- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Deep winter has come to my Baba Yaga cabin. The snows pile in rolling pillows, crystalline breasts of milky white. As yet they are unmarked by animal tracks. The smarter, or at least more prudent, animals are abed. Now and again a jay or chickadee peeps sadly from a branch, but they are rare visitors. Only Raven keeps company with my days, a few neighbouring pairs flying about in search of a stray mouse. I’m glad of their company for many reasons. The coyotes who had been howling downhill have moved on, I think. I’ve not seen their tracks this past 旬, nor heard their dusk light howls. So the ravens fly overhead, once in a while to circle above me to espy my doings. They must find me inexplicable and a nuisance, for they often wind their routes around mine airspace. Mad dogs and Englishmen and me.
Climate issues are revealing, if one keeps track of forecasted local outcomes. Western North America is seeing far wetter snows. That is expected by supercomputer models and borne out in the long term evidence. The snows are more gloopy, tending toward slush. They pack into an icey concrete.
And rains are more common. The odd blast of desperate heat puffs off the subtropics, melting the snowflakes en route, seeking to cool Earth’s fever. The result is inland Cascadian weather. I have never much enjoyed rains. They are harbingers of ill omen for me personally. Sensorially and aesthetically, I find them vaguely dirty. As TE Lawrence famously said with laconic wit of why he liked the Arabian desert, “It’s clean”. Snows are at least clean, when honest powder. Our climate karma is mucking up even such small graces.
But selfishly, I must like the rains in the hopes they tamp down the snowpack a bit. My poor chariot hasn’t 4 wheel drive. Why any sturdy ute isn’t required by law to at least have a drive axle differential lock is beyond me, but it hasn’t that either. Such are my modest means of a lifeline down the mountainside, should I need it. And this, parked a good distance from camp, half kilometre or so, as I wanted it ready to sluice down if need be.
Unless one has lived a life of modest means, one can’t truly appreciate how tenuous are the linkages in the chain of civilized logistics. A chain seems strong, but as the aphorism has it, it only is as strong as its most brittle link. When that link goes, bets are off, and plans often rendered moot. Any of us who lived in poor countries, or poor lives, or went to war, or suffered disaster know this in a way for which no abstract understanding can prepare one. And so too the silly hermit on her hillside. I’m one dead battery away from the Iron Age. I’m one chipped blade away from the Neolithic. And despite my studies and amateur efforts, I haven’t nearly the skills of the average flint knapper of yore.
What’s true of a slightly befuddled, masochistic lunatic in a remote forest, is true of us all. On this continent, no one has learnt aught from the hurricanes and pandemics; JIT logistics get thinner with each year. The psychopaths who rule us simply can’t help themselves to another 0.1% of profit from efficiency. I won’t belabour (haha) a rant too far here on the evils of late capital. Others have done far better anyway.
But I will say that if any worth for social utility is found in the semi-retreatant in her Walden, it must be in the palpable understandingof the insanity of modern life. To draw away from the turmoil of empire is to truly feel, in all senses, how demonic it is. And I mean that with rigor and intent: empire is demonic. It is ridden with fatalistic poisons which shred our ability to take care. “You really have no other choice,” the demons declare with sinister lisps, “You are locked by all sense and reason into your station”. And so in time even logistics become the enemy of human resiliency by holding community captive. To choose the hermit’s life is at the least to see this thinness, this starvation of the human soul and self, with a rod of distance. It’s paradoxical: by putting myself at such unreasonable risk, by extending that chain of civilization a few links, I can feel their tender preciousness. Civilization, in the end, is a very smol thing.
I mean here to gesture to the edge of reason in all this. All logic and reason fail us if our basic, lived, spiritual axioms are out of whack. And by spirit I mean the pith of reality, not the pastel kitsch which hypermodernity has sold by that brand of “spirituality”. I mean the bedrock you feel when you are face to face with the angels and demons wrestling you to the earth. I mean the thing you cry out in the night in words beyond words. Sorry to Mr. Spock, but ultimately you must choose to declare a measure of primordial ethos or die in the prisons demons build around our ribs. There are many ways to taste this freedom in perception. Some learn it by faith, some by aesthetics in art, some by happenstance of love, and some by the inward regard of the Natural. Regardless, it is there, a millimeter away, yet often shrouded by our carefully crafted blinders.
In this natural good, this capital Truth, we further see by relief the true horror of empire, what is stolen from us. We sacrifice our birthrights on the most picayune of pretexts. Such is the poverty of our hearts, that we would tear down a forest to make a tin can.
And yet, oh, the preciousness of that tin can. A food can qua can, is like the red wheelbarrow, the salvation of the lazy hermit! I look at my hoard of sterilized beans with awe, prepared with spices upon which men once built vast and brutal empires. A dash of cumin or nutmeg or coriander still yokes the necks of millions. And so I at least demand of myself a dram of gratitude in partial repayment. And I demand that I, that we all, stare without flinching into the costs of our wants and needs, these arguments the demons toss at us like Lutheran shite.
We must relearn two simple principles, I think, and quite quickly:
First, we are we. Not them and us. Not even I and thou. And certainly not I alone. We must speak as we, and render that we in silence to the attention of our global needs. That doesn’t mean we cannot disagree. It means that when we disagree it must be always as we in mutual care. This necessitates good faith, natch, and that needs some kind of policing of the bad faith actors. I won’t elaborate on that here, and I have no big ideological answers for such a societal pickle, but… what we face is a need more basic than politics and ideology: an ethic for the new millennium. That is as first principles, we need a communitarian mandate for the planet tout de suite. No quasi-religious utopian creed can do, but a commonwealth ethic at the deep level of daily social contract. It must worm even deeper than capitalism has been able to do. And that means all of we: humans and all the suffering lives who have been yoked to our grinding service. A tall order.
Second, we can choose. We can say yay or nay. We can say it as private lives, smol in our persons. We can decide it together in the circle of community. We can do that now, right now, I swear it. We can choose not merely on flailing panic or drunken impulse or when cornered by desperation. We can choose in the deepest mansions of our hearts and make it stick beyond all reason. We can always find that place, no matter how debauched we think we have become, no matter how hunted by the ravenous dogs, no matter the guns against our heads. We can choose the good. And I say that knowing full well how hard that can be to believe. I do. Because it takes belief, in the depths of despair, to step out away from the swamps the demons paint. It takes mammoth faith, and yet how simple, to just decide to walk a single step toward the good. But, as the great Sage said, 「千里之行，始於足下。」
It may seem paradoxical for a hermit to say, but the worst thing we can do these days is to prepare alone. The “every man for himself” view is the folly of reptiles, who most assuredly shall not inherit the Earth. I have no truck with macho “prepper” individualism.
The proposition that we are inherently alone before the catastrophes of our lives, not to mention the vastness of Nothing, is a mere artifact of hypermodernity. It’s just the demons gabbing. And we know that because in moments where crisis finally breaks our conceits, we find a universal web around us. Physics says so. Take a breath and ask which was “you alone”, the intake or outtake? And beyond all that, a Not-thing for which the sages whisper and the poets sing. It’s certainly more than reified Platonic-materialistic anomie. And it is hardier than mere mind.
As such, our alienation is ever vulnerable to hopeful struggle, to spiritual practice, to jihad. Atomism and alienation are predicated on the demonic logic that we can never “know” each other fully, so all connexion is ontologically futile. But the ecological hope against this rests on empathy, not sympathy; we can break the closed sets of intellectual conceits, ideologies, and despair with the open sets of organic attention. Open awareness is enough. It must be. Otherwise children could never unlearn the unwise lessons of their elders. Open awareness is why simple people can be quite sociopolitically soluble: they oft inherently understand on the grounds of presence, like high falutin’ chatty types often do not, that Gödel’s anthropic correlate is profoundly correct - knowing alone has an ontologically unreliable edge. It is best to ultimately (in the Tillichian sense) not rely on the bread of one’s own reason alone.
So that means, we must prepare together. We must find options and backups. We must gift them hither and yon, to persons known and unknown. We must strive to produce abundance against the future and the harbingers of our conceits. And we must do so without luxury. For luxury is the cant of the sociopathic gangster, the CEO in their gilded seraglio. It bends exploitation in the shadows. Abundance demands of us a deep moderation, the ethic of the salt of the earth. Its symbol is the cornucopia held by Earth’s good, dirty hands. This is how poor people survive the catastrophic, to put it in Westian terms.
An ecocentric decision making on such ethical grounds must take into account the “we” of true resilience. In terms of society and the planet, that means we need to spread preparedness like an antivirus. Mutual aid is the barest minimum beginning of what I mean. Care must become our daily cash. That care can be measured in various ways or not, natch; but when contextualized in a prepared logistics of abundance, it means we must always seek the new option, the new path for care, and to keep it abubble on the back burner. Civil preparedness must be snatched from the language of fear and raised as a standard for communal resiliency.
Paradoxically, the care for life is ultimately not enough to prepare “we” for life. If we prepare against death alone, we prepare in fear and are thus defeated. The care must be enough. Compassion is axiomatic, not utilitarian. It is a priori, primordial, a natural good. If we do not hold to this, we will live and die as mere reptiles and fodder for empire’s hungry demons. Care must become cash with compassion as a gold standard, because ultimately compassion is inarguable as a necessity in life *and* death.
I go out now to my morning chores. The drifts rise high quickly. I must sweep the snow from my camp paths, if I can. Tender camp lifelines, veins of my life in winter’s siege. My broom could break. Oh, I’d forge a kludge. But three things might break and all kludges fail. That is life and death. And it might mean my death. I am not particularly brave against that dire possibility. Nor, I hope, am I particularly foolish in regard of it. I have backups for things. But it’s a thin chain, really. Smol. I could die in this winter on this mountain. And someday I shall die. We die over and over even in the midst of life. Memento mori, the cold winds whisper.
In the particular, it’s a desperate thing. And I am afraid. I’ve been in more danger before, and felt more fear, but… I am afraid. And yet, the Sun will rise with or without me. The clouds will part and the rains will cease. This seed dies on the rocky path, that takes root in soft soil, like Jesus told. That is Destiny, karma, the wending of the weird in the cosmos.
Let us remember each other. Please remember me. With these words, I remember you.
-30-EOF-ETX-