"Grappling with a strange world"

Update (18 June): In this and the subsequent comment(s) I make statements that I cannot easily support with research or outside material. I welcome criticism, even strong critique, as long as it is done in a collegial manner. Most of this was written as a loose, intellectual synthesis of ideas I have been encountering of late. Especially claims concerning historically powerful entities--industrialists, corporate entities, political powerhouses--are made loosely; I can point out a few outstanding individuals, but do not have the academic background to make a thorough enumeration or accounting thereof. Again, any comments are greatly appreciated.

Reading through the wintertime musings of Miss Ellie Rogers, paging through the much delayed Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken, watching the film The New World, listening to Michio Kaku's book Physics of the Impossible, and reading BPRD comics (see image below, click for a larger image), I have come to wonder about "grappling." Grappling, not in the sense of wrestling, but in the way the character of Dr. Kate Corrigan uses it, and in a way Ellie and Hawken I think would agree. This is an odd motif I have found in a number of my current, shall we say, exploration: That we are in the process of handling--understanding, defining, articulating, interacting with, cohabitating with, etc.--this remarkably peculiar and conceptually complex object/idea/reality that is the world.



When confronted with some novel aspect of reality, I cannot help but appreciate the grand mystery that has been suddenly thrust upon us. When Colin Farrell's Captain John Smith is freed of his chains to explore the otherworldly greenness of pre-colonial Virginia, he neither speaks nor writes nor laughs; he is simply taken by this new reality. Hawken points out that through the 19th Century, most Westerners viewed forests as the realms of darkness, wild animals, and dangerous natives; regions that couched the unwholesome, furtive realities of untamed wildness. Thoreau and Emerson among other Transcendentalists, as well as Romaticists in their own manner, took Nature and Wildness as an entirely different notion, one in which humanity is inevitably interwoven. The incorporation of humanity into notions of Nature expanded into ecological study and environmentalism; a field and sister social movement that realized the togetherness of soil, water, sky, and flesh, both in a poetic spiritual manner and a empirical scientific way.

Ellie posted this quote from Russel Banks:

"No other species needs to be constantly reminded and taught what it is to be itself. And it is our story-tellers, our poets, our novelists and dramatists, who have always performed this task. And surely, in this moment in the history of our species, when there is such a danger of forgetting and so much inducement to forget, we must not waste our limited time here doing anything else."

I want to build on this. Banks emphasizes our psycho-social need for storytelling to frame ourselves within our shared reality. In his comments on the danger of forgetting, he does not recognize our previous exercise in forgetting previous ecological-economic-social order. Ellie puts it:

Tom and I talked once about the way a place can change you. I am starting to believe a little more in things unseen. Tom says he's read about this phenomenon in anthropology, this maybe unknowable thing, and someone called it the Invisible Constant of Place. Anthropologists know it's there: place will dictate what you eat, how you build shelters, all those practical things. But of course it must affect our spirits a little too, the shapes we know in the world. It reminds me of the way we love certain music, how no one quite knows how we came to be such dancing, singing beings, or what that does for us exactly.

What I mean to connect here is that what Banks wants our storytellers to frame, what Ellie recognizes, and what our cultural has frustratingly forgotten, is our connection to a real, substantial, and spiritual place.

I don't want to state this in a trite way, nor do I want to overemphasize natural landscapes. Presently, the resurgence of urban environmentalism, urban gardens, and favela/slum ecopragmatism makes it clear that an "natural" landscape isn't the necessary starting point for a social narrative of earthbound connectedness. If anything, these movements invigorate a variety of the social narrative in which earth, soil, life, biology, ecology, rootedness, and liveliness intertwine with pragmatism, problem-solving, population density/cities, cooperation, industry (in the broad, personal sense), and development (in a loose connotation). Notice that these are both concrete realities (soil and cities, for example) and intellectual objects (biology, ecology, pragmatism) and social-spiritual characteristics (life, rootedness, cooperation). It isn't a prescription for development, but a cord woven tightly from many, many threads composed of different materials; a cord that grows and strengthens in order to hold people, place, and spirit together.

Perhaps I speak more plainly of spirit than I am wont to do. But, ultimately, I think that the "object" of the world cannot be defined and obviously not articulated without the incorporation of spirit in some manner. Some friends and colleagues of mine, I doubt, would have much if any problem with incorporating spirit into this conversation. But it is less of a foundation for me and more of a girder, used again and again to refit, strengthen, and support the overall structure. That is in part why I began with the image from the BPRD comic (a spinoff of the Hellboy series). The conversation involves folklorist and historian Dr. Kate Corrigan and a mysterious rare books dealer in France, with whom they are exploring various artifacts of Medieval France. For the characters of BPRD--Hellboy, a demon do-gooder (inactive); Liz Sherman, a pyrokinetic; Abe Sapien, an extraordinarily long-lived aquatic humanoid; Johann Kraus, a disembodied median in a specialized containment suit; Roger, a Medieval humunculous; Benjamin Daimio, a mysteriously resurrected special ops soldier; and Dr Kate Corrigan--spirit is just part of the necessary means for explaining the world they experience, the world they have lived. Grappling, in their cases, involves a bit more than a hard materialist could muster for empirical explanation.

The conversation, you see, is not especially limited to the pages of the comic. What Ellie describes--and here I am synthesizing our conversations and her above comment--is not simply the physical reality of place, which would be something like making long houses in the Northwest because of trees and pueblos in the Southwest because of clay and stone. Rather, it has to do with the spiritual existence of a place and the things living therein. A personal spirituality and social mythology or soulfulness arises from the coexistence of place and people. Coexistence isn't exactly the word I mean; what I intend is more accurately a symbiosis or hybridization of psycho-physiological entities into one persona or community of personae.

What has often been missing in dominant Western cultures, which was been increasingly enforced since the Industrial Revolution, was a strong separation between person/personal identity and the location of that person in space and time. Of course, that space and time is relative to the individual's surroundings, which includes history, other people, animals, ecology, agriculture, and ultimately its future. Hawken tells the story of the Luddites and General Ned Ludd--a story with which I was previously familiar--in which a nascent social cognizance of a right to full employment is directly exercised. In addition, the mythical Ned Ludd manages to embody the role of land, employment, and labor that is manifested in the identities of displaced artisanal workers. The enforcement of such division would be easy in the face of truly atrocious child labor, unsafe working conditions, and short-lived employees. Suddenly, the symbiosis of person with land because person to work; not only is the partner distinct, but the preposition denotes a much more one-sided attachment. The work pulls from the person, takes the labor often at a horrible cost.

In addition, this new synthesis of person and other (land, work, etc.) is conceptualized as material interconnections. Bruno Latour has pointed out social and philosophical impacts of material-material dichotomies, but here I only want to emphasize the importance of material spiritual mutualism. I want to say more than I very well ought to. What I have in mind is a balance or imbalance between individual--described as having both material and ethereal properties, as well as internal and social, and so on--and some correspondent "mate." In one case, that mate is the land, rich with physical richness and diversity and a potent spiritual reality; the other case is work--distinguishable from labor by being an institution rather than an activity--with its extractive, capital-based notional infrastructure. By alloying ourselves with work, we even have the potential to redefine land in a work-based mental picture: Land is a place of resources for use, similar to a pool of potential employees.

The present predicament is more and more about severing the mental construction of capitalism--a set of resources that require extraction for capital meaning--and understanding alternatives. Indigenous rights groups around the globe are shouting for support and attention, suggesting an articulation of "The Rights of Mother Earth" so that social and environmental incongruities can be dismissed. I understand these endeavors as a hope to bridge a gap between a generally land-based philosophical picture and a generally capital-based philosophical picture. Unfortunately, the notion of rights is strongly built on a capital-based social reality--one of the first articulated rights was the right to property, i.e. the capitalization of land. The aspiration one can hold out is that this bridge ultimately segues the capital-philosophy to a land-philosophy or some manageable hybrid of the two.

These two psycho-social philosophies are means by which we can grapple with the world. They explicate the world as having certain characteristics, specific attributes that make it understandable. I cannot escape the notion that these mindsets are only tools for handling the world around us, with its rich and delightful and awful confusion. Again and again I am confronted by this strange and enriching and terrifying bewilderment. Whether it is through land or spirit or a breath of fresh air, I personally aspire to make better sense of it, to feel it more precisely than I am currently able.