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This is a long form blither articulating a vision for permacultural human futurity. I see the most likely and healthful tack towards permaculture as leveraging human prehistorical evolutionary baselines, and eschewing large scale hivelike society.
It’s a big holiday to-day, and as such I had best try to summon my better self. But the winter has been long hard. It has taxed me in numerous dimensions. And yet it becomes us to remember the principle of Heaven most especially when we dare embark on routes which occasion big talk. Polemical trails lead us only into the morass of high thought. Souls are given succour by kindly attention, held hands, quiet smiles, not the online wild-eyed ravings of which our degenerate era has long had its fill. With this proviso, in the laughing spirit of brave foolishness, let’s ponder the future.
I’ve been meaning to write a jot of futurism here for a long while. But until now I nixed the notion out of a shrugging remembrance for the many times long past when I wasted words in earnest advocacy. It was pathetic. I was one of those Young Turks who believed a well turned word could change the course of nations. Heal the world, I charged, one mind at a time. Of course it came to naught. Oh, enough of my true blue prognostications came to pass; canaries are fairly reliable carbon monoxide detectors after all. But as for any two bit Cassandra, no one really paid any heed to any of us.
This was an educational humiliation I’ve tried to take to heart here on Smolnet. I learnt to write because I wished to, in respect of the word and my voice qua itself, without any hubristic optimism for my powers of persuasion. For all their poignancy, prophetic traditions usually wail against the wind. When the human mass decides to ignore inconvenient truths, there’s no gentle rein which can turn that stampede. (More on that hard fact later.) We idiot savants who try reap what we deserve in alienation.
But Solderpunk recently penned his vision for a long term sustainable future:
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/gemlog/one-billion-one-continent.gmi
Solderpunk ably paints a long human dénouement as a gradually depopulating Megaeurasia. 50 conurbations, “only” as cram packed as Shanghai, largely unchanging in state of material relation from our current supposed epitome as industrially enhanced hives. A sort of collective human coma. We are to slowly diminish as Tolkienesque elves, into unmarked languor. Solderpunk denies a utopian cast for this future of one billion humans on one continent. This is sensible, because such a world would almost inevitably be a hellscape for all but the blinkered bourgeois elites or their velocipedarian equivalents. For the rest of us, as now, cities are mere prisons - rat mazes and warehouses for souls.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this portrait of “childhood’s end” horrified me. (I adore you, Solderpunk, but my gut sank at the 1Bin1 vision on a number of vertices.) Oddly perhaps, as I eagerly share with Solderpunk the urgent understanding that there are simply far too many of us eating far too much of our little globe. We must revitalize a concerned attention to overpopulation as a baseline prerequisite for any collective human responsibility. But there are even deeper issues than any horizon of population moderation programme, ontological objections, which take some precedence in consideration. So I must try to write as I wish to speak.
As with Solderpunk, I only ambivalently adhere to the “solarpunk” movement, if one can generously call it that. I’ve never read any real solarpunk literature. I’ve not even read the manifesto yet. (Good to know there is one!) Rather than genres, what we have in these terms flourishing in the information empire are aestheticist subcultures. Aestheticism is ever a disease of fin de siècle degeneration. Moreover, I object to all *punk aesthetics on the grounds of jejune rebel fatalism, as others have well articulated elsewhere. A rag tag gang of snot-nosed teenagers saving the world from megalomaniacal tyrants surely must be a mythos losing its creative appeal by now. We need futures grappling with elders and children at stake. Demimondes and countercultures are essential under any empire, as they keep the lights on for future potential, and allow some of us bare spiritual survival. We owe much to the canny protorodent underclass who held fast during the long epochs of dinosaurian hegemony. And after all, here we are on smolnet. But for any counterculture worth its ethical dreams, it must maintain an open set invitation to the whole. Mere cliques, subcultural identity cults, ultimately go nowhere. I think it is yet early to judge our solarpunkery either way on these terms.
Likewise, I agree optimism is a poor choice of words for the attitude adjustment for which our era is in dire need. Here I must piss off any anarchist punks (a redundancy no doubt) who abhore pink lights such as Chris Hedges and Cornel West; but their brimstone prophecy of open-eyed, nonconsequentialist hope in faith much better threads the needle in the long run than mere intellectual cults redolent of either pessimism nor optimism. Optimism is a bloodless disposition in disregard of the estate of lived suffering. Optimism waves hands at our muddled unpleasantness. Hope bears the scourge much better precisely because it must flourish to allow basic human survival in the unavoidable face of suffering. This is why the daily bread of hope is faith, the power of chips-down charism, as any poor person can tell you. That faith takes many forms and needn’t mean churchgoing. But often it does, and for good biospiritual reasons peculiar to the human being (and, some of us would argue, to the quandary of sentience itself). If we hope to survive the hyperfeudal ecodystopias visibly on the horizon, we had best all learn the sustainable spiritual wisdom of slaves… and fast.
By all means, let us imagine utopias. But utopias or dystopias are instructive only so long as we keep our eyes open to the ground on which we tread. All such imagination must stoke the fire to walk forward, not smother it. The turn in the postmodern era from dystopias as education in Orwell and Huxley to the dystopian masturbation of torture porn in later decades illustrates the danger. Empire curdles imagination as it recouperates its output. Utopias can inspire, not distract. Dystopias can warn, not immiserate. And even merely projected preferences ought to cleave to this curve.
So we cannot hand-wave the crisis, even when imagining utopias without sacrificing imminence. For our livable futures, utopias, and dystopias we had best turn at least peripherally to the problems of the intermediary.
And that is likely grim terrain indeed. To navigate that terrain will be an unsavoury affair at best. I like my libertarian principle as much as any eccentric. But I cannot see our species enlightening enough out of self interest to do the needful. The hard truth unspeakable in most political contexts these days is that there are too damned many of us. And most of us are not going to rationally decide to put a rubber on when it rains. Trace any problem in the human oikomene backwards with enough intellectual honesty and you’ll find overpopulation at the root. Our canny rodent wiles have allowed us to play dodge with Malthus for a short period. But that ghost is knocking on the door demanding his due. This not least when one factors in not mere survivable conditions for human population on this planet, but conditions where humans must choose to either thrive or die in mass psychosis. And as much as some of us wish otherwise, intellectual argument will not win us a modest birth rate.
Eventually we need to come up with a miracle. I mean that quite seriously. We must somehow birth a society which regulates itself in family planning without totally sacrificing the equally biospiritually needful parameter of freedom. This society must be hegemon “enough”, but no more. It must allow for dissent “enough” for survival of the human body and the mythopoetic heart - both at once. Any options “we” take as a whole must tend to the rightness of dissent. Any route to a permaculture must needs cleave seriously and ineluctably to the Chomskyan libertarian axiom - that power structures must justify themselves for the collective good or be dismantled. And we must yoke ourselves to the faith that miracles are possible *and comprehensible* if we at all desire survival. Our miracles must be of the canny and the uncanny both to wear the name, a faith feeding strategy with the milk of universal compassion. Such miracles are tenable; far more absurd realities have vomited out of history to become commonplaces, surely.
So we need some at least vague hints for how we get to our future visions, if such futures are to slake any appetite for human hope now. We must dare to stare at the hard choices a bit, at least enough for pointers. We need an outline. We need to curate possibilities in transit more than the hard edges of manifesto. Call them trail blazes. This courage of traversal vision, I feel, is more in need in our era than either optimism or pessimism, utopia or dystopia.
I have faith we can do this, but certain probabilities militate. I’ll indulge myself toward some ipso facto here. Permaculture will not be a state. I mean that word in several senses: we cannot count on a political state for the long haul any more than a stable state of societal evolution. There will be no “last men”. No absolute is possible under Heaven. Nor is it desirable! If I may code switch to a more organic voice for a moment, we need 太平 far more than 大同 in our imagination. And our Great Equilibrium must be ruled by intimacy before revolution or order. We require far more motility and dexterity for our livable future, far more exceptions than any rules. We must become prodigious in both rules and slyly allowed exceptions. Demimondes are our guides in this. We can thrive as a species, but the sinuous river of permaculture must become the moving water we drink far more than any aesthetic, ethic, or principle. Prime directives can be broken. So permaculture must ironically become liquid and unspoken, dug down deeper than the explicit ideology, as deep and with as much polyphony of song as the very human urge to breed and die.
Yes, song. That is the human juice which truly moves worlds: music heals hearts and binds Heaven with Earth. Give me a Utopia in song before a manifesto. I can’t sing well. So I write. But underneath all my blather, give me the song!
We can hear the songs listening back to our ancestors. Prehistory is a good litmus for possibility in such hard work as we face. Humans indeed can change drastically. To the average soft urbanite now, the life of a forager chipping an Acheulian blade is no doubt exotic. But there are realities we ignore if we overlook the “primitive” and perhaps the primitivist. We evolved as primates in smol egalitarian bands. That is our deep heritage as hominins. The homo erectus far outstripped their distant descendants to-day for long term planning and sustainable social articulation.. Even once most of us became adepts at the higher Dunbar limits needed for super-band level interactions, we remained so for millennia. All prehistory argues for the forager band as the datum, the baseline test of hominin lifeways.
All the meddling and amnesiac novelty we have indulged in the last few centuries pales before the yawning triumph of human prehistory. We survived. We even thrived. Sometimes we even got things halfway jolly well right. If this fact doesn’t give us an imaginative lodestone for hope, nothing can.
For all this, I am emphatically not a primitivist. New things happen. New things can be the “jolly well right”. But the fracture of anomie, alienation, and despair coincident with modernity or hypermodernity bespeaks the lie of the cult of novelty. Those of us who have imbibed a tradition know the need for human heritage, even as we must also emphatically eschew traditional*ism*. I’ve been pondering my own position as a hairshirt solarspinster in this as dialectical: the need for a both/and solution to the issues brought by the insanity of the past ten kiloyears. It must scale from personal to the global, however that trail wends. We need a “bright-primitive” sustainability synthesis at least as a key element of permaculture.
For all the foregoing and more, I feel on far more unanimous ground on the subject of cities.
Paleoentomologists speak of two kinds of sociality: the intimate society and the anonymous society. The human heritage speaks strongly of the former as the basis for our biospiritual and collective health. If we desire mutual accountability or solidarity of friendship, we must first know each other on intimate levels. We must speak of band and clan and ancestors and the places who live in us. In terms of permacultural futures, we must indeed form a global village not merely as cliché, but as imminent fact.
On the other side, our alternative are the ants. Anonymous. Grey. Impersonal. Uniform. The evolutionary logic of humans has taken a sharp turn in a few centuries from a species which bore few children who knew their lives richly enmeshed in meaning and with deep investment of love to a monocultural megahive of pseudinsectile cogs in the cold machinations of empire. The tragedy of the city is the world of the human, a species borne of deeply intimate matrices of aboriginal meaning, suddenly imprisoned in the filthy, burgeoning hive.
This isn’t hyperbole. The most salient argument for global family planning is antiurbanism rooted in biological fact. The biology lingo here is “high-K” versus “high-r”. And it’s pretty much population law.
A high-K society invests much in few. Children are precious and care isn’t abstract but imminent. For hominins this means incredibly high-K, biospiritually full spectrum. Band level intimate societies which succumb to dysfunction likely die. Prudence, solidarity, care, tact are the strategies such societies need to survive. Ask the Neanderthals who cared years for elders grievously disabled by a hard high protein hunting lifeway. They lived on liquid meaning in a hard packed, intimate society. I wager 20 quid they would say the same, and they had highly autistic Dunbar numbers to boot. We evolved to thrive as hunter-gatherer populations with the exacting social strategy of the rifle.
Meanwhile, high-r societies function on the gross logic of the shotgun. The logic is “shoot first as much as you can, ask questions later”. Such societies spurt out their issue with unpremeditated abandon. Think of our aforementioned ant friends. Or the wriggling death of salmon on their thousands of roe. High-r is the lifeway of bacteria in a Petri dish. It works precisely because it doesn’t need brainpower. It is inattendant toward dimensions of choice, that is *agency*, never mind the richness of meaning in a life contemplated. And it is the only way a finite mind of any stripe or make can handle mass society. Mass society is by necessity anonymous society. The hive militates as a superorganism against intimacy. It renders life cheap. And it invents zero sum games to increase its powers of infestation by any means necessary.
Primates have always had an intraspecies violent streak. But war is the fruit of anonymous societies. Humans had to invent it. Like patriarchy and capitalism, it had a beginning in societal, material, biospiritual predicates. And of all the dependencies of warfare, the anonymous mass society comes first. The innate disposition to destroy is rooted in the malign innovation of abstract identity. The tribe, the nation, the class, the arbitrary label. Whatever you call it, the vapid logic of the sports team is absolute and brooks no meditation nor nuance. Win! Take all or die!
Primates also have a deceitful streak. The “simian revolution” in socialization was the invention of lying. It helps bolster the brain to create games within games, and monkeys outdid their prosimian ancestors this way, sewing the seeds in us for gleeful Milgram test failures and sociopathies like capitalism.
But our hominin ancestors found some cure for this in the accountability of the intimate society. The band outgrew the jejune impulse in primates to cheat for an extra handful of wild rice by creating status games of beneficence. We learnt to make a game out of giving, slapping those on the back who cared the most. It’s called the Potlatch. And it enabled even bigger brains with fuller tummies. To invoke some pop culture, it was like the monsters in Monsters, Inc, if you recall, who discovered far more energy in a child’s laugh than a scream. We learnt to leverage virtue against ourselves and good wavy gravy it worked. It worked heaps well! For hundreds of millennia it worked. It was probably our heyday, both as permacultural and moral beings.
I don’t believe the choice is stark, a simple either/or. But a choice it is, and it is pressing us hard. Either we return to the high-K principles of our long evolution as hominins, with egalitarian band level basic organization or we continue to descend into the evils of domestication (another word for slavery), anonymous anomie, and insatiable violence which characterize our high-r trajectory. The word for a late human hive is “city”. It is with all these good reasons of both sense and intuition that I challenge that the city cannot likely be a vehicle for human permaculture.
And even if we can jam pack humans into cities for long periods into deep futures, why in hell would we? If we claim the agency of sentience, if we dare to uphold our moral mandate to bestow a decent future on posterity, our most obvious first path is to enhance human band sociality and decrease our urbanism. To put it in the postmodern idiom: Abolish the City.
By numbers, if reduction of ecology to the number is ultimately even important, cities will be necessary in the near term on pure efficiency grounds. But we had best have no faith in the anonymous hive. We should be skeptical of its supposed possibilities of reform. We should lean our faith hard on what we know from our ancestors’ hard won lessons: their victories and follies both. And that militates against the liberal Eurasian model of permaculture allowing for urbanism. We will constantly need to fight the innate logic of the hive. We will forever need to kludge our alienation and atomism with bandaids (plasters) of mitigation. We will always need authority heavy negation toward the strong incentive of our hives to overpopulate. In this, the city cannot help but be a bane in the long arc of human ecology.
Cities should not centre our permacultural futures. I’m prepared to be disproven should I live so long. New things happen. But I’m not holding my breath.
Solderpunk takes as a given that current urban humanity and post-industrial technology are the natural trajectory of human desire. This is amply disproved by the long arc of human history and prehistory. The truth is we have plenty of exemplars for the permacultural society. I won’t exhaustively detail citations for any of this here in speaking from synthesis; I’m too cold and tired to play Google. Regardless, a heady exploration of paleogenetics, history, archaeology, religiophilosophy, natural philosophy, and other such 25 cent lexica as invoked above ought to bear me out.
All this gives us hints of an outline to permaculture. There are likely irreducible principles which one may glean regarding the optimal ecosocial health of human populations:
Girard may have been too absolute, but mimesis happens. It is common, as the Bard would say. People want “stuff” because they see their cohorts want “stuff”. Microsoft Windows ran the show for decades because it ran the show. People bought it because people bought it. Hypermodernity’s bad actors have gotten very good at curating what humans want. This is likely to continue, and provides an obvious authoritarian tool toward sustainable population. So, if you can’t beat ‘em, co-opt ‘em. Manufacture the consent before we turn Earth into Venus. If it becomes “cool” and convenient to have less children, humans will have less children. It’s as simple as that, and as difficult. Far better for human ontological health is the soft influence of rebel avant gardes, who can finagle following herd/flock behaviour in risqué elites. Either way, “influencers” like famous preachers might have convenient “revelations” regarding moral reproduction to get the thing going. All of this is unpalatable politics to say the least. But it is an immediate trailhead.
But beyond some threshold of human psychohistorical predictive statistics, the thing probably eventually feeds itself. Societies favour high K or r depending on what societies valourize. Primates make big strategic shifts throughout evolution. Chimps versus bonobos. There will always be outliers, but that won’t matter. Make it eternally cool to care for population, to plan families, until it is like water to a fish, humans will fall in line towards this when it’s convenient for them to do so. So it’s not enough for an authoritarian regime to make it illegal to have more than X number of kids. Humans think it’s “cool” to rebel, often. Subalterns will flourish against this until subalterns decide for it as much as mainstreams.
The key, the goal, is a long term livable Earth wherein humans needn’t slit each other’s throats to survive. That’s a pretty big, and incidentally sensible, carrot. The route there should include every trick in the book, not merely gross suasion or compulsion.
As discussed above, the optimal human ecology resolves to the band level. In Homo sapiens, that is about 20 persons. It is much less than allistic Dunbar limits for a reason. Homo sapiens is infamously good at interband intercourse. These needn’t be in conflict, but could function in dynamic tension. That is, a fundamentalist anarchoprimitivist hairshirt isolation is not only ideologically Puritan and unlikely, it struggles against the Homo sapiens datum. It is impractical, as any non-apocalyptic path to permaculture (and a good deal in an apocalypse) requires global human coördination. And coördination means governance, at least for now. So all measures in any programme towards permaculture can both push toward the band (the fluid, permeable family and septs) as the basic unit of economy as well as muddling towards interband relations which negate anonymous hive conglomerates. Homo sapiens live in bands optimally, but prehistorically often came together for festivals - large seasonal hunts, big projects, marriage. This faculty of large organization turned sour in Anatolia and such, but it seems to me a sword with double edges.
The key is intimacy and high-K as the universal mandate of human economy, ecology, and accountability. Any syndicalist organization to permacultural economy must needs leverage such an optimum between the quotidian band and the exceptional Dunbar maximal group. The important thing is: go no bigger.
It is possible AI and other cyborganic anthropogenic sentient species can help fill the breaches in maintaining global coördination without that succumbing to human status seekers. If the band and regional confederations can work, they must provide humans who seek social status goods with many routes toward excellence. And that means permanently divorcing power from status. For that to be effected, a “rebanding” tendency must be universalized. High-K and smol groups.
The primitivists are correct on their diagnosis, if not their solution. When economy outgrows the attention of the human band level datum, it is unmanageable. Indeed, it tends to become inaccessible to point of unsurvivable by all but the most maniacally driven. This means the kind of toxic characters who rule us under empire (hive societies) - clinical narcissists, psychopaths, bad actors all. Agrarian tribalism failed. Feudal permaculture failed. Mercantile imperialism failed. Communism failed. Capitalism failed. A Permaculturalist “state” would fail too. Politics qua politics fails because societies run on more than bread (or oil) alone. There’s heaps of square pegs in round holes going on the past few kiloyears of human muddling.
So stop. We should quit trying to institute, engineer, ideologize our way out of being simply (and not so simply) human. Easily said when we have an insane global hive to put the brakes on. But the point is, our real long term solutions will likely need to fit the foraging impulse in organic human community. We have good tests for how this feels (if not looks) in a future context. Marx’s dignity of work is a good biospiritual litmus, if not entirely his conceptual context for that dignity. But here’s where I lose the secular hypermodernist by an insistence that human economy be rooted in an indigeneity of perception. And to the West and Westernized hypermodern, taxonomically, that looks “religious”.
For the human economy to work, it must needs be rooted in a band’s communal curation of personhood. That means dumping Cartesian subjects, citizens, and so-called “individuals” (literally meaning human atoms). In fact it means chucking the whole notion of atomistic reductionism as a living argot of hermeneutics. The articulation of economy and society must be ecologically intimate to be humanly permacultural, and that means animistic worldviews.
Shamanism is tangential here, and worth exploring. It isn’t just a matter of charismatic ritual and funny herbs. (Sorry middle class Americans.) Shamanism &c. is the ritual modus of band level cultures when living organically. Entire language families have been curated in basic phonology for millennia by shamanic song modalities. Vast forests have been kept as nature preserves because the shamans listened enough to say a firm no to generations going to clear cut them. Shamans typically don’t form a “class” per se, but represent the exceptional recuperation of an outlier human member by a band. Agrarian societies chuck weirdos on the heretic bonfire, which should tell you their importance. Shamanism recuperates them by a kind of inverse status - attendants in keeping the memory of the band secure. That’s a modernistic way of putting it, I hazard. The reality goes much deeper, to the lineaments of human consciousness. The spiritual isn’t just a word for pastel self help books in this sense, but the essential ontological context for all human material relations. “Things” are modalities of meaning, singular in economy and meaning. The primordial way of life of human economy is thus inextricably pneumatic, animistic, and imminently biospiritual. Shamans or their songster equivalents help keep bands permacultural. This isn’t seriously debatable, I challenge, on the grounds of anthropology of any stripe, not to mention recent history of the genocidal impact on shamanic societies.
If our posterity don’t have shamanism, they will need to invent an identical substitute. They won’t be able to attend to planetary ecology to the necessary depth as mere urbane tourists on a breather jaunt from the stressful city. Cities, it is firmly proven, encourage biospiritual disease of all sorts, from anomie to psychosis to criminality to cancer. The alienation of the human as *organism* is at stake in city life, and as a living organism with sentience. The city is hence a context of biospiritual bale due to our abstraction. We must not see an indiscriminate “Nature” - as a fearsome “Wild” severed from our quotidian reality - any more than we can see it as an opportunity for a pretty picture. That model of oldschool conservationism of the urban tourist to the country has failed us. It is unworthy in practice of the name of sustainability, never mind permacultural need. Rather, a deep education must be reforged in all humans - as persons intimate with the ecosphere in the most essential of lived ways. This intimacy must be curated by intimate and accountable human ecosystems - bands.
In this way, naturally, 自然, can humans attend with real skill to our place in the Earth as a system. No abstracted scientism can suffice where indigeneity and animistic care have repeatedly proven themselves throughout history and prehistory to be our best perspectives of lived context for both permacultural mandates to good commonweal and environmental defense. Give me one Lakota rez water-defender over a thousand Sierra Club skyscraper colonists any day.
This is to say, we need mass reindigenization. “Rewilding” of human lifeways across all populations. Fast and total. And it cannot be done fast, probably, just as the curation of imperial urbanite subjects from indigenous populations didn’t happen in one generation. So we are in a major pickle.
But it can be done because *that is who we are*, really. It happens all the time in miniature, in smol. We don’t see it because we are under enormous collective pressure under empire. But if it didn’t happen organically, we wouldn’t need to take our breaks from the city. We wouldn’t find the ineffable “just right” of a meadow. We wouldn’t suffer to strive for peaks or care for trees at all. We wouldn’t crow over a deer we had just killed for the family or a basket we’d woven or a turnip we cultivated with uvuncular care. It happens just that quickly.
As such, human perception to ecology is only legitimate when it is tutored in Earthly specificity. Bioregionalism inches in the right direction. We can never be good enzymatic actors for the ecosystem if we do not live *in the ecosystem* as agents of that ecosystem. In this, the city/human hive is inherently a simulacrum which by ecological necessity leads us astray into conceptual opioids of virtuality. It is not enough to seek out our temporary Waldens. We find dynamic homeostasis as ecosystem enzymes (stewards), when we live in “nature” to the point of finding “Nature” a grotesque idealization or idolization of a cosmological material gestalt.
One needn’t spout hippie words like gestalt to get this. In fact, one best should not. Transcendentalist movements have done few favours. The permacultural need is an human community in practical, largely *unspoken* relationship with ecosystem-as-commonwealth. The identity should be singular, ineluctable. And this means living as human animals on and *with* the land. We get healthy when we get our fingers filthy. We learn compassion by tending gardens. We find joy when hosting a wanderer from afar, such as a butterfly. We learn what ecosystem really means when a mountain lion sees us as supper. These practical necessities of human life require quotidian relation with ecosystem, lives living out “institutional memory”, not merely as tourists in a sterilized park.
It goes deeper, then, if as animistic persons living in immediate collective material relationship with Earth, other beings, and each other, thence there is an identity between the practical and the mythopoetic. And this identity inculcates ontological perspective, in a Tillichian denotation of the word, in a fiercely intimate and immediate realm. We will learn what Earth, contingent reality in this universe, means. And what that reality demands of us if we are serious as sentient beings and ecological agents is reverence. Imminence is our hope point. We find the sacred in the specific when the transcendent cannot be heard. We can love a person when a concept is too rarified. It’s not for abstract noötic conservationism that indigenes across the “4th world” fight so hard for the Land and Water. It’s not for climatological infometrics and online memes that some of us throw our bodies before bulldozers. It is because the land is a god, sacred, as imitate as any mother’s womb and just as bloody. (And when pushed, just as cruel.) We may not say it in those terms, but we grok it as such. In reindigenization, there lives the hope that we can overthrow not merely transient regimes of empire like capitalism, but to again walk the cosmos as we once walked as an entire species. But next time, we bear the possibility of dilated attention to outcomes and humility in our power, if we take our lessons to heart. That means a deep ontic reverence.
The best hope for reindigenization and rewilding at this juncture is for the entire human race to care. Care is not an emotion. Care has jack shite to do with sentiment. Care is an act. Care is athletic - the practical, canny, focussed application of compassion. Care in ecology means getting dirty. It means to tend and support. And it leads to and needs compassion because we as part of life suffer with the life we care for. Care. K. High-K ethics lead us ineluctably to reconstruction efforts both in our own hearts and with the Earth.
I hope a few museum cities will be kept around as object lessons. They will need the dispositionally ecophobic. Not everyone has to live on a feral back-to-the-land commune. But it will be best for us when we *mostly* do, when that is the starting point. To get to the beginning, we need to get dirty. To go from the beginning, we need to stay dirty. That means intimately with the Earth.
So what of the far future? Utopia according to Shufei? What of universal heat death and species extinction? I prefer to say it with word pictures, I reckon.
Ten thousand stars. A million people around each. We are not necessarily human. But we are the People and we are persons together. We talk slowly across the yawning gulf. We look at the gulf. We explore. To be the People is to know discovery. We take our time as we journey. We hunger for discovery as earlier people hungered for bread. But we are happily languid. Lazy, even! We consider before we step. We apologize before we need to kill. We try hard not to kill at all. We think before we eat.
We observe. We tend to gardens when they need tending. Just a little bit. A nudge to a world full of new life, but about to go Venusian. A second chance for a dead planet who cries to our spirits for life. We listen to things, all things. And we try to listen to what is and is not beyond things.
We contemplate. We sit quietly for a million years, then go outside to run and jump. We play! As Bradbury’s Martian had it, we know life is to be savoured. Some of us are Martians. We try to savour. And above all, we dare ourselves to care.
We sometimes die. It takes us a while. After all, we do things slowly. We wait. Down this quantum singularity. Up in that nova. We don’t let others die alone. Not just out of compassion, but isn’t that enough? But we cannot conceive of “alone”. It’s a curiosity of history, “alone”, a bit of historical detritus we occasionally dig out of the attic of our songs. Our elders say we should keep the lessons. We aren’t wise yet, they say. Maybe next aeon. When we wave goodbye, through our myriad gates into the “yonder next”, we who remain wave adieu. And just maybe, in their unfathomable weirdness, other persons wave from the far other side. They may be us too.
We may know someday, say the elders. Maybe next aeon. Let’s go find out together.
How many mouths be the People? That’s not so important. It may be uncountable. Not because there are so many of us, no. There aren’t so many of us, we think. But who can compass more than our neighbours and a few wanderers? Who would bother to try? The insane, that is who. We watch them carefully. We care for the insane. We give them fun games to play so they know they are important. We all need games, and to know we are important to someone. We are indeed all important to us all. It’s ridiculous to bother to say.
Ok, I can guess. We, the Salmon Eaters, live on Earth. No, not Earth as in “contingent cosmic reality”, I mean old Earth, our womb planet. Our seed planet. The Blossom Matron. Yep, that planet. We Salmon Eaters are about… 300 of us? I think? I met about that many at the last Great Potlatch. Old Liut the old elder, yeah, him. He gave away every last woven blanket and kamas token he had, haha. He had nothing left, and when he did die 30 years later he was thus the wealthiest man I’d ever heard of at least. So many friends! Who couldn’t love him, respect him? I asked him for advice on a partner. Wise chap.
Very well, I shall ask the librarian next time she sings how many humans are on Earth. A lot! I reckon about… 5 million? Maybe? I dunno, not my interest. There are twenty of us in our band. (There were 23, but Old Liut went to final dying and two young sprouts got in a huff and went journeying to join the People across the mountains. Eh, it’s best just forgiven, that drama. I hear they live with a dolphin pod, their band.) We plant biscuitroot on the plateau, then come down with our handcarts to fish. Ever had salmon roasted on a skewer? Mmm, so good. Salmon is good to us. He is tasty and returns like the generations revived out of the mindcreche.
No, I don’t fish so well. I sit with my pole and wait but often they don’t bite. I don’t have the knack. I can’t cast net myself nor spear. No, I have four hands like most human people, it just makes my heart too sick. Not everyone can handle that work eh? I talk to cyberbugs mostly. Haha, they are always gossiping, little bugs. So demanding, too, especially the bees. “We want more flowers in the meadow! More daisies for next year! Our Queen said so!” Haha, someone’s got to talk to the little people, I reckon, get the skinny and plan the diggings.
Oh, news? We had a Visitor the other year. Their name was… I can’t remember, offhand, need to sing the Visitor Song. “…Appledumpling, Smartie, Aroomasli, Jacob of Saturn, mmm, Finchfeather!” Yes, Finchfeather. They were from somewhere up towards Galaxy’s Heart, somewhere called Bacon’s Regret, I recall. A funny place, an asteroid I think, but altered like Mars and Venus were back in the ancient days. No idea how that is done, but they said they like it, had nowhere else to live because the local living world didn’t want them and their Singer said it was fine. But we surely learnt heaps from Finchy. No, not human, some kind of metal life, but they looked like a ponderosa squid to me. Oh, they are still around somewhere on Earth. We’re all supposed to have a big jubilee in a few centuries to make a rocket to send them home. If I remember correctly, they go to Proximacent first, though.
Shanis and I are having a babby next year! Not really news, yet, but the whales sent a song from the coast saying it was good to go. They keep an ear on such auspices. Yes, everyone’s excited. No, a first birth, even. There’s not been a first birth child around here in a Martian’s age, haha. It’s about time. Our Singer said it may be an ancestor spirit coming back, so we’re praying on that. Fresh mind anyway. Shanis is from far away, Titan. So it’s a bit different than they do things. We’re muddling through.
We sing. We spent five lives learning the Cod Cycle from the Dolphins’ Friends. It is very long, takes 35 years to sing. But it’s more than that, of course. We keep it as an heirloom of our band. The Whales sent the song inland when they had the Great Tide of Cold. They couldn’t keep it up, and who could blame them? It is a masterpiece, and vast beyond understanding. So we took up their song and learnt to sing as a whale. One of us was a whale once, so that helped. We keep the song and someday shall return it to them. We will know: when the Moon has rested in Her new orbit after the adjustment, we will take that song to the coast and out into a ship we make yonder. We will descend from the ship into the cold and meet them eye to eye. They are massive, I hear! Like an airship almost.
A ship in the black. Long in the cold. It dives onto the shore of this world and that. But it cannot bear to stay in the warmth of starlight for long. Out into the deep. The quiet. There are secrets there, which no word can tell. The Abyss above calls with perfect silence belied by the fall of hydrogen snow on a wayward comet in the rarified dust light. The deep. The ship sings in the night. Another calls back, 4000 parsecs distant. Such joy! The learning of a new song. A song of mind magma and bosons which flip flop in circles of 3 million years. A song in the deep is worth the whole of a warm carbon rich star’s trillion years. So the ship finds, so the ship sings, the whale of ages. And who is to gainsay such wisdom? Mysteries come back from such songs, echoing across the People’s minds. A million years to cross a galaxy. Pretty good, for an old whale from long lost Earth.
We observed. We were there when the Two Mothers, the galaxies, collided. One made of light, the other of night. Fires of Andromeda, the dark shadow burdens of Galaxia. We halted everything we were doing for a billion years and just watched. We hummed low and heard the Two Mothers in our echoes. Oh, yes, we might have modeled it in some simulacrum, a clockwork pocket universe. We might even have fled. No! Insanities! Such carelessness is unbecoming of the People. And had we done so, we would have missed the Surprises, no matter how good the model. We peeked ahead just enough to make sure we and all our Friends would be well enough, then let the Joining happen.
The Surprises were many. They birthed us fresh like blossoms under an old starlight. Children and ancients, we watched the Surprises. I cannot say. I would not if I could. But I literally cannot say. No words can compass such mysteries. No mere thought suffices. Not even song can do but hint. And the Surprises are their own reward, surely. But this I will paint in my mind: we look up again to the Great Night. Finally we are unafraid. We had patience. That much we got right. It was a good first step. We’d have been nowhere now without it. Locusts, maybe. Or lost before we were truly born. But now we stand here in the light of … Surprises. The truly new. The Boundless. And all we may come to attend in the limitlessness ahead. We smile at Death, old hooded friend. He was only a hint of what might be coming. And what now be amongst us is only the palest shadow of what cannot be. And that is enough for any soul.
Come, night. Come dark skies. You are our Earth, our love, our paradise lost and found. Sing with us beneath the last red suns. Sing with us under the eternally winking dream lights. A proton here, an electron there. And then time’s own dream and then… Oh, surprise! The unforseeable beacons across the sea. We will come singing. Now the Night is our friend.
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