My Inner Anarchist & Me:Reuntited and it feels so good

Again I’m struck by how this class has led me to ponder the facets of point of view, to consider differently and to see with new eyes. Ways of seeing are as variable as everything else, and those based on the goal of the getting of wisdom rather than on the accretion of power will be more true and authentic. The object seen through that lens will be presented with greater disinterest -- although there’s no such thing as pure objectivity since the simple act of naming it disqualifies it from itself--but at least it may be examined more fairly. The human agency that powers the arc of desire to know essential truths about things is fueled by a deep need to uncover their numinous hearts. It’s what the examined life demands and Socratic method supports. In that way, Pre-Columbian Histories of North America as facilitated by Sev, Barnard’s Keeper of the Shamanic Trace, with the help of fascinating, well-chosen readings, becomes not just a course but, a journey of the spirit to the things that matter most. Truly psychedelic, without even loading the effigy pipe.

I entered the class a liberal Democrat, which I remain for practical purposes for the time being, but came out transformed, and fully reunited with my inner anarchist. It was a part of myself long buried but never extinguished, hidden from sight by the accumulation of debris that the soul-killing hierarchy of capitalism produces in exchange for freedom. I served as a carrier of baskets of soil for far too many years, and have no intention of ever doing so again. The accumulation of material goods and economic clout should never be an end in itself, but now I’ve come to realize that one cannot dip into the system without being trapped by it.

It could be argued that the purpose of Darwin’s oeuvre was to provide natural scientific support to the ideas Rousseau presented in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1754 and The Social Contract in 1762, and that The Origin of the Species was their natural and inevitable successor. One might also suggest that Darwin’s book moved to clarify and offer an alternate viewpoint to the overarching principal of the Industrial Age that humankind climbs inexorably up the rungs of civilization’s ladder from savagery to complex social organization, as codified later by Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Societies (1877), and that what is higher is always better. This concept stands in stark contrast to the emotional aesthetic, creativity, and communion with Nature and our better intuitive selves that defined the concomitant ideals of Romanticism.

It is this tension between the disciplines of science on one side and the realms of philosophy on the other that allows spandrels to hang in the space between them waiting for all the diversity of human creative thought from finest flowers to most poisonous fruits to flow into them and develop. Here, between what is and what might be, a brave new world that has such beauty in it shares a bed with visions of the End of Days, clutched in a headlock for the ultimate prize, the success or obliteration of the human race.

The great revolutionary year of 1848 straddled the waist of a century that simultaneously spanned both the Romantic Movement and the Industrial Age. The time was torn by the advances of science and industry crashing constantly into the spiritual longing to stay true to the morally right and good. At no other period, except, perhaps, our own, have the possibilities of what might be weighed as heavily on the imagination of the present that is. Nor have the potential outcomes of theses ideas mattered as much to humanity’s greater combined future as they do now.

We are at such a point in history now, ready to move away from the economic system that has ruled human lives in ways as bad as, and at times far worse, than the Colonialism it replaced, but whose patrimony it conserved intact. One simply replaces the star of nationalism at the top of the tree with that of lucre, and 90% of the resources still remain in 10% of the same hands. It becomes Chapter 11 & 13 recombinant voodoo economics repackaging the same old shit in a crisp new cover, as is happening now with AIG and Chrysler. Sometimes you simply have to pull the plug. But there can also be revolution from the bottom up, and not from the top down, as described by Christopher Boehm in Hierarchy in the Forest: the Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. It can be relatively bloodless, and is essentially a change from within. The problem with that type of overthrow of power is that you have to get all the other slaves to work as one against the overseers, and that never work.

The numbers of past civilizations that reached Icarian heights only to crash and burn leaving no suicide notes explaining their sudden and complete departures is astonishing. But, there is another alternative, the one Wilson recommends, and that is to simply walk away and start over, as it seems possible the people at the bottom rung of Chacoan and Cahokian civilization(s) may have done. We all have the choice to refuse to help construct the pyramids of others. If enough people at the base remove themselves, the center will not hold. The society will collapse leaving behind only the monuments of man’s inhumanity to man.

Sylvia V.T. Calabrese

Personal Archaeology:Changing One's Point of View

Earthmother said...

I love a book that forces me to reassess my point of view and adjust the knobs accordingly. So it is with David Hurst Thomas's Skull Wars, which has made me examine filters that color views long held but never consciously acquired. We all have some less than pretty notions, which like souvenirs lugged back from happy times prove cheap and inappropriate when examined in the light of home. It wasn’t very long ago that I underwent a paradigm shift in my understanding of colonialism under similar circumstances. I had blithely cruised from political refugee immigrant child to Caribbean traveler and connoisseur of the comparative virtues of ex- British, French, Spanish or Dutch Caribbean islands and their luxurious Colonial flavored post-Colonial resorts. Then I read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place about Antigua, my favorite island, and its tourist industry viewed from a native’s point of view, and everything changed forever. I realized as I finished the book that I had spent my life until that day seeing everything through the lens of a post Colonial apologist.

Skull Wars required me to evaluate how and why I view Native Americans, and forced me to do some necessary personal archaeology before I could once again move forward. This stratigraphic examination of my thinking led me to understand why I’ve always felt more attuned to the 18th and 19th centuries than to my own. But to examine my viewpoint and find to my immense dismay that I think like a Brit educated at Rugby under Thomas Arnold with a grand tour under my belt is flat-out scary. How did someone with my catholic interests and liberal outlook been so willing to subscribe to the blindered notion of Mediterranean & European supremacy in all things touching the cultural and intellectual history of our species? Examining myself, I saw a clear and direct link to Rousseau, the Romantic movement, and the many dead white European males who have formed my thinking, consciously or not. My own personal and ancestral history cluttered any possible objectivity. When Moses was rounding up the other Jews to head out of Egypt, my great to the nth grandfather was playing cards with Pharaoh, so we stayed. Over the next millennia, my family were subjected to Greek, Ottoman, French and British rulers, culminating in the early 1950s in Egypt when Nasser toppled the sham monarchy of King Farouk, and we “Europeans” sailed to the New World.

Arriving in the US as a child I immediately forced my parents to buy me a set of pearl handled six shooters, a leather holster with conchas and tassels and a cowboy hat. I wore these in our hotel, where I spent a lot of time learning English from the refrigerator sized TV that spewed endless shows about Davey Crockett (I soon obtained a coonskin cap for watching that more authentically), Jim Bowie, Annie Oakley and all the singing cowboys and girls, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Armed with endless rolls of caps, I played in Central Park with the local children –Manhattan natives, white, Upper East Side private school kids- who were also armed with six shooters. We with guns were the cowboys and those without, the kids we repeatedly killed each afternoon in the playground, were the Indians. I shifted from colonized to colonizer by arming myself with toys and hats, a change that has colored my views about Native Americans and pre-Columbian culture until now.

Hats off, Skull Wars.

Sylvia Calabrese

Motherhood

Last night I rose to get a fix of the children. I needed to kiss them,

breathe them in,etch their sweetness on my mind. Jack’s essence is bread, 

a delicious yeasty perfume that’sparticularly noticeable between the

vulnerability of his small downy shoulder and the crook of his curl covered 

neck. He’s my Pillsbury Dough Boy. Smoothing Victoria's covers,

I tuck Woofie closer to her. She had spaghetti with garlic and oil for

dinner, and brushed before bed, yet her breath smells like attar of roses 

and has from the day she was born. I always find myself praying for 

them, wordlessly and passionately, in the dark before I leave. Please, 

keep them safe. Grant them happy lives. Give me time with 

them, please. I neither know nor care whom I petition. I

feel such love for them my solar plexus aches; something so strong I 

could die from it. Now inextricably linked, I doubt I could ever, more than

momentarily, not feel their tug. Exterior, yet part of my very core,

invisible cords moor them to me. It startles me to notice I haven’t 

thought of them for a measureable length of time.

They are the best thing I will ever do.

January 17th, 2009: Sorry I was Right

Just found the post I wrote in April about the lurking economic disaster which has since come to pass. Wish I had that kind of horse picking ability for less Cassandra-like applications, like choosing lottery numbers. Things are terrible, and they are going to get worse for a long time as the after effects of all the big players trickle down the economic chain. We had it coming for a long time. Unbridled greed and blatant disregard for all those who share our Earth led us here.

Nonetheless, I feel enormously positive about the chance we have to refashion ourselves as thoughtful stewards and kinder people who will develop new energies, provide an internationally competitive education to our children, health care for everyone, a return to the land-to farming and cheese making and  artisanal saucisson made from humanely raised and  slaughtered animals- as a viable and honorable option to law or finance. We need to develop  crafts and trades, and set up schools that teach them. I feel more hopeful politically than I have since working for Robert Kennedy in '68, but worry about the nearly terminal apathy that has set in to our society since Nixon was first caught screwing around with the democratic process. We have become so jaundiced to the repeated disregard some of our presidents have shown for the people and the Constitution, that we merely shrug in acceptance. Where are the ramparts? Where is the outrage? In two days we'll have President Obama, who carries the burden of all of our hopes for the future. May he be kept safe.