The Life Force and a Sense of the Elegiac

I am 48 years old. I am in good health. I wonder if my life will be cut short by climate catastrophe and its consequences. In recent years, I have written angrily about what is occurring in the Earth system as the result of the highly elevated levels of carbon and other toxins that humans have introduced into the atmosphere, the ground and the waters. As we lurch into 2016, I think that such a tone is no longer necessary. My anger has grown out of a feeling of indignation that a species would pursue such a blatantly horrific and destructive course for itself and its fellow Earth creatures. I thought that by expressing this - often incandescent - rage I could provoke ripples on down the line of causality that might alter the course of the plodding, stupid beast that is global industrial consumer society.

A feeling of rage toward the operatic stupidity of civilized human behavior is very natural; indeed, I consider it a sign of the life force radiating within one. However, directing a prolonged scream toward The Madness in an effort to draw attention to The Madness is no longer needed. The ravages of climate change and the strange, at times almost whimsical movements of the weather and the rubble and the refugees left in its wake are now a constant presence. Bizarre swings in the weather act now like a high, circling bird who swoops down at odd times to crash through the windows of our dwellings before exiting once again toward the heavens and the renewal of its high hunter’s arc.

I don’t believe I have the mental or the emotional profile to engage in acts of sabotage that might make a dent in the death machine and its gloomy, dumb march. I can and do participate in local movements against extraction industries and on the myriad other issues of social and animal and environmental justice that our present lifeways force. I am focused on a massive personal shift in consciousness and living that is based on the principle of entering into relationships with other people, other biota and other places as fellow subjects to be listened to and not objects to be exploited.

But the question returns: How to express the bewilderment, the frustration, the rage and the despair that all arise within one upon witnessing the galloping ruin and the obtuse and wretched mentality that is driving it? Not expressing our feelings in the face of such loss causes soul sickness. I believe we will only know how to voice these feelings by voicing them. Expressing the truth is like pulling back the curtains to reveal the sun shining outside: the contours of perception and the world are changed as we speak and relate. We learn how to speak by speaking. As for myself, I feel I can now voice my range of emotions on this topic without focusing on angry yelling and gesticulating toward the destruction. The destruction has become very evident and becomes more so with each passing day. A sense of the elegiac is important now and it may even help to drive changes on the level of Deep Culture (to use Gary Gripp’s term) that are the only thing that may slow the burning of the world. 

The Fundamental Strangeness: Mental Health and American Culture

The fundamental strangeness of being born into a culture whose central and guiding principle - pursue your own personal greed in order to accumulate more green paper survival coupons than your fellow humans - I reject. I not only reject it, I am repelled by it and find it anathema to my essence and to the essence of most of the people I know and love.

I have lived with this sensation of profound estrangement for forty-eight years and have now – thanks to much reading and dialogue and life experience – begun to receive some perspective on it and to reflect upon it. I believe that being born into a culture whose founding tenet I reject forced a traumatic rupture or disassociation in me. In my teens, I began to obsessively think morbid and painful and ego-dystonic thoughts. (An ego-dystonic thought is one that directly runs counter one’s actual self and values). This tendency has waxed and waned over the decades, cresting a handful of times into near psychotic breaks. I was diagnosed with OCD and have taken medication in order to control it for 10 years.

What I am now coming to grasp is that my obsessive-compulsive disorder, in many ways, has served as a form of adaptation to the world I was born into. Certainly, I was born with an “atypical” neurological profile and my DNA contains the potential for episodes of OCD. However, I am also beginning to sense that the intensity, the frequency, the duration and the very nature of my OCD episodes have been shaped by and has been a response to my fundamental estrangement from the founding principles of this culture.

Ours is a culture that, above all, has pursued the profane. Nature is to be feared, despised, and attacked. The person guided by pursuits – such as art, poetry and working for peace - that fall outside of the commodity-world is also to be feared, despised and attacked. These facts strike me as fundamentally violent and have caused me, on occasion, to seek refuge in self-destructive thought loops. But what if even those people who appear to cherish and profess to love this culture were also – on a much more deeply unconscious level – repelled by it, unbeknownst to them?

Much has been said about the pathetic and circus-like nature of the 2015 Republican debates. Perhaps what has not been noted is how deeply strange and eerie and profoundly sad the candidates appear. Whether it is the blustering bigotry of Donald Trump or the calmly pronounced nonsense of Ben Carson or the bullying bleats of Chris Christie, it all has the shimmering tinge of great desperation – not only desperation, but despair. I believe that the despair huddling behind the bellows and burps of the presidential candidates is founded upon their own inability to feel well in a culture that goes against our biology as social beings interdependent upon nature. When they speak, when TV commentators speak, when the titans of business speak, when actors in commercials speak, all I can hear is people trying with tremendous desperation to convince themselves that the insane tenets of our culture are not insane: That the atmosphere is not warming, that the ocean is not acidifying and that we humans are not splitting violently in two on the inside, unable to reconcile our true selves as sacred and loving beings with the cultural tenets we have been told to follow.

Stories Old and New

I do not view the frequent incidences of mass shootings and the emergence of racist billionaire demagogue Donald Trump as a popular politician as separate problems. Additionally, I do not view these two problems as separate from the fact that there is a garbage patch of plastic the size of Texas floating in the Pacific or the fact that if you were to weigh the large fish in the ocean you would find that total weight down 90% from what it was before the Industrial Revolution or the fact that eight of the last ten years have been the hottest years on record.

The extremes: the crazy extremes, the tragic ones, the absurd and farcical ones, the devastating extremes that we are witnessing are the manifestation of the end of a story. This story, which is in its final and terminal phase, contends that humans are atomized selves who can function independent of community and in a realm separate from “nature.” It is a mad story – and it is tragic that such a story could become so widespread, dominant and entrenched.  Mercifully, this mad narrative is on its final legs; its contradictions are more manifest with each passing day. Yesterday I heard a report on the radio from Beijing in which the interviewer asked a six-year-old girl if she knew what color the sky was. The girl responded that she thinks it is blue because she saw the sky one day. The little girl also remarked that she has never seen a star.

We know from the wars in the Balkans and now the war in Iraq  that when a force that maintains a society in place is removed (even if that force is a brutal and sociopathic tyrant, as in these examples), chaos is unleashed. As the previous story – one which goes back 8000 years to the dawn of agriculture, continued with the rise of empires, was distilled in the Enlightenment and reached its final and obscene apotheosis in the philosophy of the founder of modern marketing, Edward Bernays – truly begins to unravel and release its grip on Western consciousness, chaos will be unleashed. However, the degree of chaos and what emerges to take the place of our current moribund myth depends very much on us.

We are very fortunate in the United States to live in a place where vestiges of alternate stories have hung on among Native Americans, people of African descent and people from anywhere – including Europe and Asia – where the current dominant story did not completely obliterate previous lifeways and modes of consciousness. In summarizing the difference between Western and indigenous thought, writer Derrick Jensen has remarked that the greatest difference between the indigenous view of life and the Western view of life is this: indigenous culture views the world as subjects to enter into relationship with; the Western mind views the world as objects to be exploited. In his book The Reenchantment of the World, Morris Berman writes, “For more than 99% of human history, the world was enchanted and man saw himself as an integral part of it. The complete reversal of this perception in a mere four hundred years or so has destroyed the continuity of the human experience and the integrity of the human psyche. It has nearly wrecked our planet, as well. The only hope, or so it seems to me, lies in the reenchantment of the world.”

Alternate ways to interact with each other and with the world around us abound. These ways offer not only the hope for the survival of our species and our fellow Earth species, but offer a way of existing that can be much less fraught with the isolation, alienation and explosions of murderous rage with which we live now.

Dedicated to Leo Gonçalves, Vioarr Odinsson, Stephanie Ferrera, Emily MacDonald, Harvey Taylor, Christine Ferrera, Julie Gouldner, Janos Biro Marques Leite, Temple Crocker, Charles Eisenstein and all of those helping to remember, rediscover and reimagine our stories.

My Kind of Candidate

If there exists a presidential candidate who advocates the abandonment of GICE (the global industrial consumer economy), the reduction of the US military budget to one dollar annually, the mobilization of the citizenry to plant prairie grasses and forests as emergency (and long term) carbon sinks, who renounces publicly Christopher Columbus and also many of the founding fathers as insane people – sociopaths who preached individual self-aggrandizement and avarice at the expense of human and nonhuman lives; if there exists a candidate who, finally, advocates the dissolution of the nation into local, land-based economies of scale and organizes nation-wide permaculture and foraging classes to help realize this transition... Well, that person has got my vote.

coltrane

invested in

the elements

spins a sun

and sets another

system swirling

on the pulse

of elvin jones’                                 

breakneck

metronome

to redefine

rhythm

and therefore

space/time

these are

a few

of my

favorite things

sings a

soprano sax

so unlikely

only inevitable

like a cardinal                                                                     

on green grass

it appears

to wrap minds

around

new vines

scaling manhattan

canyons

trane laid

down sets

with monk

at the five spot

said rehearsals

were just learning

from sphere

eight hours

at a pop        

how to stop

a blue train              

can't be done

bends into night

sounds

lonesome blue

midnight blue

blue Egypt

blue ascension

blue the color

of the robin's egg

In carolina hills

blue beam

of starlight

on the

nightingale's beak

blue stones roll

as tumbling notes

across the

staff paper

blue

the color of

astrological charts

strung across

the beams

of night

blue reason

to play

until the hour

of 5 am

harlem

sunrise

won't the

midnight special    

shine a light

on me            

leadbelly

memorandum

laid the table

for stone

cold blues

trane could

reform

in the

steam engine

of harmonic

extension

medieval modes

put into

brass improvisations

call it africa/brass

call it the spirit

made me do it

ballads whispered                         

from duke ellington's

piano

were information

in a glazed glass

tangerine sundown

the tenor

in the hands

invocation

of the very stars

of the coming night

all was written                    

in your name

already

coal the element

to generate

steam                        

trane the engine

crossing the continent

in ascents

and

whistle-round-the-bends

so much

trouble seen

refined down

to copper penny

arpeggios

trane baroque

tapped

onto broadway

melodies

so much

trouble seen

must glean

some daybreak

into the

coldwater flat

while the

steam

of trane’s

inventions

floats up

the fire

escape dawn

It's time

to craft

a monument

alright trane

will do it

in sonic sculpture

and know

the rushmore

of this night

this song

is in

the ascension

up

Dan Hanrahan