Loren Bliss: Outside Agitator's Notebook : 17 January 2021

and Why Ryokan's Haiku Typifies Our Only (Real) Source of Salvation:

First some Bad news:

Then some Good news:

Obviously if we humans are to save ourselves, we must mobilize not as Americans or Russians or Nooksacks or Koreans or Masai, but as Gaians -- as lovingly fierce defenders of our Mother Earth -- and we must do so no matter our nationality or race or ethnicity or gender or ideology or whether we view Gaia as metaphor or matriarch.

Thus our most immediate need is clearly some sort of Gaian International, organized to speed our evolution into a globally cooperative, Nature-embracing humanity. As we've been repeatedly warned, perhaps most accessibly by Edvard Munch (1893); William Butler Yeats (1919); Jackson Browne (1974); and now by Greta Thunberg -- we must do so immediately, with unprecedented speed, before the Neoliberal legacy of murderous greed becomes our own inescapable torture-chamber of knowingly self-inflicted extinction.

My own brief summary-analysis of this good news -- that yes, we as a species may still have one (last) chance for healing the demonstrably fatal wound inflicted on us by the patriarchy's forcible, usually violent suppression of biological truth we were all born knowing -- ends, not ironically, with its beginnings: those glimmers of human perception and intent evident in our revolutionary (re-evolutionary) re-acknowledgement of the biblically despised biological reality -- the fact we like the wolves and bears and cockroaches are all children of our Mother Earth -- that unites us inseparably with all of Nature.

And thus we forever remain -- in this era, challenged to re-learn how to embrace such kinship, how to nurture it and help it thrive, as I have done my very best to do throughout my post-news-staff years -- and yes thanks to the north-looking window beyond my desk do even now in quarantine. I likewise mourn the many who delude themselves into believing Christianity's adult-Santa-fable some false divine will "save" them from the deadly consequences of denying their irrevocable kinship with the rest of Nature.

Or maybe they really are genetically different.

But as a favorite astronomy professor often said, "we humans are literally made of the substance of stars." (I apologize that I do not identify him; it is because I cannot remember the correct spelling of his name. All my personal copies of academic transcripts were destroyed by the same arsonist[s] who destroyed all my life's significant work, and obtaining the information by telephone or email under pandemic conditions would take days if not weeks.)

In any case, I feel that before we go on, we should perhaps quickly reflect on just how patriarchy assails us. However it might have been propagated -- more on this in the footnotes -- there is no doubt it wrenched human society out of the egalitarian, cooperative, proto-communist mode that enabled our ancestors to survive 194,000 years, four ice ages included. Then, beginning some 6,000 years ago, patriarchy overthrew that demonstrably superior ethos and eventually brutalized us into the murderously hierarchical, violently acquisitive, ecogenocidally imperialistic mode that begat the Abrahamic death-cults (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), which with Christian leadership eventually cloned themselves into the secular death-cult of Capitalism, which in turn divided into the apocalyptic death-cults we know as fascism, Nazism and Neoliberalism.

In other words, our would-be exterminators today are the direct ideological descendants of those who sought to exterminate our pagan ancestors.

Given our present-day peril -- and factoring in Jungian discoveries about our ability to recognize and describe risks to our species well before they become obvious¹ (note again the prophetic elements in works by Munch, Yeats and Browne) -- I believe we can define as functionally anti-patriarchal any human expression that can be shown to foster our conceptual reunification with Nature. This most assuredly includes Marxism, which at least in Frederich Engels' view was an effort to restore humanity to a modern equivalent of its relatively harmonious pre-patriarchal cooperativeness; it also includes ecosocialism and ecofeminism, the healing intent of each made obvious by its name. But our most effectively anti-patriarchal accomplishments are too often the most obscure. These are the scientific resurrections of ancient wisdom via the Gaia Hypothesis and the burgeoning growth of environmental science documented here, all of which are faulting the patriarchal bedrock.

Anyone who doubts the revolutionary nature of such advances need only reflect on the extent to which they infuriate the Christianists. Note how their early-'70s assertions of Christian anti-environmentalism -- "Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Means Of The Devil" -- have since metastasized into open warfare against science itself. Our counterattack -- more evidence of that prophetic function identified by Carl Jung -- is exemplified here, here, here, here and perhaps more evocatively here.

Meanwhile, though the folk renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s was methodically suppressed in the United States, it has elsewhere continued its growth into an ever-more-wildly popular brand of multi-generational Neopaganism that powerfully nurtures our quest for reawakened awareness of our biologically indivisible oneness with Nature.

Greta Thunberg's assertion we must now radically accelerate and condense into less than a decade a learning process that hitherto took centuries if not millennia should thus be welcomed. I am frankly surprised it took so long for someone to name our species' plight in a voice heard round the world. Ignore her -- or ignore the Earthly foundation upon which she stands -- we'll soon have no more than a hell-bound snowball's chance of survival, much less of toppling six thousand years of patriarchy's (deliberate?)² planet-killing misogyny. I'll have reverted to nonexistence by then, I'm sure, but I've seen enough -- and read enough history -- to know I wouldn't wish the horrors of a dying planet on my worst enemy.

And now amidst this gotterdammerung what might we have that's valuable enough to bribe us to undertake the struggle of biological self-salvation?

In response I offer the following, reprinted here as it was given us by Ryokan via Alan Watts in The Way of Zen (Pantheon Books: 1957)³ -- for me the gateway, 62 years ago, to what through quarantine-enabled contemplation and meditation I have come to (gratefully) recognize as a lifelong path toward learning Earth-centered consciousness:

The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.

-- Ryokan (1758-1831)

___________________
¹Influenced as I am by the Jungian understanding of how art can function as prophecy -- presumably because our subconscious minds perform the function Marshall McLuhan described as analogous to early warning radar -- I take all such expressions as indicative of the yet-unplumbed magnitude of our survival instincts. Moreover I believe the fact such perception shows no evidence of yielding to the bottomless despair that is increasingly the sole defining ethos of modern life tells us at least some of our species will survive our present self-inflicted apocalypse.

²Patriarchy with its implicitly mandatory ecogenocide is not only ever-more-obviously our species' one ultimately deadly "unnatural" act. It is also -- at least if we dare consider the possibility our Earth is a target of extraterrestrial invaders -- perhaps the interstellar equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets, its anti-Nature terraforming spawned by "unnatural" inseminators such as talking serpents, fiery wheels in the sky and shrubs inflamed to loquaciousness. If these origin tales are true -- that is, if they are based on indigenous perception of real-time events -- patriarchy's lethally invasive "unnaturalness" is all the more evident in the fact "unnatural" ranks among the patriarchs' favorite pejoratives of projection.

³The best Watts anthology is entitled Three and includes complete texts of The Way of Zen (1957); Nature, Man, and Woman (1958); and Psychotherapy East and West (1961); it was published by Pantheon Books in 1977. Eerily, it was also one of my half-dozen bound volumes that survived not just the utterly life-changing arson of 1 September 1983, but which -- far more eerily -- were salvaged in readable form after spending a year beneath the sodden ashes of my friend Helen Farias' house. She returned them to me immediately, sole remnants of a boxed-up personal library that had exceeded a thousand volumes, and they have accompanied me ever since; (Helen died in 1994. Writing this, I realize I can no longer deny the guilt I feel because I do not doubt her house -- indeed her ancestral home -- was torched solely because she dared harbor within its upstairs rooms, as a favor to me whilst I sought a permanent Manhattan address, my books, phonograph records, photography dating from my 12th birthday; clip-files, awards and journals dating from my 16th birthday; and most importantly, the 24 years of writing, photography and supportive research that had evolved into "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" -- all that plus the potential of at least two other photographically illustrated books, one an exploration of academically ignored archaeological anomalies in the Pacific Northwest, the other a pictures-and-text portrait of commercial salmon fishers on the Sailish Sea.) (Yes, that was a spontaneous digression, one necessarily followed by an apologetic excuse: but where else might I get way with such a stylistic outrage save in the footnotes?) Returning now to our discussion of Watts' Three, unfortunately but predictably, the book is long out of print -- with extant copies effectively censored by prohibitive prices.

LB/20-22 January 2021

-30-

22 January 2021

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