and now the places where the essential innovations need to happen are out in the country or even in the wilderness? Or in the urban gardens and other eruptions of the country within the city?  What if the essential innovations that we need to make as a civilization have nothing to do with concentrations of humans, but in a fundamental re-thinking of the relationship between human civilization and nature?

This kind of innovation doesn't even have a name yet.  It would be fundamental, as in changing the foundational pattern of civilization, from a strongly centripetal pattern to something more balanced.  Changing the economic relationship between the city and the country, and between civilization and nature has profound implications for the health of eco-systems, for the psychological and physical health of humans.

And there are a bunch of people already working on it, feeling their way towards innovations they can't even name, and might not work out. Innovations that build on the best that the cities produce but that question the assumption that only cities and its citizens can do civilization and innovation.

Everyday magic

The ability to perceive beauty in everyday life is a magic art that sets one free - free from the economic machine that corrupts one's desires to increase consumption.  And ever increasing consumption is necessary to keep profits flowing to service the debt and keep the whole highly leveraged Ponzi scheme rolling along towards total resource extraction.

Finding everyday, wild, humble beauty - a wildflower, a cloud, the sound of the wind in the trees - to sustain your heart is an act of rebellion.  And a survival skill.  And a key to the doorway out of the machine.  And therefore a magic art.   You didn't know you had magical skills, did you?

Trump, jihad, and eco-warriors

I actually feel some sympathy for the Trump fans and their rage at the machine.  The ironic thing is that it’s the same rage that fuels the jihadis of ISIS that we have all vowed to exterminate.  It’s also the same rage that any environmentalist has felt at least once, if not constantly.  

I’m not saying that I sympathize with the barely concealed racial resentments of the Trump mob, or the violence of the jihadis.  Or even the self-righteousness of the environmentalists.  

But with their rage at the cold, efficient extractions of Western civilization, I have some sympathy.  And can even find a bit of a silver lining in all of the ugliness that is emerging. That mote of dreaming for a better way that fuels the extremism is the strip of silver in all the darkness of violence and hate.  And it is in danger of being extinguished in the necessary victory of common decencies. 

If only all of this anger and energy can find a course to run that is not hateful, but constructive of radical but peaceful alternatives.  Towards a caliphate that governs kindly, towards a global economy that is not self-cannibalizing and oligarchic, towards an environmentalism that is self-critical. 

I know, that is seriously Pollyanna - naive about the role that American hegemony has played in bringing us to this pass and overly optimistic about human tendencies - but anything else will probably involve lots more mayhem. 

Civilization is what you do, not what you are.

We all live in a simulation created by language, art, and symbolic thought. We all live within the social systems that symbolic thought makes possible: agriculture, trade, politics, technology, etc. We all live in the matrix we call civilization.
Our Matrix is not created by aliens, AI, or future versions of ourselves; it is created by our ancestors and by all of us together, by our consent and by our not knowing any other way to live our lives. Our matrix is created by our parents, our education, ourselves. It is the project we all work on, the thing we were all trained to do.

What you are is both less than, and more, than civilization tells you. Civilization tells you that you are human and special amongst all creation. Civilization tells you stories about yourself so that you think only in words and pictures. So that you see only other humans. So that you learn to compete with other humans to build the walls and screens of civilization ever higher.

What.you are is an animal, amongst animals, a creature amongst creatures, a pool of proteins, a city of cells that walk on its back legs. What you are, as are all things, is the inheritor of stars and eternal, a continuity of life in its unceasing transformations, unseparte from the farthest reaches of the universe, vibrant with the traces of supernovas and black holes. You are, it all is, much bigger than the little box that civilization puts you in.

But civilization is very entertaining.