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Title: Nihilist Animism Author: Aragorn! Date: 2016 Language: en Topics: black seed #4, nihilism, animism, indigenous anarchism, black seed
Ultimately everything I do, every project, everything I build, every
relationship I start is going to fail. The world, to the extent that I
am part of it, is also dissolving. This building/destroying is my
expression of a feeling that lives somewhere between the Protestant work
ethic, the will to inflict anarchy on the world, and an attitude against
the projects of Man. I am satisfied living here, in this unstable place,
continuing to do things that will blow away as soon as the center stops
holding. I’m satisfied to call this nihilism, not because that is what
it is, but because our culture is into naming things and I am into
sending lemmings off of the cliffs of their own creation.
There is a current that breezily uses animism as a solution to the
“problem of spirituality.” I have concerns. An older article on the
topic, Sarah Anne Lawless’ “The Song of the Land: Bioregional
Animism,”[1] both demonstrates and refers to the problems of immediatist
spirituality rather well. On the one hand we benefit from the knowledge
(mostly from anthropological data) of the seeming parallelism between
many peoples (i.e. that everyone, in the past, was an animist) and on
the other hand any attempt to practice animism either suffers from being
a sort of cultural appropriation or a hokey stab in the dark that does
not immediately satisfy a cultural need and feels embarrassingly small
compared to the greatness of the whole earth.
There is a painful gap between being (or naming yourself) an animist and
feeling the glory of the profane (and holy) things around you. This gap
is enormous. It is filled with the mono-culture religions, civilization,
and technocracy. This trinity makes the compelling claim that the holy
holy is in fact achievable by ritual, law, and blinking lights. It
claims this with the promise of personal salvation and potential of
private revelation by way of priest, urban living, and new cell phones.
It an enormous provocation to say that kneeling alone by the bank of a
river and being cleansed by the sacred is a pure, unadulterated animism.
It may be a true moment (especially to someone enveloped in spectacle
and lies) but it is not a complete one. At some point one packs up the
REI equipment in the Subaru and drives back home. Sometime later one
posts about it on Tumblr. One is not complete in the moment, but instead
is an observer of one’s own life. That life can feel like a series of
real moments punctuated by gaps of disconnection that look like daily
life. Living can be like a problem that can be solved after retirement
or whatever.
Animism (grand, capital A) began to die as the City was being born. This
does not mean the urge died, but that urge primarily moves us against
ourselves and towards camping trips, Eschatology, and faith–based
approaches to the sickness of this world. Our question is whether
mediated experiences are the only ones we are capable of. If that is the
case, as is likely, then our capacity for revelatory joy is similarly
curtailed, all arguments to the contrary. If we are indeed broken are we
capable of NOT being broken? As anarchists who have an interest in how
the world operates, and perhaps how we could perform as wooden shoes to
it, we are naive about what grinding gears mean today. We think it is
enough to change the world without realizing that troubleshooting gears
is a quarter of what the world does. We have urges but little wisdom
about the unforeseen consequences of our small strategies. This is the
reason why we are so hungry for the possibility of animism, a spiritual
practice where desire and capacity are mapped perfectly.
The reason we will not solve this problem like the little special
snowflakes that we are is because of exactly that. Just as monotheism
has succeeded in the deception that it represents a personal
relationship between you and the almighty (parsed and mediated by
priests, ministers, and the dining room table) animism needs a social
fabric, outside of the civilized order, to keep warm. This social fabric
isn’t as simple as playing outdoors with other children, starving for
life lessons from the kitchen table where the elders sit and talk, or
rituals that help you understand that you are a part of something large.
But one can imagine such simplicity. One can imagine life without
screens as that life just passed us by, but that is only a fraction of
what it would take to live a whole life. While the cell phone may itself
be sacred and alive, the things we see on it are mundane and ordinary
and make us the same.
It is on infertile land that future spiritual practitioners attempt to
live. These are hardscrabble lives, devoid of community or anything but
scraps of information of how others did what you are trying to do. In
this context it makes perfect sense that racial, silly, or fantastic
elements (often the same thing) often infiltrate what is an impossible
effort. It’s not that we can’t “go back,” it is that doing so is just as
difficult as marching to somewhere completely new (whether Narnia or
into the Star Wars universe). The new just seems easier.
What I would propose, what a nihilist animism would entail, would be an
acknowledgment that a spiritual endeavor must come from a sociable
practice. This might be a conversation between seven of us in the woods,
or different sets in different places but it has to pass the test of the
I/we. If you can find a group of people who are willing to ride the
tension of being individuated, having undergone the great pain of core
alienation in the modern world, while not privileging one’s own
experiences in a group then you could begin. This would look like a long
waiting, while the traffic passes overhead, while your devices beep,
bop, beep in your car, when you could be doing other things, for the
world around you to expose its language to you. This would not happen
quickly. It would probably take years and then it could shape a set of
principles, a path to walk, that would make sense to your set of people.
This is why it is impossible to imagine in this world, the context has
shifted too radically to imagine building a set of tools over years
before even thinking about using them. The context has shifted too
radically to imagine doing anything so long term with sociability.
This long listening project does not make sense in a world of traffic,
screens, and bullshit dichotomies like I and we. But this is the start.
One, find a set of people, two, find a language. That language should
probably not be a public one because the task that comes next is all too
vulnerable. We are talking about creating something that the history of
the current order has done a bang–up job of genociding, mocking, and
parading in front of the slavering consumers of modern spectacle for
their amusement. Keeping this language secret will be nearly impossible
in a world of social media but the task isn’t nearly complete then.
Finally this language has to become meaningful. With it a set of people,
who will have to become multi-generational, have to disassemble and
recreate a world that does not suffer from monotheism, civilization, and
modern technology.
That impossible task set I share with you is the closest thing I would
put forward as a recommended practice. A world-weary rebuilding of the
very reasons we should do things together at all. A practice I am myself
incapable of participating in because I have been broken by the same
things as you. My mind is no longer limber enough to learn a new
language. My heart is too scarred to do something so honest with a group
of new people and too experienced to do it with the monsters I surround
myself with (for other reasons). To go deep enough to subvert the
conditioning and violence of this world is just impossible enough that I
can imagine the kind of person who would attempt it but I have no idea
what will result, even in a best case scenario.
I dream of free actors who live without fear. I imagine words that speak
beyond comprehension. I imagine the same goals that I have expressed
lived by people who care for one another, who laugh at the empty
sociability of our era, who are the anarchy unleashed unto the world. I
imagine connections to the world that I am not capable of. This
impossible set of conditions and potentials is why a nihilist animism
appeals to me at all. It names capabilities I don’t have in a world I
can’t imagine living in. That’s all one can ask of oneself.
[1]