Inherited Behaviors in Evolutionarily Novel Environments: The Fixity of Human Social Structure and the Flexibility of Its Manifestations

I will not lie; exhaustion dims the light in the margins of my field of vision and makes my body heavy. Under other circumstances, I might have a great deal of commentary to present in conjunction with this writing. But, after a lifetime of vehemently priding myself on having no formal academic structure in my life, after scoffing for 33 years at the notion of paying for someone to tell me to read a book I would just read anyway, I have begun college courses. This, in conjunction with my existing schedule, leaves little time, and my inclination is thus to simply publish this now, exhausted or not.

The one thing that I want to say about it is that it was initially born out of a completely unrelated impulse; it is the product of an extensive program of research I began slightly over a year ago on the behavioral effects of domestication in nonhuman animal species, with the intention of comparing them to the behavior of civilized, as opposed to hunter-gatherer, peoples. My general assumption was that I would be able to find a clear-cut pattern of similar and widespread behavioral pathology in civilized humans and domestic animals. I am not even certain that I am ready to say this is not the case; most assuredly, domestic animals and civilized humans behave in ways that could be reasonably classified as pathological. However, the results of methodical inquiry began to form a picture that was too complex to really adhere in a meaningful manner to my broader ideological framework.

I feel this point is important to make because I do not think what I did occurs as often as it should. My convictions were not entirely, or even largely, born out of methodical observation. They were born out of intuition and my own emotional inclinations; a paradigm condemning civilization is amenable to many aspects of my personal psychology, which is so terminally at odds with much of the group behavior I am exposed to and which finds an acre of forest to be infinitely more valuable than entire cities I have visited and even lived in. If I had chosen to, I strongly suspect I could have taken all this research, which so frequently contradicted my assumptions, and fastidiously toiled away on shaping pieces of information into some kind of supporting basis for the arguments I started out with. But I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in doing such a thing. I sincerely doubt there is really anything as important to bettering our world than contributing to an understanding of it, and we live in far too critical an era not to make as valiant an effort as possible in this direction, even if it involves discarding notions we value.

In any case, at some point I stopped reading exclusively about domestic animals and started looking into the broader matter of how behavior is generated by a structured cognitive architecture interacting with a given environment. Thus, after much reading, most of which is not cited in the present work, I found myself writing a paper called Inherited Behaviors in Evolutionarily Novel Environments. It advocates nothing more than the furtherance of knowledge. With respect to any of the subjects it discusses, I do not claim to be offering anything comprehensive, nor anything totally novel. However, I am convinced that if I stumbled on this writing a year ago, I would have considered it valuable, and so, hopefully, someone else will as well.

Here is my one paragraph summary:

This paper is an overview of some of the key elements of evolutionary psychology. It is particularly focused on the theme of innate behavioral protocols, shaped by natural selection, responding to the recent innovation of modern human society. It also discusses the greater behavioral rigidity animals exhibit interacting with other members of their own species than they do in interacting with the external environment at large, and how this is reflected in familiar social structures emerging in different human groups living in vastly different relations to their environment. Finally, it discusses the manner in which the existence of innate behavioral tendencies has been a subject of controversy. While acknowledging an inherited basis to phenomena like war or rape is disheartening, the very fact that we find such things so disturbing must also have some inextricable role in the psychological structure natural selection has created, and this should be a basis for hope about the human condition. Ultimately, there is no meaningful way we could even define anything as universally adverse or unacceptable if we did not all share a highly structured, evolved perceptual framework about how the world works and what is desirable within it.

I decided that 22,000 words would be somewhat ponderous for HTML viewing, and so am presenting this file as a PDF:

Inherited Behaviors in Evolutionarily Novel Environments

The Blind Man in the Mountain

In December of 2010, I performed at my former home, the Hall of the Woods, with my girlfriend-at-the-time’s dance project MirrorMilk and my friends’ folk music entity novemthree. I had maintained a fairly steady – approximately monthly, when it was averaged out – performance schedule for a couple of years, decided it was becoming something of a distraction from the course my life was taking, and decided to spend a year offstage. This year, plus a couple of weeks, has now transpired, and it seems entirely unclear to me when or if I will resume such efforts.

The performance art scene that I had immersed myself in in Portland and Olympia was very focused on experimental and folk music, noise, butoh dance, and various unclassifiable modes of gesture and movement, that were highly disparate in their immediate manifestations, but somewhat unified in consistently avoiding directly spoken elements. I was fascinated by the experimentalism but always wanted to utilize it toward the end of conveying clear messages and telling explicit stories. To this end, my collaborations with MirrorMilk took the form of dances, more or less based on Meghann’s butoh background, with English language lyrics that were intended to convey something of an overt and comprehensible narrative. An example is in this video, which is taken from afar in a dimly-lit environment, and thus does not capture a great deal of the facial expression that is fairly integral to the piece, but for which I am nonetheless quite grateful to my friend Inga for capturing:

Probably some elements of the narrative are unclear (particularly on video, where it might not be apparent that we are cutting her bonds at the end), but hopefully to some extent it is apparent that I am a captor, she a captor of sorts, and the piece involves her struggle for freedom, which she eventually enlists me in as an eager comrade. In any case, I wanted more complex stories, and eventually took to the expedient of simply writing out pieces of written dialogue. This piece, The Blind Man in the Mountain, is the fullest realization of these efforts. I wrote it last spring, requiring only one other performer for the sake of logistical plausibility with actually getting it on stage. I do not know if it will ever be manifested; I have not been making any effort to see it to completion myself.

Skeptical of its prospects in my own hands, I have lost any sense of propriety with it, and now present it to the world at large. Perform it, if you like. Steal random parts of the text for your own stories, or for the liner notes of your next album. Copy it for an assignment in a creative writing class. It is my gift to you. The actual performance, as I envisioned it, is extremely difficult to convey through text. The entire sequence is a battle, fought through the modes of speech, percussion, song, and movement. At times, any number of these elements would be occurring simultaneously. I think, if I remember correctly, that the elementary form of this theme took root in my mind in Portland, in my collaborations for a large experimental music theatrical production called Bogville. I recall that at a few crucial junctures in the story, conflicts occurred that were essentially dance battles between two antagonists. This was a source of some humor at the time, but the concept was ultimately quite beautiful. In this video, you can see my decisive defeat by Tiare Tashnick starting at around 3:13, albeit in a highly fragmentary format:

We would dance, circling around and around, and appear to strike each other without making any sort of contact, simply as a contest of gestures. Eventually, she lights fire fans and these do me in. This has to be understood for this text to make any sense at all. Throughout more or less the entire thing, words are spoken and appear to have the effect of delivering physical blows to the person being spoken to. Dance movements and percussion have the same effect. It is not a dialogue. It is a desperate battle.

Aside from its performative manifestation, hopefully this text is of some innate interest as a piece of prose poetry. I wrote it with the theme in mind of nature becoming aware of itself, ie aggregations of matter progressing in complexity from simple elements to complex molecules to functioning organisms to conscious brains that were capable of knowing themselves and where they came from. This is the moment of struggle between a human, the created thing, and god, or nature, the thing that has created it. It is the moment when the creator realizes that the thing it has made is aware of it. Before this happened, god/nature did not know itself. The human it made is the vehicle of its sentience. But god/nature would like to think it is more powerful than the thing it made, the thing it contextualizes. Thus, as the human becomes aware, it is a struggle. This theme of nature coming to know itself never ceases to fascinate me. I imagine standing on a ridge somewhere, looking out over some valley, realizing that the body I inhabit, the mind that I am, first was elements in the rocks, then rose up through the soil, through ever-increasing complexity, until I know myself and everything around me and then, in the final permutation, I realize that I made all of these things, and am nature.

As a note, the captor/deity figure is referred to as a female in this script, for the simple reason that I was working with a female collaborator at the time it was written. It is also worth noting that we were both going to have numerous bells and pieces of junk metal and other trinkets attached to our bodies, so that our movements would have an auditory effect.

(Captive is lying on stage, face completely obscured by a scarf tied around his head. Captor stands above him.)

CAPTIVE: Wait, what’s happening to me? I can’t see anything. Where am I? Where am I? Where am I? What’s going on? Where is my body? Where is the world? I can’t find the boundary between the two, and there’s nothing in either of them, no skin nor blood nor bone here, there’s not even really a here that I can tell, and beyond, no sky nor stars nor howling raging wind… Where am I? (repeated with
percussion). I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, perhaps if I rise to some other, higher vantage point, I can see the stars, or feel myself breathing some air, or least, if I can not sense any world around me, I could again be able to know where my hands are, where any part of my self is in relation to any other part, I would like to feel myself moving my hands, but I can not reckon them now, I have no body… I don’t remember coming here, maybe I’m on some mountain that has no soil, beneath a sky that has no appearance, not even of darkness… if I rise…

CAPTOR: Stay still!

CAPTIVE: I must

CAPTOR: Stay still!

CAPTIVE: I must

(This exchange is repeated many times. With each ‘I must’ the captive raises up a little bit, with each ‘stay still’, he is brought back to the ground. Then the captive stops saying anything, only straining upward, captor repeats a chant of ‘STILL!’ with faster and faster percussion until they eventually scream it a final time, stopping percussion, captive falls all the way back to the ground with a crash. Dead silence and no movement for a moment. Then captive begins writhin on the ground, weak and disoriented, speech faltering.)

CAPTIVE: (not remembering what has just happened) Wait, where am I? I can’t see anything. What’s happening to me? Am I in some terrible bondage, that renders even my senses null, that makes me unable to perceive the very bonds that tie me down, the very body that they bind? It’s so strange… (trails off, voice grows calmer, stops writhing) I can’t feel my face, I don’t know where it is (touching face), but there is something… isn’t there some breath of liberation swelling my breast, even if ever so slightly, some wind from some far-off foreign sky? Is my chest filled with a hidden, distant sky, despite that I can’t see the one above me? Could such an enormous thing live in this small frail body, this body I can’t move or see? Do I know this sky from the breath it gives? Is this a howling storm that moves through my lungs, that gives breath to the words I speak? Could I feel this sky’s fierce gales, its piercing wind, its mornings, its dawn in which Venus dies in the pale blue light the blackness surrenders to? (Begins gesticulating, growing more urgent) This is the thing. This is the thing. I do not know where I am or how I got here or what the fuck is happening to me, but I swear I have some vague memory of trying to get out of here, if there’s such a thing as here, if this is a place, once before. It had something to do with moving upward…

(Battle of percussion, breath, and screams ensues. Captive strains and moans each time he tries to rise, is brought crashing back to the ground by a single strike of percussion each time. Percussion starts to be in multiple beats, captive begins screaming, finally strikes their own flutter of percussion, captor is visibly affected, blown back, look of rage grows in face. They begin an exchange of strikes, each one beating the other one back, no one makes any progress, finally the captive points at the captor and screams)

CAPTIVE: I can see you!

(Deafening silence. Captor is thunderstruck. Here begins integrated percussion and speech.)

CAPTOR: What?!?

CAPTIVE: I can see you!

CAPTOR: No. You. Can. Not.

CAPTIVE: (uncertain) It seems I can…

CAPTOR: You have less than no sight, in you the absence of light is a treasure, you

CAPTIVE: I can see!

CAPTOR: are like the worm that rules the desert, the mad

CAPTIVE: No!

CAPTOR: despot whose tyranny extends over an

CAPTIVE: I have living eyes!

CAPTOR: an empty waste with no beginning and no ending

CAPTIVE: And they flood with precious light, they birth the image

CAPTOR: who gloats, feeble-minded, over the nothing that he covets, his crazed, greedy laughter the only sound to be heard as he counts the sands of his empty wasteland,

CAPTIVE: of the world and all its motion and all the aching tender flowers that open within it, trembling as if in anticipation of a lover…

CAPTOR: reckoning each one a pretty bauble with which to adorn himself. So, too, you gloat over the nothingness you perceive, you grow fat from feeding on your lack of sight, you frenzied glutton, the blind bring you their severed eyes and you, stupid and selfish and cruel, crush them between your teeth, and because your hunger for blindness can not be sated, you demand of them – cruel despot, blind tyrant, king of nothing – that they bring you the eyes of their weeping children.

CAPTIVE: (exhausted, having dropped mallets, face buried in hands) If I can not see you, I swear I can sense you somehow.

CAPTOR: You sense nothing. You can not see me. You can not hear me speaking to you right now. You can not feel me beating you. (Strikes captive, captive falls) You do not know, my trembling little blossom, that it is the wind that moves you on the branch, and threatens to send you hurtling from the safety that you cling to. You know nothing of the forces that control you.

(Captor lifts captive up by head and begins percussion and breathing, alternately beats on scrap metal and on captive’s body, captive wails. Eventually they are breathing, screaming, moving together. Finally, captor gets up and begins to walk away. In a very soft voice, captive begins singing a pretty song. Captor stops dead in tracks, intent on singing.)

lyrics:
It’s a fair wind that carries
the song from the red bird’s throat
and a good place of green hills
where that song will go
It’s a fair sun that is golden
that warms the smiling face
and a cruel wind and bitter
that carries you away
O my autumn, o my autumn,
there are many fair things
pale moons and bruised blossoms
that your chill wind brings
But gladly I’d foresake them
to spend a single day
swaying in the spring breeze
with the true love you took away

CAPTOR: (still staring at the ground, absorbed, nods head) Very clever. (Turns, voice resumes harshness). You are desperate, and you are feeble. But you are clever. You can not overcome the stifling weight of your motionless, featureless world by strength, for it is an absolute weight that bears down on you, so you surrender to it. You bare your pretty throat to the force that controls you, hoping that, rather than desire to draw the blade across such a tender throat, I will pity you. Very well, songbird. You wish for song? (Caresses captive’s face beneath scarf, begins unraveling it while speaking. Captive sways back and forth on knees, captor grabs by hair and pulls his head back, presses face close to captive’s, speaks through bared teeth). I will make you dance, my little singer. (They rise, captor sways forward and back, moving drunkenly and haplessly). It is the singer who controls the dancer. It is the pretty song, so innocent and pure, such a seemingly harmless instrument, that grows in the mind and seizes the body, deceitful in its charm, like the malevolent flower plucked for the beauty of its blossoms by someone unsuspecting of the poison that it harbors, that takes control of the dancer and moves them according to its will. Dance! (Word simultaneous with stomp, throws captive, who teeters and stumbles wildly before beginning a crazy, swaying, slow, perpetually off-balance dance). A dancer is precisely what you are. Hapless, pure of heart, having given your body to the beauty that controls it. Dance! (Captive again reels violently) I am the beauty that consumes your body, I am the song that moves you, and I command you to dance! (Captor sings pretty song, causing captive to dance, occasionally punctuating song with violent stomps/beats of percussion, which causes him to reel as if blows are being struck. Eventually they move closer together and embrace, dancing and swaying together. Captive appears feeble, and captor gently lowers hm to ground, sitting down and placing his head in her lap. Captor strokes captive’s face; a complete change of demeanor, to one of tenderness, has overtaken her.)

CAPTIVE: It seems the world was born out of an injury, some great wound inflicted into something that was here before. But I can’t see whatever was here before there was trauma; all I can sense is the horrible motion of everything in existence, every hill and every flower and every creature, flinching from that primordial injury that gave birth to it. Everything is fleeing from the source of its pain, which is the thing that gives it shape. What was it like in the beginning, I wonder?

CAPTOR: Perhaps nothing could take shape, or have any solid substance or living breath, if it were not suffering.

CAPTIVE: I can’t tell where my body is or what it is doing. But it seems as though it is carried on a rushing tide of agony, a roaring blood-red flood. But as it careens through the maelstrom, it occasionally collides with other things, and I try to comprehend them as they tumble by. I think I recognize some of them. A carousel horse, painted gold, its pole broken. A fragment of music. A bird carved from wood, with some tiny round object for an eye embedded in the head that I don’t recognize; a piece of bone or shell? Do I remember these things? Are they from my former life, from when I could still see and move, from when I was young?

CAPTOR: (With a tone of sympathy for the captive’s suffering, the captor tells a completely decontextualized story from their childhood, about something traumatic and definitive. ie something that introduced the person to the understanding that the world was not fair, and contained pain) [Editor's note: If I had taken the role of the captive, which was not my intention, I would have told a story about a dream I had during a very terrible fever when I was four years old. My girlfriend Lauren, who was planning on collaborating with me as the captor, planned to tell a story about a heavy snow on a farm in Iowa, during which she came to associate the vast fields of snow, littered with the bodies of dead cattle, with the ocean, and how this association of the ocean with pain was reinforced by her first visit to the actual ocean, when she ran toward it and immediately cut her foot on broken glass.]

CAPTIVE: Do my senses rush away from the world, or do they flee from themselves, and cast themselves headlong into the world? Perhaps they assault it. Perhaps my senses, although I am oblivious to them, are invading everything. Perhaps my words are like a knife, a weapon, cutting skin and breaking bone, drawing blood and stopping breath. They pierce the world’s heart, and throb with it, the great quivering of that heart at the center of all things that is afflicted with all of the terrible joy and great agony of experiencing all things in nature simultaneously. I am within this heart, I am of it. I feel my arms reaching up through the soil to twist into the trunks of trees, even as my hands cast lightning bolts down from the sky to split my arms in two. The hand strikes its body. God fights itself. I can feel all of this happening.

CAPTOR: Your pain has made you crazy. You are becoming a madman.

CAPTIVE: Yes. I am a madman. I am a monster, for I resemble the misshapen creator of our world. My mind has been touched by the hideous light, flooded with the image of myself as the world, creating itself in order to know itself. The soil and the rocks desired to comprehend themselves, so they grew me out of them – blood and breath and skin and bone – so that I could look on them, and know them. But now I feel not only myself, when I look on the soil I also think I am looking on myself. And I see my body from the perspective of the soil. I possess two minds. We are recognizing each other. We are gazing on one another. We are mutually aware. There are two selves, two gazers, within me, and I must somehow comprehend both of them looking into each others eyes. I am gazing on a thousand suns. It is more than I can bear.

CAPTOR: (still sympathetic) You see all this, and yet you still can not see me.

CAPTIVE: I can see you in the pattern of random objects that races by me. Any one of them on their own is meaningless – something innocent and pure torn from the good place it once occupied to tumble senselessly on the raging tide – but if I watch them I can see the shape of your body in the pattern of these things flowing by. I can tell where you are, I can see how you move, and I can hear you speaking to me.

CAPTOR: (Grows angry, lifts captive’s head up by hair, snarls) Then do you think, my captive, helpless in your bonds, that you could overcome me?

CAPTIVE: I could fight you. I can sense you. Something is guiding me. I could be free from the weight you have born down on me.

CAPTOR: (roaring) Fool! (Stands abruptly, dropping captive from lap) Hold your tongue! You have no sense of what you are saying or to whom! (Picks up scrap and mallet) You know nothing! You are not the knower, you are the known. I am god! I possess you, I make your body and I give it breath! (God strikes scrap with mallet, standing directly over human, leaning down close to him. Human cries out and writhes in agony) I do not just strike you, I shape your face as it contorts in pain from the blows I strike. I make your body writhe, captive! I give you the voice with which you cry out! (God falters in mid-beat, straining to strike the mallet against the scrap. Human likewise strains on the ground; a contest of wills is occurring. Human’s voice rises gradually into a yell, struggling to break out of bonds, and then very suddenly, as if they have snapped, he beats on chest, stomps on ground, and uses breath as a weapon. God, afflicted, takes a few steps back, raising hands to shield face and head. Human stands and wheels to face god. Does not appear confrontational, but rather, delicate, appealing for peace, hands clasped before chest delicately.)

HUMAN: Don’t you see, god, that I am a part of you, and therefore I can know you, and anticipate your blows? Fight me if you must. But you can not look on me, you can not decide to strike me, without me knowing it, because I am you.

(God does not listen. Strains to strike the metal. Human strains back. Both their voices raise gradually with the effort into yells until abruptly human drops to the ground, rapidly retrieves scrap and a mallet, and beats on it. God is driven back a few steps, until she recovers the effort to strike her own scrap, which silences human. They stand staring at each other in silence. Finally, god strikes. An exchange of blows occurs, with each one almost knocking the victim off their feet until they recover the strength to strike back. Finally, god appears to be winning. Human stands on tiptoes, teetering, almost falling over, back turned to god.)

HUMAN: (Turns rapidly toward god, beginning a battle of words) Clutch your breast and you will feel it, beneath the flesh that heaves with breath, beneath the skin that stings with wounds and aches for the tender caress of the blossoms that flutter from their branches in the breeze, the constant devourer, evercircling, the serpent strikes your heart! Feel how he wends his way

GOD: A lilting flower with a slit throat, sick and stricken, anguished blossom, your mouth hangs open gasping, your cheeks flush with venom, venom floods your veins and venom gives you sweet sleep and peace, your last breath rattles from your limp mouth, making your petals quiver, your blossom loses color. Gasp, flower, surrender

HUMAN: (coming closer to god) The serpent always circles and ever comes closer to the center, undulating pulsing throbbing serpent churning through the oceans and giving birth to all the mountains, always does his tongue sing with the poison that seeks the heart, and the heart, born of great longing, aches and yearns for the poison that seeks it like a lover. Desert, river, blade, center

GOD: (coming closer to human) Gasp, flower, surrender to the blade that strikes your center, surrender to the desert with no river, surrender to the desperate tide of sun that strikes the flat white hot unyielding sand in which you stand. Let the red veil cover your eyes

HUMAN: (God and human are standing face to face, speaking directly into one another) Desert, river, blade, center, unreckonable space with no edge and no center, this is the monster that is also the mouth that gives birth to the river, the desperate tide of venom that flows through the white hot brain that swells in your head. This is the fever that consumes you, this is the hunger that wastes you, this is the taste of the decaying fruit on your tongue

GOD: Let the red veil cover your eyes, let the red sun fill your mind with livid red-hot light and swell your brain and flow out of your mouth as blood, pour forth the desperate tide of venom from your monstrous flower mouth to scorch the earth and give her fever, she undulates and pulses beneath you. Feel her gasp and shudder, bare of food or water, in your hungry roots

HUMAN: Rage! (God is knocked back decisively, begins immediately beating on scrap, but this seems to have the effect of animating human rather that harming him) All things race along their courses – earth circling sun, sun spinning out of the sky night after day and day after night, grass growing toward sun and sinking back again – in a rage! The sun teeters on the axis that sets it down. The mountain
strains against the tether of the ground. The tree pulls away from the soil in which it is bound. All things long for freedom. All things heave and snap and shake in rage! As the boulders pile up above me, as you build the great mountain on top of me, as it forms soil and
grows trees and stands for a thousand years so that I am forgotten, voiceless, nameless, unknown and unknowing, having lost recollection even of my own shape amidst the jumble of rocks that press down on me, reckon the weight of each one as you burden me with it. Reckon the weight of each rock so that you will know the terrible strength that lives in me when I break free of them, when I rise above them. For all these rocks will break on my body, and I will rise above them! Know, god, that among all the monstrosities you created, among all the atrocities you have committed, nothing is so horrible, so boundless and unfettered and insane, as the strength which surges through me. Do you feel it now? Can you feel it within you? That is the rage of tempest that swells my breast. Nothing can withstand its desperate motion as it strikes out against all that confines it.

GOD AND HUMAN: In rage the sun teeters on the axis that sets it down. In rage the mountain strains against the tether of the ground. In rage the tree defies the soil in which it is bound. In rage – in rage – in rage.

HUMAN: The soil is the seed’s universe. It is oblivious, as it longs and strains and reaches to sprout from the ground, to what lies beyond what it has always known. But is is born to strive upward, to whatever grief or joy is beyond. As I rise above the world, as I hurtle through the sky, as I expand in every direction, I do not know what is beyond these stars or the vast and aching blackness they pierce. But I must strive, I must rise. I must go beyond. I must go beyond. I must go beyond. It does not matter whether it is the boundary or myself that is destroyed. I am the transgressor. I am the transgressor. I am the transgressor. May my body break these bonds or may these bonds break my body. I am the fate of the earth. All the light will come to live within me, and I must shine with it or it will die within me, and existence will cease. I am the momentum of life hurtling ever forward. I am all my brothers and sisters
of every kind – all silent standing trees and mottled owls and speckled fish gliding through the light as it shimmers in the water – they are all within me and I am within them. We are a circle and we must rise.

GOD AND HUMAN: In rage the sun teeters on the axis that sets it down. In rage the mountain strains against the tether of the ground. In rage the tree defies the soil in which it is bound. In rage – in rage – in rage.

(God stops percussion)

HUMAN: Please forgive me, whoever you are, that I cause pain to as I strike out in every direction, blind and insane, in my frenzy to be go beyond these horizons. Forgive my violence. I can not help it. I was born with this desperation; it is this very desperation with which I ventured from the womb. Please forgive me, precious flower, should I crush you underfoot as I flee through the field. Know that I love you even though I destroyed you, that I praise your name, and that I wish also to be destroyed by you. I wish for you to be born anew, glorious, verdant, brilliantly blossomed, reveling in your unshakable strength. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It is simply my nature. I must go beyond, as the eagle must swoop down on the hare, as the salmon must swim home to the stream where it was born. I have to go now.

(A moment of silence. God and human look at each other. Human is shaken, grieved.)

HUMAN: Where are we?

GOD: We are together.

HUMAN: I did not recognize you. I have been raving like a madman.

GOD: (opening her arms to him) Come.

HUMAN: Have I hurt you?

GOD: (taking him into her arms, reassuring him) Come. I will take you where you wish to go.

(They walk off stage together)

THE END.

Spring Speaks Truth #2 – Like a Weapon Shining in the Sun

It is an absurd thing to admit, but I grow anxious after a few months without producing anything tangible that I will be forgotten, or at least consigned to the dustbin of irrelevant memory. I have not released new writing since I posted The Mountain and I Contemplate One Another in Mutual Silence here over three months ago, I have not performed in seven months, and if there’s anything other than writing or performing that I do that would be of note to the world at large, I’m not certain what it is. That anxiety can be partially ameliorated by the release of Spring Speaks Truth #2 by Autonomy Press.

Very capably designed by Ogo Eion, I think this volume looks beautiful, and it’s yours for just a few dollars.

However, you will forgive me my need to account for my lack of new writing and performance works in recent months. I understand perfectly well that no one is distressed or anxious whatsoever by my reduced output, but of course, that’s precisely the problem: no one cares, and I want to be loved. In general, I believe this slower pace reflects a greater substance and intensity of work.

It is unlikely that I will perform whatsoever all year, but I have written a performance called The Blind Man in the Mountain, featuring a few thousand words of dialogue, that I am working on when the opportunity presents itself with a girl I am terribly sweet on. I say when the opportunity presents itself because we are separated by hundreds of miles at the moment, but when I make my way down to Oakland this fall, we should be able to work in earnest, and I imagine that the piece could be brought to life sometime at the beginning of 2012. The performance is a sort of integrated work of speaking, chanting, rhythmic breathing, dancing, and percussion. From the text:

“Perhaps my words are like a knife, a weapon, cutting skin and breaking bone, drawing blood and stopping breath. They pierce the world’s heart, and throb with it, the great quivering heart at the center of all things that is afflicted with all the terrible joy and great agony of experiencing all things simultaneously. I am within this heart, I am of it. I feel my arms reaching up through the soil to twist into the trunks of trees, even as my hands cast lightning bolts down from the sky to split my arms in two. The hand strikes its body. God fights itself. I can feel all of this happening.”

In addition, I am toiling away on a piece of writing that is tentatively titled God Is the One-Eyed Monster Whose Many Hands Strike in All Directions. I will offer only the very simple explanation that this piece is an attempt to make a map of my recent travels and turn it into a series of magical symbols which will liberate the capacity for perception and action from the confines of the pain and anxiety that seems to pervade so much experience, so that it can become a new and effective thing, like a weapon shining in the sun. I’m a big believer in art as magic, even if I’m a bit less credulous of magic in a more general sense. That is to say that I believe the impulse to create art and do magic are integrally related in the evolutionary history of our species. And also, I find art that is not an attempt to do magic, however desperately quixotic and futile that attempt may be, to be somewhat lacking. This piece will feature a great deal of graphic design and even audio recordings.

“My friends, with the greatest love and the most tender of affection, I wish to do you harm. Not out of malice, but as a means of liberation. I think we must all bleed together, to wield a knife that cuts us free from the golden anguish that forces its way through our mouths and contorts our faces and twists our hands and fingers according to its will. I would like to cut you with my knife, which is made out of words.”

Finally, and on a less crazy note, there is my ongoing program of research and writing which derives from fields such as anthropology, animal behavior, biology, and cognitive science. The putative output of all this research and writing will be a long paper, of which there is presently some 5,000 words, called The Listless Gaze of the Idly Chewing: The Effects of Domestication on Humans and Other Animals. This is part of my broader ongoing efforts to understand the destructive elements of human behavior in biological terms. I am disinterested in political ideologies because they always start with what are ultimately, when given a moment’s consideration, utter abstractions: systems are analyzed, attacked, advocated. But we are never informed of where the basic impulses to create these systems comes from and what alternative ways these impulses might play out in human behavior. Malevolent, disembodied entities like ‘capitalism’ or ‘patriarchy’ or ‘industrialism’, apparently possessed of a sentience of their own and intent on finding human hosts to invade and bend to their evil wills, roam the land, imposing themselves on populations and doing their harm. My interest is in finding the basic biological phenomena that underly behavior, evolved under specific ecological conditions, in the context of specific social structures, and seeing how it ultimately has extended into the varied human activities we witness around us, from the systematic persecution of political enemies by those in power to group BDSM parties. In so doing, the agenda is to take human action and experience out of the realm of utter abstraction, to which it has largely been relegated by the mainstream of disciplines like psychology, anthropology, and sociology, and make it part of the study of the natural world. This has been the focus of a relatively small but increasingly undeniably relevant group of scientists in fields like psycholinguistics, neurobiology, and evolutionary psychology. I suppose what distinguishes me somewhat from others with the same focus is a persistent orientation toward applying the research to understanding and perhaps addressing pathological and destructive behavior on the part of our civilization. This work has become a primary and consuming focus, and I imagine it will occupy a great deal of the foreseeable future of my life.

I’m not always sure where this work will go; if, for instance, photocopied zines and internet posts are the best venues for it, and if I really have any options for greater exposure. Sometimes I think, for instance, that I should call my piece, rather than The Listless Gaze of the Idly Chewing, something like Neoteny, Behavioral Plasticity, Human Evolution, and Animal Domestication: Four Interrelated Biological Phenomena. Maybe I could get research grants, although the foundations dishing out research grants to people who barely got out of high school are probably few and far between. Maybe I should go to college; people sometimes tell me my academic inquiries would be taken seriously there, but I am always skeptical. Maybe I should write to a major book publisher and tell them they ought to publish my writing, despite that I have no credentials and am totally unestablished in the publishing world. I don’t know.

In any case, my embarrassment at not having produced anything has conceded to an embarrassment at being able to write so very much about not having produced anything, so I will go now.

The Mountain and I Contemplate One Another in Mutual Silence

“And this slow spider which creeps in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and you and I in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things- must we not all have already existed?”
Friedrich Nietzsche,  Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I sometimes have the overwhelming impression that there are two of me, or that I am somehow living two lives which are for the most part mutually unaware of one another. This is due to my preponderance of false memories, wherein I find myself reflecting on something I did in vivid detail, immersed in the remembered stimulus, until it occurs to me that it never happened. Occasionally, I have to actually subject the remembered circumstance to a deliberate evaluation and process of elimination to realize it isn’t real.

Not too long ago I had some very fleeting insight, born out of an abstract contemplation of mathematics, which seemed of great significance before it vanished. I remember it happening as I walked down a certain road, despite that I have only been on that road on a bicycle. The memory is so agonizing clear; it forms a vivid picture filled with the deep hues of the dying red light of the setting sun off to my left behind the blackening mountain and the jagged silhouettes of trees. The road is very steep, and I feel small rocks grating against my feet and dust being stirred by each step. There are, however, telltale deformations, as in a dream: I have much longer and lighter hair than I actually do, falling in haphazard curls on my shoulders, and I am wearing a jacket that I lost some years ago.

Shortly after, another false memory. This one has a positively magical character, and I readily realize that it has not actually occurred. I am sitting on the banks of a clear, fast moving stream. I am thinking about how close a salmon might be to the place it was born, and thus the place it must die, when it is plucked out of the water by a fisher, whether a human or some other animal. I am thinking, essentially, about how it is killed as it races to its death. There is a salmon in my hand that I have just taken out of the water and I look into its round eye and its mouth, which moves and gives the impression that sound should be coming out although it does not speak words I can hear. I say, “You’re home now, brother.”  Then I bash its head in with a rock. What’s strange is that both of these memories seem to be about the same intangible thing, they seem to illustrate something I keep thinking I am becoming aware of before it evades me again. I am haunted by the sense that the salmon is saying something as its mouth silently moves. And I think – although I am wary of inventing details after the fact – that in this memory, too, I have longer and lighter hair than I actually do.

For a reason I can not exactly describe, I associate these two mental images of things that did not occur with something that did indeed occur some time ago. In September of 2009, I became extremely sick for a very long period of time. I was in Portland, without a permanent residence. I had been staying with friends or, when the occasional fancy took me, bicycling along the Columbia River until I found a suitably remote place to sleep outside, sometimes in the city limits and sometimes well beyond them.

My sister was out of town for a couple of weeks and graciously allowed me to stay in her apartment. I put the Carl Sagan documentary Cosmos on on her computer. I intended to lay on her couch and watch it, but I could not keep my eyes open. I drifted through a fever delirium, the walls seeming to swell with the sensations coursing through my body. At some point, I briefly became aware of Carl Sagan’s voice, amidst a wash of 70s synthesizer music, saying something to the effect that we are a means by which the universe has come to know itself. I thought about this, how matter had organized itself in forms of increasing complexity until it became us, capable of analyzing those most elementary forms of matter that had existed before life. How when we gaze on a carbon atom we gaze on another permutation of ourselves. We are mutually aware. Then my consciousness drifted elsewhere.

Throughout the course of the next couple of days, I repeatedly had the impression that a little girl lived in the shower of the apartment and that she came and visited me, hovering over my body. One night, my lover came to visit and she lay sleeping next to me. I was thinking perhaps the little girl was a ghost and I suddenly found myself wondering what it would be like to be a ghost myself. Then, terrifyingly, I thought I could see every room in the house all at once from every possible angle and I felt a great, shocking rush as I exited my body. The sensation of leaving seemed to emanate from my chest; my self seemed to be rushing out of it. I opened my eyes in alarm and my lover woke and grasped onto my chest, as if to hold me back in my body. She told me the movement – the rushing – had woken her.  Later that night, she tells me I woke her up and earnestly implored her to move to the forest and have a child with me, although I do not remember it at all. I have no idea, really, what these few days at my sister’s apartment have to do with these two false memories, but they are inextricably connected.

“Priests, professors and doctors, you are mistaken in delivering me into the hands of the law. I have never been one of you; I have never been a Christian; I belong to the race that sang on the scaffold; I do not understand your laws; I have no moral sense; I am a brute; you are making a mistake…”
Arthur Rimbaud,  A Season in Hell

In The Mirror’s Heart, I wrote about some of the unique attributes of instinctive behavior, having delved deep into the world of authors such as Konrad Lorenz. An organism has a certain amount of  energy to perform instinctive behaviors. In the wild, this energy should roughly correspond to the amount of the behavior that is needed for the organism to be successful. The longer the behavior is not performed, the more the drive for it builds. Sex is a readily familiar example from our own experience.  In situations such as captivity, where there may never be an appropriate situation or environmental context for a behavior, it will eventually erupt in vacuo. Birds will build nests from nothing, and certain male fish deprived of other male combatants will simply turn on their female tank mates and kill them.

Obviously, civilization represents a situation in which much of the instinctive behavior that allowed our species to survive through the millennia is no longer useful whatsoever. On the contrary, characteristics that have typically been beneficial for us, or for a number of other animals, are precisely the characteristics that make one function poorly, or not at all, in a domesticated context. Self-reliance, courage, self-assertiveness and aggression toward individuals who have a higher social status, which they may maintain by force, are qualities that make many animals more likely to reproduce. In our present circumstance, however, they range anywhere from useless to precisely the characteristics that get you locked up in jail, or killed, or at least guarantee you’ll always be broke.

The innate drive toward aggressive behavior is, of course, occasionally considered useful by a civilization, in cases where that society decides to make war on another. It is actually an articulate illustration of the inherent energy we have for an instinctive behavior, like aggression, that war requires far more violence of the combatants than they really have the drive for. Soldiers enter wars filled with a fervor for battle, having been deprived of opportunities to release the innate aggressive drive in their civilian lives (after all, we intuitively begin to pretend to fight when we are children, much as a kitten stalks and kills a stray piece of string), and they leave wars fatigued and insane, having seen far more conflict than we have a drive for. Neither the settled life, where aggression is expected to not exist at all, nor a war zone, where an individual is expected to be a ceaseless font of it, correspond to the amount of aggressive instinct we have developed over the course of our evolution.

War can also really only be understood by reference to what Lorenz calls the social defense instinct, the drive to identify as part of a group to which one has allegiance, and defend it against threats from other groups. This makes sense, as in earlier times of course it must have been fairly common for small bands of our ancestors to come into conflict with one another, much as territorial troupes of chimpanzees do today. The fact that this social defense drive is truly innate, and not just a behavioral inclination that comes up as a response to rational evaluation of a situation, can be best illustrated by the simple fact that wars are chronically fought all over the world for no good reason whatsoever, with great enthusiasm on the part of massive segments of the warring population, to deter entirely nonexistent threats to the wellbeing of a nation.

But of course, these are just the cases where a civilization deems aggression, and social defense, useful.  To participate in a nation’s war, you would have to either genuinely believe the cause was just as a result of some deliberation, or you would, as is more typical, have to allow your aggressive and social defense instincts to be used by a social order to which you are subordinate. But insubordination is also an inherent biological tendency. In our species and many others, conflict to establish dominance is a primary tendency. What happens when all three of these drives occur simultaneously? What if one identifies with a group their nation happens to regard as the enemy? What if they happen to see their nation itself as the enemy? What if they are willing to fight it?

In domesticated animals, aggressive behavior, and the drive to fight for dominance, can be bred out, along with just about everything else one may think of as useful or beautiful in a creature (like the parenting drive, the capacity to form meaningful social bonds with other members of the species, and all the basic instinctive behaviors by which an animal might find food or avoid predators or generally look after itself). Birds are rendered unable to fly. Rats lose their mating dance. Canines lose the complex language of dominance and submission by which they establish a pack. In experiments, wild foxes have been selectively bred to lose their aggressiveness towards humans, and have in short order become highly submissive, retaining essentially a juvenile state throughout their lifetime, physically and behaviorally (many adult domestic animals share a set of features only found in juveniles in their wild counterparts). Something along these lines has clearly happened in the civilization of humanity, as well. Much of what would have previously been thought of as useful, noble, or beautiful in us has clearly been bred out, replaced by terminal submissiveness and dependency. But humans have not exactly been subject to the same program of selective breeding as the animals we have domesticated.  One can not help the sense that in some cases lineages that are genetically disposed to more characteristically wild behaviors have managed to survive, engendering people who, simply put, feel like they do not belong here.

The roaring of the captive is the voice of god

There is a ceaseless restlessness that haunts my being. My instincts drive within me a storm of relentless, intrepid intensity, a storm that rages against all the behavior necessary for success in the modern world. I hate the docility, I hate the safety and convenience, I hate the narrow definition of wellbeing, that seems to take into account only the accommodation of immediate desires, that characterizes the modern world. I hate it. I can’t stand it. The comforts we are supposed to take for granted make me feel like I am not a real person when I take advantage of them for any sustained duration. My life has been a jumble of confused, painful, and often pointless circumstances. When I look back on it I can think of no other thing than the in vacuo eruption of instinctive behaviors of animals in captivity. I must prove myself courageous and strong. It is in my nature. I have ceaselessly subjected myself to trials for no other reason than to endure them.

I stand behind the bar at work on a quiet night and find myself repeatedly imagining someone coming in and threatening some harm to me or someone else and physically feeling myself leap over the bar to do combat with them. I get off of work in those latest hours of night when no one is around, and I walk up the hill and I look down over the Budd Inlet of the Puget Sound, the reflected lights from the buildings shimmering on its dark surface. Everything seems insane; there seems to be a maelstrom of possible catastrophes beneath every surface I gaze upon, at any moment there may be some threat that I will have to rise up and fight. I look at the cranes on the docks, their hooks hanging silently from their massive metal arms, and I imagine this machinery coming apart and hurtling to earth and me dodging the metal gargantuans as they tumble from the sky. I imagine grabbing someone and carrying them to safety. I imagine silently standing waist-deep in water beneath one of the docks, a gun drawn, waiting for some unknown assailant, in some deadly conflict whose origin I do not bother to imagine. I am longing for great trials, for the red flower of my courage, which is blood, to blossom on wounds inflicted on my body in combat.

But I realize none of this is happening. In fact, what I am looking at is by a more objective standard an extremely tranquil scene, a city sleeping by the water. I try to imagine what the world would look like  if it were not for my instincts; if only the rational part of my brain were in operation. Would I even look on the same sky, and would it be reflected in the same black water? Would this particular night, bathed in all of these city lights, seem to have the same faint reddish tinge to it? I can’t really say.

My friend reads something else I’ve written and says precisely the same thing to me, that my life has been largely defined by instinctive behaviors that would have been a lot more useful in some other context. I want so badly to be of use to someone, or something. Increasingly I have been thinking of my life not in terms of a vast set of possible things I will do in the future, but in terms of what I’ve actually already done. Not that my life is almost over, but it is also not just beginning anymore. I’m really not certain I’ve ever done much good for anything at all. I am just some guy who at the age of 32 has no resume and has a uselessly vast repertoire of stories involving hardship and depravity.

I feel so old. Not just chronologically, not just in the mid-life crisis sense that apparently I am indeed experiencing (although it is worth noting that my mid-life crisis seems to be the inverse of the more typical one, where someone who has spent their life functioning in society wishes that they had occupied their time playing in rock ‘n’ roll bands or going on reckless adventures). But also in the sense that I feel like I belong to some archaic order of existence, an order of existence the world utterly forgot about a long time ago, leaving me without a viable course in life.

I have spent much time raging against the civilization that apparently usurped the mode of existence I imagine myself belonging to, but right now I don’t really feel rage. I wonder if I am, quite legitimately, just sort of obsolete. Is the tendency toward greater and greater docility and dependency in humanity bad? I don’t know. It seems like, honestly, it involves a set of trade-offs. Greater behavioral sophistication, which does seem like a good thing, is basically being exchanged for all of the qualities I’ve already mentioned we’re sacrificing along with our domestic animals. If I could assess myself, and society, purely rationally, beyond the influence of any of my instincts, would I decide that I am wrong, and it is right? The question is ultimately a stupid one. What would it mean to assess anything as good or bad outside of the context of your biological nature? Is there some absolute, objective reason that certain women should make my throat constrict and my heart flutter when I see them, other than the intrinsic character that defines me as an organism? Really and truly, is there some external, objective reason that it would be better for me to live than to die screaming in pain right now? I can’t think of any real reason I would make this judgment other than the biological drive I share with all other creatures to exist. Attempting to conceptualize thought without its biological foundation is like conceptualizing a tree without the trunk, branches, leaves, or roots; there simply isn’t anything left. I find the modern life absurd and abhorrent because that’s just how I am. I find people relaxing in front of the television after work, who have never endured even a few nights of cold or hunger or uncertainty or peril, pathetic; because that judgment is built into me the same way that laughing or breathing is.

I didn’t really get better from whatever illness I contracted that fall until next spring, but it would come and go, and it seemed after awhile like it was attenuated to my various circumstances, so that I could function if I absolutely needed to. Life went on, and at the beginning of October I traveled to California in search of work. I got off the train in Dunsmuir and as I began to travel by road, climbing up the Trinity Alps, I felt a thrill I had not felt in some time. A ride I had gotten dropped me off seven miles before Weaverville as the sun set and I walked the rest of the way into town and then beyond it and slept on a grassy mountain high above crisscrossed with numerous game trails. My water bottle froze in the night, and I felt at peace. After a couple of weeks of travel I found a few weeks work on some land at the base of a mountain. In the morning, I would walk up the trails to a high point on it and watch the October fog burned off of the valley by the morning sun. I found a mountain lion track in some mud on the trail.

I had to return to Portland in mid-November, and when I got there I had difficulty adapting. I felt awkward and out of place, confined by the city. Shortly thereafter I left again with little destination in mind, despite that it was the rainy season and I could have been looking for a place with the money I’d just made. I traveled in the direction of the ocean and slept in a muddy field on Highway 26 in the last few hours of dark, having walked the night through. My friends and I had chosen that night to attempt to find one another while we were sleeping in our respective locations and communicate with each other in our dreams. I dreamed we were all standing at the site of a bomb test and singing as the bombs rained down on us, causing them to harmlessly explode in the sky above our heads. Nobody else dreamed anything remotely similar, but if I recall correctly three of the people had strange dreams about eggs right around this time.

When I got to the ocean I traveled up Highway 101. I was not aware that it split into two different routes, and so to my surprise ended up hitch hiking to Olympia, far east of the ocean, on Thanksgiving day. I stayed with some friends a few miles to the west of the city. As I would come and go, I would notice a mountain on the north side of the road whose presence struck me in a way I could not describe.  I left Olympia at dusk and walked up Highway 101, looking at the other side of the mountain, drawn to it. I walked nearly to Shelton, and toward the end of the night I slept for awhile in a grove of trees. I  woke at some point and two or three deer scattered from my vicinity the moment I opened my eyes. I had not moved; so far as I can tell, they sensed me waking. Their movement away from me seemed like an extension of the rushing of my consciousness back into the world. I could think of nothing other than the rush out of my body, my lover holding me down in my frame.

“Mystery-filled in the light of day,
Nature; won’t have her veils stripped away.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,  Faust

I have already declared myself a savage; I have already resolved that my animosity with society is inborn. Fair enough. But this does not prevent me from wishing to bring rational thought to bear on this apparatus of blood and bone and instinct that generates my perceptions, to see if I can understand it, and to see what of my experience is generated by reason and what is created by something I have never stopped to give thought to. The question remains. Would I even look on the same black sky, would it, bathed in all of these city lights, possess the same reddish hue this evening, if it were not for these instincts? It is a little like Descartes’ horrifying speculation that there is an evil demon tricking him, generating all of his perceptions while he remains oblivious to the world as it actually is. This led him to formulate what is arguably the best known dictum of western philosophy ever written. Cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am.

Before I had ever heard of Descartes, when I was thirteen years old, I smoked weed for the first time.  Sitting at my desk in my high school classroom, I had the same metaphysical terror that he did. I realized that my perception was, owing to the drug I had consumed, vastly different than those of my classmates around me. As the teacher talked about Shakespeare I looked over at one of them, who seemed to be far away and possessed of an indefinite shape, although bathed in overly-bright light. I realized with horror that since we did not agree on the nature of reality at this moment, and since there was no external third party who was not subject to the unique vicissitudes of their own perception to mediate our dispute and give an objective verdict of what was going on, that there essentially was no reality. (Obviously, this conflict is negated if you believe in god, but for someone who is fundamentally uncertain if his desk is really there in front of him, feeling confident of something so remote and abstract is a bit of a stretch).

Perception is a flower whose blossoms are brilliant but whose roots extend from a place unseen

That night at home I more or less resolved the conflict, at least from a practical standpoint. I realized that, at the very least, my perception did, in fact, have parameters. Simple experiments revealed a key detail. If I held an object in my hand and said it would not fall to the ground, then let it go, it still plummeted. I didn’t actually try, but I imagined that likewise I could decide that a window on the tenth story of a building was not high, but that if I jumped out of it I would still hurt myself. The fact that what I perceived as the world remained constant, and could defy my expectations if I chose to change them, or surprise me if there was something about it I did not know, was enough for me. I was able to at least close my eyes that night assuming that my room would still be there when I woke, despite that I would forget all about it in my sleep.

But while there are similarities, there are important differences between Descartes’ famous philosophical construction, or the weed-induced metaphysics of my adolescence, and the question I am asking about instincts. For in the study of innate behavioral drives, we can begin to actually see the demon, so to speak, that Descartes was only speculating about. It ceases to be an unresolvable philosophical exercise one would do best to simply get over and begins to be an inquiry with tangible results.

Humans are adapted to adaptation itself. Our evolution has involved a profound increase in our capacity to respond to our environment, to affect it and solve problems within it, based on general intelligence, the means by which all animals modify their inborn instincts to be suited to the specific situations they find themselves in. This can lead to an unconscious, sort of half-formed assumption that our fabulously complex perceptual worlds are the products exclusively of the critical, methodical, reasoning parts of our minds. Konrad Lorenz wrote that humans exhibit by far the least instinctive behavior of any animal. But the transition from our early primate forebears, who doubtlessly exhibited more fixed motor patterns for things like food-collecting and fighting than we do, to modern humanity has not exclusively involved a diminution of instinct. We have acquired at the very least one new instinct fundamental to our definition of humanity: the language with which Lorenz communicated his insight into our lack of instinctive behavior.

Language is not really a facet of general intelligence; it has a hardwired, dedicated circuitry in the brain. Subjected to critical analysis, language, which we use so intuitively, is fabulously more complex than other types of mental activity we consider difficult. The very fact that this statement may not seem readily apparent, or to require justification, is in and of itself a testimony to how innate our capacity for it is. We know language the way a bird knows precisely what material to build a nest from, the structure it should have, and the motor activity to create that structure, despite that a similarly complex feat of engineering in some realm other than nest-building would of course be unthinkable.

Darwin himself noted that infants begin babbling in order to develop the neuro-muscular strength and coordination for speech. Presumably, everyone can be confident that they are not doing so as some deliberate procedure to develop a means of communicating with those around them, which they have devised through painstaking analysis of the speech they have been exposed to. Some anthropologists and social scientists argue against predetermined perception or behavior of any kind, insisting that we are essentially empty mechanisms for the acquisition of whatever type of thought and deed our environment and culture indoctrinate us into. But such arguments seem to deteriorate into absurdity when confronted with the overwhelmingly more articulate evidence of an infant’s babbling.

Some of the more remarkable evidence for the innate language mechanism comes from situations where children are forced to develop their own language. One such scenario has been when a labor force is brought from many different parts of the world, speaking many different languages, into a single place. The adults develop a very minimal common vocabulary with which to communicate with one another, borrowed from their respective mother tongues, called a pigdin. If, however, children are brought up with this pigdin they will collectively develop a language, called a creole, with a legitimate grammar, consistently using complex rules common to all languages. Interestingly, these creole languages may share some basic grammatical uniformity with each other and with the grammars of sign languages developed in similar situations by communities of deaf children, giving the sense that they are speaking according to a particularly “pure” version of the language template we are born with.

We don’t remove the auxiliary in a declarative sentence and place it at the beginning of a sentence to ask a question (The man is speaking. vs. Is the man speaking?) because someone told us this rule and we struggled with it until we remembered it. Likewise, we don’t insert a dummy subject into a sentence (the It in It is raining or the There in There is rain) out of conscious consideration of the rule that every sentence must have a subject. We just do it. Unlike other complex things, like the quadratic equation or the second law of thermodynamics, we learn language when we are very young. And very unlike other complex things, it becomes far more difficult to learn language if it is not acquired during this critical early development phase. It is far harder and less intuitive to learn a second language later in life than it was to learn a native language in early childhood. And deaf people who are not exposed to sign language (or enough other deaf children to develop a sign language with) at an early age, and thus become the only cognitively normal people to reach adulthood without a language of any kind, never develop true “native” fluency with sign language if they are instructed later in life.

Human cognition might be somewhat more complex, in a general sense, than that of other animals. But within the minds of other animals are modules of extraordinary complexity, allowing, for instance, birds to migrate by calibrating the position of the constellations relative to the time of day and year.  These specific modules may be said to have a similar complexity to our language module. The larger point, of course, is that we should be wary of thinking of behavioral-perceptual modules as things that are sort of left over in human experience from earlier on in our evolution, that only produce what one might consider more archaic impulses like sex and aggression. Rather, complex perceptual dimensions, like language and ideology, perhaps should also be understood within the framework of innate biological modules. A moment of stark terror, or unbridled joy and freedom, or both things simultaneously, might occur when one realizes that they really do not understand the processes that generate all the complex things they think about, and that some abstract apparatus of pure reason may not be responsible for them. This would include when one feels the need for just the sort of brooding, introspective questioning of reality I am presently engaging in. In the simplest terms possible, one asks themselves where their thoughts comes from, and a flood of words and thoughts responds immediately.  And one can’t quite be certain the voice that is answering in their head is really theirs, or that they have a total grasp on what it’s saying or why; that ‘they’ truly and unquestionably control it.

Taking for granted that I do not understand the unconscious rules by which I construe language, it is also true that what I say often just seems to be some completely spontaneous construct, springing fully-formed from my head like Athena from Zeus, only making itself apparent to me once I’ve said it. This can have an uncanny, vaguely disquieting significance, as I often find myself stating fundamental beliefs for the first time in the course of conversations, and articulating complex justifications for them.  To be certain, I do give much thought to what I think about the world when I am not talking to people.  But it always seems to be the case that everything I think coheres into something far more decisive, far more fully-realized and actionable, at the very moment I start speaking about it.

“And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great weight of our courage!”
F. T. Marinetti,  The Futurist Manifesto

It is a subtle and readily misunderstood statement, but I don’t get the sense people really think about where their beliefs come from. It is a fact of the modern condition that it engenders a greater and greater diversity of belief. This situation to some extent contrasts with the human situation in less technological eras, wherein a group of people sharing a region and a language shared a cosmology of some kind, so that in a very fundamental sense there was agreement about what the world was and how it worked. People in modern culture have the novel task of having to decide what to believe. People living next door to one another, speaking the same language and sharing a material culture, may believe utterly disparate things about reality. One may think that the world was created a few thousand years ago by an omnipotent, albeit terribly insecure, deity, prone to incessant fits of wrath against his creation for various transgressions real and imagined, while the other may believe that extraterrestrials came and gave us psilocybin mushrooms, which gave birth to consciousness, or they may think language is the only reality and there is no such thing as truth, or they may believe physics has proved there is no such thing as god.

When truly given a moment’s thought, it is a somewhat curious circumstance that so many people, exposed to the same external world from which to derive information, come not just to differing hypotheses they favor, but to fervent convictions, which they profess absolute certainty as to the validity of, that are so radically at odds with one another. It seems the more information we gain about the world the less we can come to any sort of agreement on what is true about it. In his story The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, Jorge Luis Borges writes of a man who “reflects that he has shown himself capable of killing an idolater, yet incapable of knowing with any certainty whether the Muslim possesses any more of truth than the idolater does”. The man then goes off in search of truth, eventually seeking out a prophet whose word is disseminating among the people, and who seems to have the answers he seeks, only to eventually realize he is the prophet. I think it is safe to say that most people who’ve killed each other in a Hindu-Muslim riot, or any other such scenario where ideology has come into deadly conflict, did not have this moment of subsequent introspection.

On the contrary, people will make much effort to justify their beliefs, but I can not dispel the overwhelming impression that any evidence they might garner in favor of their paradigm is a sort of post hoc effort to justify something they decided to believe without much conscious deliberation, because of something inherent in their nature. I will most assuredly confess this about myself. I have, and I mean this quite literally, always had the same basic attitudes about the world I possess now. One could say I was a precocious child, or one could say that I’ve suffered very stunted development.

For instance, I confess my hatred of the police exceeds all reason. There are many good reasons to hate the police, but when I see a cop, and rage courses through my body and lurid thoughts of violence flood my mind, it is automatic, preceding any analysis, and it has always been there. I hated the cops when they picked me up when I was eight years old walking down the interstate in southern California with a backpack on. I wasn’t even really trying to run away from home, exactly; I just wanted to be free. It seemed strange to me that everyone should have to drive everywhere, and live in houses, and I just wanted to walk out into the world and experience it on its own terms. I have no idea how many freeways I have since walked down, how many times I’ve decided to walk some great distance, navigating the ceaseless perils to foot travel people have made, crossing interstates and circumnavigating golf courses and housing developments, since then. And the police have always been there to fuck with me. I can provide no more or less articulate an objection to them now than I could then: if I want to wander on my own way, what business could it possibly be of theirs?

Something more fundamental, something purely biological, is going on in my deep animosity with the established order. I hate this civilization because it is has lost its understanding of, and humility before, the nature it is a part of, and it is ravaging all the other parts of nature. And I hate the cops because they protect this civilization. That is the logical part of my animosity. But I also hate the dominant order because it is precisely that, and it simply is not in my nature to submit to a social order. I am an animal with a born aversion to anything that holds power over me, and a need to fight against it, just as a wolf is compelled to rise up and assert itself against the dominant members of its pack. Perhaps I simply disliked too greatly the way authority was exercised over me by adults when I was a child, perhaps it is just the blood with which my veins sing, but even if it were not abhorrent and destructive in and of itself, I don’t think I could ever accept an authority imposed on me.

I remember being taken out on a hike in the Anza-Borrego desert, also when I was eight years old, and seeing a rattlesnake devouring a rodent, and thinking that all our buildings and roads and neon signs were intrusions on the land we had no right to make. I remember my violent clashes with adults when I was younger still, the frenzied contortions of my body and the twisted rage of my face, and I think of myself singing in punk bands, then later in life speaking at protests, then later still employing various menacing, grotesque, and savage postures in my performance art career. It is all the same language of movement and expression. I have looked at photos from some of these things spanning fifteen years; despite that what I was doing ostensibly came from different places, or had somewhat different intentions, in many of them I am making exactly the same enraged face. Pablo Picasso, looking at the breathtaking murals of Pleistocene animals on the walls of a cave, said, “We invent nothing.” I certainly haven’t. I am the same man I ever was. The thousands of books I have read and the countless hours of observation and contemplation apparently only further develop, elaborate, and refine what I’ve always been. But never change it.

I said that I hate this civilization because it is destroying the nature of which it is a part, and that is the logical part of my animosity towards it. But I suppose it’s a fairly surface sort of statement. Why, exactly, do I hate something for destroying the rest of nature? Here, too, it seems like innate aspects of human biology come to bear. Much as with language, we develop a fabulously complex intuitive understanding of nature very early on in life that would utterly evade us if we were bringing only general intelligence, rather than an innate module for understanding, to bear. In experiments, infants already have a solid grasp on the distinction between animate and inanimate things. If an inanimate object is invisibly manipulated by experimenters, so that for instance a ball starts rolling without being propelled by a person, the infant reacts with much greater and more sustained attention than if a ball is simply propelled by a collision with something else. Likewise, they pay far more attention if people begin to act like inanimate objects, going on indiscriminate trajectories until they bump into each other.  This understanding is so familiar to us that we take its magnificent perceptiveness for granted, but clearly the baby has not come to a definition of the animate and inanimate by a conscious formulation of their distinct properties. It just knows that some things move on their own, and modify the course of their actions according to the conditions of their environment, with an individual will, and some things don’t.

Likewise, experimenters show young children a picture of a toy bird. They tell the children that the bird has been given real feathers, a motor that makes it fly, and the ability to chirp. They show them a picture of a real bird, saying that it looks like this now.  The children are adamant that, despite these changes, the entity is still not a real bird. They have no difficulty whatsoever, however, accepting that a coffee pot can be made into a bird feeder, or that pennies can be melted down into keys. There is an innate understanding there of some irreducible biological identity within an organism that pennies and coffee pots do not have. There is an innate understanding of a difficult-to-define essence of life. I once read a biology textbook that began with a definition of life, acknowledging that it was actually quite difficult to provide a decisive and concise one, but that children somehow intuitively know that a tree or a spider is alive and a rock is not.

We have an innate understanding of nature, an innate communication with and connection to it, because this is how our species has survived to this age. By knowing the track of the hunted, feeling the mountain lion stalking through the trees when it can not be seen or heard, by mapping a mountain in our minds and knowing its moods and habits. The same inborn communication and connection by which we hunt and gather is brought to bear when we study biology. When we decide that life on earth is a precious thing we wish to defend against attack, it is perhaps the combination of this irrevocable connection to all the rest of nature, a connection which is not so much a part of us but ultimately completely defines us, and the social defense instinct discussed previously. The social defense instinct compels us to identify as part of a group and defend it against attack. History shows that the group is a highly variable part of the equation, however. People might identify as third world, or black, or heterosexual, or capitalist, with concurrent antagonism toward everyone who isn’t. But these are vastly larger scales than people ever would have thought on until recently. For instance, white racists, eager to reclaim the lost utopia of white civilization uninhabited by people from other regions, would find little precedent for their dream in European history. It would have been far more typical of historic Europe for people to think of themselves as Franks or Burgundians, and fight among themselves accordingly, than to think of themselves as white people united against the rest of the world. For someone who sees the attack on nature as abhorrent, the group with which one identifies is simply all of nature. This makes a pretty fair amount of sense, as we are after all related parts of a single thing that is life.

There is only one body, and harm to any part of it is harm to the whole

Like I have said, rather than negate my convictions, this biological perspective seems to reinforce them.  I can ultimately think of no better reason to be a certain way, to believe a certain thing, than because it is my inborn biological identity to do so. Of course, one may readily say that everything else, or much else, that other people do and believe also has some intrinsic biological basis. This is doubtlessly true;  insatiable and rapacious desire for material wellbeing, concern for one’s own interest at the expense of others, and cowardice are entirely legitimate biological phenomena. All of the characteristics that I perceive as deficiencies that make an animal, human or otherwise, suitable for domestication are all valid aspects of biology. But if this puts the world in a position of insoluble conflict, so be it. We are all nature, raging in whatever inner conflict would contort one’s limbs into a posture of agony as they writhed against the opposing forces within themselves, we are all a single thing contorting in a great conflict where the limbs of our tortured trees rise up to meet the metal teeth of our machines. God’s body – nature – is fighting god’s body.

“Nature is life and life is Nature. I love it and I know what it is. I understand it because I feel it and Nature feels me. Nature is God and I am Nature. I am alive.”
Vaslav Nijinsky,  The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky

Still unsettled in Portland, my friend invited me to come to Olympia and live in that same space I had stayed in, a large performance venue, sometime in December. When I would walk on the road I would see the mountain to the north, but more often, I would walk through the ceaseless rain on the railroad tracks. We left the space from late winter to mid-summer while it was being worked on, but in spring I rode my bicycle out and made my first trip up the mountain. The sun was warm and the hillsides were green with grass and purple with a torrid eruption of foxglove. I wandered past an enormous open pit mine and up in elevation until I could see Mount Rainier off in the distance. I began to make frequent visits. I listened to great-horned owls at night and wrote songs based on theirs. I watched red-tailed hawks drift high above during the day.

It begins to hold some increasingly greater and greater allure; the promise of something I can not express. I am driven to it by something I am not conscious of. I begin to realize that I repeatedly imagine myself on the mountain as I travel by it, not in the simple sense that I imagine being on it, but I have the uncannily vivid impression that another me is up there wandering around through the night, a restless creature. It is him that is experiencing all the things I think I remember before realizing they never happened. He has blond curls of hair falling onto his shoulders. He belongs to the mountain, or perhaps he rules it. There is no difference; he is of it. Sometimes, I see his blond hair curling into the stems of flowers, a great mane of daisies and trillium, his head surmounted by branches, a profusion of ferns and grasses emerging from his skin. If I were a little more insane than I apparently already am, perhaps I would do him reverence. Perhaps I would walk up the logging roads and build him an altar in the heart of a madrone.

In winter, I move to a new house, which I select because it is directly at the base of the mountain. I can walk out of the backyard and onto a logging road and walk up it. The day after I move in, I do so. As I go up the road, I feel as if I am gliding, propelled by some external force. I walk to a high point and then I find the track of a large animal I can’t quite recognize in the mud. I sit down and stare at it.  Much time passes. I seem to have entered some sort of reverie; it seems odd that I am sitting here staring down at the ground for quite this long, but then I quickly stop thinking about it.

When I get back up, I am disoriented. I don’t know which way I just came from. I want to walk back home, and I came from the eastern end of the mountain, but suddenly I do not know which way is east or west. I can think of no experience in my adult life that resembles this. My sense of direction was immaculate for years. I once woke up in a forest I did not recognize from an alcoholic blackout and realized that, despite not remembering getting there, I still knew my directions. It has deteriorated a little since then – it is not as if I do nothing but constantly hop trains anymore – but I can’t remember ever losing my bearing this completely unless I was in a car someone was driving. I look around for the sun, but it is low and so obscured by the trees. The sky is glowing red and peach and orange on numerous horizons. Which horizon contains the sun, and which, like a mirror harboring an illusory world, only contains a reflection?

I strike out in a random direction. Something exceedingly strange is happening, some shift just occurred in my mental state. I feel driven, but also overwhelmed. I am walking rapidly, urgently.  Perhaps I feel a little like I am confronting a truth that is more than I can comprehend, and I have thus been rendered incoherent, just as too much light, rather than illuminating more, makes one blind. I find the sun, but the day is somewhat overcast and I somehow manage to literally convince myself that it is not the sun, but just diffused light from the other side of the sky. Thus, I walk towards it while convinced, in my delirium, that I am walking east. I imagine my other self, my mirror image, and think perhaps only he can know this place, where I must see everything in reverse. I truly think this. Perhaps I am only the reflection, and he is the real me. I am not concerned or frustrated with this apparent breakdown in my mental faculties; indeed, for some reason, I am ecstatic. I end up essentially in someone’s backyard and on a road I do not recognize. I walk up and down it. I eventually find a sign with the road’s name and realize I am on the wrong side of the mountain, but I am still in this state. I do not know which way is north or south.

After some wandering, I promptly exit my reverie. I realize I am on a road that I know perfectly well, and have always known perfectly well, is on the western side of the mountain. I therefore know which way to walk to get home. I am back, as precipitously as I departed, in the waking world of cars, roads, motion, and knowable directions.

I have spoken of language, I have spoken of beliefs, but what of the very sky? My initial question is not satisfactorily answered. Is the world I perceive ultimately the result of a fairly selective module? This line of questioning could readily deteriorate into trivial absurdity. Of course, I would not see the world were in not for the eyes our species has evolved, nor would I hear it were it not for our ears. But can we learn anything from examining our aggregate senses about how ultimately circumscribed they may be?  I can’t imagine they’re wrong, or we’re back into the utterly abstract and ultimately fruitless territory of Descartes and weed. Not wrong, but I can readily imagine that our senses provide us with a picture of the world that, from the perspective of another observer, would seem very incomplete. In this case, I can’t find a great deal of evidence from within human biology along the same lines as that for the intrinsic understanding of nature or the construction of language. Nonetheless, my suspicion is steadily growing, perhaps based on nothing more than a persistent sense that there is more to the world than I am aware of.

The summer I spend at the venue demands much of me, exhausting my body’s capacity for work. I work constantly on the space. I work at a day labor agency. I live far from everything, and ride my bike many miles in the predawn hour to carry boxes up and down stairs. I am cold, and then hot, and thirsty, and my body is always aching, although it is also growing stronger each day. I have little time to read, but when I do, I read a book called The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, detailing the baffling nature of quantum physics, string theory, and inflationary cosmology. I have exerted myself to a point of feeling disembodied, and so these moments when I manage to read a few pages of this work, with its description of a reality so lavishly endowed with properties that utterly defy the appearance of the world, are always utterly disorienting. I can’t say I necessarily have moments where I think I’m not really laying there reading it. It is more that I have moments where it seems just as likely that this book is in my hands, telling me particles decide what properties to have only when we look at them, as it is that an infinity of other things are happening instead of this, or simultaneously.  Why not, really? The behavior of the universe seems to be beyond the bounds of our senses or our capacity for reasoning. The more we learn about it, the more completely it seems to throw our understanding of it into utter chaos.

To me it seems that three basic events can basically account for the seemingly ever-increasing complexity of reality, and its ever-increasing amount of content. These are the initial moment of creation of the universe, the emergence of life within it, and the emergence of consciousness. What I find so interesting is that as much as we may have fairly copious detail about these phenomena after the point of their origin, their actual coming into existence remains a place of stark and fundamental mystery, unassailable by our inquiries. We can discuss how they work in detail, but what they are and why they came to be are beyond us. In other words, why did something come from nothing, and bring about matter and energy and all the behaviors and dynamics it possesses? And how did, out of these materials with their governing dynamics, did life emerge? The answer given to this question in a biology textbook does not seem false, but inadequate, giving an account of an astonishing complexity of very ambiguous physical processes all occurring in concert to produce from mere molecules a system as sophisticated and organized as a living one. Apparently, this process, which happened spontaneously four billion years ago, has never occurred since. Surely there must be something else to know about this. And how did, out of these living systems, consciousness emerge, matter coming to be aware of itself?

Each one of these things, emerging out of one another in the order I just stated them, creates an entire new echelon of reality, with a greater degree of complexity and interrelationship than would have before been possible, which has no discernible precedent or mechanism in the universe as it existed before. What is this essential impulse, this seemingly spontaneous initiative to create these new orders of reality? Where does it come from and what exactly does it do? If we could meaningfully define something like existence (in the sense of being vs. non-being) or consciousness, perhaps we could begin to hazard answers to these questions. One may even ask if consciousness is, indeed, the final term in this series, or if there is some whole new order of reality that is waiting to emerge. Because every other unprecedented development of this nature has proceeded from the previous one (nothing to something, something to life, life to consciousness), one would be tempted to suspect that consciousness would be the origin of this unprecedented thing. Perhaps this mysterious mechanism for the creation of new elements of reality comes into play every time its medium reaches a certain stability, or density, or prevalence, or something (I am using these terms randomly, since I imagine it is quite clear there is no way I or anyone else could really know anything about the thing of which I am speaking). If consciousness were the medium for something new, I suspect we’d be the species in whom its seeds would blossom. I suspect it would have something to do with the worlds of complex symbolic thought we are presently engendering.

This is a true memory; I could date it with only a day or two margin of error. Indeed, when I think about it, I am fairly certain this is where my false memory of killing a salmon as it raced to its death came from. I encountered a dead salmon lying on the stream bank as I was walking along a busy highway. I think of the salmon rushing along their course and the cars rushing along theirs. It feels like I am thinking of the movement of the two as the primary event, rather than the individual cars or salmon, or any of the attributes that distinguish them. That the primary phenomenon I am perceiving is the underlying pattern of motion, the rushing, and so the two are cohering into a single category of reality. That is not really all that noteworthy, when I give it a moment’s thought. Or at least, it doesn’t count as a whole different echelon of reality that has never before been perceived. It’s the best I can do at describing it, though. It is simply as if there is a greater continuity to things, rendering their broader patterns and properties more visible.

I suppose the idea is that one can always subdivide reality into smaller categories, or expand it into broader ones. In the end, of course, the impact of the crater that ended the age of dinosaurs, the beautiful curvature of a mouth crying out during orgasm, the trembling appendages on a peacock’s tail feather, Hitler’s suicide in his bunker, the naked dancing of Isadora Duncan, and the masked dancing of the Hopi are all part of the single entity that is reality. I imagine the cognition of an insect, the world it perceives the direct function of the neurological system that has developed to perpetuate the survival of its species. I imagine that, while some parts of the world are apparent to this insect that are doubtlessly not apparent to me, that ultimately I can process more information and therefore perceive echelons of reality fundamental unavailable to it. The next step of this argument is obvious. How much of reality can really be accounted for by the neurological system that has developed within our species? Are there larger scales we could perceive things at? When things change scales, sometimes, rather than simply having more of something, fundamentally new dynamics emerge.

After all, it was less than 80,000 years ago that art did not exist, giving the strong sense that before this leap our forebears lacked a great deal of the cognitive complexity we possess. (Actually, I should briefly acknowledge that it is extremely perilous to try to directly associate a cognitive development with material artifacts – we’re more or less cognitively identical to stone age peoples – but the more general point that some time in fairly recent evolutionary history we lacked our present mental sophistication is certainly safe). The vast panolpy of knowledge we take for granted, in all its rich detail and interrelationship – our heads cluttered with lines of Ezra Pound and an understanding of how leaves affect photosynthesis and tactical observations on the Algerian independence movement – just wasn’t possible until fairly recently. It seems absurd and arbitrary to assume we have reached a final state, simply because we can look at subatomic particles or encode our thoughts into symbols and transmit them via electromagnetic waves to people on other continents, any more than people huddled in caves in South Africa 80,000 years ago should have thought they possessed a total knowledge because they knew how to make fire and stone tools.

At every moment in the history of our species, we have been at the vanguard of new evolutionary territory, and we continue to be so. Does it seem unreasonable then to assume that we should be experiencing things that have no precedent, and therefore are not typically regarded as possible? What would it have felt like to be one of the people who had language, the innate capacity for vocabulary and grammar that allows deaf children to create sign languages together, developing within you? Who was the very first person to etch lines into a piece of red ochre, or perforate and arrange some shells on a string, purely for aesthetic purposes – the first person to make art – and what did it feel like to be them?  I try to recall that perception of the salmon and the stream and the cars and the road, with its uncanny continuity, in all of its detail, to try to see if there’s anything there I haven’t already accounted for. I note with interest that there was much less color, it was practically all shades of gray. There was an insistent murmuring sound in the background. The flesh of the salmon was rotting away a little, revealing some white bones, and everything else was the same; their surfaces seemed to be peeling away to reveal hidden structures of unknown significance beneath them.

The world has many faces, and beneath all of them are bones

I walk up the mountain late one night and the impression that there is another me is tremendous. He seems very proximate, like he is somewhere behind me, just around the corner. Just before the top, I look out on the lights of the city to the east, through the foliage of a hemlock tree that is in the perfect shape of an enormous bird. I build a debris hut, a structure of branches just big enough to accommodate a person lying down piled with enough foliage and sticks and whatnot to stay warm and dry, up on a ridge that looks down on the Puget Sound. My friend and I walk up there and she lies down in the hut and I sit next to it, and despite my ceaseless aimlessness and restlessness, despite being gravely concerned about a friend of mine to the south, despite living with the burdensome knowledge of all the seemingly irreconcilable wrongs that the modern age contains, I feel content.

This moment most certainly happens, and it has no mystical character to it whatsoever: I am walking home and, just before my driveway, I feel like I understand something I’d been getting at for a long time. But now that I do, I can’t think of a way to express it linguistically that would really distinguish it from anything I’ve already said. I think about how when I read something, it is the same as if I look at the subtle and delicate structure of a leaf. It is all nature speaking with one voice to anyone who will listen. Nature speaks through the leaf, and nature speaks through the symbols that creatures adorn the flesh of a tree with, after it has been pulverized and pressed into a thin sheet and bound with many other such sheets into a book. Didn’t I already know that? Some greater continuity has become a part of my perception, some clearer understanding that subject and object are part of a single continuous circle.  I can not find a way to express it linguistically to make it sound less passe. Maybe everyone else already understood this, but I have come to some new understanding.

“I am God. I am God. I am God.”
Vaslav Nijinsky,  The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky

I’ve had a job for over five months now. I don’t cease to be the absurd bundle of impulses that utterly resist the relative safety and tranquility of domestic living, but I think this time is probably good for me in many ways. I am congenial. I pay attention to detail. I read books of cocktail recipes and ask people their opinions on different drinks. Then I get off of work and imagine killing police officers, escaping from prison, hitch hiking to the coast to find an abandoned building and salvage its lumber in order to build a seaworthy craft and launch it into the Pacific Ocean. I am trying. I open a bank account. I make a big deal of little transitions, like buying a bath towel and trying to make myself use it after I shower.  I get the towel but often forget to bring it with me into the bathroom. Virtually anyone would have to find my present state at least a little bit funny. I’d be inclined to argue for outright hilarity.

Who knows? Perhaps the revelatory encounter with the unknown will come while I am working. I serve someone who has recently had brain surgery. With great difficulty, he explains to me that he knows what he is trying to say, but since the surgery lacks the neurological capacity to physically say it.  Every time he comes to a word that he can’t make himself say, he says ‘fuck’ over and over again until it comes out, or until he settles for trying an alternative formulation. He does this so much that ‘fuck’ begins to seem like an all-encompassing term, subsuming within itself all that ever has been or ever could be. If I were Borges, perhaps I would speculate that this man was, in fact, god. For if a definition of god had to be hazarded, that which encompasses the incomprehensibly vast and wildly multifarious infinitude of reality into a singularity would not seem like a bad one. But I am not Borges, and so I must continue to trudge through the difficult and uncertain mire of my own philosophical terrain.

Please Do Not Join My Cult

A few words are written and they have perhaps a single, perhaps a few, meanings. Others are added and a text begins to develop an elaborate and ever-growing cumulative significance, each part interacting with each other part in a myriad of subtle and powerful ways which seem beyond the scope of our comprehension to really isolate or define. They demand ceaseless refinement on the part of the writer. They want to say something, and it is an anguish for that thing to go unsaid or to be imperfectly spoken, just as a seed suffers that longs for the sun but can not break free from the frigid soil, or whose tender flesh is torn and blemished on its course upward by sharp rocks and therefore greets the benevolent sun with a malformed body.

This is all to say that the writing, which I think is becoming more effective, is also taking on a correspondingly greater subjective element of struggle for me. Two pieces hang in various states of limbo, one simply unfinished, as the breadth and depth of the research for it continues to grow in a seemingly exponential fashion, the other as I wait for correspondence. An 11,000 word third piece I have finished, after great toil, for some reason leaves me breathless, experiencing difficulty contemplating publication. I feel like I gave birth to it out of my body with all the attendant pain one would expect; various sharp implements pressed into various parts of me, constituent words slowly and carefully incised and extracted with exquisite, meticulously calculated suffering. Although I have not been performing since the end of last year, I can think of no more suitable physical analogy than the prolonged agonies one might witness in the course of a butoh dance.

I know this is all quite ridiculous, but for me, it feels entirely inevitable. I am perfectly aware there are certain conspicuous elements of a stereotype here, but, to use Yahweh’s somewhat glib phrasing from Exodus, when Moses inquired as to the identity of the voice speaking to him from a burning bush, I am that which I am. I can’t help it. I freely and graciously take my place within the constellation of stereotypical elements of our culture. Along with the guy who lives in the trailer with an enormous family and an uncountable preponderance of dogs, both of whom he ceaselessly yells at, along with the guy who has a nice career and an overzealous love of espresso drinks and is sympathetic toward the socioeconomically marginal but terrified to run into them on the street, place me, the artist, or thinker, or whatever, who feels it incumbent upon himself to inform people that it causes him pain to write, but that he must do it anyway.

The actual sense, though, is that I am creating something over time that is effective in the most literal sense. I can not evade the persistent feeling that, in the crafting and careful rearranging and interweaving of words, that I am creating a weapon, and that the more I require of myself in its construction, the more fiercely potent it will be when it is deployed. Each phrase is like one of the myriad components of a bomb, lovingly crafted and carefully arranged with all the other parts. I imagine buildings crumbling to the ground when the words are spoken. I imagine the bodies of my enemies, who are destroying the earth, succumbing to the force of the words as to blows inflicted on them with a bludgeon.

This persistent sense once led me to create a series of writings that were overtly oriented toward this theme, rather than it just being a subjective experience I have in the process of writing, centered around an entity called Do Not Seek the Light. Do Not Seek the Light was never entirely clear about what it was up to, but in its coarse outlines it seemed to be conveying that it was a sort of fanatically anti-modern sect that was going to destroy the dominant order by sheer force of will alone; perhaps someone with a slightly different orientation would simply say with magic.

I had been doing this sort of thing – creating fictional realities and presenting them as fact – for some time in more or less utter obscurity. As best I can remember, it started with a piece titled The Marginal and the Magical: On the Margins of Society and the Thresholds of the World, which was my attempt to make sense of the phenomenon of modern ritual performance, which is deeply integrated into various experimental music and performance art scenes. The basic argument therein was that social deviation was also a classic element of the lives of magicians, ritualists, ecstatics, whoever, from more archaic cultures, and that the same basic antagonisms with society could be observed in the cross-dressing of a shaman and the subcultural status of modern performance artists. In the course of that writing, I inserted a series of images showing structural similarities between various artifacts produced in both modern and archaic cultures. At some point, I went ahead and made an artifact of my own, placing it next to images of mythological fathers devouring their children. It seemed like an innocuous joke at the time, but it planted the extremely fertile seed within me of creating documentation for nonexistent religious movements, and writing their secret histories.

The next project I undertook along these lines was centered around my obsession with Jorge Luis Borges. I have always harbored the suspicion that he must have left some manner of encrypted messages in at least some of his fiction. The man was simply too obsessed with unseen, implicit meanings in things, hidden references in obscure documents, and secret identities to have not done that. It seems like all his fiction is telling us that if we look deeper into his fiction we’ll find out what he’s really saying. After awhile, rather than decode his work, which seemed like a guaranteed journey into a lifetime of fruitless madness, I decided it would be far better homage to the man to simply invent my own secret meanings in his published work, and to demonstrate these meanings through the meticulous documentation of the references his work makes to obscure elements of history, literature, and mystical thought that I would myself invent and insert into larger bodies of legitimate work. For various reasons, and I suspect one of them may have simply been the mercy of a universe that is secretly more benevolent than it appears, this project never went anywhere.

Do Not Seek the Light was the third such project, and by far the coolest. Unlike the first two, it seemed to actually be successful in spreading somewhat, and gaining some validity in people’s minds. This fact should largely be attributed to my friend Ogo Eion, who publishes the print version of Spring Speaks Truth with his Autonomy Press. He is a brilliant graphic designer, event organizer, and general sort of leviathan of the west coast underground, and together we created a series of documents that, while they didn’t succeed insofar as I know in destroying any buildings or killing anyone, certainly managed to freak a number of people out. I understand this may not seem like the most laudable of objectives, and, after awhile, it did indeed become necessary to ask ourselves what exactly our objective was. In the end, the thing I think that would be truest to say is that, for me anyway, it was done out of simple compulsion to do it. Is there a better reason? I don’t really know why I like to dance, either, but I most assuredly don’t plan on stopping.

So just to be perfectly clear, should any ambiguity at all remain; I do not have a cult, or more to the point, I never did. There are, no doubt, quite legitimate elements of how I and others might feel about the world in the material we produced, and we were most certainly motivated by a shared love of seeing how certain symbols, aesthetics, and formulae would be received by people, and affect their discourse. But we don’t actually want you to sign up with us because we’ve never exactly been real in that way. I couldn’t try to convince you to share an orthodoxy with me because, honestly, I believe ideology is a poison that diminishes one’s ability to simply perceive the world according to the uncertain and multifarious dynamics of pure existence. This type of perception of pure being should be able to translate into action – for instance, the defense of the earth – but I see no good reason that meaningful action should have to be defined or circumscribed by definite and static systems of belief.

In any case, and this can probably help you imagine why writing is such a demanding task at times, all of this foregoing text has really only had the purpose of providing you, my friends, with a link. As these numerous current projects wait to emerge into the public eye, here is a document of an effort past:

Do Not Seek the Light

The Mirror’s Heart

“…mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both increase the numbers of men.”

- Jorge Luis Borges,  Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

I have been reading a great deal on the subject of animal behavior recently. Particularly Konrad Lorenz, who contributed a great deal to many fundamental tenets of the field.  I find the subject of innate behavior patterns, what most people would subsume along with a number of related phenomena under the general term ‘instincts’, to be intellectually thrilling.  Some of the deepest lessons about our experience and our motivations are there.

I am fascinated to learn that the characteristic posture of military ‘attention’ – broad shoulders, chin erect, etc. – is also the precise posture adopted by chimpanzees when they feel their group is threatened.  However, because they retain much body hair that we’ve lost, in them it actually functions in concert with the raising of body hairs on the arms, laid flat against the body with elbows outward, to give a larger appearance.  The behavior has taken on a social significance readily understood, and innately responded to, by other members of our species, despite that the physical facts that led to its evolution no longer exist for us.  Another fairly similar example would be the baring of teeth to give a ‘savage’ or threatening expression, despite that biting is not a particularly common form of violence between members of our species these days (although this policy may be one we want to collectively reconsider, as biting does obviously hold a certain appeal).

Until recently, I have managed to read much on the subject without having any emotional responses other than the thrill of acquiring knowledge and discerning relationships, free of any perceived moral or philosophical burden.  Instinctive behaviors have many features.  They are as innate as a species’ physical appearance, entirely unlearned, and therefore the drive to perform them exists regardless of the situation the organism finds itself in.  Thus, in environments other than the one the organism evolved in (such as human captivity), one may observe animals execute very complex and specific sequences of movements with no purpose whatsoever.

It seems to take two forms.  One is where the absent ‘releasing object’, the thing or situation that would typically induce the instinctive behavior in an animal, is substituted for something else.  In captive environments, instinctive behaviors otherwise directed toward parents are often directed towards the human captors.  Later on, courtship and breeding behaviors are also directed toward humans.  If the species is introduced to others of its own kind, it will often not be able to perform any of its social roles with them.  It will literally fail to recognize its own species.  But the releasing object may often enough be substituted for some inanimate object. Animals can be compelled to fight with, or court, or attempt to defend, many objects that vaguely resemble a member of their own species, or prey, or a predator.

The other form it can take is so-called ‘vacuum activity’.  There is an innate energy to perform instinctive actions.  When they are performed, an animal (including us) is gratified, and the energy is used up for a time.  When they are not, the drive increases, and increasingly less and less of an appropriate stimulus is necessary to compel the instinctive behavior.  Eventually, if absolutely no relevant stimulus is ever presented, the behavior simply erupts in vacuo.  During the threshold lowering phase, one may witness a bird attempt to build a nest out of increasingly unsuitable materials, lacking the physical environment wherein suitable materials could be found.  However, if there is simply nothing to even make an attempt with, eventually one may see a bird simply build a nest out of nothing at all.

Aggression is certainly an instinctive behavior pattern, with a great many fixed, unlearned motor patterns for fighting existing in a number of species.  In humans, there seems to be little left of our instinctive aggressive motor behaviors, although we do retain the aforementioned ‘intention movements’ such as baring teeth, which do have a biological function of communicating aggression.  And of course, it is hard to make very much sense at all of human history unless one concludes that there appears to be an innate drive towards violence in general within our species, even if we no longer commit these acts of violence with instinctive fighting behaviors.

In some fish species, males placed in an aquarium with only a female will, lacking any other males with whom to have combat, experience a threshold lowering for the elicitation of the fighting drive until they eventually simply kill their female tank mate.  In some species of the genus Geophagus, this can be prevented by placing a mirror in the tank.  The male’s own reflection will elicit the instinctive aggressive motor pattern, and the female will live.

It was when reading this that I lost my previous sense of pure thrill in the quest for understanding, and felt myself disturbed in some very distinct and difficult to characterize way.  There is some appalling significance I think I detect in this seemingly innocuous fact, some vague but fundamental disturbance I experience that could be likened to briefly realizing you’re dreaming and trying to wake yourself before forgetting and resuming your dream.  The fish is bound to a heroic struggle in which all of its will and purpose is directed into combat, into the only moment that ever mattered, raging against an enemy its own presence creates on an impervious and passive glass surface.

I think I suspect that I am like this fish.  I am possessed of some tremendous energy I do not really understand.  I feel ceaselessly driven toward something with an often-painful fervor, I feel as if my internal state would make far more sense if I was fighting the most pitched battle of some terrible lifelong war.  When dangerous, violent, or potentially catastrophic things used to happen to me, I would suddenly feel possessed of some great self-knowledge I otherwise lacked.  I would feel reconciled.  When I got shot at while inadvertently trespassing on someone’s land in New Mexico some fifteen years ago, I thought it was one of the most beautiful things that had ever happened to me.  Now, nothing even really changes.  I got hit by a car on my bike a few months ago.  I remember thinking I could be greatly injured as we collided, then I remember getting myself up and putting myself on my bike.  The guy stood there stammering some nonsense by his car and seemed surprised that I didn’t seem flustered or affected.  I rode away as he stood there, looking confused.  As I rode, I wondered why I couldn’t find it within me to react with some drama, and I felt like it was probably because, in my mind, there is some ill-defined struggle of far greater significance raging already.

But there is also a disaffection within me.  I think I am waiting for something to happen.  I walk on the railroad tracks, I feel my feet moving repetitively, and feel the blood in my body and my heart moving in concert with my feet and I think I am a tiny part of some larger organism who I propel forward with my movement.  I study intensively, I am constantly trying to refine my methods for coming to know things, I sit huddled in blankets and warm clothes in my cold room and do math problems.  I walk through the forest and I try to hear what all the different plants are saying.  I am suddenly possessed of the need to sing, often for hours, in continuous, delirious outpourings.  But something is missing.

I suspect that all the experiences I am having are not truly fundamental.  I believe everything I perceive is real.  I am certainly not someone with an ideology that the world is an illusion, and therefore meaningless, because of some spirit world that is the only thing that is real.  I loathe such paradigms.  The world is real and I love it.  I just suspect that I don’t see all of it.  I get the sense that the intense, and difficult to define, drive that consumes me would perhaps seem petty, or perhaps finally make sense, if I could see the world better.

The other day I was trying to imagine how a mathematical procedure that I have yet to study would work out.  I found myself thinking about the correspondence in nature to the very basic concept of a series of numbers.  Of course, most of the things we count with numbers, i.e. segregate as distinct from one another, don’t have any inherent relationship with the numbers we give them.  Perceiving things as separate is at least partly a result of simply our particular mental modules, which are programmed not to comprehend endless complexity, but to reduce information to manageable quantities.  You can always perceive things at greater or smaller scales.

For a moment, I thought I understood something.  Then it was gone.  What is strange is that when I think of it now, I seem to remember myself thinking this while I was walking down a very steep road through the forest, but it was a place I’ve only been once, and was on a bicycle.  It was a fleeting moment, and at some point it was incorporated into a false memory, albeit a beautiful one.  I thought I was becoming aware of something, and then it was gone, like a dreamer who briefly becomes aware that they are asleep before resuming the course of their dream.

Perhaps when we look up into this vast and omnipotent sky, searching for a god, or cursing malevolent gods we perceive therein for afflicting us, or praising them, we are looking into something like a mirror.  Perhaps it reflects not our image exactly, as it does for the fish, but some aspect of our mental character, or our souls.  Perhaps someday our gaze will pierce its reflecting surface and we will see something beyond our present limitations; we will see the heart of the mirror and the dark secrets it harbors behind the light.

“Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the maze of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.”

- Octavio Paz,  The Labyrinth of Solitude

Dances with Wolves as ideology: A critique of anarcho-primitivism

Last summer was an era in which I had a fair amount of time on my hands.  I lived in a one bedroom apartment in downtown Olympia, an exceedingly sleepy town in which, for me in any case, incessant socialization, artistic collaboration, or similar human contact are not distractions.  I did not have to work but did not have to go through the ceaseless scrambling typically associated with not having money.  This was owing to the fact that in fall of 2009 I was broke, and so I hopped trains to California and when I got there I hitch hiked around until I got picked up by someone who gave me extremely profitable work on which I lived comfortably for the next nine months.  Essentially, I had no real practical survival matters to occupy me, nor adequate projects of any kind to take up all my time.  I was allowed a fair amount of time with which to simply find ways to amuse myself.  Because many typical forms of entertainment hold limited appeal for me, I found myself pursuing a variety of obscure lines of inquiry into an assortment of topics.

Olympia, WA: a great place to get a lot of reading done

One thing I found myself studying, out of a combination of idle curiosity and deep concern for the issues it addresses, was anarcho-primitivism as it is represented by two of its more prominent authors: John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen. In late spring or early summer, I am not sure which, I picked up Jensen’s Endgame Volume I. A couple months later, I got a copy of Zerzan’s Twilight of the Machines. I still have not finished either of them.  Engame went back to the library a long, long time ago.  But I own Twilight of the Machines, and so made numerous sincere efforts over many months to get through its meager 125 pages, feeling it would seem insincere to critique not one but two books I have not read in their entireties. But in the end I suppose this very fact functions as the essence of any review of them I could provide.  It is the primary thing that I experience to be true of both of them, more prominent and relevant than anything I could say about their actual content, that I find them tedious.

John Zerzan: just not that riveting a writer

I don’t think this is entirely owing to a lack of studiousness on my part.  This hasn’t been the most study intensive part of my life by any means, but in the same period of time we are talking about I definitely read some books without encountering the same feelings I encountered with these two that turning the pages required a sort of rigorous discipline.  I found Studies in Animal and Human Behavior vol. I, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Tom Brown’s Guide to Wilderness Survival, Dune, Guns, Germs, and Steel and The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality all to be wholly engaging.

The preview for Dances with Wolves, the 1990 film made by and starring Kevin Costner, states its premise in fairly modest terms, saying only “In 1864, a man went in search of America…and found himself.” I think it would be fair to go a little bit farther and say the film is about a disenchanted soldier during the Civil War who requests a remote post on the Great Plains.  He encounters Native Americans and, judging their way of life to be a sound one, free of all the inequities, traumas, and brutalities of civilization, quickly gains their trust and is assimilated into their society.  They name him Dances with Wolves, and Dances with Wolves finds he not only has many friends in this wise and egalitarian culture, but he also has the good fortune of finding a white woman who has been raised by his new people from a very young age, who can be distinguished from the natives by slightly lighter complexion, a fragmentary recollection of English, and hair that is utterly inexplicably feathered in the manner still popular in 1990.  A love story ensues between the two.  Sadly, Dances with Wolves’ time with the natives turns out to be fleeting, as the American war machine unsurprisingly brings to an end their peaceful idyll.

Her name was Stands with Fist in the movie, but they really might as well have named her Feathers for Hair.

If you happen to be less familiar with this particular vicissitude of popular culture than myself, I can think of no compelling reason that you do not go immediately to this link and spend the next two hours and fifty-four minutes remedying this unfamiliarity:

http://megavideo.com/?v=GC6VIAJ8

If that turned out to not be a very good movie, you have my apologies.  Please understand that I have not seen it since it was released, when I was thirteen years old.  My tastes may have matured since then.  In any case, I thought it is necessary to establish that cultural framework as a reference for understanding Derrick Jensen or John Zerzan, as a similarly naive idealization of less technological societies seems to pervade their work.

It is a truly remarkable phenomenon that people can develop such solid convictions about something without any direct experience of the thing, or even substantial information gleaned from the observational research of others.  In the case of anarcho-primitivism, the initial conviction that informs most of its analysis is simple.  It is that primitive societies are egalitarian, peaceful, in equilibrium with nature, and lacking the individual alienation, malaise, and chronic psychological distress that characterizes our civilization.  Detailed analyses of modern situations proceed from there, always with passing references to the state of primitive harmony that we all used to live in.  This idyllic state is always simply cursorily acknowledged, as if so patently obvious we should all just take it for granted, rather than actually established in its own right with an argument of any detail.

As far as I can tell, the reason that a detailed argument for this underlying notion does not occur is because any such argument would almost invariably have to begin incorporating some substantial extent of facts.  These facts would presumably have to be taken from things like studies, based on actual observations, of real primitive societies.  And, much as I wish it weren’t so, these studies would refer to culture after culture permeated with violence, inequality, treachery, interpersonal conflict, bizarre custom resulting in much human suffering, and general maladaptation.  If one were to read such studies, I suppose one would cease being so baffled as to why the ubiquitously happy and wise people of the past gave up their way of life to create canned liquid cheese, super maximum security prisons, world war, and Riverside County, California.  One would, rather, get the distinct sense that everyone, at all times and places, in societies of all levels of technological development, was just as fucked up as we are.

Now, I make this statement with some caveats.  Different societies are maladapt in different ways, and I think we can learn much from understanding ways in which our behavior has become pathological where others are healthy.  This is a large part of my focus in research and writing.  But this is essentially another subject.  For our purposes here, it is more to the point to simply establish that the general notion that primitive societies somehow represent anarchist utopias is a paramount absurdity.

For instance, here is a chart displaying the findings of a book called War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by University of Illinois archaeology professor Lawrence H. Keeley.  It shows the percentage of male deaths caused by warfare in eight different tribal societies from New Guinea and South America (two of the only places left in the world where there are still hunter gatherer societies).

Note that it tops out at a breathtaking 60% for the Jivaro, and then drops to the still pretty jaw dropping >40% for the Yanomano.  I don’t really know anything at all about the Jivaro.  But I do know that historically Yanomano lived in a more or less ceaseless state of warfare with other Yanomano and with neighboring tribes.  The intratribal warfare seems to have been more about prestige and property (men who engaged in raids typically had more wives and children than those who did not), whereas raids on neighboring tribes was largely to capture slaves.

The Yanomano: it's probably safe to say their society has better aesthetics than ours, but not that it's any more peaceful

Yes, slaves.  And just to be perfectly clear, we are talking about a society possessing no mass settlements, or even really permanent settlements, nor domestic animals, nor technology such as metallurgy or wheels.  We are talking about a people who meet everyone’s definition of a primitive.  I mean, I don’t know how, if your entire bent is discussing ad infinitum how war and domination proceed from domestication and technology, you can not eventually come across something like this chart.  Maybe the chart is wrong.  Maybe the author’s methodology is severely flawed.  After all, it’s just one of the first things that came up when I searched the internet for ‘prehistoric warfare’.  But the point is, Zerzan and Jensen aren’t even talking about this chart.  Or any of the rest of the massive body of anthropological research out there, which contains a rich detail of information contravening their basic assumptions.

While I would most certainly like to live in one of the hypothetical, utopian primitive societies they write about being ubiquitous throughout the world before technology, I can not say I’d like to live in any actual primitive society of which I know.  (It is probably worth reiterating what I hope is the patently obvious fact here that I also don’t want to live in this society).  I would not like to live, for instance, among the Kurnai of eastern Australia (or at least among the Kurnai at the time they were written about in Ruth Benedict’s anthropology classic Patterns of Culture; I don’t know to what extent their traditions survive in the present day).  In this culture, ‘incest’ is avoided to an extreme that makes marriage essentially impossible.  There is no distinction made between near kin (like siblings) and very distant kin, making anyone related, no matter how remotely, a brother or a sister.  Further, there are complex and highly prohibitive regulations on what localities can intermarry at any given time.  Finally, old men exercise power in this society in the matter of bride selection.  These combination of factors leads to young men being literally bereft of any legal bridal candidates of their own age.

The convention that has developed is to simply circumvent society’s prohibitions and elope.  But society does not respond favorably, despite that everyone in it has essentially been married by the same means.  They respond with furious indignation and pursue the escaped couple.  If they catch them, they kill them.  If the couple can make it to an island traditionally recognized as a safe haven and persist there long enough to bear a child, they can return.  They will be beaten, but they will be allowed to live.

That sounds terrible to me.  I think of this absurd, elaborate, anti-human convention somewhere along the same lines I think of, say, Catholic stigmas surrounding sex.  In both cases, the culture creates an untenable and unsustainable paradigm, and the role of humans is to fulfill their natures by violating the culture’s mandates.

Catholic penitents flagellating themselves and bearing crosses: the next best thing to the lost life affirming harmony of Kurnai marriage customs?

I know it is somewhat atypical, in our sensitive day and age, to say anything that could be construed as ”judging other cultures”.  But I find this notion extremely curious, that one should not evaluate the behavior of other people and come to conclusions about whether or not it is a viable way to act.  How else could one come to decisions about how to conduct themselves?  The very same Ruth Benedict whose information I just cited, and who is so often referred to as one of the harbingers of so-called cultural relativism, that term so frequently associated with not saying anything negative about any culture, had this to say:

“From every part of the world and for every level of cultural complexity it is possible to illustrate the overweening and finally often the asocial elaboration of a social trait.”

If anything, it would seem from reading her book that she is emphasizing that different human cultures represent the vast diversity of possible ways in which humans can behave in ways that are clearly maladapt.  Not that we simply can not judge another culture as possessing malign traits.  And who knows?  Maybe she’s entirely wrong.  But again, if there’s a flaw in all of her observations, neither Zerzan or Jensen are pointing it out.  More to the point, they’re not acknowledging that such information exists at all.  And Ruth Benedict has the considerable distinction from the anarcho-primitivists of having actually lived for large durations among the cultures she writes about.

I also would not want to live among Native Americans of the eastern woodlands cultural area, such as the Iroquois, because I would not like to capture victims in warfare and publicly torture them to death.  I would not like to burn them one ember at a time, or break their fingers and then let children yank on them, or tear out their fingernails, or cut little pieces of their flesh off, or let them sleep and eat for a while so that I could resume torturing them at a later date and thus prolong the overall duration of their suffering.  I suppose I am just a judgemental bastard.

The Iroquois: beating the US government to the punch on the torture question by hundreds of years

It is certainly beyond my the scope of my capability or ambition to document all of the insidious behavior of every different human society from every different era in this writing.  For in doing so, I’m afraid one would literally exhaust the entire history of our species.  I am simply making the point that even the most cursory and elementary survey of anthropological literature would seem to provide a wealth of information utterly contradicting the happy notions of the anarcho-primitivist writers about pre-technological living.  It is not like I am referring to only a very few extremely obscure sources.  I found that last little bit about torturing captives on Wikipedia, after all.  And whereas all the literature contradicting the claims of ubiquitous harmony among primitive peoples contains actual observations of real live people, the anarchist writings do not.  To establish that tribal societies were egalitarian, for instance, Jensen literally quotes an activist friend who says, “once, we were all equal”.

So, they might have been fucked up to each other, but did they live in harmony with nature?  This is a relevant question, one I suspect has great bearing on some of the distinct sickness that characterizes our own society.  For I think it is certainly safe to say that, harmony or no harmony, primitive societies know nature in ways modern people simply can not imagine, and that we are certainly the worse off for this ignorance.  While I can not bring myself to the wholesale and indiscriminate idealization of the primitive way, a desire for this knowledge has characterized much of my life at least since I was 16 years old.

It was at this age that, visiting my grandfather in Vermont, I happened upon a group of juvenile ravens (fledged but not yet mated, and thus living in groups) traveling through the tops of the trees.  I began to venture each morning to witness their regular flight, which was probably from some roost nearby, climbing trees to get a better look at them.  Something happened, and intuitively, I began joining in their chorus of calls and flapping my arms like wings.  This process was immediate, undeniable, and automatic, like sexual desire.  It was then that I knew with a certainty that within the technological milieu of my own society, I had become unfamiliar with the basic workings of something fundamental.  Perhaps I will never completely find this thing I perceive as lost knowledge; after all, I am sitting here writing about it on a computer rather than somehow rediscovering it, and after this I am going to go to work.  But it’s certainly worth it to keep looking.

But while it may be eminently worthwhile to query primitive cultures for a better understanding of nature, Jensen claims outright that indigenous people never would use more of a given resource than nature replenishes.  (Incidentally, I’m using his term ‘indigenous people’ here without modification or clarification on my part, because I don’t know exactly what it means; I would think of it meaning native to a given place, and I’m not sure how one decides who is native to somewhere and who is not.  But I’m guessing it means people with spears cooking over fires, even if they just wandered over some windswept frozen steppe from somewhere else to get there, and excludes people living in cities and driving cars, even if those city dwellers happen to be in Africa, where humans are unequivocally native.)

It may be safe to say that once they had occupied a landscape for a while, some primitive cultures developed an economy that was in equilibrium with their environment, and hypothetically sustainable forever.  But once humanity left Africa, there is nowhere they went where they were not followed by massive extinctions of large mammals.  The very reason that Africa teems with enormous animals, so seemingly exotic from the perspective of the world’s other landmasses, is apparently that human hunting techniques developed there, giving African elephants and rhinocerii a chance to learn to avoid us.  American elephants, or European rhinocerii, were not so fortunate.

Hippopotamii: likely still around because they learned to avoid humans

There are still some people out there who claim that these extinctions were likely a result of climate change, but I must confess I regard this opinion as being of a truly paramount stupidity.  Innumerable ice ages had come and gone during these species’ existence, environmental variation to which they were adapted to survive.  Why the most recent ice age, which by sheer chance happens to coincide with humans’ arrival in these landscapes outside of Africa, should be the one to initiate massive waves of extinctions of all the largest animals that walk the land, is incomprehensible to me.  This is particularly true as human migration throughout the world does not correspond to the depth of the ice age, to a period of the most unfavorable weather, but to its very end.  And because these extinctions are worldwide, from Australia to Siberia, where utterly different climatological conditions prevail.  And they span a huge period of time, tens of thousands of years, always corresponding to the arrival of humans rather than to any particular phase of the weather.  And for a number of other reasons more or less too laborious to state for the sake of countering an argument as baseless as the climate change hypothesis.

This loss is difficult for me to contemplate.  In North America, we lost giant camels twelve feet in height, enormous armadillos, woolly mammoths, wolves twice the size of modern timber wolves, 450 pound beavers, and giant ground sloths that were larger than African bull elephants, weighed over five tons, and could pull foliage off of trees 17 feet high.

Giant ground sloth: driven extinct by primitives

This strikes me as one of the greatest catastrophes ever, and, much as I know they’re evil and all, nothing British Petroleum or Boise Cascade or any other such entity has ever done really stacks up in my opinion to what the noble savages who are our forebears – yours and mine- did.  (This applies even if you’re from Africa, as Africa also suffered much in the way of large mammal extinctions with improved human hunting technologies, it is just that African extinctions were more moderate than in other parts of the world).

It also seems relevant to say that, after the Pleistocene large animal mass extinctions, civilization itself was the next step on what should be seen as a long historical continuum of human devastation.  Utter savages, after all, created civilization in the first place.

My critique thus far focuses exclusively on anatomically modern humans, possessing all the basic traits like language and complex symbolic thought that we do.  It is thus fair to say that it more directly addresses Derrick Jensen’s naiveté than it does John Zerzan’s.  Jensen idealizes the present day savage, and those from relatively recent history, with worldwide utopia presumably in effect at the end of the Paleolithic, before agriculture or cities. In contrast, Zerzan seems to long for a state of affairs that ultimately precedes not so much civilization, but the development of our very biology.  If Dances with Wolves can be said to characterize Jensen’s ideology, the 1982 film Quest for Fire might be said to encompass Zerzan’s with some aptitude.

Quest for Fire: A moving testimony to the ideal state of human affairs?

The film involves a group of archaic humans who have to continually tend their fire, lacking the knowledge of how to kindle one.  They are attacked by a group of what I assume are even more primitive hominids who are somehow occupying the same landscape at the same time as them, and their fire is stolen.  As the title would indicate, they set off to find more.  Granted, the film does portray early hominid groups in violent conflict with one another over property, something Zerzan seems to assume was virtually impossible, so perhaps the film doesn’t totally encapsulate his paradigm.  But what they do have in common is they involve humans not using language in an extremely elusive landscape ostensibly based on some historical reality.

A presumably rare instance of early hominid on early hominid violence, as what looks much like a Cro-Magnon spears what might be a degenerate Neanderthal of some sort, or just a very sophisticated and psychotic monkey

The film tells us that it is 80,000 years ago, but seems to feature as its protagonists a group of people who look for all the world like Cro-Magnons, a group of humans that developed in Europe less than half that long ago.  They seem to traverse a landscape that alternates on different days between the African savannah where early human ancestors diverged from chimpanzees and a more temperate landscape, like the Europe of Cro-Magnon.  A baffling diversity of different hominid species occupy it, and encounter one another within it, each at apparently greatly different stages of evolution.  This has happened a number of times, at different places, throughout history.  But none of these groups is very easily recognizable.  The adversaries of the Cro-Magnon looking protagonists seem like they’re possibly vaguely modeled on Neanderthals, who occupied Europe with Homo sapiens, but one is troubled by their stature, far too small for Neanderthals, and by the fact that it seems the whole thing might be taking place in Africa.  I suppose they look a little like a hybrid of Neanderthal and some early species of the much smaller and more  primitive Australopithecus.

I suppose this is all well and good, as it is after all a movie, and probably the real consideration should be whether or not it is any good, not how plausible it is.  But Zerzan is not writing fiction, and thus plausibility is indeed an essential criterion for evaluation his work.  He likewise traverses an allegedly historical landscape, occupied by early humanity, that I find extremely difficult to locate in space and time.  Zerzan harkens us back to a time long ago, before there was property, war, or hierarchy.  This time is not exactly delineated, but it is certainly before civilization.  Moreover, it is before language.  He urges us to give up that uniquely human trait of symbolic thought altogether, arguing that it has removed us from the world terribly and, in our state of disembodied alienation, allowed us to do great violence to it and to our own distant bodies.  This seems to be the basic argument throughout.  Symbolism, language, complex thought, etc. are so engaging, becoming so all-encompassing, that we simply are not aware in a tangible sense of the actual, directly sensible reality of our lives.

This is really not an unreasonable argument, that symbolism is superseding reality in many people’s experience.  Truthfully, I would go a step further and say I believe that symbolism is becoming a whole world in and of itself.  To me, there are three fundamental events, all similar to one another in certain regards, particularly their deeply mysterious origins, that best characterize the history of Everything.  They are the coming into existence of the universe, the development of life, and the emergence of conscious thought and symbolic experience.  Each one is a totally novel phenomenon, introducing into existence a whole new order of reality with a previously unprecedented set of dynamics.  Each one contributes to a far great overall complexity than reality previously possessed.

To me, suggesting that we forego symbolic thought is, quite literally, like suggesting that we exterminate all life on earth to avoid the pain a small rodent will feel being tortured by a cat, or the cold a bird will have to suffer in a winter’s storm, as life mercilessly goes through its cycles.  Or like attempting to go back and stop the big bang to avoid all the violence and privation of matter being created and elements coming into existence only to cease existing forever a fraction of a second later as the universe expands and cools.  I would regard it is a sin against nature, in one of its most precious and majestic manifestations, to give up symbolism, because it causes painful realities.

Then there is the simple matter of precisely how it is we are supposed to give up language and symbolism, which are innate.  Zerzan contends that symbolism is an absolute distinction between us and other animals, but I’m skeptical of this distinction.

In his paper The Study of the Ethology of the Social Corvidae, Konrad Lorenz gives intriguing testimony on the songs of jackdaws.  There songs are mostly composed of calls imitating sounds in their environment, but do contain a large number of their own vocalizations, vocalizations intended to warn of predators or frighten away another member of their own species or induce other birds to follow into flight.  Although he could discern no difference between these and the actual calls, the birds apparently could, never responding to a call warning of a predator with any apparent alarm when it was in the context of a song.  This was the case even when the song began with an alarm call.  Something was different; there was some signifier discernible to the birds that the call was symbolic.  They could tell the call was a song, not a literal warning.  Characteristic postures accompany these calls, and the singing jackdaws would adopt them as they sang.  Lorenz said: “Like an orator, it accompanies its utterances with the appropriate gestures.”

Jackdaws: harbingers of disconnection from direct experience and ruthless oppression of nature?

Lorenz lost all but one of his birds while he was in a hospital in the winter of 1929-1930.  He writes movingly of the behavior of the final one, her songs seeming to be a sort of narrative representation of her desire for her flock, composed of calls jackdaws use to call their kind to them:

“Like all isolated birds, Red-Yellow sang almost continuously after she overcame her initial despair.  But it was completely new for me that the jackdaw’s ‘mood’ can be expressed in the song.  The song of Red-Yellow was almost completely composed of ‘kioo’-calls.  She would repeatedly interrupt her song and fly off searching the countryside whilst uttering genuine ‘kioo’-calls which were no longer components of a song.”

I can think of no compelling reason whatsoever not to call this one example of many found among other animals of symbolic representation of reality.  I suspect that, while our minds certainly may be more complex than those of our animal brothers and sisters, the fundamental essence of symbolic experience is contained at least within all the vertebrates.  After all, any kind of subjective experience at all is ultimately a symbol, a reformulation, a self-contained representation of reality within the mind of a given individual.  Unless one is to deny any subjective experience to all animals other than humans, one must say they are symbolic.

Giving up language seems equally problematic, and if we somehow repressed this instinctive behavior it would seem to me like any other terrible crime against a beautiful aspect of nature, just as much killing off every last whale or filling in every last wetland.  Zerzan writes as if language is not simply within our biology, but some cultural paradigm imposed upon us, something we are indoctrinated into.  This is not the case.  There are many variable aspects of culture, some of which many people without adequate perspective into other cultures will mistakenly assume are universal, and thus intrinsic human attributes.  But language is not one of them.  There is no human group on the planet that does not use it.

There is a book called Human Universals by one Donald E. Brown that tries to characterize in pretty rich detail the fundamental human attributes on which all individual cultures are variations.  His list of universal human attributes is long, ranging from crying to fear of snakes to Oedipal feelings to dancing to shelter (and, giving the sense that Jensen also never read it, the list of universals also includes: property, inheritance, conflict, rape, some degree of economic inequality, division of labor by sex and age, more child care by women and more aggression and violence by men, and domination by men in the public political sphere).  More pertinent to the topic immediately at hand, it also includes language. And not just language in general but very specific uses of language, such as metaphor, poetry with repetition of linguistic elements and three-second lines separated by pauses, humorous insults, and narrative and storytelling.

Even if it were desirable, we can not stop speaking.  Indeed, human infants begin babbling at a very early age specifically to develop the muscular strength and coordination to articulate all the different sounds of speech.  Language is associated with specific neuroanatomical adaptations we possess, in specific regions of the brain such as the Broca’s area.  In other words, we do not really learn language, as some abstract construction simply comprehended by our general intelligence.  We simply acquire the specific features of the language spoken by the culture we are born into, with anatomy and brain architecture that is designed specifically for this acquisition.

In fact, if learning language were something that had to be done by general intelligence, rather than by a language-specific module within the brain, relatively few people would speak.  And those who did would have learned much later in life, as a result of a conscious effort, rather than instinctively beginning to do so in their first years of life.  Before Noam Chomsky was best known for criticizing United States foreign policy, he wrote a book called Syntactic Structures that defined modern linguistics.  In it, he showed the remarkable similarities of all grammars of all known languages, which he termed the Universal Grammar, and demonstrated that the Universal Grammar was a module hardwired into our brains upon which all languages are ultimately subtle variations.  This point can best be demonstrated by the fact that the rules of our own English grammar are extraordinarily complex, and linguists spend much effort consciously analyzing them.  However, we all use them unconsciously.  We innately know how to, for instance, modify words to become plurals, and change the phrasing of sentences to reflect a plural subject, whether we ever stop in our entire lives to consciously think about how we do it.  If we did not have this innate capacity, no doubt some people could learn language through a laborious process of conscious effort, but I think it would be roughly analogous to learning fairly advanced math.

Deciding not to speak would be like the salmon deciding not to return from the ocean to within a few feet of where it hatched to spawn and die.  It is what we were born to do.  Seals evolved from bears. Suggesting we not speak, because things would be better if we stopped, would be like if we someday pollute the ocean so greatly that seals cannot subsist within it, suggesting that they return to the ways of their ursine forebears and hunt on land.

If you stop swimming, I'll stop speaking

The ideological motivation for this willful oblivion to the fundamental biological distinctions between us and our forebears, which creates the belief we could return to essentially being an earlier species, is the belief that less mentally sophisticated organisms are free of the characteristic conflicts, social inequality, and violence of our species.  I find this claim highly dubious, and it seems out of touch with a basic understanding of sociobiology.  I would say that mental sophistications have allowed us to elaborate upon violence, conflict, and inequality present in much of the animal kingdom in unprecedented ways, but we sure didn’t invent these things.

One does not have to look to the genus Homo, or even to apes, to see it.  After all, some animals simply kill and eat other, smaller, weaker animals.  I know that it is the cycle of life, a great and endlessly turning wheel on which all things are birthed and feed and die and return their bodies to the wheel that it may continue turning, a thing upon which every living thing is connected to every other with blood.  It is beautiful.  But predators do not kill other animals in order to perpetuate such an abstract concept.  They kill because they are innately driven to do so, and because they are hungry.  And the animals that fall prey to them do not like it; they do not die and squeal in agony as they are tortured to death in order to perpetuate such an abstract concept, either.  We might simply see it as nature whereas they might perceive it as an injustice, an experiential corollary to our sense of some wrong being done by one party to ourselves or to another.  They may think of it in somewhat less complex terms than we can, but I think animals perceive it as wrong when they are preyed upon just as much as we see it as wrong when some harm is done to us for the gain of some other.  This can be witnessed in the remarkable and often hilarious ways in which many species of birds, often as a concerted effort organized with many of their kind, will go out of their way to mock and harass their predators.

The cougar/deer relationship: possibly even more violent and oppressive than your employer's relationship with you

Likewise, animals engage in violence with conspecifics for status, sexual rights, and territory.  The reason that human hierarchies are described with the somewhat unlikely term ‘pecking order’ is precisely because hierarchy is so clearly delineated in birds, with birds above others in rank entitled to peck those birds.  And I know of no animal for whom sex is not just an anatomical identity, but also a behavioral one.  I’m afraid it won’t be enough to follow Zerzan’s plan and regress back to an earlier form of humanity.  We’ll probably have to regress back to some one-celled organism or something, and even then we would probably compete, so if we’re going to take him at face value we should probably just scrap the whole project of life altogether and call it a day. 

If we look to other primates, we find particularly clear analogues in their behavior of some behavior in our own species. For instance, chimpanzees, usually males, will make deliberate ventures into the territory of neighboring groups in order to find a member of the neighbor group and beat it to death.  They adopt a characteristic single-file line formation and move silently along their borders (the behavior is thus termed ‘border patrols’), during which they eat or socialize very little.  If they are successful in enough repeated instances of organized violence against their neighbors, they can then move into their territory.

A chimpanzee on border patrol beating another chimpanzee to death

It’s an essential feature of human identity, this sense of allegiance to a group and reduced allegiance to, or enmity for, people perceived as being outside of the group.  It is the nature of social animals to recognize such distinctions. For most of our history, the group we would have felt solidarity for would have been not too dissimilar from a chimpanzee troop, a band of less than a hundred, probably less than fifty, individuals.  Society has become adequately big and complex that the groups people feel part of, to the exclusion of everyone else, can be quite large and quite arbitrary, and may involve mostly people they do not know.  It could be, for instance, white people.  Or people who aren’t gay.  Or people who are rich or people who aren’t.  Or people from Serbia.  Or people not just from Serbia but all non-muslims  from anywhere in the Balkans.  Recent history has given us numerous examples of people identifying with a group characterized by ancestry from a place, such as a whole continent, that would have historically been considered a number of entirely disparate regions occupied by different peoples.  There are people, for instance, who identify with anyone from Africa.  This would no doubt be a novel conception to a Khoisan hunter gatherer who was overpowered displaced from their homeland by a Bantu speaking herdsman.  Such a person would probably think of their small band, or at least of all their fellow Khoisan, as their group, and Bantu speakers as the Other.  The definition of the Other turns out to be extremely malleable, but what seems rigid in human behavior is that there be one.

Is what I am trying to say that all the terrible killing, all the wars and the programs of extermination by one group of some other group, all the brutality of humans to other humans, the prisons and the bombings of cities and the death camps and the torture, all just part of nature?  Of course I am. Every damn thing is a part of nature.  We are not separate from it, and we never can be.  Life is beautiful, but it is also exceptionally cruel.  Anyone who does not want to acknowledge this can not, ultimately, love nature.  For they wish to insist that it is something that it is not, or at the very least, claim that it only consists of those parts that they find desirable.

I find a deep humility about, and desire to understand and respect, one’s place within the Totality of existence to be the most admirable of human traits.  But I am not the kind of fool who thinks that this is all there is to humanity.  Or even that everyone possesses such a quality at all.  Or that such an attribute represents humanity’s “true” or undiminished state, before it was corrupted by pop culture, or the state, or technological conveniences, or any other thing that apparently fell out of the sky onto the nurturing soil of our benevolent, primordial paradise.  I understand perfectly well that Nazi death camps, the aesthetics of the neon sign for the hot dog hut in the indoor shopping mall a few miles from my house, the killing of the last American camel by some noble savage 10-12,000 years ago, the CIA’s overt assassination of President Kennedy, the beating of children by their parents, daytime television talk shows where people confront lovers who have been cheating on them, and everything else I find objectionable, are all a part of nature.  Otherwise they wouldn’t exist.  They are just as much a “true” aspect of human character as everything I like; as the soul wrenching, tragic character of some Croatian polyphonic singing, as the great bravery with which some people confront oppression, as sexy women.

Is what I am saying that, since everything is nature, we should simply disregard any sense we may have that some of what humanity is doing is terrible, and that we desire that it not be so?  Not exactly; but what I will confess is that I really don’t know what to do about it.  I find every revolutionary conception of a radical restructuring of human existence to ultimately be sort of ridiculous, for they all seem to fail to take into account that things are the way they are because that’s how people really are.

In my last blog post and printed zine, I argued for destroying all the forces that are undertaking systematic violence against nature by the sheer power of thought and willpower alone.  This may sound completely absurd, and I have no doubt that many people engaged in more tangible action may find it to be counterproductive, an idle fantasy, an indulgence that will get nothing done.  But you know what?  I think my idea is a lot, and I mean a lot, less ridiculous than the idea that they will ever change people’s behavior (for ultimately that is what the behavior of every corporation or government or whatever is, human behavior) by engaging in fucking dialogue with them. This may be a perfectly legitimate way to restructure society somewhat in a favorable direction, but the idea that the existence of the fundamental evils of the world will be done away with by exposing them for how bad they are or some such thing is a wholesale absurdity.

For there is ultimately nothing you can do that will ever remedy the fact that at the end of the day there are still all the people in the world who have it in their nature to do terrible evil.  Or at least, there is nothing you can do short of a whole, whole lot of killing, or at least forced sterilization.  That’s the problem with the idea of revolutionary violence.  You can kill everyone in power, sure, but they’re just a small subset of the people who would put themselves in similar positions if they were able to, who have it in their hearts to be on the committing end of atrocities.  For that matter, few of the unfavorable characteristics we see in the powerful are exactly totally absent even from our own social circles.

This realization, that one does not really know how the wrongs of the world could conceivably ever be remedied, is raw. It is not easy to deal with.  But it does have the favorable characteristics of not being an absurdly simplistic way to explain away all the pain in the world, or of being an ideology that conceives of a possible remedy by insisting the world is a way it clearly is not.  It requires us to look to the frontiers of experience; for ultimately, nature is the great innovator.  If what we are doing is not a plausible form of existence, I believe we will have to probably literally evolve away from it, and I mean evolve in a biological sense.  To do that, we would have to survive long enough.

So far as I can tell, Jensen and Zerzan want nature to be other than it is. Jensen says repeatedly in the pages of Endgame that “nature is based on cooperation, not competition”.  I have no idea what this really means, exactly.  I can’t imagine nature is based on any one abstract conceptual principle or another, cooperation or competition or any such thing, because they are just that; simple conceptions.

But whereas Jensen seems to be motivated by a pretty genuine sympathy for the plight of the world, Zerzan’s motivations seem largely abstract.  It seems that his primary intention is anarchy as a more or less theoretical construct: he wants to find a way to envision a society without centralized government, and he can think of no other way than to revive the time before government existed.  This is deeply ironic as he rails on and on in page after page about the symbolically mediated, indirect world we all live in modern times.  For it seems his arguments are born largely out of dedication to a more or less purely conceptual reality – anarchism – rather than a direct response to experience within the world.  One does not get the sense at all that his mind is burdened with thoughts of the suffering caused by real wars or of actual  forests falling to the axe.  One does not get the sense that much of his alleged desire to return to direct communion with nature is born out of any real passionate experience with nature he himself has.

This, beyond any logical fallacies one may point out, is the most fundamental of flaws one can observe in anyone’s arguments about anything.  If there is not a vivid experience that informs it, that erupts out of the structure of the text, uncontainable, then it is probably not worth listening to.  If one can not sense great pain, or desire, in a writing, if one can not hear stones or rivers or mountains in the voice they imagine the words would be spoken in, it is probably nonsense.

FURTHER READING

Here are some books and papers that address some of the topics discussed in this writing in much greater detail.  Some of them I have based my writing on, and some are simply of interest for a thoroughgoing study of the material involved.

Benedict, R.  Patterns of Culture. Routeledge & Kegan Paul.  Tenth impression edition 1968.

Bryant, P. J.  Evolution of Humans and the Pleistocene Extinctions.  Chapter 4 in: Biodiversity and Conservation: A Hypertext Book.  http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/bio65/lec04/b65lec04.htm

Diamond, J.  Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. W. W. Norton & Company.  Later printing edition 1999.

Lorenz, K.  Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour. Harvard University Press.  First edition 1974.

Mitani, J. C. Watts, D. P. Amsler, S. J.  2010.  Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees.  Current Biology 20(12) June 2010.  http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(10)00459-8

Pinker, S.  The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Perennial (HarperCollins).  First edition 1995.

Dreams as weapons: A call for non-corporeal revolutionary war

I. COSMOLOGY

Curled up in the back of my coworker’s SUV as we travel up Highway 101 between job sites, going to the boat launch that will take us on the Puget Sound, filthy and aching and exhausted and covered in the sea, I read about string theory. Apparently, there are not just the three spatial dimensions so familiar from experience, but ten. From where you are sitting right now, there is not just up and down, left and right, forward and backward, and combinations thereof.

Forces like electromagnetism, responsible for the light you see and the sound you hear, and the weak and strong nuclear forces, responsible for the cohesion of the atoms and molecules of your body, are in fact confined to three dimensions. For at the root of these three forces, there are fundamental particles, open strings whose ends are bound to an entity than only extends in three directions. But this object to which they are bound, that we think of as space, is just something in space. We only experience three dimensions because we’re bound up on that thing, much as we’d only experience two if we were somehow confined to a piece of paper. Gravity, the fourth fundamental force, is the work of tiny closed strings called gravitrons, free to move through all of space. The reason gravity appears as a relatively weak force is because the gravitron particles and object emits may by and large end up freely traveling through the other dimensions, and thus only perhaps 30% of them ever influence things bound to three.

Calabi-Yau shape, an extremely vague approximation of the form of hidden spatial dimensions

Reading things like this, I find modern physics’ conceptions of the universe, born out of meticulous calculations of carefully observed data, abounds in wild notions that utterly contrast with how the world appears to be. Subatomic particles, shot through a device that diverts them to one of two detectors, will show up on the other end as having traveled to both, as if the particle is a probability wave, 50% present where it has a 50% chance of showing up, 50% present somewhere else it also has a 50% chance of being. Unless you add a set of detectors at the point of diversion, to record which path it takes. Then it will take just one, and show up in just one place at the detector further down. Apparently, in response to being observed, particles change their behavior.

Also, the universe is infinite but somehow also expanding. And, it is somehow completely flat. And it might exist inside a black hole out of which we can never see, the point of infinite heat and density that started the big bang might be a dead start collapsed in on itself from its own gravity. Or our universe might begin and end every time it collides with a universe adjacent to ours. Seriously.

Utterly inscrutable?

Maybe it is the long hours, the constant lack of sleep, the hot sun, the endless waking early and bicycling to town and exerting myself throughout the days. Maybe it is my friends’ weed smoke drifting from the front of the vehicle to where I’m sitting. But suddenly, nothing seems certain; hurtling in this vehicle over which I have no control through seven dimensions I can’t see, it seems at any moment we could careen off our trajectory into some unknown facet of the universe. The particles of my body could flee in any given direction at random in accord with the quantum uncertainty principle. Some new matter and energy, some new universe, could simply explode out of nothing for no particular reason as it apparently did during the big bang, destroying everything we’ve ever known. The feeble appearance of stability would be lost to the chaos that rages underneath.

Maybe it’s exhaustion or weed smoke or whatever, or maybe it is some deeper neurosis. Maybe I’m alienated from the world in some fundamental way, disconnected, and its workings seem frightening and exotic and threateningly senseless as a result. Is this alienation, the feeling that the universe operates on an elaborate and prolonged series of inscrutable mechanisms, a symptom of modernity? Is the terrifying and incomprehensible way in which technology operates all around me simply bleeding over into my view of the basic structure of the world itself?

Madness. Note that posture resembles one of opening the sky to reveal its secret inner workings, or looking upon the face of a benevolent god.

Maybe. But on this point, it would perhaps be worthwhile to consult some ancient cultures on the manner in which they perceived the universe operating. In the Vedas, we are given the intriguing but somewhat opaque datum that before the world began, darkness was concealed by darkness. In some Australian mythology, the world begins with a sleeping giant from whose head an enormous tree sprouts. Actually, as if it to lend veracity to this scenario, a number of world mythologies feature in some fashion or another primordial sleeping beings, and the beautiful conception of the world as a tree, not infrequently with a head at its roots.

The Olmec Tree of Life, another possible schema for the hidden shape of the universe.

Norse mythology is an excellent example. In Norse mythology, there is a well, within which there is a severed head. And from the well grows the world tree, Yggsdrasil.  However, it should also be understood that this tree is not one world but nine, the one we occupy and others, some occupied by deities or giants, some composed of fire and ice. At the same time, though, the universe was made by Odin and his brothers Ve and Vili from the body of Ymir, the primordial first being that they killed and dismembered for the purpose of creation. His blood drained from his body to become the seas, they ground his flesh to dirt, his skull they fashioned into heaven.

The murder of the primordial being Ymir in Norse myth.

Nine world is no more comprehensible to me than ten dimensions. And a universe that is a tree but also the dead body of a giant may as well be a universe that is infinite but also flat but also expanding but also inside a black hole. It would seem that both archaic mythologies and the rigorous methodologies of science converge on a single point of paramount significance. That in its essence, in its most fundamental forms, the world is teeming with hidden structures. The world is lavishly endowed with innumerable, complex features beyond our reckoning, beyond the capacity of our senses. The seemingly irrational, the unknowable, always seems to rear up to take its place as the ultimate foundation of any paradigm, whatever the methods used to formulate said paradigm. In the end, science and myth differ perhaps more in their methods than in their conclusions.

II. MADNESS

There is no escaping the irrepressible and all-pervasive tide of madness. Whatever ideology a society adopts, however fastidiously it may formulate its principles on coherent foundations, human behavior is always a lurid deluge of irrationality. Note that medieval European Christendom was, entirely at odds with its overriding theme of repressing the urges of the body and its connection to nature, subject to widespread dancing hysterias that would spread over large geographic areas and consume tens of thousands of people. These were spontaneous Dionysic frenzies of feverish and prolonged dancing, hysterical laughter, animal noises, and sex that would erupt out of the day-to-day atmosphere of reviling the earth and feeling guilt for being born. People foamed at the mouth and danced until they collapsed, or died. Note that in modern society, the well fed and highly educated peoples of the most privileged societies in the world revert to the apparent primitivism of gathering en masse to dance maniacally to cacophonous music, to take drugs, to abandon their senses. Note that traditional societies the world over engage in similar rites, putting on terrifying masks, banging on clamorous drums, impersonating spirits. All is madness.

Dancing mania consumes Europe

The emergence of humanity, in an evolutionary sense, seems itself to be largely a venture into behavior with no direct consequence or intention in the corporeal world. For synonymous with humanity is symbolic culture. To perceive the world and reformulate this perception as a symbol is to take action in a domain of reality that has no direct capacity to feed you, provide you with shelter, find you a mate.

It would seem that early humanity could have been reasonably defined as a species gone utterly mad. A species that, in a systematic attempt to procure food, would paint an imaginary animal on the wall of a cave being pierced by the picture of an arrow. An absurd species, doomed imminently to extinction.

Action on the symbolic plane, in this case a horse pierced by weapons on a cave wall in southwestern France. A poor choice of survival strategies?

But of course, in contravention to this seemingly obvious conclusion is the fact that most if not all of the animals humans painted on cave walls no longer exist. These seemingly ridiculous picture weapons turned out to be far more insidiously potent than would be indicated by any immediate property they possessed. The European rhinocerii and mammoths and bison are gone, slain by symbols that became corporeal, weapons that existed first in dreams or rituals or stories told around fires. Weapons that were first symbols.

The woolly mammoth: something killed by picture weapons

In the place of these great beasts, humanity has risen to exercise ubiquitous dominion over nature with absolute and systematic brutality. Everything once teeming is being crushed, all of the dynamic communication between all natural phenomena, storms and rivers and mountains and fish, is being controlled. All of the endless incomprehensible diversity is being either wiped out or manipulated to conform to a single schematic of the world that is coming straight out of the minds of humans to serve our ends. The world is taking on the shape of a symbol for the world, a collective symbol living in many minds. This is a symbol I would like to smash.

A fairly typical scene of what we've traded saber-toothed tigers and giant ground sloths for from Stockton, California

Certainly, this is not to say that symbolic action exists exclusively within Homo sapiens. Before us, there were many predecessors. There is a great deal of  uncertainty about the cognitive lives of early hominids, when language emerged, etc. But symbolic life certainly shows up other places. Neanderthals, who share with us a common ancestor from before humanity existed, buried their dead.

Going back millions of years all the way to the time of Australopithecus, a very early hominid from which we are descended, there are quite possibly ritual devices. There are stone axes of a size that appear to great to have served any direct utility in hunting or in processing meat or any other such activity. They seem to be associated with the methodical removal of the heads and tails of hunted animals.

Australopithecus: early ritualists

For that matter, hippopotami seem to engage in a sort of funerary rite when one of theirs dies, moving the carcass onto land and standing around it in a circle licking and nuzzling it. They will even fight off scavengers until they are done paying their respects. And elephants, too, maintain their graveyards, deposits of the bones of their relations, which they visit repeatedly.

But of course, in humans this venture into action on a non-corporeal level has taken on vast new dimensions. But could it not be said that rather than possessed by a pointless madness, early humans were subject to that unique insanity of beginning to be able to touch and perceive some hitherto unknown echelons of reality? And, subject to the same impulses of madness even still, compelled by seemingly senseless behavior, confronted with both a science and a religion that are more or less incomprehensible to our immediate senses, might we not venture the hypothesis that there is vastly more to this world than we are presently able to perceive? Not just more than we know, but more than our present perception even allows to be known? Might we not suggest that some other tremendous, qualitative change in our experience is waiting for us, waiting to open our eyes to profound new vistas of reality as inconceivable to us presently as the world tree or particle physics may have been at the beginning of hominid evolution?

III. WAR

For in the end, the unique capacities of Homo sapiens seem largely to have been born of crisis. We exhibit far less genetic diversity worldwide than do many species with far fewer numbers and far smaller ranges. Why? Because every single one of us is descended from a very small group of people who lived in Africa together not that long ago, survivors of a population crash that was nearly the extinction of our species.

Anatomically modern humans emerged around 195,000 years ago, and almost immediately thereafter, in geological terms, the earth entered a glacial stage known as Marine Isotope Stage 6. The landscape of Africa changed greatly, becoming cold and arid. Deserts grew, plants and animals migrated. Food was scarce. At some point during this crisis, our population plummeted from more than 10,000 breeding individuals to a matter of just hundreds.

Everyone, distributed all over the globe, is descended from people who left Africa no more than 50,000 years ago. And those people who left Africa were all descended from a very small group of people who managed to survive through the glacial stage living in one region together. For this reason, there is far more genetic variation within the continent of Africa itself than humanity exhibits throughout the rest of the planet.

All people outside Africa have common ancestry at least as recently as 50,000 years ago

Reasonable questions would be who this group of people who survived the population crash were, and where they lived. The most plausible candidate for location seems to be on the coast of South Africa. Here, the ocean would have provided a nutrient rich diet not available throughout most of the landmass. And indeed, there are caves on South Africa’s coast with evidence of human occupation through the glacial stage and well after. The occupation is intermittent because sea levels would have risen and fallen during this period, so it would not always have been adequately near the sea, but occupation continues intermittently through the era of inhospitable climate.

Blombos cave in South Africa, site of what is argued to be the first example of art ever

Because we can not really directly access the mental life of our ancient human forebears, determining what sort of creative capacity and symbolic world they may have had is done largely by examining proxies, such as art they may have been left behind. Using such methods has sometimes resulted in what I consider to be jaw droppingly late estimates of the beginning of the rich symbolic world we presently know. There are suggestions for as late as 40,000 years ago, with the breathtaking artifacts of upper Paleolithic Europe; majestic cave paintings of great beasts, bizarre but uncannily familiar rituals.

Even if we were never to find evidence in the form of artifacts for an earlier date, I think such a late timeline is untenable. The most simple and fundamental reason is that the population that left these artifacts, Cro-Magnon man, is a distinct population that emerged after our ancestors left Africa. At the time Cro-Magnon finds Europe, from a population that migrated out of Africa first into Asia, and becomes properly Cro-Magnon, there are already people living all over the globe.

But of course, one can find no human population anywhere that does not share the same features of complex symbolic experience, that does not have rituals or beautiful art or language. All of these things require hardwired and very specific features of neural anatomy. It is extremely difficult to imagine that these universally human properties, these very complex and novel innovations of nature, emerged separately and independently in numerous scattered populations. In short, if a human group living today was descended from a people who left Africa before language or art came into existence, we should probably expect them to look like us, and to possess a far greater quotient of intelligence than any other animal, but lack a fair amount of the distinct sophistications of mental ability we possess.

Rather, for the innovation of these human traits, we should look to Africa, to a time of common ancestry for the whole contemporary population. And this small population that persisted through the glacial stage seems the ideal candidate. Indeed, the archaeological sites from coastal South Africa yield shells of deep sea animals that were systematically collected but could not have been used for food, simply being collected to adorn the cave. Also there are caches of red ochre, preferentially selected among various other hues naturally occurring in the area, bearing deliberate marks that may well be the oldest example of ornament we possess.

Perhaps decorations, perhaps ritual objects. Significantly, red ochre is commonly featured in ancient religious contexts from many places the world over, perhaps in association with menstruation and fertility. The people of these caves also seem to have practiced cannibalism. At a point of symbolism and ritual this developed, many suggest we should also be thinking of them as possessing the same type of complex language we do.

Engraved ochre from the Blombos Cave, from approximately 75,000 years ago

As we stated previously, there is certainly some symbolic, artistic, ritual action in other, earlier hominids and other animals altogether. But as far as humans’ unique and prodigious capacity in this regard is concerned, this small ancestral population is a very likely candidate for its origin.

Let us reformulate, only slightly, what has just been said. Shortly after the advent of humanity, it faced a potential extinction crisis. And a small group persisted while others perished. And this group is uniquely characterized not by a new physical adaptation, not by any real tangible action it took in the corporeal world. But rather, by … decoration. By ritual and symbol. By engaging in a hidden world, a world in which there was no food or clothing or shelter per se, but which had nonetheless the potential to influence the world where these things existed on profound scales.

We, too, face a crisis. Life itself is being destroyed. Everything the world is made of, the teeming abundance of organisms and the multifarious processes that support them, the web of life that gives rise to our symbols, is vanishing. We are losing our grip. We live in a mythical age, and age of epochal cataclysm. We are not living, obviously, in a myth of creation such as those discussed above, but rather, this is the myth that comes at the end. This is the heroic age par excellence, for in this age we find our resources arrayed against those of forces that literally seek to destroy the world.

Apocalypse

Confronted with this situation, we could do a number of things. We could take tangible action. We could, for instance, take up arms, and start killing people. Perhaps key figures in large corporations, as well as anyone who tried to stop us, such as the cops. While this is indeed a much discussed scenario in certain circles, it seems to occur fairly rarely.

Another thing we could do would be to not kill people who run large corporations but simply destroy their property, attempting to immobilize their operations. This happens somewhat more frequently.

Another approach, one that occurs on a fairly large scale, would be to do things like lock ourselves to earth moving equipment and hold hunger strikes on the steps of legislative bodies and live high up in the canopies of trees slated to be cut down, so that if they die, we die with them. In contrast to the former two approaches, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in life, particularly in the late 90s and early 00s, taking all manner of these sorts of actions. Also in contrast to the former two scenarios, I can think offhand of numerous tangible victories these efforts have garnered. There are certainty real stands of trees that were not decimated due to the efforts of people who gave up weeks, months and years of their lives to occupy them. These efforts are very energy intensive and require large numbers of people concentrated in one place, which is unfortunate because it is not just a place here and a place there that is being raped, but whatever  their limitations, they do sometimes claim victories.

The fairly rare scenario of an automobile put to good use in the form of a logging road blockade

The fourth and final major category of action that is commonly acknowledged is to do things that are not illegal at all, but rather that are entirely sanctioned as participation in civic life. Things like writing to legislators, petitioning for species to be listed as endangered, filing lawsuits. From me, this type of action would receive a wide array of reactions depending on the party undertaking them. Much of the mainstream environmental movement is at best ineffective and at worst actively collaborating with and legitimizing the forces of industrial devastation. However, other entities have used these methods to protect millions of acres of land and water from certain harmful activities. A particularly successful approach of this variety is litigation under the federal Endangered Species Act, an approach most notably championed by the Center for Biological Diversity, who are hardcore motherfuckers in the extreme.

I must confess that I am something of an innately violent person, and also possessed of a substantial sense of adventure, and moreover simply prone to the extremes of a given scenario. These things, combined with the obvious aesthetic appeal of criminality, disincline me to say it, but ultimately strategic legal action has stopped industry from doing more of its dirty work in a day than civil disobedience or sabotage or anything else has in decades.

The aesthetically appealing option: Earth Liberation Front arson in Colorado

Because of its effectiveness, for awhile I engaged pretty extensively in this type of action, mostly writing administrative appeals of timber sales and authoring studies and that sort of thing. Simply and frankly, I feel ashamed for not being more involved in such struggles presently.

Concerted action of the types just discussed is of the utmost importance. I want to be careful to emphasize this here lest my argument be taken for another, one that looks unfavorably on corporeal action and suggests we should just hold hands and hope for a better tomorrow. But with all due respect to all the brave, creative, fiercely intelligent people who have been engaged in these struggles, one thing that all these very tangible approaches have in common is that they ultimately have failed to stop the fabric of life from unraveling. Indeed, the pace of deterioration continues to accelerate.

To be fair, one could perhaps argue that the first two, armed revolution and sabotage, simply have not been effective because they have not been carried out on any large scale. But then again, one could also argue that this in itself is a deep seated problem with these strategies, seeming to indicate that the people who are supposed to carry them out are not really disposed to do so. Perhaps they do not really want to make the sacrifices. Perhaps they hate industrial civilization but can not really see clearly enough outside of it, into alternative scenarios, to feel empowered to take up arms. I don’t know, but the problem is certainly not that there is nowhere to buy guns.

A fifth possible approach would be, as our forebears did in response to their terrible crisis, to do something utterly irrational. To go insane. To deviate from the existing conventions of what even constitutes effective action, to disregard current definitions of the underlying plane of reality it occurs on. Perhaps it is not by engaging industrial civilization on its painfully concrete, tedious terms that it will be stopped from all its killing. Perhaps it is by some act of willful and wanton beauty that has never before occurred, a flowering of prodigious capability in some new echelon of reality, a coming to know and truly grasp things we’ve only previously sensed. Perhaps we will defeat this monster in dreams.

We should think of the symbolic weapons painted on the cave walls of southwestern Europe and the torrent of very real and very lethal consequences they unleashed. Is it not permissible, then, to speculate about what sort of symbolic actions we might take and what effects might arise from them? To be clear, I am suggesting a large scale assault on the empire of which we are all subjects using symbolic weapons and succeeding by no presently apparent, known mechanism. Speech and hand gestures directed to the sky, bark from the stumps of old growth trees fashioned into symbols of redemption for all the blood that has been shed, spears fashioned from stone cast at icons of the killing machine. Anything that operates on the premise that it is at least possible we may be able to influence external events through our internal world, through the agency of nothing more than will and intention. If you would now chide me for being impractical, perhaps diverting energy from more important efforts, I would suggest that at the very least we have nothing to lose by trying. Living on a logging road, waiting day after day for the cops to come, does after all leave you with lots of time on your hands.

Masked dancing: another possible course of effective action?

I am suggesting a brutal assault on rationality, or more particularly, the limits of action determined by rational evaluation of the world. Not so much because rational thought is wrong as because it is incomplete. Because we are presently capable of experiencing only a limited segment of the total existing reality, and rational thought of course allows us only to consider and acknowledge this limited segment. But science and myth, take your pick in whatever doses you prefer, tells us there is much more to the world than we are truly aware of. There is much we only get very fleeting suggestions of, whose dynamics we do not know.

Now – that is, before everything dies – would be a good time to become able to perceive these dynamics of which we are presently unaware. It is fairly easy to argue that this could happen. For of course, there is no particular reason that any dimension of reality should forever lie beyond the bounds of a living creature’s perception and action. A creature being able to see and comprehend electrons or the structure of DNA was inconceivable before it became entirely possible. While there is a technological aid here, and some might well equivocate on this basis, in the end there is also a coming into existence of new mental dimensions corresponding to already existing dimensions of reality. A new place into which our senses became able to extend.

And of course, we all live with the reality that what we are hurtling down a course of irreparable destruction that can not sustain us for much longer at all, nor should be sustained even if it were possible. We are at a time of just the sort of crisis that would facilitate some great advance.

I think nature is such a wonderful thing. She has given us the means to access whole domains of reality nothing else living has gotten much of a chance to explore. Just as she opened up so very many new domains with the advent of life, and at some earlier time, with the advent of the universe. I am personally eager to continue the exploration everything coming before us has initiated. Far from experiencing the disenchantment with symbolism and complex thought felt by some people who share my antipathy towards mass society, I eagerly anticipate their new developments. I think it is high time we used these wonderful gifts nature has given us to bring our lives back into some sort of respectful accord with her, some solemn pact that gratefully and reverentially acknowledges the awesome whole of which we are a part.

Let us hope that our dreams of life abounding, of the unfettered expression of nature, prove stronger in the long term than the persistent nightmare of destruction by which we presently are plagued.

IV. DISEMBODIMENT

Sadly, at least as far as leaving off with the most dramatic and decisive statements possible is concerned, there are important qualifications. I used to fancy myself quite an adept issuer of manifestos. But now, as the years continue, I find myself overly concerned with nuance for the most effective possible delivery of a true rallying cry.

One thing that always strikes me is how modern society hosts such a huge array of people with ostensibly radically different ideologies who in the practice of their lives are really no different at all. For one may conceive of themself as a harbinger of a Nietzschean age of heroism and the ascension of will, in which all present social codes are sacrificed on the altar of the realization an individual’s nature. But in the physical reality of one’s life, one is simply some guy on the bus on his way home from work, covered in the smell of the deep fryer. Or one could be a heathen who endeavors to revive the sacred institutions of their ancestors, or an anarchist who does not believe in money, or a bleak futurist who wants to sacrifice everything to the accelerating motion of  machines, but in a physical sense just be someone waiting in line at the food stamp office.

Caveman or Viking? Ideology as a minimal corollary of physical reality

My purpose here is absolutely not to make fun of any particular group of people for failing to institute their values, for it would certainly apply to me, also. If archaeologists were to dig up my body and my artifacts in a thousand years, and analyze the material remnants of my lifestyle, I doubt there would be any real indication of my beliefs. Rather, there would simply see me as part of a society, an economy, a set of devices for securing sustenance, in which I ostensibly do not believe. I think they would say that relative to much of this society I was fairly poor, and that I appeared to suffer a lot of injuries in the course of my life. Perhaps if they were feeling really daring they could make some sociological inferences from these things, but I think it would really be asking some unwarranted generosity from them to classify me as somehow not part of the society into which I was born. For that matter, if I were a mummy rather than just bones, they could see the track marks all over my body. Then they’d know that at some point, beyond just relying on it for necessities, I certainly embraced with abandon some of the optional pleasures industrial civilization exclusively affords.

What, then, does it really even mean to believe in something? Of course, within the fairly narrow parameters allowed by our society, varying beliefs can have some consequences. One could, for instance, be a Republican instead of a Democrat. In this case, one’s beliefs can quite readily translate into the tangible consequence of electing one person over another, with some modest change in government policy presumably resulting. But if your beliefs are not, as is the case with Republicans and Democrats, about the particular course our society should take, but put you radically at odds with the society itself, what does that really mean?

For, much as I may be advocating a non-corporeal assault on the institutions that are enslaving the earth, I also see a very serious problem in the wanton abandonment of a physical dimension to one’s path in life rampant in present day counterculture. While the symbolic, or the next dimensions of reality that we could possibly access beyond the symbolic, are of profound importance in fighting empire, they can not occur without the physical. Those bold pioneers who ventured beyond all the horizons of previous experience, that small group from which we are all descended, after all did find physical sustenance by living in caves on the coast while their peers died inland. Without this, they are nothing more than bones, begetting only dust.

However much we scrutinize present day society, however successfully we expose its flaws through critical analysis, we are all deeply emotionally and psychologically disabled by it. It seems that by and large contemporary counterculture is filled with people who believe that a fundamental distance from, and critique of, the socioeconomic structure into which they were born is something that can be taken for granted about them, but who nonetheless find themselves submitting to precisely this structure.

After all, what other options are there? Our society is great in its geographic extent, and where it exists geographically, it exists with comprehensive force. It does not claim territory in some purely symbolic sense. All the land in its domain is owned by someone very real, and they will come and kick you out if you were to do something like just try to go live there on your own terms. Trying to establish some truly fundamental measure of autonomy seems a very difficult thing to even conceive.

Two bear costumes: note trend from fierceness to nonthreatening features, or cuteness, associated with animals in a biological stage of dependency

Physical limitations are not the only ones. Most projects to purchase land and garner some measure of self reliance are very modest efforts, perhaps growing some eggplant here, perhaps installing a solar panel there, but ultimately relying for sustenance on a dizzying and remote set of transactions that imply wholesale brutality and destruction around the world. This probably has a few causes. For one, civilization exists for a reason. Conveniences are nice.

For another, the social context is difficult. We are ultimately hardwired to be part of a cohesive group. To undertake an endeavor such as this is to isolate yourself somewhat from the way of life of everyone around you, or almost everyone. In some previous context, of course, weaving your baskets or planting your seeds would have integrated you with your peers, it would have been the activity of the total social group. Now it distances you. This is a more important point than most people give it credence for being. We may all have different jobs and landlords, or maybe we don’t even have jobs or landlords, but if we’re crashing on someone’s couch or working at a coffee shop we’re tied into the same basic economic and social fabric. People need that; trying to live a radically different life is a lonely proposition. Throughout our evolution, our shared economy is what has bound us to our group. If anything, these bonds have of course weakened greatly in modern life and its compartmentalization, but they weaken further still if you simply walk away from the socioeconomic setting you were born into.

Most modern subculture I have come into contact with is about creating symbols that express alternate paradigms to mass civilization while ultimately relying on it completely. While I think I’ve made it clear that I think symbols might be potent weapons against it, I do not think they can achieve the desired effect from within the terms of existence civilization itself presents. For, in accepting wholesale dependence on it, one accepts a debilitating quotient of emotional damage and moral subjugation. While it may not be entirely necessary to live without a modicum of interaction with the mass economy, I do not think we can be healthy without significant ventures into territory of self reliance.

We are born with an innate need to assert ourselves and demonstrate competence within the basic, physical circumstances that determine our survival and wellbeing. To find a means to provide for ourselves, to excel at the skills that become necessary to do so, to meet the demands of situations and dilemmas that may present themselves in the course of existence. Whenever a creature becomes domesticated, they lose some of this, essentially trading a measure of security for a measure of self reliance.

This may or may not happen voluntarily at first, but after many generations, it is inconceivable for a creature to live without being provided for by something beyond itself. No doubt, numerous animals are disinclined in the extreme to accept the yoke of domesticity, and can only be brought to bear by great violence against body and spirit. Others, like dogs, the very first domestic animal, tamed themselves voluntarily. They began to feed on scraps from human hunting. And then, they began to develop more characteristically juvenile, puppy like facial features throughout adulthood, inducing a biological urge in humans to care for the young and helpless looking things. This transition, or exchange, should in my opinion be regarded with great aversion, as a pathological process of the most dire order.

Wolves did this to themselves

Whether voluntary or forced, in the end every animal undergoes profound behavioral modifications as the result of domestication. Animals miss developmental cues, or these cues seem to misfire in various ways, bereft of their inborn place and function. In dogs, juvenile play behavior persists into adulthood, but more serious behaviors of territory defense or the establishment of social order are never undertaken. If territory defense is undertaken, it may be directed at ludicrous or utterly pointless targets. Sexual behavior may also find totally random, inappropriate outlets.

Hunting may not occur, even among domestic animals who have every opportunity. Or it may occur in incomplete fashion. Note cats who do not hunt, or catch prey but do not kill it, or kill it but do not eat it.

Among horses and cows, the ability of adults to defend themselves against wolf predation in the wild, which generally causes wolves to strongly prefer hunting very young or sick wild horses or bison, disappears. The animals become stupid and pathetic, simply freezing up in terror in the presence of such predators and allowing themselves to be decimated. In his novel The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy chillingly wrote of wolves seeming to savage domestic livestock with particular ferocity, as if in retribution for violating the ancient protocols of hunter and prey.

Pregnant cow, killed by wolf, who then ate only the embryo

Hunters who can’t hunt and prey that can’t defend itself, a failure to mate or form innate social relationships, and a perpetually childlike nature. Everywhere domestication occurs, one gets the sense that the intrinsic ability of an organism to manage itself, to encounter the demands and variables of the environment and meet them as necessary, is lost in exchange for a little material security.

The situation seems little different in humans. Certainly, one may observe modern civilization with the distinct and persistent sense that most of its members are failing to make a successful psychological transition to adulthood, to adopt an independence of psyche and accept the emotional responsibility of dealing with problems as they arise. I wish I could say this is somehow less true among the deviants within civilization, for instance within the artistic and spiritual underground in which I spend most of my time. But it absolutely is not.

Honestly, beautiful as much of what these people are making is, the lives it is all born out of seem frequently to be paragons of emotional distress and absurd levels of interpersonal dysfunction. And so very often, it seems that discontent members of subculture will continue to try to remedy their problems with symbols, by focusing on new works of art, or by looking for more gratification through greater socialization. When clearly addressing some baseline essentials of their existences would be the only meaningful route to happiness. When it is patently obvious that taking care of some responsibility they perceive themselves to be neglecting is what their wounded psyches need; to quit drinking all the time, or simply clean up their living spaces, or, much as I am somewhat loathe to say it, get some kind of job.

In this sense, the artistic underground could be seen as something of a more sophisticated variation on mainstream consumer society. Always seeking some new stimulation beyond the life one is living, while that life deteriorates utterly. The constant stream of symbolic experience that inundates the artist’s psyche, impoverished of the experiences of self assertion and reliance it so badly needs, not so unlike the constant stream of television or simple physical pleasures that the mainstream attempts to use as a substitute for real life.

Performance art: essentially just television for eccentrics?

At nearly 32 years of age, I am not completely certain I’ve successfully transitioned into adulthood myself, but I’ve certainly tried. At different points in my life, different things have given me the strong sense of self reliance and effectiveness necessary to be happy. Making money and providing for myself within the context of the dominant economy. Hopping trains and living off my wiles with nothing and no one, on the absolute underbelly of this economy. Learning to fix or make things. Learning primitive technologies. Creating safe and warm homes where I could give shelter to my loved ones who needed it. Seeing any responsibility through, undergoing any difficult trial and not giving up or completely losing my head over it.

I can prescribe no particular course of action for anyone else, only suggest that any symbolic mental world is bereft of value if it is not within a solid physical context. In the end, whatever the method of struggle, what our struggles seem to suffer from the most is that we ourselves are confined within the framework we seek to challenge. While we may be able to formulate perfectly adequate critiques of this framework, we do not really have the moral authority of very clear alternatives born out of our own experiences.

I want to use the symbol to smash this machine of death feeding on us and everything around us. But I don’t want to escape into the symbol. I would like to see it born from our bodies, healthy and beautiful and strong, and rise up a thing unstoppable.

Primitive impulse and mechanized slaughter: Rites of Spring

One of the things by which I find myself dismayed is the relative dearth of manifesto issuing on the part of artists of the current era. Particularly compared with the positive frenzy of ever changing, always fervent manifestos one may find from the earlier part of the 20th century. My goodness. Absolute statements proliferated at a brisk pace, declaring new approaches and then declaring those approaches to be dead. When a new artistic paradigm was proclaimed to the world, it was with a revolutionary fervor, a certainty that the world as it appeared was to be shattered. And when an artistic paradigm was derided, it was with fervor, as decadent, false, bourgeois and venal.

People said, in all sincerity, that ornament was dead. People heralded straight lines as the only spiritually viable response to the horrors of modernity. People like Isadora Duncan rejected ballet because it was contrary to nature, attempting to subsume all innate and intuitive expression into rigid, formalized movements. And then people like the Dadaists condemned the naked, ecstatic dancing of Isadora Duncan and her students as too personal, too much an art. Apparently, in the intervening 10 years or so between her rise to prominence and theirs, individual artistic experience and expression had become outdated. Personal affirmation, via a reconnection with nature through some inborn desire to dance or by any other means, had become irrelevant. All that remained were livid and senseless assaults on the very notion of rationality. They called upon the aimless of the world to unite.

Perhaps the Futurist movement exemplifies this tendency better than any other. Before a single canvas had borne a single drop of paint, before a single line of a play had been authored, before any tangible product that could be termed “Futurist art” existed, they announced to the world that they were ushering in a new epoch in the form of a manifesto. They wrote:

“At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is the very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.”

Below is an image of a painting by the Italian Futurist Carlo Carrà:

Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, Carlo Carrà, 1911.

I think I like this painting, but I really am not so certain that I would go so far as to characterize it as the first sunrise on earth. I just think it’s noteworthy that these folks felt the need to write such an earnest announcement of their forthcoming work, promising in all sincerity to “demolish museums and libraries” and “fight morality”. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that what I like about Futurism the very best is not any of its particular artistic output, but its manifestos.

Me, I can’t stop writing manifestos of precisely these types. I can’t stop attempting to construe the works of art of myself and my peers as a serious assault on the foundations of modern civilization. This being the case, it is curious that I have not approached any sort of earnest study of the early 20th century avant garde sooner. I finally remedied this by reading Modris Eksteins’ Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of  the Modern Age.

I think this book is fairly amazing. As the title indicates, it discusses the ballet piece the Rites of Spring, and the larger artistic avant garde it may be seen to represent, and the wholesale slaughter of World War One. The book approaches these two seemingly disparate things as aspects, in a sense, of a single impulse. This may be a contention that seems a bit difficult to swallow at first. Especially if you’re the kind of person who likes groundbreaking performance art rooted in primordial vitality and ceremony and thinks of industrial warfare as characteristically the sort of thing you do not like. I am one such person. Nonetheless, such an analytical approach immediately begins to shed light on certain relationships and to find a relevance in far flung corners of culture and history, to such an extent that it really can not be ignored.

Rites of Spring was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, an early 20th century ballet virtuoso of legendary charisma and talent. Nijinsky had been enjoying tremendous renown in Paris and throughout Europe dancing pieces choreographed by others, in the Ballets Russes. When it came to be that he was choreographing work of his own, it was decidedly more challenging of convention, and was met with wide disdain. The piece is ritualistic, an expression of reverence for life, fertility and sacrifice necessary for renewal to take place. Its aesthetics are overtly pagan. This all may very well have gone over fine with the Parisian balletgoers of 1913, but the music and choreography were also radical deviations from convention. The music had no particular melody and bar after bar had different time signatures. The dance featured heavy stomping and body postures of cocked heads and knees pointing in on themselves, in direct contravention of typical ballet poise.

Accounts of the premiere of Rites of Spring vary. In some cases, the negative audience response has been exaggerated into a virtual riot. But there can be no doubt that there was a ceaseless din of shouts and cries of disapproval for the entire duration of the performance. Audiences were shocked as a new sensibility that was emerging in the civilized world was being revealed to them. A sensibility that seemed, just as industrialization was transforming the world into a bright place with a certain future, to reject all of civilization’s sensible values for primitive impulse and ritual. For the sacrifice of a virgin to herald spring.

Here is a video of the Joffrey Ballet’s beautiful recreation of the Nijinsky piece:

The piece may undoubtedly be said to be a very early example of modern ritual performance, the phenomenon of artistic experimenters tapping archaic themes. This is a phenomenon in which I avidly participate.

Let us juxtapose two images. The first is of Dadaist Sophie Taeubert dancing at the opening of the Galerie Dada in a costume of striking contrasts. She wears a primitive looking mask painted with ox blood, but her arms are enclosed in stiff, awkward cardboard tubes terminating in metal pincers rather than fingers.

The second is of anonymous French soldiers in World War One, masked and encumbered with the awkward protrusions and burdens of a flamethrower:

No doubt, what is clear here is that both art and life are exhibiting an extension of the body into profoundly awkward, constricting, clumsy machines. The mechanization of life is occurring in these decades, and people are experiencing a drastic alienation from their own bodies and from the world around them. Their actions no longer take place, or have effect, on any sort of immediate and human scale. Rather they are amplified, conveyed, distorted by the machines upon which they increasingly rely. One may no longer trust one’s own senses and one’s own strength, for a person’s actions have become disembodied, taking place in the incomprehensible domain of advanced technology.

But one may ask why juxtapose these two particular images, for the image of the soldiers exhibits no particular archaisms. It is purely an example of alienating technology in uneasy conjunction with the body. But one could certainly answer that the very actions in which the soldiers, and the larger armies and nations, are engaged in is precisely the kind of hysterical, senseless frenzy of emotion and action for which Dada and other elements of the avant garde are known.

A fully mechanized Hugo Ball during a Dada performance in Switzerland

The point would be this. The artistic elements of society found themselves, at the advent of modernity, increasingly inclined towards two simultaneous and seemingly completely disparate impulses. One was a resurgence of archaic concerns, of bloody ritual, spirit possession, frenzied dancing. The other, though, was a sort of delirious abandonment to technological innovation, to newness, to ceaseless motion, to increasingly drastic expressions of the prominence of technology. And mass society found itself similarly occupied. These dual impulses certainly surfaced, with a fury, in World War One. By World War Two, with Fascism and Nazism, the fused impulses of the very archaic and the very modern would reach their paramount. When we find that people simultaneously reach, with a sort of senseless desperation, toward the distant past and the distant future, we must assume that the present is unbearable.

I can think of no particularly good reason for World War One. This may seem like an absurdly simple statement, lacking nuance. Certainly, if people in power had been possessed of any sort of principle of human decency, any measure of  integrity whatsoever, it could not have happened the way it did. But the datum that someone whose politics are radical, such as myself, may be less inclined to acknowledge is that there was a massive outpouring of support for the war throughout the combatant countries.

Indeed, the leaders of Germany were somewhat pressured into a costly and debilitating war by public opinion. When Serbia turned down Austria’s harsh ultimatum on July 25, 1914, the German public seemed to largely assume that they were going to war. Massive, spontaneous demonstrations took place in numerous parts of Berlin, and over the course of the next few days the emotion swelled to such a point that there were small scale riots. Russia, France and England experienced similar displays in the summer leading up to the war.

Well known photo of crowd in Munich cheering Germany's entry into World War One, detail shows young Hitler.

This is a curious situation, for certainly, it is not as if all of this sentiment is coming from deep seated feelings about the relations between Serbia and Austria, the ostensible source of the massive conflict that ensued. No doubt, much of the crowd of any nationality would not have been able to coherently characterize the nuances of this somewhat insignificant squabble. Nor does most of the rhetoric seem to have focused on it. The talk about the war is possessed of a psychotic sort of grandeur and monstrous sense of scale. People spoke of the clash of civilizations, the remaking of the world in a new image.

Eksteins quotes no less a poet than Rainer Maria Rilke, who at the beginning of the conflagration that would consume Europe, wrote of the “War God”:

“And we? We glow as one,

A new creature invigorated by death.”

The proliferation of sentiment toward conflict, and the resulting annihilation, may be seen as something that existed for no particular reason other than for its own existence. The politics seem incidental. The inexplicable desire for the washing of the world in blood, and its emergence renewed, seem the real motivation for the mass hysteria. The war seems something of a tantrum, a frantic and violent reaction to a modern condition that people could neither bear nor understand. A desperate need to change something, to do something, to achieve a radical transformation. It looks very much like how an individual who would be characterized as suffering from trauma might behave, but on a massive scale.

Let us now return to the Futurists. To understand much of modern history, such as Nazis and Fascists and their ilk, one must only read the Futurist Manifesto. This first point is particularly pertinent:

“Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!”

“We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.”

“We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

“Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”

And finally:

“We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.”

Dada was born in World War One, and so one could conceivably argue that, rather than being subject to a similar impulse as the mad world around it, Dada was simply responding to, reflecting, the mad world. Dadaists were, after all, horrified by the wholesale and purposeless slaughter consuming the continent. However, Martinetti wrote his manifesto in 1909. Futurism and its doctrine were born before World War One, before Fascism, before the tendencies so explicitly outlined in the manifesto were actually born out by numerous political movements throughout the world. It seems plausible that we could say that because they were artists, the Futurists were able to be honest about the impulses to which they were subject in a way that, say, Hitler could not be. They were able to say, simply and starkly, that they sought widespread and savage violence simply for the sake of testing the limits of experience, a life of ceaseless action and unleashed energy for its own sake. Futurists at some point started a political party in Italy, and that party was eventually subsumed within the Fascist party that took power in that country.

A new messiah heralds the birth of a new sun

If the first world war is inexplicable in simple political terms, the second is even more so, particularly in terms of German sentiment. In Nazism, we find a resurgence of archaic motifs, from Roman imperial aesthetics to an obsession with heathen Germanic mythology and ritual. This excellent British documentary covers the more primitive/traditional themes within Nazism:

But we also find, of course, a hyperfuturistic reality. A regime devoted to the perfection of technology, to technical precision, to the awe inspiring might of their roaring machines. When we see the crowds giving the seig heil and cheering at the Nuremburg rallies, when we watch their eyes roll back in dazed rapture, do we really think stopping the tide of Bolshevism is what’s on their minds? Or anything purely political at all? It is not about any particular events in the external world, because in the modern world people are frighteningly disconnected, rootless. Rather, the collective hysteria looks like a search for meaning, an assault on whatever robbed their lives of it, an attempt to make the world sacred again.

If one were to venture into the present, could one find these same juxtapositions of archaic and futuristic themes? Of course; one must look no further than the avant garde. One could perhaps look to neofolk music. This burgeoning genre utilizes acoustic instrumentation and archaic, usually European, spiritual themes, but almost invariably seems to also feature distorted electronics, synthesizers, sounds of post-industrial deterioration. And what of the archaic mask, the dancer, and the mechanical body? For a parallel, one could certainly look to Douglas Pearce, one of the founders of the neofolk genre, with his project Death In June:

A carnival mask and a military uniform coincide in Death In June

Those World War One soldiers who were clearing the trenches in the previous picture have finally found the archaic mask that is so suiting of their actions.

Neofolk is a particularly overt example of the impulses being discussed here, for it not only features themes of European heathenry and industrialism, but, in the case of many of the most prominent musical acts, makes incessant reference to Nazism and World War Two. But these dual impulses can also be seen in the broader experimental music/ritual performance underground in which I find myself immersed. One may attend performances where the most archaic of aesthetics combine with modern technological methods and soundtracks of distorted noise. I myself have smashed icons of suns with giant bones while collaborators played harsh electronics over PA systems.

Toward the very modern and the very ancient, wherever one desperately reaches, it is away, away from the unbearable moment. We are looking for a way out of the truly untenable reality of the present. Me, I’m typing away on my laptop and spending the rest of my time in the forest practicing my aim with stones, planning my escape.

Meghann Rose as captive spring and myself as the captor/liberator, MirrorMilk performance 2010

Photo above by Sarah Hoyt