I Come Before You as a Demonic Demonstrative Monstrosity
“I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.” ~Anne Frank
When I do these silly photoshoots I’m always afraid I’m going to cross a cultural misappropriation line. As a Casper white European mutt, what right do I have to dress up like this? (I think there is a good reason why ghosts are always portrayed as white: some particularly nasty and funky shit went down in that part of the world and it may have ripped a serious hole in the life afterlife continuum).
Hungry ghosts such as myself who were not born into a culture built on healthy relationships to the Earth, to the elements, to the spirits, to the forces of Life can easily become cultural vampires, preying upon those who still do have some semblance of a healthy vibrant culture. You’d have to go pretty far back in my bloodline before you got to any relatives that lived in the midst of a rich, sane culture.
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Gabrielle Roth wrote “In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: “When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?”
I would add to this list “When did you stop adorning your body?”
To not bedazzle ourselves with the jewels and cosmetics of Nature is like the male Puffer Fish NOT making a beautifully symmetrical mandala in the sand of the ocean floor as a way to woo a mate…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B91tozyQs9M
Self festooning (and the festooning of others) is part of what makes us human. I mean, have you seen how many makeup tutorials there are on youtube??? But of course, like so many aspects of our domesticated industrial lives, what passes for makeup is just watered down, bastardized, artificial, empty substitutions for what it is we really need. Painting your face with clay and mica mixed with water at a creek’s shore is going to be a profoundly different experience than heading over to Target to buy some toxic chemical sludge that was tested on animals. I believe we humans first started altering our appearance because we wanted to look more interesting and colorful like our animal brothers and sisters. At first it was a tribute to them. Now they are paying for it.
The makeup that I use in my shoots was “foraged” in a Whole Foods Parking Lot about 9 years ago. It’s deemed “all-natural” (as if anything that comes in plastic packaging can be natural). This Whole Foods was closing because a bigger Whole Foods had been built 2 blocks away because America. So there was this huge crazed sale, with Caspers galore who were absolutely losing their shit. And in all the pandemonium I guess someone accidentally dropped all the makeup they had bought. A nicer person than I would have left it there in case they came back for it.
I’ve literally never used it until now.
And it’s interesting that it’s called “makeup”, no? We also use this term when talking about our DNA. So when we apply makeup we are aesthetically altering what we were biologically born with.
I have to say I’ve really been enjoying the process of putting on this makeup. And once made up I don’t feel like someone else but more like it is bringing out different versions of myself that were dormant, that have been neglected and deprived.
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So many people alive today have been so deprived of so much of what makes us human.
I know I am one of the more privileged humans on Earth just by the mere facts that I have more than adequate shelter, plenty of relatively healthy food, and clean (enough) water that I didn’t have to walk hours a day to fetch like the average woman on Earth has to. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still deprived in ways that are traumatizing and depleting:
I have only seen the night sky totally free of light pollution a handful of times.
I have never drank from a stream.
I have only a fraction of the intestinal flora that our Hunter-Gatherer counterparts have in their guts.
I have never fully used my body for what it was designed for.
I have never, just like you have never, been a part of a close-knit egalitarian tribe living in relative balance with their direct natural surroundings.
I have never been in love — at least not fully to where it was reciprocated.
I have never felt safe in a lover’s arms (so I probably shouldn’t refer to them as “lovers” I guess)
I have never had my face painted with mud by another’s gentle touch. There is a scene in ‘We Are Humanity’, the documentary about the Hunter-Gatherer tribe the Jarawa, where a young woman is doing the makeup of her husband. I’ve watched it a hundred times and it still makes me cry, not just because it’s a beautiful and tender expression of intimacy but also out of not really knowing such intimacy myself, and knowing that so many have been deprived of this too. Being privileged doesn’t mean you aren’t deprived. The most privileged among us are probably some of the most deprived humans who have ever lived because they were denied essential necessities like love, intimacy, a feeling of belonging, a feeling of purpose that serves the whole. Privilege can often get in the way of these things.
Most everyone alive shares many of these same deprivations I’ve listed. The list of traumas that I have not (yet) experienced but are felt by millions and even billions of people is too long to list in it’s entirety but includes: Living in a war torn country, living with domestic or sexual abuse, living in extreme poverty, living with extreme life threatening environmental degradation.
But my point is that there is a basic baseline of trauma that everyone (and everything) is experiencing right now.
It’s like every living thing now has Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome to some degree….to be alive today is to be in a constant state of trauma whether we realize it or not. Just walking down a busy city street can set off stress hormones because we actually have no evolutionary reference point for seeing that many strangers. For most of our existence as a species we saw no more than 150 people our entire lives and we knew all of them. Stranger Danger is more real than we know.
So we need new terms….like how about ‘Present Traumatic Stress Syndrome’ and ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome’. Just focusing on ‘Post’ implies the trauma is over and there is some baseline of safety and security and “normalcy” we have returned to. THERE ISN’T. And there won’t be unless we slay these artificial systems depriving us of so much of our humanity.
Recognizing your privilege is important but identifying your trauma is also crucial…trauma should not be excused away just because others are far more traumatized. Trauma must be dealt with. We have no culture that facilitates actually diving deep into the roots of our trauma so that it can be properly dealt with. That’s because traumatized people are more profitable, more easily exploited and manipulated and suppressed.
Those who have the means to deal with as much of their own personal trauma as possible must do so that they can use their privilege to tackle the piling collective trauma plaguing us all, and to help those who are…I was going to say “less fortunate”, but that’s insulting and inaccurate. The poor and exploited aren’t less fortunate, they aren’t fortunate at all.
You are alive during the 6th greatest mass extinction event the Earth has ever seen.
The global rate of species extinction today is higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years. No extinction event has happened this fast, so far it’s mostly due to industrial civilization’s rampant destruction of natural habitats, but as the Earth warms, climate change will contribute to this demise more and more.
Fortunate is used to describe those whose lives take the most from the Earth and from other humans, that contribute the most to 6th mass extinction. Fortunate is never used to describe people still living in right relationship to the Earth and one another.
But everything is in danger now, even the “fortunate”.
“Less fortunate” needs to be replaced with the term “most unfortunate” or “more traumatized” or some other word or phrase that we don’t even have yet. As Angela Davis said….
“One of the greatest challenges of any social movement is to develop new vocabularies.”
As I see it, the least unfortunate, aka the privileged, are mostly using their advantages not to heal themselves and others but to use their means for pain aversion (often disguised as elaborate “healing” or “spiritual” practices usually involving crystals and/or gongs). Pain aversion doesn’t heal our wounds and traumas, it just puts off the real work, and can create even more damage.
We are being ruled by some of the most traumatized people among us, people who are able to go to great lengths to avoid feeling pain.
Our animal selves are in a constant state of varying degrees of panic, always trying to reach some kind of equilibrium. We think this constant panic is a normal state, we give it unassuming names like “Mondays, am I right?” and “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee” and “It’s Wine O’Clock somewhere!”
Depending on our social status, this quest for homostasis is carried out is countless ways, but it’s near impossible to achieve true balance as long as we live by systems that are creating ever more imbalance. Balance isn’t a fixed thing though, it’s always in motion. The trouble is that industrial civilization isn’t so much causing imbalance but blocking the means by which balance continually seeks itself. There is all this frozen backlogged balance, encrusted with layers upon layers of calcifying trauma.
And the answer isn’t to try and make it so we are ruled by the “least traumatized” among us.
The answer is to not be “ruled” by anyone! Our species is not one of those animals that looks to authority past the juvenile stage. Our problem is that we were never allowed to grow up, we are kept in a state of perpetual adolescence by this culture. There are hardly any real grown-ups left! I’m trying my best to grow up. More and more I feel like Michael Bluth….
* * * * * * * *
Now the story of a wealthy species who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together. It’s Arrested Development.
* * * * * * * *
I believe we do want to grow up. We just don’t know how. We are not given that many good strong examples of what real adulthood looks like.
A story like ‘Peter Pan’ would never arise out of a mature culture full of fully functioning adults, but from one that knows on some level it’s very immature.
Hierarchy is not natural to our species (at least not to this extreme). We are egalitarian by nature. We can of course be forced into authoritarianism, be conditioned into believing and accepting such extreme hierarchical class systems are “inevitable” and “just the way things are” or my personal favorite “human nature” but NOTHING good has come from living this way. It’s all just intended to give power and wealth to a selected few, while it makes accomplices and/or slaves out of the rest of us.
As Voltaire said “Those who can make us believe absurdities, can make us commit atrocities.”
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I often hear people say “the Earth would be better off without us” or “humans are a virus, a plague” or simply “humans suck”.
We need to really unpack these sentiments.
I think “Humans suck” is often said to justify and excuse our own bad behavior, or those evils we are complicit in.
But what most people really mean when they say “humans suck” is “I suck” (not as in me, Sarah Baker. Although I have been known to suck, so they might mean me some of the time).
I believe “Humans suck” can be coming from a place of self-hatred or feeling helpless and these feelings need to be recognized.
We simply are not equipped to have such a strong sense of self like what is forced upon us by this culture of separation. It’s so toxic and creates all sorts of dysfunction. Only with such an isolated self is self-hatred (or the notion of self love), or self-aggrandizing even possible.
When the tribes gave way to civilization we lost that special feeling of collective self that defined our species and allowed us to feel connected not just to other tribe members, but to all of creation.
It never ceases to amaze me how I’ll be working on writing something and then someone I know or admire will publish something so similar. At first, for a brief moment, the separation culture brainwashing kicks in and I’m like “That was what I was going to say! That was MY idea! I want credit and praise for that! I’m special, dammit!” Or if I’m the one who wrote it first, I’m like “Hey! They stole my thing!”
But more and more I can easily dismiss this kind of thinking because I know that when it happens it’s just the collective self trying to piece itself back together again after enduring such awful fragmentation. I do believe the collective self is indestructible, it’s just badly weakened right now. But sadly it’s also exploited for destructive and malicious endeavors. We must figure out how to use it for good again. I believe we can.
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Humans aren’t a virus, we are infected with a virus — an inoculation that is administered on a rigorous schedule from the first day we are born into this Industrial Tribeless pathetic excuse for a culture.
The Cree called this virus ‘wetiko’. The Ojiwa used the term “windigo”.
Jack Forbes, author of ‘Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism’ wrote….
“For several thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox…. Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease…. This disease is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man.”
“Those afflicted with wetiko, like a cannibal, consume the life-force of others — human and nonhuman — for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back something from their own lives.”
“If we continue to allow the wetikos to define reality in their insane way we will never be able to resist or curtail the disease.”
It drives me crazy when those of us infected by this virus fail to recognize that there are still humans alive today who are not infected, who have against all odds managed to resist it.
Like the Jarawa, the Hadza, the Pirahã, the Sentinelese, to name few. But sadly they are few.
These Hunter Gatherer Tribes are the last hold outs of how we humans lived for the vast majority of our time as a species.
I’ve been accused of romanticizing such peoples.
What does that even mean though?
These peoples are the origin of true romance, still living out the greatest love story ever, one born out of real intimacy with Her.
A recent Guardian article reviewing the book ‘Against the Grain’ by James C. Scott had a headline that read…
“We used to think moving on from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle meant improvement. Not any more, argues this excellent study”
Ummm, that deserves the biggest fucking DUH of all time. If science tells us this then it’s just fact, but if a tree hugger like me says it I’m accused of romanticizing. I’m told “Hey, stop idealizing those people, they’re not perfect you know, they got problems too!”
Who said anything about being perfect (whatever that means). How about just aiming to live in a way that gives back more than it takes? And protects and contributes to the web of life instead of tearing it down as nonchalantly as someone clearing out a cobweb from the ceiling corner. Ooops, there goes another species.
I’m sorry but I do find the way Hunter-Gatherers live to be hella romantic, don’t you? We could all use more romance! If anything should be romanticized it’s them! We are in deep dire need of some serious romancing. If we don’t start falling in love with Her again, with one another, with our fellow non human earthlings then as I’ve heard Jane Goodall say when envisioning the future based on our reckless behavior today “I’m glad I won’t be around in 50 years to see it.”
And when did we start weaponizing a word that has its root in love??? We use “romanticize” to mean “regarding something as better than reality would warrant”. But living in balance with Nature, as Hunter-Gatherers do, IS BETTER than our current shithole reality. Reality has put a warrant out on us Industrials and our ridiculous fantasy life! Hunter-Gatherers are as real as it gets. What is actually being constantly romanticized is this stupid industrial culture, so that we don’t want to ever leave it!….
“Oh, the McRibb is back! Yes! Oh, they re-made that movie from when I was a kid! Yes! Oh good, Obama is basically president again, nothing wrong with that, now I can enjoy brunch again like I used to back when it was totes easy to pretend everything was fine!”
The last time I was at the riverhouse where I do these photoshoots, I noticed a male Merganser (a duck like bird) that had been sitting on this big rock out in the river for a long time. Thru binoculars I could see that his beak was badly broken. I watched him for hours. At one point a Bald Eagle came out of nowhere and skimmed over him. He fled off the rock in time and hid in some brush by the waters edge. I looked it up and Bald Eagles do eat waterfowl. The Bald eagle came back a few more times but the Merganser was too protected by the brush. One of the times I could see the Bald Eagle coming. I started to rush out to try and shoo it away. But something stopped me. I realized that I had no right to interrupt this scene, to interject with my learned ideas of right and wrong.
It was getting close to dark and I hadn’t seen the Merganser in a little while. I snuck outside to where I last saw him. He was hiding behind the brush and when he heard/saw me he flew off.
I felt like such an asshole for disturbing him.
That’s how I often feel now when I venture out into “nature”, that I am disrupting something very intimate, something I’m not part of. Like I’m intruding on a private love affair, really spoiling the mood.
I do long to be included in that love story, I think we all do.
To live an authentic life like the Hunter-Gatherers do.
Unfortunately so much natural space has been destroyed, compromised, and degraded that there simply is not enough Nature left for everyone alive to live a real life, a truly romantic life, like the Hunter-Gatherers do. This is such a complex colossal conundrum, and it needs to be talked about incessantly if we are to get anywhere. But we can’t because Trump!
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I’ve been sick for 11 months with what’s called ‘Long Haul Covid’. It has left me weak and tired.
Over the last year I’ve used what little energy I have to do these photo shoots at a friend’s rural cabin. Part of this project has involved taking slow walks in the evening around the urban neighborhood where I live with my parents. The city is easier for me to take then, the darkness helps soften the violations on my senses. As I walked, I would go around clipping plant material that could later be used in my shoots. I never took so much that it hurt the plant or in a way that anyone would notice, and rarely from someone’s yard — mostly I picked stuff from parks and the landscaping of Banks and fast food restaurants. My mother, somewhat worried about my new found hobby of petty botanical theft said in an obligatory parental manner “Well what if everyone did this?!”
But they’re not, that’s the point. I wish everyone was doing things that connected them more to Nature, to their humanity.
This question she asked is only applied to things that this culture has deemed wrong. Meanwhile those who are stealing the most, committing the most heinous crimes, go unchecked. Most people would say shoplifting from Walmart is wrong but that Walmart itself, which is one of the biggest pillagers of all time, is fine. I’m sure lots of people would say that me stealing all these flowers and other plant materials is wrong but then don’t think twice about buying something on Amazon. No one ever asks “What if everyone bought shit from Amazon? Then what would happen, huh???” Well, we’ve seen what has happened if everyone did this: One human now has “made” $160 Billion by screwing over poor people around the globe in a way that has escalated and normalized eating the Earth alive.
Jeff Bezos has made $90 billion just since the pandemic started. That means he’s made one million dollars 90,000 times. It just came out that he has hired former FBI agents to conduct surveillance of Amazon workers as to crack down on any unionizing or protesting. But he can afford to pay all of his employees so ridiculously well that they would never ever dream of unionizing or organizing or protesting!!!
Jeff Bezos is an example of someone who is composed of nothing but the wetiko virus, there’s no human left. He probably couldn’t even get coronavirus because there’s no room left in there.
He’s a monster. But many of us helped make him one.
But like with so much of our language, we often stray from the original meaning of words, preventing us from understanding things in a way that would help free us from our servitude to these soul sucking systems we live by.
The word ‘monster’ is derived from the Latin word ‘monstrum’, itself derived from the verb moneo, which means:
to remind, warn, instruct, or foretell, and denotes anything strange or singular: contrary to the usual course of nature: by which the gods give notice of evil.
For ancient Greeks and Romans, monsters were seen as signs of “divine displeasure” and “a visual and horrific revelation of the truth.”
A now obsolete definition of the word ‘monstrous’ was:
Marvelous, exceedingly strange, fantastical.
Monsters are meant to get our attention. To scare us straight. But many of our worst monsters, like Jeff Bezos, are not perceived as scary.
We’ve even demonized the word demon. It’s from the Latin word ‘daemon’, meaning “spirit”. And from the Greek word ‘daimon’ which meant “deity” or “divine power”. It did not carry negative connotations. Plato used the word to describe the source of Socrates’ divine inspiration.
What happened?
As Friedrich Nietzsche said….
“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
Side note: he also said “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” Good stuff. Spoken like a true person trying their best to expel the Wetiko from their soul.
So when we use the original meanings of these words, we can come to see monsters as a warning, not as an evil to rid ourselves of.
But over time the very things sent by the gods/spirits/consciousness to warn us we were getting off track became the things we hated and feared.
The ultimate shoot the messenger situation.
Most people see a figure like Jeff Bezos as either a monster (in the modern sense) or just a super successful dude. But neither assessment helps us change course.
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We industrial humans are vaguely aware of our own wetiko, otherwise our subconscious wouldn’t produce stories of monsters who do horrible things without full (or any) awareness of it: such as zombies, werewolves, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Nutty Professor. These characters are us.
Yes there are people at the top who are true monsters but civilization itself is a monster that practically has a life of its own, no one person or group of people is even running it really. Wetiko is running it.
So how do we treat the wetiko virus? One possible vaccine would be if every person who says they care about the environment (which is a shit ton of people) actually took action to stop the destruction of it. Things would change for the better practically overnight.
But wetiko is able to mutate and spread fast. It’s always coming up with ways for us to keep feeding it while tricking us into thinking we are doing something good and productive.
For instance, many environmentalists believe getting off fossil fuels requires a massive transition to so called green energy. But this would result in even further insults and injuries to Her, some irreversible. That’s because it’s just replacing one wetiko for another. The new book ‘Bright Green Lies’ explores this in depth… https://www.maxwilbert.org/books/?fbclid=IwAR3hz9dMzqCxV-RAOAnC1W3iotyc6aFN7MTpoNDXXqyCMJYEIJr9Vj0kYYU
“Bright Green Lies is a much needed wakeup call if we are to avoid sleepwalking to extinction — joining 200 of our fellow creatures and relatives that are being driven to extinction per day by an extractivist, colonizing money machine that is lubricated by limitless greed, and guided by the mechanical mind of industrialism. This destructive machine is labelled ‘civilization,’ and its violent and brutal imposition on indigenous cultures and communities is legitimized as the ‘civilizing mission’ for which exterminations of the rich cultural and biological diversity of the Earth is necessary for the linear, blind rush to progress. Religions change, extermination continues. But there are other ways: the ways of indigenous cultures to whom we must turn to learn how to walk lightly on the Earth.” ~Dr. Vandana Shiva
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Sadly, the coronavirus is just another monster that many of us will ignore or make into a villain to fight, instead of learning from it, instead of seeing it as a divine warning. The coronavirus vaccine is merely turning off that warning bell. It’s like hitting the snooze button….but then not getting out of bed. It’s disabling a fire alarm but then not putting out the fire, or even evacuating the building. As long as the alarm has stopped ringing the danger must be gone, right?
Tell that to Horseshoe crabs.
Their blue blood is an essential component to testing vaccines for safety. They are “harvested” along the mid-Atlantic shore and taken to labs to be “milked” of their blood. Then they are released back into the ocean, where at least 30% of them die (but that is a figure put out by the drug companies. Conservationists estimate it’s higher).
Before the pandemic, pharmaceutical companies were taking half a million Horseshoe crabs out of the sea. There are no numbers showing exactly how many are being taken out now, but it’s estimated to be higher than usual. In 1990 there were an estimated 1.24 million crabs in Delaware Bay, one of the main places they go to spawn. The 2019 count was at 335,211. The 2020 count was cancelled due to the pandemic…but harvesting and milking them wasn’t canceled.
Horseshoe Crab eggs are a key food source for other species, like Striped Bass and Flounder, whose populations have been plummeting. And the threatened ‘Red Knot’, a small shorebird that stops in Delaware Bay to load up on crab eggs along their 9000 mile migratory journey. So if Horseshoe Crab numbers get too low, it could set off what’s called a Trophic Cascade. Don’t be fooled by the pleasant sound of this phrase, it’s not a prize awarded to waterfalls, or a brand of Shampoo, a new strand of weed. It’s when part of an ecosystem’s foodchain diminishes or disappears, causing the rest of the food web to collapse.
Horseshoe crabs are hundreds of millions of years old! To have lived that long just to be wiped out by certain members of this one species who can’t get their shit together enough to stop spreading their diseases all the fuck around, well there are no words for how tragic that is…but I’ll try: SUPER FUCKING LAME.
More fun facts: They have 9 eyes- two compound ones and 7 simple ones. They’re not actually a true crab but more closely related to spiders and scorpions…but that’s the hairsplitting of science talking. Everything is related.
But we industrial humans act as if we aren’t related to anyone anymore.
If we still held a mindset like that of ‘Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ’ (All my Relatives), the Lakota people’s worldview that everything is related and interconnected then we would never even dream to do what is being done to horseshoe crabs. It’s all pain aversion. We need a family reunion, stat.
What if every person who is all up in arms because they believe the covid vaccine contains microchips was that upset over the impact the vaccine will have on the Horseshoe crab and the ecosystem to which it contributes.
How many more of our pandemics can the Horseshoe crab endure?
Suffice to say it can be pretty easy to lament “The Earth would be better off without us.”
Well, yeah, if we’re going to act this way.
But really, to say the Earth would be better off without us would be like saying She would be better off without life.
And also, who is the “us” in that statement anyways?
Surely the Earth wouldn’t be better off without the Jarawa or the Lakota or the Aboriginals.
As writer Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume recently wrote…
“The claim that “humans suck” is too often made from too small of a sample size. Looking at, say, US Americans as presented by the media and making sweeping generalizations thus is ignoring at least three things: the difference between media image and material reality; the 96% of the human population that is not US American; and the huge numbers of people who lived and died for 200,000 years before now.”
Humanity isn’t the problem, our lack of it is. And we must look to those who still got theirs in tact.
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So again, Humans don’t suck. These systems we are trapped in suck. We have such terrible collective Stockholm Syndrome that many of us will blame anyone and everyone including ourselves before we attack the system that we perceive as keeping us alive, keeping us from fully feeling the pain of what is happening to the actual real systems keeping us alive, HER systems, systems we were all once a part of and can be again.
But that being said, I will add that some people do straight up suck. Elon Musk sucks and can suck it bigtime. If people just replaced “humans suck” with “Elon Musk sucks” and then collectively started fighting against everything Elon Musk represents then I think that would be a step in the right direction.
We have not the emotional or intellectual tools to deal with the sheer volume of simultaneous disasters and misfortunes and heartbreak and disturbing information present in the world today.
So it can help us to have a concentrated target for our hatred and pain and disappointment, otherwise it’s too overwhelming.
But THAT being said, it’s important to acknowledge when we’re using this tactic, otherwise we will never be able to look at things as a whole. The culture of Trump hate was an extreme example of this. He is still being talked about constantly and blamed for everything that is wrong. He is the jackpot for pain aversion, perhaps one of the biggest scapegoats of all time (this is the part where I have to say no I don’t like Trump, he’s dangerous, and I’m not defending him in any way blah blah blah).
We are not taught in this culture how to look at nuances, at complexities, at root causes, to make connections, and to see the bigger picture. We are trained to look for one bad guy.
Trump, a true monster in the old sense of the word, should have gotten us to take a hard look at ourselves and at a system that would produce such a monster. But I don’t think it did, AT ALL. All I see on mainstream news is just an aggressive feverish hitting of the snooze button, instead of dissecting how it has come to Trump and how to prevent it from happening again. We think impeaching him will do the trick, but it’s just turning off the alarm. If we keep bashing in these warning bells, we are in danger of breaking them for good.
Several years ago when my cousin and I were talking about the sorry state of things, to help us from spiraling, whenever we went to say we hated something, we replaced it with “Kohls”.
Instead of “I hate the military industrial complex” we said “I hate Kohls”…yes, as in the retail establishment.
Kohls is a good blanket catch all word for everything wrong with this whole mess we find ourselves in. It’s full of mostly luxury items, poorly made by slave labor, with misrepresented value, promising happiness and fulfillment but just ends up further excavating the hole in our souls.
Like most Midwestern women I have spent more time in Kohls then I care to admit. If you’ve never been to Kohls, it’s a consumer scam posing as a department store. Whenever you buy something you “earn” Kohls Cash (which isn’t treated like cash at all, it’s a coupon), which makes you come back again because you don’t want your hard earned Kohls currency to go to waste. But then you earn more Kohls Cash on the next visit. You can never catch up because you just keep earning more cash!
Most Kohls shoppers are middle aged women who have bribed their teenage or adult daughters into attending the cult meeting with promises of immersion blenders and new bed sheets in order to help their poor mothers with the burden of unloading the Kohls Cash that is burning an imaginary hole in their imaginary pocket.
I would venture a guess that at least 65% of American woman age 17- 45 have at least one bra that was bought using their mother’s Kohl cash.
Kohls Cash is the Albatross of the Midwestern Middleclass mother.
Playing over the sound system at Kohls, shuffled between the top 40 hits, are ads for Kohls, which I always found disturbing since you’re already there. The ads always have some ambiguous tagline like…
“The more you know, the more you Kohls.”
Or….
“Kohls, that’s more like it.”
Or….
“Kohls is everlasting.”
“Kohls is you and you are Kohls.”
“If you hear a Kohls in the Kohls, does it Kohls?”
“Both the question and the answer are Kohls.”
“Kohls, giving up on life never felt so Kohls.”
“Kohls, your 38 yr. old daughter will never get married or have kids which is precisely why you need this air fryer to fill the void”
“Kohls, we own you now”
“Kohls, we will destroy you and everything you love.”
Ok, I made up the last eight. Please feel free to come up with your own and post them in the comments!
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So yeah, I hate Kohls and Elon Musk sucks.
But who doesn’t suck are those on a hunger strike in Chicago right now to stop environmental racism… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoAWPNUUnMY
Who doesn’t suck are those who participate in the ongoing protests of Tagebau Hambach coal mine in Germany, one of the biggest man made holes on Earth (check out these astonishing Aerial views of it… https://www.huffpost.com/entry/photos-german-coal-mine_n_5545451
Who doesn’t suck is Apache Stronghold, an indigenous group opposing the proposed copper mine at Oak Flat, AZ….
https://www.facebook.com/SaveOakFlatArizona/videos/879363456171847
Apaches call this mountainous area Chi’chil Bildagoteel. It has ancient oak groves, traditional plants and living beings that tribal members say are essential to their religion and culture. Those things exist elsewhere, but the Apache say they have unique power within Oak Flat. The copper mine will create a massive crater 7000 feet deep, wiping Oak Flat off the face of the Earth.
Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Steven Logan said that because the group is not a federally recognized tribe with a government-to government relationship with the United States, it lacks standing in arguing that the land belongs to Apaches under an 1852 treaty with the U.S. and so Oak Flat will be transferred from the U.S. Forest Service to one of the biggest mining companies in the world.
Apache Stronghold has said that this mine will “close off a portal to the Creator forever and will completely devastate the Western Apaches’ spiritual lifeblood.”
Who doesn’t suck are Ruby Montoya and Jessica Renzicek, who in 2017 single handedly postponed the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline more than the thousands of people at Standing Rock were able to. Damages done to the Buena Vista County section of the pipeline alone were estimated at $2.5 million. They plan on pleading guilty at their sentencing in May, which may result in up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
https://dgrnewsservice.org/resistance/direct-action/press-release-dapl-protestors-plead-guilty/
Who doesn’t suck are the Inuits in Northern Canada blocking an Iron Ore Mine… https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9jxz/inuit-hunters-are-braving-30-c-weather-to-block-nunavut-iron-mine
Who doesn’t suck are those occupying Thacker Pass, NV, site of a proposed lithium mine…. https://www.protectthackerpass.org/
Who didn’t suck is Gonzalo Cardona Molina, a Columbian conservation biologist who had dedicated his life to protecting the ‘Yellow Eared Parrot’, a species found only in the cloud forests of the Central Andes. He was murdered in early January.
An average of more than 4 environmental activists are killed every week…. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/29/world/global-witness-2019-defenders-report-scli-intl/index.html
Who didn’t suck was Black Panther Organizer Fred Hampton, who was killed by the FBI. Yes it sucks that they are only now getting around to making a movie about him, but not before they churned out not one but two ‘Paul Blart, Mall Cop’ movies and 9 ‘Fast and Furious’ films.
And I fear that this film will just whitewash the hell out Fred…all part of the mainstream trend to de-radicalize black radicals as a way to tamper down further BLM protests. (If I see that dude who wrote that new book on James Baldwin one more time on MSNBC using James’ words to prop up neo-liberal agendas I’m going to lose my goddamn mind).
But it sucks that there even are movies at all because all they are doing is replacing a quintessential human activity: sitting around a fire telling stories. Stories that remind us who we really are.
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I read an article once on how the majority of zoo animals are on anti depressants and anti-anxiety meds. To say that our bad, greedy, selfish, destructive, violent and troubling behaviors are just “human nature” is like saying a zoo animal pacing in its cage or compulsively gnawling at its own paw is part of their nature.
No, it’s a reaction to being deprived of the conditions that facilitate their true nature.
All too often, what we call “human nature” when talking about some shit thing happening is really referring to what happens when we are deprived of our true human nature.
I think people’s knee jerk reaction that I’m glorifying Hunter Gatherers and Indigenous peoples is a defense coming from a great wound. It’s hitting a nerve. We are animals after all. Part of us knows this is all wrong and only going to get worse. But we don’t know what to do about it. Some people have a real problem with me, often it is unspoken. I can tell they feel judged by me. They feel the need to defend what they are doing to me, even when I have said nothing critical to them. Or they feel the need to point out all the ways in which I am a hypocrite or how “unrealistic” I am.
We are living with so much unprocessed pain. I find it unbearable at times to be around others’ unprocessed pain.
I think we harbor vague but deep feelings of jealousy, and we don’t even know why. We feel like we are missing out on something even when we can’t name it. BECAUSE WE ARE MISSING OUT ON SO VERY MUCH.
The evils certain humans are unleashing and the allowance and acceptance of these evils is what happens when we are deprived of our nature.
It’s going to take a lot of work to get it back.
But we have to start somewhere. We can’t run from the pain forever. We must stop trying to put Nature in it’s place and instead return to our place in Nature. The notion that nature can be “managed”….Ha! That’s like working for a boss that is way younger and way more inexperienced than you. You can never love something you manage, for you always see it as beneath you.
There is a gaping hole left in Her body from our mass exodus.
It’s filled with plastic bags, and syringes, and farm run-off, and waste water, and depleted uranium.
But there is a proportional hole left in each of us too.
It’s filled with corn syrup and prescription drugs and Netflix and Tweets and cancer.
Every ailment, every injury, every disorder….
It all falls under Lovesickness.
“The “norm” for humanity is love.
Brutality is an aberration.
We are not sinners by nature.
We learn to be bad.
We are taught to stray from our good paths.
We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.”
~ Jack Forbes
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When I was dressing for this shot, I started to feel this fantastical energy inching in….a daemon/daimon/demon.? A monster?
I thought of that Joseph Campbell interview with Bill Moyers where he talks about monsters.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I tell you, there’s another emotion associated with art which is not of the beautiful, but of the sublime. And what we call monsters can be seen as sublime. And they represent powers too great for the mere forms of life to survive. Prodigious expanse of space is sublime. This is a thing that the Buddhists know how to achieve in their temples.
BILL MOYERS: I once interviewed a veteran of the Second World War, and I was talking to him about his experience at the Battle of the Bulge, with the assault of the Germans about to succeed. And I said, “Well, as you look back on it, what was it?” And he said, “It was sublime.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And so the monster comes through there.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean by monster?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, by a monster I mean someone who breaks all of your standards for harmony and for ethical conduct.
BILL MOYERS: Is there a story in mythology that illustrates the sublime in the monster?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the god of the end of the world, Vishnu, at the end of the world is a monster. I mean, good night, he’s destroying the world, first with fire and then with a torrential flood that drowns out the fire and everything else and nothing’s left but ash, the whole universe has been wiped out. That’s God.
BILL MOYERS: Well, the Christian millennialists talk of the rapture.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, read Chapter 13 in Mark.
BILL MOYERS: Which says?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s the end of the world. You see, these are experiences that go past ethical judgments. Ethics is wiped out. Our religions, with the accent on the human, as I mentioned a little while ago, also stress the ethical. God is good. God is horrific the end of the world? There’s an Arab saying that I read somewhere in The Arabian Nights that the angel of death, when the angel of death comes it is terrible; when he has reached you, it is bliss.
Now, in the Buddhist systems, particularly as we get them from Tibet, the Buddhas appear in two aspects; there is the peaceful aspect and there is the wrathful aspect of the deity. Now, if you’re clinging to your ego and its little world and hanging on, and the deity wants to open you, the wrathful aspect comes. It seems to you terrible. But if you are open, and open enough, then that same deity would be experienced as bliss.
BILL MOYERS: Well, Jesus talked of bringing a sword, and I don’t believe he meant that in terms of using it against your fellow [man], but he meant it in terms of opening the ego, I came to cut you free from the blinding ego of your own self-centeredness.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: This is what’s known in Sanskrit as Viveka, discrimination, and there is a Buddha figure called Manjushri, who will be…who’s shown with a flaming sword over his head.
BILL MOYERS: Yes.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And what is the sword for? It’s to distinguish the merely temporal from the eternal. It’s the sword that distinguishes that which is enduring from that which is merely passing. The tick-tick-tick of time shuts out eternity, and we live in the field of time. But what is living in the field of time is an eternal principle that’s inflected this way.
BILL MOYERS: What’s the eternal principle?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Brahman.
BILL MOYERS: Which is?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, we call it God, but that personifies it, do you see. That’s…
BILL MOYERS: It is the experience of eternity.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: The experience of the eternal.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: As what you are.
BILL MOYERS: Yes.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I would say, that’s…
BILL MOYERS: That whatever eternity is, is here right now.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And nowhere else, or everywhere else. If you don’t experience it now, you’re never going to get it. Because when you get to heaven, that’s not eternal, that’s just everlasting. Heaven lasts a long time; it’s not eternal, it’s everlasting.
BILL MOYERS: I don’t follow that, now.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The eternal is beyond time; the concept of time shuts out eternity.
BILL MOYERS: Time is our invention.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Our experience, yeah. But the ultimate, unqualified mystery is beyond human experience, it becomes inflected. As they say, there is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man, and that is what looks like God.
BILL MOYERS: So whatever it is we experience, we have to express in language that is just not up to the occasion.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s it.
BILL MOYERS: It’s inadequate.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s what poetry is for. Poetry is a language that has to be penetrated, it doesn’t shut you off, it opens, it’s the rhythm, the precise choice of words that will have implications and suggestions that go past the word, is what has to happen. And then you get what Joyce calls the radiance, the epiphany. The epiphany is the showing through of the essence, what Aquinas called the quidditas, the whatness. The whatness is the Brahman.
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Brahman is a Sanskrit word meaning…
Oneness
Transcendence
The unchanging reality amidst and beyond the world
I think as we moved further and further away from tribal life we were smart enough to develop safeguards that would serve to remind us of what the real deal was, so our heads didn’t get too big. But at some point, or many points, we just couldn’t stay ahead of it, and those very systems, like religion, once intended to keep us tethered to what is real and sacred, started having the opposite affect.
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So, like I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself.
As I was adorning myself I felt a monstrous presence.
That’s when I added the two huge leaves coming out of the sides of my head, like fins that had sprouted.
And that made me think about this one poem. I couldn’t remember the title or author or even any lines really. I just remembered the feeling it gave me.
Googling “What’s that one poem I’m thinking of where this crazy wild monster shows up at some guy’s house?” strangely wasn’t leading me to the poem I was looking for.
But then, a couple weeks later, I saw the effing poem on someone’s fb post!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s called ‘Sometimes a Wild God’ by Tom Hirons
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Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine.
When the wild god arrives at the door,
You will probably fear him.
He reminds you of something dark
That you might have dreamt,
Or the secret you do not wish to be shared.
He will not ring the doorbell;
Instead he scrapes with his fingers
Leaving blood on the paintwork,
Though primroses grow
In circles round his feet.
You do not want to let him in.
You are very busy.
It is late, or early, and besides…
You cannot look at him straight
Because he makes you want to cry.
Your dog barks;
The wild god smiles.
He holds out his hand and
The dog licks his wounds,
Then leads him inside.
The wild god stands in your kitchen.
Ivy is taking over your sideboard;
Mistletoe has moved into the lampshades
And wrens have begun to sing
An old song in the mouth of your kettle.
‘I haven’t much,’ you say
And give him the worst of your food.
He sits at the table, bleeding.
He coughs up foxes.
There are otters in his eyes.
When your wife calls down,
You close the door and
Tell her it’s fine.
You will not let her see
The strange guest at your table.
The wild god asks for whiskey
And you pour a glass for him,
Then a glass for yourself.
Three snakes are beginning to nest
In your voicebox. You cough.
Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all.
You cough again,
Expectorate the snakes and
Water down the whiskey,
Wondering how you got so old
And where your passion went.
The wild god reaches into a bag
Made of moles and nightingale-skin.
He pulls out a two-reeded pipe,
Raises an eyebrow
And all the birds begin to sing.
The fox leaps into your eyes.
Otters rush from the darkness.
The snakes pour through your body.
Your dog howls and upstairs
Your wife both exults and weeps at once.
The wild god dances with your dog.
You dance with the sparrows.
A white stag pulls up a stool
And bellows hymns to enchantments.
A pelican leaps from chair to chair.
In the distance, warriors pour from their tombs.
Ancient gold grows like grass in the fields.
Everyone dreams the words to long-forgotten songs.
The hills echo and the grey stones ring
With laughter and madness and pain.
In the middle of the dance,
The house takes off from the ground.
Clouds climb through the windows;
Lightning pounds its fists on the table
And the moon leans in.
The wild god points to your side.
You are bleeding heavily.
You have been bleeding for a long time,
Possibly since you were born.
There is a bear in the wound.
‘Why did you leave me to die?’
Asks the wild god and you say:
‘I was busy surviving.
The shops were all closed;
I didn’t know how. I’m sorry.’
Listen to them:
The fox in your neck and
The snakes in your arms and
The wren and the sparrow and the deer…
The great un-nameable beasts
In your liver and your kidneys and your heart…
There is a symphony of howling.
A cacophony of dissent.
The wild god nods his head and
You wake on the floor holding a knife,
A bottle and a handful of black fur.
Your dog is asleep on the table.
Your wife is stirring, far above.
Your cheeks are wet with tears;
Your mouth aches from laughter or shouting.
A black bear is sitting by the fire.
Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine
And brings the dead to life.
******************
Disclaimer: I don’t want to come off as preachy or some know it all that has it all figured out. I do feel like I’m mostly talking out of my ass here. So. Much. Talking.
I feel like I know so little really. All I know is that ever since I can remember I’ve had a feeling that things are not what they seem, that things feel off, that there is something vitally important that is missing. And I’ve always been curious about how I could feel this from such a young age when I had nothing else to compare it to. But we do have something to compare it to. When the vast majority of human generations lived in a certain way, that way is still in us, even though we’ve never lived that way ourselves.
I’m just sick of living in a culture that doesn’t know anything but acts like they do. I’m sick of living in a culture that isn’t curious, isn’t courageous, isn’t completely fed up.
Creating images like this where I attempt to wring out what’s left of any feminine wiles I might still have is the only way I can think of to draw people’s attention to these ideas. But I’ve noticed this novelty has started to wear off. Time to up the ante, but how????….
