65. BIG ENGINE, LITTLE RADIATOR

From the Archives

(April 2005) Just finished half an order of tom kar gai and half an order of Bangkok duck and am now kicked back on my sofa in my batman pants and wienie woman T-shirt watching the National Geographic channel/relaxing.

This channel gets on my nerves sometimes because they sensationalize topics much as Fox does: Then, disaster struck! And one species was nearly lost . . . forEEEEEver! or Then, in the midst of their celebration, the big cat struck! and you see a fallen bicycle with one wheel still spinning and the child’s shoe, lying there in the dirt.

Still, this is my favorite channel of late and their shows about plate tectonics and anthropological or archeological studies and Alaskan bays and wild foxes and bear cubs are interesting. The station’s attempts to show viewers the ways that humans can coexist with other species are really interesting too. And they occasionally air a show in which my friend Hakon, several other anthropologists, and the girlfriend of the lead anthropologist who got the grant build a bamboo raft using an ancient design and attempt to travel down the Amazon on it.

My pal Hakon is an absolute joy and one of the most intellectually curious people I’ve ever met. He really does see the earth as one giant place to explore (and plays a mean game of basketball too).

Late in the show, Hakon et al. hit a patch of roaring white water and their entire raft comes apart underneath them, dumping them and all of their gear into a rapid.

But back to the present. Tonight’s show is about evolution, which no doubt will provide National Geographic with some interesting mail. The show explores why, at some point 70,000 years ago, we homo sapiens almost became extinct (mostly likely from a global catastrophe, and probably from a deadly volcano) and what allowed us to survive while other species did not.

Back to that in a minute but what caught my attention first was the life-like model of the remains of a giant species the scientists refer to as Goliath. They built this model to try to understand why Goliath evolved into a smaller species the same scientists refer to as a hobbit.

Adaptability. Or, as they say so well on the show, Goliath had a big-engine, little-radiator flaw. He was massive, but didn’t have enough skin surface to stay cool in a hot climate. So Goliath adapted in order to stay cool.

Since I’m always hot when people around me are cold, I plan to co-opt this explanation and refer to myself as Medea of the big engine, little radiator species. (-:

So. Why did homo sapiens survive while other species became extinct? Let’s jump ahead a few centuries to when cave-dwellers first began making things with an eye for beauty as well as function.

Homo sapiens alone have a sense of pride or beauty that drives our work, the scientists report. And our ancestors must have had a little extra time on their hands because it didn’t take them long to carve fancy arrowheads and intricate stones and to string shell jewelry.

You don’t wear jewelry unless you care what other people think about you, and that character trait is part of what makes us who we are. (Vain?)

So think about it. Creativity is a huge evolutionary leap. I mean, ten thousand years ago, everyone was making jewelry; eighty thousand years ago, no one was. What a leap to make!

Why did we emerge alone from the crowded field of apes?

Well, creativity generates multiple ideas. Yo. And chimps never could control the bullies within their own communities.

Compared to the chimps, we are surprisingly nonviolent. We tend to be peaceful and cooperative and we work well together (sometimes), building on each other’s inventions.

Go-it-alone erectus had but one tool to solve every problem, but we use our creativity to create new tools to solve specific problems. And our grain is an infinite toolkit.

Language, however, is what really allowed the weak among our ancestors to team up against the bullies and create a “coalition of the timid.” (Nice phrase.) Eliminating the bullies that threatened the whole with their unbridled aggression improved the odds of our species surviving.

There. That’s what I learned while lying on my ass in my batman pants: Language and creativity generate species-saving solutions—or, creativity is the ultimate survival tool.

Gotta love it.

54. A DE-EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION

From the Archives

(March 2005) And now, to continue a previous thought, Joy Harjo said

I believe that written language was, in many ways, a de-evolution of the communication process. You lose human contact, context of time and place, and a sense of relationship. With written communication, you gain the ability to lie more easily. There is separation between the speaker and the reader/listener. There is less accountability.

Blogs take this a step further. Now you can read someone’s blog and satisfy your curiosity about her while avoiding actual communication, self-revelation, or reciprocity—create yet another level of separation between the speaker and the reader/listener.

Convenient that.

All righty. It is 9:45 PM on Sunday night. I have talked with my mother. I have talked with my bestgrrl. I have said hello to the duckies. (No great blue heron sightings today.) I have eaten a tasty dinner and packed a lunch for tomorrow. I have packed my gym clothes. I have even washed my car windows and edited many lines of academese.

(Favorite edit of the day: change “becomes extremely dubious regarding” to “he is doubtful of.” Lordy lord lord. . .)

READING: the TV channel

LISTENING TO: an old tune, Natalie Farr’s “Build Your Wall” (Maybe it’s real safe inside your house. Maybe it’s real safe all set apart. And maybe I’m a fool to climb your wall. You build your wall, deprive your heart. Build your wall, deprive your heart....)

SINGING IN SHOWER: For some reason I don’t understand I sang the Bee Gees’s “New York Mining Disaster 1941” (In the event of something happening to me there is something I would like you all to see. It’s just a photograph of someone that I knew....)

53. LANGUAGE IS CULTURE

From the Archives

(March 2005) Got tired last night, so am continuing yesterday’s ponderings this morning.

I am most at home outdoors, and especially by water, where I recognize connections between my self and the world around me. Yet I am rational enough to recognize that these connections are themselves an act of my imagination (even though they could also be a reality that I have just absorbed somehow).

Is it Merleau-Ponty who said my body is my presence in the world?

Anyway, I don’t buy that crap about humans having dominion over the earth and its species in accordance with some white-haired old rule-bound deity. Nor do I believe that humans have any special rights. Period. Instead, I see us as just one part of a larger whole.

Plus, take a look around. At best, the earth is indifferent to us; at worst, it should destroy us to save itself.

I have been trying to pay more attention to the words I use when I speak about nature and connections and wildness in general—in part, because I want to express myself as accurately as possible. But also because several writers I’ve read recently have made me recognize my need to do this.

David Abrams makes this good point in The Spell of the Sensuous:

in indigenous, oral cultures, . . . language seems to encourage and augment the participatory life of the senses, while in Western civilization language seems to deny or deaden that life, promoting a massive distrust of sensorial experience while valorizing an abstract realm of ideas hidden behind or beyond the sensory appearances.

Paula Gunn Allen, similarly, points out that,

in English, one can divide the universe into two parts: the natural and the supernatural. Humanity has no real part in either, being neither animal nor spirit—that is, the supernatural is discussed as though it were apart from people, and the natural as though people were apart from it. This necessarily forces English-speaking people into a position of alienation from the world they live in. Such isolation is entirely foreign to American Indian thought. At base, every story, every song, every ceremony tells the Indian that each creature is part of a living whole and that all parts of that whole are related to one another by virtue of their participation in the whole of being.

And Joy Harjo notes that

language is culture, a resonant life form itself that acts on the people and the people on it. The worldview, values, relationships of all kinds—everything, in fact, is addressed in and through a language.

The Great Chain of Being Theory, so popular in Shakespeare’s time, is based on inflexible hierarchies—humanity’s incorporeal intellect places us above corporeal things in a strict pecking order—yet this linear cosmology recognizes the interrelatedness of all things.

Shakespeare illustrates this inteconnectedness particularly well with the disruption of “natural” order—say, the disruption of a Danish king’s right to rule, which subsequently causes disorder in other arenas—that causes storms on promontories and so on, until the whole friggin' spheres are untuned.

(This is a big aside, but I just love the fact that humans once thought our universe could sing. Now we just wonder when we’ll blow ourselves up.)

Connections between humans and other species were once understood. J. Scott Bryson, for example, points out that the root of ‘animal’ speaks to this.

‘Animale’ (having the breath of life) is derived from ‘anima’ (life), which is derived from ‘animus’ (mind, spirit, soul).

Many native cultures believe that animals have souls. The blue cornmeal ritual that some hunters perform after killing a deer, for example, honors the animal’s spirit.

Stephen Whithed describes Wendell Berry’s work as poetry that “places value . . . on the restoration of a traditional understanding that measures value by a mutual interdependence” between self and world.

I don’t have much faith in this, but do hope that we can come to understand this mutual interdependence as a culture.

Here’s another point to ponder. Neil Evernden, in Creation, wrote that we will only change

once we accept, through the study of Nature, that all life is organically related, organically the same through the linkage of evolution, then humanity is literally a part of Nature. Not figuratively, not poetically, but literally an object like other natural objects.

All righty. I’ll close my meanderings with this quote:

The nearest thing I can imagine to what I would think of as a sound or even healthy approach and attitude toward existence as a whole (as distinct from the endless separation of the human species from the rest of existence that leads to evaluating the one at the expense of the other)—would be Blake’s ‘How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d to your senses five?’ It works both ways, one both can be and can never be the bird.—WS Merwin

LISTENING TO: Dar Williams’s “Wilder Than Her” ... (of course), but I could just as well have been listening to Beast of Burden

52. BESTIA, or, THE CALL OF THE WILD

From the Archives

(March 2005) Readers who know Latin probably saw that title and assumed that they would be reading a description of the wild sex I had last night. Sorry. I’m not writing about that, but am instead free-thinking about ideas that have been percolating ever since I read an J. Scott Bryson piece and a Sun magazine article and some other useful reminders of the need for unstructured wildness in our busy lives.

Random words and cosmologies and Mary Oliver’s sometimes predictable (but always appealing to naturegrrls like me) poems and Cartesian thought and Native American spirals and the subtle and explosive nuances of spiritual and creative release and unbridled lust and creativity in general and some good hallucinogenic drugs have been percolating in my old noggin ever since I finally put down my books to consider the ways in which embracing wildness and mystery and unstructured movement can explode the boundaries of our logocentric selves and allow us to form deeper connections and interconnections, to grow.

I’ve also been pondering linguistics. Sort of.

Descartes separates thinking minds from the material world—a useful distinction for the objective sciences, no doubt, but, as many a medical doctor trying to understand a so-called non-compliant patient and David Abrams have pointed out, objective sciences can overlook our ordinary, everyday experience of the world in which we live.

Direct experience “is necessarily subjective, necessarily relative to our own position or place in the midst of things, to our particular desires, tastes, and concerns,” so creating such artificial separations can translate into fear of untamed terrain.

This fear, as numerous psychotherapists have noted, thwarts our ability to live fully—and to fully appreciate—a world that is often random and only sometimes controlled by those handy weather charts and scowling schoolmarms and fire-and-brimstone ministers who insist that we will find salvation—or at least relative safely and a good job—if we restrict ourselves to the landscape they prescribe.

We burst those strictures eventually though, don’t we? Raise our partitions enough to release the pressure that threatens to boil over from within, catch the whoosh of an owl flying overhead or the scent of an unexpected rain shower and then, all of a sudden, artificial deadlines and forced commitments and unnatural work expectations fall by the wayside and we know it again: nature, our wildness, a fleeting moment of internal and external harmony.

We return to that sacred wilderness that Max Oelschlaeger describes as “a spontaneous and naturally organized system in which all parts are harmoniously interrelated.” Yep, the same system that can slam into us with twenty-food tidal waves or flood our living rooms or make us leave our lovers and homes and take up with the wildest things. (Powerful stuff, ain't it?)

People have been proclaiming the danger of raising children in a way that is devoid of everyday wildness and mystery and organic connection and loss of control for years now. These children, they say, grow up suspicious of the dangerous and uncivilized, the undomesticated, at their own peril.

Native-American poet Joy Harjo has pointed out that even our chickens have become too civilized.

She says, wisely, that

Europe . . . gifted us with inventions, books and the intricate mechanics of imposing structures on the earth, but there are other means to knowledge and the structuring of knowledge that have no context in the European mind.

We have an instinctual need to survive at the emotional as well as physical level, and recognizing that we are wild at our core helps us do that.

Of course Cartesian rationality is useful too, but an over-reliance on rationality can be fatal to our spirits.

We creative types especially must access our full selves in order to create authentically, so tamping down our instincts can lead to all kinds of soul-damaging behaviors such as drinking till our livers pickle or swallowing our connections until we become mere shells of ourselves, the very embodiment of Dante’s sad vanilla “trimmers, neutral, weak in spirit” people who live on the earth while never really living.

Now I’m as logocentric as the next INTP, but the poet in me recognizes the existence of worlds and experiences and sacred planes that would be unreachable to me if I limited myself to Cartesian rationality.

I celebrate so-called wild experiences, seek them out in my own particular raised-in-the-deep-south, slide-that-car-around-another-curve-sideways-and-let-out-a-woohoo-while-doing-it way that keeps my spirit alive (till I misjudge a curve, anyway).

So color me undomesticated (please!) but, here’s my firm belief: Rationality helps me understand and interpret my surroundings based on projection and the principles of logic, but poetry and other unstructured creative endeavors, like great sex, escort me to dangerous worlds where I truly live.

Harjo says this about the writing process:

Each time I write I am in a different and wild place, and travel toward something I do not know the name of. Each poem is a jumping-off edge and I am not safe.

Oelschlaeger again: “Human beings are not pure thinking things ensconced within Euroculture, but [are] beings whose thoughts and feelings are embodied, centered, in an organic human nature fashioned in the web of life over the longueurs of space and time, internally related to nature.”

Harjo: “To survive is sometimes a leap into madness.”

That madness can get us locked up. But it can also expand our worlds.