(no subject)
Since the summer solstice, I've been working on a piece so far titled "Madness/Gealt," which is about irrationality, God, the old Irish story of mad Sweeney, and the lessons nature has to teach -- more or less. I have been having trouble finishing it for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that a chunk of what I'd written really didn't belong in it. Normally I just chop such things out and save them for some other use, if I like them well enough, but I can't imagine another use right now for the chunk in question, and I got rather attached to it. So I have finally lopped it out and to assuage my feelings of loss (my baby!) I am posting it here.
Another complicating factor is my current reading matter: two wonderful books by Rebecca Solnit, one called A Book of Migrations: some passages in Ireland, and written more recently, As Eve said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art. The latter includes some musing on the idea of a natural world that has fallen from a harmonious, pristine past to its current sullied state. About this Solnit says, "...I like Paul Shepard's analysis best: the anarchic, lively, pantheistic cosmos of hunter-gatherers, in which nothing was really work, is the best approximation of paradise or sanity, and agriculture -- matriarchal or otherwise -- was already a decline if not a fall." I find myself wondering how paradisical the world really was to the hunter-gatherers themselves, who lived much shorter lives than we do, and whose women often died in childbirth. I can't help but wonder, also, how quickly our paleolithic progenitors would've put up strip-malls of their own (complete with Mickey D's) if only they'd had the technology. It will be interesting to see what becomes of Ireland, as the Celtic Tiger drags her into the First World after so many centuries of being the savages of Europe. Never mind that Ireland saved civilization for them, the ungrateful bastards. Between that and Karen Armstrong, whose The Battle for God I also read recently, I have too much to think about that all wants to poke its head into my already-too-long piece inspired by Buile Suibhne.
I hope that the finished piece will be done and checked out by the pertinent parties (I don't like to write about people unless they have a chance to read and perhaps edit what I've said about them) before the winter solstice comes to pass. But here is the chunk I cut out of it:
I haven’t had as much time as I would like in recent years to be out in Nature simply for the pleasure of it, to learn what She has to teach me. Living as I do in a very rural place, I am conscious of the same turnings of the year that the ancient Irish structured their lives around. Nowadays that cycle is codified into the sacred round that modern pagans celebrate: Beltane, Lunassadh, Samhain, and Imbolc, of which only the last is not also the modern Irish name for the month it represents. The life of the land was deeply embedded in the Irish psyche and culture, and perhaps even coded in the genes. Why not? I haven’t yet met an Irishman with lactose intolerance. It stands to reason that thousands of years of inbreeding on a small island might pass along, even in diaspora, something less visible than a face like the map of Ireland and more subtle than a hunger for cow’s milk. So I pay attention to the green world around me, as my ancestors did, learning things about Her like a lover catalogs his beloved’s features.
It’s hard for me to see the Deity, or even Nature - one of Her more tangible representations - as some kind of divine parent. Partly, that’s my own quirk, not having had a human parent reliable enough by which to form an analogy. But just as importantly, I don’t think the relationship between the Earth and people of the developed world is one of Mother and Child anymore. Human culture is our mother and father now; we live in a world of cars and planes and television and microwaves, in cities of concrete, eating food from factory farms at best and processed into something barely recognizable at worst. I live there; I eat that food. When I consider Nature as a teacher, She seems more a grandmother to me, wise and incomprehensibly ancient, and yet also, something I don’t really have to take care of just yet, except to listen to Her stories. It’s a good metaphor, really: not being farmers anymore, most Americans are insulated from that responsibility, like the mostly grown-up children whose parents can still be counted on to see that Grandma gets her trips to the doctor and her Meals-on-Wheels. We can allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring the landfill mountains of our plastic food wrappers and the lagoons of pig manure from our factory-raised pork. If we know about those things at all, it’s somebody else’s worry, not ours. Taking care of the Earth is somebody else’s job. The fact that we’re all living off Her trust fund - and what happens when the oil runs out? - seldom occurs to us. Me, either. I’m an irresponsible grandchild, too, looking to human culture to supply all my immediate wants - frozen pizza! internet access! - without much thought for She who gave us Life. It’s too hard and scary and I just don’t have the time; the best I can do is to honor Her in small ways. To not waste food if I can help it - it seems a sin to me to prepare more food than I can eat and relegate the excess to a city sanitary landfill, where its life-force is lost to the cycle for how many years? (Not to mention how such a practice spits in the face of my less-privileged brothers and sisters, that large portion of the world’s human population who are lucky to get a bowl of rice in a day.) To not eat pork, which is almost never raised anymore in circumstances that respect life or deal properly with the unwanted by-products. I choose to take responsibility for some of the companions we humans have bred for our convenience and amusement, then somewhere down the generational road, allowed to become unwanted strays and mutts in shelters. I try to recycle and reuse and remember to turn off lights. I’m nowhere near as conscientious as I should be - I could hang out wash instead of putting it in the dryer. I could waste less. As an overfed, privileged, middle-class American I could even make a fetish of buying organic, shopping at expensive shops that supply earth-friendly products to those who have the money to afford them. I could go to the city to find some little neighborhood butcher that supplies family-farm-raised pork to the upwardly mobile sorts who now outnumber the neighbors that used to shop there (and probably can’t afford to anymore) and have all the bacon I wanted, relatively guilt-free. I could buy my way out of responsibility, then hike my nose in the air and stand in judgment of anybody who doesn’t shop organic and cook wholesome meals from scratch, just because, what, they don’t have the time and money? Let them eat cake.
(I say “relatively guilt-free,” because I would still remember George and Martha, the pigs I took care of for just a week, some winters ago. They were as smart as dogs, which I would starve before eating, as I would starve before eating you who reads this. It seems to me that some animals are so much like us in their ability to think and feel, that they are kindred spirits. In a certain dimension of being that matters more to us than any other, they are our own kind. We do not eat our own kind. We do not do violence to our own kind. It is our greatest sin as humans, to be able to define our own kind so narrowly as even to make other humans our chattel. Myself, I would rather err in the other direction.)
I’m just an ordinary working-class guy, without much patience for people who make a show of their righteousness, and I know I’m not as responsible as I should be, in caring for the earth. I know this. I comfort my conscience a little with the knowledge that I am at least more intimate with Her than most people I know, even the professed Pagans. I spend at least half my day outdoors, delivering the mail on a rural route, driving through farm and woodland, feeling the weather and hearing the birds and rescuing turtles from the pavement. I spend part of every day in the woods with my dogs, running and walking on trails where I almost never see another human. I go as often as I can, though not nearly often enough, to lose myself in green places, on hill and mountain, by swamp and beaver meadow, in forest that has never known the loggers’ blades and forest that has been reborn from pasture. That is where my God lives that I can see Her most clearly, and when I am there, (as I said) She is nobody’s Granny.
I have never been able to believe in Her as God, but in all the ways that matter I gave myself to Her long ago. I will not, and may not, honor Her with ritual, but I am so much Hers that I need not call Her by any name: She is all there is. She is the femme bitch top I pant after desperately and fear like a nightmare. I know how quickly a furless thing like me might die of hypothermia, how by one well-placed rock I could drown in two inches of water, how easily heat and lack of water can addle my ability to watch out for myself. The Goddess whom I court is not sweet and loving and nice. It is useless to ask boons of Her, pray to Her, curry Her favor, and I do nonetheless. I know that I am Her beloved, as She is mine; She showers me with blessings, and still, an instant’s carelessness might destroy me. She is gorgeous and wild and well-ordered as the stars, fickle and constant and profligate and random and deliberate and capricious and absolutely mad.
Another complicating factor is my current reading matter: two wonderful books by Rebecca Solnit, one called A Book of Migrations: some passages in Ireland, and written more recently, As Eve said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art. The latter includes some musing on the idea of a natural world that has fallen from a harmonious, pristine past to its current sullied state. About this Solnit says, "...I like Paul Shepard's analysis best: the anarchic, lively, pantheistic cosmos of hunter-gatherers, in which nothing was really work, is the best approximation of paradise or sanity, and agriculture -- matriarchal or otherwise -- was already a decline if not a fall." I find myself wondering how paradisical the world really was to the hunter-gatherers themselves, who lived much shorter lives than we do, and whose women often died in childbirth. I can't help but wonder, also, how quickly our paleolithic progenitors would've put up strip-malls of their own (complete with Mickey D's) if only they'd had the technology. It will be interesting to see what becomes of Ireland, as the Celtic Tiger drags her into the First World after so many centuries of being the savages of Europe. Never mind that Ireland saved civilization for them, the ungrateful bastards. Between that and Karen Armstrong, whose The Battle for God I also read recently, I have too much to think about that all wants to poke its head into my already-too-long piece inspired by Buile Suibhne.
I hope that the finished piece will be done and checked out by the pertinent parties (I don't like to write about people unless they have a chance to read and perhaps edit what I've said about them) before the winter solstice comes to pass. But here is the chunk I cut out of it:
I haven’t had as much time as I would like in recent years to be out in Nature simply for the pleasure of it, to learn what She has to teach me. Living as I do in a very rural place, I am conscious of the same turnings of the year that the ancient Irish structured their lives around. Nowadays that cycle is codified into the sacred round that modern pagans celebrate: Beltane, Lunassadh, Samhain, and Imbolc, of which only the last is not also the modern Irish name for the month it represents. The life of the land was deeply embedded in the Irish psyche and culture, and perhaps even coded in the genes. Why not? I haven’t yet met an Irishman with lactose intolerance. It stands to reason that thousands of years of inbreeding on a small island might pass along, even in diaspora, something less visible than a face like the map of Ireland and more subtle than a hunger for cow’s milk. So I pay attention to the green world around me, as my ancestors did, learning things about Her like a lover catalogs his beloved’s features.
It’s hard for me to see the Deity, or even Nature - one of Her more tangible representations - as some kind of divine parent. Partly, that’s my own quirk, not having had a human parent reliable enough by which to form an analogy. But just as importantly, I don’t think the relationship between the Earth and people of the developed world is one of Mother and Child anymore. Human culture is our mother and father now; we live in a world of cars and planes and television and microwaves, in cities of concrete, eating food from factory farms at best and processed into something barely recognizable at worst. I live there; I eat that food. When I consider Nature as a teacher, She seems more a grandmother to me, wise and incomprehensibly ancient, and yet also, something I don’t really have to take care of just yet, except to listen to Her stories. It’s a good metaphor, really: not being farmers anymore, most Americans are insulated from that responsibility, like the mostly grown-up children whose parents can still be counted on to see that Grandma gets her trips to the doctor and her Meals-on-Wheels. We can allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring the landfill mountains of our plastic food wrappers and the lagoons of pig manure from our factory-raised pork. If we know about those things at all, it’s somebody else’s worry, not ours. Taking care of the Earth is somebody else’s job. The fact that we’re all living off Her trust fund - and what happens when the oil runs out? - seldom occurs to us. Me, either. I’m an irresponsible grandchild, too, looking to human culture to supply all my immediate wants - frozen pizza! internet access! - without much thought for She who gave us Life. It’s too hard and scary and I just don’t have the time; the best I can do is to honor Her in small ways. To not waste food if I can help it - it seems a sin to me to prepare more food than I can eat and relegate the excess to a city sanitary landfill, where its life-force is lost to the cycle for how many years? (Not to mention how such a practice spits in the face of my less-privileged brothers and sisters, that large portion of the world’s human population who are lucky to get a bowl of rice in a day.) To not eat pork, which is almost never raised anymore in circumstances that respect life or deal properly with the unwanted by-products. I choose to take responsibility for some of the companions we humans have bred for our convenience and amusement, then somewhere down the generational road, allowed to become unwanted strays and mutts in shelters. I try to recycle and reuse and remember to turn off lights. I’m nowhere near as conscientious as I should be - I could hang out wash instead of putting it in the dryer. I could waste less. As an overfed, privileged, middle-class American I could even make a fetish of buying organic, shopping at expensive shops that supply earth-friendly products to those who have the money to afford them. I could go to the city to find some little neighborhood butcher that supplies family-farm-raised pork to the upwardly mobile sorts who now outnumber the neighbors that used to shop there (and probably can’t afford to anymore) and have all the bacon I wanted, relatively guilt-free. I could buy my way out of responsibility, then hike my nose in the air and stand in judgment of anybody who doesn’t shop organic and cook wholesome meals from scratch, just because, what, they don’t have the time and money? Let them eat cake.
(I say “relatively guilt-free,” because I would still remember George and Martha, the pigs I took care of for just a week, some winters ago. They were as smart as dogs, which I would starve before eating, as I would starve before eating you who reads this. It seems to me that some animals are so much like us in their ability to think and feel, that they are kindred spirits. In a certain dimension of being that matters more to us than any other, they are our own kind. We do not eat our own kind. We do not do violence to our own kind. It is our greatest sin as humans, to be able to define our own kind so narrowly as even to make other humans our chattel. Myself, I would rather err in the other direction.)
I’m just an ordinary working-class guy, without much patience for people who make a show of their righteousness, and I know I’m not as responsible as I should be, in caring for the earth. I know this. I comfort my conscience a little with the knowledge that I am at least more intimate with Her than most people I know, even the professed Pagans. I spend at least half my day outdoors, delivering the mail on a rural route, driving through farm and woodland, feeling the weather and hearing the birds and rescuing turtles from the pavement. I spend part of every day in the woods with my dogs, running and walking on trails where I almost never see another human. I go as often as I can, though not nearly often enough, to lose myself in green places, on hill and mountain, by swamp and beaver meadow, in forest that has never known the loggers’ blades and forest that has been reborn from pasture. That is where my God lives that I can see Her most clearly, and when I am there, (as I said) She is nobody’s Granny.
I have never been able to believe in Her as God, but in all the ways that matter I gave myself to Her long ago. I will not, and may not, honor Her with ritual, but I am so much Hers that I need not call Her by any name: She is all there is. She is the femme bitch top I pant after desperately and fear like a nightmare. I know how quickly a furless thing like me might die of hypothermia, how by one well-placed rock I could drown in two inches of water, how easily heat and lack of water can addle my ability to watch out for myself. The Goddess whom I court is not sweet and loving and nice. It is useless to ask boons of Her, pray to Her, curry Her favor, and I do nonetheless. I know that I am Her beloved, as She is mine; She showers me with blessings, and still, an instant’s carelessness might destroy me. She is gorgeous and wild and well-ordered as the stars, fickle and constant and profligate and random and deliberate and capricious and absolutely mad.