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

Externalities and the Sacred

A recent report by Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program concluded the following, “The huge profit margins being made by the world’s most profitable industries (oil, meat, tobacco, mining, electronics) is being paid for against the future: we are trading long term sustainability for the benefit of shareholders. Sometimes the environmental costs vastly outweigh(ed) revenue, meaning that these industries would be constantly losing money had they actually been paying for the ecological damage and strain they were causing.” ¹ This is a very important fact to recognize, as one considers the global economic and social system. However, I believe there is a deeper point to be grasped as we consider the report’s conclusions.

The notion that you can affix a monetary value to many of the "externalities" that the report identifies is the notion of a madman. To wit: if the neoincotinoids found in Monsanto's Roundup result in the catastrophic reduction or extinction of the monarch butterfly – as is occurring presently -- what price tag do we put upon such a crime? I recall visiting the shores of Lake Michigan with my mother in the 1970s and viewing great clusters of these floating miracles perched upon milkweed patches. As Monsanto seeks to remove wonder – in the form of bees and butterflies – from the planet, how many dollars do we assign to this extermination?

Answer: no dollars. The very essence of such elements of existence is that their value exists outside of financial calculus... because they are Sacred. With approximately 200 species going extinct daily, we exist in the epoch of the Sixth Great Extinction on earth and this event is being forced by... "externalities."

The world of the global market is the world of desacralized life. It is a slow motion crime scene.

^{1 http://www.exposingtruth.com/new-un-report-finds-almost-no-industry-profitable-if-environmental-costs-were-included/}