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Title: Childhood, Imagination, the Forest Author: Sever Date: Spring 2015 Language: en Topics: nature, anti-civ, imagination, spirituality, Black Seed, Black Seed #3, underHILL distro Source: Black Seed no.3 Notes: The Underhill Distro zine version of this text contains numerous errors: this is the original text as published in Black Seed 3.
One summer when I was about thirteen, I decided to live for a week in
the forest near my house. I had read up on edible plants, but pretty
early on I took to raiding my father's garden. In retrospect, I suppose
my experiment in rewilding was a perfect success, since raiding the
garden is exactly what the deer and gophers did.
I spent a large part of my childhood in that forest. I watched it
assailed by progress. My family was among the first wave of profaners.
Every year a new parcel of farm, orchard, or woodland would be converted
into ugly, poorly made houses. The very ground was scooped up by
bulldozers, contoured to fit the look the subdivision's developers were
projecting.
I noticed the effect on the creek I always played in, wading miles
upstream in the summer, walking dangerously on a cracking sheet of ice
in the winter, crossing falling logs, catching crayfish, giving chase to
the deer since they didn't have any wolves to run after them anymore.
The more woods were replaced with subdivisions, the worse the floods
became, swelling the creek, brown and gorged, washing away its banks
year after year. An island I once could leap to, gone, ancient tulip
poplars that towered overhead, undermined and knocked down, the rocky
bank where I let my pet garter snake go when I realized it wasn't happy,
silted over. An old railroad bridge where years later I learned they had
executed an abolitionist preacher and a black militia man had been
wounded and escaped, swept away.
My forest, though, the greater part of it, remained, protected by some
law or another. In most places it was a long strip, just wide enough
that I could ignore the houses on either side, walking from cliff to
marsh to pine hill without ever coming in sight of what I recognized for
civilization. And the length of it... I never got to the end. On some
summer expeditions I would go for hours, albeit at a snail's pace
perhaps, until I reached some glade that I imagined humans had never set
foot in before. Only later would I learn to distinguish first or second
generation forests from old growth. In the meantime, how perplexed I
would become on discovering a rusted length of barbed wire or an old
junker in the midst of what I was sure was pristine forest.
The wild is often characterized as pristine. One element of the myth of
the pristine is changelessness. In books, the intellectually rigorous
will mention how nature is always changing, how even when it finds
stability it cycles. They write the same thing about acephalous
societies that are not properly āhistoricalā in the Marxist sense. I had
read these texts and understood them, but the idea was meaningless, or
at least unactualized, until I took in all the intimate changes in one
particular forest over a span of decades.
The concept of pristinity conveys a certain fragility. Wilderness is not
wild unless it is untouched. I see it reflected in the tendency of
postmodernists not to talk about freedom, to read any kind of influence
as a form of corruption and thus a circumvention of liberty. So close,
yet so far, they have deconstructed the self, and found liberty
meaningless because they still use the rationalist, Enlightenment
concept, based on sovereignty, a naturally endowed lord over his domain.
Another kind of freedom dwells in the world where the self only exists
through its relations, and the freedom of one does not end but begins
with the freedom of another.
I find another echo of pristinity in the thinking of the primitivists,
who believe that freedom and wildness ended with one invention or
another. It also stalks the thinking of the back-to-the-landers, who
thinks that nature does not exist in the cities, nor capitalism in the
countryside.
My bedraggled, polluted, eroded, young, bounded little forest saved my
life. While my yearmates were learning about how to be popular, dress
well, and play football, I was learning about life. This whole horrible
farce never would have been worth it for me without that. And the
wilderness that taught me had probably grown up in the space of a mere
seventy years, since the Depression I reckon, on what had previously
been farmland, clearcut by the English at least two hundred years
before.
The wild is everywhere, ceaselessly pushing back. The only thing it
needs from us are cracks. In the city, in the countryside, all of it
impoverished by centuries or millennia of progress, wildness and freedom
are active forces. Those who say there is no outside to capitalism never
talk about crab grass or sparrows. They are almost right, but there is
one tiny, infinite thing they forget, and it is the most important thing
of all.
The purpose of anarchists is to destroy. We don't even need to destroy
all of it. Confounded by words, we will have a hard time figuring out
what exactly is meant by all of it. We only need to destroy enough of
it, make enough cracks that sunlight and rain filter down to whatever
poor dust is left beneath, enough so that the machine can't reassemble
itself, and nature will do the rest.
If we still wish to live after all this horror, we can also worry about
cultivating what grows back, the way beavers or even deer shape their
habitat. We can do that as gardeners, as humans, as beings who choose to
live. The anarchist tradition also suggests a passel of marvelous future
worlds, each of which are worth talking about it. But anarchism is the
bastard child of civilization, the umbilical cord hanging ragged,
another purpose in mind for the dagger clenched between its teeth.
Anarchism's destiny is to murder a certain future. To be tasked with
destroying and replacing would convey an awful lot of power, even to a
vocation that forswears power.
Games of imagination came naturally, unbidden, while I wandered in the
forest. The other kids played video games, and while I never kept myself
entirely pure from that pursuit, I quickly noticed an inverse relation
between imagination and the consumption of imaginary worlds. I always
preferred computer games to video games, the more open-ended the better,
and especially those that allowed character development and the
exploration of other universes. Nonetheless, they had a numbing effect.
I found that with just a stick, and perhaps a friend or two, in the
woods I could accomplish so much more, and afterwards I felt
exhilarated, alive, kept up at night thinking about what adventures the
next day would bring.
One of the greatest blocks of cement that we anarchists must crack is
that which has been poured over the faculty of the imagination, with
more being poured every day. People who cannot imagine other worlds are
dead. They are zombies, they will never be revolutionaries. Anarchists
who cannot imagine other worlds might as well roll over and rot. All of
their words are moribund, fetid things. The nihilists who willfully
confuse the drafting of blueprints with the exploration of imagined
futures have to resort to pyrotechnics to cover up their fundamental
frailty.
And while everyone has their own method for surviving repression, I find
that imagining other worlds can disrupt the hegemony of this one. When I
face a line of riot cops, sometimes I have to laugh, because what I see
are corpses. I love the politicians in their pretty suits, because those
are the same suits they are wearing as they are forced at gunpoint to
clean up Superfund sites. And when I'm sad about friends in prison, I
look out my window and see gardens where roads had been, and I know our
fight is worth it.
The anarchist imagination has a lot to offer. But imagination rooted to
place is even more potent, more alive. All the games I ever played in my
forest are there waiting for me. And all the people who live in a place,
though they do not dare to be anarchists, can imagine changes in their
surroundings that could never be born from an ideology, and that the
cleverest of all the anarchists would never think up, unless she were
also from that place. One of the contributions of an anti-colonial,
anti-rational anarchism is the importance it gives to the particular,
against abstract schemes and universalities. There can be some benefit
in anarchists debating levels of technology, one vision of the world
versus another, but only if they realize that all they are doing is
playing a game. For the winner of that debate to impose its vision on
the world would be the cruelest violence. It is a million specific
places that human communities must relate to, each of them different.
Freedom will triumph when everyone actively imagines their own
surroundings, and remakes themselves within the specific place that
holds them up.
The forest also calls on our spirits to exult and express themselves,
against the confines of a world that is rational and materialist, both
in its dominant expressions and in the theories of its dissidents.
Clumsily, like a baby first learning to swing its chubby fist, I began
to pray in my forest. I would light candles, meditate, and feel the
other living beings around me. Completely lacking guidance, I turned to
books on Daoism, Wicca, and Native American spirituality. I didn't know
anything about cultural appropriation (I think I still don't), but still
the books on European paganism seemed the most appropriate to me. (And
being on stolen land, āappropriateā is not the word I would use today).
I am reminded of the recent controversy in the Pacific Northwest, with a
couple Green Scare prisoners and their immediate circles dabbling in
Norse neo-paganism and its attendant, crossover white supremacist
iconography.
It's curious how some white people look to the Scandinavian pagans for a
link to authentic, ecocentric European traditions. I could claim a line
to that myself, if I wanted. Some of my ancestors were Vikings who
became farmers. When I was a teenager I carved my own set of runestones
and laid them in my little forest shrine. Since then it has occurred to
me that what's most interesting about the Norse is not their funny
alphabet or their Prometheus-Christ god hanging from a yew tree, but all
the ways that they became what I hate most about this world. Why lie and
see them as pure earth children when their brand of paganism made them
so susceptible to statism and ecocide?
Nowadays, I cherish my ancestors for all their ugliness, their mistakes,
their horrors. I cherish my ancestors for their puritanism, their
involvement in genocide, in the KKK, in clearcutting one continent and
then another. I cherish these things that I hate, because this is all
they gave me, and if it does not serve as a positive compass, it serves
as the map of a minefield, warning me of a hundred possible missteps.
Why would so many white children, who in general despise their parents
and ignore their grandparents, want to emulate their ancestors? Trauma
is always the first hand-me-down, and I'm pretty damn sure our shit did
not start with the Industrial Revolution.
The European pagans, at least those who populated or neighbored the
Roman Empire, cut down their forests and created many more states than
they overthrew. Turning to them might be better than mining the remains
of colonized societies to manufacture spiritual models, if those were
the only two options, but the truth is, there already is an unbroken
spiritual connection between the ancestors of the West and its forlorn
modern children, and it isn't to be found in any book, for it's writ
large across the world. Our heritage is ecocide, patriarchy, monotheism,
the State, alienation, along with a hundred half-forgotten stories of
rebellion against these forces.
I understand the need for authenticity, but everyone who feels it should
understand it as a red flag, warning us away from the inherent
artificiality of a search for the authentic.
The recent anarchist children's story, The Witch's Child, provides a
sort of negative history of the West. Instead of proletariat and
bourgeoisie, the classes it posits are the uprooted and the rootless
ones, which I read as colonized peoples fighting to reassert their way
of life, and people who have been colonized so completely and so long
ago that even the memory of it has been obliterated. This last category
certainly includes me and most people I know. We have no remaining
spirituality, only the need for it.
It occurs to me that most comrades who attempt to fulfill this need fall
into some rationalist assumptions about self and victory. Namely that a
person is simply one body and one lifetime. In fact each of us is the
nexus of a million beings and the inheritor of a thousand generations,
whose lives will play out in many lifetimes to come. What kind of idiot
would think that life ends with brain death? It would take years of
education to make a person so ignorant.
Facing the problem of spirituality, all of us rootless ones assume that
we must and we can come up with a solution in a single generation, in a
single body. But how could that be? If an old growth forest, by
definition, cannot spring up in a single generation, how could a single
generation in a human community create a healthy, earth-centered
spirituality?
I don't trust peopleāat least not white people or westernized peopleāwho
talk about spirituality. I think that's a healthy impulse. Perhaps those
of us who are starting, not from scratch but from the misery that our
ancestors left us, shouldn't ever talk in public about spirituality, nor
shamelessly make collective rites. Maybe we should feel ashamed of our
spirituality, and only talk about it in whispers. Maybe it's not strong
enough to come out into the open yet. Perhaps we should only attempt the
most timid of steps forward, trusting that if we suggest a vague
outline, the next generation will be able to fill in some darker shades,
to talk about their nascent spirituality a little louder, and on and on
until eventually we have something robust that can be passed on with
confidence.
I might talk about the times the deer woke me up in the middle of the
night, snorting and stamping at me as I lay in my sleeping bag, or the
night I felt the the contours of all the land for a half mile in every
direction as an extension of my own body, as I listened to gust upon
gust of a powerful wind rush over the pond, past the cliff, through the
marsh, up my hill, and then suddenly crash all around me, rocking the
trees back and forth then leaving us in silence until the next gust. But
I am not good at talking about those things. They were very private
moments.
I know that many of my friends have moments like that too, that they
have never shared with me. I also know that when I'm holding a friend's
baby or taking care of a toddler, there is no limit to the stories I can
tell or the songs I can sing. It's funny the way adults will talk about
magic with children but with no one else. They're not simply taking
advantage of the youngsters' gullibility to tell a tale no one else
would listen to. What's actually happening is they are confiding in
these children a part of themselves that they need to exist, but don't
have the confidence to nurture on their own. The cycle becomes endless
when we are taught never to learn from what children do best.
This time around, we can do it differently. We can tell our secrets to
our children, tell them about magic and spirits, share in the private
knowledge of the other worlds that so many people are ignorant of, and
as they grow, have their backs rather than beating them down, honor
their wisdom and lend them our confidence, so as they grow, they might
trust their experiences, and speak a little louder, dare to go places
where we could not tread.